The Golden Age: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “They actually thought they could win a war against us?” Burden was incredulous.

  “Not win. Buy time.” Aeneas began, slowly, to twirl his wedding ring, a sign of—for some reason that Peter had not worked out—uncertainty.

  “They figured it would take us a year to recover, by which time they would have occupied southern Asia and we would never be able to dislodge them. They also knew enough about the President to figure that his only real interest was Europe. They also didn’t think we had the means or the power to fight two major wars on two hemispheres. So they took a calculated risk that proved to be miscalculated.”

  Burden started to pace the room again. “Will McCollum testify to the Senate?”

  “He must, if ordered to. Will he tell you about his program? No. He has sworn a military oath of secrecy.”

  “No military oath takes precedence over the Constitution.”

  “The military, sir, have the guns.”

  Burden stopped in his tracks. “They would overthrow the government?”

  “I think—this is only a guess, sir—that if they were driven into a corner by Congress or the new President, they would … well, let’s say be mutinous. After all, it’s their view that they have just won two great wars despite the politicians.”

  “And it is our view that we won despite the generals and admirals.” Burden’s sarcasm was genuine. Peter knew that the Senator had always been suspicious of the military, particularly at appropriation time. “Is there proof, Mr. Duncan, that the President ever said or gave the go-ahead to these acts of provocation?”

  “Only circumstantial. Commander Arthur McCollum himself often made deliveries of intercepts to the President, but usually they were routed through his naval aide.”

  “Who is what my naval friend calls one of the military kowtowers at the White House.”

  “Admiral Richardson is already on record as saying that the chief kowtower, Admiral Stark, is the most culpable of anyone for Pearl Harbor because he deliberately refused to inform the Hawaiian commanders of the coming attack.”

  “Why didn’t he, Mr. Duncan?”

  “Surely the Senate must find the answer.” The wedding ring no longer twirled.

  “No.” Burden shook his head. “Not this Senate. Brewster will complain. The Democrats will paper everything over. Then in—when did you say?”

  “1995.”

  “When we’re all gone, the story will come out. Frustrating.”

  Peter had caught a glimpse of Diana coming out of the woods above the house. Peter rose. Aeneas retrieved his various folders. “I think,” said Peter, “that we can put together a sort of hypothetical story, without running the risk of prison. ‘Unanswered questions’ we might call it.”

  “You’re very brave, Peter.” Burden seemed to mean what he said. “I’ll do what I can …”

  “Put our unanswered questions into the Congressional Record. That would be a help.”

  “Hardly a great blow for liberty. But the trend toward liberty is hardly noticeable these days. Too much has been done in unconstitutional secret, too many crimes covered up.”

  “The cost,” said Peter, as blithely as he could, “of empire.”

  They parted. Aeneas drove back to the Union Trust Building while Peter asked Diana for a ride. “Where to?”

  “Laurel House. Unless you object?”

  “No. I like your parents, as parents go.” Mostly in silence they drove along the canal that paralleled the Potomac. The early morning’s light snow was turning to slush. “They’ve taken in Alice, haven’t they?”

  Peter, at first, had no idea whom she was talking about. “Alice who?”

  “Your niece, Enid’s child. By Clay. We assume.”

  “Oh, yes. I suppose so. How did you know?”

  “Clay told me. After Enid was put away …” She did not finish.

  “And Clay is now a legal resident of the Sunflower Hotel in that state of his, until November at least.” Peter turned onto Chain Bridge, a splendid relic of the Civil War, all chains and skeletal girders flung in what looked to be a haphazard way across the Potomac, now darkly aswirl with icy winter currents. The bridge was doubly symbolic: the last thing for him to cross after leaving home on the Virginia side of the river, the first thing that he crossed when he left the District of Columbia for Laurel House. He noted how comparatively placid the river was for this season. Usually it had risen dramatically by January, twisting and turning and roaring. Were there floods to come? As a boy, he had watched with awe sheets of water strike the bridge which would then writhe and sway and threaten to break into pieces and fall, full fathom five to the dark mud bottom. Threaten but never had. So far.

  “Do you see her?” Diana was frowning. Peter wondered why.

  “See Alice?”

  “See Enid.”

  “Yes. From time to time. Dr. Paulus thinks it may take a year or two to dry her out and deal with her demons …” Peter glanced at Diana’s profile; the jaw was set, concentrating on the road. “Have you been out to the sanitarium?”

  “No. But she did ring me not long ago. To warn me against Clay.” Diana turned onto the river road, made dangerous by black ice; she drove in second gear. The road was narrow, two lanes that, at points, particularly on curves, could not properly accommodate two cars as they passed each other. One would have to skid to a halt. Peter tried, as he often had in the past, to visualize the Washington dignitaries in their carriages, on a warm summery day, driving out to see the Union Army suffer its first major defeat at Manassas Court House. A former slave, allowed to live for nothing in his cabin on the Laurel House grounds, enjoyed recounting the events of that fateful day, and though the Union Army eventually took credit for freeing him, he himself favored the white Confederates whom he knew as opposed to the Yankees of whom he had never heard a good word. Peter assumed he was no longer alive.

  A mirage of low-slung coaches containing smart congressmen and be-bustled ladies faded into the snowy woods on either side of the river road. “Warned you of what?” The thought of Enid and Diana even knowing each other well enough to talk on the telephone seemed somehow wrong.

  “She is convinced that Clay will run against Father in 1950.”

  “Isn’t this a little too soon to be plotting? Clay won’t be elected to the House until November, if he’s elected, which he can’t be without your father’s help. Then, if he is, 1950 is still four years away.”

  “I know. It makes no sense to me. I just wondered if Enid had said anything to you.”

  “No. But I’ll bring it up when I see her next week. I’ve never trusted Clay.”

  “I know.” Diana swung the car onto the driveway leading through woods to Laurel House; then she stopped, engine running. “He’s in a great hurry.”

  “Is that the excuse for what he’s done—does?”

  “I think it probably is. Of course, he’s used Father mercilessly.”

  “He’s also used my father—but mercifully.” Peter was rather pleased with that highly fraught adverb. “I’ve always suspected a wide streak of lavender, as Blaise would say, in Blaise. Clay brings it out.”

  Diana stopped frowning and smiled. “He flirts.”

  “He’s catnip, obviously, to powerful old men.”

  “Women, too.”

  “To you?” Would what had been unspoken between them for so many years now be said?

  “Yes.”

  Peter stared out the car window. A red-brick wing to Laurel House was visible through the rows of thin trees neatly set in fresh snow the way department-store Christmas trees are set in fiberglass. “They used to say that during the fighting here at Fort Marcey, all the trees were knocked down, and that the new ones never again grew to their old height. You should have told me.”

  “I never thought you’d be really interested.”

  “What splendid antennae you have! No emotion goes undetected; no matter how delicate.” Irony was an easy option at such a time. But then Peter had never
before encountered such a time as this. He was cool in most relationships and easily satisfied with brief encounters in those parts of town where he was not apt to find anyone that he knew except, of course, those also on the prowl, in which case mutual discretion was the rule. Also, in wartime, the ratio of women to men in the city had been so skewed that between working women and military men serious emotions need be neither tapped nor affected. But with Diana that day beside the spring in Rock Creek Park, he had experienced a sense of total familiarity, if not of lust—friends, for him, were exempt from so predatory an emotion. Rather, a powerful desire simply to be with her was, in his view, a far deeper emotion than the mere sexual, particularly because he had assumed that it was exactly the way she herself had felt when she hastily, mistakenly, kissed his earlobe.

  “Clay was the first,” she said.

  “And Billy Thorne the second.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one can accuse you of having a type.”

  “Each made the weather, in his way.”

  “Each used you.” That was brutal.

  “I’m not vain. Why not be used? Or be of use. Of course, Billy turned out to be ridiculous and so did I, for marrying him.”

  “And Clay?”

  Diana turned and faced him. “We plan to be married after the election.”

  “Even if he’s not elected?” This was most brutal of all.

  “That’s below the belt. Anyway, if he’s not, which is unlikely, I admit that he probably will not renew his offer to me. He will need a rich wife. Of course, he needs one now, but I serve his purpose in other ways. I’m Burden’s daughter. That will help him in the state. In Congress, too, only …” She stopped; again, the frown. “Father thinks he can beat Truman. In the 1948 primary. He thinks Dewey will be easy to beat in the general election.”

  “In which case, President Day’s daughter gets her man.”

  “To put it bluntly. But Father’s too old now. He’ll settle for reelection in 1950. I think Clay may try to …” She stopped.

  “I can’t imagine him running against his own father-in-law.”

  “I’m not so sure. If he did, he would be obliged to run as a divorced man. Twice divorced. First from Enid. Then from me.”

  “It would seem that you hold all the cards.”

  “No. Only what I’ve been dealt. But I’m not sure if I want to play them. I think when my father was young he must have been very like Clay. Ruthless. In a hurry. That excites Electra, you know.”

  “How would I know? I’m only what’s his name? Her brother? Orestes. Pursued by Furies.”

  “I think Father must have been involved with many women.”

  “Including my Aunt Caroline. He’s supposed to be the father of the unspeakable Emma.”

  “Good God! What an awful thought.” She started the car, and began the descent to the house. “Emma, the toast of the FBI, is my half sister?”

  “So Blaise once told me. In his cups, of course.”

  “Does Burden know?”

  “I’m sure Aunt Caroline confides in him the occasional sentimental secret.”

  Diana parked in the driveway. Peter took her arm and led her across a sheet of ice, glittering with large rough grains of salt.

  Blaise and Frederika were in the drawing room, staring at the bedraggled Christmas tree, whose needles were gently falling off. The room had the exciting—to Peter still—Christmas smell of pine and peppermint.

  “We are beginning to think about having it taken down.” Absently, Frederika kissed Diana and rather formally shook her son’s hand.

  “Alice wants us to keep it here for the rest of the year.” Blaise turned to Frederika. “I’ve stopped thinking about it. Let’s get it out of here before she’s finished her nap.” Blaise led Peter and Diana into his library. “People are still talking about your Potsdam piece. I hear the White House is fit to be tied. That’s always the bull’s-eye. Why don’t you come work for me?”

  “Oh, I like having my own little paper.”

  “You’ll have mine one day.” He turned to Diana. “What’s happened to that husband of yours?”

  “I have no idea. Someone said he may have gone to work for the Wall Street Journal.”

  “A man of total principle.” Blaise chuckled.

  “He left his coat and hat in the office,” said Peter, angling his chair so that Aaron Burr was not in his line of sight. “We may raffle them off.” Then he realized that he had so arranged his chair that immediately in front of him, on a side table, he could enjoy the silver-framed portrait of Enid and Clay on their wedding day. He tried not to look at Clay and, of course, could not look at anything else as he envisaged the preposterously handsome face and body entwined with Diana on a bed—but where? When? How often?

  “Your sponsor, Mrs. Samuel I. Bloch, paid me a call.” Blaise was in a good mood.

  “My ideal sponsor. When I wanted to get rid of Billy Thorne, she discovered, quite on her own, a loophole in our agreement with him, and that was that.”

  “Practical woman. She wants to buy the house.”

  “Laurel House?” Diana sounded astonished.

  “The very same. When I told her how much I wanted for it, she didn’t bat an eye.”

  It was Peter’s turn to be astonished. “You’d really sell?”

  “For the right price. Why not? We’re too far out of town. Your mother likes the idea of being able to walk to Woodward and Lothrop’s.”

  “She’ll never walk there, or anywhere else.” Like so many indolent people, Frederika never ceased to celebrate the virtues of exercise, which, in her case, meant, once a week, a stately dog paddle across—never the length of—the pool.

  “Where will you live?” Peter felt suddenly ejected from what had been for so long his home.

  “There’s no hurry. Georgetown maybe. Or back to Massachusetts Avenue. Our old house is only rented for another year. Anyway, we must adjust to postwar America. We must simplify. We’ve always had trouble getting servants to work so far out of town. Now we won’t be able to get any. Besides, it appears that all the servants were killed in the war.”

  “That means another monument at Arlington.” Peter had just done a piece celebrating Washington as the great necropolis of a nation so furiously dedicated to peace that it was almost never not at war to ensure ultimate peace for all time. “President Truman will dedicate it to the Unknown Upstairs Maid, sunk at Pearl Harbor, while polishing the brass.”

  “What are you going to do about Pearl Harbor?” Blaise had lately shown more than a polite interest in Peter’s projects. Peter wondered if, perhaps, his father might not be poaching his ideas for the Tribune.

  “It depends on what your father does.”

  Peter turned to Diana, who simply shook her head and said, “He can’t hold hearings because hearings are being held. He could release his …” Diana paused, in search of a word. “… his findings. But who would testify in his favor?”

  “What … findings?” Blaise was now the alert publisher of the capital’s finest morning newspaper.

  But Peter was not about to give his father so potentially sensational a story. “It’s something that may or may not be relevant—the higher hearsay.”

  “So I’ll have to wait until I read what you write?” Blaise’s attempt at a jolly smile vanished beneath disappointed jowls.

  “If I write about it. How is Enid?” Peter changed the subject.

  “We’re still trying to find a way for her to divorce Clay.”

  “I thought it was going to be the other way around.” Diana was bold.

  Blaise seemed surprised that she would be interested. “Well, yes, that’s been discussed, too. Which is worse for a young man in politics? To divorce a wife in a sanitarium or have her divorce him? Neither’s apt to be very desirable.”

  “Particularly,” said Diana, “back home in the ultraconservative Second District.”

  “Burden! Of course. Yes, he’ll be concerned, won’t he? He’s
handling Clay’s campaign.”

  “Very concerned,” Diana reprised, glancing at Peter, who looked away. He had still not absorbed the fact that she was back within Clay’s orbit. But then he had not believed the rumors—admittedly, before he knew her well—that she had been in love with Clay, who had then left her to marry Enid for the sake of his career while she had married Billy Thorne to show that her judgment in these matters could be as misguided as his. After all, Clay had finally lost Enid to alcohol and a lover in the Navy, but, in the process, he had obtained custody of Blaise Sanford and, presently, he would be free, one way or another, to return to Diana, daughter of his mentor and campaign manager. Idly, Peter tried to hate Clay and was pleased to note that even a second-best effort was more than enough to start his blood pressure to rise.

  “I’m going to New York,” Peter announced, somewhat to his own surprise.

  “To live?” Blaise was politely neutral.

  “No. To stay with Aeneas. Meet some of our contributors.”

  “That’s always a mistake,” said the senior publisher. “They’ll ask you for more money which you don’t have.”

  ELEVEN

  Mr. and Mrs. Aeneas Duncan and three-year-old Master Duncan lived five floors up in an old gray—for some reason—brownstone in Thirteenth Street west of Sixth Avenue. “We have a guest room,” Aeneas had admitted when Peter said he’d probably stay at the Gotham Hotel where Sanfords always stayed.

  “Petesie!” Rosalind Duncan threw her arms around him. She, alone in the world, called him Petesie, but then she had pet names for everyone; indeed, she had a tendency, thanks to her profession as a child psychologist, to chatter away in baby talk, which no doubt delighted tiny patients but unnerved her contemporaries. “Isn’t him a bit porky-worky?” She patted Peter’s stomach, which he promptly drew in.