“Why don’t you tell me who you work for, Dick? The Russians?”
“They’re just my friends,” I said.
“And that Tatiana woman? Are you ‘just friends’ with her, too?”
“Yes, her. And Arkady.” I started to slide over toward Pat but she jerked the gun up.
“Hands on the table; let’s do this properly,” she said. “How long? Since the presidency? Since Eisenhower? Since the very start?”
“Mrs. Nixon,” Arkady said, “I must tell you, I am feeling this is awkward marital conversation and perhaps I am not belonging.”
“You go over there. The bar. You sit.” He got up slowly, hands in view.
“Is great mystery, marriage,” he remarked, “of which I have not the happiness to know. But I wish its greatest blessings to you both.” Pat waited for him to take his seat at the bar.
“So you’re a traitor,” she said. “After all this time. Have you told Alger Hiss?”
“Pat, these things are complicated.” I was sweating torrentially in my wool suit, sweating like a man losing a televised debate.
“Because you’re in love with Tatiana?”
“No!” I blushed even though I didn’t want to. Was I in love after all? Was it possible to be elected president and still not know how to tell if you’re in love?
“Dick. I know we’re not anything anymore. Maybe not even friends,” she said. She sat down opposite me, the gun still in her hand. “I know that. I just don’t want to be lied to.”
“I admit that in a very technical sense, I am a spy,” I said. I closed my eyes as I said it, not wanting to see her expression. But instead of a gasp of shock, I heard something that sounded like a badly suppressed snort of laughter. I opened my eyes.
“No, you’re not,” Pat said. She smiled, a little patronizingly, I thought. “You can’t be!”
“I’m sorry, but yes, I am.” She shook her head. “Why am I not a spy?”
“Spies have to be—well, you have to be good at things. You have to be able to shoot a gun. Run a mile in a reasonable fraction of an hour. Speak languages. Hold your breath underwater.”
“I can speak French.”
“Well, then, you have to be brave,” she said, and now there was ice in it. “Are you brave?”
“I’m investigating a threat to the United States that very few people know about.” At least she wasn’t pointing the gun at me anymore.
“Is that what you’re spying on when you go get drunk on Thursday nights? Is that the only time this threat is available?”
“Pat, there is no possible way you would understand.”
“Show me, then,” she said, apparently in no hurry to finish torturing me.
“There’s nothing to see, Pat. Nothing at all.”
“So you never got the magic to work, then?”
“The…what?” I stammered, waiting for my brain to tell me she hadn’t said what she said.
“I know, Dick.”
“How do you know about any of this?”
“I got a letter from Ike. A long time ago, fifteen years maybe. It said not to open it unless he died, but then I did anyway.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the Constitution was special, that it was magic. That he was magic, because he was president, and that he’d done unspeakable things. It went on and I thought he’d gone crazy. He said he killed Stalin.”
“What else?” I said. “Did he talk about a plan? Anything we’re supposed to do?”
“He talked about you. He said he didn’t understand you. He said you had secrets from him, and it shouldn’t have been possible. But you did, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” I nodded slowly.
“He said you were powerful, that you might be the greatest president in history. And he said there was a terrible thing coming for us—he couldn’t describe it, only that it was a hideous darkness. He was afraid of you. He didn’t know if you would defeat the terrible thing, or if you were that thing.”
“So you know. You really know.” I scrutinized her face, trying to guess what she would do. You’d think after thirty years, I could. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because when Ike was gone I would have to be the one who watched you and decide what to do. I didn’t tell you because by that time I didn’t know who the fuck you were.” She said the curse word experimentally, in a way that made me remember my very first time firing a rifle: squeezing the trigger, waiting for the bang. “What if he was right? You weren’t much of a husband, so what kind of president were you going to make?”
“And you believe it all? The magic? The lineage of presidents? The Soviet necromancers?”
“Not at first, no, not fifteen years ago. But I talked to people. I learned Aramaic, which you never bothered to do. There are at least five forms of magic operating in America and at least nine in the world. Did you know that, Mr. President?”
“No. How do you know that?”
“I have friends you don’t have, Dick. You don’t have many friends at all right now.” I glanced at the gun on the tabletop; she saw me watching and rested her small, pale hand on it. “God, Dick, why do you always think you’re the smartest one in the room? You don’t know your own mother was a powerful witch on top of being a terrible, terrible person. And, okay, last one, I swear.” She gave the snorting laugh she never did in front of cameras. “I’m what’s called a New Deal Democrat. I’ve never voted Republican in my entire life.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
December 1970
A cold war keeps going even when you can’t see it; even when it’s miles under the ice. Armies glare over the border and jockey for advantage; factories strain to outproduce one another; proxy wars are won and lost; new technologies are invented and change the strategic landscape. But one way or another, a cold war has to end, even if it takes decades, or centuries, or millennia.
Maybe a common enemy appears and the opposing sides unite for the sake of self-preservation. Some cold wars flare up into hot ones; a border commander loses his temper; missiles fly, and mutual annihilation takes its course. Or maybe the conflict just drains more and more resources from both nations, a mutual grinding into nothingness that goes on and on until both sides simply collapse.
Or sometimes there is just magic.
It was a very odd Christmas Eve celebration at the White House that year. Afterward, everyone else in bed, Pat and I sat in the Green Room and talked, sipping incredibly old bourbon we found in the back of an ancient cabinet, the label in Gothic script. I cautiously told Pat about Alger Hiss, Eisenhower, Arkady, Tatiana. Gregor.
“Eisenhower liked you. He just knew you had secrets, and he couldn’t figure out how you were keeping them. He said it shouldn’t have been possible, not the way the power works. I couldn’t figure them out either.”
“All those years. Why did you stay? Why the hell didn’t you leave me?”
“God knows I thought of it, every day. Then I’d tell myself it was nothing, or that I’d stay just another week. Maybe I just don’t know to leave people.
“But there were good days, and there were times when I thought: Well, Dick has to be in there somewhere.”
“I was.”
“Remember the day Ike came to see us, the first time? And we waited for you? I spent three hours making tea and listening to his stories about war and golf. And I happened to be at the window and I saw you come up the street. You saw the black cars and the Secret Service and I’d never seen a person so afraid, so clutched by shame and terror. You’d done something wrong and you thought you’d been caught.”
“I’d just come from the farm at Pawtuxet. It was the first time I spied for them.”
“But then you turned back and you walked to our door. You thought no one was watching but you did the brave thing, just that once. It wasn’t much to go on for the next decade and a half of marriage. If I’m telling the truth, it was starvation wages.” She took a sip of her whiskey. “But I tried t
o remember it, and I did. Even when they told me not to.”
“Who told you not to?”
“The Democrats, silly. Even Eisenhower never understood. It’s a much older party—your people didn’t get started until the Outworld Horror Kings—excuse me, what you call the Civil War, which was when so much was lost. You’d be surprised who turns up at society séances and tarot readings. Those people at the Lincoln Memorial were my friends.”
We walked along the colonnade through the snowy night to the Oval Office.
“What have the Democrats really been doing all this time? What do you know?”
“I know about how FDR’s plan for the modern version of the Oval Office came to him in a dream. About historical anomalies around Grover Cleveland. And Woodrow Wilson. The plagues of 1918 were his work, you see. His final words were never written down, but it was a kind of ghastly antiquarian curse.”
“What did you say about the Oval Office?”
“He dreamed it. You haven’t thought, then, about the shape?”
She traced the wall with one hand, feeling the numinous curves.
“Why is it not a circle?” she said. I stared bleakly around myself, as I’d done every day of my tenure there.
“I don’t know. Because it’s an oval. I don’t know why it’s an oval.”
“The first time you saw Ike do his ritual, he wasn’t alone, was he?”
“No, he had the secretary of defense with him,” I said. I leaned on one of the low-backed couches, which is what low-ranking cabinet members do when they’re being left out in meetings.
“Eisenhower guessed, then, that it would need a second person to make any of this work. Now I’m going to teach you what they’ve learned on the other side of the aisle. The office isn’t just an oval, is it? It’s an ellipse, which means it has two focal points. You only have to measure to figure out where the points are. Here, and here.” We marked spots on the carpet with tape. “I think FDR didn’t want one person to have all that power.”
“Why didn’t Eisenhower just tell me that himself?” I asked.
“Maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe, dear, he somehow got the idea you were an asshole.”
We stood on the points we’d taped, maybe twenty feet apart.
“What now?” I asked.
“Well, what did you try all the other times, Mr. Chief Executive? Or was it all just ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’?”
We started with the Constitution. I never found out exactly what did it. An activation code, a resonant sequence of words or syllables, a gesture. I’m not a technical magician; two-thirds into the backward reading of the Declaration, Pat stopped me.
“Dick? How long has that door been there?” she asked.
I turned, slowly. Without the room’s seeming to have expanded at all, there was now enough space between the fireplace and the grandfather clock to fit two doors instead of one. One led back to the residence. To its left was a large white-painted wood door in the style of most others in the West Wing, unremarkable except that it had never been there before.
“What now?” I said. No one implied this wasn’t going to be dangerous.
“I think we have to,” she said.
The door opened inward onto a simple flight of stone steps curving down and out of sight to the left, lit by dim electric bulbs strung along a wire stapled to the wall. The walls were unadorned plaster, their age impossible to determine. Outside it was silent, early Christmas morning. Pat took my hand and we descended.
Past the first turn the plaster walls gave way to brick and the air grew colder. One turn and we were level with the lowest subbasement, and then below it. Who had come this way last? Did Eisenhower descend these steps, in the earliest days of the Cold War? Did FDR force himself to make the trip down and up on his crutches and halting, crippled legs?
A second turn and the brick grew older, mortar crumbling. Far off I heard a sound like constant rippling thunder, or an enormous river cascading into the depths. Another turn and the stairs stopped in front of a door just like the one above.
“It’s the real Oval Office,” Pat said. “The true one. It must be.”
I opened the door. It was the same room but it wasn’t. Oval, yes, but the details had shifted.
The presidential desk was solid New England granite, carved, more altar than workspace. The chair behind it was high-backed and seated there was a skeleton, long dead, in an outdated wool suit suggestive of the 1940s. Its posture was skewed left as if by a sharp blow or bullet impact, its bones shattered at the shoulder joint. One hand still clutched at the receiver of a red telephone. There was a black phone as well, its cord severed, and next to it a white phone, and a sapphire-blue one. I lifted the blue receiver to my ear and a voice spoke in musical tones, urgently but too quietly for me to understand. I felt a numbness spreading up from the hand that held the phone, and I slammed it back down.
The painting of Lincoln gazed empty-eyed, somehow devoid of expression. The portrait of Washington hung just as it did upstairs, but its face was seared away almost entirely.
The high windows were obscured by green velvet curtains. I eased them back and looked beyond the windows. A vast white cavern of marble, the neoclassical architecture of the American Capitol expanded to inconceivable size, a city of white stone hewn into enormous blocks. A broad flight of steps gave onto a massive causeway flanked by gigantic fluted white columns whose breadth and height I couldn’t estimate. It might have been beautiful, but it seemed somehow hideous. We saw in the distance a vast plaza, crowned with an empty white throne like the seat of the Lincoln Memorial. An enormous sphinx crouched on its left, its massive face was Washington’s. A second sphinx sat on the right, its face in shadow but as I strained to see I thought I discerned a long bulbous nose and angry sloping brow.
I closed the curtain. This was the madness that America made itself forget. The madness of King George Washington the First, the king who never was.
Pat had been pulling books off the shelves, checking titles and stacking them on the floor. Many of them were half burned, a few were just loose pages bound in twine. She’d stopped and laid one flat on the dead man’s desk.
“It’s a manuscript copy of Bradford’s history of the colonies, but there’s another set of writing in the margins. Listen to this,” she said. “‘At first the wind blew against us, day after day, and then it died altogether and we drifted, sails slack, on a current of black water, under stars that no man of us knew. When we landed we were some two hundred miles north of New Amsterdam, and—as we were to learn—it was by no accident. By whose unseen will, we were soon to learn.’”
The unknown narrator had left us a fragmentary portrait of the founders’ first year. They were brilliant in their way but they were not like us. They believed in a predestined elect, an original depravity, and an agonizing afterlife for all but a few. They spoke Latin and German and Aramaic and there were some who had read widely in profane and pagan texts now lost. It was 1620 and Europe still lingered on the threshold of the century of Descartes and Galileo. But for all their knowledge and bravery, these people who’d come to the New World were dying.
The Pilgrims looked on their problem with cold eyes and a breathtaking intellectual flexibility. Long ago, kings and princes and the nations of the world had made peace with old things neither angel nor seraph nor demon, but the Pilgrims had crossed a great ocean to a place where no treaty or contract shielded them.
They would forge a new one, with stolen Native American knowledge and Old Testament thunder and the scraps of learning they’d brought from Europe and much else they invented for themselves. Somebody walked into the forest and summoned the terrible old ones and made a deal. The Pilgrims would live and the old contracts would be broken. The principals of those old contracts, the Pequot and Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes, would lose both their protection and their title to these strangers.
Reading between the lines it seemed clear the four surviving women were the instrumental pa
rties: Eleanor Billington, Mary Brewster, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Susanna White Winslow. I have a dark suspicion that in some way, the women who didn’t survive made their own contribution. I believe the members of the Roanoke colony were either reluctant to pay a similar price or unable to live with having done so.
It was not a small thing they bought. Everyone thinks of the Enlightenment as the end of superstition, the breakdown of religion and magic and the beginning of a new and rational order. The United States is the standard-bearer of that order, a nation founded not on superstitions about bloodlines and myths of swords in stones but on sound civic principles and contracts rationally entered into.
Everyone is wrong. The dawn of modernity wasn’t the end of enchantment, only the beginning of a new and more terrible one. The Plymouth elders made a bargain and brought forth nothing less than a new American sorcery, the casting of a vast invisible spell great enough to bind the darkness of the New World. The settlers lived, and prospered, and over time their work was given the name by which we now know it—the Constitution, the thing that opened the way for the master enchanters of the nineteenth century, Lincoln and Whitman, and for the obscene magical forces that would one day push us all the way to the Pacific.
The Pilgrims’ bargain bought them a continent, and we were the inheritors of a contract bound into our land and our nation and infused again and again into the flesh of its principal executive, the president of the United States.
No one ever matched the power of the events and conjurations described in the first generation of founders. American magic may have reached its peak with Washington, the desperate man who married wealth and was given command of the Continental army only to see it on the verge of starvation until, in unknown fashion, he contrived to come into his power. After him the line of chief executives waxed and waned, scholars of the Constitutional arts. But after the disasters of Grant and the Civil War so much was lost, and the result was wilder spikes and surges in executive force, diminishing until even McKinley couldn’t save himself. Taft had begun his project of retrieval too late. The presidential seal had certain properties, yes, and the signing statement, and the blood of the sworn, but all of these varied from decade to decade, president to president. So much depended on the officeholder. Or was it something else? The decade? The electoral mandate?
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