by Gore Vidal
“No,” said Caroline. “They are for an aging grand duchess at the Casino in Monte Carlo, not ‘our Mabel.’ ”
“The next day, little Mary rang me: could we meet? We did. I can’t stand her and she can’t stand me and no one can stand that mother of hers, the Louisiana belle.”
“Why did Mary want to see you?”
Mabel took off the lashes; and turned to face Caroline directly. “She wanted to know if Bill had said anything about her being in the house when he hustled me out the door and walked me to my car and gave me this book by Freud, which he said was better than my usual reading, the Police Gazette. I told Mary, yes. He told me.” The grin was impish. “Of course he hadn’t. But she fell for it. Then she told me what happened. After I drove off, Charlotte came into the house. She’d been hiding outside the bungalow, spying on her little girl. You can imagine how surprised she was to see me on the premises. Then, when I was off the premises, Charlotte went inside the house and shot Bill dead, as she’d been threatening to do if he married her meal ticket, which little Mary had told her he planned to do and which, poor bastard, he had no intention of doing. Anyway, she shot him right in front of her daughter, which makes little Mary—technically—an accomplice.”
“Do the police know this?”
Mabel nodded. “The three blond hairs cinched it for them, which is why with all the stories about all of us, the only real evidence has never been given the press and never will be. Charlotte’s personally paying off the D.A. Mary says Woolwine insists on taking the money in cash.”
“What must it be like to have a mother … a living mother … who is a murderess.” Caroline’s own mother had contrived the death of the first Mrs. Sanford, and Caroline had never been able to rid herself of a sense of inherited sin.
“Well, it gives them a lot to talk about, I suppose.”
There was a knock at the door. “On the set, please, Miss Traxler.” Then the make-up man and wardrobe mistress were in the room, transforming Caroline first into Emma and then into the Grand Duchess Olga in disguise.
“You look really wonderful.” Mabel sounded sincere. “I wish I could dress like that.” Mabel turned off the wash-basin taps.
“I wish I could act like you.” Caroline was absolutely sincere.
“Act? I’ve never acted a day in my life that I know of. Help me, Em.” Mabel threw Caroline a kiss and departed.
Caroline then walked onto the set and received a round of applause, led by Tim. The string orchestra played Offenbach. “Give me any mask,” said the Grand Duchess to her maid. “Tonight I am someone else. I wonder who?”
At six o’clock that evening, Caroline knew exactly who she was—Mrs. Sanford of the Washington Tribune. She rang the paper and got Mr. Trimble, who stayed late, unlike Blaise, who left early.
“Mrs. Sanford—Caroline,” the voice was that of an old man now, “or maybe I should say Emma …”
“Emma Traxler goes into retirement next year and Mrs. Sanford becomes a full-time movie producer …”
“Come back to the paper …”
“This is better than a paper, once I’m out of the papers …”
“We’re playing it down, as much as we can. That place sure sounds like a real mess.”
“Exactly.” Caroline was brisk. “That’s why I want you to write an editorial, one of your fierce Cotton Mather numbers, insisting that Will Hays, for the good of the nation—of the world—become our czar. He’s said no already, but I think he can be convinced if we say that the person who cleans up Hollywood could very well be elected president by a grateful nation. You know the line.”
Mr. Trimble spent some time coughing on the other end. Then he said, “I know Hays pretty well. If he thought we—you and Blaise and the Trib—would support him for president, he’d probably go along …”
“Tell him we will. Tell him Hearst will, too. That I can guarantee him Hearst’s support …”
“Can you?”
“Who knows? But I can get Hearst to write an editorial just like ours asking for Hays to take the job.”
“I guess you know, there’s a lot of trouble brewing here for the Administration, so now’s maybe a good time to get out of the Cabinet. Tell me, what’s this Mary Miles Minter like?”
“She is a dwarf, aged sixty.” For a moment they gossipped.
Then Caroline said, “After the editorial runs, why don’t you go see Mr. Hays, and tell him how much this means to us, and so on.”
Mr. Trimble knew what was expected of him; and they bade each other good-by.
Tim came into the bedroom, already in his dinner clothes. Pickfair was early but formal. “I think we’ll get Mr. Hays,” said Caroline.
“What’s he like?”
“A dwarf, aged sixty. No, sorry. What’s he like? A very ambitious mouse. If we help him politically, he’ll help us … populate our imaginary town. I think he’ll be easy.”
Tim nodded; and smiled. Caroline had come back to life, as Caroline. It was not yet time to stop.
3
Jess slowly, painfully lowered himself into his usual chair in the lobby of the Wardman Park Hotel. The truss that kept the wound in his unhealed belly together was tight, and smelled disagreeably of witch hazel. It took him an hour to dress nowadays. When he had plaintively asked the surgeon if his appendix scar would ever heal, he had been told that for a diabetic the healing process was always a slow one. The only good news in what had been a relentlessly bad year was the appearance of insulin, a new medicine that was saving the lives of diabetics everywhere. For the first time in years Jess could eat and drink normally.
Jess held a copy of the Washington Tribune in one hand. In the unlikely event that he saw someone he didn’t want to talk to, the paper would cover his face, as he carefully studied the stock market. Otherwise, he simply stared at the people coming and going. Members of Congress and high government officials lived in the hotel, and it was possible to transact quite a lot of unexpected business in the shadowy lobby with its thick carpeting and heavy old-fashioned arm chairs, and the spittoons thoughtfully set nearby.
An Ohio congressman stopped by to say hello. “It was a close thing, Jess, boy, a close thing.”
“Sit down.” Jess was eager for news of the recent election, in which the Republican Party had lost eighty-eight seats in the House of Representatives and seven seats in the Senate. The party still controlled both houses of Congress but everyone agreed that the people were in a restive mood and Harding’s re-election in 1924 was by no means a sure thing.
“We lost Frank Mondell, best floor leader the House ever had. And Lodge barely squeaked in.” The congressman shook his head sadly. “It’s the radicals, Jess. And the progressives, the madmen like La Follette and Norris. They’re out there busy inciting the folks to revolution, just like Russia.”
Jess agreed that if the election had demonstrated anything it was that the radical element was on the rise and that the quiet sensible conservatism of Harding was being rejected. But the set-back had had an energizing effect on the White House. W.G. had promptly summoned Congress into a special session two weeks before December 4, when the regular winter session began. W.G. was about to crack the whip at last.
“I just hope he can ride herd on these wild men.” The congressman ran his fingers through an enviably full head of gray hair. “Seen much of Charlie Forbes lately?”
Jess’s heart began to beat a little faster as it always did when the subject was business. “Every now and then. He’s been travelling a lot this year. Charlie Cramer’s been running the bureau for him. Yeah, I see a bit of him. Nice guy. You know?”
The congressman nodded. “They say Charlie—Forbes, that is—is going to take Fall’s place at Interior when Fall steps down.”
“Yes,” said Jess, and nothing more because he knew nothing of the matter and someone in his situation, as the right arm to the President’s right arm, was supposed to know everything.
“So then Forbes goes to Interior?”
“Well,” Jess did his best to look sly, “yes, to Fall’s going home. He’s in bad shape physically and his two sons died, you know?”
“Well, I think Charlie Forbes would be a real live wire in this job. Yes, sir.” Suddenly the congressman chuckled. “Friend of mine sold the Veterans Bureau seventy thousand gallons of this four-cents-a-gallon floor wax which they then bought for close to a dollar a gallon.”
“That’s a lot of floor wax.” Through his vest, Jess tugged at the right end of his truss, which had begun to curl in on itself.
“Enough floor wax for those hospitals for a hundred years.” Jess made amiable sounds; and the congressman went on his way.
Jess had managed to do some business with Forbes, but not much, because Daugherty deeply disliked him. There was always a certain amount of money floating around in an agency like the Veterans Bureau, and Forbes was getting a reputation for carelessness when it came to giving out contracts for new hospitals. Daugherty was positive that Forbes was an out-and-out crook while the President was satisfied that he was, at worst, too much in a hurry to make a name for himself in the bureaucracy so that he could move up the ladder to the Cabinet itself. Jess made it a point never to volunteer information to Daugherty on the subject of business. By and large, the Attorney General was not one to arouse someone else’s sleeping dog. As it was, he had quite enough to worry about. Despite W.G.’s complaints about the presidency, he was eager to be renominated and re-elected, and it was up to Daugherty to make sure that nothing went wrong. Meanwhile, Lucie Daugherty was in Johns Hopkins Hospital and their alcoholic son, Draper, was about to be institutionalized, while Daugherty himself was obliged to fight off fourteen charges of impeachment, the work of a fanatic congressman who found the Attorney General too lax in prosecuting the trusts. Since everyone knew that organized labor was behind the impeachment proceedings, the Congress threw the whole thing out. But Daugherty was physically exhausted, and Jess was not going to add to his burden if he could help it; quite the contrary.
During the next hour, Jess did a fair amount of business of the sort that he filed away in his mind as “guidance”: whom to see about what. Then he pulled himself carefully to his feet in order not to disturb the open scar beneath the truss, which might, even now, with luck, be healing. The Wardman Park doorman helped him into a cab, as if he were made of glass. “The White House,” Jess announced to the driver, a phrase he never tired of using.
The Duchess was in her wheelchair; at her side was tiny Doc Sawyer, in his uniform as surgeon general of the Army. Both looked somewhat forlorn in the large oval sitting room with its bright fire. “Well, Jess, you stay away when a body’s sick.” The high nasal voice was as strong as ever. “Don’t think I don’t know.”
“Now, Duchess, you know I was here every day in August, wasn’t I, Doc?”
“Well, I was in a coma, so that didn’t do me much good, did it? Evalyn’s just been here. She brought me this.” The Duchess held up a lace bed-cap, cut in the shape of a crown. “Doc says I’ll be up for Christmas, but I don’t see how. I’m so weak, I’m like a dish-rag, and I’m getting dropsical, too.” With sombre joy, the Duchess chanted her list of symptoms. But, as Daugherty had said, she’d earned the right to bore everyone with her illnesses because she had nearly died in August when the remaining kidney had become infected. Although Doc Sawyer was only a homeopathic practitioner, he had somehow, yet again, saved her life. Either he was a better doctor than anyone suspected or Florence Kling Harding was an unkillable old bird.
Once illnesses had been exchanged—the Duchess was morbidly interested in Jess’s unhealed scar—she gave him a half-dozen sheets of White House note-paper, covered with her best handwriting. “Christmas presents. You’re the only one who knows how to buy things on the cheap that don’t look cheap. We’ve got to economize, you know. The stock market …” She sighed. Jess knew exactly what W.G. had lost. “We may have to sell the Star.”
“Would he really do that?” Harding without the Marion Star simply wasn’t Harding. But then if he was to be president for another six years he’d be too old to ever run it again.
“We’ve had a good offer. Anyway, see what you can do about those presents.” The President’s valet, Brooks, appeared at the door. “All right. I’m ready. I’m exhausted. Oh, Jess, I had a call from Madame Marcia. Guess what she said?”
Jess shook his head dumbly. “Beats me, Duchess.”
“Well, she knew all about the flu, but she could’ve read that in the papers, couldn’t she? Anyway, what she wanted to see me about was the opposition of the moon to the sun and Saturn, which is very serious. Because it means that Warren can’t depend on his friends. She said he should be suspicious of the ones he should trust and trust those he’s usually suspicious of.”
“That’s a pretty wide field, Duchess.”
“Uh huh,” she said, noncommittally, as Brooks started to push her chair.
“Want me to go with you?” asked Doc.
The Duchess shook her head, as Brooks pushed her wheelchair into the hallway. “I can manage,” she said, putting on her lace crown.
Jess moved to the edge of his chair, preparatory for departure.
Suddenly Doc sat down in the chair opposite him. “I want to talk to you, Jess.” The little man’s voice was cold and his gaze unnerving.
“Sure thing. Whaddaya know?” asked Jess reflexively.
“I know Charlie Forbes is a crook. What do you know?”
Something was going very wrong indeed if twice in the same day two such different people as an Ohio congressman and Doc were on to the Court Jester, as the press called Charlie.
“Well, Doc, I don’t know I know that. There was all that fuss about Perryville, Maryland, last month, but that’s all over. Isn’t it?”
“No.” Doc stared fixedly at Jess. “I’m surgeon general of the Army. I’ve got a job to do for all the Army, including veterans. Charlie’s been selling off everything that isn’t nailed down for pennies to the government and dollars to himself.”
Jess was now feeling distinctly unwell. The wound in his right side was burning: he suddenly visualized a heifer being branded. “I thought the President stopped the sales and then Charlie explained everything and now everything’s all right, and that the only stuff they’ve been selling was old and useless.”
“You do business with Charlie?”
That was the question. Jess’s face became hot; mouth dry. He longed for water, a gallon of cool water. “Doc, you know Daugherty don’t get on with Charlie, and so I don’t either. Oh, he comes to K Street for poker and booze, like you do, but that’s all.”
“I’m there for the poker and the booze. That’s true. But some of the other fellows aren’t, are they?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jess’s fear was turning to anger.
“I suppose not. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to blow the whistle on Charlie Forbes.”
“Go ahead.” Jess knew that Doc would do nothing without the President’s approval.
“I just want to make sure there’s only Forbes involved.” Doc stared again at Jess, who looked away. All he could think of now was water.
“If Charlie’s really up to something, he can’t be doing it all by himself. Can he?”
“Well,” said Doc, “I meant aside from him and his friends, like Charlie Cramer. I just hope nobody else from the K Street house is involved, like Mannington.”
“They’re not.” Jess was fairly certain that what he said was true.
“Good.”
“You know if you’re really going to … blow the whistle like you say, go to the General.”
“Daugherty?”
Jess nodded. “He’ll be happy to put Charlie Forbes in jail. It’s just the President who’ll be upset, particularly now he’s going to run for re-election.”
“He won’t run.” Doc was suddenly bleak.
“He is running.”
“He thinks he is. Bu
t he isn’t going to be here in two years.”
As the truss suddenly doubled in on itself, Jess felt as if a hot knife had stabbed him. “I don’t get it.”
“His heart’s going fast.”
“How do you know? You’re not his doctor.”
“That’s why I can say it. He’s just running down, like an old clock. I see it in his face, his eyes, the way he can’t breathe when he lies down unless Brooks props him up with pillows.”
“Can’t you do anything?”
Doc Sawyer shook his head. “Some things there’s nothing you can do about but just stand by and watch, and wait.”
FOURTEEN
1
James Burden Day put his feet on the brass fender, and stared at the burning coals in the grate. February was a melancholy month at best, made only bearable for a senator by the knowledge that Congress would adjourn in a few weeks, and the round of committee meetings would end, except, of course, when they did not. Currently, those who were not ill with flu were simply sick of winter and politics while the country itself had never before seemed so out-of-focus. For the moment bad economic times were over. But Harding’s normalcy was still a dream. Everywhere, working men were on strike or threatening to strike, and in the Senate cloakroom there were long idle conversations about the advantages and disadvantages of revolution, dictatorship, sheer chaos. Meanwhile, the President was recovering from influenza, and Burden had been sent for.
“What,” asked Cabot Lodge, in the chair beside him, “is the subject of your meeting? If I do not pry, of course.” Lately, the ghostly old man had taken to dropping in on Burden. He was, simply, lonely in the cold windy Senate Office Building. Although Lodge was Senate majority leader he tended now to delegate his powers to others. Between the death of his beloved wife and probably even more beloved poet son, Bay, Lodge had no one left to love; worse for someone of his temperament, he had no one to hate. The President was not only a fellow Republican but absolutely unhateful. For some reason, Lodge had always been well disposed toward Burden, even though Burden was now, in effect if not in title, the Democratic minority leader. Caroline was a link, of course; and there was always the court of Henry Adams, now as dispersed as that of King Arthur.