Extrait
In her room inside the czar’s apartments, Pat Nixon, jet-lagged at 4:30 a.m., lay awake and looked toward a crack in the velvet curtains. The White Nights wouldn’t really come for another month, and Moscow wasn’t Leningrad, but the glow outside had nothing to do with dawn. It was the same strange silvery light that had persisted all night and been shining even when the state dinner ended at ten- thirty. The sky reminded her, oddly enough, of the ones she used to walk beneath in the Bronx on rainy autumn twilights back in the early thirties, looking south toward Manhattan. She’d leave the X- ray machine she’d tended all day and, with her coat pulled tight and never more than a dollar in her pocket, head down Johnson Avenue in search of dinner, often just a slice of apple pie and coffee. She could no longer remember the names of the nuns she’d lived with atop the TB hospital, but could still recall what she would think while walking on nights that looked like this one: Maybe I won’t try to get back to California; maybe I’ll seek my life right here.
She wondered whether Mrs. Khrushchev, now a widow, still lived in the dacha she and Dick had lunched at back in ’59. There was probably no more chance of her having been allowed to keep it than there had been of her being at the dinner tonight. When Pat had raised that second possibility with Kissinger, he’d pompously informed her that it was out of the question, and that she should be grateful for the political progress signified by Nikita Khrushchev’s having been merely retired instead of shot.
What a show Mrs. K had made, a dozen years ago, of not trying on the hat that Pat and the other ladies had presented her with at a luncheon in Washington, when the Khrushchevs returned the Nixons’ visit to Russia. She’d said she would accept the hat only so that back home it could be copied for the masses of Soviet women! Oh, put it on, dear, they’d all cajoled, and they eventually did succeed in raising a smile from her plump face. But, no, they never saw her try it on.
The Soviets had certainly never given up any of the swag in this room. Pat decided she might as well get up, put on the lights, and give it another look instead of just lying here staring at the curtains and gold- leaf ceiling. But on her way to the mosaic table, the one supporting the beautiful French clock, she stumbled over an extension cord left by Rita, her hairdresser, who’d fought a losing battle with the different voltage until two young men from Kissinger’s staff got the dryer going just before they were all due downstairs for the first toasts. Was Rita—across the courtyard in the block of rooms supposed to be full of ramshackle Communist-era furnishings— getting any more sleep than she was? Poor Bill Rogers wasn’t even inside the Kremlin; he’d been put in some hotel a few minutes away, no doubt from Kissinger’s continuing need to keep the secretary of state in his place and away from the real action.
It bothered her that Dick encouraged all that, especially if he did it not for some strategic reason but out of resentment left over from their six years in New York, when Bill and Adele would invite the Nixons out to “21” and give the impression—at least to Dick—that the Rogerses were doing them a favor. Pat herself had never seen it that way. She remembered those evenings, as well as the law firm’s partner dinners from that same all- too- brief time in her life, as being more agreeable than all the political entertainments in the years before and after.
Even Martha, for a while, had been fun.
How Rose Woods would love this room: all the figurines and bibelots, the kind of stuff she filled her little place at the Watergate with, those frilly knockoffs amidst the real little gems she got from Don Carnevale, her very safe escort from Harry Winston.
She heard voices coming from the courtyard below, bouncing up off the paving stones. Dear God, it was—Dick. She parted the curtains and saw him down there in a
