by Gore Vidal
When Caroline had reciprocated, Héloise serving a candle-lit dinner with all the joy of Saint Teresa bathing a leper colony, the evening had ended, again, in backgammon. Caroline had come to hate Mary Miles Minter, who had not yet, in the actuarial sense, grown up.
“That’s the whole problem, really.” Taylor mixed Caroline a martini. Caroline drank deep. If she was to be frustrated, she might as well be numbed. “She gets these wild crushes on people …”
“On you?”
“Among others. Then she writes incriminating letters and poor Charlie Eyton has to buy them up, to keep them from blackmailers and worse.”
“Charlotte?”
Taylor nodded. “The last batch of letters were to a director, the father of her child …”
“But Charlotte knew all about that at the time.” By now, Caroline felt that she knew the passionate Charlotte intimately. Taylor had confessed to a flirtation with mother as well as daughter. So when it had become clear that Taylor was to be the second director—and great love—in Minter’s life, Charlotte had behaved like a bayou Medea. On several occasions, Minter would be locked in her room; then Charlotte’s mother would help Minter to escape and she would show up at 404 Alvarado and Taylor would then … what? Caroline wondered. He had denied having an affair with the child. But then he had also denied his long affair with Mabel Normand. To hear him tell it, he was a sort of healer—like Rasputin, Caroline had sweetly remarked. But so much healing of others had given him an ulcer.
“I can’t wait to go to Europe. Anything to get out of here,” he said, looking about the very pleasant living room. Knoblock was out to dinner, and they would dine alone and, of course, early. Fortunately, Eddie was a good cook, which made up for very little.
“Perhaps I’ll open up Saint-Cloud, or do you hate France?”
“No. No.” He smiled at her through a haze of aromatic smoke from a gold-tipped cigarette. “I’d love that, and if you were there.…”
Caroline waited, eagerly, for the declaration.
But Taylor only sighed. “The problem is, with both of them, their careers are over, and they don’t know it.”
“Poor things.” Caroline hated “both of them” with a purity that she had not suspected herself capable of. One was a world star at nineteen and a failure; the other a world star of twenty-six, and a dope-addicted crone.
“Of course, Mary doesn’t know or care. She hates the movies, hates her life …”
“Hates her mother?”
Taylor shrugged. “She says she does. But if she really did, she could always move out.”
“A child? A minor—a Mary Miles Minter Minor?” Caroline thought what a pleasure it would be to pull out, one by one, those carefully arranged golden ringlets, grown especially to replace on screen Mary Pickford’s, which, when finally cut off, brought an entire nation to despair.
“She has her grandmother.” Taylor was thoughtful. “But there’s still that contract she signed, giving Charlotte thirty percent …”
“Since,” said Caroline, bored beyond the call of any duty heretofore known to her, “tiny Minor Mary was a mere gosling at the time of the contract, it is not valid under the laws of this state. Tell her to go to court.”
“She’s still under-age. You know, she tried to kill herself, with her mother’s gun.”
Caroline’s attention if not sympathy was at last engaged. “Why—a gun?”
“Because Mary thought she was in love with someone that Charlotte wouldn’t let her see.”
“I divined that. Why,” asked Caroline, “does Charlotte have a gun?”
“Southern ladies are used to protecting themselves and their honor, from violation.” Taylor was light.
Caroline was even lighter. “In the case of Charlotte Shelby, I suggest a softly murmured ‘no’ would do the trick. Or, perhaps,” she elaborated happily, “an enthusiastic ‘yes’ might cause even the most devoted rapist to flee.”
“We must find you a comedy,” said Taylor.
“I have found it,” said Caroline. This was later proved after dinner. Taylor put one hand on her shoulder, as if he knew exactly how ready, indeed eager, she was. “Yes, William,” she whispered. “Yes?”
The fingers burned through the silk of her blouse. “A penny a point,” he whispered and led her to the backgammon table.
ELEVEN
1
My God, how the money rolls in!” sang Jess, tonelessly. Try as he might he could never learn the rest of the song or, indeed, anything other than the one line of chorus that perfectly summed up his situation. In the small parlor of 1509 H Street, Ned McLean was sound asleep on the sofa. Long before midnight when the poker game had broken up, Ned had passed out; and Daugherty had telephoned Evalyn to say that Ned was being well looked after. Now Daugherty was asleep upstairs while a colored cleaning woman removed bottles and overflowing ashtrays from the stale-smelling parlor.
Jess sat at a rolltop desk, doing sums. He was, he knew, handsomely turned out in a chocolate-brown suit with a lavender vest. Had it not been for a nagging ache in the lower right quadrant of his paunch, he was in the pink of condition, both chronic diabetes and asthma at bay. Then he made the first of several telephone calls to his—their—broker Samuel Ungerleider, formerly of Columbus, Ohio. “Whaddaya know?” Jess announced. But Ungerleider knew no more than the previous day’s stock market figures. Sam handled investment accounts for the Hardings, Daugherty, Jess and a number of other Ohioans. As Jess was involved in a complex series of speculations, he was always in need of quick cash to cover his margin calls with Sam, who was as honest as Jess was punctilious about coming up with the cash on time. “You’ll need eleven, twelve thousand by noon,” said Sam.
“You’ve got it. How’s Mr. Daugherty doing?”
“Fine. He don’t play dice like you do, Jess.”
“And the President?”
“A regular old widow woman …”
“That’s the Duchess. She won’t let him gamble on nothing.”
“Lot of money to be made …”
“You’re telling me. Let’s keep it rolling in.”
The first caller of the day arrived at seven-thirty. “Whaddaya know?” Jess sprayed the air between them but the man, a lugubrious Virginia bootlegger, seemed not to notice.
“Very kind of you I’m sure, Mr. Smith, to see me so early.”
“Any friend of … of what’s-his-name’s a friend of mine.” Jess opened and reached into one of the desk’s pigeon-holes. From a drawer to which he alone had the key, he withdrew a Treasury Department form. “Now then, I am making you the Virginia–District of Columbia agent for the General Drug Company, with headquarters in Chicago, and in that capacity you would like to withdraw from the Federal custody, for medicinal purposes—how much?”
“One thousand cases of Scotch whisky. Five hundred of the best gin. Seven—”
“Whoa! Whoa! Hold your horses. I can only write so fast.”
“Please to forgive me, Mr. Smith. But the thought of having the best to sell to my customers means a whole lot to me …”
“Them, too,” said Jess. “It’s a wonder half the state of Virginia isn’t dead from all that illegal hooch they been drinking. There ought to be a law …”
The Virginian said, sadly, “Oh, there’s a law all right, but no one cares about law these days.”
Jess whistled a line or two of “April Showers” as he forged the name of an imaginary Treasury official to the form. “All right, sir, there you go. Present this at any one of the government’s bonded warehouses, and they’ll hand over the merchandise upon receipt of this bona fide Treasury Department order.”
“I’m real grateful, Mr. Smith.”
“Alexandria’s the easiest warehouse. If there’s any trouble, you call me at my office in the Justice Department. That’ll be two thousand five hundred dollars, please. In cash like always.”
The Virginian counted out the money; and was on his way. The next two callers were in need o
f inside guidance to political office or preferment. Each paid two thousand dollars for interim instructions. Then as the Attorney General of the United States came down the stairs, the last caller was shown the door. Jess never told Daugherty about any of his private business, and Daugherty never asked.
Daugherty gazed upon Ned McLean and shook his head sadly. “That boy had better get a good hold of himself or they’re going to put him away. We should’ve sent him home last night.”
“Well, this is his house, too, isn’t it?” Jess was most protective of his friend Ned, who moaned in his sleep. “You want breakfast?”
“No. I’ll get something at the Department.”
“This a poker night?”
Daugherty grunted. “Ask the Duchess when you see her. I got me a busy day.” Daugherty opened the front door. Outside in the street, the Attorney General’s car was waiting. The chauffeur saluted Daugherty, and called him “General,” the usual title for the nation’s chief enforcer of the law. Daugherty quite liked the title; job, too. He got into the car and was driven off to the nearby Department of Justice.
The previous day, Jess had received a message from the White House that the First Lady of the Land wanted him to help her select materials; and so, having given instructions to the grim-faced colored woman on what to do when the owner of the house awakened, Jess stepped out into the bright spring morning and gazed near-sightedly upon the dogwood abloom in the front yard opposite and then, in a mood close to perfect contentment, he walked the short distance to the White House.
The contrast between the mansion now and as it was during the Wilsons’ last days was vivid. A few weeks ago, the main gates were padlocked, the public kept away, and only the west wing transacted any business. Now the gates were open; and tourists filed in and out of the state apartments. (“It’s their White House,” the Duchess had proclaimed, as she took over.) The guards at the north gate waved Jess through even though he had his Federal Bureau of Investigation badge in hand, a gift from the obsequious assistant director, J. Edgar Hoover, a young man fearful of replacement by one of Daugherty’s creatures. But Daugherty had gone by the book; obeyed all laws and most customs.
In many ways, the Harding Administration was the most capable and distinguished of the century, at least according to those editorial writers who did not care for Harding himself. True, one of the country’s richest men, Andrew Mellon, was secretary of the Treasury, but his very wealth made it a certainty that he would not have to sell off contraband whisky to cover his broker’s margin calls. Also, everyone knew that Mellon would create an atmosphere in which the country’s best elements could do well. Although Harding had wanted to raise the income tax on the rich, Mellon had gently dissuaded him, and Wall Street and its newspapers had cheered Mr. Mellon. Also admired was the secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, who had run against Wilson in 1916. Equally reassuring was the presence at the Commerce Department of the country’s most popular public figure, Herbert Hoover, famed for his competence and honesty while Will Hays, as postmaster general, pursued his high destiny. The secretary of the interior, Senator Fall, had been unanimously hailed by the Senate. Only Daugherty had inspired the cry of cronyism; but then every president was allowed to have at least one political manager on the payroll.
Jess entered the main door. An usher greeted him with the message that Mrs. Harding was in the upstairs family parlor. As Jess crossed to the elevator he was aware that the long line of tourists moving from Red to Blue to Green to East Rooms were staring at him, and wondering who this powerful man was, wearing a new Chesterfield coat and thick-rimmed owl-like—for wisdom—glasses. There was a sigh of ecstasy when the private elevator arrived and he stepped in.
In the oval parlor the Duchess had draped materials over every piece of furniture. In attendance was a frightened clerk from Woodward and Lothrop’s Department Store.
“Jess Smith, you come in here and get to work. Is this real velvet or is it velveteen?” The clerk dared not speak. Jess fingered the material. There was very little that he did not know about fabrics. “It’s velvet, all right.”
“Just wanted to make sure. I’m sure Donald Woodward would never try to cheat us but sometimes mistakes,” she glared at the clerk, “get made.”
Jess helped her pick out several bolts of material that he was certain would look good on her. Now that Florence Kling Harding was First Lady of the Land, she intended to dress up to her new role. The result was not entirely pleasing in Jess’s eyes. For one thing, she had taken to wearing clown spots of rouge on her gray cheeks while her hair was, regularly, mercilessly, marcelled. As diplomatically as Jess could, he steered her away from gold and silver threads for daytime wear and pale pastel chiffons for evening wear. “More suitable, maybe, for the boudoir,” said Jess, assuming, unconsciously, his Smith’s Emporium wheedling voice. Then, orders given, the clerk departed.
“Sit down, Jess. Warren wants to play poker tonight at H Street. So tell the usuals. I’m not going. That means you make sure he’s home before twelve.”
Jess said that he would do his best, as always.
“Also, don’t let him chew. It’s bad for him. Cigars are all right if there’s no camera around but keep an eagle-eye on him if he chews.”
“How do I stop him?”
“You tell him you’ll tell me and Doc Sawyer. That should do it.”
“I’ll try, Duchess.” But Jess expected that this mission would fail. So addicted was Harding to chewing tobacco that Jess had seen him, on several occasions, unravel a cigarette and put the tobacco in his mouth. “How’s the household going?”
The thin mouth opened like a letter-box. “I’ve got the kitchen under control at last. I tell you, the Wilsons just let everything fall apart. So when Mrs. Wilson said to me—first thing—how good the housekeeper was, and after I saw the house, the first thing I wanted to do was get rid of her. But she’s turning out all right. The villain was Mrs. Wilson. She just didn’t care about anything except that sick husband of hers. They were extremely selfish people.”
The Duchess was now at the birdcage which contained the much-loved, by the Duchess only, canary. “Pete, sing for Mummy. Pete!” the Duchess commanded; then she, not the sullen Pete, trilled. “I declare that bird gets more temperamental every day. Sulk. Sulk. Sulk. Why didn’t you take that job Warren offered you?”
“Oh, you know I like being out on the floor with the customers, like we say in dry goods.”
“You’re just about the only person from Ohio I can think of who said no to a job.” Jess tried to look modest and above the battle. “Of course you’re pretty rich,” she added. “Pete sings just like a nightingale when he isn’t in one of his moods.”
Actually, Jess had been delighted when he had been offered the post of commissioner of Indian affairs; and he had been distressed when the western senators had informally told the President that he wouldn’t do. W.G. had then asked him if he’d like to be treasurer of the United States, a ceremonial job which involved little more than allowing his signature to be printed on every dollar bill. But as Jess had other plans for dollar bills, he had thanked the President warmly and said he preferred to be of use to the Administration in less formal ways.
Laddie Boy, the President’s collie, stormed into the room; leapt upon Jess and barked at the Duchess, who said, “Shut up. Warren’s on his way. Here he is.”
But it was not the President but Charlie Forbes. “Hiya, Duchess! Hiya, Jess!” Forbes was the President’s jester, a round-faced man with owl-like glasses and, despite red hair, a passing resemblance to Jess. “I’m here for lunch. The President’s promised wienerwurstels and sauerkraut, so I left my veterans to their affairs and hurried over.”
“Charlie.” The Duchess disliked any and all sexual allusions. But Charlie was now playing with Laddie Boy, and Jess envied him his easy charm. Where Jess was only called upon to run errands, Charlie Forbes was asked over to cheer everyone up. A builder from Spokane, Washington, Colonel Forbes
was a genuine war hero, who had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Everyone had agreed he was a natural to be director of the Veterans Bureau. A Wilson Democrat, Charlie had been so charmed by Senator and Mrs. Harding, and they by him, in the course of a senatorial junket to the Northwest that he had shifted parties and organized the region for Harding. Finally, Charlie was the only one of W.G.’s playmates that the Duchess doted on. “I just hope Warren gets the lunch he ordered. The cook makes such a fuss every time he asks for sauerkraut. And toothpicks. Lord, the problems I’m having with Warren. He tells the butler he wants toothpicks on the table, which has never happened before in the White House …”
“First president to have his own teeth,” said Charlie. “They ought to be proud.”
“Then the butler comes to me and I say no, and then Warren goes to the housekeeper and raises his voice …”
Laddie Boy bounded out of the room.
“That means Warren’s shaking hands in the East Room. Half an hour every morning, no matter what. He likes it. Imagine!” The Duchess sighed.
Charlie sighed, “I’ve got a buyer for Wyoming Avenue.”
“You know the price?”
“He’ll meet it. Don’t worry. He’s my legal adviser at the Bureau. Charles Cramer. First-rate. From California. Big law firm.”
“I’ll hate giving up that house …”
“Busy days.” Charlie was so full of energy that he made Jess tired just watching him dance about a room. “We’re building, building, building. Hospitals everywhere.… Oh, Duchess! We’re taking Carolyn on, in Personnel.”
“Does Warren know?” The Duchess frowned. “She’s his sister, after all.”
“He’s happy we could fit her in.”
The President and Laddie Boy entered the room together. “Good morning, gentlemen. Duchess. Pete.”
“He won’t sing,” observed the Duchess.