May We Be Forgiven

might have been more damage from the stroke than I realized.
    My excitement turns to anger.
    In the lobby of the building a guard asks me for my identification. I put my hand in my pocket: I find two twenties and a fifty rolled together—funny money—and realize that when I put on George’s suit I forgot to “repack” my pockets. Anxious, I begin to sweat; I confess to the guard that I have no identification.
    He throws me a bone, offering to phone upstairs and ask Wanda to come down and collect me.
    Wanda is tall, black, efficient. She handles me like I am a specimen—the confused professor.
    “Apologies for making you come all the way down,” I say in the elevator.
    “Not a problem,” she says as the elevator door opens on the twenty-seventh floor. “The firm is located on this floor and the one above.”
    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.