May We Be Forgiven: A Novel

by Homes, A. M.

  The firm is silent; telephones don’t ring, they blink, and people glide soundlessly across the carpet. The only noise is the shussshing of their clothing. Wanda leads me down a corridor, unlocks a door, and ushers me into a conference room filled with innocuous, if expensive, furniture. In the middle of the table sits something that looks like a UFO, a telephone pod for conference calls. On the far end of the table are two battered cardboard boxes with “R.M.N.” written in block letters on the side. My heart races.

  “You’ll have to leave your backpack with me,” Wanda says.

  “My backpack?”

  “Your bag.” She points to what I am carrying in my right hand.

  “George’s briefcase?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s for taking notes”—I pat the briefcase—“paper and pens.”

  “No outside materials,” she says. “We have supplies”—pointing to legal pads and pencils on the table. “And, please, no quoting more than seven words in a sequence.”

  I nod and hand her my briefcase. She hands me a three-page confidentiality agreement. I sign the document without reading it.

  “How much time have I got?” I ask.

  “I’m here until five.”

  “Thanks.”

  She moves to leave and turns back. “You’re under constant surveillance; that means no funny business.”

  “Am I allowed to unpack the boxes?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And handle the material?”

  “There are gloves on the table. You’re not allergic to latex, are you?”

  “Latex is fine,” I say. “Perfect.”

  I put the gloves on, imagining myself as a physician and RMN as my patient. With enormous excitement, I open the old box. The sight of Nixon’s handwriting makes me blush. My cheeks are warm, my palms sweating inside the gloves. I’m glad to be alone, because, frankly, I’m a little overexcited, like a twelve-year-old with his first girlie magazine.

  I am touching the paper that he touched—this is not a reproduction, this is 100 percent real. The legal pads are embossed with Nixon’s rich blue cursive, with cross-outs and fresh starts, numbers, underlines—often a page has several headings, things numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.

  He quite literally breathed on these pages; these are his thoughts, his ideas. “Eat less salt. Try pepper instead” is scribbled in the margins. “Or cinnamon. I hate cinnamon,” he writes in response to himself. “It’s like dirt.”

  Holding these well-used legal pads, I am overwhelmed with pleasure. I hear Julie’s voice in my head, “Take a look, and then we can talk.” I think of Julie marrying David Eisenhower, grandson of the general and former President, in December 1968, only weeks after Nixon won the presidency, the ceremony officiated by none other than the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale—Mr. Power of Positive Thinking.

  Pondering the high hopes, the promise, the great aspiration of RMN, I start thinking of myself. I trip over a psychic speed bump, tumble down, and am deep into my own family history. The irony is that, though my parents expected George and me to grow up and be president, they didn’t believe we were actually even capable of crossing the street on our own. It was the mixed message, simultaneous extremes of expectation and reminders that we weren’t worth crap, that in retrospect seems abusive. I am sure it was “unintentional” and was born from their own deprivation and the sense that we should be lucky for anything we got. I always had the feeling that my family was somehow “defective” and that it was those well-matched flaws—the ability to love and loathe all at once—that kept my parents together. Basically, they were lousy with bitterness. We were supposed to become president ruling from the children’s table while never daring to dream of going beyond where our parents had been; never transcending.

  My heart sinks—here I am with these legal pads, the literal hand of my subject in mine, and I’m losing time, digressing.

  I begin again, staying focused on Nixon and his contemporaries and a period of enormous change in this country—the bridge between our prewar Depression-era culture and the postwar prosperous-American-dream America.

  FROM R.M.N. BOX 345 LEGAL PAD #4 NOTES MARKED; GOOD AMERICAN PEOPLE.

  Wilson Grady is a man alone. Each morning Grady wakes with pride swelling in the center of his chest—he is filled with possibility, the hope that each day will be better than the last. He is a lucky fella, a fella of good fortune, crossing the plains, mile for mile, trailing a cloud of dust, his holey muffler so loud people think it’s a crop duster flying low. He sees folks in the distance looking on as he’s coming in—he jokes about it when he gets out of the car. “No surprises here,” he says. “She may be loud, but she’s what got me to you folks and I’m countin’ on her to get me back home at the end of the week.”

  The lady of the house steps off the front porch and comes towards him—a woman home alone will never invite him in—that’s understood.

  “Wilson Grady,” he says, extending his hand. “Thank you in advance for your time.”

  If she likes him at all, she’ll offer him a cup of coffee.

  “That would be nice,” he says, whether or not he had another cup two miles down the road.

  “How do you take it?” she asks and then before he can answer she adds, “We’re low on milk.”

  “Black with sugar would be fine.”

  He waits while she goes back inside. You can tell a lot about folks from their porch—Is it painted? Are there chairs, flowers? Curtains in the windows? Crocheted doilies under the lamps in the parlor? He has made himself a kind of a mental checklist.

  The coffee is hot—the thick ceramic cup nearly burning Grady’s hands.

  “You mentioned your children; how old are they?”

  “William, the oldest, is eleven, Robert is nine, Caroline is eight, and Raymond is six.”

  “One of the things I’ve got with me is an encyclopedia set, packed full of information, history, maps, things each and every one of us should know.” He leads the woman towards his car—carefully opening the trunk, which is outfitted like a traveling five-and-dime. “What I can tell you about these books is that every night when I have my supper I myself sit down with another letter of the alphabet—there is so much to learn. I’m on the letter ‘H’ right now—and getting a good education.”

  “How much is it?”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “It’s not cheap. The 26 letters of the alphabet are combined into 13 volumes and it comes along with an atlas of the world. Makes a heck of a Christmas gift and it’s something all the kids can use—even the little fella will be reading soon.”

  “Do you have children, mister?”

  “Not yet—but someday. I’ve got my eye on the girl I want to marry, she just doesn’t know it yet.”

  The woman smiles.

  “I could let you have the full set for forty dollars.”

  She nods. “That’s quite a lot.”

  “It is,” he says. “It’s an investment, a lifetime of knowledge.”

  “Do you by chance have an iron?”

  “I do”—taking a moment to find it. “Steam electric,” he says, carefully taking it out of the box to show her. “I got one of these for my mother and she says it does a beautiful job.”

  “How much does that go for?”

  “Six dollars and forty-nine cents.”

  “And what about penny candy?” she asks shyly.

  He laughs. “Don’t think you’re the first person this week who’s asked—I have peppermint balls, lemon drops, red and black licorice, and, if you’re looking for something fancy, I’ve got a couple of boxes of See’s chocolates.”

  “I had one of those once,” she says, “it was heaven on earth.”

  “Chocolatiers to the stars,” he says.

  She laughs and reaches into her dress pocket. “How about I take the iron and fifty cents’ worth of candy.”

  Grady works door to door 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. If the husband is home, Grady makes it a po
int to seem interested in whatever it is the fella wants to show him—it’s always something—a project he’s got going in the barn out back or in his basement workshop. Grady finds it sad—all the fellas want is a pat on the back and someone to tell them they’re doing fine. He listens, lets the man go on longer than he ought to, and then, before starting his pitch, he sobers the fella up with the story of how he never saw his father in a suit until the day he died. And then he goes for the sale—anything less than fifty bucks he considers a failure. It’s a success if he can get them to buy the encyclopedia for the kids and a box of candy for the wife—and near the holidays he also keeps a supply of toy trucks with working headlights, and dolls whose eyes open and close for the girls.

  For Wilson Grady, a good day ends in a diner. With the exception of his mother’s pies, he’s had the best meals of his life tucked into a window booth under the glow of the neon sign and with a letter from his encyclopedia as good company.

  “I’ll start with a cup of the chowder and then I’ll have the special.”

  His plate, with two thick slices of meat loaf, well-cooked green beans, a warm biscuit, and a scoop of mashed potatoes mounded like hills with a well of brown gravy in the center, is so perfect it almost makes him cry—he loves America.

  At night a wind sweeps across and the temperature drops down. Even though it’s been a good day, Wilson Grady is achingly cold. He keeps a couple of old wool blankets in the car, along with a pillow that belonged to his brother as a young boy. He parks on a side street and hunkers down for the night—most of the time no one notices him, and if they do he apologizes and drives off into the night, thinking of the waitress with her apron tied neatly around her waist like a chastity belt, as he vanishes down a darkened road.

  I finish and I’m almost in tears—it’s a side of Nixon that I’ve never seen before but always suspected existed beneath the surface. There’s a humanity, a desperation to this Nixon, which is early Nixon, not presidential Nixon, but Nixon as he knows himself. This Nixon is a man with burgeoning ambition, an idealized, if clichéd, everyman, crisscrossing the country laying the groundwork for the great moment to come. Wilson Grady is a man who wants something but doesn’t quite know how to get it.

  I unpack the box, making a row of piles of the material, careful to keep things in order—but wanting to get to the middle, the end, wanting a sense of the arc of the materials, the shape of things.

  I find a short piece about halfway through the stack. What draws my attention to it is how Nixon has printed “SOB, Son of a Bitch” multiple times across the top two inches of the page. The “story,” almost entirely in curses, is a vignette of a man being attacked by the furniture in his office. The man arrives late, having been delayed by train trouble. And rain. His shoes are soaked. His socks are wet. He comes into his office, takes his shoes and socks off and lays them on the radiator, puts his damp leather briefcase down—noticing that it actually smells like a barnyard—takes out his important papers, and sits in his chair, which promptly spins him in endless circles before tipping him forward onto the floor. He remounts the chair and leans forward to turn on the desk lamp, which delivers a surprising shock. He then picks up his ink pen, which leaks all over his fingers, and then, finally, in a rage, as he’s looking for a handkerchief to clean himself, he slams the pencil drawer shut, pinching his fingers.

  “Christ.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Damn it.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Cocksucker.”

  From there I find another story; scrawled across the top in parentheses is a note, “no names, because I actually once had a drink with this fella.”

  An Apartment on the Avenue

  Arthur comes home late, having had one or two more than is good for him. He finds his wife in the bedroom, undressing; he watches her thinking she still looks good, sexy, he’d be in the mood for getting frisky, but as soon as she speaks, his hopes…

  “Is there something I can get for you, Arthur?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  “All right, Arthur, I thought from the way you were standing there that you were waiting for something.”

  “You wanna know what it is, Blanche? The truth of it all…I never loved you—I married you because I thought it would be good for me.”

  “I already know that, Arthur.”

  “And if I didn’t think it would cost me in more ways than one, I would have been out of here long ago.”

  “You’re not the only one who feels that way,” she says.

  “When was the last time you wanted me?” he says. “In the way that a woman should want her man.”

  “I’ve never liked sex, you know that,” she says, looking at him in the mirror of her dressing table.

  “Exactly,” he says, talking to her reflection. “But imagine how that makes a fella feel? The thing is, I like it and it would be nice to do it once in a while with someone who didn’t think it was disgusting.”

  “It is my understanding that you certainly have found places to ‘do it.’”

  “It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?”

  “Doesn’t it?” she says. “Well, Arthur, when you talk about things that could hurt you, having relations with your boss’s secretary can’t be good for you, can it?”

  “Men don’t see it the same as women,” he says.

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  He comes close to her, close to the dressing table where she’s sitting, putting cream on her face.

  “Put some on me,” he says, almost begging for it. She’s not interested.

  “You know how to take care of yourself,” she says, getting up and walking away.

  He reaches out to pull her towards him, but everything goes wrong, and his hand connects with her face, like he’s taking a swing at her. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.

  She has no reaction, she just takes it, and somehow it’s the lack of a reaction, the absence of anything human, that prompts him to do it again—this time with clear intention. Fingers rolled into a fist, he lays one on her, hitting her cheek.

  She doesn’t fall; she stands there, barely swaying. “Are we done for the night?” she says and then spits—a single tooth lands on the carpet.

  With nothing left to say, he goes down the hall, takes the blanket they used to use for summer picnics in the park out of the closet, and sets himself up on the sofa. Alone among the side tables, lamps, and wing chair, he sobs. Heavy tears like marbles running down his face as he talks out loud to himself, in a rambling incantation that stops only when he plugs his mouth with his thumb—sucking until sleep comes.

  At noon, Wanda comes into the conference room, puncturing the reverie. “Time for lunch,” she says.

  “That’s okay,” I say, “I’ll work straight through.”

  “We break for lunch,” Wanda says. And I look at her. “There’s no one available to monitor you, so you need to come out for an hour. You may leave your materials as they are; we’ll lock the room.”

  I ride down in the elevator with Wanda. As we’re getting out, I glance at her; she looks at me, concerned. “Do you need money for lunch?” she asks.

  “Oh no,” I say. “I’ve got plenty of money, just no identification. Not to worry. Is there someplace you’d recommend?”

  “There’s a salad bar in the deli across the street, and restaurants up and down,” she says, relieved.

  I walk out of the building and into the light, realize Claire could be out there, and furtively duck into the deli, where I slip into the rotation of people walking in slow circles around the salad bar, vaguely mumbling like they’re meditating. There’s chopped lettuce, cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, steamy trays of meat in mysterious sauce, brilliant orange macaroni and cheese.

  I think of Nixon’s short story about the diner and find myself putting meat loaf and mashed potatoes into my container, and then a large scoop of hot, heavy macaroni that softens the Styrofoa
m. I pay and go to the back of the deli, where I see a few guys sitting on empty plastic pickle barrels. “Mind if I join?” I ask, and they simply look at me and go back to eating. The food is delicious—beyond delicious, it is divine, a mélange of flavors like nothing I’ve ever had before.

  “You look busy,” the Chinese woman from the deli says to me while I’m perched on the pickle barrel.

  “I’ve had a very big day,” I say.

  “You go to work, you win, win, win.”

  I nod. She brings me a cup of tea.

  “Do you know Richard Nixon?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says. “Without Nixon I’d be nowhere.”

  “I’m working on Nixon.”

  “Pick something,” she says. “Before you go, you pick for yourself for later.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, not sure what she wants me to do.

  She slaps a Hershey bar into my hand. “You like with almond?”

  “This is great,” I say, looking down—almond.

  “You do good work,” she says, nodding. “I know you from before, long time ago, you buy cookies for your wife.”

  I’m confused.

  “You don’t remember?” she asks, holding up a box of cookies. LU Petit Écolier. “You buy these.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s right, I did. I used to buy those for Claire.”

  “Of course you did,” she says.

  “Was that here?”

  “One block down,” she says. “We move, this much better location, big building right on top, big bankers, crunching numbers, need something to chew on.”

  “I’m surprised that you remembered me.”

  “I never forget,” she says, and then pauses. “I sorry for your life. I see you in the newspaper—one big mess.”

  “It’s more my brother than me.”

  “It’s you too,” she says. “You are your brother.”

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Things are looking up.”

  “See you later, alligator,” she says, walking me out the door.