Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

He had displeased them — without meaning to. He wanted to apologize but didn’t have the words.

“You want to watch?” asks the woman in the uniform, the woman who is in this room with him now. She points to the box.

To be polite, he says yes. The colors, once they’re switched on, produce pictures that move.

“Oh, right in time!” the woman in the uniform exclaims. “Look who it is! Talking to the delegates! Look how pretty!”

People are cheering for the woman inside the box. It is her , the woman who sleeps next to him at night and winds his watch in the mornings. He looks at the timepiece often because her attention to it means it’s important.

He remembers a big room with a desk, not this room but one with curved walls where he used to work, a room with a great green lawn beyond the window. It was down at the end of the big house where he believes they both, he and she, may have lived.

He looks at the box. It’s showing a man and woman he recognizes as Jerry and Betty, but he can’t remember a thing about them besides their names. They, too, are listening to the woman who sleeps beside him. She is talking to a crowd inside a great hall:

Thank you for the life you gave us. A life that we never thought we’d have. It was interesting. It was challenging. It was fascinating. It was sometimes frightening. There were times that the sun forgot to shine, but those days have dimmed in comparison to the accomplishments that now glow brightly…

The woman who is really in the room, the woman who speaks with an accent, is getting ready to leave. He can sometimes still understand things, figure matters out, and he believes that she feels he should have privacy while he watches her, the woman on the screen , a word that has just come back to him.

“Good night, Mr. President.”

He recognizes this as a second name for himself but doesn’t know what it signifies.

And now he is alone.

We’ve learned, as too many other families have learned, of the terrible pain and loneliness that must be endured as each day brings another reminder of this very long goodbye.

His mind moves abruptly from one thing to another; he is aware that he doesn’t think the same way as the other people who come in and out of this room. For a moment he isn’t hearing the box at all, but his attention comes alive once more when she, the woman whose red dress it was, begins to talk of a shining city on a hill.

He believes that she has made a mistake. If he looks out the window here, he can see the lights of a city, some of them just coming on, but it is not on a hill; it is stretched out below. Sometimes when he looks down into it, at this hour of the day, he imagines a particular white house in its midst, not the large one where he thinks he and the woman lived, but a different white house, much smaller and made of wood, which he remembers being in a cold place up above the sea.

He has already lost the name for cranberry juice — the words always come and go so fast — but he finally picks up the glass that was placed beside him. He sips from it carefully, but when he puts it down a small red stain spreads over the napkin underneath it. The shape and color of the stain make him remember the head of a man whose name he has forgotten. This is an urgent memory, one that makes him see the small white house, inside of which he and the man once sat together. He knows the memory will not last, but it stays long enough for him to hear his own voice. Ten years from now I’ll be a very old man…

Is he an old man? He does not know. For a few seconds he sees himself wearing an old coat and can even feel a fur collar around his neck, but a moment later these things are gone, along with the small white house and the man who’d been inside it with him.

Soon the fellow who gets him ready for bed will be here. He’ll turn off the box, its moving pictures, its sounds. Right now they are cheering for her, the way he believes they once cheered for him. Is that Mermie standing there beside her — waving? He isn’t sure, but he blows her a kiss; and when she’s no longer visible he gets up from the chair he is in to see if he can find her picture among all the ones in silver frames.

By the time he reaches the long table he has forgotten her name, forgotten what he was looking for. But he begins to touch and examine some of the pictures and souvenirs, all of them laid out so carefully, everything recently dusted. There are medals and ribbons and small statues — and his lifeguard’s whistle, all shined up! He knows that these things are beautiful, clever. They have been brought to him as gifts, and he has sensed the happiness in the givers. Picture after picture, object after object, all of them infused with good feeling, except for the one thing just past the end of the table, the one object that always displeases and perplexes him: a jagged block of concrete, ripped from something immense, smeared with paint and pocked by hammers, bearing the numbers 1961–1989 and placed on a wooden stand all its own. Whatever it may be, this object, too, has been brought here to make him happy, but it is something cruel, different from everything else in the room, and often, when he stands before it, he feels an impulse to knock it down.

My editor, Dan Frank, has lent this project the same insightful support and enthusiasm he has given to eight other books we’ve worked on over more than two decades. My gratitude to him really can’t be measured. Thanks, too, to my agent, the matchless Andrew Wylie, and his associate Kristina Moore.

I couldn’t have done without Ed Cohen, Altie Karper, Thomas Giannettino, and Betsy Sallee during editing and production.

In Washington, Jeffrey M. Flannery and Dr. James Hutson of the Library of Congress assisted me in using the papers of Pamela Harriman and Donald T. Regan.

Dr. Steven H. Hochman of the Carter Center in Atlanta provided me with useful information about former president Carter’s travel and activities in 1986, and Lisa Nickerson Bucklin of Father Martin’s Ashley, the drug-addiction treatment center, cleared up a vexing point.

At the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, I was helped by archivists Kelly D. Barton and Steve Branch, and by docent Bob Dirks. Thanks to the Reagan Foundation’s Barbara Garonzik and to Genevieve McSweeney Ryan, my friend for the thirty-five years since she was my student. I’ve more than once, while writing this book, recalled a conversation I had with Genny on the steps of the Vassar College library in 1980, during which I asked her what she intended to do that summer. She told me she would be working for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, and I told her that he was too old to get elected.

I appreciate the cooperation I received from Daniel Katz and Paul Cunningham at the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik — and am grateful to Jillian Bonnardeaux for helping me establish contact with them. Special thanks to Anna Kristinsdóttir, chief of protocol in the Reykjavik mayor’s office, for the room-by-room tour of Hofdi House. Thorir “Toti” Ingvarsson also shared memories of the ’86 summit.

My visit to the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage, California, was set in motion by Michael Singer, and made fruitful by Frank Lopez and Daniel Modlin, the excellent archivists there.

Christina Bellantoni and Jim Corbley of WETA in Washington made it possible for me to view a tape of the Gershwin performance held at the White House and described, with some liberties, in chapter 19. This is perhaps as good a place as any to repeat what I said in a note to a previous novel: “I have operated along the always sliding scale of historical fiction. The text contains deviations from fact that some readers will regard as unpardonable and others will deem unworthy of notice. But this remains a work of fiction, not history.”