May We Be Forgiven

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.”

    F rom 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