by Gore Vidal
2
For Jess Smith, Christmas meant the main street of Washington Court House, with the electrified Christmas tree in the front yard of the county courthouse and enough snow and ice to keep the town’s doctors busy setting bones and pouring plaster-of-paris. Also, it made him feel glad to see the business his emporium was doing. For some reason, the war was stimulating people to buy up everything in sight; and as he stood near the main entrance, just across from the cashier with her high black money-register, he inhaled the fragrant odor of Christmas holiday money, a heady combination of damp wool and rubber galoshes. Automatically, he greeted half the customers with his usual “Whaddaya know?”
Jess greeted Roxy with the same phrase as she came down the stairs from her mother’s flat. Roxy had doubted the propriety of living in her former husband’s store, but Jess would not hear of her moving out. “You’re my best friend,” he’d say. “After Harry Daugherty,” she’d say.
Roxy gave his plump cheek a sisterly kiss and together they went out into the cold evening. Roxy still dreamed of going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. But until she got around to making the trip, she saw every photo-play that came to town. Currently, at the Strand, Geraldine Farrar was playing in Joan the Woman. Roxy loved historical movies in general and the overweight Farrar, an opera singer, of all things, in particular. As there were no gangster movies available, Jess had agreed to go with Roxy after a simple supper at the Blue Owl Grill. With luck, there might be a good serial with the feature, which was already a year old and only re-released because of the war.
“It’s about Joan of Arc,” Roxy explained as they crept down the icy street, half-blinded by the lights of automobiles, come to town for last-minute shopping.
“I don’t recollect the name.” But Jess knew every name in town; and he greeted passersby cheerily.
“You should have some interests outside politics.” Roxy nearly fell, which Jess took to be fate’s swift punishment for suggesting that his life was anything but idyllic, barring a tendency to put on too much weight. Jess propped Roxy against the wall; then, arms carefully locked, the couple entered the Blue Owl Grill, where the owner said “Whaddaya know?” first, an old joke with the old-timers; and Jess was shown to his table at the back of what was, despite all the recent patriotic fuss against all things German, an old-fashioned German beer hall with solid German food and known, until recently, as the Heidelberg. The owners were a Swiss German couple, fierce in their neutrality.
“Bratwurst and sauerkraut.” Jess always ordered the same supper. “Sausage and liberty cabbage,” said the immense German waitress, without a smile.
“Can you imagine?” said a woman’s voice. “Changing the names just because they’re German.” It was Carrie Phillips, alone at the next table. Even though she was Jess’s age, she looked more than ever like a Viking goddess, with dark gold curls framing a face unaided by cosmetics.
“I sometimes think people are crazy,” Carrie added, to Jess’s unease. All in all, it was not a wise time to speak up in public for the Germans, or indeed for anything German. Wagner could not be played in many cities, which suited Jess fine, but earlier that week Congress had declared war on Austria, and Jess prayed that this did not mean the end of the Strauss waltz, the only dance that he could do happily and with some grace. Jess had not been prepared for so much ill-feeling. Neither had W.G., the love of whose life was sitting at the table next to Jess and Roxy.
“Where’s Jim?” asked Roxy.
The seated Carrie put on her coat, with Jess’s help. “He’s gone to get the car. We’re going back to Marion tonight.”
“On these icy roads? My!” said Roxy. Relations between Jess and his emporium and Jim Phillips and his Marion emporium had always been surprisingly good, since in the age of the motor car the distance between the two towns had shrunk to practically nothing, making them competitors. But Jess was not ambitious, while what ambition Jim had was more than compensated for by the branch of Uhler-Phillips that he had opened in New York City, right on Broadway itself. After the Hardings, the Phillipses were the first family of Marion, maybe even of Fayette County. All the more irony that, unknown to the Duchess and to Jim, W.G. and Carrie Phillips had been deeply in love for a dozen years. At first Daugherty had been distressed; then he had realized that when there could be no real scandal in the sense that the lovers would ever want to be married or that there might be a child, he had accepted the situation, as did those who suspected, who were few, as opposed to those who knew, who were many, at least in Marion.
The affair had begun in the wake of the Duchess’s kidney operation, which had coincided with the equally ailing Jim Phillips’s removal to the sanatorium at Battle Creek, Michigan. During the summer when W.G. would take to the Chautauqua circuit, speaking in a different town six days a week, Carrie would come join him in the homely anonymity of a variety of small-town hotels.
Jess thought the whole thing truly romantic. Certainly they were the best-looking couple in Ohio; on the other hand, they were not all that well matched. She was a bit nose-in-the-air, like Alice Longworth. She loved Europe; worse, she prided herself on her German heritage; worst, she would not stop talking about it. “Just think,” she said, “Jim and I were booked this summer on the Bremen. I’d hoped to stay over in Germany for maybe a year, working on my German. Then this war …” She frowned. Several heads at nearby tables turned. Jess blushed; and pretended that he was a soldier at the Front.
“Well, it won’t take long.” Roxy was cheerful. Jess had finally persuaded her to cut off the Mary Pickford curls; as a result, the short not quite natural red hair made her look younger than her thirty-five years. More gamine, as she would say. Roxy had also spent a year in Europe and could be almost as high-toned as Carrie. “Now that our boys are all over there,” Roxy was unexpectedly patriotic. The heads returned to feeding.
“I don’t think,” said Carrie, coldly, deliberately, elegantly, which for her meant the affectation of a slight German accent, “that our boys will have an easy time with the greatest army on earth. We … they,” she took her time in changing the pronoun, “are winning in France, and now with the Russians just about out of the war, Ludendorff will drive the Allies into the sea.”
“Us, too.” Roxy’s tone was hard.
Jess put his napkin over his face; he had just been wounded in action. He shivered, as he always did, at the thought of guns, bullets, death.
“We’re not allies.” Carrie was suddenly girlish and sweet and ominous. “Didn’t you see what Mr. Wilson said? We’re for the war to end, and that’s all. We’re not taking sides one way or the other. Peace without victory. No,” Carrie smiled at her own reflection in the back of a heavy spoon on which was engraved in Gothic letters Heidelberg, a memento of the pre-Blue Owl world, “the only possible way for us to beat the Germans is with a general like Johann Josef Pfoersching.”
“Who?” Jess dropped the napkin and speared a dumpling from Roxy’s plate.
“John J. Pershing is what he changed his name to.” Carrie was triumphant: America’s commanding general was a member of the race of supermen, not to mention women. The patrons of their corner of the Blue Owl were now all talking at once.
“Well, I never,” said Roxy, thoughtfully, forgetting her year in Europe and lapsing into Ohioese.
“I don’t think many folks know this.” Jess was uneasy. If Pershing should be a double agent, taking his orders from the Kaiser … What a plot it would make, he thought excitedly; now he was a spymaster as, earlier, he had been an amateur detective, alert to clues and able to spot a murderer in a crowded room simply by the way he moved.
“I’m glad that W.G. finally tried to talk some sense to the Senate for a change, about all that Liberty Bond hysteria. I was disgusted by it, and I told him so, too. The way they went on about German crimes, and the Huns, and quite forgetting all the crimes those French darkies are committing, and the English …”
“Against the Irish, anyway,” said
Roxy without thinking. Then they were joined by sallow, small, lean Jim Phillips. “The car’s outside, Carrie.” Jim greeted Jess fraternally as a fellow Elk, smiled at Roxy, helped Carrie to her feet. “We got us a nasty drive ahead, what with the snow’s starting up again.”
Carrie towered over her husband in the same way that the Queen of England did over hers; and she stood as ramrod-straight. “You tell our friends in Washington how I …” She changed whatever it was she meant to say. “How we miss them.”
“You do that,” said Jim.
Merry Christmases were exchanged. Roxy looked at Jess, who looked at Roxy. “She does go on,” said Roxy.
“I wish she wouldn’t.” Jess drank beer from a pewter mug. “I really wish she wouldn’t.”
“Sir.” Jess looked up at a stout young man with the lower half of a moustache; the rest had not grown in or was not there to grow in. “If I may interrupt you in your meal, sir.” The man withdrew a wallet from his inside pocket; and opened it halfway so that only Jess could see that it contained a badge. The voice whispered, “Silas W. Mahoney, United States Secret Service.”
“Sit down.” Jess could barely speak. Terror and excitement caused him, literally, to lose his breath. For an instant he actually ceased to breathe. This was as high as you could go in the world of detectives: the government’s own secret investigators, forever at work, capturing criminals and protecting presidents—freedom, too.
“What’ve you done, Jess?” Roxy was more querulous than alarmed. Mr. Mahoney slid into a chair between them. Fortunately the grill room was now so crowded that the comings and goings at Jess’s table went unnoticed.
“It’s about Mrs. Phillips,” said the Secret Service man, removing a small notebook and a pencil from his jacket. “As you know, this is war-time.” Mr. Mahoney expected the news to have more effect than it did. But Jess was still breathing hard, and Roxy was unimpressed by the law in general and by Mr. Mahoney in particular, who said, very slowly, “Mrs. Phillips is a woman of some influence here in Ohio, and in Washington, too.”
“The branch store is not in Washington,” said Roxy with a swift coolness that Jess admired and envied, “it’s on Broadway, in New York City. Uhler-Phillips is an influence only in dry goods, Mr. Mahoney.”
“I didn’t get your name.” Mr. Mahoney poised his pencil over the notebook.
“This is my wife,” Jess began.
“I’m his ex-wife, Roxy Stinson …”
“Smith,” Jess added; he was beginning to enjoy the situation. Mr. Mahoney made a notation. “Now just why are you investigating Mrs. Phillips?”
“We have reason to believe that she is a German agent. That she provides the Wilhelmstrasse with secret information.”
Roxy burst forth with a great laugh, of the sort known in Fayette County as a horse-laugh. “Well, I reckon she could tell the Germans what the markdown will be on blankets after the Christmas sales are over, and I think she’s very good on lingerie. Uhler-Phillips has the best selection in this part of Ohio—”
“Roxy!” Jess was stunned. He prided himself on Smith’s wide range of exciting hand-stitched silk undies.
“I don’t think you understand the danger that a woman of her thinking poses to a great nation in time of war.” Mr. Mahoney tried to sound reasonable but, plainly, Roxy was rattling him.
“I don’t think,” said Jess, finally in control of an excitable self, “that she’d have any information from around here that the Wilhelmstrasse would want to know about.”
“Mr. Smith, when it comes to intelligence, the smallest detail can be of significance.”
“You’re right there!” This was the real thing all right. Mr. Mahoney could have stepped off the page of a Nick Carter story.
“Look, Mr. Mahoney,” Roxy was now waving to the waiter for the check, “Mrs. Phillips is a vulture for German culture, and that’s it. She works for the Red Cross, like every patriotic little lady in these parts, and there’s nothing for her to spy on anywhere around here.”
“But what about Washington?”
“What about Washington?” Roxy looked blankly at the Secret Service man. “I don’t think she’s been there in years. Has she, Jess?”
Jess shook his head. “No occasion to. She doesn’t even go to New York except to sail for—”
Roxy kicked him under the table. Fortunately, Mr. Mahoney could not write and listen. He had missed the dangerous verb. “But then, I guess, Washington comes to her, when Senator Harding is back home in Marion.”
An alarm sounded in Jess’s head. Fortunately, he was able to subdue his nerves by pretending that he was a counter-agent, a master detective, who knew far more than this insignificant cog in the vast Pinkertonian machine. He was guileful. “The Senator and Mrs. Harding are close friends of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips. Fact, they went to Europe together a few years ago …”
“To visit Germany, wasn’t it?”
“No. It wasn’t.” Jess was suave, like Raymond Griffith, his favorite film star, elegant, unflappable, and seldom out of a tuxedo. “France and Italy mostly, looking for works of art.” W.G. had come home with two marble statues of naked women, while the Duchess had bought a fully clothed lady called Prudence the Puritan.
“I see,” said Mr. Mahoney, who, Jess had noticed, could not both think and speak either, which eased Jess’s task. “They often make trips together …”
“They did. But that was in younger days. Now the Senator is busy in Washington or out on Chautauqua, and Mr. Phillips’s health is not so good, and she’s so busy with the Red Cross …”
“Why do you think she said what she said about General Pershing?”
This was a surprise, to which Roxy rose. “So you were listening in—”
“That’s my job, Miss Stinson … Mrs. Smith.”
“I think she thought it a good joke that our commanding general against the Germans is a German. I think it’s pretty funny, too.” Roxy was on her feet. “We don’t want to miss the feature,” she murmured. Jess helped her into her coat.
“I’d like to know,” Mr. Mahoney doggedly began.
Roxy cut him short. “If you want to know whether or not General Pershing is a German spy, I suggest you go to France and ask him. Anyway,” she added with true Roxy zest, “a well-set-up young man like you ought to be in France, anyway, fighting for his country, instead of bothering Ohio ladies.”
That took care of Mr. Mahoney, Jess could see. But if there was to be a real investigation of Carrie, then the affair with W.G. would come to light; and if that happened, all was lost. Even as Jess complimented Roxy on her cool handling of the detective, he was wondering just what he dared tell Daugherty over the telephone, which might very well be tapped into by the government. Suddenly the whole country had become very exciting and dangerous, and Jess was both thrilled and terrified as his dreams of spies and detectives and ghosts in the broom closet were now all starting to come true.
3
Burden Day congratulated the President on his recent birthday. Wilson’s thin face looked more bleak than ever. “Thank you, Senator. Sixty-one is a riotous age. You have it to look forward to. Meanwhile, tell Senator Reed of Missouri that I really do celebrate my birthday on December twenty-eighth and not, as he thinks, on December twenty-fifth.” Burden sat on a sofa beside the fire while the President sat in a straight chair opposite. Comment was no longer made on why it was that the President chose to conduct his business from a small upstairs study rather than from the presidential office in the new west wing. Doubtless he liked the proximity of Lincoln’s ghost or, more likely, Edith’s ample presence.
Although the Senate was in a brief recess for the Christmas holidays, few of the Westerners had gone home. Burden and Kitty had sent for relatives; and like a kaleidoscope, the Senate continued to turn, rearranging its component pieces in ever new combinations. Last week’s ally was this week’s enemy. Only the politicians’ code of a favor for a favor gave any shape to the very odd club that had made for itself s
o powerful a place in the scheme of things that even the President, with all his war-time powers, was often at the mercy of the savage-tongued Jim Reed—a member of his own party—not to mention the more or less crazed Henry Cabot Lodge of the opposition.
On this, the last day of 1917, the President had asked Burden to come see him in the late afternoon and together they would go over some of the points that the President would make to the new Congress on the progress of the war and, most important, on the peace that would follow. Burden had long since discovered that Wilson did not crave advice; consequently, he tended to nod his head and hum agreement, grateful for the room’s fire. Half of the White House had been shut off to conserve heat; or so Tumulty had piously informed the press. Certainly the downstairs hall had been somewhat colder than the portico outside.
As the beautiful voice droned on, Burden did his best to keep awake. If Wilson did not want advice, Burden did not want to be read to. Finally, the President put down the pages, typed by himself, Burden noticed, recognizing the characteristic blue of Wilson’s typewriter ribbon. “You get my thrust. I have a group working on the details. A sort of inquiry, you might say, on what to do after. Because there is—was—no point to our joining in this war if at the end we cannot find some way to stop these wasteful bloody enterprises.”
“You agree with Mr. Taft, which should impress the Regular Republicans.” Burden decided to advise. “If I may say so, I think it a bit too soon to speak as if we had already won the war when the Germans have been smashing the British to pieces, and we haven’t done much of anything yet—in the field, that is.”
To Burden’s surprise, Wilson took this well. “I agree,” he said. “I don’t plan to make a speech tomorrow, but I’m trying to sort out what should be our position when it comes time to …” He stopped.
Burden finished, in his own way, the master of eloquence’s thought. “… to justify a war so unpopular with so many people, particularly those in my part of the country, who are your main supporters.”
