May We Be Forgiven

three burglars, Bernard Baker, Felipe de Diego, and Eugenio Martinez, and two lookouts, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Oddly enough, several of these “Plumbers” are CIA and ex-CIA and can be traced back to the Bay of Pigs and forward to Watergate. …

    M y eye is killing me; after class I go to the Student Health Center. They have an actual eyewash station built right into the sink. The “nurse” on duty, who turns on the faucets, makes a point of saying, “Just so you know, I’m not really a nurse, I’m a health aide; they cut the nurse a couple of years ago, during a budget crunch; there is no nurse …” and then asks, “Are you sure you didn’t get some kind of chemical in there that might have burned your cornea?”
    “It was just dirt,” I say, thinking, for all I know, I could have gotten a chemical in there; maybe there was one of those toilet fresheners in the bathroom, maybe I waterboarded myself with fucking Ty-D-Bowl.
    The not-a-nurse gives me some ointment for my eye. It’s so thick everything becomes blurry. “It’s a lubricant,” she says, handing me the tube. “Put more in tonight, and if it’s still sore tomorrow you’ll have to see a doctor.”
    “Thank you.”
    Half blind, I walk to the parking lot, the voice of the Indian student calmly saying they’d cut off his head echoing in my mind. The goddamned envelope is still in my car. I sit on it and drive to Schwartz’s house. His wife answers the door. I hand it to her. “This is for Schwartz,” I say.
    “He’s not home,” his wife says. “He’s at a department cocktail party.”
    “Take it,” I say, pushing the envelope slightly aggressively towards her.
    “It’s really not necessary,” she says.
    “I am returning it to him,” I explain. “The envelope and its contents belong to him.”
    “What is it?” she asks.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t open it, he left it in my car.”
    She takes the envelope. “It was very good of you to return it.”
    I shrug.
    “What happened to your eye?”
    “Spider bite,” I say, without knowing why.
    “Maybe take something for it,” she suggests. “It doesn’t look good.”
    “Will do,” I say, turning to leave.
    “I look forward to reading your book,” she calls after me. “My husband speaks of it often.”
    Without stopping or turning back, I say goodbye: “Goodbye and good luck.”

    A s I’m cooking, the phone rings, I grab it, thinking it’s her—Julie Nixon Eisenhower.
    “Hi,” Nate says. “I tried you earlier and you weren’t home.”
    “Teaching day,” I say.
    “Might want to change that outgoing message,” Nate says, his voice tight. “It’s still Mom.”
    I haven’t been able to bring myself to change it—I can’t erase Jane, but I can imagine how hard it is for him to hear.
    “I’ll get a new machine tomorrow,” I say, though I’ve secretly liked hearing Jane’s occasional “Hello, we’re not home right now. …”
    “I keep thinking about the boy from the car accident,” he says. “We have to take care of the boy.”
    “I know you’re concerned about him,” I say. “I’ll talk with your father’s lawyer about what’s being done.”
    Meanwhile, as glad as I am to hear his voice, I’m also wondering, does George have call waiting? What if Julie Nixon Eisenhower phones and gets a busy signal? As he’s talking, I simply blurt, “Does this phone have call waiting?”
    “Why?” Nate asks. “Are you beeping?”
    “I’m not sure,” I say.
    “Well, there’s beeping that’s call waiting, and then there’s beeping if someone is recording the call.”
    “Are you recording the call?” I ask.
    “No,” he says, “I know about it because we studied wiretaps in my Twentieth-Century Political Scandal course—it’s a history elective. If you want to tape a call you must first ask permission, record the granting of permission, and acknowledge that the call is being taped.”
    “Interesting. In what context did that come up?”
    “We were studying Watergate. I wrote a paper on Aunt Rose.”
    “Who?”
    “Rose Mary Woods, she was Nixon’s secretary.”
    “Of course,” I say, proudly. “You do know that Nixon is my area.”
    “I know,” Nate says. “The Nixon children called her ‘Aunt Rose.’ She was fiercely loyal,” Nate says. “I’m very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong. I’m also studying the evolution of