by Gore Vidal
“Did he?”
Peter chuckled at the memory. “Not before he’d finished a half bottle of brandy. Anyway, Father had his row with Henry Luce and so Time magazine bought the Evening Star instead of the Tribune. But it would have made no difference. In four years, Luce lost eighty-five million on the Star and shut it down, by which time Father was dead and the Washington Post had the town to itself.”
“But you had American Idea.”
“Which still flourishes, if that’s the verb for what it is we do. You know, it was Aunt Caroline who created the Tribune. Then, just like Hearst, she found movies more interesting and left publishing to Father. She was like no one else.”
Sturtevant agreed. “It’s curious how little sense of history Washington—of all places—has. Even people who should know better think Kay Graham, at the Post, was the first woman publisher, but long before her there was Cissy Patterson and before her Caroline Sanford.”
Peter nodded, recalling a conversation with Mrs. Graham. She, too, was surprised at the shortness of Washington’s memory. Then, unexpectedly, she gave the crown not to Cissy or to Caroline or to herself but to Cissy’s relative Alicia Patterson, who had successfully founded a new newspaper on Long Island. “She started with nothing!” To which Peter, for the sake of accuracy, added, “Except a fortune.”
Peter’s own fortune came not from his father, who had left everything to the Overburys, but from Caroline, who had made it possible for Peter to finance not only American Idea but almost anything else that engaged his sympathy; she had also saddled him with, after Versailles, the greatest white mammoth in all France, Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. The will stipulated that he was not allowed to sell it or give it away. He was bound to it not only by his gratitude to Caroline but by deeply caring lawyers, schooled in all the arts of entailment. Fortunately, a grandchild now preferred a French life to an American one and so Caroline’s great-niece had taken her aunt’s place, for which the will had thoughtfully allowed. On Peter’s rare visits to Europe, he knew that he had the wing of a museum to himself where he could read and write far less comfortably than at home in Georgetown. But, then, with each passing year, he did less and less of either. For one thing, he knew fewer and fewer people as opposed to those unknown to him who put themselves in his way with projects and schemes all based on hopes which he was too often obliged to confess he could not share, unlike his fears, which he could but did not share since they were so often remote from others’.
The new people took for granted a world that had grown ever tighter and more controlled, not to mention crowded. Currently, he was reading about the ancient Mayan cities, whose temples, altars, pyramids were once thought to be ceremonial centers set apart for the religious life of a sparse population scattered about in leafy jungle lean-tos. But, lately, generations of received opinion had been overthrown by new evidence. Apparently, the surviving monuments had been central to huge cities where millions of people were jammed into vertical compounds, victims of a Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation in a land of limited resources. Since dogs and deer provided too little protein, human flesh was crucial to their survival and never-ending war became a dietetic necessity. Finally, too many died off, leaving the too-few to lead brutish lives in ruins that still reverberated with old stories of what the world had been like at the start of their civilization’s millennium, to be neatly completed on the eve of December 31, 1999, according to a made-up Christian calendar not applicable to most of mankind, much less present-day Mayans no longer able to interpret those intricate ancestral calendars that had once rung time’s changes for a slow-mutating race nourished, at the end, by its own warm blood.
“Now, Mr. Sanford, I’ve never brought up the subject before …” Nervously, Sturtevant stirred champagne with his forefinger.
Peter knew what the subject was. “Yes, Dr. Sturtevant?” There was, he hoped, a bit of the judgment of God in his voice.
“And, of course, there have been so many theories over the years …”
“About what?” Let him dangle.
“About the plane that crashed in late October of 1958.”
“November first,” Peter murmured but Sturtevant did not hear him. Clay had been running for what looked to be an easy reelection to the Senate to be followed by preparations for the presidential race two years later. But one bright morning, as a chartered campaign plane came in for a landing at American City airport, an engine caught fire. The plane crashed into a motel just short of the runway. Clay and a dozen members of his staff were killed on what proved to be, for once entirely by chance, prime-time television. He who had lived his life in bold exciting images had ended his in spectacular flames, not unlike those on Luzon from which he had pretended to emerge a hero in order that he might, in triumph, walk up and down the earth until, in real flames, he crashed and departed.
“Of course, the plane was entirely destroyed. But there was sufficient … uh, forensic evidence that one of the engines had been tampered with. Who do you think …?”
Forty-two years had passed since the so-called accident at American City. Suddenly, Peter was more intent upon time’s brutal passage than on the old murder, if such it was, of Clay Overbury. But Peter was willing to indulge Sturtevant, up to a point. “First, who benefits? Naturally the Kennedys would be our first suspects. Particularly now we know their record in the political assassination line. In 1958, Clay looked unbeatable for 1960. It is quite possible that Bobby might have engaged someone to remove Clay from the vale of tears as he would, later on, with the dedicated help of our many secret services, do the same or try to do the same to Castro and Lumumba and the Diems and other demons. But I seriously doubt that at this point in their adventures they would have dared do anything so excitingly creative.”
Sturtevant was doing his best to disguise his shock. “It’s also perfectly unthinkable, isn’t it? I mean, after all, they were serious political figures …”
“Surely, Dr. Sturtevant, there is nothing,” said Peter, enjoying himself too much, “more serious than political murder?”
“Yes. In Chile. But one doesn’t associate our people with that sort of thing.”
Peter affected surprise. “Surely political murder is the only thing one ever associates with the Kennedys. Poor bastards,” he added more for himself than for the record. “Jack and Bobby were both murdered along with Martin Luther King, and no matter what suspicions many of us have had we will never know for sure who was behind any of the three killings, which may be just as well.”
“We can rule out the Kennedys …”
“Rule out no one.” Peter felt suddenly cheery. “It is New Year’s Eve …”
“Who else would, as you put it—cui bono? Benefit?”
Peter decided to go all the way if only to test Sturtevant’s nerves and intelligence. “Who else was on the flight with Clay?”
“Just aides. People working on the campaign. And …” He frowned.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Go on.”
“Well, it was tragic, certainly. Aeneas’s wife Rosamund …”
“Rosalind. Yes, she was aboard. She traveled everywhere that season with Clay. They had been lovers for several years.”
Sturtevant spilled his glass on the hearth rug. Tried to mop it up with a handkerchief. “Don’t bother,” said Peter. “That rug’s day is done.”
“I thought Overbury was very promiscuous—like they claim Jack Kennedy was.”
“The promiscuous have love affairs, too. She was no beauty but she was very intelligent. She was also a child psychologist, much the best kind for a man who lusts for the presidency …”
“Did Aeneas know?”
“I’d rather hoped you’d be able to tell me something I didn’t know. Yes, he knew, and, unlike the Kennedy cuckolds, he was not proud of the horns Clay had set upon his brow. Aeneas had, as they say, motive, but I shouldn’t think he had the resources—or the skills—to eliminate both wife and lover. So that leaves only one suspect.” Peter rose
. “I’m going to take a nap before the celebration. Then, tomorrow, if you like, you can join me at our New Year’s Day party. Come to the offices at noon.” Peter started slowly toward the door.
Sturtevant hurried after him. “That leaves only who, Mr. Sanford?”
“Who?” Peter gave him a calculated blank stare. “Oh, the most intriguing suspect. That leaves only me. That we know of, anyway. Clay was responsible for Enid’s death. Could I let him be president?”
“You’re joking?”
“Of course I am,” said Peter. “I’ll see you later. When that crystal ball drops into Times Square or wherever it’s supposed to, and we undergo metamorphosis, to hear the journalists run on about this night.”
At noon, January 1, 2000, Peter made his by now traditional New Year’s appearance at the offices of American Idea on Capitol Hill in what had once been a prosperous middle-class black enclave but now resembled some bombed-out European city in the throes of a corrupt restoration. At least, the offices had survived the civil war of the 1960s when the heart of the “capital of the free world,” as the presidents liked to call the peculiar white official city set in the middle of a black one, had been well and truly broken. Currently, there was an irritable truce between the races as those blacks who had not yet moved to the suburbs viewed with benign neglect the overwhelming presence of their white masters, well defended by a black police force rooted in a black national army.
As Peter was driven past the Supreme Court, he wondered, for the thousandth time, who benefited by an American race war. What joy was derived by the combatants on either side? In half a century, American Idea had published hundreds of symposia on the subject not to mention learned as well as defiantly unlearned essays on the subject. Lately, academic zealots were once again peddling the crude racist line that the Dark Other was, somehow or other, genetically inferior to its pale cousinage and no matter how much money it was given or even earned for singing and dancing prettily, its children’s academic scores would always be lower than those of whites, while overconcerned zealots, eager not to be thought racists, pretended to abase themselves before the hordes of clever Asians who were currently getting the highest marks of all in the sciences.
Peter’s idling mood was suddenly concentrated by the sight of old Vernon; he was seated on his usual brick stoop; and he waved at Peter, who waved back. Vernon was at least a hundred years old and had claimed to have been born a slave until Peter persuaded him that the dates didn’t work out. “Well, I reckon I was the next best thing,” he had said, “you could find in Fairfax County.”
For a good portion of the century, Peter had watched Vernon push his cart around the neighborhood, sharpening knives and scissors on a round sandstone wheel. He also soldered broken metal over a blue flame. Upon appearing in a street, he would announce his presence with a high-pitched cry followed by a song whose words were meaningless but whose overall meaning was clear to the homeowners who hurried to him with all sorts of wounded metal objects to be made whole. But now, time-crippled, he could only watch the street where once he had reigned.
“Happy New Year!” Vernon shouted; and Peter shouted back.
Two connected brick buildings housed American Idea, while in their joint backyard a modern wing had been built to give shelter to several small publishing houses, each capable of creating more disturbance than its modest size might suggest.
The driver helped Peter out of the car. Today’s arthritic pains were as exquisitely varied as the next day’s weather promised to be. If nothing else, arthritis ensured that he would always be given dramatic notice of any meaningful rise or fall of the barometer. Numerous medical specialists, to a man and one woman, assured him that as he aged everything would get worse. What to do? The obvious thing was not to overdo aging; a process that was, in any case, predicated upon an abrupt stop of its own feckless choosing. Meanwhile, at home and at his office, he had wheelchairs reserved for rainy days.
Education. SAT: that was the acronym for the tests that were now given every schoolchild in the country. To measure intelligence. To determine further “education,” if any. Peter was still looking to publish the ultimate analysis of a test that he was convinced had been devised by the mediocre to advance the mediocre through a common educational system designed to maintain in passive ignorance the general sub-population for which there was nothing much of interest to do and nothing at all of interest to think about once they had learned what little they were expected to know to get through dull repetitive days; to float through like … From childhood, he recalled one of the aquarium tanks in the basement of the Commerce Building. Large flat brown fish floating in cloudy water. Electric eels slumbering on pebbles. He used to wait hours for them to light up but they never did. Fish in tanks. Mayans crowded together …
“Who was Time magazine’s man of the year for 1999? Or was it the century?” he asked the new editor, Doris Oenslager, a onetime history professor at the same university in Oregon where her mentor, and Peter’s late unique contributor, the historian William Appleman Williams, had taught. The current fashion to hire women for all highly visible jobs had been a lucky one for Peter. He was more at ease with them than he had ever been with Billy Thorne or Aeneas Duncan. The fact that President Clinton had made so many terrible rainbow-hued melting-pot appointments did not undermine the principle, at century’s end, not so much of “equality,” an impossible notion at best, but of interchangeability, modern society’s one valuable discovery. It was not that a member of a minority could now be proudly hailed as every bit as good as a member of the old white male ruling class; rather, one could say proudly, that the current woman secretary of state had achieved gender parity by proving to be every bit as bad as her male predecessors. Once the idea of excellence had been abandoned and competence was judged by SAT scores or IQ tests, the mediocre could then move freely from foreign affairs to hospital administration to brain surgery … perhaps not brain surgery just yet. But most of the showy occupations were as easily filled with interchangeable citizens as the less showy jobs had always been, while the huddled masses … How did the Mayans maintain order in their crowded tenements?
Apparently, Time‘s man of the year had “invented” the retailing of consumer goods on the Internet, selling things from farthest space over telephone lines and off satellites. Well, that must be changing the way people lived; certainly, the way they bought and sold things. From out of a mostly lost past he heard the voice of Herbert Hoover at Laurel House on a summer’s day, prescribing an antidote to depression as well as to civil and world wars. “What America most needs now is a great poem,” he had said. Peter had been too astonished to ask, A poem like what? The Man with the Hoe, of an earlier America? The Waste Land of the time before theirs? No. Not Eliot. Frost? Folksy, yes, but perhaps too dark for a would-be age of gold. He must ask Jimmy Merrill, the best of the midcentury poets. Then he recalled that after communing for years with the dead, in verse, by Ouija board, Jimmy was dead, too.
“Doris, we need a great poem. And we need it now.”
Doris was making tea in her office. In the conference room next door, editors and contributors were gathered for eggnog made from an eighteenth-century recipe, inherited from Frederika.
“So hard to come by,” said Doris vaguely. “Assuming one knows what is great when one sees it. I’ll ask Helen Vendler. She’s bound to know if someone has written one, or could write one.”
“On commission?” Peter sat at the partners’ desk that had been in the editors’ office since the beginning. “But then I suppose Pindar also worked on commission.”
“He just did athletes, didn’t he?” Doris poured them tea; laughter from the conference room. “Winners of the Olympic Games. That sort of thing.”
Grimly, Peter pressed the various go-buttons of a mind that had once, so swiftly, summoned words onto … There was a slight hitch as the weary custodian within sought the latest word as it rattled about, probably unfiled. Kaleidoscope? Word-pictures as pr
ojected on the … what? Inner—screen? No. Computer screen. Bull’s-eye: A late arrival in his consciousness, unlike Pindar, who was an old secure memory. No problem there. He recalled a discussion with … The custodian was put to work. On the screen loomed a round bald freckled man. In bathing suit. Body covered with apish orange hairs. Maurice Bowra. Classics don. Translated Pindar. Sardinian beach. Wind. Cloud of flies. Bowra’s beautiful unstoppable voice. Great gossip. Great Britain. Greats …
The custodian is now showing off. Produces ravishing if pointless picture of an all-black sea with whitecaps, wind- rather than tide-driven. Picnic lunch at a trestle table on a beach. The young Peter and Diana and a half-dozen others. Umbrellas. Slyly, the custodian zooms in on bottles of black peasant wine—black due to memory’s eccentric lighting. Sudden glimpse of the melancholy pug-dog face of Cyril Connolly … once edited a “little” magazine. Which? New Writing? Hudson Review? No. Hudson was Cornelia Claiborne’s. She was long since lost to a marriage that had taken her life, in another country. Now Pindar is on the soundtrack. The custodian is showing off.
“Who, in his tenderest years, / Finds some new lovely thing, / His hope is high, and he flies on the wings of his manhood: / Better than riches are his thoughts.—/ But man’s pleasure is a short time growing / And it falls to the ground / As quickly when an unlucky twist of thought / Loosens its roots …”
Peter spoke aloud the next line even before the custodian could get to it: “Man’s life is a day. What is he? / What is he not? A shadow in a dream / Is man—is man …” The malicious custodian switched off the audio. “I can’t recall another line.” Peter sighed.