The Golden Age: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

The first tally came from a New Hampshire village: Dewey had won it. Aeneas was the first to quote the old joke, “As New Hampshire goes, so goes Vermont.”

  Peter bet Aeneas that New York State would go for Truman. Aeneas bet five dollars that Dewey would win the state. “The liberals—the Americans for Demonic Action—are so busy smearing Henry Wallace’s Progressives as communists that they are going to knock off Truman, too. Guilt by association.”

  “Ironic” was the best that Peter could do. Dewey was an unacceptable candidate for those who thought that the future role of the United States would now be set for some time to come. Wallace, alone of the candidates, had accused Truman of committing the United States to a never-ending “cold war” against communism, which meant any regime that ignorant Congress and ignorant President could be persuaded to dislike.

  In addition to smearing Roosevelt’s heir as a communist, Truman had ensured the Negro vote with a vigorous stand on civil rights, while his sponsorship of Israel cut deeply into another of Wallace’s natural constituencies. The South’s candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond, was simply undercut, as Truman knew he would be, by an ancient Southern voting pattern. Each generation since the Civil War had been “Yellow Dog Democrats,” meaning that they would cheerfully vote for a yellow dog if he was on the Democratic ticket. That night Truman’s various gambles paid off. Thurmond carried only four states of the old Confederacy. Wallace’s liberal enemies split New York’s vote, giving the state to Dewey.

  At eight in the morning, only Peter and Aeneas were still listening to the radio. The others had gone home. All night, Truman had been at least a million votes ahead in the popular vote, but the wishfully thoughtful commentators and analysts maintained that Dewey would, eventually, win in the number of states carried. At eight-thirty a.m. that dream ended when Ohio voted for Truman. Peter gave Aeneas five dollars. “I lose on New York but I win on the election. I knew Truman would win.”

  “How?”

  “The night he was nominated, I spent a few minutes with him and Barkley, who thought—like everyone else—that they were going to lose. He didn’t say so, of course. Politicians don’t. But Truman knew what he was thinking and so he said, very casually, ‘I know you don’t believe it but I’m going to win this election.’ I could tell by the way he said it that he meant it. I could also tell that he knew something no one else did.”

  “What?”

  “The people, I suppose. The voters, anyway.”

  The telephones at The American Idea were now beginning to ring. With an American airlift supplying encircled Berlin and loyalty oaths being administered throughout the country in the hopes of trapping spies, Harry Truman would now be presiding, in his own right, over a highly fearful nation that was transforming itself, before Peter’s eyes, into something altogether different from what had gone before. Truman, the principal transformer, had dexterously appealed to those who were being reluctantly transformed. Uncanny instinct, thought Peter. Great mischief, too. Yet Peter was certain that Truman had not the slightest idea what he was doing and where the country was going. But then no one, placed in a given period of time, could ever know.

  FOURTEEN

  1

  Peter came to New York and stayed not with Aeneas but at the Gotham in Fifty-fifth Street off Fifth Avenue. Upon arriving, he had lunch with Cornelia Claiborne, as droll as ever. He took her to Robert’s across from the hotel. Robert was an elegant Francophone—Swiss? Belgian? He always wore a morning coat and striped trousers and sternly encouraged Peter to practice his French.

  Robert announced the arrival of fresh shad roe from the Hudson River and the season’s first asparagus. Both were ordered, since Peter’s latest vow to diet had been set aside as he entered a restaurant that he had known since childhood.

  “Were you taken here for culture?” asked Cornelia; they sat side by side on a banquette, a hedge of yellow roses and feathery green fern separating them from the next booth.

  “To Robert’s?”

  “No. To New York.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Mason Morton,” he said.

  “Miss Mason Morton.” Both laughed. The lady had been a fixture in the Washington of their childhood. Conscientious but “busy” parents would call upon this lean, energetic Baltimore spinster to escort their children to New York City for initiation into high culture, something that Washington so proudly lacked. She would take her charges to museums, to theaters: usually Shakespeare, starring Maurice Evans, whose footlit spittle during long speeches glittered as it fell upon the audience like the girl in the fairy tale who extruded jewels and roses when she spoke, so unlike the wicked girl from whose lips fell only toads and scorpions. Opera was also a favorite of Miss Mason Morton. Peter still recalled the excitement of sitting in a box at the Metropolitan Opera House as it suddenly became still and the lights dimmed and the red plush and gilt all around him darkened and the overture began.

  Cornelia’s experience had been the same. “Though I seemed to have got more than my share of The Nutcracker. What was your first opera?”

  “Madame Butterfly with Licia Albanese, still going strong.”

  Each confessed to an early passion for the Hayden Planetarium with its ever-changing starry dome and curious ice-cream-parlor smell.

  Cornelia then discussed The Hudson Review, which she had helped to found. He had done no more than glance at this elegant academic literary quarterly (Partisan Review was his current reading), but Aeneas had found it serious if a bit too strong on what was currently being called the New Criticism, so very like the old except that all historical context—Peter’s only interest—was to be sternly stripped away to reveal the text in its shy nakedness, weakly etherized upon a table, prepared for critical autopsy.

  “Gore is angry with me because the editors, under the pseudonym ‘Shrike,’ attacked both him and Capote in the first issue.”

  “Surely he’s used to attacks by now. After all, he and Dr. Kinsey have libeled the great republic as a land of sexual perversity.”

  “Well, to be exact, he only objected to being linked with Capote.”

  “He would have preferred Dr. Kinsey, I’m sure.”

  “Mother thinks Shakespeare is more apt.”

  As the shad roe arrived, Peter quizzed Cornelia about what seemed to him something of a recent phenomenon. He had noticed that most of the writers for the Hudson Review taught at universities while even the politically minded Partisan Review was publishing an unusual number of schoolteachers. “We usually steer clear of them,” he said. “We prefer freelance writers like Dwight Macdonald or Edmund Wilson or artist-critics like Virgil Thomson.”

  “Wasn’t it always like that? What you call schoolteachers writing about what they teach?”

  “I don’t remember ‘always’ very well.” Peter put a strip of bacon over his shad roe. “But the English seem to be able to be writers and critics without becoming teachers or at least not admitting it if they are. I suppose the problem with most of our academics is that they don’t write very well.”

  Cornelia frowned. “Possibly because they aren’t meant to write but to teach. But then I don’t suppose I know anything at all about ‘always,’ either. I mean I’m not really literary or political or … But maybe it’s because so many of the young men from the war went to college on the GI Bill of Rights and then decided they wanted to stay on in the colleges.”

  “Putting down roots in Academe while writing for tenure?” Peter made a note. “But when will they ever get to see the world?”

  “They saw the war.”

  “Most of life is peacetime. Or was until last week.”

  Peter was already at work on an analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: a permanent military alliance of West European nations under the control of the United States. This was supposed to be a deterrent to Stalin’s known ambition to conquer the earth—so eerily like Hitler’s—but actually it was plain to both Peter and Aeneas that NATO was to be nothing more than the outward and visible si
gn of the military annexation of Western Europe by the United States on the sensible ground that American bases in so many countries would intimidate any Western government from going to the left. NATO’s brain was the supersecret Central Intelligence Agency, which had managed, somehow, to take public credit for the defeat of the Communist Party in the Italian elections of April 1948.

  A year later, the first secretary of defense, Forrestal, had installed a B-29 base in England in order to protect the British Isles from a surprise nuclear attack: this would have been, Peter had written, a true surprise, since the Soviets still lacked nuclear weapons. Forrestal’s airy response to this argument had been that, even so, it was a good idea to get the British used to a permanent American military presence in their vulnerable islands. Forrestal himself was now in a military hospital, suffering from “nervous breakdown”: he had been captured running through the streets of Washington shouting, “The Russians are coming!” At least such was the whispering gallery’s version of why he was so swiftly removed as chief of the defense of the last free nation on earth. But Peter had then uneasily added: wasn’t the United States also as occupied as Great Britain by an ever-increasing military establishment that was costing the earth? Aeneas reminded him of the ancient vaudeville adage “Don’t make a joke on a joke.” Peter cut the line.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t go to the funeral.” Cornelia was tentative.

  “I hate them, too.” Peter had developed several responses to condolences, of which the most effective was changing the subject, but since Cornelia had been a friend of Enid’s, he repeated yet again how his sister had fled from Dr. Paulus’s institution in the doctor’s car (he had left the key in the ignition); just south of Richmond, she had smashed into a farmer’s truck containing two cows. “Yes.” Peter anticipated Cornelia’s question. “She had been drinking. She must have stopped somewhere on the road. She was planning to divorce Clay.”

  “She was very unlucky.” Cornelia ate an asparagus with her fingers.

  “Very unlucky. Clay, on the other hand, has more luck than is usual.”

  “What is usual? Faust?”

  “Faust was supernatural. Blaise as tempter-in-chief is more usual. Except I can’t see my besotted father as anything so glamorous as Mephistopheles. I’d cast Clay for that.”

  Cornelia was surprised. “He is so … blond. I mean bland.” She laughed. “I mean both.”

  The sommelier poured them the last of the Chassagne-Montrachet. “Blonds can be diabolic, too. Not you, of course.”

  “I’m borderline blond. Bland, too, I fear.”

  Peter asked Cornelia to go to the movies with him. “I plan to see at least four today. I seldom get the chance to see even one in Washington. Aeneas usually covers all the arts for us, searching restlessly for an American Idea. I’m beginning to think he thinks anything will do. We’ve given up on the The. Tell no one.”

  Cornelia declined the invitation to go see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and then, at a small movie house on Broadway, Fire over Luzon, starring Audie Murphy “in a real-life story of heroism in war.” A larger-than-life-size poster showed Murphy, a handsome youth who had won, in real life, in the real war, the Medal of Honor for killing German soldiers; he was carrying a wounded marine out of a flaming building.

  Clay Overbury was identified in the credits as the original hero of this “real-life story,” taken from the book by Harold Griffiths, “the GI’s Homer.” Peter rather doubted if the classical allusion, no doubt Harold’s contribution, had done much for the box office. Even so, for early evening, the theater was half full with adolescent males and a few matronly women. Voters.

  Apparently Clay—the protagonist—was a youth from the American heartland. He had had his doubts about foreign wars but when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor he enlisted even though he was supposed to marry a girl who lived, for some unclear reason, far from the heartland in Washington, D.C. Audie Murphy’s astonishing feats in the real war made even the most bogus movie scenes of combat come to life. Reel after reel, Clay’s luck kept on holding. At the end, grateful neighbors sent the shy Audie with his new wife to Congress to make sure that there would never be another war in the new world that Audie-Clay had so famously risked his life to give birth to. The Harold Griffiths touch was everywhere as the young couple, at the end, loomed like archangels over the dome of the Capitol, a radiant alabaster skull set in lush green. Peter made a note: “Why are greens and yellows so phony in American films?”

  Peter took a taxi to the East Side. The sun had just set and the sky was a bright electric April blue.

  The offices of Hugh Pendleton, M.D., were on the ground floor of an East Side brownstone. Peter was immediately shown into the doctor’s office by an irritable receptionist; it was almost eight-thirty p.m. and long past closing time in the land of healing.

  Dr. Pendleton was professionally benign. “I hope you don’t mind this ungodly hour but I’ve had a heavy schedule today. At Memorial.” He added the chilling touch.

  “Cancer’s on the increase?” Peter had a morbid if not quite hypochondriacal fascination with disease. Dr. Pendleton motioned for him to sit in a brown leather chair beneath several museum posters featuring Oriental art. On the wall next to his medical degrees, he had hung a Chinese scroll painting—bird in a willow tree, boldly rendered. “Well, it looks like we’re doing more surgeries but I suspect that’s only because we’re better at early detection.” He took off one pair of glasses and put on another. He looked to be Clay’s age.

  “As you know,” said Peter, “I was given your name by my sister’s lawyer, Al Hartshorne.”

  “At Mrs. Overbury’s funeral. Yes. Mr. Hartshorne told me that he’d spoken to you. Very sad. Very sad.”

  “Yes. For some of us at least.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Pendleton’s voice was neutral: inquiring for symptoms?

  “I’ve just come from the movies. In the daytime. I’m afraid I feel a bit decadent.”

  “I seldom go at all. Too tired.”

  “But you saw what I just saw. Fire over Luzon.”

  Dr. Pendleton nodded. “I’d been reading about Congressman Overbury these last few years. And I knew there was a book about him, which I didn’t read but Life or Look ran a section from it, about Lingayen Gulf. Naturally, I was interested.” Dr. Pendleton was eyeing Peter with some curiosity.

  “And, naturally,” Peter picked up the conversational slack, “I was interested to hear that Mr. Hartshorne had been in touch with you. He was preparing my sister’s divorce case when she died.”

  “Apparently it was not going to be an amicable divorce.”

  “No.” Peter was not about to give any more details than necessary. “You had told a friend that you were there that day, when—Audie Murphy saved a marine from the burning hangar.”

  Dr. Pendleton’s smile was very small indeed. His eyebrows grew together in a straight line, mark of the devil Peter had been told in youth by certain members of the Laurel House domestic staff, ever on guard against Lucifer and all his works. “No. I wasn’t at the airfield that day. I was at a hospital in the jungle, ten miles or so away. Just a Quonset hut, really.”

  Peter’s stomach began to churn from tension. A recent development. Dyspepsia?

  “So if you weren’t there, how would you know—what happened?”

  “I didn’t know. But I did know that Clay Overbury wasn’t there either. He had cut his foot and the wound was infected—gangrene’s always a problem, particularly in the tropics. I was busy trying out penicillin on him. We had just got our first shipment and I’m afraid we were really splurging. Reckless, considering how little we knew about side effects.”

  “So he could not have been at the airfield when the Japanese bombed that particular hangar.”

  “No.” An odd smile. “But I thought Audie Murphy very convincing. Of course he was actually there. I mean on the set, anyway.”

  “How did Mr. Hartshorne find you?”

  “We hav
e a mutual friend. I’m afraid I’d told her how funny I thought the story was. She told Mr. Hartshorne.”

  Peter was thinking hard. But then so, apparently, was Dr. Pendleton. “I’m quite aware of the political and ethical problems involved,” he said. “The political, for Congressman Overbury, is obvious. The ethical, for me, is difficult. We’re not supposed to talk about our patients, to put it mildly.”

  “But you have talked, haven’t you?” Peter was gentle, almost apologetic. “So the story is not only now known but it would have figured, directly or indirectly, in my sister’s divorce suit. There’s really nothing to be done about what’s said and done. Tell me,” having made his gentle threat, Peter moved on, “how did the story get out, to begin with? Was there a wounded marine in the hangar? Did someone save him? In the presence of a cameraman?”

  “At Lingayen Gulf there were many marines, dead and wounded. And someone did carry one of them out of a burning hangar.” Dr. Pendleton removed a glossy photograph from his drawer. “I must say I was curious as to how the mistake was made. So I got this printed up from the original negative. United Press was very helpful. As you can see, there is no way of telling who the rescuer really is. The light from the fire’s back of him. So he’s in total silhouette. He wears no insignia. Officers didn’t in combat. So it could be Clay. It could be me. It could be—well, certainly it was whoever it was, of course. Only he’s never recognized himself, that we know of.”

  “We? You know a lot about this.”

  “Al got me curious. But the only person who really knows is the journalist who was there and invented the story. Henry—no.” He frowned. “I have a block about his name.”

  “Harold Griffiths.”

  “Yes. Personally, I preferred Ernie Pyle.”

  “Who didn’t?” Peter rose to go.

  At the door the doctor gave him a prescription form with a name scribbled on it. “This might be useful.”

  Peter took the slip of paper.

  “It’s the name of the photographer. He’s still alive, UP says. You must lose weight.”