Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

“I can tell you,” Nixon continued, “that she never felt being born in a miner’s shack, or being a schoolteacher, was something she had to overcome. She’s the same person she was the day I met her.” He paused once again. “Don’t know if she’d say the same thing about me.”

“I’m sure that—”

“Well, let’s cut out all this Barbara Walters crap.”

“Should I share the fax with Mrs. Kirkpatrick?” Anders asked, as briskly as he could.

“Where is she now?” asked Nixon.

“In the South of France for a bit.”

“Writing her book?”

“Well,” Anders began to answer, reluctantly. All the speaking and column-writing was coming easily to Jeane. But her book was something else. She’d told him that she preferred to write about things like diplomatic strategies for dealing with Bulgaria, whereas Simon & Schuster was pressing her for “How I Unmanned Haig.”

“She’s going to have to make up her mind,” said Nixon.

“About the book?” asked Anders, afraid he’d inadvertently spoken what he’d meant only to think.

“About politics,” answered Nixon. “Whether she’s going to be in or out.”

“Oh, the VP talk,” said Anders. “Yes.” Jeane was being mentioned as a running mate for a whole series of Republican contenders in ’88, including George Bush and Jack Kemp.

“God,” said Nixon, “I even hear presidential talk.” His tone indicated that he didn’t take it seriously. “The Texans I speak to are crazy about her. As if she’s some female Connally. The Connally of old, I mean.”

Anders recalled the ex-president’s infatuation with his Treasury secretary, the sleek, silver-haired assassination survivor and the biggest Democratic convert to Nixon’s momentary New Majority.

“He’s a sad s.o.b. these days,” said the former president, with a sigh. “He’s going to file for bankruptcy before the year’s out. Real estate deals!” Nixon scornfully disbelieved that any man could prefer business speculation to political gambles. “He still owes eight hundred grand from 1980. That was a pretty expensive delegate!”

Anders smiled at the thought of the one convention vote Connally had managed to rustle up for all that money.

“He’s got a man in his current operation, one who’s sticking by him, fellow named Peter Cox, who’s done me some favors. He was in the office here in New York for a drink yesterday. We were talking about you , incidentally — in connection with that fax I was preparing.”

“Really, sir?”

“This morning he calls back and tells me how he mentioned our conversation to his wife— ex -wife, actually — over the telephone last night. And now she’s wondering if this nice young fellow — I guess that’s what I called you — could possibly show her around the West Wing and the EOB when she visits Washington in another week or two. Hang on and let me find the scrap of paper with—”

Nixon hunted for whatever note he’d made. Two hundred miles away, Anders could detect through the receiver a high degree of fuss and clumsiness. Was there no one to fetch it for him?

“She goes by Macmurray now,” said Nixon, after returning to the line. His tone contained a hint of disdain for women’s lib. “Her maiden name, I suppose. Never met her.”

Anders, who like most EOB employees had given White House tours to countless classmates and cousins, said, “Of course, sir. I’d be happy to show her around.”

Nixon gave him the phone number for Anne Macmurray’s Washington friends.

“Well, good,” said Nixon. “And how is your own wife?”

“She’s fine, sir.” There seemed no pressing need to admit that he’d moved out of the house and into his bachelor condo last month.

“Good. Put Poindexter in touch with me and be prepared.”

“Prepared?”

“For that test I mentioned.”

“Oh, yes.”

“ Hasta luego, Andy.” It was his usual sign-off, jokey and almost affectionate, even if its abruptness signaled a kind of chagrin that he’d caught himself speaking to you at all.

Anders felt ready for another two or three laps of the building. He always needed to let the tension run out of him after talking to Nixon. And he’d just rattled himself with the little lie of omission about his split from Sarah.

Looking out the window of his office, beginning to stare at the building’s French Empire columns, he thought, in sequence, of Cindy and Emily and Sarah, one girlfriend and two wives, as well as two or three women in between. He found himself considering a reason why his political views may have toughened as much as they had. Was it because of what the Post ’s Style section liked to call an “inability to commit” when it came to women? Sarah had suggested as much, told him that ideology had become the only thing from which he could experience the satisfactions of fidelity. Was that it? Or was there some deeper dislocation?

Deciding that this, too, was a lot of Barbara Walters crap, he tightened his shoelaces and went out into the hall.

“You’re late!” said Mrs. Harriman, entering her own living room with an enormous quadrangular smile.

“I wasn’t told that the subway has been forbidden to… penetrate Georgetown,” explained her guest, the delicately handsome, almost porcelain, Christopher Hitchens. “I had to walk the rest of the way from Foggy Bottom.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Harriman, nodding in regret over her tony neighborhood’s resistance to the proletarian Metro. “That was probably small-minded of Georgetown.” Her democratic sentiments didn’t extend to offering her guest a chair.

“Well, I took the opportunity to ‘go postal,’ ” Hitchens informed her, using a phrase that had been gaining currency this week, ever since a letter carrier had slaughtered fourteen of his coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma. “I mailed off my latest piece at the little substation over on Thirty-first Street.”

“For The Nation ,” said Mrs. Harriman, taking up position in front of van Gogh’s White Roses, which Hitchens’s research had told him might now be worth $40 million. “Have I got that correct?” she added.

“You’re right on the money,” answered Hitchens, thinking it must be a nice relief from lying under it, which she’d done for so much of her life.

“This piece, however, the one that brings you here, is for Harry’s wife. Have I got that right, too?” asked Mrs. Harriman.

“With complete precision,” said Hitchens, out-cooing her. He only wished he could be similarly matter-of-fact about the gulf between The Nation ’s newsprint pages and the satin sheets of Vanity Fair, on which Tina Brown, Mrs. Harry Evans, had asked him to have a lucrative go at Mrs. Harriman. If all worked out, Hitchens foresaw a long and fruitful editorial commute between justice and Mammon, The Nation and Vanity Fair, the second continually subsidizing the first. What could be more agreeable?

“This isn’t the only place the governor ever put you in, is it?” Hitchens asked Mrs. Harriman.

“I don’t understand,” she replied.

“That flat in London.” He was referring to the apartment that Averell Harriman had rented her more than thirty years ago, during the war, when she was his mistress, in her early twenties and still married to Randolph Churchill.

She ignored the question. “He gave this house to Mrs. Kennedy to live in for a short time after the president’s assassination. Before she bought a place across the street. I’m afraid she didn’t stay there very much longer. New York really suited her better.”