Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

“Would you have married him ?” He gestured vaguely in the direction of downtown and could see that she understood he meant Reagan himself.

“I would point out to you,” she replied, rising from the garden table, all playfulness gone, “that I married Randolph before his father was prime minister.”

Hitchens smiled at this attempt to express her indifference to power. He was convinced that she would have made a play for the Ayatollah Khomeini had their Parisian exiles overlapped.

“Well,” he said, getting up and extending his hand. “I’ll look forward to seeing you at the memorial service.”

“Yes,” she responded. “I imagine you’ll be way in the back.”

“Oooh,” said Merv. “Great building .”

Nancy smiled and watched Ronnie humbly regard the little balsa-wood model of his future presidential library.

“It certainly is!” cried Betsy Bloomingdale, in whose enormous dining room sat the architectural miniature her guests were now admiring.

The Reagans had just made the two-minute drive to Holmby Hills from their suite at the Century Plaza, where they’d been the past few days, more or less taking a vacation from their vacation; they would return to the ranch by helicopter on Friday. Between now and then — late tomorrow afternoon in the suite — there would be a fund-raising cocktail party for big donors, potential and committed, to the library.

“The roof is just dahling !” cried Eva Gabor, who pointed to the model’s little orange corrugations. “It look just like dat lovely little mission in San Looees Obispo!”

Nancy smiled, though she could do without Eva’s Green Acres voice, which came or went according to whichever person or purpose she had in view.

Thomas Jones, the chairman of Northrop, who along with Ed Meese and Lew Wasserman would be raising a lot of the money, pointed out some of the building’s features. The library would cost thirty million dollars and have an auditorium that could seat 350 people. The project would rise amidst the foothills of Palo Alto, represented in little green felt bumps at the edges of the model.

Nancy looked at this toy world with longing and fear. She wanted to be in it right now, cutting the ribbon. If she were, it would mean that the presidency was over, a movie that had been judged a hit, available for rerun but no longer vulnerable to the introduction of mistakes. And yet, to indulge this fantasy, to imagine herself walking across the model’s felt lawn and through its tiny cellophane doors, was to tempt the gods — that phrase she always remembered from Smith. Carter’s library hadn’t even opened yet; and everyone knew how his last couple of years had turned out. Her husband’s legacy was not yet fixed; it remained, like the nation’s schoolchildren, “at risk.”

Thomas Jones was explaining that Hugh Stubbins’s design would command respect, the way his Citicorp Building in New York had won over even the New York Times . The library would become a graceful adornment to land that now, however close it might be to Stanford, got used only by a handful of farmers and joggers. Nancy looked at the little balsa-wood roof and once more imagined the arena in Kansas City, the one that could have collapsed on top of them all.

“Glenn Campbell will be doing the honors tomorrow afternoon,” said Jones.

“Zee Vitchita Lineman?” asked Eva.

Jones laughed. “This is a Glenn Campbell with two n’s. W. Glenn Campbell. The head of the Hoover Institution up at Stanford. Don’t worry,” he reassured Eva. “I go through the same thing all the time with that other Tom Jones.”

“Oh, I know exactly who you are, dahling. I vas vonce married to von of your competitors .” She meant Frank Jameson, who’d run Rockwell for ten years.

“Well,” said Jones, with a courtly nod, “in some areas of life I could never compete with Frank. Or, I guess, with Merv!”

Nancy led the appreciative laughter. Eva might get on her nerves, but she liked pretending that Zsa Zsa’s sister and Merv were a real couple, the way she liked pretending Ron and Doria were. Of course, these days Jones couldn’t even compete in business with Merv, who — if you didn’t count Walter Annenberg — was the wealthiest man in the room.

Annenberg himself now pointed to the model and made a suggestion: “Mr. President, we need to fill this with stuff like that old Mustang you campaigned in for governor. And maybe a piece of the emergency room at the hospital. I took this up the other day with Ed Meese. Let’s have something more interesting than one more damned replica of the Oval Office!”

Nancy knew that Walter was Walter, and famously blunt, but she shot him a glance. A piece of the emergency room? We do not talk about March 30, 1981.

No one knew how to change a subject better than Merv, and he did that now: “Well, at least working on the library will keep Ed Meese from watching Debbie Does Dallas. ” The chubby attorney general, often called Poppin (for the Pillsbury Doughboy) behind his back, had been catching all kinds of ridicule for the report his Commission on Pornography had issued a couple of months ago, and Merv’s remark got them all laughing now.

“Do you think there really could be a link?” asked Lee Annenberg as everyone took their places around Betsy’s dining room table. Lee was much more tactful than her husband — she’d been Ronnie’s first chief of protocol — and her question about the commission’s most contentious finding, that there could be a connection between viewing pornography and committing violence, gave a momentary seriousness to the conversation. It also helped to cancel any mental image of what Ed Meese might have been doing in the dark while Debbie did Dallas.

As she unfolded a Porthault napkin, Nancy smiled warmly across the big table at her best friend. How quickly time passed: it had been five years since Betsy discovered Alfred’s affair and cut off funds to his mistress; four since Alfred had died; and already three since the mistress had been beaten to death with a baseball bat by the AIDS-infected junkie she’d been reduced to living with.

“I’m sure there is,” said Ronald Reagan. “A link between those two things.”

His smile seemed incongruous, but Nancy knew it didn’t spring from the grimy subject of pornography. He was just pleased to have heard the question. He’d been fitted with new hearing aids the other day at the Century Plaza, and though the improvement never seemed to last long, for the moment it was marked, and a pleasure to both of them.

“It happened with That Hagen Girl ,” he explained. “People see a movie and then go out and do the wrong thing. A couple of girls tried to drown themselves just the way Shirley Temple did.”

That Hagen Girl was hardly pornography, but people understood what he meant and nodded. Nancy knew that he hated the film. He’d always thought it smutty — having to become the teenaged Shirley’s love interest once she found out he wasn’t really her father — and he’d made it when things were at their worst with Jane.

“Dat’s terrible!” cried Eva, in response to the drownings.

Betsy Bloomingdale ignored her. “I’m sorry about this arrangement,” she told everyone. “Lew and Edie were supposed to be here, and if we’d been thirteen, I would have done two tables, seven and six. As it is, we’re too many for one table and too few for two!”

Everyone protested that the setup, with or without the Wassermans, was perfectly elegant. The president seemed further energized by the reference to his former agent. “Too bad about Lew. I was planning on asking him for my old job back.”