by Gore Vidal
Lamont gave Tim his card. “Let’s meet in New York.” The others rose respectfully.
“What … uh, do you do, sir?” Tim saw that the card merely read “Thomas W. Lamont” with a Manhattan home address.
“I’m just another Wall Street banker.” He bade them all good night; was gone.
Tim asked Willkie what primaries he planned to enter.
Willkie laughed. “None. Isn’t that right, boys?”
Davenport managed his first smile of the evening. “That’s right. But that’s only because we have President Hoover working for us.”
Plainly, this was a joke, whose point Tim was not supposed to get until Davenport explained. “Hoover’s encouraging every state to nominate a favorite son who after a ballot or two will shift, he thinks, over to him.”
“Only they will be coming to me now.” Willkie shut his eyes; smiled pleasantly. “Did you hear the applause I got when I said …”
An actor, Tim decided, an actor already rather too much at home in his part. “But what about Dewey? He’s beaten Vandenberg in Wisconsin and Nebraska.”
Mike Cowles answered. “Those delegations don’t really have to stick if they don’t want to. Taft isn’t going into the primaries either. He deals with the power brokers in the states, the cities.” Mike gazed thoughtfully at Willkie, who appeared to be asleep, still smiling. “That’s what we’ll do after our man has had a chance to see the country and the country’s had a chance to see him.”
“So why not just vote for Roosevelt?” Tim asked the question that the more they talked seemed the only essential one.
Willkie’s eyes opened. The mind was sharply focused. “I was a Democrat in 1932. Voted for FDR. But the New Deal wasn’t on any ballot that I ever marked. Well, Mr. Farrell, I’m a businessman. Proud of it. But the New Deal has no reference or relationship to democracy. I want to drive a stake through its heart. But I will tell you one thing, I tremble for the safety of this country if Dewey or Taft or Vandenberg is nominated and elected. I’d go and vote for FDR first. I don’t want a Nazi Europe. I don’t want us attacked when Hitler’s good and ready. The only thing he respects is strength. Well, I want us strong. Militarily. That’s where a businessman is a lot more use than a Harvard man who grows Christmas trees on his Hudson River estate. I’m going to bed.” He stood up; gave Tim a bone-crushing handshake, then, shedding his clothes, he moved into the bedroom and shut the door.
“Can he be nominated?” Tim asked the three advisers.
“Yes,” said Davenport. “We’re playing the Taft game. We’re acquiring the power brokers. We’ve been at it since January.”
Mike Cowles was on his feet. “He’s got most of the press by now. He’s got Harry Luce, who is shameless, if you’ll forgive me, Russell, when it comes to biased reporting in favor of—or against—politicians.”
“I guess your Look magazine must have learned all that from us.” Davenport already looked like a somewhat sleepy secretary of state.
The four men parted in the lobby, now forlorn and empty.
Tim turned to Mike Cowles. “Who is this guy Lamont? He says he’s a banker. What bank?”
The three men laughed. Davenport said, “Well, he told you the absolute truth. He is a banker. In fact, he is the banker.”
“Which bank?” asked Tim.
Mike Cowles answered for his co-conspirators: “He’s the head of the House of Morgan.”
So, Tim duly noted to himself, it was going to be that kind of election.
THREE
1
“This was a mistake,” said Harry Hopkins as Caroline and the chauffeur helped him out of her hired car.
“Your proposal of marriage to me? Or my acceptance?”
“Neither. Our coming here to Cissy Patterson’s. She’s a madwoman.”
“But she’s the only pro-Roosevelt publisher in Washington except for me, and I’m only a half, no, not even a quarter, publisher.”
More or less seriously, Hopkins had proposed marriage in the car and, not seriously at all, she had promptly accepted him. “We have known each other so long,” she had said, patting his hand. “At least a month.”
“I think my lack of a stomach is putting you off.”
They stood before Cissy’s Italianate marble Stanford White palace dominating its curve of Dupont Circle. Then two footmen in livery flung open the doors and Caroline, with the fragile Harry clinging to her arm, made an entrance duly noted by those in the marble hall with its elaborate plasterwork and shining dark mahogany doors whose knobs were made of semiprecious stones. Cissy had inherited all this grandeur from her mother, whose taste she affected to deplore; yet there was no doubt that she very much enjoyed what was, after all, a proper setting for Washington’s Sun Queen.
Cissy herself was still a handsome woman with hair that could well have been red in daylight but now, in the refracted crystallized light from chandeliers, seemed to be so many subtly shaded pelts of mouse intricately arranged around a dead-white face.
“Caroline!” She embraced the “pioneer” woman publisher, as the Times-Herald always referred to Caroline Sanford Sanford, delicately emphasizing that their own non-pioneer woman publisher was a slip of a thing by comparison.
But all eyes, including Cissy’s, were on Harry Hopkins, man of mystery, the President’s alter ego, seldom seen at Washington parties as opposed to those of Astors on the Hudson, Whitneys on Long Island.
“Harry! Why do you avoid me?” Cissy kissed his cheek.
“My illnesses always come first. Then you.”
“Isn’t he a bastard?” Cissy, well pleased with her trophies, led them into the main drawing room, where she abandoned Caroline to show off Harry, who wearily smiled at friends, acknowledged acquaintances, his sharp glittering eyes half shut as if to disguise how much he was actually taking in. Caroline had never met anyone quite so … sharp. Yes, “sharp” was the word. He was hardly brilliant but he was preternaturally attentive, as he watched faces, listened to the inflection of voices, arranged and rearranged data in his mind with astonishing speed as well as, according to the President in a rare non-self-referential mood, acuity—like the perfect barometer on a sunny day at sea which surprises you with the news that there’s a storm up ahead.
Since the evening that Churchill had become prime minister, Hopkins had been living at the White House in Abraham Lincoln’s office–Cabinet room, now a bedroom which Eleanor, with characteristic goodwill, had made not only depressing but uncomfortable. “Really just like home,” she would say contentedly, looking at the heavy dark furniture and dull wallpaper.
Cissy’s onetime son-in-law, Drew Pearson, a tall humorless Quaker, reminded Caroline that they had met before. “Years ago I tried to get a job on your brother’s paper.” Caroline still disliked hearing the Tribune, her invention, referred to as Blaise’s creation. As always, when annoyed, she gave a radiant smile whose effect she could no longer gauge without, at the very least, a looking glass that magnified. “I am sure he regrets not taking you on.”
“Are you going to marry Hopkins?” He asked the intimate question as if he were inquiring about the length of her stay in what local radio had recently taken to calling “the Nation’s Capital.”
“No. I’m much too old for marriage. Why did you and Felicia break up?”
It was his turn to be taken aback. Like all prying journalists, he treasured his privacy. He stammered something incoherent.
“Now, now,” said Caroline. “Here is why.” She had recognized Luvie Pearson, the second wife, who smiled and took Caroline’s hand. With blond hair and equine features, Luvie was elegant in a non-Washington way. “Your husband was explaining to me how he left Felicia for you and I said that now I can see why.”
Pearson’s response was sharp: “I said no such thing!”
Caroline realized, happily, that she had made an enemy of a Quaker who wrote a daily column in which he mixed personal vendettas with, occasionally, actual news.
“C
issy is at it again.” Mrs. Pearson addressed both husband and Caroline.
“At what?” Pearson gazed about the room, in search of ever more interesting quarry.
Luvie turned to Caroline. “Occasionally, she exercises droit de seigneur—or is it madame?”
“Tell me what it is and I’ll try to translate.”
“She picks someone—usually from the paper—someone she wants to go to bed with. Then she asks him to the party with the understanding that he’s to sleep over.”
Drew Pearson had moved on. Luvie pointed to a rugged young man in evening clothes; surly face flushed with drink. “Droit de madame, I’d say. But I’m afraid he won’t be able to fulfill her rights if he drinks much more.”
“She’s already told him to go up to bed. That was after he pulled up his trouser leg to show us that he’s wearing silk pajamas and Cissy said, ‘Oh, God, my crepe-de-chine sheets are ripe peach and your pajamas are burgundy red.”
“Will he be spared if the colors clash?”
“No. Look, he’s heading for the stairs.”
“I never knew Cissy had this Catherine the Great side to her.” Caroline was more admiring than not.
“She’s very regal. And Drew’s very rude to her. They only see each other because of the child by Felicia.”
“But he works for her.”
Luvie shook her handsome head like a thoroughbred horse at a race’s start. “He doesn’t work for anyone.”
“There are other papers …”
“Many other papers.”
“There are also contracts.” Caroline knew that Cissy would not let the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column go without a fight.
They were joined by a large-boned pink-and-white woman in her late thirties, who said, “Mrs. Sanford?”
“Yes.” Caroline was gracious. But then so few people any longer recognized her in what had once been very much her city.
“You look so well. Remember me?” A bright smile. “I’m Emma. Your daughter.”
“Well!” Luvie Pearson was the one who gasped.
“So you are. So you are.” For this quiet reading of lines, Caroline awarded herself an Academy Award, if only for lifetime achievement. The two women embraced formally.
“I had heard you were in town,” said Emma.
“And I had heard from your Uncle Blaise that you were out of town. That you live in New York now.”
Luvie excused herself, to go spread the news.
“I heard that you were staying in the White House.”
“I was there for a few days. I’m at the Wardman Park now. You must come see me.” There was, Caroline realized, no proper etiquette for dealing with a daughter that one hardly knew, and if she was at all the same sort of woman that she had been when they last met, nearly twenty years earlier, a renewed acquaintanceship was bound to be unpleasant.
“I should like that.” Emma seemed quite sane. But one never knew; one moment she could charm even her mother; then, the next, she would begin a tirade worthy of Bernhardt in Racine, usually on politics, where she had passionate views about the need for total order in the lives of the common people. Caroline wondered, somewhat nervously, if Emma might have found her hero in Hitler, who seemed to sum up all the virtues that she had most extolled in the past when she was married to a conservative academic. “You know, I’m divorced,” Emma contributed to Caroline’s reverie.
“Oh, yes. I think you wrote me. In France. Yes. Am I to have another son-in-law soon?” Caroline hated her own kittenish tone. But then she had never played the part of a mother with a daughter; on screen she had comforted only sons, usually as they lay dying in the trenches of the First War.
“Oh, I think not. Hope not. Too busy. You have a grandson at Princeton. Aaron Burr Decker. Very brilliant. Giles—my ex-husband, remember?—got friendly custody. I’ll tell A.B. to call on you. That’s his nickname. Keep the name alive. You know, I’m president of Fortress America. We have ten thousand members. Growing every day. We’re doing our best to keep us out of this war, which you probably want us in.”
“Who do you mean by us?” Caroline began to focus on the face of her daughter, who had improved, in appearance at least, with age. Caroline could not recall if she had ever told Emma who her real father was. Pregnant by a married politician, Caroline had been obliged to marry John Sanford, a complaisant cousin, who had provided the child with a suitable name and place in the Sanford clan of New York. Upon arrival in Washington, Caroline had intended to tell her daughter—if she saw her—who the father was, but now she decided to withhold so fair a gift from one who would, no doubt, denounce her for this ancient adultery.
“Us! America?” Fortunately, Emma kept her voice down. “That’s why it’s so important that we keep your friend FDR from running again. He’ll get us in, but Jim Farley won’t. We’re all for Farley. Byrnes will do, of course, and even Senator Day …”
Caroline kept a straight face as her daughter, unwittingly, named her father. As Caroline suspected, she had neglected to tell Emma that James Burden Day had been her first lover when he was a young ambitious congressman, much too happily married to the daughter of the boss of his state’s Democratic Party to marry Caroline. She had only seen him once since her return. He was now like the amiable whole brother she’d never had. He was also certain that if Roosevelt did not run again, he himself could be nominated and elected. After all, he was as against the war as the rather shadowy American people, who were, with each new poll, giving even more Delphic responses to interested pollsters who asked their questions in ever more complex ways, responding to the urgencies of British agents, operating out of Rockefeller Center in New York.
“We also work with Martin Dies. I don’t know where we’d be without that Un-American Activities Committee of his. You know, he single-handedly got Warner Brothers to drop that March of Time film about life inside Germany. We’ve also learned that Mr. Farrell is making a propaganda film, too.”
She had always called Tim “Mr. Farrell,” thus expressing her displeasure at her mother, who had lived for so long a time in sin.
“He is doing some sort of documentary.” Caroline was deliberately vague. “About the election, I think.”
“What are you doing?” Emma’s gaze was direct, as befitted an informer.
“I’ve come home to talk to Mr. Macrae at E. P. Dutton in New York. About the publication of my grandfather Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler’s reflections on the election of 1876 …”
“Didn’t his daughter …”
“Yes, my mother seems to have murdered the first Mrs. Sanford. Too sad!” Caroline could not resist this tinkling drawing-room note to offset the general darkness of the first Emma now reincarnated, rather dully if what she saw was truly representative, in her own daughter. “Is your Uncle Blaise here tonight?”
“No. He’s feuding with Cissy this season. She tried to steal his Sunday comic strips. How did my grandfather …”
“How like her!” Caroline cut her daughter off. In the middle distance Harry Hopkins’ sharp predator bird’s eyes were fixed, somewhat desperately, on Caroline. “You must pay me a call, Emma. I’m off.” With a little wave, Caroline started across the room to be met beneath the main chandelier by a tall young man who identified himself as her nephew, Peter Sanford.
“It is,” said Caroline, after he had introduced himself, “literally old home week. I was just chatting with a charming, if somewhat mature, woman who claims to be my daughter.”
“So I saw. I didn’t dare interrupt. Even if I could.”
Caroline laughed, for the first time spontaneously. “A nephew after my own heart. Yes, Emma is a deeply serious and committed woman, with much of a disturbing nature to tell the world.”
“But then these are deeply serious and committed times.” Peter had charm, she decided. But then so had Blaise, in youth. But Blaise’s charm had always been without ease, unlike his son’s. The eyes, she noted, were blue, like his mother’s. “I see you brought M
r. Hopkins.”
“Have you read Saint-Simon?”
“Only about him.”
“He writes in his diaries about Louis XIV and Versailles and the court, about his grievances as a beleaguered peer of France—a sort of civilized Drew Pearson—anyway, something rather similar is happening in this once small sultry African city with its dowdy court …”
“We grow more like Paris then?”
“We are growing more like an empire. It is exciting. I’ve decided Franklin is Augustus. You live here. Keep a diary.”
“He’ll need a war first.”
“That comes.” Caroline thought of France with pain. “Sad to say. You’re still in school?”
“University of Virginia. But I expect to be in the Army next year. I want an early seat at the show. Have the Germans taken your house?”
“I think so. I hear nothing, of course. Ambassador Bullitt was useless before he fled, if he’s fled. I do hope the Germans catch him.” She changed the subject abruptly. “So what will you do with your life?”
“I must wait and see if I’m going to have one.” He was serene.
“It is like that, is it?”
Peter nodded. “Just like that. When you don’t know how long you’ve got.”
“I see.” Caroline stopped play-acting. Shut her eyes. Saw refracted light as so many glowworms back of the lids. “Perhaps the isolationists have a point after all.” She opened dazzled eyes.
“Of course they have a point. After all, the last war …”
“I know all the arguments. But this time …” Happily, she lacked the courage to lecture someone who, any day, would be called to service in a drama where she herself was, at best, an idly redundant spectator.
“I have to go, Aunt Caroline.” Then he stopped. “Father says you have some Aaron Burr papers.”
She nodded. “I’ve also got my grandfather’s journal for 1876. I’ve been putting the various pieces together. That’s the main reason I’ve come back, Hitler to one side. I want to publish.”
“I have a good many papers, too. Like Burr’s attempt at a memoir, and so on. I’ve always thought I’d like to publish one day, but if you …”