by Gore Vidal
“But I’ve been thinking very seriously about the future.” Nan gazed into Jess’s eyes. What, he wondered, did W.G. see in her? She was just pretty; nothing more. On the other hand, there was no doubt that she was in love with a man more than old enough to be her father, and she had been in love with him long before the presidency; in fact, most of her life. Jess wondered what it would be like to be so loved.
“I’ve made one or two visits to the photo-play studios, the ones in New York, and they think that I show considerable potential, that was what they said, for acting because—this was Mr. Hirshan who works for Cosmopolitan Pictures—I have these suppressed emotions that you can always see on the screen, like Pola Negri.”
“Nan,” Jess was careful not to sound too alarmed, “Cosmopolitan is owned by Mr. Hearst, whose newspapers would do anything to find out about you and the President.”
“Don’t be silly, Jess. How could they ever find out? We aren’t going to tell them. So who can? Anyway, it looks awfully easy, acting, if you have these emotions for the camera to show, like a radiogram, in a way. Well, I have suppressed emotions all right.” Softly, Nan began to cry. Jess noted that she was careful not to make her eyes red or smear her make-up.
“There. There.” Jess was avuncular. Then, when she had paused in the course of her audition, he asked, “Why did that new agent come to me just now?”
“Because Jim had to go home at the last minute. So he got his friend to bring me in here. I pretended I was here to see you about Ohio business. Jim’s leaving the Secret Service, you know.”
“I know.” It was Jess who had got Sloan a job as Washington manager of Samuel Ungerleider. They were all family, Jess had reported to Daugherty, who had grunted. Certainly, it would never do to have Jim Sloan at large in the world with all that he knew about the President’s private life.
“Anyway, from now on I’m to write in care of Arthur Brooks, the colored valet, so Jim tells me, which I don’t in the least mind. Anyway,” now recovered and eyes shining, “will you go tell him I’m here?”
As Jess got to his feet, Nan crossed to the President’s desk, where she picked up a miniature of W.G.’s mother. “He was so devoted to her, everyone says. Doesn’t she look precious here? Like Elizabeth Ann, her granddaughter.”
Jess returned to the upstairs sitting room. Others had joined the President. General Sawyer, small and shrewd, was laying down the law to the Duchess, who listened to him with perfect docility, for he alone understood her last kidney and its vagaries. Charlie Forbes was delighting the President and Daugherty with excited stories while the Secretary of the Interior sat beside the fire, drinking tea with a disgusted expression. After much debate, the President had decided that in the private apartments—specifically the bedrooms of the White House—the law prohibiting alcohol could be broken but in those parts of the White House that plainly belonged to the nation, the law must be upheld. It was not much of a compromise, but then Prohibition was not much of a law. Nevertheless, W.G. took very seriously the dignity of his place and he would not do anything unseemly if he could help it. Now, of course, he could not help it. Presently, he would be joining Nan in the anteroom closet.
Jess simply stared at the President until W.G. became aware of him. Easily, smilingly, W.G. left the group that was laughing with Charlie Forbes, and came toward Jess, who whispered, “She’s in your office.”
Harding’s smile did not fade; but the eyes were suddenly alert. He glanced at the Duchess and General Sawyer; neither was aware of anything on earth save her kidney. Then the President and Laddie Boy left the room. Only Daugherty had noticed. The blue eye stared at Jess, who nodded. The brown eye blinked, as Daugherty nodded, meaning, no.
Jess sat down beside the Secretary of the Interior, who said, “Jess, you want to know what I know? Well, what I know is I can’t wait to get the hell out of here, and go home to New Mexico.” Fall coughed at length into a bandanna-like handkerchief. “Bronchitis.” He held up a gnarled hand. “Arthritis. Now pleurisy, they say.”
“Ask Doc Sawyer.”
“I’d rather go to a veterinarian.” Fall eyed the small doctor with disfavor. “I’ve also got a hole in my lung from this stag which don’t help matters. I keep asking the President to let me go but he says it wouldn’t be seemly so soon into his Administration. Now I’ve been stuck with the naval oil reserves because Denby doesn’t want to be bothered with them, which means every crook in the country is trying to get his hand on all that government oil.” Fall was full of complaints, and Jess was eager to hear each and every one because he had—as who had not?—friends who were keenly interested in acquiring those oil lands held by the government. The Navy believed implicitly that since a war with Japan was bound to come sooner or later, American battleships must have instant access to their own fuel supply. So oil-reserve lands in California and Wyoming had been set aside by President Wilson. Now peace had broken out; and the fleets of the world, instead of growing, were, thanks to Harding, shrinking, and the dim Secretary of the Navy, Denby, had turned the whole business over to the Department of the Interior, a mixed blessing to hear Fall tell it. “Now I’ve had all the bother since May. Denby’s out of it. I’m in it. Favors. Special favors,” Fall muttered into his huge moustaches. He shook his head bleakly.
“Well, the government can turn a nice profit auctioning off those reserves. That’s something.” Jess’s pulse began to beat faster; this time not diabetes but money had triggered his nervous system.
“If I can.” Fall was cryptic. “We had open bidding last summer for Elk Hills, California. Wasn’t much in it for us. But a lot of oil … lot of profit for the winner.”
“Edward Doheny.”
Fall glanced at Jess with mild surprise that anyone should have bothered to follow so insignificant a matter. “That’s the one.” He was noncommittal. “The big problem isn’t oil. It’s those God-damned conservationists, like young Roosevelt.” Fall denounced the Under-Secretary of the Navy, who was, like his cousin Franklin and his father Theodore, occupying the family post at the Navy Department.
Jess was surprised at Fall’s vehemence, considering the fact that Fall was a Roosevelt Republican, an original Rough Rider, a true progressive, whatever that was.
Then dinner was announced, an informal affair for W.G.’s particular friends in the Administration. Since Jess was not asked as often to these meals as he would have liked, he did not in the least mind being put next to the general counsel of the Veterans Bureau, Charles F. Cramer, a colorless Californian whose main distinction was that he had bought the Hardings’ house in Wyoming Avenue. He also though the world of his boss, Charlie Forbes, a man equally mistrusted by Daugherty and Doc Sawyer, to Jess’s surprise, since Daugherty was never censorious and the Doc’s only interest in Forbes would have been on the medical side, involving all those hospitals which were supposed to be not only first-rate but highly profitable. Jess suspected, on Daugherty’s side, a degree of jealousy. Charlie always made W.G. laugh. Daugherty usually made him frown.
At the moment W.G., somewhat too red in the face, was laughing at one of Charlie’s jokes. Presumably, the tryst with Nan had been satisfactory, if brief.
Cramer turned to Jess. “Where are you living now?” Everyone seemed to know that Ned McLean’s H Street house had been abandoned the previous month when Daugherty and Lucie and Jess had all three moved into Wardman Park.
“Well, I’m camping out with General Daugherty.” Jess took pleasure in his friend’s title.
“Thought you were at K Street now.” Cramer was not as dim as he appeared. “In the green house.”
Jess shook his head. “That’s my old friend Howard Mannington. He’s set up shop there, doing business, he says. I see him from time to time.” That was enough information, Jess decided. The operation at 1625 K Street was a smooth affair. Jess and two old friends were agents for the ever-thirsty General Drug Company. They also transacted all sorts of business with desperate men who wanted immunity from pr
osecution or, simply, information from the files of the Justice Department, to which Jess, in his sixth-floor office, had the key. But no matter how much business was done in the little green house on K Street or from Jess’s office at the Justice Department, Daugherty, by design, was kept largely uninformed while the President never suspected anything amiss other than a somewhat blatant trafficking with bootleggers on poker nights. “My God, how the money rolls in!” Jess hummed.
3
Blaise looked out the window of Laurel House and, like pre-Edenic God, was pleased at his creation. The house itself was comfortable but not too grand for the Virginia countryside. The mock-Georgian style tended to symmetry, as did Blaise, who had, instinctively, like God when he made Adam, done things in twos—one marble obelisk on the left of the lawn balanced exactly the one on the right. The pool house, now visible through the winter trees, was equally balanced: a pavilion to the left was hers, one to the right was his. Only the original trees were allowed to escape Blaise’s binary passion. They loomed like black slashes and scratches drawn against the dirty gray winter sky.
Beyond the trees, far below the level of lawn and house, the swift Potomac River broke upon the confusion of rocks that edged the steep river bank, a sign of nature’s lack of art much less symmetry. Here and there, between the rocks, the water had frozen into solid white sheets, and at night, in bed, Blaise liked to listen to the scrape and crunch not to mention the odd shuddering groans of the ice as it shifted in response to the water sweeping down from Great Falls.
Frederika was so delighted to be living in the country that every chance she got, she would cross the river at Chain Bridge to visit friends in Washington, secure in the knowledge that an earthly paradise awaited her on the Virginia side, all ordered garden and wild forests crossed by earthworks from the Civil War, for Laurel House was set on the road to Manassas where, twice, the Union Army had lost to the Confederates at Bull Run. Up near the greenhouses—built originally in an L shape until Blaise rebuilt the base of the L so that it resembled an evenly balanced T—there was a slave cabin complete with original slave. Although long since freed, he had never fled from the cabin of his birth: he went with the property—thus enslaving the owners to him as he had once been to them. Blaise kept the old man on as a not-so-handyman and a source of folk-lore both Confederate and African; the two, Blaise decided, were much the same. The old man had a set-piece that he enjoyed reciting to anyone who’d listen: how all the fine folk had come out from Washington to watch the Union Army defeat the rebels, and how they had passed by his cabin on the road—he had been seven or eight years old then, and he had cheered them on. “But they looked mighty different that night, runnin’ for home.” He was a loyal son of Virginia; and except for Lincoln hated all Yankees.
Frederika came into his room. “Do shut the window. It’s freezing.” She wore a summery sort of dress, not suitable for a winter lunch, but then lunch was Christmas dinner at the McLean palace in H Street and any costume was all right in that house of fantasy. Enid and Peter followed their mother into Blaise’s room, and Peter climbed his father’s leg while Enid complained that it was not fair to leave them on Christmas, despite that morning’s orgy of present-opening in the pine-scented drawing room where a Christmas tree had been set up, its base surrounded by a thick white snow-like material that contained something very like ground glass which still caused Blaise, who had been Santa Claus, to squirm with discomfort as it clung to his skin.
“We’ll be home early, my pets.” Frederika was admirably patient and serene with even the crankiest child. “We’ll have supper together. Miss Claypoole will take you out in the sleigh, if there’s enough snow.”
“There’s more than enough up at the stables,” said Enid, a dark rather glamorous-looking child. Peter nodded and chewed on a red-and-white-striped candy cane taken from the tree and not meant to be eaten. Peter was always hungry. Frederika worried. Blaise did not. Let children enjoy themselves. Later there would be little enough to enjoy, he maintained, as only a man whose life had been entirely easy and largely happy could.
In procession they descended the carved staircase to the main hall, decorated with holly and mistle-toe. Christmas Eve had been their celebration for friends and familiars. Despite Peter’s last-minute attempt to get his father to read him Captain Marryat, of all writers, Blaise and Frederika were able to depart without tears.
Snow covered the ground in drifts. The narrow road to Chain Bridge was dangerously icy, and not much helped by the county’s addition of rock-salt to its surface. Frederika sat, very alert, as the chauffeur managed the curves like an expert skier. Blaise, who had no fear of accidents—or death?—sat far back in his seat and enjoyed the warmth of the vicuña coverlet.
At Chain Bridge, Frederika relaxed despite the cautionary sight of a Model A Ford that had skidded into the railing. Beneath them the river was filled with shards of ice. The sky over the city was yellow like a cheap diamond. “Evalyn says we’re to tell no one but this is the day the President is going to be killed.”
“At the McLeans’?”
“If he gets there in one piece. It’s very exciting,” said Frederika mildly.
“Who would want to kill Warren Harding?”
“The Vice President, I suppose. They say he never speaks but every time I sit next to him at dinner he never stops talking.”
“You have that effect on everyone.”
“Not you.”
“That is a condition of marriage. Long meaningless silences.”
They were halfway across the near-deserted city when Frederika observed, “You don’t think they’ll try, do you?”
“Who’ll try what?” Blaise was already in his own world, which, nowadays, involved Paris and a friend’s wife and a private room at Prudhomme where, for two centuries, initials had been inscribed on the ancient window pane with diamonds—white and blue but never yellow diamonds.
“The murderers, whoever they are. The Secret Service takes it all very seriously. That’s why they were happy to get the President out of the White House and into the I Street house, where, they say, it’s easier to guard him, which I doubt.”
“I’m sure Evalyn and Ned wrote the letters, just to get the Hardings for Christmas Day.”
Frederika shook her head, unconvinced. “They see them all the time. Perhaps anarchists will blow up the house like Mr. Palmer’s.”
Blaise was greeted warmly by his rival publisher. Ned was on a new regime which he called “English drinking.” This involved a first drink at about eleven in the morning and then, at regular intervals throughout the day, he would continue drinking. The result was, so far, satisfactory. Although he was never drunk he was also never sober, very much in the English manner, as Millicent Inverness observed to Blaise, herself a committed Anglophile in these matters.
Evalyn, hung with ill-omened diamonds, did her best to compete with what must have been Washington’s largest Christmas tree, whose glittering star just grazed the ceiling of the drawing room, which itself was three times higher than any other drawing room in the city. Splendor was the McLean style, and the Hardings seemed as at home as they were out of place in this palace.
Blaise sat beside the President before the fire while the half-dozen ladies gathered around Evalyn. “Well, Blaise,” said Harding, nursing a pale whisky and water. “I can’t think of a better place to be killed in.”
“Or such an auspicious day.”
“Better than April Fool’s.” Harding chuckled. Blaise had never been able to gauge the President’s intelligence. Harding did not read books, and the arts chilled him except for the girlie shows at the Gayety Burlesque theater where he liked to slip, unobserved, into a box, to the delight of the excited manager. But a cultivation of the arts was hardly a sign of practical intelligence. The fact that Harding’s career had been one of astonishing success could not be ascribed solely to brute luck or animal charm. Without luck and charm, Harding would probably not have had a political career. But
he had had the luck and the charm and something else as well, hard to define because he was so insistently modest. “Mr. Hughes took them by storm,” he said with satisfaction, as if only the Secretary of State had been responsible for the terms of the Disarmament Conference. “I thought Admiral Beatty would have a stroke when Mr. Hughes looked right at him, and told him how many ships England would have to scrap.”
Harry Daugherty joined them. “May I?” he asked of the sovereign, who nodded. Daugherty sat next to Blaise. “We’re surrounded by the press, Mr. President.”
“In the event that I join McKinley and Garfield and Lincoln up there in the sky, I want Ned and Blaise to be witnesses of my last hours on earth, omitting no gruesome detail except one.” He held high his drink. “The people must never know that I died violating the Eighteenth Amendment. That would be unseemly.”
Then Harding, the publisher and editor of the Marion Star, took over from the President, and Blaise found him both knowledgeable and interesting in their common trade. As they chatted, Blaise was very much aware of the Secret Service men in the hall and in the next room. Their attention was evenly divided between watching the President and observing all conceivable entrances and exits. The secretary of war, John W. Weeks, was allowed to enter, followed by the black-eyed part-Indian Senator Curtis of Kansas. They were a part of what Harding called his poker cabinet. Blaise found the President to be a curious mixture of an almost Buddhistic stillness interrupted, at regular intervals, by a small boy’s restlessness. He must play golf. He must play card games, particularly poker. He must travel as much as his office allowed. Constant motion was a necessary distraction. Yet he could, just as easily, remain as still as a statue, self-contained, smiling, content. All in all, he was a mystery to Blaise, but no less enjoyable for that.
