by Gore Vidal
Madame Marcia had been Daugherty’s inspiration. “I’ve never been to her. But they say she’s just what the doctor ordered, and the Duchess needs a lot of doctoring.” Like all politicians, Daugherty spoke code; and Jess, who had grown up in the actual shadow of his Ohio hometown Washington Court House’s actual colonnaded courthouse, understood the code. Also there was nothing that he would not do for Harry M. Daugherty, who had befriended him when he was first starting out; done his legal work for nothing; introduced him to those Ohio politicians who always came to Daugherty for aid at election time—their elections, of course. Although Daugherty had been chairman of the State Republican Committee and was now forever a part of history because he had nominated William McKinley for governor in 1893, thus launching the sun, as it were, into the republic’s sky, Daugherty himself had no political luck; had failed by seventy-seven votes to be nominated for governor; had now settled for being the hidden power behind whatever throne he could set up. Of course the highest throne of all was currently empty or, to be precise, occupied by one Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, an unnatural state of affairs which would be corrected in 1920 by the election of a Republican president. But that was three years away, and there were certain arrangements that must first be made. Madame Marcia was one.
“Is she always so late?” Madame Marcia glided into the room, at an odd angle to the floor. She had once been a dancer, as she had told Jess on his previous visit, with the Frank Deshon Opera Company. “At sixteen,” she would add, in case someone were to count the years that had passed since her name had appeared in very small letters on a very large poster whose date marked her as an artiste from the long-ago age of McKinley. Now the dancer was a spiritualist minister and a guide to the stars in the dark days of Woodrow Wilson when every day, for Republicans, was like today, February, with wet snow falling and a cold north wind.
“No. The Duchess is the soul of punctuality.” Jess rose, as he always did, when a lady, any lady, entered a room, any room. “The weather …”
“The weather, oh, yes.” Over the years, one by one, Madame Marcia’s Brooklyn vowels had gradually closed until she sounded refined and deeply spiritual. She wore priestess black, and a string of pearls. Only the thick scarlet hair struck a discordant Frank Deshon dancer note. Jess had first met her with Daugherty, who swore by her, whatever that meant. Although Jess believed fervently in every sort of ghost and ghoul, he had no particular interest in any spirit world other than the one in his hall closet where, back of an old winter coat and a stack of galoshes, horror reigned. Only his driver George dared enter that closet; and return unscathed and sane.
“Mr. Micajah is keeping well?” Madame Marcia sat in a straight chair, and smiled, revealing pearl-like teeth rather more authentic in quality than the pearls she wore. Micajah was Daugherty’s middle name. Real names were discouraged by the lady. “Otherwise I might be influenced when I consult the stars.” Daugherty maintained that she had no idea, ever, whose horoscope she was casting: hence her high price. She was a legend in the capital and much consulted by some of the highest in the land, usually through intermediaries, as the faces of the highest would have been recognizable to Madame Marcia, thanks to photography and the newsreels.
“Yes. He’s gone back to …” Jess stopped himself from saying Ohio. “Home. But his—uh, friend is here. The Duchess’s husband.”
“An interesting—even significant—horoscope.” Madame Marcia had been given nothing more than the date and hour of birth of the Duchess’s husband. Of course she had a Congressional Directory in her inner sanctum and she could, if she were so minded, check the various birthdates with the one in hand, assuming that its owner was in the Congress. But, as Daugherty said, even if she knew whose horoscope it was, how could she predict his future without some help from the stars or whatever? The whole town knew that she had predicted the elevation to the vice presidency of the current incumbent, Thomas R. Marshall. Without supernatural aid, this was an impossibly long shot.
“I’ve never seen such a cold winter. Worse than New York ever was.…”
“Why did you come to Washington?”
“Fate,” said Madame Marcia, as though speaking of an old and trusted friend. “I was associated with Gipsy Oliver at Coney Island. Mostly for amusement’s sake. But”—Madame’s voice became low and thrilling—“she had gifts as well as—worldliness. Dark gifts. Amongst them, that of prophecy. I was, I thought, happily married. With two beautiful children. My husband, Dr. Champrey, had an excellent practice, specializing in the lower lumbar region and, of course, the entire renal system. But the spirits spoke to Gipsy Oliver. She spoke to me. Beware of the turkey, she said one day. I thought she was joking. I laughed—more fool I! What turkey? I asked. I know turkeys, and don’t much care to eat them—so dry, always, unless you have the knack of basting, which fate has denied me. Well, lo! and behold the next month, November it was, I was preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for my loved ones, when Dr. Champrey said, ‘I’ll go buy us a turkey.’ I remember now a shiver come over me. A chill, like a ghost’s hand upon me.”
Jess shivered in the stuffy room. This was the real thing, all right. No doubt of that.
“I said, ‘Horace, I’m not partial to turkey, as you know. Just a boiled chicken will do.’ ” She exhaled. Jess inhaled and smelled boiled chicken, old sandalwood. “ ‘Why not splurge?’ he said. Then he was gone. He never,” Madame Marcia’s bloodshot eyes glared at Jess, “came back.”
“Killed?” Jess had always known that he himself would one day die violently. Roxy said he was mad as a hatter. But Jess knew; and so he was never alone in an empty street or alleyway or, for that matter, bed, if he could help it. When George did not sleep with him, one of the clerks from his emporium would oblige. In Washington he always shared a room with Daugherty, next to the room of the invalid Mrs. Daugherty. Whatever town Jess was in, he cultivated policemen. He read every detective story he could get his hands on to find out how to survive the city jungle with its wild killings, human swarm, dark alleys.
“Who knows? The son-of-a-bitch,” she added, suddenly soulful. “Anyway, I had had my call.” She indicated the Spiritualist Church diploma. “I don’t need any man, I’m happy to say, except when I feel we’ve known one another in an earlier life.” She smiled at Jess, who blushed and took off his thick glasses so that her face might blur; he adored women but, what with one thing and another—like his weight problem and diabetes—what was the point? as Roxy had said in the third month of their marriage. Jess had wept. She was firm, yet loving. Roxy would never go for a turkey and not return. She just went for a divorce, and as Jess was worth even then a small fortune, more than one hundred thousand dollars, he could keep them both in high style. Today they were better friends than ever, each devoted to gossip; each able to remember almost to the week when a couple was married so that when the first baby was born they could—she without fingers, he with—work out the time of conception and whether or not it was blessed in the Lord’s eyes. Each delighted secretly in the fact that the Duchess’s son by her first husband was born six months after the wedding which was to end in divorce six years later. Roxy shared Jess’s high pleasure in this sort of knowledge, proving that there were, Jess decided, blessings yet to be counted, particularly if Roxy should end up in Hollywood as a photo-play star, their common dream—for her.
The Duchess was in the room. “I let myself in.” The voice was dry and nasal and whenever a word had an “r” in it the Duchess made that poor letter go through her thin dry lips, over and over again, as if she were French. But she was quintessentially a Midwesterner of German extraction, born Florence Kling. The head was large, the body small. The Duchess suffered from what Madame Marcia would call renal problems, and her ankles were often swollen while her sallow normal color was often dull gray with illness. She had only one kidney, which obliged her to drink quantities of water. Often bedded with a hot-water bottle on even the most stifling of summer days, she would try, sometimes in vain,
to sweat. But today the small blue eyes were bright and there was even a suggestion of color in her cheeks due to the north wind, while the end of her somewhat thick nose was also rosy—moist, too. Like a trumpet, she blew her nose into a large handkerchief and said, “I hate incense. So foreign, so bad for the air.”
“Chacun à son goût.” Madame Marcia was gracious. “Let me take your wraps.” As the Duchess was divested, she turned to Jess. “We’re invited to Mrs. Bingham’s but …” The Duchess was about to name her husband; then saw the dark brown myopic eyes of Jess so unlike her own small gray far-sighted ones; remembered the rule of omertà. “… but I don’t want to go alone. So you can take me, can’t you?”
“Sure thing, Duchess.”
“Now, Madame Marcia,” the Duchess made the priestess sound like the patroness of a disorderly house, “I’ve been hearing so much the last couple of years about you and I’m really glad to meet up with you though I can’t say I’m all that much a believer in all this.” The Duchess’s face set in what Jess was convinced she believed was a jovial expression but the long sheep-like upper lip and thin mouth produced an effect more alarming than not.
“Dear lady,” Marcia sighed and blinked her eyes. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.…”
“I don’t like Shakespeare.” Jess was always surprised by how much the Duchess knew and, usually, disliked. But then she had had a hard life which was probably not going to get any easier. She could hear storm warnings more clearly than anyone else he knew, like those animals that were able to anticipate earthquakes, much good it ever did them. “I saw the Frank Deshon Opera Company once.” The Duchess did a complete reversal; she was also a perfect politician when she chose to be. “They played Cincinnati. I went with my … brother. That was way before your time, of course.…”
“Oh, my dear lady!” Madame Marcia was properly hooked.
“Now what do I do? I feel like I’m at the dentist’s.” Madame Marcia took her client’s arm and steered her into the back room. “It will be painless, I promise you.”
“Now, don’t you listen, Jess.” The Duchess touched the beads.
“I never listen when I’m not supposed to.”
“Says you! Those big ears of yours flap like nothing I ever saw outside the circus.”
Jess resolved not to listen; and heard everything. “The subject,” as the Duchess’s husband was referred to, “was born November 2, 1865, at two P.M. in the Midwest of the United States. Jupiter.” Then something, something. Then, “Sign of Sagittarius in the tenth hour.” Jess stared into the small coal fire set back in an iron grate. Washington was just like Ohio, nothing big city at all about these R Street brick houses. But then everyone liked to say that Washington was just a big village which happened to be full of big people of the sort Jess was naturally attracted to as they were to him.
Lately, Jess had started to keep a notebook in which he recorded the name of every important person he met in the course of a day. In Washington his fingers soon got tired, adding up the day’s score. Even so, he was looking forward to Mrs. Bingham’s reception. A wealthy widow, Mrs. Bingham conducted what Jess had first thought was a political “saloon” like a bar and grill until it was explained to him what a salon was. Mrs. Bingham was also the mother-in-law of the publisher of the Washington Tribune, a paper most friendly to Ohio Republicans, unlike the Washington Post, whose owner, John R. McLean, an Ohio Democrat, had died the previous summer, leaving his son Ned to do right by the Duchess and her husband. Ned and his wife Evalyn were now their close friends; and so, marvelously, was Jess, who had never dreamed that he would be taken up by a rich and glamorous couple of the highest society. Evalyn was especially magnificent, with the most diamonds of any one woman on earth, among them the Hope Diamond, a bluish chunk of old bottle to Jess’s eye, worn on a long chain about her neck and as full of evil, it was said, as Jess’s downstairs closet. But unlike Jess, Evalyn was unafraid.
“I feel extra-marital entanglements may cause grief.” Madame Marcia’s voice richly hummed through the beaded curtain. The Duchess’s nasal response was pitched high. “That’s somebody else’s husband you got there. But that’s all right. Go on.”
“The stars …” Madame Marcia’s voice dropped to a whisper and Jess sighed voluptuously as he thought of all the sin in the world, and so much of it of the flesh. The Duchess suffered because her husband was a ladies’ man and there was nothing she could do but turn a blind eye, as she did to their neighbor Carrie Phillips, wife of James, who, like Jess, was a dealer in dry goods, as well as fancy and staple notions and infants’ wear.
Carrie was handsome and golden and well-born—related to the Fulton of the steamboats, it was said. She was also part German, and that was cause for many a quarrel in the parlors of Washington Court House and of nearby Marion; worse, of many a quarrel between Carrie and her lover, who was obliged to placate both his pro-German and anti-German constituents. On this subject, Carrie could be fierce; otherwise, she made the great man happy, thought Jess, whistling softly to himself “My God, How the Money Rolls In!”
“That,” the Duchess’s voice rasped, “was all pretty interesting. I’ll say that. Food for thought.” As she strode into the sitting room, Jess thought of what her husband had once said about her: “She can’t see a band without wanting to be the drum-major.” She liked people to think she was her husband’s dynamo, but Jess doubted this if only because he liked people to think that she was his spur. Daugherty thought they were more of a team, like a pair of old-time oxen pulling a cart, with her bellowing the most and with him pulling the most. But thanks to Jess’s mother and to Roxy and to her mother, he knew more about women as people than anyone, and it was his view that the Duchess was a joyous slave to her apparently lazy, charming, lucky husband, who called the shots.
“Jess, you’ll settle up?” The Duchess was now safely inside her various wrappings. Madame Marcia’s smile was sweet and faraway.
“Okay, Duchess.” Jess was aware that the “D” of Duchess had produced a sudden jet of saliva. Fortunately no one was drenched. He dried his lips with the back of his left sleeve; he would have to dry his thick moustache later, when unobserved.
“You’ll pick me up at Wyoming Avenue. Five o’clock sharp. Wear something spiffy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The two ladies parted, amid powerful assurances of mutual high esteem and deep—on Madame’s side—compassion.
“What’s the damage?” asked Jess, reaching for his wallet.
“The damage,” Madame Marcia gazed ethereally out the window at the black afternoon sky, “has been done.” Then she blinked her eyes, as if coming out of a dream. “Mr. Micajah’s paid already. The lady’s not very strong,” she added, probing, Jess could tell. “She has a renal complaint.”
That was on the nose. Impressed, Jess nodded. “She’s been sickly quite a lot lately.”
“Bright’s disease, I should guess, not having done her horoscope. He’s sickly, too.”
“The picture of health.” Again, she was on target. Jess was impressed for the first time. The subject’s fluctuating health was one of the few secrets in public life; private, too. When he went off to Battle Creek, Michigan, the town thought that he was just getting away from the Duchess and politics, but he was actually trying to bring down blood pressure, moderate his heartbeat, dry out his system. Jess had gone with him once and was amazed at how pale the ruddy face became once he’d stopped drinking, and how frail he was for all his highly visible not to mention remarkably handsome robustness.
“I think you should tell Mr. Micajah—as he is paying—what I did not tell the lady.” Madame Marcia drew the curtain against the February sky.
“Something bad?”
“These things are open to interpretation. If one were always right, I’d be living in a palace on Connecticut Avenue like Blaise Sanford. Of course, our occult gifts do not extend to ourselves. In that sense we’re a bit like doctors, who never take care of the
mselves.”
“Never take their own medicine either.” Jess had seldom been free for long of doctors—asthma, diabetes.
“There, they are wise. Mr. Micajah made it clear to me that if I found in the stars what he thought I would that I should impart it to—the Duchess, which I have done. I have seldom seen so glorious a chart or one so brief. I can see why he is melancholy and moody and wants all of life that he can seize before he rises to the heights.…” She stopped.
Jess’s heart was beating faster. This was it. Clever Daugherty. Clairvoyant Madame? “Will he be president?”
Madame Marcia nodded solemnly; then she turned to gaze with bemusement at herself in a dust-streaked mirror.
“Yes. With those stars and that rampant lion, he cannot fail. I told her that. I told her everything, except …” For a moment she seemed to have lost her train of thought. What was she thinking of? The turkey that never was, or … ? She turned away from the mirror; crossed to a table where amongst numerous beautiful objects a small porcelain cup held a number of toothpicks; she selected one and most deliberately went to work on her lower teeth. “I did not tell her what I want you to tell Mr. Micajah. After glory in the House of Preferment, the sun and Mars are conjoined in the eighth house of the Zodiac. This is the House of Death. Sudden death.”
“He’ll die?”
“We all do that. No. I see something far more terrible than mere death.” Madame Marcia discarded her toothpick like an empress letting go the sceptre. “President Harding—of course I know now exactly who he is—will be murdered.”