by Gore Vidal
At first the war had been deeply unpopular in the state; then, overnight, everyone had succumbed joyously to every anti-German, anti-Red, anti-Negro demagogue. The Ku Klux Klan was now reviving, this time in the cities rather than in the countryside, an ominous development. Would the voters punish Wilson—and Burden—for the war? Or would they accept the notion that, thanks to the pro-warriors, the United States was now pre-eminent in the world?—something hard to believe when you had to walk ten yards on a cold night to the privy. Not for the first time Burden wished that Bryan had been of even average intelligence, because he alone had had the ability to give voice to the confused majority. Burden and his mad father had parted company over Bryan. For the veteran of Chickamauga, all one needed to do was to organize the people so that there would be a representative government and a more perfect union for all. But Burden knew that this could never happen. One look around the Senate cloakroom was enough to demonstrate to even the most zealous populist that he had no chance to unseat the likes of Penrose. They—the true gilded They—owned it all, including himself. Was it not that clever Wall Street lawyer, McAdoo, who wanted to, in effect, hire Burden to be on his ticket as an enticement to the unrepresented?
Borah sat opposite him. “Daydreaming?”
Burden gave a start. He was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Senator. The heat …”
“And the flu.” Borah was understanding. “It clings. I came a little early.” A waiter brought them iced tea. Kitty was in the next room with Mrs. Borah, an attentive dragon, ready to scare off over-enthusiastic ladies. “Wilson’s going to take a trip.”
Burden nodded.
“Well, it should do him good. Get to see the country after all that time in Europe. See the folks. Johnson’s going to cover California. I’m starting out in the Twin Cities.”
“One hundred percent against the League?”
Borah nodded. “I’m also eager to get our boys out of Siberia.”
“So is the President.”
“But he put them there in the first place.”
“I thought you were a T.R. man.”
“I am. But I’m also for getting us out of places where we don’t belong.”
“Roosevelt thought we belonged everywhere, toting the white man’s burden.”
“I’m older now, wiser. I like to think there’s probably enough for us to do right here at home. Once we start having colonies around the world we’re their prisoner. I thought Wilson had more sense. But his head’s been turned by all those kings and chancellors and bankers.”
Burden was never sure how to handle Borah. They were personal friends with similar constituencies. But Burden had gone along with his party and Wilson, while Borah had remained in concert with what he took to be the majority of Americans. If the people were to feel betrayed by Wilsonian internationalism … Burden experienced a mild chill: he could be defeated. On the other hand, if the economy improved and the propaganda for the League made rosy the prospect, Borah would have a difficult time. “I think the League is popular, to the extent people know about it.”
“It won’t be when I finish explaining how we’d lose control over our own armed forces, and how if England ordered us to send a hundred thousand troops, say, to Constantinople, we’d have to go, like it or not.”
“I don’t think it will work quite like that.”
“It won’t,” said Borah, thin mouth no more than a straight horizontal line, “work at all. It’s the banks that are doing this to us. New York’s bad enough to have to live with. But London, too? No, thank you. We fought that war of independence once. Don’t need a second round. Siberia!” Borah shook his head, with wonder.
“Would you let Japan have it?”
“Why not? They’re next door. Anyway, whoever owns that icebox will still have to do business with us.”
“What about this hemisphere?”
“Well, Mexico’s our own back yard. So when they go grabbing our land and killing our people, I’m perfectly willing to go beat them up. I’m not a pacifist. Mexico matters to us. So we fight. Germany doesn’t.”
“What about Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Cuba?”
“What about them?”
“Each of those supposedly sovereign states is currently occupied by American Marines, answerable only to the President. We behave to them the way the Austro-Hungarian Empire behaved to Serbia and Montenegro and Slovenia …”
“Don’t make my head ache. I don’t want to think about those old bad places. Wilson really wants to be the first president of the world, doesn’t he?”
Burden shrugged, somewhat disloyally. “He’s never said anything about it. And after this last round in Paris, I don’t think he wants to have anything to do with Europeans ever again. He hates the French, thinks Lloyd George a crook, the Italians vultures …”
“Well, I’m relieved that he has grasped the essentials. You know, I wasn’t all that impressed with him at the White House. Fact, I was pretty shaken. Does he lie a lot, do you think?”
Burden laughed. “You mean more than you and me?”
“I never lie,” the lion of Idaho lied; his devotion to himself was more religious than secular. To himself he was, simply, God, and he saw that he was good. Despite—or because of—this certitude, Borah was the most popular man in politics and not about to share his godhood with mere mortals. “No. What struck me was the feeble way Wilson lied to us about the secret treaties. He certainly heard about them when we heard about them, if not before, but then he says—”
“He’s edgy these days. He’s easily flustered. He was sick in Paris …”
“Encephalitis.” Like God, Borah was nothing if not well-informed.
“I hadn’t heard that. But he’s still pretty weak, and shouldn’t go to the country now, not in this heat.”
“I suppose he’ll be your candidate, won’t he?” That was why Borah had arrived early, Burden decided. Even God needed an occasional political tip.
“Yes,” Burden lied. “He is, barring accidents.”
“You’ll be his running mate?”
“He hasn’t got that far. But he means to sweep the country for the League.” As Burden improvised, he was somewhat disappointed to discover that his spur-of-the-moment lie, calculated to confuse the enemy, was the plain truth. Of course Wilson was preparing for re-election as the first three-term president. Of course he would need someone like Burden to balance the ticket. Would, Burden wondered, lightning strike? If it did, could he also, as insurance, run for the Senate as well? State law was ambiguous while political opinion was severe. Whoever ran for two offices would probably lose both, and, of course, Wilson would be ill-pleased at so public a lack of faith.
“You’ll be a big help to him.” Borah nodded in god-like acknowledgment of one of his own minor works.
“You’d be a big help—to whom?” With Roosevelt’s unexpected death on the eve of his political rebirth, the Republican Party was a leaderless group of feudal lords like Penrose and Piatt, with no hero—as opposed to a deity like Borah, who was too large for the presidential office, while Lodge was too old and odd and shrunken.
“I don’t think I’d look right as vice president.” Borah did not smile. “As for president, I’ll have to wait till everyone catches up with me and realizes what a mistake this war was.” At the doorway, Kitty gestured for the statesmen to join the party.
Kitty had managed to collect a bit of everything for their housewarming. The Senate was on hand in collegial force. The Lansings and the Phillipses represented the State Department. The Longworths and the Mombergers stood in for that vast herd, the House of Representatives. The ever-present lobbyists of the war years were no longer to be seen, smiling and waiting to present their petitions. Of old Washington, there were the usual Apgars, paying court to the ancient Mrs. Marshall Field of Chicago, who had recently, mysteriously, settled her court at the capital.
Blaise and Frederika stood in front of the carved stone fireplace f
illed with pots of flowers, something Burden had first noted years before in Caroline’s house and, gradually, brought Kitty round to. Frederika was now wearing her own somewhat thin gray-blond hair. She looked younger than she had before the flu. “I’m trying to convince Blaise to be cool, like this, in the country.”
“If Connecticut Avenue isn’t country, what is?” Blaise was brusque.
“Virginia is.” Frederika was prompt. “The Potomac Heights. We already own a hundred acres just past Chain Bridge. I want to build where you can hear the sound of water, cool water, like here …”
“Water? All I can hear is iced tea,” said Blaise, reaching for a champagne glass, another of Caroline’s importations that Kitty, temperance like most of their constituents, had long resisted.
“We can hear the creek when there isn’t company. Where’s Caroline?”
“Gone west. To be a cowboy.” Blaise was mildly drunk.
“Movie star.” Frederika was wistful. “I envy her. All that energy. Emma’s married, you know.”
Burden was startled that Caroline had said nothing. “When?” he asked, meaning to whom.
“A professor at Bryn Mawr,” said Blaise, getting the order straight. “Just now. She brought him home to Caroline’s, and they quarrelled. They are now honeymooning with us in Connecticut Avenue.”
“He is critical of Caroline’s movie director,” said Frederika.
The arrival of Henry Cabot Lodge obliged Burden to break away and greet the great man, who had grown frail in recent years. Without his wife, he seemed only half a person, and that half all senator. “There aren’t many people left to talk to,” he observed to Burden, with perfect if unconscious rudeness.
“There’s history.” Burden spoke with exaggerated deference.
“History,” said Lodge, “does not respond. I love the park,” he added, looking about the airy room. “We wanted to live here but didn’t. And if you don’t, early on, you won’t. Colonel Roosevelt and I used to ride across your property, coming up from the ford.”
“I remember.”
Kitty brought the Attorney General over to Lodge, who graciously received him. A. Mitchell Palmer had been in a state of euphoria ever since his house had been blown up. The enemy was everywhere, and he had been singled out to save the democracy from Bolshevism. With practiced charm, Lodge strung him all the rope that was needed, while Burden continued his rounds, greeting the guests and making an appearance of making conversation.
“Jess Smith, Senator,” said a voice he never could place. “I’m here with Mrs. Harding. The Senator’s laid up.” Jess Smith was owlish and slack of jaw. Mrs. Harding was slack of nothing; sharp cornflower-blue eyes glittered behind a pince-nez. “Really nice home, Mr. Day. Really nice. Which proves you’ve always got to build it yourself if you want something nice.”
“I thought Wyoming Avenue was pretty grand.” Burden’s politician’s memory seldom deserted him. He had been to their house once; and remembered everything, including her maiden name, Kling, and the fact that she had been divorced from a first husband before she married Harding, some years her junior, and that she had had a son by the first husband, and that her well-to-do father had disapproved strenuously of Harding on the ground that he was supposed to be several parts Negro. One could not know too much, was Burden’s theory; or, more precisely, one could not forget too much.
“You must see us when Warren’s back from Chautauqua. How he loves the circuit. The crowds—the hotels, the boardinghouses—and the hundreddollar fee for each appearance, which is pretty important now that everything costs so much. You don’t do Chautauqua, do you?” Mrs. Harding made it seem like a kind of religious observance, not lightly unobserved.
Burden said that he seldom had the time, much less Harding’s gift of oratory. Mrs. Harding was not listening; she was staring at the Longworths, who were at the door to the dining room, where Cissy Patterson Gizycki stood, red hair set off by classic jade green. Alice looked grim for all her toothy smile. Cissy looked seductive, and Nick Longworth looked seduced, and drunk. “The Countess sure is a sketch,” observed Florence Harding.
“She’s no duchess, that’s for sure,” said the amiable Jess.
“She’s always been popular here.” Burden sounded to himself like one of his prim old-guard Apgar cousins instead of his usual rough Western tribune-of-all-the-people self. But then he had been in politics in Washington for more than twenty years; he had known, as girls, Cissy and Caroline and, for that matter, Alice the Great.
“It’s a good thing the folks back home don’t know what goes on here.” Mrs. Harding fixed him with a hard stare just as his natural daughter, Emma, entered the room.
“I’m sure Washington’s no different than Marion, Ohio, when it comes to—secrets,” said Burden, scoring a bull’s-eye.
Mrs. Harding turned a mottled red. Jess cleared his throat of nonpresent phlegm. “Marion is so correct it’s dead,” Jess said. “Now Columbus is something different, I’ll say.”
Burden, as host not to mention collegial senator, had gone too far. Warren Harding was known to indulge himself carnally, and it was not for Burden to betray the secrets of a lodge whose members were known by the women they kept. He changed the subject. “We asked your friends the McLeans—”
“She don’t go out yet. At least not much since Vinson died. They thought the world of that boy. Always had guards with him so he wouldn’t be kidnapped, and then this car runs bang into him. She’s like a madwoman on the subject and of course she knows and I know that it’s those diamonds of hers—that Hope one, in particular—but she won’t part with them and now Vinson’s dead.”
“Tragical,” moaned Jess.
Burden found Emma at the buffet table in the dining room. “Where’s your husband?”
“You know?”
Burden gave her a senatorial kiss on the cheek. “Yes. Congratulations. Why such a hurry?”
“I had to. Marry, that is. We quarrel. Mother and I. We really tore it this time.” Burden looked down into his own blue eyes, as she looked up into her own eyes, without recognition. This was simply her mother’s old friend, not her father, demi-creator.
“These things pass.” He was soothing. “Is he here, your husband?”
“No. He had a meeting. With a committee. Against Bolshevism. So many are in the history departments. One of the reasons. Particularly Henry Adams.”
“Henry Adams?” Burden had not entirely followed her rapid delivery, and put it down to the noise in the room.
“Harvard’s the worst, you see. But Hollywood’s Red, too. Mother’s a dupe, or worse. I hope not. If you draw it now, and you will. We will! Must …”
“Draw what, Emma?” Burden wondered if his own mother’s hereditary deafness had finally claimed him.
“The line! We must draw the line.” As she continued to speak rapidly, eyes narrowed as if observing her own thoughts rush by like the fastest of trains, Burden saw deliverance approaching him.
“The very man you should be talking to …”
But Emma was now out of control. “Laughed after the Winter Palace, 1917. Our opportunity. Kerensky told us. Did we listen? No! China. The final apple to fall from the bough …”
Burden seized the Attorney General by the arm, and drew him close, for protection.
“Emma Sanford … I haven’t yet learned her married name, it’s so new,” Burden said to the Attorney General. “You know her mother, Caroline Sanford …”
“Oh, yes. This is a pleasure.”
“Emma, this is Mr. Palmer. Mr. A. Mitchell Palmer.”
“At last!” Emma was ecstatic. “I’m from Bryn Mawr. A letter. All of us. The June-second bombing. Trotsky—who else? Your anti-radical division. Superb. Wrote Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the right person. In spite of—”
“Yes. It was pretty noisy, I’ll say that. The explosion, I mean.” But A. Mitchell Palmer had no idea what Burden had unleashed upon him. Emma has finally found her tongue, Burden thought, as he mov
ed away, greeting guests; unfortunately, her mind now moved too rapidly for her tongue to express so many urgencies.
Burden completed his tour of the party where he had started, on the porch. A fragment of a waxing moon decorated the black-purple sky and the last of the season’s fireflies glided lazily on the west wind. From the grape arbor, two figures entwined, approached, unaware that he was watching. Tactfully, he stepped behind a column as Cissy Patterson, lipstick smeared, stepped onto the porch, followed now by the slightly dishevelled drunken Nick Longworth. They went inside. Burden was not surprised. Nick was a compulsive womanizer, made uninhibited by the drink, while Cissy was restless, to say the least. Then, as fate, or herself, would have it, Alice Longworth stepped onto the porch from the far door. She could not have avoided the sight of her husband and Cissy together.