Authors: Gore Vidal
They were met at the door to a modest sublet flat by its current if somewhat, to hear him tell it, fugitive tenant.
“Oh, Touche. Come on in.” Absently, Tennessee Williams shook hands with Aeneas and Peter. “There seems to be a party going on.”
There was. Two dozen theatrical people were helping themselves to drink arranged on a long table. “I seem to have had a permanent party going since the opening.” Williams put a cigarette into a long holder; he lit up, producing a smoke screen about his head. His eyes were cloudy-cataract blue. A moustache emphasized full lips.
“Were you at the play?” he asked his new guests. He squinted at them suspiciously. Enemies?
Aeneas began what promised to be a panegyric laced with practical suggestions about staging in order to clarify meanings.
Williams cut him short. “I am finished with the theater. You have seen my last play, the very last. You must understand that my heart has been affected by far too many illnesses, not
all
of them venereal-related.” His high heh-heh-heh laugh was like someone imitating a barnyard resident, just as his voice, though pleasantly Southern, could suddenly become extremely precise, with all sorts of single and double quotation marks as well as italics which he used to put forward, as if for exhibit, certain words that were not usually given such emphasis. “I shall be dead before the
end of this year
. It is a miracle that I lived long enough to undergo the rehearsals, not to mention the
tender mercies
of Dame Selznick. On the other hand, Gadge is merciless. But a
genius
at directing me.” Williams drifted off.
Touche brought Peter whiskey while Aeneas stalked the dying playwright. When Peter asked if Williams was really in a terminal condition, Touche laughed. “He’s a total hypochondriac. On the other hand, to steady his nerves, he munches Nembutals with vodka as a chaser. This is not healthy. He’s off to Europe at the end of December. What’s become of your uncle or whatever Tim Farrell is to you?”
“I thought you’d know. Weren’t you doing a film together …”
“It was often a rich subject of conversation at three in the morning in Harlem. But rich subjects of conversation seldom end up on screen. I’m doing it as a musical for Broadway. Oh, here’s Paul. Virgil says you need a music critic.”
“I’m a composer, actually.” Bowles was slender, small, blond; he could have been any age that was not young.
“He’s now becoming a writer.” Touche moved away.
Bowles seemed mildly annoyed. “How do you
become
a writer?”
“I suppose by writing something.”
“My wife, Jane, is a writer and she never writes
something
. In fact, she writes practically nothing.” He seemed approving. “Which is what Gertrude Stein told me to do when she read my poems in Paris. ‘You’re not a poet, go on with music.’ So I did. Until now, perhaps.”
“You did the music for the play tonight.” Peter recalled the playbill.
“You’ve just come from
Streetcar
?”
“Yes.” Peter was not about to use an adjective which would then be examined and assayed for value.
Bowles seemed disappointed that there was no hyperbole to dissect. “I also did the music for
The Glass Menagerie
. Tennessee thinks music enhances his plays.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t think I could tell. I only hear the music. He sees and hears the play. Whose American Idea?”
Peter gave a brief report: news as history, history as news.
“I’ve never seen any connection between the way the world works and what is written of it.”
“And I don’t see how there can
not
be. The writer’s in history, like it or not.”
“The composer’s part of the play but he listens for the music not the words.”
“Try,” said Peter, succumbing to his worst didactic instincts, “to do both.”
“One should, of course, always try.” Bowles’s solemnity plainly disguised a certain watchful glee. “But, of course, I do listen to the words, up to a point.”
“Which is?”
“One
stopping
point is Tennessee’s unerring misuse of foreign languages.”
“Spanish instead of French in New Orleans?”
“The wrong Spanish instead of the right. I’ve given up correcting him. He doesn’t hear.”
Leonard Bernstein made a movie star’s entrance. Darkly handsome,
he wore on his shoulders a coat with a mink collar. All eyes were upon him as he embraced Tennessee.
Bowles sighed. “It must be a terrific burden to be the whole of American music at twenty-nine. To have it all and still want more?”
“What more could there be?”
“He says that he would like to be a man of fashion like me.” There was a cheerful glint in Bowles’s eyes; and Peter noted that Bowles was indeed elegantly turned out in a prewar school-of-Paris gray suit, pinched in at the waist. “Not long after his musical comedy,
On the Town
, he offered me a job as his valet.”
“Valet?” Peter was astonished.
“He was serious. I suppose because I’d lived in Europe before the wars. He wants to have a European style like the other great conductors. But, of course, they
are
European and he’s from Lawrence, Massachusetts. Even so, I might have helped him with French and Spanish and tactfully talked him out of that mink collar. I see astrakhan as being more Lenny’s style.”
“Why didn’t you take the job?”
“The salary wasn’t much more than what I’m getting at the
Herald Tribune
. Besides, Jane and I expect to be living in Morocco …”
Bowles turned away to greet friends. Peter suspected that either his leg had been pulled or it was actually Bowles’s nature to be flatly literal and precise in all things and what he said he simply said and he always meant exactly what he had said like his mentor in Paris, Gertrude Stein. At the other end of the room, Bernstein was discussing himself with all the passionate zest of a professor enthralled by his subject. “I’ve never seen anything like it! The crowds on the sides of the hill. All the leaders of the country were there to hear me conduct. I felt like weeping. I was home. In Israel. They said my success was the biggest thing in their history! Yes, the old history as well as the new. They said I was a bigger hit than Jesus Christ!”
“But, Lenny,” said Touche, sweetly, “are you sure that was a compliment? I mean, look at what the Jews did to Jesus.”
“Oh, Touche. Stop trying to be witty. You know what I mean.”
“Of course,
I
do. I was just wondering what
they
meant.” Latouche’s round.
Later, walking in the cold to Aeneas’s flat, they compared notes on the evening. “Bernstein’s basing a symphony on Auden’s
Age of Anxiety
.”
“The pieces are starting to come together.”
“One interesting bit of gossip,” said Aeneas, who never gossiped. “Williams is interested in an Italo-American who was in the Navy.”
“Curious the number of homosexuals there are in the arts now. Or has it always been the same and we just didn’t know?”
“Probably the same. Anyway, this former sailor lived awhile with Touche. Then, before that, you’ll never guess who he was with.”
“Aeneas, I don’t care what men and women are doing, much less men and sailors.”
“Then I won’t tell you that the sailor lived with Joe Alsop.”
Peter stopped in front of a Sixth Avenue bar. “I don’t believe it. Joe’s too … too …”
“Too what?”
“Careful. No. Too snobbish.”
“It adds depth to his character, doesn’t it? The Baron de Charlus of Georgetown.”
Peter shuddered as a cold wind came down the street from the north. “This is a new world, isn’t it?”
“Or the old world, better understood.”
In June of 1948, Caroline returned to Laurel House. For nearly a year she had been in France restoring Saint-Cloud-le-Duc to what it had been before the comparatively mild German occupation.
Frederika had insisted that she launch Caroline’s Aaron Burr book with a garden party which, she said, ominously, would doubtless be the last before Irene Bloch took possession.
“But that,” said Caroline, “is two years from now.”
“Even so, the way things are going …” Frederika’s voice trailed off. They were seated on the red-brick terrace that overlooked the Potomac, for the most part, at this season, screened by tall trees and thick-growing laurel.
“I love the roar of the river,” said Caroline.
“Don’t tell me you can actually hear it?” The one-eyed butler brought them iced tea. The other guests had not yet arrived.
“I
think
I hear it, which is almost the same.” Caroline’s hearing had been gradually fading, a condition which she had learned to accept as
she had fading vision, various arthritic pains, and a memory no longer reliable. “My bones are turning to sand,” Caroline observed with what she hoped was sufficient cheerfulness. “What about yours?”
Frederika shook both arms, thoughtfully. “I don’t think I have any left. At least nothing aches. We’re really much too old to be up and around.”
“Up from what? Around what?”
“The grave.” Frederika maintained her cool hostess voice. “Oh, I’ve got some copies of your book.” On a coffee table there were a half-dozen copies of
Memories of Aaron Burr
by Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, edited by Caroline Sanford. Absently, Frederika picked the price tag off the black-and-gold dust jacket. “Five dollars for a book. Imagine. Weren’t they all two dollars and fifty cents before the war?”
“Novels. Not works of history.”
“Curious to think that your mother killed Blaise’s mother. Or was it the other way round?”
Caroline treated this lightly. “She did not exactly kill her. She let her die.”
“Surely it’s the same thing.”
“Not in court. And when all’s said and done, history’s court.”
Blaise came out of the house. “The authoress. First in the family. They say Cissy Patterson’s dying out at the Dower House.”
“Such a pretty place,” said Frederika, always more interested in the state of houses than that of their occupants. “I wonder who will inherit?”
“The grandchild,” said Blaise. “Drew Pearson’s daughter. It’s the
Times-Herald
that I want to get my hands on.”
“Doesn’t it still belong to Hearst?” Caroline tended to rise above age and decrepitude at the mention of newspapers.
Blaise shook his head. “No. Cissy’s got it all now, and the paper’s making money for a change. She wanted it to go to her—what is it?—niece, Alicia Patterson, who’s started a newspaper out on Long Island.”
“Long Island? That’s not a real place.” Frederika was firm. “What a perverse thing to do, to put a newspaper there.” She went inside to make final arrangements for the buffet.
“Should we take it on?” Blaise turned to Caroline. It was like the old days when they were working publishers and partners.
“Aren’t we … Oh, I swore I’d make no reference to time’s wingèd wastebasket, but we’re old, Blaise.”
“I don’t feel it. You don’t either.”
“I’m also French again. Even so, it is tempting.”
“If we don’t take it on Eugene Meyer will merge it with the Washington
Post
, and that will be the end of the paper.”
“A good thing for Meyer. And probably a good thing for us, too. Anyway, the city’s far too small for three morning papers.”
Blaise gazed thoughtfully at the boxwood hedge that had grown so enormously during his reign.
“You’re really going to sell the place?”
Blaise nodded. “Too much trouble to run. Irene’s got the energy. And she’ll pay my price.”
“How is my nephew?”
“Obstinate. Prefers his little magazine to the paper. I’ve always thought a publisher should be able to write and even, if necessary, think, which neither of us could really do but Peter can.”
“Speak for yourself. I do nothing but think. Only now I promptly forget whatever it is I was thinking. Isn’t this the day Dewey is to be nominated?”
“And elected in November. Yes. He’s about to be nominated. In Philadelphia. I should’ve gone but he’s such a bore. Even so, I’ll be glad to see the end of this gang. What’s happened to Tim Farrell?”
“Other than my daughter Emma?” Caroline could not even simulate malice, so tired was she of the idea of her daughter as opposed to the reality, which she was cunningly able to avoid.
“The picture Tim hoped to make was promptly made two years ago.
The Best Years of Our Lives
was the optimistic title. Harry Hopkins’ friend Robert Sherwood wrote it.”
“Bad luck. For Tim.” Blaise went inside.
“Bad luck,” she repeated to herself. Some relationships simply broke off, rather as if one of the two had died; others continued to flourish even after death, in memory. The affair with Tim had been erased while the affair with James Burden Day was a permanent part of
her life in the present as well as the past; at least as long as she could recall herself at all, which might not be too much longer; promptly, she recited to herself, in a whisper, the speech of Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth. This was her touchstone: the day she could no longer remember the “Cousin speech,” as she always thought of it, she would be gone. Today she remembered it all, including the last line that American censors had not allowed her to say: “A bastard sits upon the throne of England.”
Caroline had her lunch in Blaise’s study with Burden Day, demonstrating to herself the depth and nature of her fidelity to what should have been her husband had she ever actually wanted one. Now he seemed old to her but the charm was still present. “I see your nephew from time to time. We agree on most things, a sign of premature wisdom in one so young.”
“Surely you’ve not become a socialist in your golden years?”
Burden laughed. “No. Peter isn’t one either. But Aeneas Duncan can occasionally raise my blood pressure.”
“I like him when he tells us about American culture. Apparently the musical comedy is our unique art form, and Cole Porter is our Phidias.” Caroline had quite enjoyed herself for a week in New York, going to the theater. She had even dined with Cole Porter in his Waldorf-Astoria Tower suite; and she had betrayed no surprise when a manservant carried the one-legged Porter into the drawing room and placed him carefully on a sofa as if he were a rare porcelain vase. “Caroline.” He took her hand; she kissed his cheek; he smiled his chilly gentle smile. He drank martinis as they spoke of the dead. Then the manservant asked her to step out of the room, which she did while Cole relieved himself.