“I haven’t dictated in years!” said Mrs. Longworth. “It will be thrilling.”
The girl had arrived at nine a.m. sharp to pick up the recipe Alice had agreed to contribute to the Kennedy Center’s fundraising cookbook, which was overdue at the press. Mrs. Longworth had promised something suitable for the category “Tea After the Matinee” and sworn that she would have her typewritten submission ready to collect, but naturally she didn’t. So she’d proposed dictation, handing the girl, who didn’t know shorthand, a cracked pencil and a tablet of paper brittle with age.
“I used to dictate my column,” she explained. This syndicated rival to Eleanor’s “My Day” had not lasted long; the editors were always cutting and caviling and deciding she’d gone out of bounds. Of course, that was decades ago, and Alice realized that this girl, poised with ancient pencil over ancient paper, had a very sketchy idea of who she was. The thought displeased her.
Janie called from downstairs: “You’re going to be late! Mr. Alsop’s outside in a car, with a driver, and the motor’s running!”
The housekeeper’s order to hurry slowed Alice down further. “Read me Jackie’s,” she said to the girl, who pulled from her folder Mrs. Onassis’s typewritten directions for “Risotto with Mushrooms,” suitable for an “Early Dinner Before the Concert.”
“And Mamie?” interrupted Alice, before the girl could even get to the beef marrow and onions in Jackie’s list of ingredients.
Further rummaging of the folder revealed that President Eisenhower’s widow had sent a dessert recipe for “Frosted Mint Delight.” It called for a lot of pineapple juice and whipped cream.
“Revolting!” cried Alice. “Couldn’t be worse if you topped it with a hair from one of her bangs. All right, I’m ready.” She cleared her throat: “Bread and butter,” she said solemnly. The girl headed the paper with these words, and Alice continued: “Buy very good unsliced bread; cut it into very thin slices with a very sharp knife; then butter it with sweet butter.”
The girl looked up.
“Did I go too fast for you?” asked Alice.
“Well, no, but—”
“Good, I’ll telephone later if I think of anything else.” She gave a little off-with-you-now wave, and picked up a page from Wednesday’s Post, which lay open on the couch. So gripping was the drama being provided by young Mr. Dean that she had been reading—even underlining—Joanna’s copies of Kay’s rag, and hardly bothering to cover her tracks. She had, for example, put a large red circle around one transcribed exchange between the Ervin Committee’s chief counsel, Mr. Dash, and the Tortoiseshelled Tattler, as she now liked to call the bespectacled young star witness:
DASH: Therefore, Mr. Dean, whatever doubts you may have had prior to September 15 about the President’s involvement in the cover-up, did you have any doubts yourself about this after September 15?
DEAN: No, I did not.
She had put two red rings around a later bit of interrogation—Senator Talmadge asking the TST why he hadn’t told Dick, right from the start, that everyone in his employ was trying to cover up the break-in:
TALMADGE: You mean you were counsel to the President of the United States and you could not get access to him if you wanted to, is that your testimony?
And the reply!
DEAN: No, sir, I thought it would be presumptuous of me to try, because … my reporting channel was Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman.…
He made it sound as if they were a battalion of ants in some skyscraper, not allowed to get on the same elevator with the boss. For heaven’s sake, she could remember old John Hay, Father’s secretary of state, bursting into the office to talk about his problems just after she’d burst in to discuss her own. There was no more barrier to his getting in than there’d been forty years earlier, when he was just little Johnny Hay and Lincoln’s private secretary.
It was the strangeness of Dick’s operation, not any misconduct, that had her shaking her head. When it came to accusations, she preferred not to believe Mr. Dean—but first she needed to see the Tattler in action, even if the opportunity for that depended on Joe trundling her in and out of the Senate Caucus Room.
“How long are you going to keep him waiting?” scolded Janie, who’d come upstairs after showing out the Kennedy Center girl.
Alice gave her housekeeper a hard look.
“It’s twenty to ten,” said Janie, whose patience with the old lady’s nonsense went only so far. “And from what I hear on the radio, Senator Ervin likes to start on time.”
Reluctantly, Alice accepted the other woman’s help in getting out of her chair, into her hat, and down to the first floor. Once out the door, she called hello to the people at the bus stop, a few of whom recognized her. Joe’s driver then assisted in getting her into the back of the big black car. “Thank you,” said Alice, crisply, as if forgiving an imposition.
Alsop wouldn’t even speak to his cousin while the car cleared Dupont Circle on its way east toward the Russell Building on Capitol Hill. In the space of two minutes Alice saw him take three nervous-Nellie looks at his watch. It was now a quarter to ten and he was worried, even with reserved seats in the Caucus Room, about their having to fight the crowd.
“I thought it was thirty transfusions that you’d supplied,” said Alice, breaking the silence.
“It was,” replied Alsop, confirming the number of blood donations he’d made to his still-dying brother. “It’s been going on longer than a year now. Just like this goddamned thing.” With the back of his hand he slapped the Post’s front page of Watergate news.
“Well, from the expression on your face, Joe, it looks more like sixty drainings.”
“Don’t want to. Too depressing. And I’m sure he doesn’t want to see me.”
“You saw what he wrote? ‘A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep.’ And the doctors say it could go on for another year.”
Alice decided to change the subject. “Tell me, why am I not on the Enemies List?” The existence of an actual roster of the president’s foes—people to be denied White House invitations and perhaps audited by the IRS—had come to light during Tuesday’s questioning of Dean.
Alsop gave her a worried look. “Because you’re his friend. You know, I’d be concerned that you’re going through second childhood if it weren’t fully apparent that you never left your first.”
Alice ignored the insult. “I concede that it’s a long shot, but not beyond possibility. Bobby was my friend, and if he’d gotten in in ’68, I’m sure he’d have had such a list, and I’m sure I’d have done something to put myself on it by now. And we’d still be friends.”
Alsop remained silent. He was weary of her monkeyshines.
But Alice plowed on. “Bella Abzug and Mary McGrory! Putting them on it. Could anything be more obvious? Aside from all else, I can’t believe the fuss over this list—as if Dick isn’t entitled to hate people.” She paused briefly, before asking, “Why are you so gloomy? Apart from letting yourself be tapped like some maple tree?”
“There’s this nephew of Susan Mary’s who’s coming for a long visit,” said Alsop, with a sigh. “The two of them are great pals, and I can’t stand him. He also can’t stand me. They’re going to chatter and whisper without letup, and I think he’s going to convince her to leave me at last.”
Mr. and Mrs. Alsop had held on so far—even gone to China together after the election, thanks to the homme sérieux—but Susan Mary still had the option on that apartment in the Watergate.
“And I’m gloomy about having to go look at him,” Alsop added, meaning Dean, whom he’d described in print, even before his testimony began, as “a bottom-dwelling slug.” A marathon “opening statement”—245 pages—and three days of questioning had not changed Joe’s mind. He clung to a piece of logic he had put into his column a few weeks ago: “What is against one’s interest is always credible. So they have to be believed if they say, ‘The President knew nothing and ordered nothing.’ ” He was talking about Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Colson—all of them apparently ready to say just this, even if it made people believe that they’d been covering up at their own initiative—and were thus more guilty than if they’d just been carrying out orders. Dean, inconveniently, was saying something else, but Alsop hoped that its manifest self-interest (confession in exchange for leniency) would be obvious. And, in the absence of independent evidence, how exactly could Dean prove that he was not a bottom-dwelling slug?
The car drove past the courthouse at Third and Constitution, where the day before yesterday Fred LaRue had become the first figure in the cover-up to plead guilty. “You know,” said Alsop, staring at the courthouse and looking gloomier than ever, “I tried to get people to pay attention to Brezhnev’s visit. But no soap.” The Soviet leader had already come and gone, the Ervin Committee having agreed to postpone Dean’s testimony while he was on U.S. soil. But the effect of the delay had been to heighten anticipation of Dean’s appearance. “Like having to watch a documentary before the Beatles come on,” Alsop now groused to his cousin.
They drove into the reserved-parking area beside the Russell Building. Alice stuck her head out the car window, looking for Dean’s “maroon-colored Porsche,” by now a famous accoutrement of the scandal, even if it didn’t have the evidentiary value of, say, the old prothonotary warbler. The crowd was making Joe nervous, and to irritate him further she pulled her head back in and leaned over him to read the newspaper on his lap.
But before she could get a rise out of him, she got one out of herself. The date on the paper: June twenty-ninth! It was Bill’s birthday, and she hadn’t realized it until this moment. She began counting on her fingers: he’d be a hundred and eight.
“Driver,” she said sharply. “Take us to the Capitol Building.”
Alsop looked at her. “You really have gone out of your mind.”
“It is Senator Borah’s birthday,” she explained. The ancient open secret of Paulina’s parentage was even now unacknowledged between her and Joe, and she uttered the fact of Bill’s anniversary as if displaying a dispassionate regard for, say, Henry Clay. “I would like to put some flowers by his statue.”
“You don’t have any flowers,” said Alsop, as the driver hesitated over what to do next.
“I can buy them at the cigar stand.”
“There is no more cigar stand. And there’s no time, either. If you want to skip the bottom-dwelling slug, that’s fine by me. But I have to see him, and we can’t do both. I’ll get out here and have Mr. Ellis take you to the Capitol.”
Alice briefly fell into a snit, then allowed herself to be led up to the Caucus Room, where she and Joe arrived less than three minutes before Senator Ervin’s gavel was due to fall. She glared at a man who asked if she would remove her hat, then turned her eyes to the front of the enormous room. “I met that one in Florida,” she said to Joe, pointing to handsome Senator Gurney. “Not the brightest orange in the crate.”
“I know,” Joe agreed, regretfully. Gurney had so far been Dean’s only severe interrogator, but his mind wasn’t quick enough to pursue any advantages he verged upon gaining. Alice had circled one or two bits of his questioning in the other day’s paper. He’d asked Dean if it wasn’t true that the cover-up “sort of grew like Topsy,” and Dean had conceded the aptness of the image. The two of them would have the NAACP on their case if they kept it up.
As Ervin shuffled his papers and twitched his eyebrows, a television camera panned the audience. She rather hoped it would come to rest on her, so she could wave and mouth a hello to Dick, who was out in San Clemente, pretending not to watch the proceedings.
Joe readied pen and pad as the committee came to order with some questions for Dean from Senator Montoya. The precise little drone from the witness, like a fan being switched back on, reinforced Alice’s dislike of him, which she’d felt ever since he began his opening statement with a Pecksniffian wish that Richard Nixon might be forgiven for whatever crimes he, John Dean, was about to charge him with.
Even so, the young man’s memory and persistence had come to impress her. She’d given up hoping that anybody on the panel would break through some weak spot and make him falter; as it was, whenever they poked at him, he rebounded with some detailed, plausible explanation. Yes, he’d been fired from his first job with a law firm, but really only because he’d been about to quit. And yes, he’d borrowed a bundle of cash for his honeymoon from a White House safe, but he’d left an IOU and had long since put the money back.
One rumor—floated by Joe of all people!—held that he was inordinately fearful of being raped in prison. Seeing him at last in person, she decided that he was delicate, but not especially pretty; he had the mousey look of Nick’s old Ohio cronies. He’d been on the make from the beginning, rooming with Goldwater’s son at military school and making a first marriage to another senator’s daughter. He couldn’t have given that up easily, thought Alice, though the second wife, with her generous figure and blond hair pulled tightly back, was as beautiful as a maroon Porsche.
Gurney, who Alice believed would make a rather attractive cellmate, asked Dean to return his attention to a meeting he said he’d had with Herbert Kalmbach, Dick’s California lawyer, at the Mayflower Hotel here in Washington, a couple of weeks after the break-in. They’d gone up to Kalmbach’s room when the coffee shop proved too noisy for the conveyance of Dean’s message. “ ‘I told him,’ ” Gurney now said, quoting Dean, “ ‘that Mitchell had suggested [Kalmbach] get his detailed instructions from Mr. LaRue …’ ”
Alice’s mind started to drift. In her long life, the superior force of the here and now against the afterglow of the past had proved, by and large, a good thing, though at this moment, in this room, she found herself sinking into the softer hues of long ago. She had often come here in the late twenties, when Bill was chairing the Foreign Relations Committee. He would commandeer the great room in an attempt to attract attention to some place like Montenegro or Madagascar, but principally (and at her urging) to gain attention for himself. Nothing thrilling would ever happen—what hearings could compete with the ones for Teapot Dome a few years before?—but she would revel in being away from the baby’s detestable crying and, after that, its monosyllabic gurgling, which provoked her revulsion instead of maternal rapture. Sometimes there would be so few people in the audience that she and Bill were practically having a tête-à-tête. No one ever asked why she wasn’t over in the House chamber, watching Nick in his speaker’s chair, because everyone knew.
She’d continued coming to see Bill even after he lost the chairmanship and Franklin went to the White House. By that point Nick was dead and Paulina sullen, beginning the long, slow-motion punishment of her mother. With Nick now buried in Cincinnati and Bill entombed in Idaho, only Paulina was right here, a few miles away in Rock Creek Cemetery, waiting for Alice to fill up the rest of the plot. How odd that she and her daughter would be spending eternity together! And yet Paulina—by now just bones and dust—remained the only commingling of herself and Bill that had ever existed. (She really would have named her Deborah—de-Borah—if Nick hadn’t drawn the line at that.)
Joe was suddenly sitting up, rigid with attention, the business with Dean and Kalmbach having acquired some urgency. Today, as on Wednesday, the Tattler was insisting that he’d met Kalmbach in the coffee shop of the Mayflower. But Gurney had just produced hotel records, subpoenaed by the committee staff, which showed that Kalmbach had been staying not at the Mayflower but the Statler. Dean, for once flustered, suggested that Kalmbach had perhaps been registered at the Mayflower under a false name; the lawyer had after all always been jumpy enough to use code names for Mitchell (“the pipe”) and Haldeman (“the brush”) during their conversations. Yet even Gurney was sharp enough to realize that it made no sense for Kalmbach to have been at the Statler under his own name while at the Mayflower under an alias. Still, Dean felt sure it had been the Mayflower.
By now Alice had come to life with Joe and the rest of the audience. Perhaps this hotel coffee shop was the prothonotary warbler!—the item in the case that pops a stitch in the witness’s story and unravels all his believability.
GURNEY: How long have you lived in Washington?
DEAN: I have been here about ten years.
GURNEY: And you don’t know the difference between the Statler-Hilton and the Mayflower hotels?
DEAN: I continually get them confused, I must confess. The point in substance here is that the meeting did occur. We met in the coffee shop. We went from the coffee shop to his room.
Alice imagined Dick leaning forward over his bowl of Cheerios in San Clemente, talking to the TV, telling Gurney to hurry up and twist the knife he’d stuck into the little bastard.
Alas, thought Alice, handsome is as handsome doesn’t. Gurney already seemed to be losing the thread, meandering into a series of unrelated questions about Dean’s credit cards. Joe began twitching with exasperation, afraid the potentially fatal moment had passed. And then suddenly it was Dean, not Gurney, who was returning them to it, asking if he might impart a bit of information that someone had just helpfully conveyed to his lawyer: “The name of the coffee shop at the Statler is The Mayflower.”
A burst of applause, loud enough to rattle the chandeliers, filled the room. Alice’s gloved hands, ignoring which side she was supposed to be on, contributed to it. Joe shot her a glance, furious that she couldn’t help herself: her love of smarts, her lifelong preference for winners over losers, trumped everything. If Iago was a species of “motiveless malignity,” she was a creature of motiveless mischief. At this new low point in the president’s fortunes, he felt only disgust toward her.
And yet it was Alice who now said, “I’ve seen enough.”
“Good,” replied Alsop. Remembering his manners, he gritted his teeth and reminded her of their plan to have lunch at the F Street Club. “I’m ready to go eat anytime you are.”
“No, thank you,” said Alice. “There’s something else I’d rather do.”
Alsop saw a chance to get rid of this petulant child. “If you want to go over to Borah’s statue, I’ll get a page to take you. And after that I’ll have Mr. Ellis run you home.”
“I want Mr. Ellis to drive me to Rock Creek.”
Alsop looked at her painfully frail frame and shook his head. “You can not go to the cemetery. What are you going to eat?”
“Janie always puts a banana and peanuts in my purse. I’m starting to look like an ape, so she feeds me like one.”
She was getting her way, thought Alsop. But he comforted himself with the thought that he would more or less be getting his, too. He headed for the rear exit of the Caucus Room; he would find Ellis and tell him to take her away.
Alice dozed during the drive to Petworth, the cemetery neighborhood near the District’s northern tip. She guided Mr. Ellis, who had remained silent, through a gate on New Hampshire Avenue and then, at under five miles per hour, along the path to the graveyard’s section A. “I’ll get out here,” she said.
Mr. Ellis at last spoke: “Mr. Alsop instructed me not to leave you by yourself.”
“I am old enough to be Mr. Alsop’s mother.”
“I believe that’s the point, ma’am.”
“All right,” said Alice, eager to escape. “I’ll get out and let you follow at a reasonable distance. If I keel over, you’ll see a black hat rolling across the lawn.”
The afternoon was sweltering, and the old lady didn’t even have a cane, but her catnap had revived her. So Mr. Ellis opened the door and helped her out of the car. She certainly looked as if she were dressed for a funeral.
Alice set off slowly through section A, wondering as she went whether Stew had gotten around to choosing where he wished to be buried. Perhaps he’d decided to send his carcass back to Connecticut, where it had been raised—a line of reasoning Alice always faulted for the way it made one’s whole adult life seem a mere detour.
She passed the grave of Agnes Harvey Stone, widow of the chief justice, dead for fifteen years without ever having returned Alice’s copy of Ten North Frederick. The mausoleums of Riggs and Heurich, the District’s biggest banker and biggest brewer, soon came into view, each much nicer than that ridiculous “Grief” statue by Saint-Gaudens, a vulgar extravagance thrown up by Henry Adams to pay off the guilt he felt over his wife’s suicide, just as another man might provide a diamond bracelet to the spouse he’d neglected for a chorus girl. Eleanor used to come out and sit on the bench across from this monstrosity, a fact Alice had turned into one of her party pieces. She would put a dish towel over her head to mimic the statue’s veil, then raise her hand to her face, just like the sculpture, shutting her eyes to complete the imitation. And then, when her tableau vivant appeared fixed, she would buck out her teeth and say, in Eleanor’s horribly untethered upper register, “I have just returned from surveying conditions in the afterlife!”
A circle of trees now shielded her eyes from the statue, so popular with visitors that it had become a celebration of suicide rather than a caution. She preferred the plain lawn and modest headstones of section F—and there it was, her own eternal reward, the half-filled plot beneath the granite marker for PAULINA STURM 1925–1957. Watching Mr. Ellis watching her, Alice lowered herself onto the grass covering HILDA WILHELMINA LUOMA, Paulina’s preposterously named neighbor since 1959.
From this seat, Alice recalled the expression on Dick’s face as he helped to carry her daughter’s coffin to its open grave. She also again remembered the night that had followed, her going to the Nixons’ house on Tilden Street, Pat remaining upstairs, the girls out of sight, watching television somewhere. Alone with Dick in his study, she had forced herself to speak of suicide, the subject which all day had ruled everyone’s thoughts and stilled their tongues.
“She didn’t do it, but I believe I shall,” she’d told Dick, meaning it, her voice quavering as it never had before or since. To her surprise, he’d gone to one of his bookshelves, as if to fetch a Physicians’ Desk Reference, and taken down a volume of Father’s collected works. It took him no time at all to find the passage he wanted: And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever. He read out loud, astonishingly, what Father had written about her mother and, by extension, about her, the child whose birth had brought on such a foul death and such inordinate grieving.
She knew, right at that moment, why Dick had picked those lines, and why she’d come to him. No, he had not yet protested the Post’s libel about suicide, and not yet pressured the insurance company to pay out. But she didn’t need to see him do those things. She’d come to the house that night because of the look on his face when he’d shouldered the coffin—the creased, naked expression on this darkest of dark horses, this misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession, able to succeed from cunning and a talent for denying reality at close range. She didn’t share his general dinginess: she smiled in delight, however viciously, whereas he smiled only in a kind of animal desperation. But she shared the darkness beneath and the capacity for denial; she could sometimes change or negate reality just with her contempt for it.
By the time she left his house that night, the two of them had effected a little sorcery, succeeded in convincing her that Paulina had been her own heart’s dearest and that all the world knew it. She held on to this illusion long enough to get home to the empty house in Dupont Circle and throw away Bill’s old straight razor with which she might have put an end to herself the way she’d imagined doing it, draining the blood as if she were her own taxidermist.
Dick’s current illusions would evaporate soon enough. Fewer and fewer people shared them. Joe might be one of those, but he’d soon look a fool if his columns kept talking of resignation and impeachment as remote possibilities. Stew, who by now knew something about dying, rightly gauged Dick’s prospects for survival as not much brighter than his own. She was still ashamed of her own early blitheness about the burglary; her dismissive remarks of a year ago now struck her not as the denial of reality, into which she’d successfully put so much of her life’s energy, but a failure of imagination, a kind of laziness or, even worse, stupidity. She’d wised up soon enough, but shouldn’t have been so dumb in the first place.
Would her kindred spirit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—so shrewd and so deplorable—manage to hold on? The other afternoon, Janie, glued to the radio, had asked her the same question. “California, here he comes,” Alice had replied, pleased with the remark as she made it, but rather miserable about it once she got back upstairs.
And yet, she now thought, closing her eyes against the afternoon sun: surely the Tattler had no proof. And if he didn’t, could not the truth remain forever in abeyance, like Paulina’s paternity if not her death? Could not Dick live on in the White House, known but not proved to be guilty, like Lizzie Borden in Fall River? Surely he could endure such a condition better than anyone. It was now the best he could hope for, and perhaps it would come to pass. After all, what deus ex machina could possibly provide corroboration for Mr. Dean?
The watchful Mr. Ellis, fearing she’d started to doze, honked the horn.