by Gore Vidal
Suddenly, Jess was inspired. He telephoned the McLeans in Leesburg. Evalyn came on the line. “It’s Jess,” he announced.
“Back from Ohio?”
“For a while. Listen. I wonder if I could come down there and spend maybe a couple, three days.”
“Of course you can. There’s plenty of room, Lord knows. Are you all right?”
“I’m a little upset. I guess you know, business, and things.”
“I know,” said Evalyn, who probably did know a great deal.
“I’ll start soon as I can.” Jess hung up. Thunder sounded even louder, rain started to fall in sheets.
Jess dozed off. The last of the papers was now ash. He woke up with rain in his face. He looked at his watch. It was after ten. He shut the window. Then he telephoned Evalyn again; told her it was raining too hard to drive. She told him to come in the morning. He would be there at seven, he said. On the dot. It would be light out then. He didn’t like to drive in the dark or, indeed, do anything without a light on somewhere.
Jess dozed off again. He dreamed of monsters, closets, horrors that he could sense but could not see. He dreamed that he heard a key turning in a lock and a door being opened. Then came an explosive thunder-clap, lightning, darkness.
3
Warren T. Martin and Lieutenant Commander Joel T. Boone leapt to their feet as Brooks announced, “Gentlemen, the President.”
Harding entered the oval sitting room. He was in pajamas and dressing gown, and only half his face had been shaved. With a towel he wiped shaving cream from the unshaven side. “What happened?” He motioned for them to sit.
“Well, sir,” Martin began, nervously pulling at the fingers of his right hand with his left, “at about six-thirty this morning, I heard what sounded like somebody had slammed a door, or maybe thunder because there was this bad storm most of last night. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t. Then I got up to see how Jess was. The door to his bedroom was open and I looked in and there he was, lying on the floor, his head in this wastebasket full of ashes, with this pistol in his hand. He had shot himself in the head, on the left side.”
Harding held the right side of his own head, as if to shield it from a second bullet. “Did he leave a letter, or anything?”
“No, sir. He’d burned up a lot of papers in the wastebasket, before he …” Martin’s mouth was dry. He swallowed hard. “Then I called Mr. Burns, who lives in the apartment on the floor just below, and he called you, sir, and you sent Commander Boone here, as a medical man, and he saw the body.”
Harding looked at Boone. “You must speak to the press. Tell them … he shot himself because …” Harding rubbed his eyes.
“Because, sir, he was in a diabetic depression, and had suffered from such depression ever since last year when his appendix was removed and the scar would not heal. As there was no reason for a post-mortem, I surrendered the body to Mr. Burns of the F.B.I.”
“He’s sending the remains back to Washington Court House for interment,” said Martin.
Harding rose. “Commander, go down to the press office and make your statement. Thank you, both.” Harding shook hands with each man, and saw them to the door.
Harding then sat at the window, and looked out at the Washington Monument, like a white needle in the bright morning sun. From the hallway, he heard a door slam shut. Then he heard Daugherty’s voice. “What’s wrong with this phone in my room? I can’t get Mr. Smith on my extension.”
Whatever the usher answered was not audible to the President. But from Daugherty’s face, it was clear that he had been told: he stood in the middle of the oval sitting room, unable to speak.
“Jess did it,” said Harding. “But first he burned a lot of papers. There was nothing left in his room. No message, nothing.”
“He shot himself, with that gun he bought last week in Washington Court House.”
“With a pistol, they said. Martin found him. He phoned me. I sent over Dr. Boone. Then Burns took over. The body’s on its way home now.”
“Where did he shoot himself?”
Harding placed his left hand against the left side of his head. “Here,” he said.
“But Jess was right-handed,” said the Duchess. She stood in the doorway, wearing an elaborate silk dressing gown.
“Perhaps I heard wrong,” said the President. He shook his head. “First Cramer. Now Jess. There is a curse on us, I swear.”
“And tonight of all nights we have the Sanfords for supper. I’ll call them off.”
“No, no. That wouldn’t be seemly.”
“Or wise.” Daugherty gave a great long moan all on a single exhalation of breath.
Blaise and Frederika had been surprised to be asked to a White House family dinner party, and even more surprised that after the front-page story of Jesse Smith’s suicide, the dinner had not been cancelled.
The President was all grave politeness, but nothing more. He seemed distracted. The Attorney General spoke hardly at all. The First Lady of the Land did her best to make small talk. Since one publisher made her think of another publisher, she discussed Ned McLean at some length. “I think he’s done well by the Post I know people don’t think he’s serious. But over-all linage of advertising is three percent better than last quarter.” Blaise recalled that Mrs. Harding herself had run a newspaper for years. They spoke of advertising rates, while Frederika tried to amuse the President.
“Has a president ever been to Alaska before?”
Harding stared at her blankly; then he appeared to play back her question in his head. “No. I’m the first. I can’t wait to get out of here, let me tell you.”
“I just saw your itinerary, Mr. President. You’re very ambitious. All those stops along the way, in all that heat.”
Mrs. Harding looked up at this. “Doc Sawyer doesn’t want you to go at all. Says it’s too much. I agree.”
“It’s my job.” Blaise noted how sallow the President’s face was; also, jowls had begun to appear; when he looked down, heavy jowls flowed over his stiff collar. Blaise wondered if there was any truth to the story of Harding’s Negro blood; he also wondered why Jess Smith had killed himself. The Tribune reporter had been most suspicious of the fact that no one had seen the body except a White House doctor and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Also, it was remarkably convenient that Jess should kill himself in Daugherty’s hotel suite with an agent from the Justice Department in the next room and Mr. Burns of the F.B.I. on the floor beneath. Then, instead of an examination by a police coroner as the law required, a White House naval physician had been called in. But why, asked Blaise, would Daugherty want his closest friend killed? Why, asked the reporter, were so many papers burned and then the one person who knew their contents killed?
Mrs. Harding proposed that they watch a film in the second-floor corridor, and everyone was much relieved that there would no longer be any need to make conversation.
As Frederika and Blaise followed the President and Mrs. Harding down the corridor, past the projectionist to where five arm chairs had been arranged, Frederika whispered to Blaise, “It’s like an evening with the Macbeths.”
“Do shut up,” said Blaise.
The film was Monte Carlo, starring Emma Traxler. “We hope you haven’t seen it,” said Mrs. Harding.
“No,” said Frederika, “we haven’t. Caroline always asks us not to.”
As Emma Traxler made her entrance in a ball gown at the Winter Palace, Mrs. Harding observed, “I guess that sister of yours is the best-looking newspaper publisher in Washington.” For the first time that evening everyone laughed except Daugherty, who gave a long-drawn-out “Oh.”
FIFTEEN
1
Burden and his blind neighbor, former Senator Thomas Gore, gazed upon the moonlit woods where Gore was building a house. Defeated in 1920 after three terms in the Senate, Gore was practicing law in Washington and for the first time making money. “The house will be just out of view, three hundred yards to t
he northwest of that hill.” The blind man pointed accurately with his cane. Burden had always been delighted by the way that Gore would hold a manuscript in his hand when he spoke and, from time to time, would pretend to look at it, as if to check a statistic or the exact wording of a Latin quotation. Although two separate accidents had blinded him by the time he was ten, there was a legend that he had been elected Oklahoma’s first senator by pretending not to be blind. Hence, the pretense of reading, of seeing.
During dinner the wives had talked, now the wives were talking in the living room and the men were enjoying the warm August night. Fireflies blinked in the dark woods. The moon was behind clouds. Burden shut his eyes to see what it was like not to see. Unbearable, he decided. They spoke of the investigation of Fall. “He’s an old friend,” said Gore. “I won’t speculate on what he did or didn’t do. But Sinclair and Doheny are hard to discourage once they’ve got you in their sights.”
“Well, you turned them in.” Some years earlier, Gore had created a sensation in the Senate by revealing that he had been offered a bribe by an oil company. No one had ever done that before and, privately, Gore’s eccentricity was deplored in the cloakroom. “I’d starve if it wasn’t for my friends!” a Southern statesman had declaimed.
“I wonder now if I would’ve done what I did if I’d been as broke as Fall is. You never can tell what you might do in a different situation.”
“I don’t think you or I would take a bribe, ever.” Burden was firm.
“But then there are the contributions.” Gore sighed. “That’s where things can get right shadowy. You know, back in 1907, my first campaign, I had no money at all. Literally. Fact, I was in debt because instead of practicing law I’d been politicking, to get Oklahoma into the Union, and so on. Anyway, after I was nominated I was standing in front of the barber shop in Lawton, thinking what a fix I was in, when a stranger came up and said, ‘Here, take this,’ and gave me an envelope. Then he was gone. Well, inside that envelope was a thousand dollars.” Gore laughed. “I love telling that story because I’ve never met anybody who believes it. But that’s the way it happened.”
“You plan to come back, don’t you?”
Gore looked at him. In the moonlight his single glass eye shone, while the blind one was dull and reflected no light. “When I went down in the Harding sweep, I thought it was the end of the world. Then I pulled myself together and said to myself, Here you are, fifty years old, and you’ve been a senator since you were thirty-seven and never had a chance to make a penny. So take time off. Build a house in Rock Creek Park. Then go back. I wrote a note and hid it in the Senate chamber, saying I’d be back one day. Funny,” he held his cane in front of him like a dowsing rod, “right after I hid that scrap of paper, I went into the cloakroom to collect my gear—this was the last day of the session—and suddenly I felt two arms around me and I was being given a bear-hug and I said, ‘Who is it?’ and this voice said, ‘Just an old duffer, going off to be hung,’ and it was Harding.”
Burden recalled how radiant Harding had looked on his last day as a senator, gently teasing those senators who had taken all the credit for his election. Now he was sick in a hotel room in San Francisco. Officially he was supposed to have contracted ptomaine poisoning. But ptomaine poisoning was quick to pass, and the President had been ill for five days, and the balance of his tour was cancelled. There was talk of heart trouble. “He had so much luck for so long,” Burden said. “Now the people are getting ready to turn on him.”
“Sooner or later, they turn on everybody.” Gore sighed. “I tell you, if there was any race other than the human race, I’d go join it.”
Burden had forgotten how much he’d missed Gore’s black wit. When forced to take a stand on Prohibition, a dangerous thing to do for a Bible Belt politician, Gore had said that he thought the Eighteenth Amendment was a very fine thing. “Because now the Drys have their law and the Wets have their whisky, and everybody’s happy.”
Kitty came out onto the porch. “The White House is calling. Mr. Christian’s office.”
“So late?” Burden went into the hall; he picked up the receiver. “This is Senator Day.”
An unidentified voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you so late but Mr. Christian thinks you should know that the President is dead.”
“Dead? What?” Burden sat down on top of the refectory table, something not allowed in Kitty’s by-laws.
“Apoplexy, they say. Mr. Christian wanted you to know before the papers report it.” Burden thanked the unknown man. Then he rang Lodge. Had he heard the news? Lodge had not. When Burden told him, Lodge exclaimed, “Oh, my God! This is terrible. Unthinkable.” He seemed truly shattered.
“Well, yes, it’s pretty awful, at his age and everything. But I didn’t know you two were so close.”
“We weren’t.” Lodge’s voice had regained its usual cold balance. “I’m upset because Calvin Coolidge is now the president. Calvin Coolidge. What a humiliation for the country, that dreadful little creature in his dreadful little two-family house.”
In the living room, the Gores and Kitty responded more sympathetically. Kitty was not surprised. “You could tell he was getting sicker and sicker this last year. He was always a bad color, and so swollen-looking. I’m sure it was an old-fashioned stroke.”
Gore thought that Harding was probably well out of it. “He was much too nice a man for the presidency.”
Burden sat on a sofa, and drank Coca-Cola. “You know, he wasn’t going to run again with Coolidge.”
“Who did he want?” asked Mrs. Gore.
“Charlie Dawes. So Dawes told me. He couldn’t stand Coolidge. Nobody can. In the Cabinet he just sits and stares.”
“Now he has it all,” said Gore. “You’ll be running against him, I expect.”
“If nominated …” Burden felt the familiar tide of ambition begin its rise. Who else was there? Cox would not be acceptable after his disastrous defeat in 1920. Franklin Roosevelt was a cripple from polio and would never walk—much less run for office—again. The governor of New York, Al Smith, was a Roman Catholic. Hearst was dead politically to all but himself. McAdoo had no following. James Burden Day against Calvin Coolidge seemed now to be inevitable, with the inevitable result. Burden shuddered with delight and fear; and thought of his father.
2
Caroline stood on the terrace of Laurel House and looked down at the river. “It is All Souls’ Eve,” she observed to no one but herself. Blaise and Frederika had decided to entertain everyone in Washington, and, somehow, they had picked the evening of November I, when the souls of the dead were abroad or asleep or somewhere, waiting to be—what?—propitiated: she could not remember exactly what. Mlle. Souvestre had driven all religion out of her soul, including the attractive pagan.
The night was ominously warm, and a last summer storm was approaching the house. Time of equinox, she thought, time of change. But then was this the equinox? The science teacher had not been as successful in filling the niches in her mind which Mademoiselle had so ruthlessly emptied of their idols.
Tim had come out on the terrace. He wore evening dress; and looked older than he was. “Do they do nothing here but talk politics?”
“The gentry talk horses—and blood lines. Theirs and the horses. My father talked about music,” she added, wondering how that curious man had suddenly slipped back into her memory. “All Souls’,” she said, in explanation to herself. “My father’s spirit is abroad tonight. But I’d rather see my mother’s.”
“Your namesake.”
“Partly. Emma de Traxler Schuyler d’Agrigente Sanford. It is too long for a marquee.”
“What about for a life?”
“I don’t think she thought so. But I don’t know. I don’t remember her.”
From the lower terrace, a couple emerged from the darkness. Plainly, they had been at the pool house. “Young lovers,” said Caroline tolerantly, holding up the lorgnette that was both a decoration and necessary to see with.
“Not so young,” said Tim, whose far-sightedness complemented her myopia.
“Caroline,” said Alice Longworth, with a bright smile. “What a lovely party. What a lovely place. What a lovely film star you are. Act for us.”
“I am acting for you. I am smiling tolerantly, and recalling the fevers of my long-past youth. I am Marschallin at last.”
Senator Borah found none of this amusing. He shook hands solemnly with Caroline and Tim. “We were looking over the place,” he said. “I hadn’t realized it was so big.”
“The pool house is a great success,” said Caroline. “It is All Souls’ Night.” She turned to Alice, handsome in blue and as happy as that restless creature could be.
“So it is. I think I’ve met them all by now. After all, everyone who’s interesting is dead. We better go join them—in hell, I suppose.”
“You do. I’m going inside.” The Lion of Idaho opened the French door and stepped into the crowded drawing room.
“Do you find maternity rewarding?” asked Alice.
“My daughter’s here tonight,” was Caroline’s non-answer.
“I remember when you had her, years and years ago. Have I missed anything?”
“A great deal of trouble.”
“I’m almost forty.” In the half-light from the drawing room, Alice looked pale, like a phantom, a restless soul.
“Well, it does wonders for your skin. But then you have perfect skin. So you need not … replicate.”
“What a disgusting word,” said Alice, and went inside.
“She’s worried,” Caroline observed.
“About getting pregnant? From Senator Walsh?”
“Borah. No. Oil. Her brothers Ted and Archie Roosevelt are involved with Mr. Sinclair. If he gets involved in the Teapot Dome hearings … Why do I talk about these things when I’m out of it?”
