The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “What is that?”

  “Powerless,” he said.

  EIGHT

  1

  Caroline stepped through the open French window onto the rose brick terrace and into the full heat of the day. Opposite her, Frederika cowered in the shade of a striped umbrella, weakly fanning herself with the society section of the family newspaper. “This is not October weather.” Caroline kissed her sister-in-law’s cheek, redolent of eau de cologne.

  “It is unseasonable,” Frederika whispered as a one-eyed butler placed a tea tray in front of her. “Thank you, Lionel,” she smiled vaguely.

  “It’s George, Mrs. Sanford.”

  “I know, Lionel.”

  Lionel-George withdrew.

  “He lost an eye in North Africa. Before that he worked for Vincent Astor. Between the two, I must say I’d prefer North Africa … with both eyes, of course. Poor Lionel was the last butler on offer at the agency. He couldn’t be nicer except that he lost his depth perception along with the eye. He pours wine straight onto your lap.”

  “We must make some small sacrifice for the war effort.” Caroline mopped her upper lip with a muslin sleeve. “Laura Delano has warned us that the servant class will not survive the war. They will simply wither away.”

  “Too sad.” Frederika seemed unperturbed as she poured them tea. Caroline ate a star-shaped cucumber sandwich, a specialty of Laurel House. “Blaise thinks we should sell the place.”

  “Will anyone want so large a place, with no servants?”

  “Oh, there are always embassies. And schools for disturbed girls. You know, the usual sort of buyers. Of course, we still have the Massachusetts Avenue house, though that’s also far too big. I shouldn’t in the least mind crawling into one of those hideous brick ovens in Georgetown, like Joe Alsop.”

  “I think you’d mind very much. At least here you’re cool indoors. Harry Hopkins says the White House is an inferno now.”

  “I thought all the windows were blacked out after Pearl Harbor. That should cool things.”

  “Just the opposite. And since Franklin won’t permit air-conditioning the house is as musty and depressing as Tutankhamen’s tomb.” What was it she had intended to say? With failing memory, Caroline had taken to making mental lists. Tombs? “Oh, yes! Speaking of tombs, Wendell Willkie died last night. In New York. Heart.”

  “So young! How lucky for Franklin that poor Wendell wasn’t his running mate this year. For the fourth term!” Frederika let the newspaper drop to the terrace. “A fourth term? Who would ever have imagined such a thing?”

  I would, thought Caroline. Between the victories of the Russian army on the ground in Europe and the American victories at sea and in the air against Japan, it had been clear since the Allied invasion of Europe that each half of the global war was drawing to a close. As a result, every Democratic politician, including Burden, had been positioning himself to succeed Roosevelt in the election of 1944. But Caroline had known, instinctively, that FDR meant to reign and to rule for all his life and so he would run for a fourth term and, as a matter of course, win. Although there were many disturbing stories about the President’s health—some no doubt true—she rather doubted that the sixty-one-year-old Roosevelt would forgo so great a triumph as a lifetime presidency during which the United States would, in effect, govern most of Europe and Asia. He must also rule long enough in order to accomplish what his mentor, Woodrow Wilson, had so dramatically failed to do—create a world organization in order to maintain a permanent American peace.

  After a quiet summer, the President was now on the move across the Midwest, addressing huge crowds, while the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, having taken to heart the criticism that his carefully studied statesmanlike campaign of four years earlier had lost him the election, had metamorphosed into a prosecuting attorney, attacking the President with all the fury of a terrier tightly leashed by wartime censorship, not to mention by the aura of a president grown mythical to an electorate hardly able to recall any other sovereign.

  Caroline opened her handbag; withdrew a United Press report. “He should be in Chicago today. He’s going to promise sixty million new jobs after the war. And no depression.”

  “Bad luck to count your eggs before they are even laid.” Frederika clung uneasily to folk wisdom; then she asked the butler for Dubonnet and ice. “Caroline?”

  “Nothing, thank you … George.” George smiled his gratitude at Caroline and went inside. She continued, “You know, I was actually in the Cabinet room when Wendell Willkie came to pay a call on the President. It was the morning that Harry and the President were going over the third inaugural address …”

  “Third! I still can’t get used to any of this. It makes our country seem like … like Santo Domingo, without the loud music.”

  “With no music at all. Anyway, Grace Tully came rushing in to say that Mr. Willkie had arrived to pay his respects to the President, who had forgotten all about him. So Franklin rolled his own chair to the door. When I offered to help him, he said, ‘No, we would both be compromised.’ He was gleeful that day.”

  “Old goat … in his day, anyway.”

  “Young goat, then. Anyway, he’d got as far as the door when he said to Harry, ‘Hand me some papers.’ Well, the Cabinet table was piled high with every sort of paper. ‘Which ones?’ Harry asked, and Franklin said, ‘Just grab anything. I want to spread them all over my desk so that Willkie can see just how busy I am, and what a killing job the presidency is.’ ”

  Frederika took the Dubonnet and soda from the butler. “Thank you, Lionel.”

  “Actually, the two of them were already planning on 1948, Roosevelt and Willkie …”

  “Not a fifth term.” Softly, Frederika moaned.

  “No. No. A first term for Wendell at the head of a new party. With Franklin up at Hyde Park, writing his memoirs and pulling the strings. They were planning to spend the next four years joining the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the liberal wing of the Republican Party.”

  “Nonsense!” Frederika was obscurely firm. Frederika was also not so interested in what might have been as in what was: “Franklin had a heart attack last week. From his angina.”

  At that moment a handsome young woman with a sun-flushed face appeared on the terrace; she was carrying a small girl. Behind them, a nurse in white uniform kept watch over both.

  “Enid.” Frederika motioned for her daughter to join them while her granddaughter climbed onto her lap in order to inspect the sandwiches. “I thought you’d gone back to … uh, back to …”

  “To prison?” Enid’s smile was pretty. “My parole has been extended. Hello, Aunt Caroline …”

  “I never see you,” said Caroline, somewhat inanely since Enid was more often than not in the care of one Dr. Paulus, whose home-away-from-home clinic in the Virginia woods was not only a refuge for those whose nerves had been unduly frayed by life’s exigencies but, if one also followed Dr. Paulus’s special regimen long enough, the need for unnatural stimuli would gradually cease and one would be “made whole again,” as he put it in his gentle evangelical way, so at variance with Enid’s brisk “He means he’ll get you off the sauce and out of the way.”

  On Caroline’s only visit to the sanitarium, she had been inhibited by Blaise’s presence. She had sat in the parlor while father and daughter made stilted conversation. In fact, so much was not said between them that Caroline, in the car on the way back to Laurel House, bluntly asked, “Why on earth is she in that ridiculous place?”

  Blaise put up the window between them and the chauffeur. “She tried to kill herself.”

  “Since you’ve always found her a problem, why didn’t you encourage her?”

  “I am sure that sounds very witty in French …”

  “It doesn’t sound too bad to me in English. What are you up to, Blaise?”

  “She is an alcoholic. She also takes morphine when she can get it.”

  “Who doesn’t? Morphine, that is. I certainl
y did when I was younger, in Hollywood. But never alcohol! Ruins your looks. You wanted her out of the way. Why?”

  Blaise was getting red in the face. “She has a child …”

  “Who has an excellent, dedicated nurse.… No. It’s Clay Overbury, isn’t it? Her man-of-destiny husband. She is an embarrassment, isn’t she?” Caroline had been as impressed as everyone else by Clay’s leonine beauty. For years an invaluable secretary to James Burden Day, he had also been, everyone agreed, a congressman soon-to-be until the war claimed him. Now he was on duty in the Pacific, where his recent exploits during the reconquest of the Philippines had been featured not only in the Tribune but also nationally in Harry Luce’s Life magazine, ever eager for a photogenic conservative hero.

  “Clay could have a great political career …”

  “What is that to you, if I may pry?” Caroline had always thought her brother overly susceptible to his son-in-law’s … what? It couldn’t be simply beauty. “The son you never had? Is that the not so dusty answer?”

  Blaise turned away from her and looked out the window at Virginia’s state capitol, so like the national one in miniature. “Perhaps.”

  “I prefer Peter.”

  “Because he’s like you. He’ll say anything. You know, he’s joined up with Burden’s son-in-law. The communist with the wooden leg. They want to start a magazine and they want me to pay for it. A liberal magazine.”

  “I assume you said no.”

  “Peter’s clever.” Blaise was always oddly grudging about his son. “He’ll do well. Without me. While …”

  “Clay Overbury needs you.” That was the end of their discussion.

  Now on the terrace, Caroline took Enid by the arm. “Let’s take a stroll. I have been neglecting my duties as an aunt, lately.”

  “Lately?”

  “At my age, thirty years is like thirty minutes, and all of it is always lately.”

  Frederika warned: “Stay out of the sun. Both of you. It makes your hair grow.”

  Caroline patted her head. “Good. I am getting dangerously thin on top.”

  “I mean,” said Frederika, feeding a small cake to her granddaughter, “the hairs on your body. Modern girls on the beach look like monkeys, with horrid long hairs on their arms and legs …” She shuddered and pulled a lace shawl close about her.

  Caroline and Enid descended the pink marble steps edged with boxwood. “Mother gets these strange notions.” Enid sounded tranquil. The swimming pool was now in view.

  “Like that sanitarium for alcoholics?”

  “Well, that’s not so strange. I am what’s known as an alcoholic, I think. At least I do get very drunk and sometimes … I paint, you know.”

  “I didn’t. But until you cut off an ear …”

  “Oh, I’m not that good. Not that bad, either.” They stopped at the pool’s edge. A cool breeze suddenly stirred the woods back of the connecting cabins that served as a pool house. Enid pointed to the cabin on the left. “That’s for the boys. The other’s for the girls. It was in the boys’ changing room, one hot summer night, during a storm, while there was a party up at the house, that I was deflowered, on the floor, on a pile of men’s Jantzen bathing suits.”

  “It sounds a bit soggy.”

  “Actually, I thought it was quite romantic. I still get a bit of a shiver when I smell chlorine …”

  “And Clay Overbury’s wet Jantzen?”

  Enid laughed. “Actually, we started out in dinner clothes. It was some sort of celebration for old Burden Day …”

  Caroline winced at the adjective. “Old” Burden. “Old” Caroline. Were they slipping offstage so noticeably? “I must have been in Hollywood then.”

  “It was the year you played Mary Stuart. I liked that picture. Where you had your head chopped off. Just as they are going to chop off mine.” Enid began, noiselessly, to weep. Caroline, who had never before played the scene of kindly old aunt comforting young—mad?—niece, embraced Enid, whose tears, with surprising rapidity, passed. “I’m sorry.” Enid took Caroline’s proffered handkerchief and blew her nose.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “All this nonsense. That peculiar doctor in the woods when you can be … looked after just as well at home. Why have they put you away?”

  “Because my father wants Clay all to himself.”

  Caroline was unsurprised. “That’s obvious.”

  “Oh, it’s not what you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  “You are French.” Enid smiled. “A movie star …”

  “Neither the French nor movie stars take sex as seriously as Americans who live in Washington do. As I see it—or part of it—Blaise wants a son who will have a great political career. He has selected Clay. So if you … make scenes, are difficult, you must be kept out of sight. Simple as that.”

  Enid’s frown made her very much as Caroline imagined her own mother to have looked when bent upon some murderous task. Beautiful, hard, dark. “Nothing that gets in my path can ever be simple. Particularly for me.” This was followed by a radiant smile. “Peter’s my ally, you know.”

  “May I join the … unpopular front?”

  “You can certainly be a fellow traveler.”

  At the terrace, Enid dutifully kissed Frederika and Caroline farewell; and then she led her child into the house, where the nurse was waiting. Presently, doors shut; a car could be heard driving away.

  Frederika looked at Caroline. “What do you think?”

  “She seems no crazier than anyone else in this city.”

  “She terrifies me.” Frederika’s voice quavered. “She is so menacing.”

  Caroline could not believe what she was hearing. “Are you sure that ‘menacing’ is the right word?”

  “When she is drinking or on drugs, she is quite another person.…”

  Caroline was less than impressed. “Surely, that is why she drinks. That’s why we all do—or did, in my case, long, long ago—to be a different person. For a time. Why not?”

  “She is … violent.”

  “I suspect she will only turn it upon herself. The real question is, what have you and Blaise and Clay done to get her to this state?”

  “Lionel!” The butler arrived with another Dubonnet. “Thank you, George. Caroline?”

  Caroline ordered a Tom Collins. “To ward off the heat.” Except that she was actually somewhat chilly.

  “I can never forget that book of yours about your grandfather, and about how Blaise’s mother killed your mother. These things so often run in families, you know.”

  For the hundredth time, Caroline explained that it was her mother’s neglect that had led to the death of Blaise’s mother. “If there is a killer trait, I—not Blaise—inherited it, which means that my daughter, Emma, not your Enid, is the one to avoid in the dark.”

  Frederika changed the subject. “How is Emma?”

  “She is still with Timothy Farrell …”

  “That name sounds familiar. Wasn’t he …?”

  “Yes, Frederika, he was.” A bit of Frederika went an astonishingly long way—a way along which Caroline was suddenly too weary to travel further. She rose to go. “You must let Enid come home to her own house and to the child.”

  “Of course.” Frederika’s gracious hostess voice meant that she had stopped listening. “I’ll see you to your car. We must all write that nice Mrs. Willkie. She was so good about Wendell’s mistress.”

  “A model Republican wife.”

  “You are cynical, dear.” As they passed the library, Caroline inhaled the nostalgic smell of old wood smoke and summer’s last roses. “Does one write the mistress too?”

  “Of course,” said Caroline, enjoying the consternation such a letter would cause Mrs. Willkie, particularly from a stranger. Happily, Frederika would forget all about it. At the door, Frederika said, “When does Franklin think the war will end?”

  “He says not until 1947.”

  “Oh, n
o! I don’t think I can take three more years of this.” She frowned. “How does he know it won’t be until 1947?”

  “Because that’s what a highly respected astrologist has predicted. He was much impressed.”

  “Really?” Frederika was somewhat awed. “I hadn’t thought Franklin was so … so very sensitive. I mean, reading nothing but detective stories and the Gallup Poll, the way he does, I wouldn’t have thought … Even so, three more years …”

  2

  Peter had very early found a place for himself in Army Air Corps Intelligence, known as A-2 at the Pentagon. Although officially classified as a lowly “clerk nontypist,” Peter found that his connection with the Tribune was of considerable use to the Air Corps publicity machine while his connection with A-2 was equally useful to the Tribune. As a wise assistant secretary of war—an old acquaintance of Blaise’s—had explained to him, the principal task of Air Corps Intelligence was to glorify the American air force in the world press.

  Peter’s section was a most unmilitary collection of former newspapermen, professional writers, and schoolteachers. Despite their uniforms, they performed few military duties; instead they transmitted, or even invented if necessary, astonishing victories in the air over Europe and Asia. Happily, as of the first Tuesday in November of 1944, their creative talents were no longer so urgently needed. The Philippines had been reconquered. In a firestorm of publicity, General MacArthur had waded ashore, corncob pipe clenched between his teeth; all cameras were upon him as he declared, “I have returned.” Meanwhile, the Germans were preparing a counteroffensive on their western front. At this point, Peter thought that honest reporting might be enough but for some—aesthetic?—reason, it seldom was; his section chief, Warrant Officer Aeneas Duncan, thought that this was due to the lead set them by such privileged journalists as Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. Peter knew (and Aeneas did not) of Ernest Cuneo’s highly privileged sources, duly vetted by the White House.