The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  Inside the capitol rotunda it was still cold but they were, blessedly, out of the monotonous continental north wind. At the center, directly beneath the gray fluted dome, the closed coffin was set on a catafalque. Kitty stood beside it. She wore full mourning, complete with black veil.

  Diana gave her a quick professional look. “She’s had her hair done,” she said to Peter, with relief. Next to Kitty was the Governor’s wife; at the opposite end of the catafalque was a small platform covered with red-white-and-blue bunting.

  The inevitable television lights were also in place. Peter noted that in addition to local television both NBC and CBS were on hand. Since the assassination attempt, security was intense, and state troopers guarded the entrance to the rotunda. Mourners were obliged to present tickets.

  “I flew,” said Kitty. “I’ve always hated that train ride from Washington. Now I won’t ever have to make it again.” Diana embraced her mother as did Peter, whose eyes were inexplicably full of tears while Kitty, inexplicably, was cheerful. “We have a lovely lot,” she said, “at the cemetery. Quite near my father’s. We’ve also got a monument that Burden commissioned years ago. He was always prepared. Except for that bastard Clay.” The ladies nearby stirred, not quite sure just what the word was that Kitty had used. Kitty continued, “We’ve also got plenty of room for both of you but you’d better let them know now. It seems everyone’s dying at once these days, so reserve your space.”

  Diana changed the subject. “How are the gray squirrels?”

  “Mange!” Kitty’s voice echoed in the rotunda, which was now almost full. “Of all things! The doctor insisted on giving them penicillin, of all things. They do look so forlorn with their moth-eaten fur.”

  The Governor had climbed onto the platform. State troopers stood at attention behind him. Beside the platform stood the Episcopal bishop of American City, ready to perform those sacred rites that spring the locks to paradise.

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” The Governor’s voice was a mellow baritone. “Pray welcome with me the President of the United States of America, the Honorable Harry S Truman.” A sudden burst of television light at the entrance to the rotunda illuminated the President. Truman wore a dark blue suit and a solemn expression. Back of him was General Vaughan and a quartet of Secret Service men, eyes anxiously looking this way and that for enraged Puerto Ricans; but there appeared to be none that day in American City. The crowd in the rotunda started to applaud the President until it was recalled that this was, after all, a funeral and a shushing sound stilled the applause. Truman smiled briefly in acknowledgment. A red carpet had been laid from entrance to platform, and he walked down its center, precise as always, even a bit mechanical, as if he were still the Army captain of Battery D in France.

  At the platform, he stopped. The Governor said a few words of introduction. During breakfast on the train, Harry Vaughan had told Peter how these things could become a nightmare if you let the locals talk first: “Every candidate for sheriff is going to talk for hours, knowing the President is sitting there and no one’s gonna leave till he gets up. So we said we wanted only a few words from their Republican governor. Then we say a few words and we go.”

  During the Governor’s remarks, the TV camera panned about the coffin, stopping, finally, at Kitty, flanked by Peter and Diana. At this most solemn moment, from behind her black veil, Kitty said, in a normal voice that sounded like the voice of doom in the echoing rotunda, “In my day mange was cured with a dose of sulfur and maybe lye. The vets nowadays are simply killers!” Even Diana was shaking, trying not to laugh, as Peter realized that the television audience would think that Burden had died at the hands of a rogue veterinarian.

  Now Harry Truman was on the platform. He had a written text in front of him. He had a tremor of the hands—nerves? hereditary pre-disposition? or, as the talkative General Vaughan had confided at breakfast, “The Chief starts the day with a swig of bourbon. Gives him energy. Then he walks a mile and goes to work.” To Peter’s surprise, Harry Vaughan, the crony of cronies in the White House, was a nondrinker. “That’s how I’m able to look after the Chief.”

  The Chief was a bit rapid in his delivery. But he drew a convincing picture of the opening up of the West. The settlers coming into what had once been Indian land that had now, somewhat mysteriously, become federal property due to a series of broken treaties, acts of Congress, and the interventions of suspect courts. Needless to say, Truman did not dwell upon the dispossession of the previous inhabitants; rather, he spoke warmly of the courage and energy of those who had slept outside on the ground of cities which were then no more than lines drawn in the dust until the morning when they could start to build their houses on lots created by government surveyors.

  “James Burden Day was there. In the Senate, he was always there for your new state. Now he is still here, for you. Home for good.”

  Kitty sighed. Diana wept. Peter cleared his throat, recalling that Burden had had a job of some kind at the Treasury in Washington when the state was invented, largely by Kitty’s father. But Burden had been, for so many decades, the most visible living founder that few recalled who had actually done what.

  The Governor then led the President to the entrance, where they shook hands. As the President marched from the capitol, the crowd cheered him while national television abandoned them to follow him back to the Ferdinand Magellan.

  Kitty, Diana, and Peter were driven in the Governor’s car to the cemetery. En route, on Day Avenue, they passed the Sunflower Hotel, a twelve-story mustard-colored brick building which, at election time, had always become the Burden Day “home” so that he could vote for himself. Clay also claimed the Sunflower for his official residence. The folks didn’t much mind that their representatives lived not among them but a thousand miles away at the capital. Kitty, however, had caused a bit of a scandal when, at a ladies’ tea during Burden’s last campaign, she was asked how long they expected to be in town this time and she had airily replied, from who knew what eccentric recess of her brain, “Oh, we just drove over from New York for the day.” Even Kitty had astonished herself. “Since I don’t suppose I’ve been three times to that city.”

  Even in November, the cemetery was more green than dun-colored. Burden’s white marble monument dominated a small hill. The grave was open; coffin beside it; flowers banked everywhere. Several hundred people, more curious than mournful, stood about the tomb. Now the bishop took charge. Peter was somewhat surprised that Burden was not a Baptist or Methodist. He always sounded as if he were an evangelical Protestant on the rare occasions that he could be got to perjure himself and publicly abjure his lifelong atheism, thus endangering his mortal self.

  A large blond woman moved in beside Diana. “I’m Emma,” she said. “Your half sister.” Fortunately, Kitty was singing along with whatever hymn the bishop had called forth and did not hear this exchange. Diana stepped away from her mother, drawing Emma with her.

  “This is very … filial,” said Peter.

  “I know.” Emma was benign, as always, in her self-righteousness. “I thought I owed it to my mother.”

  “Caroline?” Peter was surprised. “I hadn’t suspected that there was debt of any kind on either side.”

  “Oh yes. The gift of life is the gift of God.” Emma crossed herself dramatically, causing several nearby Baptists to turn their backs upon a representative of the scarlet strumpet of Rome.

  “You did that very well,” said Diana. “You must have been practicing.”

  “I’ve been a Catholic for years. Even before I married Tim.” Another hymn had begun.

  “Is Tim here?” Peter had seen neither of them since the night at the Blue Angel.

  “Oh, no. He’s in New York. Directing plays for television. I’m in Washington with Fortress America. We’ve been working closely with Senator McCarthy, much good that it can do now. I’m afraid our homegrown communists have really done us in this time.”

  Happily the hymn was louder than Emma’s voic
e.

  “Done who in?” Peter kept his voice low, hoping to encourage her to do the same.

  “The Chinese have crossed the Yalu River. Hundreds of thousands of them. Our army’s retreating. Korea’s lost. It’s a total defeat for us. Our first ever. Truman and Acheson sold us out to Stalin. It was all I could do not to boo that dreadful little man in the capitol.”

  “Why,” whispered Diana, “must you keep talking? After all, it is your father’s funeral and respect must be shown him, even by you.”

  The bishop’s voice vibrated in the air as the remains of James Burden Day were lowered into the grave. “For I am the way and the light. He that believeth in me …” Where, wondered Peter, in a kind of panic, was God or anyone in the great nothing of eternity?

  SIXTEEN

  It was John Latouche who reconciled Aeneas and Peter. Although Aeneas’s book, signed with Clay Overbury’s name, had helped elect the betrayer of Diana’s father, Aeneas was still a valuable contributor to American Idea. All was never forgiven between Aeneas and Diana, but two years after the rise of Senator Overbury, Aeneas met Peter and Diana in the lobby of the Phoenix Theatre, recently renovated as an alternative to Broadway not only in its geography, far below Forty-second Street, but in the sort of works that it wanted to mount. After three or four years of relentless auditioning for money, John Latouche and the composer Jerome Moross had finally managed to assemble a production of their musical comedy, The Golden Apple.

  Over the years, Peter had heard Latouche, at home and at parties, play and sing various songs and numbers always identified as being from the difficult second of two acts. Latouche’s clear somewhat toneless voice could handle the wit of his own lyrics though not the emotion of the ballads of his composer, Jerry Moross, who always listened with a sad smile to what his collaborator was doing to his music. Now, after much struggle, and many false starts, the opening night had come and all of New York that mattered, to the theater world at least, was on hand.

  Peter and Diana were dazzled by the colorful figures in the brightly lit lobby. Somehow, these impersonators or inventors of fictional characters seemed more real and positively essential than the actual, and equally theatrical, rulers at Washington.

  “Touche made me stay away from rehearsals.” Aeneas was as excited as if this had been his own opening night. But then Aeneas had already delivered up his hostage to critical fortune when he had written, in 1950, that the musical comedy would prove to be the American century’s greatest achievement. As intended, he had opened up a controversy that still smoldered not only in American Idea but, from time to time, in most serious American journals. Although hardly anyone championed the postwar novelists, poetry still had many fierce supporters, though poetry readers seemed to have died out as opposed to the audience for poets who gave readings, preferably while drunk. This recent development was largely due to the performances of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, dead the previous year in New York, of drink and overexposure.

  The graphic arts still had their hard-eyed money lobby in Fifty-seventh Street as well as their own highly rigged stock exchange, dominated, suitably, by a Rockefeller who had invented something called the Museum of Modern Art or, as Wallace Stevens liked to intone in his most poetic voice, “a mus-ee-um of mod-ern …? art …?” —the words “modern” and “art” each ending with a bewildered sigh. But the museum, like most Rockefeller institutions, had a vital financial function: to publicize and endorse those artists that its patron collected and so drive up their prices. It was all, Peter had once written, like the Defense Department’s symbiotic support of the numerous weapons industries that supported, in turn, the Pentagon and their cheery go-between, the Congress.

  As they took their seats, Peter asked Aeneas the usual Broadway question. “So what do you hear?”

  “Everyone connected with the show’s ecstatic, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Peter must have sounded mocking, because Aeneas’s response was sharp. “Everyone’s working for a hundred dollars a week or less.”

  “Well, it is a …” Peter could not find the word.

  “Showcase,” supplied Diana, cheeks pink from excitement. “What’s it about?”

  “The Trojan War,” both Peter and Aeneas answered her. Peter laughed. “Aeneas has heard Touche play most of the numbers. So have I. Once, with a bailiff at the door, come to collect the furniture. I think Touche talked him into investing.”

  Aeneas was scribbling in his notebook. “It’s about the Trojan War and the Judgment of Paris. Set in the town of Mount Olympus, Washington State. Time of the Spanish–American War. Ulysses is a local boy who goes off to fight. The story starts when he comes home to his wife, Penelope …”

  “No Odyssey?” Diana sat between them.

  “That’s after the war. When Paris …” Aeneas was now studying his playbill. There was loud chatter in the aisles as the people who wanted to be seen took their time getting seated. In the pit, the orchestra was warming up.

  Aeneas continued. “Paris is a traveling salesman who arrives by balloon. He awards the golden apple to a local Venus married to a military man, of course, and so Paris upsets the local Juno and Minerva. Then Paris flies off with the prettiest girl in town, Helen. So Ulysses and a half-dozen ex-soldiers go after Paris, to bring Helen home.”

  “Isn’t all this a bit pretentious?” Peter wanted Touche to have a success, but to use a classical story, like the Odyssey, seemed like asking for it from an American audience proudly cut free from the classics.

  “It’s basic mythical stuff. So why not? Cole Porter did pretty well by Shakespeare. Kiss Me, Kate’s going to be around forever.”

  “Forever,” said Peter, “is a long time. In ten years it’ll be forgotten.”

  “Madame Butterfly’s still around.”

  “But that’s Puccini …”

  “Oh, do shut up, Peter.” Diana was brisk. “Don’t be such a snob.” Then house lights dimmed; overture began. Moross’s music tended towards the melodic ballad, alternating with turn-of-the-century blues, ragtime, waltzes. Peter was charmed despite his vow to himself not to be overwhelmed by Aeneas’s enthusiasm for what, Peter was certain, had to be the most intrinsically banal of collaborative efforts, the musical comedy, which, at its best, was neither music nor much in the way of comedy.

  The curtain rose. Loud applause for the set. Since the audience was mostly made up of theater people, they cheered their own. But even Peter was struck by the brightness of the stage and the sense that it really was 1900 and that a new century was beginning. Wars are all ended. Boys are all coming home. Girls are all waiting. Mother Hare, a local witch, is distressed that no one is dead.

  Then, suddenly, up flared Touche’s wit, which had got him entirely banned from working in films or television; fortunately, the national censors had no power as yet over Broadway.

  Ulysses and his fellow “Boys in Blue” reminisce about the late war with Spain. Ulysses began:

  “It was a glad adventure

  The Philippine scenes were so sweet

  Them wee Igoroots

  In their birthday suits

  Made life just a Sunday school treat.

  “Wherever we went they loved us

  So dazzled were they with our charms

  The folks in them lands

  Ate right out of our hands

  But why did they chew off the arms?”

  THE BOYS IN BLUE (chorus)

  “Oh, why did they chew off the arms?”

  ULYSSES

  “The same held true in Cuba

  Where gaily we bombshelled a port

  Though harsh blows were dealt

  By Ted Roo–se–velt

  They knew it was only in sport.

  “Wherever we went they loved us

  They tucked us in rose-petal beds

  They welcomed our troops

  With their dances and whoops

  But why did they shrink our heads?”

  THE BOYS
IN BLUE (chorus)

  “But why did they shrink our heads?”

  ULYSSES

  “Wherever we went they loved us

  They cheered when they saw us arrive

  They loved us so much

  Their affection was such

  We’re lucky to get home alive!”

  THE BOYS IN BLUE (chorus)

  “Oh, we’re lucky to get home alive!”

  A great wave of applause swept from the back of the theater across the orchestra pit and onto the stage, where the hitherto edgy actors began, suddenly, easily, even joyously, to play. That’s why, thought Peter, astonished by his own revelation, they call it play—a Play. He turned to pass this wisdom on to Aeneas, who was too busy writing, small flashlight illuminating small notebook.

  Peter wondered how different this New York audience of known theatricals would be from the rest of the country. Certainly different from the audience at Washington’s National Theatre, where the lyrics for Ulysses and the Boys in Blue would be considered treasonable by the Red-bashers who were now in full command of Congress and press. The defeat of the United States in Korea had given ammunition to those who saw Stalin’s hand everywhere. McCarthy was still formidable, his enemies mostly chastened; then after the election of 1952, Truman had gone home to Independence, his place taken by the famously bad-tempered General Eisenhower, who had concluded, as euphemistically as he could, a surrender to the North Koreans, back of whom were China’s Red demons backed, in turn, by the Satanic puppet-master in the Kremlin.

  Thirty thousand ill-trained American troops had died. Meanwhile, the American Communist Party leaders had all been locked up even though their party was a legal one. But then most laws of the land had been set aside during this terrible emergency in which the United States, with no military nor economic rival in the world, was, somehow, in terrible danger from an atomic Pearl Harbor for which schoolchildren were being prepared by government-sponsored drills so that when the mushroom clouds sprouted across the land they would know enough to duck under their desks and so survive to fight the Asiatic hordes with rulers, chalk erasers, baseball bats.