Authors: Gore Vidal
“Dear Henry.” Caroline rose unsteadily to greet him but he had not seen her; he passed her by. She hobbled after him until, halfway across the room, the floor seemed suddenly the most desirable of resting places; and so she rested there: headache quite gone at last.
Blaise accompanied the body back to France. Emma had wanted to come, too, but Blaise forbade her with the relevant news that since she was not in her mother’s will, she need go to no trouble. Peter and Frederika saw Blaise and the oblong box off at the airport. On orders from the secretary of the Air Force, a military transport plane had been assigned to fly them to Paris.
Blaise waved to wife and son at the top of the steps. Then he entered the plane. Frederika wept with no sound. Peter was still stunned. He had never seen anyone dead, much less anyone die in mid-conversation. Apparently, she had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, much like the one that had carried off her friend Franklin Roosevelt.
“Well, it was quick,” he said, inadequately, as they got into the car.
Frederika stopped weeping; told the driver to take them straight home. “Quick or slow is all the same when you go. There’s hardly anyone left now. But then if she had gone back to live in France, we probably would never have seen her again anyway. So it’s probably all the same to us.”
“She thought she saw Senator Borah just before …”
“How awful for her,” said Frederika, suddenly recovered. “We must remember that along with all the people we cared about who are dead there are millions and millions of crashing bores and, between us, Caroline and I must have met them all. I don’t think,” she said with a secret, knowing look, “that death is going to be all that relaxing for any of us.”
Frederika got out of the car at Massachusetts Avenue; and Peter went on to Rock Creek Park.
Everything was in flower at Senator Day’s house. Kitty was at the edge of the woods, feeding two squirrels a biscuit. She gestured to Peter: make no noise. He slipped into the house. Diana was in the living room.
They embraced like the lifelong married couple that they had so abruptly become on her return from Reno. It was only during their time apart that Peter had become convinced that they were intended to be a permanent couple, to which Diana had agreed. Thus far, neither had mentioned Clay, and Peter hoped the subject might be permanently postponed.
“Father’s in the loggia. Waiting for you.”
Peter was surprised. “Isn’t the Senate in session?”
“He wants to know about your aunt. He’s … very edgy these days. I don’t think he’s ever quite recovered from that fainting spell he had.”
Diana led Peter into the loggia, where new green grapes were growing in tight hard jadelike clusters. Beyond the loggia Peter could see banks of deep purple irises in full lemon-scented bloom.
“Forgive me for not getting up. I’m still a bit lame.” James Burden Day held a cane in his left hand while with the right he shook Peter’s hand. The grip was strong; and the old man seemed vigorous enough.
“I gather you’ve just been seeing Caroline off to Europe.” He could not have been more matter-of-fact.
Diana left them. “I must go back to the office,” she said.
Peter sat in a wicker chair; a bright gold ray of sun fell diagonally across his chest like the chain of some celestial order.
“Yes. Mother and I saw them off from Andrews Field. The Military
Air Transport Service found room for them. Father’s … struck dumb. That doesn’t mean he’s stopped talking. Far from it. But dumb in the sense he doesn’t know what to do and say about what’s happened. There had been, after all, as Aunt Caroline would say, no rehearsal. I was the last to talk to her. She was fine. Except she kept seeing people who had not been invited to her farewell party. Literally, as it turned out, farewell.”
“What sort of people?” Burden was unnaturally controlled, even casual.
“The dead.”
“Oh!” He frowned. “Anyone I know?”
“Senator Borah crossed the room, or so she thought.”
“Let’s hope Alice Longworth saw him too. Who else?”
“She got up from the sofa to follow Henry Adams across the room. But she never caught up with him. Instead, she just sank to the floor. And never spoke again.”
“Not bad.” Burden seemed to be scoring Caroline’s singular method of departure against those of others that he had known about. “I wish I’d been there.… But I had a session of the Finance Committee.”
“Would you have persuaded her not to go?”
“Hard to say. When it’s time … Funny, I once saw my own father a few years ago. His ghost, that is. Or, more likely, my hallucination. It was near the river at Fort Marcey. You know, up above the Potomac. Just north of Laurel House.” He shut his eyes. Shuddered. Then he looked at Peter. “I’ll be campaigning soon. That time of year. Back to the state to see if anyone remembers me.”
“You’re sure to win the primary.”
“Only fools are ever sure in this business.”
“Your speech at the State Historical Society got you five points higher in the polls.”
Burden smiled. “Didn’t use a single note, either. Didn’t have to. I just remembered what it was like when we were putting together a brand-new state so that we could join it to the Union that most of our fathers had tried to get out of. Did Emma go home with Caroline?”
It took Peter an instant to remember who Emma was. Then he
recalled the strong hand relentlessly scraping mayonnaise off a lobster at the Blue Angel. “She wanted to but Blaise said no.”
Burden shook his head. “Pity they never got on. I should’ve done more.” This was the closest that he had ever come to admitting his paternity; then he changed the still, for him, dangerous subject. “Well, Peter, the big military buildup is underway. Except we haven’t given the President the money. And we can’t while McCarthy’s out of control. It would be nice,” said Burden, thoughtfully, “if someone shot him.”
“Why doesn’t the Senate expel him?”
“Too terrified. The whole lot of them. The whole lot of us. Come November he’s threatening to defeat Tydings and Lucas, and this one and that one. He may even pull it off. I’ve seen some very disturbing polls. Half the country think that communists have already taken over our government.”
“I know. In fact, I wrote a piece saying how if the communists are already in charge of the White House and Congress, not to mention Harvard and Yale, they’ve already won on points, so why not just go along with them?”
“Irony is un-American. But then everything is un-American now. I thought we’d lived through the worst of it back in 1917 when sauerkraut became ‘liberty cabbage’ and no orchestra could play Beethoven or any other German music, but this is far worse, more insidious, more …”
“Calculated?”
“Calculated. Yes. But by whom?
Cui bono?
Harry Truman wanted to scare the American people so he could start his buildup, but he certainly has nothing to do with that drunken buffoon going on about how Harry and Acheson lost China, never ours to have much less lose. No, there’s always been a streak of madness in our folks. And there have always been demagogues who know just how to press all the right buttons to scare them out of what wits they have and turn them against their own government.…”
Peter knew the litany; he, too, recited it, in different voices, in different places. “What you just said, Senator, is what we all say, but listening to you now, I started to hear something else. McCarthy’s
babbling about communists in the State Department or the Army or wherever is nonsense, of course, and we know it because we know how Washington works, but what
I’m
now hearing is something else, something really serious. The people’s fear of the government because they are starting to believe it’s no longer by them or for them.”
“Well, that’s been the Republicans’ line since ’35. You know, when we first presented social security to Congress, they said it was just plain communism and they warned the people that if our bill passed everyone’s name would be replaced by a government-assigned number.” Burden chuckled. “That’s your classic plutocratic smear. Big business never wants to pay any tax of any kind or be regulated for any reason or allow a penny of their profits to go to anyone at all, even if they’re starving. That’s an ancient battle with pretty clear rules for both sides. But now McCarthy’s gone and broken every rule and Harry Truman’s too weak to know how to put things back on track.”
But Peter was sensing something entirely new in this familiar equation. “The fact is that, starting with Acheson’s briefing, which, thank God, sir, you so usefully recorded …”
“Usefully and secretly.” Burden was still uneasy about his memo.
“
Top
secretly. Something strange was set in motion. Part of the famous scaring hell out of the people has been our own government’s prompt interference in everyone’s life. Loyalty oaths. A peacetime military draft. Deciding who can or can’t go abroad. A nonconvertible dollar. Increased income taxes. Then, in the interest of Americanism, all sorts of independent publications like
Counterattack
and now
Red Channels
are deciding who can work in film, television, theater.”
“Well, those vigilante efforts are hardly government-sponsored.”
“They couldn’t exist if they weren’t government-inspired and -sanctioned. I mean, how could they be allowed to deny others free speech, assembly, right to work, due process?” Latouche had been sending Peter a good deal of information about a professional blacklist which was getting ever longer and ever blacker. “Several pages,” he had written, no doubt with a winsome smile, “are devoted to my own treasonous activities.”
Burden had pulled himself up straight in his chair; the cane was
now placed across his knees, like a weapon. “Do
you
really believe that our government has become our enemy?”
Peter evaded a direct answer. “I believe that it has come to enjoy so much … un-American.” Peter smiled: at last a correct use for the word, “power over us that it will never ever let go.”
“Never? No. Nothing lasts forever.”
“We certainly don’t. But, for now,
American Idea
is on the Attorney General’s list of—what was their latest category?—‘subversive’ periodicals.”
Diana entered the loggia.
Condolences duly expressed, Peter said goodbye to the Senator, who remained seated. But, Peter was happy to note, his cheeks were now a healthy pink and his eyes bright.
“You missed it,” said Aeneas, switching off the television set as Peter entered the office.
“Missed what?” Peter sat on his side of the partners’ desk. Diana had her own office on the floor above where she dealt with their youthful staff.
“Representative Clay Overbury has just made an announcement from the Caucus Room at the Old House Office Building. All the press was there.”
What Peter had feared would happen had finally happened. “He’s declared for the Senate.”
Aeneas twirled his wedding ring round and round. “Were you really so certain that he’d do this?”
“Yes.” Peter was thinking hard. “Did anyone question him about his promise never to run against his mentor—I believe that’s the word he likes to use—Burden Day?”
“Harold Griffiths did.”
“A setup. Go on.”
“Harold asked the question and Clay was all boyish charm—he’s even starting to look like Audie Murphy. He did say one thing interesting. He would never be declaring had it not been clear to him that
Senator Day’s health problems would make it impossible for the founder of their state to make the sort of powerful race that people expected of so great a statesman, and so forth and so on.”
Peter frowned. “There’s a missing piece here. Either Clay knows something about old Burden’s health that no one else knows or he’s …”
Peter rang Diana in her office. Told her the news. “Go home. Tell your father. Find out why Clay’s so sure Burden isn’t running when, just now, he was all set to stump the state …”
Aeneas interrupted. “Clay did say that if the Senator was really willing to risk his health in what was bound to be a long hard election, he—Clay—would stand aside, of course.”
“Of course.” Peter repeated the message to Diana. Then he put down the receiver. “Well,” he said to Aeneas and to himself, “we are at the brink, as Harold Griffiths would write.”
“Who falls in?”
“
I
won’t,” said Peter, awash in uncharacteristic anger.
Clay’s office was a reasonably modest shrine to its hero occupant. Only one
Fire over Luzon
poster was visible in a corner. Next to it there were several decorations under glass. Peter noticed that the Silver Star for heroism was not one of them, despite Harold Griffths claim; but a Bronze Star for marginally less heroism was on display.
The usual politician’s photographs. One with President Truman, one with General MacArthur … plainly a statesman-hero president was impatiently serving time in this rather dingy office. Peter could see why members of the House of Representatives were so eager to move up to the Senate with its spacious offices, wide corridors, marble fireplaces, and, as someone had once noted, comforting air of serene megalomania.
Clay came out from behind his desk and shook Peter’s reluctant hand. The blue eyes glittered in the light of what was, so far, a perfect spring day. “Well, this is an honor.” Clay’s charm could never seem forced because it was never not on display.
They sat in black leather armchairs, a table between them on
which was a photograph of Elizabeth Watress. Next to it was a photograph of Clay holding up his daughter, whose eyes, eerily like Enid’s, made contact with Peter’s.
“Yes,” said Clay, as always getting the unstated point. “She’s very like her mother. She’s still with Blaise and Frederika. But Elizabeth and I hope to have our own house by this winter. She’ll have a proper home at last.”
“You’re marrying Elizabeth?”
“That’s the plan. After the election, of course.”
“That was the exact same plan with Diana.” Peter could not resist. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.” Clay’s smile was intimate, even boyish. “But then I figured out it was really you she was interested in.”