February 6, 2011
HIS REAGAN BIO...:
Dutch Returns (EDMUND MORRIS, 2/05/11, NY Times)
So what made him change his mind 16 years later, and want to see the house — actually a little walkup apartment over a bank — where he was born on Feb. 6, 1911? Even if he had not been struggling with the onset of dementia, he could not possibly have recalled the first of his many childhood homes. By May of that year, Jack Reagan, a restless retail salesman, had already moved little Dutch, his 2-year-old brother, Moon, and their mother, Nelle, across the railroad track to a larger house.By the time they moved on to Chicago, early in 1915, Dutch had managed to register only a few permanent memories of Tampico (among which, interestingly enough, was one of a white house with columns and high ceilings, where he felt he belonged).
In 1992, I found myself returning there with him, pointing out landmarks along Main Street and telling him about a commotion he may have heard as he lay kicking and gurgling upstairs at No. 111: the team of creamery horses that bolted and dropped a cartload of barrels in the dust.
Biographers of old people often find themselves instructing their subjects about things long forgotten. Of course, Reagan could not have cared less about 60 gallons of spilled buttermilk. But his heavy silence was so disturbing, as we strolled along the sidewalk to the museum, that I felt I had to keep up some sort of patter to entertain him. Nancy walked alongside, her face a mask.
Sadly, Mr. Nicely was not at the Ronald Reagan Birthplace Museum to greet us: he had succumbed to frailty himself. Instead, a cheerful docent took charge and led us upstairs. “This, Mr. President,” she said as they reached the top of the stairs, “is where you were born.”
A small room, a single bed jammed into the corner, a crooked picture or two. Only the walls, ceiling and floor could authentically be said to have been there when Ronald Reagan was smacked into awareness of this world. But to Reagan, who seldom questioned anything he saw, the bed was a reminder of how far he had come, and how little of his life was left — still less of cognitive life.
He wheeled his big body, balanced as always, faced away from the past, and began to tell jokes. The bed had shocked him into temporary lucidity.
It did not last long. By the time we adjourned to the Dutch Diner along the street (named not after him, we were told, but for a group of Mennonite women who bake its excellent pies), he was once again an old man in retreat — withdrawn, halting and perplexed. Yet I noted that he remained standing until every woman in our party had sat down. Of all Ronald Reagan’s innate qualities, his gentlemanliness was the last to atrophy.
In fact, I don’t know that it ever did.
...is one of our most underestimated novels.
