Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

In fact, Reagan is two years older than himself: and here he is, still only sixty-three, with his feet up on a hassock and the remote control in his hand.

All the goddamned plastic horns were getting on his nerves. He clicked off the television, just as the delegates got ready to vote for Dole. He took another look at his watch and saw it was time to steel himself for dinner with Pat. He exited the office and crossed the patio. To think that two months ago he’d still been worrying about his own slight limp, from the phlebitis! The courtyard’s flowers, he could see, were neglected. Who knew if she’d ever be able to get back to gardening? But the lawns were better: the book advance and the money from selling the place in Key Biscayne had allowed them to put the groundsman on an extra day a week.

He stood still for a moment, gathering his courage into an approximation of hers. Trying not to make a noise, he tugged on the exercise pulley, wondering not how long it would take her to recover, but how long it would take him . He snapped on the smile he’d summoned for thirty years, ten thousand times and more, whenever he’d entered a room full of people he needed.

Onward and upward —her favorite saying.

He’d be done with dinner in fifteen minutes; then he’d go back to the office and return the call from Connally’s man.

—

“What are you looking at?” Jane Hazard asked Anne Macmurray Cox, whose binoculars had been focused, intently and at length, on some point halfway across the Kemper Arena.

“Nothing,” said Anne, lowering the lenses. “Or I should say ‘good-for-nothing.’ ”

The two women, Michigan delegates — Anne from Owosso, and Jane from Chesaning — had met only on Sunday night here in Kansas City, just before the convention opened, but by now they had spent enough time together for Mrs. Hazard to know that “good-for-nothing” referred to Mrs. Cox’s ex-husband, Peter, himself a delegate from Texas. Anne had been observing him, distant but magnified, off and on throughout each evening’s proceedings, and tonight would be her last opportunity to do so. She and Peter kept in touch only about their two grown children, and he was mostly estranged from both of them, and so such occasions were few.

“He’s on the phone,” Anne said to Jane, after failing to resist another peek through the binoculars. Peter was using the kitchen-style wall telephone attached to the Texas delegation’s stanchion, mouthing the name of whoever he was listening to, so that the person standing next to him would be duly impressed by the caller’s importance — and thus by Peter’s, too. Anne explained all this to Jane.

“Who is it?” asked Mrs. Hazard. “The caller, I mean.”

“I wish I could read lips.”

Peter would be sixty in just two years. At fifty-one, Anne had quite a bit more time before hitting that milestone, but she was annoyed, as she’d been each night this week, by how good-looking Peter remained, sort of bronze and leathery all at once, even though he was too naturally fair-skinned for what people now called the “Sunbelt.” She suspected he’d had one or two “precancerous” spots removed during the last few years, as he’d already had done in the course of their seventeen-year marriage, which had ended a decade ago. The divorce had been every bit as chilly as she’d somehow always known it would be, even when he proposed to her way back in 1948. All that summer and fall in Owosso, she’d been caught between patrician Peter and, God rest his soul, Jack Riley, the local UAW man. (Man? He seemed a boy in memory.) The triangle had played itself out against the presidential election, to the amusement of the locals in what was Thomas E. Dewey’s hometown. Dewey, to everyone’s astonishment, had been defeated, while Peter had won both her and a seat in the state senate.

Over the next dozen years, despite his ambition and his success as a lawyer, he had never gone any further politically, and in 1960, just before Michigan went for Kennedy over Nixon, the Shiawassee County GOP decided it had had enough of Peter Cox’s grating blend of the blue-blooded and smart-alecky — and picked someone else to run for his seat in the legislature.

Right now, here on the convention floor, some irreconcilable Reaganites, real crazies, were trying to put Jesse Helms’s name in nomination against Bob Dole’s — a futile gesture that had the Ford people, like Anne, looking at their watches.

“ Viva! ” shouted the Texas delegates, probably out of boredom.

“ Olé! ” replied the Californians.

“Oh God, not that again,” said Mrs. Hazard.

Without lowering her binoculars, Anne listened to the cross-cheering from the two Reagan-heavy delegations. They’d been at it each night this week, keeping up one another’s spirits in the face of defeat. And, sure enough, there was Peter, off the phone but still delighted with himself, bellowing along with his fellow Texans.

Suddenly, Jane and Anne had the same thought; both turned around to look at the skyboxes. Were Reagan and Nancy arriving to greet the faithful from their little glass house? Was that what the cheering signified? All week that little bitch — Anne felt no guilt using the word — had been trying to upstage the first lady with her strategic apparitions. But Mrs. Ford had managed some good moments of her own, like dancing with Tony Orlando to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” True, the song seemed to suggest that Jerry Ford was being paroled instead of nominated — but still.

Jane, without benefit of binoculars, continued scanning the skyboxes for a sign of the Reagans. “Did you know he calls her Mommy ?” she asked Anne, who lowered the field glasses and made a puking gesture. The sight of her index finger, pointed at her own open mouth, reminded her that she’d recently given up nail polish; she tried to see whether Jane might have as well.

It was 8:45 p.m. and, sure enough, there, at last, were Reagan and Mommy, come to hear Dole’s speech and then Ford’s. Up in the skybox the two figures were waving, like the king and queen of some little glass asteroid. Every person cheering them— Viva! Olé! —now had an unobstructed view of these devotional objects. The whole arena had been built without a single interior column, and while Anne looked toward the skybox, without cheering, she wondered how the roof stayed up. She took satisfaction in how far the actor and his little wife were from the podium that had been their goal. She and Jane proceeded to let the Reagan people, including Peter, cheer their brains out for a full six minutes. Anne had to remind herself that her side had won , and she made sure the lapels of her Ultrasuede jacket didn’t obscure either her E.R.A.! button or the one that said ELECT BETTY’S HUSBAND.

The arrival at the lectern of Kansas’s other senator — Pearson? — did little to calm the Reagan troops. He was there to introduce Dole, but no one was listening.

“Shouldn’t they bring out Alf Landon?” asked Jane. The party’s 1936 standard bearer, a twinkling near-nonagenarian, had already delivered some remarks the other night. Had the convention organizers known that the VP pick would be Dole, they might have saved Alf, another Kansan, for the task.

“He doesn’t exactly spell landslide,” Anne said.

“Maybe backwards,” Jane conceded.

There were moments when Anne had to admit how little Jerry Ford had going for him. She didn’t see how he could overcome the great crush so many Americans were developing on Carter, whose I’ll-never-lie-to-you pledge seemed to one-up George Washington: Carter was making the promise without even having chopped down a cherry tree. The Republicans did seem hopelessly out of gas. Outside this arena a giant elephant balloon had failed to inflate, leaving a thousand pounds of gray latex spread across the parking lot. And inside the hall each orator had to reach back twenty years, to Eisenhower, for a GOP president whose name could be safely mentioned. Sometimes they resorted to borrowing from the other party, as Rocky had done with Truman.