The Gipper S Long Goodbye

“Mr. President, those lead soldiers make a great display with all your books! Like when you were sick with pneumonia in 1915, and played with armies on the counterpane?” He smiled faintly, not remembering, and I noticed something unimaginable before: a patch of silvery stubble on his chin. It glowed incandescently as a sunbeam slanted across his face.

“Uh, the fellow who made them, he–uh, came…”

“Came here and presented them to you?”

“Yes. He–we–we had to make space, uh–for them. Move those trees.” Mystified, I followed his gaze, and saw only a set of “Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan,” relegated to the shelf beneath the soldiers. Well, if Keats could liken stacked volumes to garners of grain, I guessed Dutch could call his collected works trees, if he wanted. They did after all bear fruit, in a dry sort of way. And how he had always loved to prune speech drafts and proclamations, just as he pruned the live oaks and madronas at Rancho del Cielo!

Courteous as ever, he took me to see something framed on the far wall… a pleasant riverside watercolor study presented itself. I recognized every curve of the oak trees and the long grassy slope of the meadow. “This,” Dutch breathed, “is where I was a lifeguard for seven [sic] summers. I saved 77 lives. And you know, none of ’em ever thanked me!”

I freed myself as soon as I could, and before going downstairs asked his secretary if I could see the original manuscript of the Alzheimer’s letter he wrote the nation in November 1994. It had the simplicity of genius, or at least the simplicity of a fundamentally religious nature accepting the inevitable: I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life…

And as if on cue, Dutch wandered in, not seeing me, going from entrance door to exit door. A young woman ran after him. “No, Mr. President, you don’t want to walk that way!” Shortly afterward, I saw him being escorted to the elevator for his limousine ride home, surrounded by bored-looking Secret Service agents.

Finally, Edmund Morris muses on the last lines of Goethe’s “Faust,” invoking Ewig-weibliche, “The Eternal Feminine,” who now comforts the ailing president.

Ronald Reagan, God knows, never had much time for poetry or music, but I like to think that those lines would have resonated with him, had he been coaxed to listen to them before he lost his mind. They compressed just about all of his simple philosophy: that permanent truths apply, that prayers are answered, that the common man is wise, and that life with a loving Ewig-weibliche is the nearest thing to Heaven.

Nancy Reagan, God knows further, is no Gretchen. Yet Dutch is lucky to have been loved by her so passionately and exclusively for nearly fifty years. His children would argue that her monomania cramped his emotions and made him overly dependent on her. Less querulous observers might counter that by freeing him of family cares, she enabled him to father the Reagan Revolution.

At any rate, the doctor’s daughter has made his “long good-bye” as comforting as possible. At the time of writing, hers is the only face he still recognizes. He still has his slow, unstoppable energy. He will rake leaves from the pool for hours, not understanding that they are being surreptitiously replenished by his Secret Service men. Perplexities crowd upon him. Why do these printed shapes beneath his moving finger not form themselves into words, as they used to when Nelle read to him? Who is this big brown-suited man in the television documentary, saluting and smiling? Why does the light go dim when clouds drift together? Why are “the fellows” so uncooperative at three in the morning, when he dresses for an urgent appointment? Why do magnolia blossoms, pristine on the tree, darken when they fall? And what is this pale ceramic object on the sandy floor of his fish tank at Fox Plaza? A miniature white house, with tall classical columns, hauntingly familiar. He takes it home, clenched wet in his fist: “This is… something to do with me… I’m not sure what.”