At the law firm, the infamous boxes are kept in a vault. Because the material has not been acknowledged or otherwise publicly recorded, they"re vigilant about keeping it under lock and key. Each day we work, the enormous vault is opened and the vault minder takes the boxes off a shelf-puts them and our work computer and a.s.sorted printouts on a metal cart, which I push to my office along with a locked rolling file cabinet.
Ching Lan sits in my office and reads the rough drafts out loud. I mark them while she is reading. Her p.r.o.nunciation is awkward, but that prompts me to listen carefully, to edit judiciously. She transcribes my corrections and prints the pages, and we go around again. I enjoy the sound of her voice; it makes me work hard to find the meaning in the story. Ching Lan has enrolled in a copyediting course, which she enjoys. "The marks are almost like writing in Chinese-almost." We have thirteen stories and twenty-eight fragments of varying lengths, from three hundred fifty words to an eighteen-thousand-word ramble that I find brilliant but quasi-psychotic, or certainly under the influence of something. The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the b.u.t.t of a melon to tell if it"s ripe, and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightning storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of a man"s having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection."
Every day, Ching Lan eats lunch with her parents in the deli. All morning they wait for her to come and restock the shelves beyond reach-she is the ladder. Not wanting to intrude, I stop going to the deli and start getting lunch from a place two blocks away, but I feel like a traitor and go back to the deli.
"We are good, clean place, we have letter "A" from Board of Health," Ching Lan"s mother says. "You get parasite if you eat somewhere else."
"I didn"t want to intrude on your family time."
"You are part of our family," she says, ushering me behind the counter to sit where the family sits, on their pickle barrels, eating food brought from home in colorful Tupperware containers. "Pok ball?" she asks, lifting up a small round meatball with chopsticks.
"My sister works at dumpling house, she brings home leftovers," Ching Lan says.
I eat the pok ball, translating only after swallowing: pork ball.
"Good boy. You eat turtle?" the mother asks.
"No," I say.
"Not yet you don"t. It is very good, like strong chicken. What about congee?"
"I never had it."
"You would love-rice gruel like cream of wheat."
I nod.
"Prawn?" she asks.
"Yes," of course.
"Bok choy?"
"Frequently," I say, if only to make conversation.
"My sister owns a restaurant in Los Angeles and my cousin has one in Westchester County-we are what you call foodies," she says, putting more rice in my bowl.
After lunch, the mother slips me another Hershey bar-it has quickly become our tradition. "Chocolate is keeping your spirits up," she says.
On the way back to the firm, I stop at a Super Store for office supplies. I go up and down the rows, admiring the plenty. I find tape flags in fluorescent colors that I can use to notate Nixon"s use of language and theme so that it remains consistent but not overly repet.i.tious or redundant.
Clutching my bag of goodies, like adult penny candy, I enter the elevator and push "16."
"Working hard?" a guy behind me asks. He"s standing behind my left shoulder; I can"t see him without turning around.
"You bet," I say, trying to turn in his direction. I see only the brim of a baseball cap, a blue windbreaker, dark pants and shoes, and what I a.s.sume to be a nondescript man between fifty and seventy, white, unremarkable.
"I"ll keep it brief," he says, speaking without changing his tone. No one else in the elevator seems to be hearing him or is the least concerned.
"You really don"t have a clue-you"re like a love-struck kid. The whole thing goes deeper than you can imagine. For one, Chotiner had his fingers all over everything. And two, even if it was unconsummated, it was one h.e.l.l of a love affair between d.i.c.k and Rebozo. Three, it"s common knowledge that Nixon was in Dallas the morning of the a.s.sa.s.sination, and so were Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. Isn"t it a little too convenient that they were also the Watergate burglers-take a look at the hoboes, or Secret Service agents, on the gra.s.sy knoll. And Ferrie"s d.a.m.ned library card was in Oswald"s wallet!" He laughs, and one woman in the elevator turns to look. His voice lowers to a whisper. "They were all in and out of Cuba, playing both sides-and the Mafia. Check out who was there and bingo-it"s a triple play." A pause. "Did you know Jack Ruby worked for Nixon in 1947 under the name Jack Rubenstein? My point, buddy boy, is: you"ve got nothing, the big zippo."
A sound involuntarily escapes me, a cross between extreme excitement and gagging.
"It"s nothing to laugh at. Let me be perfectly clear," he says, and his phrasing has a familiar ring. "It wasn"t one guy in particular, but a group of guys. No one"s hands are clean. p.a.w.ns, we"re all p.a.w.ns. There"s no man that can"t be bought and no man that can"t be brought down. It was like a freak show." He stops for a moment. "Uncle Bebe bought your little Julie a house as a wedding gift. Do you think she registered for that at Tiffany"s? I keep track of these things. I"m a history buff. The government used to be filled with guys like me, guys who think they know something, who are smart but not smart enough-sons of b.i.t.c.hes. Watergate was a domestic incident, "a bizarre comedy of errors," as Nixon called it, that got blown out of proportion when you look at the rest of it. As Nixon himself said, "You open that scab and there"s a h.e.l.l of a lot of things and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves."" My man stops for a second, then starts again, this time doing the most uncanny imitation of Richard Nixon: ""Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details...don"t, don"t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.""
He stops, clears his throat. "So how are you liking the stories?"
"I like them," I say, forgetting for the moment that no one knows about the stories.
"Did you get to the one about the SOB?"
I nod.
"That one"s all about me," he says, winking. The elevator opens and he steps out. "Double-check your homework, and good luck."
I ride all the way up and then back down to the lobby and ask the guard at the front desk if he could show me the video loop from the elevator. I see the guy standing in the one blurry spot, as if he knew exactly where to be. All you can see is the brim of his baseball cap-you can"t even tell that he"s talking to me, except that I appear increasingly agitated and am looking around as if to see if anyone else is hearing what I"m hearing and what it means to them.
Is it some kind of test? I don"t want to make anyone nervous, but, on the other hand, if it"s a test from the inside, it would be smart to report it. I ask Wanda if she might come into my office. She comes as far as the doorway and then stands there while I explain about the man, the baseball cap, and so on.
"He stood behind you," she says. "Seemed to know exactly who you were, told you things you hadn"t heard before."
"Yes," I say, excited we"re on to something.
"Nothing on the surveillance video?"
"Just a blur," I say.
Wanda nods. "He"s been here on and off over the years," she says, unimpressed.
"Who is he? Like a crazy hanger-on?"
"Something like that," she says. "There used to be others, but there aren"t too many left now-it"s generational."
I"m still concerned.
"The world is filled with people," Wanda says.
I stand waiting to hear the rest-but Wanda says no more.
How many others? How much more is there to know? I get the sense that, once one begins to dig, the information stream is not only endless, but pa.s.sed under the table from administration to administration, as though there is some much larger playbook that only the President and his men are privy to. And clearly, once you take a look at that playbook, not only are you forever changed, but the twists and turns of party politics braid the cord of information and deal making so much that true change becomes impossible.
Who wrote the playbook? And when? Is anyone in charge? It is all such a gnarly web that at best one can only pick at the knots.
"Everything okay?" Ching Lan asks when I get back to my desk. "You look discolored," she says.
"Sorry?"
"Erased," she says, "very white, like paper."
I nod. The man in the elevator was dropping a lot of little beads about things I didn"t want to hear. The man he was talking about wasn"t my Nixon, he wasn"t Nixon as I wanted him to be. He wasn"t the youthful RMN as a vice-presidential candidate, accused of using campaign funds for personal expenses, going on national television, and making sure the people knew that he was of modest means.
Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we"ve got is honestly ours. I should say this-that Pat doesn"t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she"d look good in anything.
This man"s Nixon was darker, more menacing than I ever allowed myself to imagine. Upset by my own naivete, I wonder, Can I allow myself to know what I know and still love Nixon as deeply as I do? Can I accept how flawed, how unresolved he was, the enormous fissures in personality, in belief, in morality? Is there any politician who hasn"t sold his soul ten times over before he even takes office? The mystery man in the elevator told me what I didn"t want to hear, and on some level I know it all might be true. For some this might be a turnoff, but it draws me closer, makes RMN all the more human. He clearly wasn"t the first or the last to have gotten confused with regard to the boundaries between executive power and imaginary superpowers-he just may have been that rare bird who doc.u.mented himself more heavily.
I ask Ching Lan to pull up the "SOB" story so I can take another look.
Quoting from "SOB": "If people had a clue about what"s been going on they"d be shocked, more than shocked, they"d want something to happen-the last thing anyone wants is for the truth to come out-that"d be detrimental to us all."
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h it would kill this country."
"Whatever it is you know or think you know or that anyone else you know thinks he knows-you make sure they forget it, make sure that it goes away. There"s a way to do that, have things go quiet for a while-for as long as it takes."
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h who the h.e.l.l does he think he is-Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. SOB..."
I glance up and see Wanda in the hall chatting with Marcel, who pushes the chrome mail basket around delivering mail. Later, I ask Marcel what he knows about Wanda. "Not much," he says. "Only that she"s the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela-or Desmond Tutu, or someone like that..." He trails off. "Born in South Africa, sent to England for school, came here, sold her memoir for three-quarters of a million dollars," he adds as an afterthought.
"Why is she working here?"
"Going to law school in the fall," he says. "And she gave away the advance, donated to charity."
"Really," I say.
"Really," Marcel says, echoing my tone, as he pushes his cart down the carpeted hall.
Tapping the resources of what she calls "the sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves network," Cheryl has arranged for a party planner and a travel agent to come to the house and discuss Project BM South Africa. Everywhere we go, Cheryl keeps saying "BM" loudly-it gives me flashbacks to my mother asking, "Did you make a nice BM?" "I can"t talk right now, I have to make a BM." "Are your BMs regular?" and so on...
"Can we change the name?" I beg her. "Just call it what it is, a bar mitzvah."
"Too much to say," she says.
"Then let"s just say "bar," as in "We"re planning a bar.""
"Won"t people be confused?"
"No more than they already are now."
Sofia, the party planner, arrives with a box of props marked "Bar Mitzvah." She slaps it down on the dining-room table. "I have boxes for every occasion-Communion, Bar-Bat, Sweet 16, Engagement, Baby Shower, Adoption Celebration, Family Reunion, Corporate Picnic, props for every event, everything from your yarmulkes to flight jackets and those magic pens with a photo of either the bride or groom, tilt it and their clothes fall off-very popular. Let"s face it, people like free stuff. It"s gotten so bad, you go to someone"s house for dinner and you leave wondering, Where"s my booty bag?"
"How did you become a party planner?" I ask.
"By accident," she says. "My mother was a wonderful hostess: flowers on the table, so many ways to fold a napkin. You"d be shocked to know the number of people who don"t know the fork goes on the left, much less what to do if there"s a salad fork and a dessert fork.... Okay," she says, catching herself, aware that she has a propensity to go on. "What"s the time frame?"
"The temple date was July 3; Nate"s actual birthday is the fifth."
She looks stricken.
"What?" I ask.
"We"re beyond late-this is like sudden-death overtime." She takes a deep breath. "It is what it is-so we"ll jump right in and get started. First the invites."
"The good news is, we don"t need invites. It"s going to be really small, and Nate has already told me, no gifts. We"re going to make a donation to the village to help them improve the school."
Sofia looks at me like I"m an idiot. "You"re having the bar mitzvah in July in South Africa-no one is going to come, so what you want to do is invite everyone. All the more if you want to raise money for the school. Invite his whole cla.s.s and the faculty. Do you have a list of who came to the funeral? The family holiday-card list? The wife"s relatives, who might hate you but still care for the boy? Invite everyone you can think of-it"s halfway around the world and in the height of summer; they"ll be thrilled to say no and send a gift. Figure you invite two hundred fifty people and they each spend fifty to a hundred bucks, you"ll do very well. The cost of the invite is going to be a little high. We want it nice, lined envelope, reply card, stamped envelope. It"s about three fifty per-plus some kind of a rush charge. Let"s call it a start-up or opportunity cost. We want people to open the card, read the program, and be moved to send money. We"ll have thank-you notes printed at the same time. Anyone who sees this is going to know the kid got lucky having an uncle like you."
This is the first compliment I"ve gotten about my new role, and I am surprised at how good it feels.
"Okay," she says, not giving me a second to revel in it. "Let"s use our time wisely. For the invitation, thermography is fine. In this case, with the family history, to go full-on engraved would be excessive. And I strongly suggest you not invite people by e-mail. We"ll have a nice invite, and people will feel obligated.... "At Nate"s request, all gifts will be directed to building a school in the village...." They can make a PayPal donation-I"ll find out how you do it. Meanwhile, can you get a quote from Nate about his visit there and why this place is important to him?"
"Sure."
"Write it down," she says, tapping the blank pad of paper in front of me: "This is your to-do list. "Please Join Mr. Harold Silver and"-what"s the sister"s name?" she asks.
"Ashley."
""Ashley Silver in celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of Nathaniel"-what"s his middle name?"
"Ummm, Allan?"
"Nathaniel Allan Silver on, let"s call it July 9 in-what"s the name of the town?"
"Nateville."
"Nateville, how cute, South Africa. "Bar Mitzvah at Noon, Followed by Ceremonial Feast and Dancing." Do you know where in South Africa Nateville is?"
I shake my head no.
"What"s the biggest city?"
"Durban"-I think.
"We"re going to need a caterer, a rabbi, a band, and probably a refrigerated truck to get everything to the location, maybe a tent and air conditioning. What"s the temperature there in July?"
"I think it"s their winter."
"I"ll find out." She jots a note to herself. "What are you thinking regarding food? Roast-beef carving station? Omelets made to order? And what about the band? A Jewey klezmer rock group imported from the big city-you know, top hits plus traditional Jewish songs to a danceable beat? And we need to talk budget. I can dream all day, but I have no idea what you"re thinking."
"I"m thinking something a little more-what"s the word?-not exactly low-key, but taking advantage of whatever we can arrange right there in the village."
"Rustic?" she suggests.
"Whatever we do should be in keeping with whatever the South African village traditions are and not too over-the-top."
"Is there, like, a hotel or a B&B in this village?" she asks.
"I don"t know."
"You know," she says, "you and I are working at a disadvantage right now."