by Robert Inman
“But that hasn’t happened to you.”
“Not yet.”
“Do you always agree with him?”
“No. But on the important things, usually. I respect his vision. He saw the war coming a long time ago.”
She marveled at him. He was so clearly at home here. Washington seemed to fit him like a glove. “I’m very proud of you,” she said suddenly.
He looked up from his plate, surprised. “You are?”
“Of course.” She sat back in her chair, folded her napkin and placed it next to her plate. “Now finish your lunch and take me to bed.”
He blushed deeply, and then gave her a rather incredible smile.
He undressed her slowly and lovingly in the dim, high-ceilinged room, worshiping each part of her body with his hands and mouth as he bared it until she shivered with delight. Then they made love through the long, slow afternoon, discovering each other again. She felt like a butterfly loosed from its cocoon—lighter than air, free to go where the breeze and her passions took her, unfettered and unashamed.
He slept in her arms and she lay awake, floating, hearing music again in the deep recesses of her mind for the first time in many months. She drifted back in half-dreams to her childhood, to the smell and feel of tall brown boots rubbed to a deep luster with neat’s-foot oil; to the tinkle of laughter as a mother and daughter played at tea in a sunstruck upstairs bedroom with an array of dolls for company; to the exquisite sight of bodies rising and falling against each other in front of the camp house fireplace, all golden in the flickering light. It was, even after what had happened, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. And now, locked in the long echoing hall of time, the saddest. Fitzhugh stirred against her, nuzzled her breast. This, here and now, was what mattered, and she spoke of it silently to Fitzhugh. I’ve been adrift, shut away. But perhaps I can find my way back. I make no promises, but perhaps I can even come away with you. There will be time enough to speak of it… She looked down at him, flesh against her flesh, eyes closed and face soft, and joined him in sleep.
But time rushed, with the urgency of war. The next day, January 6, Bright sat in the packed House gallery as President Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address and called America to arms. His fine, measured voice stirred them: “The militarists of Berlin and Tokyo started this war. But the massed, angered forces of common humanity will finish it.” He called for a staggering arsenal of destruction—sixty thousand planes a year, seventy-five thousand tanks by 1943. His audience gasped and cheered. Bright could not imagine sixty thousand airplanes, but the force of it struck her—the incredible latent power of the nation, the grim stakes of the conflict. Boys from small towns like hers would fly those airplanes and man those tanks. Many would die in them. She thought of Buster Putnam, a captain now in the Marine Corps. He had enlisted just after high school, when the Depression held the country in its grip and the chances of a young man finding a decent job were slight. He had undoubtedly made a good Marine. They had sent him to Annapolis and so he was a college graduate, an officer, and a gentleman. He was twenty-eight now, two years younger than she. He would lead men into battle. Little Buster Putnam. Imagine that. She realized, sitting here and listening to President Roosevelt, that it would probably be a long war and that even the winners would pay dearly. She thought of the boys who sat at her piano, laboring over Chopin and Schumann. The war wouldn’t have to last very long at all to take the oldest of them. Boys at war. It saddened her.
She and Fitzhugh stood together in the wide hallway outside the chamber after FDR had finished his speech and gone, and Bright met the great and near-great who knew Fitzhugh Birdsong by first name: Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice from Alabama; bespectacled congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee that Fitzhugh sat on; and a short, dapper senator from Missouri with snappy eyes named Truman.
“Take a good look,” Fitzhugh said to her. “You’re seeing the last of an era.”
She studied the crowd. They were mostly older men, Dorsey Bascombe’s generation. They looked, somehow, a bit bewildered tonight. “Dinosaurs?”
“Exactly.” Fitzhugh smiled. “They don’t know what’s hit them. This place”—he indicated the portrait-covered walls with a wave of his hand—“has been a fossilized gentleman’s club. The Depression barely caused a ripple in the way things get done—or mostly not done—around here. But the war …” He shook his head. “It’s turned everything upside down. Congress can’t run the war. We’re too old and fat and slow. We can’t move fast enough, we don’t know enough. We have no choice but to leave that to the president and his generals and admirals. They’ll get exactly what they want, because nobody up here dares do any differently. There’ll be a good bit of grousing around the hallways, but when Roosevelt says sixty thousand planes, we’ll open the treasure chest and say, ‘How much?’ ”
“But the war won’t last forever,” she said.
“Long enough to change everything. The old hands will stick around until it’s over, but then the boys will come home and kick them out. It’ll never be the same, Bright. Nothing will be the same.”
“And what about you?”
He looked away for a moment, his gaze roaming the hallway as the last of the crowd emptied from the chamber, the diplomatic corps in their frocked coats, members of the president’s cabinet. Bright recognized General Marshall, erect and distinguished in his uniform. Fitzhugh turned back to her, chose his words carefully. “I can be a power here, Bright.”
“Is that important to you?”
“Not as an end, no. Power corrupts, but it also gets things done. What the war means, more than anything else, is that America is part of the world. We don’t have any choice but to care about what happens in China or Russia or anywhere else. It’s heady business, but risky, too. It means Congress has to keep a check on what presidents do. We’ll have to make sure they don’t go galloping off getting us up to our eyeballs in trouble.” There was a high boyish color in his cheeks. Standing here, in the midst of power you could feel, the power now of life and death, she understood what brought him to Washington, what enthralled him like a mistress. Could she expect less of him? Could she ask less? Perhaps not. The decision, she understood now, was hers.
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She intended to be as quiet as a mouse at the White House, to be unobtrusive and observant and take away every tiny detail she could store in her heart and mind. One might visit the White House again, if one were the wife of an up-and-coming young congressman. But one would never again be here on such a night when the air fairly crackled.
Fitzhugh had told her that the White House was a comfortable, rumpled place under the Roosevelts, busy with the casual comings and goings of family, friends, political cronies, some of whom stayed for weeks or even months. No one seemed to be entirely certain at any one time just who occupied the place.
But tonight it seemed to be a dazzling palace, even with the grounds dimly lit and blackout curtains on the windows and soldiers with rifles and bayonets in clusters at the entrances and spaced along the fence. There was a small knot of people on the sidewalk out front, as there always seemed to be these days, even on a bitterly cold night like this one. Ordinary people, bundled in overcoats, silent, gazing at the broad sweep of the building as if they might catch a glimpse of their future.
Fitzhugh showed their invitation and his congressional identification card to a Secret Service man at the front gate, and they walked up the curving driveway, Bright clinging to him for warmth. The door opened to a sparkling world with young officers just inside in dress blues and greens to escort them to the state dining room, where a Marine Corps orchestra played a Strauss waltz in one corner and a protocol officer announced them formally to the receiving line. And there they were. What the devil, she thought, not a one of them has a shred more common sense than Hosanna Richardson. She smiled to herself, thinking of Hosanna sitting in on an Allied strategy session, plotting invasions and bombin
g strategies. Hosanna would make quick work of the Axis.
Franklin Roosevelt beamed up from his wheelchair as he took her hand, “Ah, Mrs. Birdsong. Fitzhugh has finally let us see what he’s been so jealously keeping to himself. Fitz, my boy, my estimate of you has increased a thousandfold.”
She felt the warm glow of his famous charm, almost a palpable thing. He was still quite handsome, she thought, despite the weariness around his eyes, the mottled complexion. She could imagine him in the years before polio had crippled him. How the ladies must have cut their eyes at him. “Mr. President,” she said, “it took an invitation from you to bring me to Washington.”
Roosevelt threw back his head. “I love it,” he chortled. “I love it.” He handed her to Winston Churchill, at his right. “Winston, this is Fitz Birdsong’s lady. She’s a Southern belle, so be careful.”
He took her hand and bowed slightly, and she found herself looking at the top of his balding head, marveling at his slight stature, the way he seemed to exude energy. His small eyes danced as he looked up at her. “Bright Birdsong,” she murmured.
“Ah,” he said, the voice rich and lovely, the music of old ale and pheasant, “could a bird song be any other than bright? And what is this about being careful of Southern belles?”
“Well,” she said, “I suppose we Southern belles are the reason Southern warriors fight so fiercely.”
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “Then you are our greatest asset in the fight against Mr. Hitler.”
And then she was past him, taking Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand, looking into gray, clever eyes. If you saw the eyes first, you didn’t notice the plain, almost shy face. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. “I hope we’ll get a chance to chat.”
“Thank you,” Bright said, and then they were being escorted to their table by another young officer.
It was not an especially large crowd, and for the most part decidedly male and military—the brain trusts of the American and British war machines. They had been meeting almost around-the-clock since Churchill had arrived in mid-December. At their own table were an American Army Air Corps general named Arnold, a British field marshal named Dill, and Harry Hopkins. “My goodness, Mr. Hopkins, I would have thought you were ten feet tall, after all I’ve read in the newspapers,” Bright said. That drew a great laugh from the others. She blushed. “I shall try to make that the last silly thing I say tonight.”
“Nonsense,” Hopkins said as he held her chair. “It’s refreshing, Mrs. Birdsong, after all our grim business.”
“Oh,” she said innocently, “what business is that?”
“Why, making war,” he said gravely, taking the chair next to her. He was a tall man with a broad, intense forehead that wrinkled when he spoke. He pointed out some of the notables in the room—Ickes and Hull and Stimson from the cabinet; the American and British military men, among them, Beaverbrook and Marshall and King; Connally and Vandenberg from the Senate. “And your husband,” he said with a smile. “He and the Speaker are the only members of the House who are here.”
She glanced at Fitzhugh, across the table from her, deep in conversation with General Arnold. “And why is that?”
“Because the president thinks a very great deal of him,” Hopkins said simply. “Fitz had the good sense to see all this coming a long time ago. If we hadn’t had not only his vote but his very vocal support on the military draft and lend-lease bills … well, it might have been an entirely different story. He took a great deal of heat over that.”
“Congressman, how was the president’s speech received on the Hill last night?” Field Marshal Dill asked Fitzhugh.
“We’re like lambs,” Fitzhugh said with a smile. “Don’t be surprised if you see Borah and the rest of the isolationist crowd driving rivets on bombers before long.”
That drew a laugh from the rest of the table as the first course was served, and as they began their soup, Bright thought with a rush of pleasure how very much this must mean to Fitzhugh. Politics, her father had told her years before when he had been the mayor, was a matter of rewards. People elect you, you reward them with good faith and good service. And for the politician, there were rewards in return. Like tonight.
They were well into the main course when a young Army officer bent over Bright’s shoulder. “Mrs. Birdsong,” he said quietly, “might Mrs. Roosevelt have a word with you?” Bright looked around at him in astonishment, then at Fitzhugh, then at the empty chair next to the president at the head table. Eleanor Roosevelt had said she wanted to chat, but Bright had assumed it was just a pleasantry. Even if it wasn’t, why now, in the middle of dinner?
“If you’ll just come with me, please, ma’am,” the young officer said.
She gave Fitzhugh a puzzled shrug, then followed the lieutenant down the hall to an anteroom where Mrs. Roosevelt was in deep conversation with another woman, who was saying, “… simply snockered, Mrs. Roosevelt. He threw up on the rug.”
Eleanor Roosevelt gave an exasperated shake of her head, then turned to see Bright in the doorway and flashed a smile. “Ah, Mrs. Birdsong. I’m sorry to take you away from your dinner. Won’t you have a seat?”
They both sat in rather stiff armchairs while the other woman withdrew, and Bright tried to compose herself. Whatever’s going on here, she thought, don’t look and act like a ninny. Remember who you are.
“I have a very great favor to ask of you,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. Her voice trilled like quick fingers on the upper octaves of a piano.
“Me?”
“Yes. You see, we were to be entertained tonight by a concert pianist. You’d recognize his name immediately if I mentioned it, but the poor man has taken ill and we’ve got him upstairs stretched out on a bed. I’m afraid he’s, ah, quite indisposed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Could you?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked.
There was a long silence while Bright’s heart thumped in her ears. “Could I what?”
“Why, play, of course.”
“Play what?”
“The piano.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s laugh tinkled. “Your reputation precedes you, Mrs. Birdsong.”
“My husband…”
“Likes to brag on you. It’s one of his most charming qualities.”
Bright folded her hands in her lap, her mind racing. “All those important people …”
“Just people, that’s all. Some people who’ve been working very hard, trying to do their best in a difficult time, and who need a bit of entertainment tonight. You needn’t play for very long. Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes would be lovely.” Her voice was pleasant but insistent.
“A contribution to the war effort,” Bright said.
“Of course.”
Bright nodded. “Well, why not.”
“Indeed! Do you need music? We have something of a library of it. A leftover from Mrs. Harding, I think. Or was it Mrs. Wilson?”
Bright thought for a moment. “No,” she decided. “What I do best, I know from memory. Do you have any suggestions?”
“Goodness, me?” Mrs. Roosevelt shot her eyes toward the ceiling. “I can barely carry a tune, Mrs. Birdsong. You’re quite the expert here. Just anything you think appropriate.”
The young officer escorted her back to her table, held her chair, disappeared. She could feel their eyes on her, but she sat quietly for a bit, then picked up her fork and resumed her meal. Fitzhugh’s eyebrows were at full mast. She chewed demurely, swallowed, smiled at him.
After dinner, President Roosevelt spoke for a moment from his wheelchair, proposed a toast to Winston Churchill and the British Empire, and then Churchill got to his feet and responded. Bright barely heard what they said. The music in her head took over, calmed her. She heard each piece clearly, her fingers tingling in her lap as she went through them mentally, note by note, stopping only to raise her glass or applaud when those around her did. When Mrs. Roosevelt got up, Bright was ready.
“We have a very special treat tonight,�
�� Mrs. Roosevelt said. Her voice was controlled and measured, and Bright got the impression of a woman who had tried very hard to master public speaking. It was a voice that ran the risk of grating, with little grace notes in it that could get out of control if you let them and run amok among the upper octaves. But Mrs. Roosevelt had turned it into a lovely thing. “Our British guests will appreciate the fact that we Americans honor our Old World heritage in things artistic and cultural, but insist on putting our own stamp upon them. We are, after all, an independent lot.” That drew a laugh from the room. “So we value our artists. And tonight, we have an accomplished artist in our midst who has consented to bring us an entertaining interlude in the grave affairs in which you gentlemen are so engrossed these days. Without further ado, Mrs. Bright Birdsong.”
Bright looked at Fitzhugh and gave him a little wink as his face broke into an astonished smile. She walked to the grand piano next to the head table to polite applause, adjusted the bench and sat. She lifted her hands to play, then thought better of it and turned to the audience. “I want to dedicate my opening number to the people of Poland. It’s a Polish folk dance, a mazurka, by the greatest musician that nation has ever produced, Frederic Chopin.”
She heard a murmur of assent from the room as she launched into the F minor mazurka, the one that had won her admission to the Conservatory thirteen years before. She summoned images of wide, green fields and exuberant youths with their heels flying, the Poland that Chopin had painted so exquisitely. Midway through the piece, it suddenly struck her. I’m playing a concert in the White House! Good grief! Old Oscar Hogarth, dead now, would say that this was what I prepared for. To perform. To summon forth a little truth and beauty. She felt a little catch in her throat, thinking of all she had given up back then, and why. But then she turned away from it and concentrated on her playing. She finished the mazurka with a flourish and received an appreciative burst of applause, then gave the audience a little bow from the waist, glancing as she did at the head table. Roosevelt had his cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, a wreath of smoke drifting up around his head. He applauded, but he seemed pensive. Churchill nodded, gave a little wiggle of the cigar he held in his right hand.