Authors: Gore Vidal
As they disappeared into the lobby, Peter turned to Aeneas. “I must say I didn’t care for your Hemingway threnody either.”
“It must be annoying,” said Aeneas thoughtfully, “to know how much better you are than someone like Hemingway but, because you’re a woman, you’re not even in the running.”
“We’ll see,” said Peter, the spirit of old Mother Hare entering his soul, “who runs farthest in the end.”
“Speaking of running,” he turned to Aeneas, “will Clay offer himself to the nation in ’56?”
“Too soon, we think. Besides, Adlai Stevenson’s going to run again.”
“He says not.” Peter had been charmed by the civilized Stevenson, who had lost so eloquently to General Eisenhower.
“He says ten conflicting things a day. But we know he’ll run again and we know he’ll lose and that suits
our
plan perfectly for 1960.”
“
Your
plan?” Peter was amazed to find the once unworldly Aeneas so entirely at home on the political heights.
“Yes,
our
plan. Clay sees a lot of the Governor. He advises him.”
Peter’s inner alarm sounded. Was Adlai Stevenson to be yet another victim of the sweet cheat? “To what end?”
Aeneas smiled at Diana, who was approaching them; then, before she could join them, he said, “Clay will be Adlai’s running mate. So you know to what end that must be.”
Diana said, “Time to go. How is Rosalind?”
Aeneas was amiable. “Busy preparing a brief on mental health—for Clay.”
“He has the whole family,” said Diana, taking Peter’s arm as she hummed,
“It’s the coming home together when the day is through …”
They went home.
Iris Delacroix carefully steered Peter into the study. Assured by specialists that there was nothing actually wrong with his legs, he took comfort in the fact that the arthritic pains in his ankles and feet were, if nothing else, reassuringly constant, exposing him to no serious trauma other than an ongoing uneasy relationship with the idea of gravity. Ever since he had watched his Aunt Caroline sink into eternity, he had taken against floors. Head down, he eyed suspiciously the carpet beneath him. Persian. A Kirman—he recalled the name and that meant whiskey as reward in the nonstop memory sweepstakes; even so, he knew that this apparently harmless blue and sand-yellow rug was capable of ambushing him from its neat place on the floor of his O Street house, bought, both rug and house, at the suggestion of Joe Alsop, who had also liked to exchange Peter’s guests with his own N Street pilgrims. Edgy friends for half a century, they had proved to be agreeable neighbors. But Joe was dead now. Or was that his brother, Stewart? “Iris,” he asked slyly, “
when
did Joe Alsop die?”
The six-foot-tall blond Iris said, “Five, six years ago. Ten? I forget. Time’s such a blur nowadays.” Iris’s smile was radiant. An impoverished cousin, she had proved to be, if not perfect secretary, ideal companion and support, literally, in his long war of attrition with gravity.
“It isn’t really forgetting.” Peter picked up the thread of his own last thought but one. “Nor is it due to any loss of the proverbial marbles. No. It’s more like a sudden readjustment—a shifting of the marbles—of people and places no longer where you expect them to be in their glass case. Like those prehistoric insects preserved in memory’s amber. I must use that.”
“Actually, you have. A number of times. In fact, Barbara quietly removed one from your last
New York Review of Books
piece. We didn’t tell you.”
Peter sighed. “How kind everyone is.” An orange-and-blue fire blazed in the Adam fireplace that Joe had so openly despised because it was a copy. “And a poor one!” he would thunder. Above the failed mantelpiece hung the portrait of Aaron Burr that had played such a significant role in the life of their family. The hole from Enid’s bullet had been so expertly repaired that only a slightly mischievous gleam in one of Burr’s eyes suggested that he no longer looked as he had when, gravely, he sat to Vanderlyn for his portrait two centuries earlier.
Peter eased himself into a chair beside the fire. Iris poured him whiskey. A small television set on a console flashed mute image after mute image. The millennium was now circling the globe from east to west. Peter had already published his farewell to the twentieth century in
American Idea
. The fact that he himself had now lived through three-fourths of that unlovable century seemed hardly real to him. So many fading, flashing images and making as little sense as the television set. He toasted Iris. Sipped whiskey. Shut his eyes and found himself in Philadelphia. The fire’s heat became summer’s heat. Summer 1940. He was in the convention hall with Joe Alsop, dapper and superior. They were discussing history while actually swimming—well, treading water—in its stream. Dreamers aware they were dreaming. Theme: better to make history or write it? For the first time in sixty years of remembering this occasion, Peter noticed that Joe was wearing a white straw hat … a boater? A floater? What did they call them? Every man
in those long-lost summers wore a white straw hat. Then, after the war, there were no more straw hats. All gone, along with the smell of prewar Washington streets—of asphalt baking in hot sun. He turned to speak to Joe, who was sitting in the chair to his right. But Iris had taken his place.
“Why am I thinking about Joe Alsop tonight?”
“Because you know how furious he’d be at having missed the changing of the centuries.”
Peter nodded. Tonight he was definitely one up on Joe. But then Joe had been much older than he and so was doomed from birth to remain forever fixed in the 1900s. Peter was solicitous of Iris. “You’re sure you don’t want to go to the Mall and watch the Clintons watch the cameras?”
“We can watch them here at home. Anyway, your descendants will be coming in with the new year. We’ve got supper for them.”
Peter still found it hard to believe that not only did he have four grown grandchildren but their mother seemed much older to him than ever did her Aunt Caroline, for whom he’d named her. Iris switched on the sound to the television. Excited voices. Fireworks on the screen. An American network was tracking the dawn all around the globe.
“There will be a river of fire,” reported Iris, “in London.”
“That was Hitler’s Wagnerian dream. Airpower,” Peter heard himself repeat something that he had been told many years before, “can never win a war.”
Iris pressed the mute button. “You said that on television. On your program. Remember? When NATO was bombing Kosovo.”
“Of course I remember.” Once a month Peter would talk for an hour on television with a lively young journalist who was eager to recreate the solemn stately dialogues that Walter Lippmann and Eric Sevareid conducted before he was born. The learned Lippmann, now forgotten, had been as commanding a presence on television as he had been in journalism. He knew many things that the audience did not know, and in those simple times there was no objection to knowledge, no insistence on the part of television programmers that an “in-depth” interview could never last longer than seven minutes while shallow was now measured in seconds. Each weighty question, even to Peter on his
own program, was invariably prefaced by the stern if smiling command “Now, briefly.” This was in stark contrast to the academic historians with their equally stern “Now, lengthily.” Such a one was Dr. Robert L. B. Sturtevant, a middle-aged history professor from a New England college. Tall, with a great deal of ash-gray hair, he had been commissioned by a university to write the life of Peter Sanford. “A witness to our times,” he had declared upon his first meeting with the bemused Peter, who had immediately started to wonder just what it was that he was thought to have witnessed as opposed to what he had simply observed as time kept moving, ever faster, past him. It seemed like only months had passed since the hapless Clintons had arrived in the whispering gallery; now two terms were almost over and, journalistic scandals to one side, nothing of any consequence had happened in
their
eight years as opposed to the eight years in which they had lived, like everyone else, as swift new means of communication were daily invented and then concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The politics of the sort that had dominated Washington from the beginning had ceased to matter. Internet, like heaven, was indifferent to who was, or wanted to be, king of the castle.
Now Dr. Sturtevant—Peter wondered why anyone not practicing medicine would use such a title—was on hand to observe the historical Peter Sanford at a significant moment in world history. “The end of
your
century,” he said, pointed tongue licking, lizardlike, thin lips. In the one year that Peter had been submitting himself to Dr. Sturtevant’s questions, he had found him agreeable if uninteresting. Although a trained scholarly researcher, Dr. Sturtevant did not appear to be much interested in getting to know anything that he did not already know. Very much a court historian, he did not question the prevailing myths about the nation-state in general and the United States in particular. Yet he had been drawn to Peter Sanford, an unglamorous subject whose worldview was hardly congenial to the one that prevailed in the land of tenure, foundation grants, and, sometimes, showy government service. But then Dr. Sturtevant had been a student of Aeneas Duncan. Since the Kennedy Administration had replaced, as it were, the Overbury Administration-that-never-was, Aeneas had attached himself to
the youthful melodramatists. Although Aeneas’s literary services were not needed, the Kennedys had set him up in the State Department as a mandarin in residence. Then, after the President’s assassination, he had resigned to become a distinguished professor of, presumably, distinction, on a range of subjects in which occasional degrees were given: hence, Sturtevant’s doctoral dissertation on “The Overbury Challenge to New Deal Orthodoxy” had been the making of Dr. Sturtevant.
“I’ve never been in this room at night.” Fortunately, Sturtevant’s voice, even at its most incessant, was a pleasant one and Peter sometimes napped when drawn out at nonbriefly length. Now Sturtevant toured the room; he paused before the life-size portrait of James Burden Day, looking ruggedly handsome. “I hadn’t realized what a good painting this was.”
“It needs artificial light,” said Peter. “Like most good portraits. In print as well as on canvas.”
Sturtevant’s hand went to his jacket pocket. Peter barely heard the click as a small recorder was switched on. He wondered if he would ever have the energy to read the eventual transcripts, as agreed. Even the thought was wearying. “My wife thought her father’s life had been ruined by Roosevelt. Every time Senator Day was ready to fulfill his destiny and run for president, FDR was there ahead of him. The bitterest time was 1940, of course. By ’44, Senator Day was too old.”
“And so was President Roosevelt.” Dr. Sturtevant moved on to a portrait of Diana.
“That,” said Peter, “was painted the year my wife died. She was only sixty. She looks much younger, doesn’t she? She never dyed her hair.”
“I can see the resemblance to your daughter.”
“You can? I can’t. Caroline is like me, poor child.” Happily, neither father nor daughter was stout this season.
Sturtevant rejoined Peter beside the fire; miniature recording machine in hand, containing a Silicon Valley chip that could store a hundred—or was it a thousand?—hours of talk.
“I must go fuss with the buffet.” Iris’s tolerance for the raw stuff of biography was slight.
“Do you find it odd, being here, tonight?” Sturtevant’s manner, at times, was that of kindly adult with slow child. He was certainly a born speller-out of the obvious.
“Odd to be at home? On New Year’s Eve? Or odd to be still alive at the age of … How old am I?”
“Seventy-seven and two months. I forget how many days. No, I meant still at the center of your world but with so many of its characters gone.”
“You would be amazed …” Peter began; then paused. How much should be—or could he—amaze the good simple Sturtevant? He selected a midrange rather run-of-the-mill arrangement of mild surprises. “… how little the old miss anyone. We have long since learned to take it for granted that the crew’s bound to skip ship and that’s just what they do and, by and large, one no longer cares. Out of sight, and so on. Certainly I miss Diana. To talk to. Without her, I simply talk to myself, which is probably all that the happily married ever do.” Peter thought of old Kitty. “Diana’s mother talked to birds and small animals. She also said aloud what she was thinking. Senator Day would be terrified when the fit was upon her and she was in chatty mood.”
Sturtevant removed a notebook from his pocket. “When I was writing my book on Clay Overbury, I discovered that the reason Senator Day did not run for reelection in 1952 was the fact that he had taken a bribe from some oilman and …”
“All that,” said Peter firmly, “is suitable for a life of my father-in-law or of Clay.
Not
of me. Clay was, as I have perhaps suggested to you, a very gifted man with a superb instinct for blackmail—whitemail, too, if I may invent a new crime of sorts. The ability to whitemail an emotional older man like my father into falling in love with him so that he would help him rise. I suspect all major politicians have this gift. Certainly FDR was a master of his own kind of whitemail and practiced it on the likes of Harry Hopkins. But he never—as far as I know, of course—operated at Clay’s visceral level.” Peter had not intended to say any of this but, once it was said, he felt as if a burden, small but real, had been lifted.
“I know that you never liked Overbury because of your sister, Enid …”
“… When it comes to politics, I’m not that personal.” Peter wondered if what he said was true. “Anyway, once Enid was dead and Diana and I were married, Clay was out of our lives—and very much into that of the public. Do you see his widow?”
Sturtevant shook his head. “No. I never really knew her. She moved to Cuernavaca after the …” He stopped. “I see Clay’s daughter Alice sometimes. Aeneas liked her.”
“So do I. My favorite niece.” Peter poured himself more whiskey. On television the Eiffel Tower was cascading fireworks. Peter looked at his watch. “Six hours to go before we, too, are catapulted into the future. How far away all this seemed when I was a boy. Once, in school, when we were about nine or ten, the class passed a resolution that in the year 2000 we would all meet again. We solemnly signed a document. Washington children learn about treaties and protocols with their mother’s milk. Now I can’t for the life of me recall anyone who was in that class.”