Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Amis and McEwan would be showing up nine or ten hours from now for the usual Friday lunch. And since he himself was in the midst of a dry spell — with no woman waiting to throw her three-a.m. arms around the torso of the Hitch — he might as well, he decided, sleep here. It was a pity the basement offered only the hard apparatus of Ping-Pong instead of the soft baize playing field of a billiards table, but he seemed to remember a decent enough couch in the conference room upstairs.

Still, improvising the arrangement made him realize he should be making a more strenuous effort to find, as he often put it to friends, his first wife. Was she somewhere in America tonight? Or perhaps the second one was over there?

—

Ford’s speech, thought Nancy Reagan, had been about as weighty as the balloons that dropped at its close — the promise of “a safer and saner world” thanks to “dependable arms agreements”—but he had surprised everyone with what seemed to be a spontaneous invitation from the podium to the skybox: I would like, I would be honored on your behalf, to ask my good friend Governor Reagan to come down and say a few words at this time.

What choice had that left her and Ronnie? None, except now to make this underground race to the rostrum, which was so far away it might as well be in another time zone. The concrete tunnel they were in amplified the click of Nancy’s heels, and her mind went to the film vaults under Hollywood: she’d recently gotten a letter asking if she’d lend her name to some preservation group trying to halt the decay of all the old nitrate and acetate reels. She’d sent them fifty dollars and hoped they wouldn’t include Crash Landing , her own last movie, in their plans.

“What’ll I say?” asked Ronnie, who had his hand on her lower back. He was pushing her, however gently, to move even faster and catch up with Mike Deaver, ten strides ahead of them.

Irritated at the pace, not to mention the long distance between them and their destination — all this to do a favor for Jerry Ford! — she wondered how Mike, the aide who usually anticipated everything, had failed to have something prepared for this .

“I don’t know,” she replied at last to her husband. “Go with ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

“Maybe,” he responded. She could tell, even as the two of them scurried in the half-dark, that he’d just cocked his head to the left.

Another voice, belonging to one of the Secret Service men who’d be quitting them tomorrow, said, “This way, Mrs. Reagan.” The agent pointed to a cement staircase up ahead. It was bathed in a shaft of light from above, and two balloons had fallen onto one of its steps. Down it came the sound of the convention orchestra playing “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” for the umpteenth time this week. And so, for the umpteenth time, she banished from her mind the thought of Alfred Drake, with whom she’d had the briefest affair when he was doing Oklahoma! on Broadway.

The stairs, it turned out, led directly to the podium. She and Ronnie and the agent climbed them quickly. The noise from the arena grew louder as they surfaced, and then came the roar of recognition. Her eyes found Mike, already up near the microphone; he was gesturing for her and Ronnie to come forward.

She refused to look toward the Fords. As Ronnie walked ahead of her, bathed in the cheers and screams, she looked up at the dozens of klieg lights, a whole little constellation of them, and thought about what Joan Quigley, her astrologer, and Merv’s, had told her more than a year ago: an “adverse configuration of Saturn” would doom any presidential run by Ronald Reagan in 1976.

Standing in place as the plastic horns blared and the crowd continued its yelling — louder than anything the nominee had received — Nancy congratulated herself on having avoided kissing Betty, who stood on the other side of the lectern under her ten-years-out-of-date helmet of hair. She wouldn’t kiss her when this evening ended, either. Not after that interview a few months back. When Nancy met Ronnie that was it as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams. And they called her a bitch! Everyone who knew anything about those long-ago days knew that Ronnie, shredded to pieces by Jane Wyman, had been the one falling apart.

As he now got ready to speak, she looked at him with what the press called The Gaze, locking it in place like a seat belt before takeoff. People wondered how she never appeared bored listening to the same speech for the fiftieth time. It was simple: she never listened to it. As she persisted in The Gaze, her mind in fact became especially active, diverting itself to dozens of matters requiring thought and worry. But her eyes were so large and attentive — they’d been perfect for the little bit of film acting she’d gotten to do — people couldn’t believe she wasn’t genuinely enchanted.

At this moment there was plenty to worry about, not just the absence of a prepared text. The lights were harsh and Ronnie wasn’t made up, things that Mike might have done something about in advance, if he’d figured on their being up here. But it was too late for that — and for everything else.

It could all have been so different. If there’d been a snowstorm in New Hampshire on the day of the primary, their passionate voters would have turned out and Jerry’s tepid ones would have stayed home. Ronnie would have stopped him then and there, assumed a look of inevitability, and made a straight march to the nomination. In the end, exhausted, they’d run out of time, and her weather wishes had grown more extreme. If a tornado had only lifted off the roof of this arena several nights ago, the sign would have been clear, and the delegates would have reconvened somewhere else, shocked into doing the right thing.

Not yet able to make himself heard, Ronnie tried to tamp down the crowd, patting the air with his hands, as if it were a piano keyboard. The delay was so long that The Gaze actually faltered, and Nancy noticed Stu Spencer, their aide before he’d deserted to Ford’s side and come up with the nastiest ad of the whole six-month struggle: When you vote Tuesday, remember: Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war. President Reagan could. It was one thing for Lew Wasserman to represent both Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman after the divorce. But what Stu had done was atrocious, and he had joined the long list of people she would never forgive. Jane, curiously enough, was not on it: she had shut up throughout the campaign, as she had during the previous ones, resisting the press’s attempts to get her to throw a zinger in the direction of her ex.

The orchestra stopped, and so at last did the cheers. She could barely get The Gaze locked back into place. Her heart was in her mouth: What would he find to say? She looked at her shoes, fearing that he might settle for that ancient ballad— I am sore wounded but not slain. / I will lay me down and bleed a while / And then rise up to fight again. The press would scorn him for it, say it was sore-loserish and all wrong for the occasion. But aside from all that, it was simply too sad; just playing the words in her head right now was bringing her to the verge of tears. She knew that this defeat had bled them to death, that there would be no fighting again. The past weeks of scavenging for delegates had done her in. Pretending to know the names of the wives and children of the men she was dialing; charming them, cajoling them, phonying it up — all of it harder work than the table-hopping and self-introducing she’d once done in the commissary after getting her MGM contract.

She was terrified, at this moment, that the podium was the precipice of a huge embarrassment. There had been too many farewells already: her agonized toast to Ronnie last night at dinner; this morning’s tear-filled goodbye to their volunteers. Enough!