Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (9 page)

Works of art are meant to be stimulating, to offer different viewpoints, and to make you think. We wouldn’t have the great country we have if people just acted on their notions without realizing that there are many other viewpoints to consider. From country to country, assumptions vary. That’s why travel is so interesting—because you get other perspectives, and you see things done differently. You might travel somewhere and come home and find that you’re not enacting your usual routine. If you’ve been to China, for example, you might return and try having rice and fish for breakfast. If you limit yourself to reexperiencing what you’re already familiar with, you’ll never grow as a person.

Fairy tales are a little like travel. Reading them takes you into the forest and off to the ball. In a fairy tale it’s as if you’re a child again, and you see things with a child’s eye. When you read fiction,
I think sometimes the writers want you to see things through their eyes, and I suppose it’s good to go along with them and see what you find out, what they know that you don’t, but just because they cast a cold eye on something, that’s not the only way to see it. Your world doesn’t have to become less cheery because some writer tries to convince you people are out there scheming or turning their backs on their fellow man. Sometimes you have to remember the bigger picture. Those soldiers at Iwo Jima didn’t let each other down. And no men stopped Amelia Earhart from flying her plane, either. If we take pride in what we do, we’re making the world better. Not too much pride, of course, but enough pride that our children can see that we believe in something and that we’ll work hard alone, or with others, to accomplish the right goals. In some of the things I’ve read, it’s pretty clear to me that no one has any real goal. Some of those characters don’t seem to belong to any country, let alone to the family they’ve been born into. It seems to me quite a few characters have lost their way and either feel alone or make it a point to operate as if they’re the only person in the world. It’s pretty easy to sense when a crisis is coming in a fairy tale, but there’s no telling with short stories. Suddenly somebody’s just acting peculiar, and it’s a bit upsetting. The Big Bad Wolf is pretty upsetting, too, because no matter what our age, we realize that certain people will always try to trick us. That’s why you need to choose wisely and take your time getting to really know people, and making important decisions.

All over the world, people have the same desires. They want to be loved. They want to be warm and well fed and safe. Short stories don’t often take that into account. I’ve read some that have made me wonder who these people are, they seem so intent on causing harm. It seems to me that a lot of characters don’t really know how to go about things. There also seems to be a lot of unhappiness, if
you read enough stories, and—maybe I’m way out of line, but I’ll say it anyway—it seems to me the characters sometimes want to cause unhappiness just for the heck of it. You want to take some of them by the collar and talk sense to them. We can all try to do our best, or we can sink into despair.

I’ve heard that short stories are written to shake us up, so that when the dust settles, things will be a little different. Why would an author want to do that, though? Think about Cole Porter. His songs tell us something in a nice way, and he’s clever, too. He doesn’t write songs to tell us about some horrible betrayal. He finds a way to get across an upbeat message, so we feel better. When we’re sweeping or cooking, how often do we recite a sentence of a story? And how many times do we sing some Cole Porter lyrics? That’s exactly my point.

Certain writers, though, can make it seem like you’re somewhere else and even somebody else—like Cinderella, on the night of the ball. I often hear people say they’ve been “lost in a story.” We know we’re supposed to get lost in a fairy tale, because so often one of the characters does. Some little child wanders off the path, ends up in the dark woods or something like that. If someone leaves the path, it’s not quite as obvious in a short story, though sometimes you’ll look up from the page and be startled to find you’re where you are. Maybe you’re startled by who you are, too. Stories are meant to transport us, but we should never let ourselves be overwhelmed with a writer’s sad view of life and think we can’t do anything to change our own lives. If that’s the message, tuck the bookmark inside, shelve that book, and move on!

S
o many angry people. They hate us. Hate Americans. That’s the Venezuelan national anthem playing, and they are Venezuelans, and they want us to do the right thing and stand respectfully while it plays, and all the while they hate us. Spit falls on us, from above. Spit! Let them spit: it can be washed away, but their shame can’t. Music, music. We stand, honoring their patriotic song, and they can think of nothing better than to spit on us, when we’re here to represent the best country in all the world.

The girls . . . if anything happened to us, how would the girls get along?

They
would
manage, because they are smart and self-reliant and because people
do
get along. You do what you have to do. You do it hoping it’s the right thing, but sometimes that isn’t clear in the moment.

They’ll get these terrible people in order.

(
Later, all twelve Secret Service agents would be commended for heroism by President Eisenhower
.)

Life involves danger. Every day, there is danger. You can’t think about it, can’t let that hold you back. If you have a job to do, you
do it. If you need to express your anger, you write a letter, or you punch a pillow. That’s what I’ve read about, in some of the same magazines that write about me. They advise that you punch a pillow, not your enemy! Imagine women on the bed, punching pillows! Anger only begets more anger.

(
Julie Nixon Eisenhower would later write: “At first the spit looked like giant snowflakes
.”)

Moving toward the car. Their flag being ripped up. Ours. An angry mob, growing larger. They could have set upon us as we stood listening to their national anthem. They might still cause harm, but they are so wrong, so wicked, in the way they are going about this.

Flowers from a child. One must always accept a bouquet. One must always be kind to children. Little Venezuelan child, holding out her flowers. A lifetime of flowers for me, after all those years on the farm, where we didn’t even have a vase. Or any time to plant and pick flowers. Thank you, little girl, with my smile, which is the universal language. It’s not your fault, you’ve been told to spit, to be angry. Your parents are angry. It is necessary to forgive. If you spit, and if you then hold out flowers, I acknowledge not your bad acts, but your kind ones.

(
Julie Nixon Eisenhower: “The girl turned away in shame
.”)

The wife of the foreign minister is sitting next to me in the car. I am so sorry for her, because even she is endangered.

Blockades. Dick’s black limousine moving in front of us. Don Hughes is so worried: he has so much responsibility. We Americans accept responsibility and carry it on our shoulders like Atlas always progressing, however slowly. Those who seek to win by intimidation will not prevail.

Someone wielding a baseball bat. Dick’s car stopped, being rocked. They want to turn it over, they want Dick dead, and all Americans to perish because of their beliefs.

(
Don Hughes: Mrs. Nixon “had more guts than any man I’ve ever seen
.”)

Dick ahead of me in his limousine, me following. If something terrible happened to one of us but not the other, how would that affect the girls? Would the other parent always be the survivor that reminded them of the one who didn’t survive?

Blockades. Like bumper cars crashed into one another. No way around them.

Heading for the American Embassy. We’re told we’re going to the embassy. Vernon Walters running back to make sure I’m okay. I’m okay, and proud to be an American.

(
Home from school, Tricia Nixon turns on the radio and hears what is happening. She calls her father’s office. It is the first they’ve heard about it.
)

Imagine the embarrassment of the wife of the foreign minister. A pat for her hand. Pat pats the hand gripping the seat next to her. If I saw this from above, that’s what I’d see: myself, offering a touch. What do they think anger will accomplish?

(
The night before, in the hotel: “Muerte a Nixon.”
)

(
Andrew Marvell: “The Grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none I think do there embrace
.”)

Horrible, to sit and watch Dick’s car set upon. Such a helpless feeling—though you can’t give in to feelings like that, because we are so rarely truly helpless.

Windows smashed. Thugs. Terrible actions, if not terrible people.

Forgiveness frees us, when we’d otherwise stay clenched in anger. Sister Thomas Anna would understand. She would certainly understand.

These people are acting like a disease. I suppose they even want to
kill
.

Day after day, Aunt Kate tending all those people, suffering
with tuberculosis. It killed Dick’s brother. His wonderful, beloved brother. Hannah Nixon’s favorite, maybe. I’ve heard mothers have favorites—though I can’t imagine it.

The car is racing toward the American Embassy. Will they storm the embassy? How will it end, all this violence?
They
must have gotten hurt, too. Some of their police were tackling their people.

My red suit, a mess.

My own father dead of tuberculosis, too. So soon after my mother. In those days, you never said “Cancer.” But it was listed on her death certificate: cancer of the liver. She couldn’t come back to the farm but lay dying at the house of the doctor. And I sat by her side, and sat by her side, and sat by her side, trying to make it easier.

(
Cancer. A scary word, almost a cliché, when used descriptively. John Dean would later speak of “a cancer on the presidency,” but on their trip to Venezuela, Watergate was an as-yet-unbuilt building. Even an unthought building
.)

They are thugs. Criminals. It degrades them, it does not degrade those set upon.

Julie, Tricia, Tricia, Julie, JulieTricia, TriciaJulie, both in my arms.

What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette.

W
hat ways of treating a recognizable person are fair game when you’re writing fiction? Both the writer’s and the reader’s expectations become complicated when the writer is creating a character based on someone familiar or—probably more common—if the reader can see in the character a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar traits, so that a whole new Literary Lego Person seems to have been created. Even people the writer knows are instantly altered when they are tuned to a major or minor key. Also, in the act of writing, the character can escape the writer’s intentions, and come to dominate the story in a way that is unwanted (or at least unexpected). Freed from the restraints of real life, the person-become-a-character can grow huge. As you write, you watch your character inflate as if you’ll be taking her to the Macy’s parade, where her huge face will bounce as high as the treetops.
Containing
a character is often the problem.

Let’s say the writer has a character who is based on a well-known figure—a situation increasingly common, as fiction writers struggle to remain standing in the Age of Memoir.

This development hasn’t happened overnight. Our American forebears congratulated themselves from the very beginning for their nuts-and-bolts factualism, their rejection of fantasy, illusion, and fiction as unmanly and “just made up.” Long before reality TV we prided ourselves for revealing the man, or author, behind the curtain as a scam, a sham. Such misleading trifles belonged to the old world of artifice, while we created a New Jerusalem of truth in a new world. Memoir or, as a friend calls it, me-moir, fits easily into our entire history, while fiction has always been highly suspect.

But what a change: memoirs now are usually about people no one would have heard of until they read the book, while novels increasingly invoke historic figures: Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s final days,
The Last Station;
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel
Marilyn,
about Marilyn Monroe. Legally, a work of fiction can simply ascribe words or actions to a person considered a public figure. But there are few cases of writers bothering to write fiction merely to express a vendetta (graffiti is more effective), so the writer’s fascination with his or her subject usually indicates something about the writer, as well. We also read excellent writers on any subject (William Shawn’s belief, when he was editor of
The New Yorker
), and we are pleased when we think a writer is sure to have something fascinating to say about a subject we would not have assumed she’d be writing about (Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville). When Edmund White writes a short biography of Rimbaud, we understand that there are two individuals whose stories will be heard: Arthur Rimbaud and Edmund White. Whether writers like it or not—they hardly ever
do
like it—readers have serious expectations of the writers whose fictional, or nonfictional, worlds they have come to know.

A certain class of writers—perhaps an ever vanishing number—remains reluctant to play to the crowd. In part, that’s because
the crowd is never right in front of them (when writing, at least) and is therefore unknowable. The writer can think only of his loyal dog, who never walks out of the room when he is reading aloud (he might hear the words “dog park” or “treat”!), or of his wife, who wouldn’t dare, or he may have internalized the opinions of his fellow MFA students, who never think he’s funny, or he might think he knows just the windup for the pitch to his agent, but in my experience, all people—even all dogs—drift away, in the moment of writing. The writer is left with herself as creator and merciless judge, struggling to keep left brain and right brain distinct.

Writers live an odd life, in which they face forward while spending much time looking back (
How much of this story do I know?
), appearing at enough events of daily life to stave off being served with divorce papers, while on a roller coaster of enthusiasm and despair, depending on how their writing is going. When you meet them, they often seem remote. That’s because they’re half in their fictional world, which they believe might blow away like a thistle in the next burst of wind (a wind, perhaps, from people recounting
their
stories, which the writer
should
know about in order to write something
really
interesting), and half fixated on passing for normal, which is the most difficult state to try to approximate. None of your clothes look quite right when your goal is to look normal.