by Gore Vidal
“Mr. Roosevelt admires him …”
“They are best friends …”
“I meant your Mr. Roosevelt.”
The eyes were very fine, Caroline decided. Mlle. Souvestre would have approved. Also Lucy—she was, somehow, a Carroll of Carrollton, which meant a Roman Catholic, which would also have pleased Mademoiselle, who, like most French atheists, respected the Church. Lucy Mercer. Caroline was relieved that she had remembered. After all, if she did not know her adopted city better than a native, she had no right to publish a family newspaper for largely political families. Lucy’s father, Major Carroll Mercer, had founded the city’s most fashionable country club, in the Maryland village of Chevy Chase, where membership was so highly restricted that Woodrow Wilson refused to play golf there while young Mr. Roosevelt did.
Aileen Tone had joined them. She was not at all dim, as companions were meant to be. “I keep trying to persuade Lucy to sing with us, with Mr. Adams and me, but she won’t.”
“Because you remember me in my youth. I am, now—in my old age—a baritone,” said Lucy. “You remember my girlish alto.”
“Perfect for Richard Coeur de Lion.” Aileen turned to Caroline. “We are studying the old musical notations, trying to work out how twelfth-century music must have sounded. We’re making progress, we think, with Richard’s prison song.”
“Oh, Richard, oh, mon roi, tout le monde t’abandonne,” Caroline croaked the French ballad, so beloved, for obvious reasons, by Marie-Antoinette.
“Eighteenth-century,” said Aileen. “Lovely, of course.…”
“I have been struck once today.” Senator Lodge was at Caroline’s side. “But I struck back a powerful blow with my right fist. Now …”
“You will use your vigorous left one on me?” Caroline smiled sweetly.
“No. I respond only in kind. You denounce me. I denounce you.”
“Oh, dear.” Aileen sounded alarmed. “Mr. Adams won’t like this.”
“I was only going to match Caroline’s observation that I am too old to fight with a compliment. She is too shrewd not to know why I called Wilson a coward. We should have gone to war at the time of the Lusitania but he was afraid that he would lose his hyphenates in the election. Because there is no Democratic Party without the Germans and the Irish.”
“The Germans usually vote Republican,” Caroline began.
“But if I’d favored a war against Germany then, they’d have all voted against him.” Lodge was smooth. “And there are twelve million of them among us, including the German Jews, like Kuhn and Loeb and Warburg, who hate England and love the Kaiser, and now that our good Mr. Morgan is dead, there’s no one to keep them in line. Fear of them made Wilson pretend to be neutral. But once he’d got their votes—those of the Irish, too—he now comes in for the last act, to claim a great victory, so that he can then be our first three-term president.”
Caroline took pleasure in Lodge’s statesman-like plausibility. For all she knew—indeed, for all he knew—he believed what he was saying. But mischief was upon her. “After the speech, I saw you shake his hand. What did you say to him?”
Lodge was superb. “I said—what else?—‘Mr. President, you have expressed in the loftiest manner the sentiments of the American people.’ ”
“ ‘Sin boldly!’ ” Caroline had been reminded of the phrase by Wilson’s unexpected casting of himself as Martin Luther.
Lodge looked startled; then recalled the context. “Trust a Catholic to know Martin Luther.”
“I don’t,” said Lucy; and waved toward Eleanor.
“It is not only good Protestantism but it is good sense,” said Caroline.
“What, then, is the sin here?” Lodge sounded as if he were conducting a catechism.
“Pride, Senator Lodge.”
“What else, Mrs. Sanford?”
“What else is there? What else caused Lucifer to fall?”
“Lucifer was the son of morning. Wilson is a little schoolteacher, and nothing more.”
“He is the son of our morning, Cabot. And in full pride, too. And sinning boldly through this war, which you love and he—to his credit—does not.”
“How do you know that he does not—or that I do?” Lodge’s face was pale except for the red circle on his right cheek where pacifism’s fist had struck. “He is guileful. Deceitful. Bold, too, at least as sinner. Yes, you may be right. But if he does not love, as you put it, this war, you will admit that he loves himself and his glory, and so perhaps he is not unlike …”
“I concede, Cabot. You are Lucifer!” Caroline was giddy with fury; sorrow, too.
“I?” Lodge stepped back, as if to avoid a second blow in one day. “Lucifer?”
“Curious,” said Henry Adams, who had appeared as if by magic. “God has nothing intelligent to say anywhere in Paradise Lost while Lucifer’s every word is ravishing, which makes him quite unlike our own dear Cabot.”
“You see?” Lodge beamed at Caroline. “I’ll let you assign to Mr. Wilson the grand sulphurous role. But remember, it is he—not I—who is fallen, falling …”
“But Lucifer took a number of other angels with him.” Milton had begun to go round in Caroline’s head.
“I promise you,” said Henry Adams, “Cabot would have remained safely behind in Heaven, close to God’s throne as angel-majority leader, singing hosannahs.”
“That is because I am from Boston, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots and I alone may speak to God.”
Caroline wondered whether or not anyone that she knew in America would now be killed in the war, which had claimed, the previous week, her favorite half-brother, aged fifty-four, the Prince Napoléon d’Agrigente. Plon had been at his regiment’s headquarters in a paper mill near the river Somme. During the night, there had been a bombardment. The next day his body was identified only because of a dented gold cigarette-case on which his initials were intertwined with those of a lady as unknown to Caroline as she no doubt was to his grieving widow. Although Plon had not been much younger than Senator Lodge, he had insisted on rejoining a regiment to which he had once been, ornamentally, attached. As Caroline smiled warmly at Cabot Lodge, she most sincerely wished him at the very frozen center of hell.
TWO
1
A smell of frying country sausage delighted Jess’s nostrils as he let himself into the Harding half of 2314 Wyoming Avenue. The Duchess kept her husband well fed and as dry as she could, considering his passion for poker and bourbon and tobacco and the company of those insidious tempters, the politicians.
“That you, Jess?” The voice from upstairs was like a crow’s.
“It’s me, Duchess.”
“You have your breakfast?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, you’re too late. Go and sit down.”
Jess sat in the modern bay window that looked out on a desolate yard. The house, still on the raw side, was not quite finished, unlike the gracious Harding home in Marion with its numerous subtle decorative touches reminiscent not only of all the other opulent Marionite households but of Jess’s mother’s own residence in nearby Washington Court House, not to mention the long-planned but never completed nest for Roxy, who preferred apartment living, leaving Jess alone to face the horror of the downstairs closet. Jess felt tears come to his eyes as he thought of Roxy. The doctor had warned him that as a borderline diabetic case, with high blood pressure, he would be given to sudden floods of tears for reasons physical not sentimental. Harry Micajah Daugherty appeared from the study, unlighted cigar in his thick fist. “Jess, boy.”
“Whaddaya know?” This was Jess’s usual greeting to anyone he knew back home and, often, to those he didn’t know but happened to see in the vicinity of the courthouse, original center to his world that was now extended not only to Columbus and the state house, but to imperial Washington and the Capitol.
“I know there’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight, for sure.” Daugherty whistled tonelessly the song that had co
me to be associated with the Spanish-American War in general and with the hero of San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt, in particular.
“They say T.R. hit town late last night.”
Daugherty sat himself in a deep armchair whose antimacassar was slightly askew, like Daugherty’s eyes. Jess could never make up his mind whether to look into the brown eye or the blue one. On aesthetic grounds, he preferred the crystalline quality of the blue. On matters of trust, however, he preferred the homely dog-like sincerity of the brown, despite its slight inadvertent twitch and vestigial cast. Otherwise, Harry M. Daugherty was a perfectly ordinary thick-set, fifty-seven-year-old politician with a small quantity of straight gray hair; no facial hair and, save for an occasional odd squint, no facial expression either. Daugherty now began to whistle three notes in ascending scale.
“How’s the Missis?” asked Jess.
The notes were whistled now in a descending scale. Daugherty shook his head, unpursed his lips. “Not good, Jess boy. Not good. A martyr, that girl, to the arthritis.” And as he did so often at the mention of his invalid wife, Lucie, he began to whistle, with a slight tremolo, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” Even the tough Duchess was obliged to admit that theirs was a true love story, in marked contrast, Jess knew—delighted to know everything about his great friends—to the Harding marriage. But then the Duchess was five years older than the Senator. In fact, she was the same advanced age as Harry Daugherty; and plain women who were older than their husbands were accustomed, when dealing with sticks, to handling the short end, as they said in Fayette County.
Harry had been well pleased by Jess’s organization of the Madame Marcia meeting. Until then, the Duchess had never really taken to the idea of Warren and herself in the White House. The Senate suited her just fine. Warren, too, she said; and he would echo her. But what Warren said and what he thought were often two different things, according to Harry Daugherty, who knew Warren—or W.G., as he called him—best of all.
Twenty years earlier, when Daugherty had begun to realize that his own career would never go much higher than that of a party chairman, he had decided to conduct a high-powered career by proxy. When he had met the remarkably handsome Warren Gamaliel Harding early one morning in the front yard of Richwood’s Globe Hotel, some fifteen miles from Marion, he had decided there and then that this handsome young state legislator and newspaper publisher was going to go all the way to the stars, or so Daugherty now told the story, and as he did, W.G. would half-smile that smile of his and stare off into space, eyes half-shut, head half-tilted. Jess had known both of them long enough to have heard the story become more and more elaborate, as W.G. had risen, in a zig-zag way, with a lot more zags then any of them had anticipated. After two terms in the state senate, W.G. had zigged into the lieutenant governorship of the state; served one term; went back to editing the profitable Marion Star, with considerable help from the Duchess, who was inexorable when it came to collecting monies due. Six years later, in 1910, W.G. zagged disastrously when he ran for governor and was defeated. But two years later Daugherty had reversed the Harding fortunes when he maneuvered the Republican magnates into letting Warren give the nomination speech for William Howard Taft at the party’s convention. In a matter of hours, the handsome, sonorous, gray-haired, black-browed young politician was a national figure; and two years later, in 1914, he was elected to the United States Senate in the first election where senators were chosen not as the founders had intended, by state legislators, but by the people themselves. Now Daugherty was scheming to place his friend in the White House. What W.G. thought of all this, deep down, was a mystery to Jess. What the Duchess thought was often voiced: “I’ve seen the inside of the White House. There’s no taste or refinement there, which is maybe the fault of the Wilsons. Anyway, how can a body stand having all those people around all the time? Why, you can’t turn around you don’t see somebody lurking back of a potted palm, his eye on you.”
The Duchess was now in the room, busily straightening up, which meant throwing cigar stubs into the grate of the coal-fire. “Where are you two going to go meet Colonel Roosevelt?”
“Mrs. Longworth’s house. Your favorite house, after the White House.” Daugherty enjoyed teasing the Duchess. As she had no sense of humor, she could tolerate quite a bit of joshing at her own expense.
“I’ve still never set foot there. Nor she here. And. I.” The Duchess spelled it out. “Am. The wife. Of the Senator. From Ohio. And Nick Longworth’s just a representative of a lot of no-good Germans from Cincinnati. Which he wouldn’t be today if my Warren hadn’t helped him get back in after he got licked in ’12, as well he should’ve been, the lecherous drunk.”
“Well, he is in Congress. And Alice is still the President’s daughter …”
“Ex-President. So stuck up. With her painted face. And cigarettes. And,” the Duchess’s thin mouth became a wide slit rather like that of a letter-box, “her cocaine.”
Jess sat bolt upright. This was what he lived for. The real inside about everything. Whaddaya know? was now answered in spades, “How do you know that?”
“The dentist.” The Duchess looked very pleased with herself. “I go to him. She goes to him. He prescribes it for her. He told me. She’s had that bad jaw ever since a horse kicked her head in. Well, he gives her cocaine, and she asks for more and more and tells him she’s a hopeless addict.”
Harry sighed. “Speaking as a lawyer, Florence, if the guilty party admits guilt like that, she isn’t really guilty. But just making fun, which is her style.”
“There is nothing, Harry, that I don’t know about dentists,” was the Duchess’s stern if somewhat tangential response.
United States Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding, Republican of Ohio, entered the room, carrying his frock coat over one arm. He wore bright red galluses and a stiff detachable collar, snowy white in contrast to his olivetinted face, whose regular features were ever so slightly blurred, giving satisfaction to those who enjoyed believing the never entirely discredited legend that the Hardings were a Negro family that had only recently, in the last but one generation, passed over to white.
“Harry. Jess. Duchess.” The deep voice rolled from the highly placed chest and abdomen. Although Harding had not yet passed the shadow-line between stout and fat, there was already an ominous sameness and lack of demarcation between stomach and chest, mitigated somewhat by the skillful hang of the trousers. “Have some breakfast, boys.”
“Can’t.” The Duchess was firm. “Tillie’s cleaned up.”
Jess helped W.G. into his frock coat. Daugherty watched attentively—his creation. But Jess wondered, at times, if it might not be the other way round. Daugherty talked strategy morning, noon and night while W.G. just gazed off into the distance, smiling at whatever it was he saw there. He seldom committed himself to anything; seldom gave a political opinion, as opposed to learned soliloquies on what he found in his favorite reading, newspaper sports pages. Yet whenever Daugherty would discuss the election of 1920, their common grail, it was W.G. who appeared to direct the discussion, as he did now, seated in an old rocker, going through a sheaf of carbon copies of telegrams and letters while the Duchess headed toward the back part of the house to tyrannize the servant.
“Now then, here’s the Colonel’s first telegram. Last month. He’s happy, as you might figure. Patriotism. Preparedness. And so on.” Harding adjusted his spectacles. “I committed myself to one Roosevelt division, that he himself would raise. Volunteers. Volunteers.” Harding sighed. “I don’t know what I can tell him. Now …” Harding’s voice trailed off.
Daugherty was on his feet, slowly coming to an energetic boil, like a Ford Model T engine, thought Jess, who envied his brilliant friend not only his formidable brain but his energy, which he could crank up himself. “You’ve done all you could, W.G. You tacked your amendment—the Harding amendment—onto the preparedness bill, and it passed, and it’s not your fault that Baker and Wilson refused to honor it, and ignored the will of Congress
, due to partisan fever …”
“Don’t,” said Harding mildly, “make a speech. It’s bad for the digestion this early in the morning. My dyspepsia’s already starting to churn.”
“So what are you going to tell the Colonel today?” Daugherty sank into an armchair.
“Three not one.” Harding’s smile was seraphic.
“Three what?”
“I’m going to see to it that when the next draft bill comes up, a provision will be made not for one but for three divisions of volunteers to be raised by the Colonel just like he did during the war with Spain, when he encouraged the brave to volunteer, to rally to the flag!” W.G. belched softly; punished for breaking his own rule against matutinal speechifying.
“They’ll strike you down.” Daugherty was flat. “Wilson won’t give the Colonel a latrine to dig.”
Harding put away his papers. “That will be between the President and the Colonel. I shall have done my duty by the Colonel, which is all that matters, isn’t it, Harry?” Harding’s gaze was benign.
Daugherty nodded. “Well, it’s clever as hell, W.G., and that’s the truth. You’re just about the only link there is between that madman and the Regular Republicans, if he really wants to make up with us …”
“And he does just as much as we want to make up with him, to welcome him home, even if he did split our party in two and got the Democrats elected, which he now regrets most of all.” Harding relit the dead cigar he held in his hand. “I think,” he said at last, dreamily, exhaling blue-white smoke, “that I’m going to suggest to him that he be our standard-bearer next time around.”
“Why?” Daugherty was suddenly alert, the brown eye blinking hard.
“Well, Hughes came a cropper, and Taft’s forever out, so who else is there?” Harding smiled, generally, at Jess, as if he was a delegation of suffragettes.
