by Gore Vidal
3
From the beginning Caroline Sanford Sanford and Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt were friends. For one thing, there was the ridiculous redundancy of their names: each had married a cousin with the same family name; for another, each had gone to school in England with Mlle. Souvestre. As Caroline, now forty, was seven years older than Eleanor, they had not known each other at school. But each had been molded—even hewn—by the formidable Mademoiselle, a square-jawed spinster of extraordinary intellect and character and a freedom from all superstition, particularly the Christian one—which had alarmed Eleanor’s Uncle Theodore, the President. But as Theodore’s favorite sister had survived the same school uncorrupted, he had decided that his tall gawky fatherless—and motherless—niece might “find herself” abroad in a way that she could not at home in Tivoli, New York, close to the Hudson River, less close to the edge of the great world—her world, because she could not have Hudson Valley friends to the house for fear that her alcoholic brother, stationed in his second-floor window, might open fire on them with a hunting rifle. Although he had, thus far, always missed, one could not rely forever on an alcoholic tremor to preserve life.
It had been an inspired notion to get Eleanor out of Tivoli, out of America. In fact, Caroline liked to take some credit for having helped persuade—or was it her half-brother Blaise?—the then Governor Roosevelt to let his niece go out into the world of free-thinkers. After two years, Eleanor had returned to America better educated than anyone of her class except, perhaps, Caroline herself, but then Caroline had been brought up in France, the country to which her American father had gone into eccentric exile after the Civil War.
At thirty-three, Eleanor could speak excellent French as well as some German and Italian. She had not succumbed to Mademoiselle’s velvety atheism; rather, she had reacted to it with a renewed Protestant vigor and spoke often and unaffectedly of “ideals,” a word seldom to be heard on the worldly Caroline’s lips, but then Caroline was, with Blaise, the publisher of the Washington Tribune, a newspaper much influenced by William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow” sensational journalism, while Eleanor was a noble matron, the mother of five young children, of which the oldest was at the Misses Eastman School with Caroline’s daughter, Emma. Finally, Eleanor was very much the shy but purposeful consort of the assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charming Hudson Valley gentleman farmer generally thought to be, in Senator Lodge’s phrase, “well-meaning but light.” Caroline was not so certain how well-meaning the ambitious Franklin was—she was impervious to his aggressive, even cruel charm—but she knew that whatever intellectual and moral force he might lack, Eleanor more than made up for. Each complemented the other. Each saw politics as a royal road to be travelled the full distance. Like Franklin’s cousin and Eleanor’s uncle, Theodore, Franklin had been elected to the New York state legislature; now he held the same office that Theodore had used in order to gain for the United States the Philippines and for himself the presidency.
“What is President Wilson’s mood?” asked Caroline. “About Germany now?”
“He doesn’t confide in his under-secretaries. But Franklin thinks war is upon us.” She frowned. “I hope not, of course.”
“Your Uncle Theodore Rex, as Henry Adams calls him, howls for war.”
“Uncle Tee is—sometimes—too emphatic, even for us.” Eleanor smiled her diffident large-toothed smile, and dipped her head, an odd gesture, as if to apologize for the too small chin, the too large upper teeth which kept her from full admission to that celebrated bevy of beauty, her mother and two aunts. But Caroline found her charming in appearance if a bit overpowering. She was as tall as most men. Fortunately, Franklin was even taller than she; both slender, long-limbed, full of nervous energy. Eleanor lived two blocks from Caroline’s house, and each liked to walk, whenever there was time, in their common village, Georgetown, still mostly Negro but, here and there, eighteenth-century townhouses were being restored by the canny white rich. Caroline had taken two row houses and knocked them into one. The result was more than enough for a single lady whose fourteen-year-old daughter was away at school all day. On the other hand, the seven unwealthy Roosevelts were all crowded into 1773 N Street, a small red-brick house belonging to Eleanor’s aunt.
Now Eleanor sat before the fire in Caroline’s drawing room, an assembly of furs about her neck, studying the schedule for the day. She is like a general, thought Caroline, every contingency prepared for in advance. She had a full-time social secretary, as well as women to look after her children, and, of course, she herself presided over the political wife’s necessity, the cardcase, with which, each morning of practically every week, she must make the rounds, stopping at the houses of congressional, diplomatic, judicial wives in order to leave a card as an act of homage. In turn, they would deposit their cards on her vestibule table. As a resident of the city for nearly twenty years, Caroline was a near-Aboriginal and so seldom planted cards anywhere unless it was on someone older than she or a friend new to the city.
“We have,” said Eleanor, “twenty minutes before we must appear at Mrs. Bingham’s.”
“You must. I just do.…”
Eleanor’s laugh was high, while her normally pale gray skin suddenly became pale pink. Although Eleanor blushed easily, Caroline suspected that this was not the result of shyness, as everyone thought, but the weapon of a marvelous social tactician for whom the blush was an evasionary tactic like that of the sea-squid which could spread a cloud of ink all round itself and thus vanish in order to chart a new course. “Naturally, I do it for Franklin. We must keep on the right side of Congress, and they all go to Mrs. Bingham’s.”
“Except this week. They’ve adjourned. I told her not to bother, but she has mortal longings. She hungers now for the diplomats who stay, and for the Administration, which never leaves town, the way they used to.”
“They can’t. Not now. Not with ‘Preparedness.’ ” Eleanor frowned. “Do you think we’ll go into the war?”
“That was my editorial. Yesterday. Yes, I do.”
“I thought it was your brother’s. He’s been so … eager to have us go in.”
“Well, now I’m eager, too.” Caroline found herself staring at a bust of Napoleon, a gift from her original mentor in the newspaper business, William Randolph Hearst, whose gifts, like his life, tended toward the inappropriate but were no less revealing for that.
“The young men all are.” Eleanor undid the button to her right glove; soon she would be shaking hands, graciously, like her uncle, but with far less noise. “I mean the ones in the Administration, like Franklin and Bill Phillips. I’m rather more—Don’t tell anyone.” She regarded Caroline anxiously, and Caroline found her charmingly innocent, since no one of sound mind would confide in a newspaper publisher. But Caroline nodded sympathetically, as she always did whenever President Wilson pretended to confide in her; he was not innocent, of course, just self-absorbed and so, at times, tactically obtuse. “Well, personally, secretly, I rather like the way Mr. Bryan resigned as secretary of state.”
“Peace at any price?”
“Almost. Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Almost. No.” Caroline was brisk. “It is too late, thanks to Herr Zimmermann’s telegram. Even Mlle. Souvestre would favor war.”
“Yes. That went too far. So discouraging. I suppose I’m getting used to the idea now. But when Mr. Bryan resigned as secretary, I thought him very brave. I’m not a pacifist, of course. I can’t be. Franklin would be furious. He’s getting to be just like Uncle Ted. War at any price. Now, thanks to Mr. Zimmermann …” Eleanor gazed forlornly at her schedule.
At first, both Caroline and the Anglophile Blaise thought the telegram was an invention of the British; as a result, humiliatingly, the Tribune was one of the last newspapers to record this shocking affront—and shock it certainly was—to the American people. Yet when the President requested congressional permission to arm American ships, the request had been filibustered to dea
th on the Senate floor: and the Congress had then adjourned on March 3, leaving the nation’s business unfinished.
On March 5, the President had taken his second oath of office in a simple ceremony at the White House to which neither Blaise nor Caroline had been invited. But then the President was vindictive not only in the large necessary things but in the small insignificant ones as well. To Caroline this was perfect proof of his greatness, since every major political figure that she had known was equally dedicated to disinterested revenge.
Jacques, the lesser half of a couple from Martinique, appeared in the doorway. “The car is here, madam.”
Caroline rose while Eleanor perversely buttoned the glove that she had just unbuttoned. The process would now have to be repeated once they were in company. There was something compulsive about the younger woman’s energy that Caroline found both touching and mysterious. But then the dread—and for Caroline, if not for all the world, charming—Uncle Theodore had set inordinately high standards of activity, ranging from every sort of fidget in a room to mad dashes up and down the Amazon in order to slaughter any animal or bird that dared place itself in his path. Happily, the women of the family had never been taken in by him. From serene wife, Edith, to brilliant daughter, Alice, to the various Norn-like sisters, the ladies were never strenuous, unlike the menfolk, who never ceased to give unconvincing imitations of Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuosity and superb manliness against every odd. Even distant cousin Franklin, who resembled the presidential Roosevelts not at all, had taken to tossing his head as if his thinning locks were a lion’s mane and, of course, flashing large teeth in imitation of the one who had been what he—like all the others—wanted to be, the president. Yet Eleanor broke the sexual pattern. Serene and controlled in manner, she was over-active in deed. She climbed the rigging of ships; she paid more calls than she needed to; she over-organized her household; she was always in a desperate hurry, thought Caroline, hurrying to catch up with her at the motor car’s door, where the Irish chauffeur stood, face anxious with sobriety.
“Why,” asked Caroline, out of breath, “are you always in such a hurry?”
“Because,” said Eleanor, “I think that I am always late.”
“For what?”
“Oh …” She leapt into the back seat of the car. “Everything,” she said. The toothy smile was sudden and very winning. “Life.”
Caroline settled down beside her. “That takes care of itself soon enough. Us, too.”
“Then one must hurry to do it all.” Caroline wondered, not for the first time, if Eleanor disliked her husband. They were so well matched a political couple that only an underlying tension of some sort could explain Eleanor’s perfectionism and irrational fear of being late—of being left behind?
Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham was Caroline’s finest invention. At the century’s turn when the youthful Caroline had taken over the moribund Washington Tribune, there was no place for the tone of the paper to go but down, down to as many common readers as possible—or out of business altogether. Caroline had imitated Hearst. Murders became her hallmark, particularly when the body—always female, always beauteous—was pulled from the canal. Caroline had a prejudice against the Potomac River which her editor, Mr. Trimble, honored whenever he could. Next to bodies floating in pieces along the canal that paralleled the river, robberies of the rich inhabitants of the city’s west end were highly popular, and when Mrs. Bingham, wife of “the Milk King,” as Caroline dubbed him, lost a few trinkets to a burglar who had found his way into her Connecticut Avenue house, Caroline had arbitrarily elevated Mrs. Bingham, a lady unknown to her, to First Ladyhood of Washington’s society, enlarging the house to Windsor Castle and making all her jewels crown. Mrs. Bingham had been thrilled; had cultivated Caroline; had forced the Milk King to advertise in the Tribune.
In return, Caroline had helped Mrs. Bingham clamber along the heights of Washington society, an affair of mutually exclusive villages that tended to exclude the largest village of all, the government. Accustomed to the political salons of Paris, Caroline had encouraged Mrs. Bingham to specialize in members of the House of Representatives, a group no Washingtonian had ever wanted to cultivate. As Caroline had predicted, the statesmen were pathetically grateful for any attention, and so, en masse at Mrs. Bingham’s, they proved a sufficient draw to fill her drawing room with an interesting assortment of other villagers. Now, widowed, blind, malevolent of tongue, Mrs. Bingham had arrived; had become an institution; had, somewhat to Caroline’s bemusement, married her daughter, Frederika, to Blaise, and so the milklaced blood of the Binghams was now conjoined with the purple of the Sanfords and the Burrs in the form of a fat child. I have a lot to answer for, thought Caroline, as she and Eleanor entered the drawing room, where peacock feathers made Indian war-bonnets of a number of blameless Chinese jugs while Tiffany’s largest lamps illuminated everyone’s worst angle.
“It’s Caroline.” Mrs. Bingham’s blind eyes turned in Caroline’s direction. She looked older than she was, thanks to a regimen prepared for her by Dr. Kellogg himself. She lived on wheat that had been shredded; and so belched constantly from too much roughage of the sort necessary only to her late husband’s cows, source of her wealth, glory. “And Mrs. Roosevelt. Franklin, that is.” Mrs. Bingham did not even try to disguise her disappointment. But Eleanor, one of the right Roosevelts, was quite used to being taken, thanks to her husband, for one of the wrong ones.
Mrs. Bingham took Eleanor’s hand. “Everyone speaks of your husband. So energetic. So handsome. Where is he?”
“He’s been in Haiti and Santo Domingo, inspecting our Marines.” Eleanor did not lie; but she did know how to avoid and evade the truth. Actually, when relations with Germany had been broken off, Franklin had been called back to Washington by the Secretary of the Navy. In the best Roosevelt tradition, he was now complaining to everyone about his long-suffering chief, Josephus Daniels, an amiable Southern newspaper editor, who hated war and alcohol and so had been entrusted with the American Navy.
“Well, he must be very busy these days. He’s pro-German, you know.” Mrs. Bingham when not spreading gossip of the most astonishing sort was given to occupying untenable positions, to the great annoyance of no one but her daughter, who was not, Caroline noted, present.
“Really?” Eleanor was not used to Mrs. Bingham.
“Yes. Really. Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe, Romain Rolland. Those are my idols.”
“Rolland is French,” murmured Caroline.
“Who said he wasn’t? Not I.” Eleanor had drifted off. Mrs. Bingham held Caroline’s arm firmly. “We must talk. Not now, of course.” The deep voice was conspiratorial. “But he’s here. With her brother. And it’s true. Seventy-five thousand dollars it cost to buy her off. Now the letters are in his hands.”
Caroline bowed to the father of her child. Senator James Burden Day inclined his head while his wife, Kitty, smiled vaguely at her husband’s mistress of sixteen years. Caroline was certain that Kitty did not know because, if she had, there would have been terrible scenes and threats of divorce in the American style so unlike that of Paris where, at least in these matters, things were better ordered. Of course, Caroline’s husband had divorced her when he discovered the father’s identity. Happily, there was no jealousy involved, only money. She was wealthy; he was not. In any case, her cousin had known that she was pregnant with someone else’s child when he married her because he had needed money as much as she had needed a husband’s good name, which was also hers, Sanford. In time, they parted. In time, he died. In time, Caroline went on, as there is nothing else ever to do with time.
While Mrs. Bingham told her of scandals too squalid even for the Tribune to publish, Caroline noted that her lover was growing stout, that the once thick bronze curls were now gray in front and fewer, and the blue eyes smaller in a lined face. Yet they still made love at least once a week: and, more important, there was always a good deal to talk about. But now she was forty, with a fleet of ships ablaze
behind her. There was no going back in time, while what lay ahead was less than comforting if only because she did not know how to be old; and rather doubted that she’d ever develop the knack.
Everyone, even Blaise, urged her to marry again, as if one simply went to a party and selected a husband. But the few possibilities were always married, as her first lover had been and still very much was. Of the possibilities, she had allowed herself several short affairs, without great joy. Now she found that she was attracted to men half her age, which would have been acceptable in France but not here, where she could well be burned at the stake. Women were not allowed such vile license in the Puritan republic. Women were not allowed much of anything unless they were rich in their own right, her one glittering advantage, seldom taken advantage of.
Mrs. Bingham accepted the worship of two new congressional couples who, when they heard Caroline’s name, saw, as it were, divinity. Aware that a newspaper proprietor was the source of all life to the politician, Caroline encouraged lit candles, murmured prayers, whispered confessions because, put simply, she liked power very much.
Suddenly she felt less sorry for herself, as Mrs. Bingham, punch cup in hand, told her with acrid breath that one of the he’s of her story was standing across the room, a stout dim-looking man named Randolph Boiling, brother to the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. “Which,” said Mrs. Bingham, delighted with the horror of it all, “is why he is with him.”
“Who is with whom?” Caroline had always had difficulty following Mrs. Bingham’s higher gossip. Now, half in half out of her dotage, Mrs. Bingham no longer bothered to identify with a name those free-floating pronouns that bobbed in such confusion on the surface of her swift sombre narratives.
“He—her brother.” Mrs. Bingham frowned with annoyance. She disliked the specific. “Randolph Boiling. Over there. With the sheep’s head. Well, he brought him. The great speculator. Over there. The Jew. Quite handsome, to give the devil his due.”