Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

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“Ave, my darling,” said Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, gently rousing her latest husband from his slumber in front of the television. “You asked me to wake you.”

The former governor of New York and ambassador to the Soviet Union, the eighty-four-year-old scion of railroad kings and robber barons, slowly stirred. “Right,” he said, trying to remember what for. “Ford.”

“ Yes ,” said his wife, with an encouraging smile. “He’s just come on.” Mrs. Harriman pointed to the television.

“He reminds me of Barkley,” said her husband, after sitting up a bit.

Bishop Berkeley? Barclay’s Bank? Perhaps he meant Busby Berkeley. Ave’s accent sometimes sounded more English than Pamela’s own.

“Truman’s vice president,” he said, by way of clarification.

“Yes,” said his wife. “Of course.” After five years at it, she still had much to learn about American history and politics.

She walked across the room to turn down the air conditioner. Americans never understood that being always-too-cold in the winter had relieved the English of any desire to be overly cool during summer. Still, it felt ridiculous to be in Washington in the middle of August when they could be in Sun Valley or at her own New York house on Croton Lake. But they needed to be here, before their upcoming trip to Russia, so that over the next couple of days Dick Holbrooke could give Ave a series of briefings. Her husband had secured a tiny advisory role in the Carter campaign; he would be reporting back to the Democratic candidate on whatever Brezhnev said during next month’s Moscow meeting, at which Ave would explain the issues in the American election to the Soviet premier — just as he’d once explained such things to Stalin.

Pamela knew that her husband was hoping, once Carter got in, for an actual job . No matter that even ten years ago Johnson had worried about Ave’s advancing age and deafness before giving him an assignment.

“More coffee, dear?” asked Pamela.

Ave ignored her to concentrate on the television.

Five years ago, when he’d been merely seventy-nine and a new, lonely widower, she’d been able to get his attention. As soon as Leland Hayward, Pamela’s then husband, died of a stroke, she made sure Averell Harriman saw the obituary. As she’d anticipated, the news sparked old memories of their World War II flirtation, when she’d been married to the prime minister’s son. Only twenty and already a mother, she’d caught the eye of attractive Mr. Harriman, who was running the American end of Lend-Lease and popping in and out of Number 10. Thirty years later, a few months after Leland’s demise, Kay Graham decided to throw them back together at a dinner party. Ave was soon crowing like some coq d’or begging to be let down from the weather vane. She’d briefly wondered whether their twenty-nine-year age difference should be regarded as more, or less, preposterous than it had been in 1941. No matter: on September 27, 1971, six months after the appearance of Leland’s obit, they’d married.

Pamela’s past five years of study had really been a return to the interest in politics she’d maintained when married to Randolph Churchill — and, in fact, quite a bit before that. Parliaments had been loaded with Digbys from time immemorial. Political life was natural to her, even if she’d come back to it only because of Ave, whose ambitions had never slackened with age.

She had adopted and advanced the interests of each husband and lover she’d ever acquired. She learned about French furniture during her years with Elie de Rothschild, and a bit later, when Gianni Agnelli entered the picture, had gone so far as to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the internal combustion engine. And between 1960 and 1971, as the fifth Mrs. Leland Hayward, she had mastered and weighed in upon all the dealings that generated a theatrical producer’s box office. When Leland put on The Sound of Music , she gave everyone they knew a silver cigarette case that played “Edelweiss.” For Ave she had even become a citizen, though she’d always felt herself to be more American than most of the actual Americans she encountered.

Her new citizenship also protected her from complaints that her electoral efforts amounted to foreign meddling in U.S. affairs. This year she and Ave had come out for Carter a bit later than they should have, so she could hardly claim that she’d made the Georgia governor or that he owed her and Ave much in particular. But Carter would, she suspected, come and go rather quickly, in time enough for Pamela Harriman to find, and cultivate, the real one, the as-yet-unknown comer whose ascendancy would be her great accomplishment.

This Georgetown residence might be too small for the operation she had in mind. It carried some nice recent legend as the house that Ave and Marie, her predecessor, had lent to Jackie and the president’s children after Jack got killed, but it was cramped compared to the apartment she and Leland had had in New York, at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-third, just a couple of blocks from where Jackie eventually settled herself. Even so, Pamela was giving it her all now. During those dinner parties, she took notes on the conversation, using a cream-colored pad so tiny one could mistake it for a dollop of sauce that had splashed onto the tablecloth. She didn’t think of herself as a hostess. She felt more as if she were working in Leland’s old lines of agentry and producing.

These thoughts drifted through her mind as her watchful eye alternated its focus between Ave and the television screen, becoming truly fixed on the latter only when the camera gave a view of the skybox, where both Reagans sat with smiles firmly in place and hands firmly in their laps. A friend of Kay’s had taken Pamela to the National Press Club last year for Reagan’s announcement of his candidacy — all part of her continuing political education. That day, she paid particular attention to Nancy, just about her own age, with a husband ten years older, instead of twenty-nine. Even so, Reagan would now be past the point of presidential possibility.

Ave, of course, was really here to make Pamela a widow, not a wife. She had been a model of assiduous devotion these past five years, a most vigilant mother hen, and even now, on occasion, a sorceress in the bedroom. But she knew the real point of this marriage would be what derived from it once Ave was gone, the life she would make from the last fortune and surname to come her way. Leland, alas, had not been made for widowing; he had left her with too many debts and too little purpose. Still, marriage was always more rewarding than mistressing — a truth she had not grasped until she’d been set aside by both Rothschild and Agnelli. She suspected that Nancy Reagan had intuited the lesson early.

“Hello, Mummy,” said Winston Churchill. “Hello, Ave.”

“Hello, darling,” Pamela responded to her son, who had just entered the room. Ave added a muffled, friendly grunt to the greeting.

Winston, at thirty-five, was now the Conservative MP for Stretford, as well as a trustee of the National Benevolent Fund for the Aged. He was here in Washington this week on a visit to some American counterpart of the charity — Pamela had forgotten its name. She did not mind being a grandmother, but was less keen on this particular job of Winston’s. His choice of a philanthropy somehow suggested that she had caught the disease of age, and that he might be pursuing its cure or relief in the way that other afflictions, cancer and so forth, inspired children of the sufferer to spearhead charities.

But at least Winston was loyal . One didn’t have to fear some poisonous book coming from his pen, the way she feared the one supposedly in the works from Leland’s daughter, Brooke. Well, you try being Dennis Hopper’s stepmother-in-law. That was no easy ride; some missteps had been inevitable, and she wouldn’t think of them now.