The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  Peter listened attentively. He’d already decided to turn down her offer to be a columnist on a regular basis. He had too much work as it was. But, at a certain level, the idea appealed to him. There was something satisfyingly immediate about appearing in print along with the news instead of waiting a month or more to be heard from on a subject of ever-lessening urgency.

  Peter wondered if the rumors were true that she wanted to sell the paper. Dolly had inherited a fortune and so could keep the Post going no matter how hard the times were for other newspapers. But she was said to be flighty or, as Aeneas put it, “First, she’ll want you to be managing editor. If you fail at that, she’ll want you to marry her. If you fail at that, she’ll give you a column.”

  Peter declined an invitation to dinner. “I must get back to Washington.” He reached in his pocket for his train ticket, found the stub of a movie ticket instead. Fire over Luzon. Would he dare? He should. For Enid’s sake. But not yet. He declined Mrs. Schiff’s offer. She walked him to the door.

  “Remember me to your father. And to your Aunt Caroline. She was the first woman in this business. I really admire her.”

  2

  Caroline had always liked Blaise’s Italianate palazzo on Massachusetts Avenue. Since it was next door to the elegant ivory-colored Embassy of Japan, the Japanese had tried to buy it from him just before the war, as an embassy for their newly acquired “nation” of Manchuria. Righteously, the Roosevelt administration refused to recognize so recent an acquisition. Blaise had then rented out the house and moved, permanently, he had thought, to the Potomac Palisades. Now he was back and Laurel House was the property of Mrs. Samuel I. Bloch.

  The drawing room was splendid as summer light played off a series of millefleurs tapestries from Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, a present from half sister to half brother. With an effort that had given her a terrible headache, Caroline managed not to limp. Doctors had spoken of recent surgical miracles where an artificial hip could easily replace the faulty original. Caroline had declined the generous offer. A wheelchair would do her very well at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. After all, Franklin had governed the world from a wheelchair and she saw no reason why she could not run the chateau just as well, if not as easily, as Franklin had done. Of course, he had had rather more help than she, not to mention an easier opponent in Stalin, who was mildness itself compared to the truly villainous communist mayor of her village. Now she had come to say goodbye to Washington, to the United States, to that exciting if somewhat rustic world in which she had for so long played a part, sometimes as a principal but more often, lately, as privileged spectator.

  “Time for me to go home,” she said to Blaise, who stood beneath two of the four Poussins that she had sold to buy and re-create the Tribune during the days when her then enemy, Blaise, had successfully kept her inheritance from her. Once she had made a success of the paper (with some help from Hearst), she had made her victory complete by taking in Blaise as her co-publisher; then she had bought back the four paintings, given Blaise two, and kept the better pair for herself. Now, a half century later, her American adventure was done.

  Blaise embraced her warmly. In the background, Frederika was doing the honors as hostess. All Washington—le gratin as Irene would say in her powerful French—was gathering to say farewell to one of their own who, without having lost an election, had mysteriously chosen to move far, far away from the only world that mattered to its residents, particularly now that their rustic town had become the world’s capital.

  “I am eccentric,” said Caroline to Blaise, who looked somewhat blurred. She needed new glasses.

  “Well, if Washington’s our natural center, then you are moving to the outer edge—to France, and that’s literally eccentric.”

  The room was filling up with familiar faces from her past as well as those made familiar thanks to Time and Newsweek magazine cover stories that brought what seemed, for the one so noticed, true fame when, actually, it was only a week’s notoriety in a given year that contained, dishearteningly for the thoughtful, fifty-one other weeks and faces.

  “I’ve had an offer for the Tribune,” said Blaise. “What do you think?”

  “How much?”

  “That’s still being discussed. I’m getting old and you’re going away and Peter …” He frowned.

  “He’s peculiar. Yes. I know.” She wondered if she had an aspirin in her handbag. “He wants to be a voice. A power. But says no to a newspaper. Does that little magazine of his break even?”

  “A bit better. Anyway, he’s come into another small trust fund. From Frederika’s aunt. The one in Watertown, Connecticut. They made brass buttons in the Civil War. He can now lose bits of money forever.”

  Caroline was tempted to ask why Blaise hadn’t considered leaving his shares to Clay, but she was not certain that this was the sort of thing that could be safely asked even by a departing half sister. “Do what you think is best,” she said. “There is a time for everything, including letting go.”

  “What news of Tim?”

  “Let go!” Caroline laughed; and lightly rubbed the back of her neck. “He’s making a film in Hollywood. Something that hardly anyone does anymore. Everything’s on location these days. Or made for television. The old studios are all letting go, too.”

  “I saw Emma out at Chevy Chase last week.”

  “Did you speak?”

  “She spoke for two. As always. She’s working for Joe McCarthy. It seems that Alger Hiss was only the tip of a very large iceberg. She has proof that Dean Acheson is the brains of the communist conspiracy in the United States.”

  “Surely,” said Dean Acheson, who had heard this last, “the real brains are those of President Truman. I only carry out orders. A loyal foot soldier.” The elegant Secretary of State bowed to brother and sister. “I never see you,” he said to Caroline, “and now you’re going away.”

  “I can go, contentedly, knowing that a loyal foot soldier is in charge of the State Department.”

  “Foot-in-mouth soldier, I think one of your columnists called me.” Acheson’s smile was like that of a cat not yet determined whether or not to yawn, the cat’s signal that all is well, or to hiss and claw.

  “Well, Dean, you know the press.” Blaise was offhand.

  Caroline was direct. “You deserve every sort of medal for your duels with McCarthy.”

  “That is what I most like to hear.”

  Caroline seated herself on a sofa while Blaise led Acheson off to greet some Senate admirers. As always, she was struck by how busy everyone had become in what had been for so long a sleepy town with an African climate now banished—indoors at least—by air-conditioning. The government seemed never to stop humming away, so unlike the long quiet afternoons when Secretary of State John Hay and Henry Adams and she would sit in old Henry’s splendid study and discuss Racine, with Caroline providing the right, she hoped, Comédie Française readings. There had been limitless time at the start of the century. Now, at the middle, the days were too short even to do what needed doing while the calendars seemed to contain not only fewer but ever shorter months. But then in the half century since she had first come upon the Washington scene, this leisurely world, hardly much different from that of John Quincy Adams, had been jolted by the First World War and the attendant corruption that war always brought; then jolted yet again by a second world war that had made the entire world, like it or not, an American responsibility.

  Who could keep track of Acheson’s activities? He had just taken three pieces of western Germany, stitched them together, and made a new republic. Next he had put in order the disorderly French house. He had even helped finance their attempts to regain control of France’s Southeast Asian empire of Indochina, now at risk to the rising tide of communism. He was also supporting the British. This busy-ness was exciting if one were young and a part of it. But she was neither. She missed the old Washington, “the city of conversation” as Henry James had noted, not entirely in ironic mode. Unfortunately, she had no on
e left to talk to. For her, the gallery was now still. The headache in the back of her head was definitely unimproved by the icy air-conditioning that Blaise had installed in the drawing room. Then her nephew sat beside her and he talked to her.

  Peter was surprisingly interesting, she had discovered in the last years of what she had come to think of as a long Bernhardt-like farewell tour. “Are you really going?”

  “Certainly. At least in the actuarial sense.” She saw a familiar figure in the middle distance, a short thick man with lion’s head and mane. “Isn’t that Senator Borah?”

  Peter smiled. “He’s been dead ten years.”

  Caroline’s face felt cold: as if a blast of winter air had singled her out on this bright June day. “Now you know why I am leaving. I can no longer tell who’s dead and who’s not.”

  “It’s a problem for the whole town. After all, to be out of office is to be out of life.”

  “Out of town first was always the best policy. But it’s nice seeing ghosts. I saw Harry Hopkins in Fifth Avenue the other day. He looked better than he had in years. I’m sure he recognized me. They must give them some time off—you know, for bad behavior.”

  “Or maybe we’re just allowed to think we see them.”

  Again the blast of cold air against her cheek. “Now that is macabre.” Caroline abandoned the ghost world. “I hear that you refuse to take over the paper that I invented, with so much effort.”

  “It would do no good. You see …” He paused, as if uncertain what next to say. He began again. “The problem is there aren’t going to be newspapers in the next ten, twenty years, not like before, not even like now.”

  “Television?”

  “That’s where what news there is will come from. By the time you get to the front page of the Tribune, you’ve already been told as much as you want to know about Mao’s meeting with Stalin.”

  Caroline’s “No!” was emphatic. “Television’s nothing but surface. It also involves looking straight into a lightbulb, which is bad for the eyes, not to mention concentration. Who remembers what he’s seen five minutes after? They are doing tests now. On how TV shuts off the mind. Damages memory. I don’t think Mr. Sarnoff is encouraged.”

  “But his audience increases. Ours decreases.”

  “We can still analyze the news.”

  “Does anyone really care what Harold Griffiths thinks about General Eisenhower’s plans to be president? Or what the Sop Sisters, the Alsops, that is, think about the Yellow Peril?”

  “Lippmann’s worth reading.” Caroline wondered why she was so uncharacteristically weak on her own subject.

  “If he really is, he’ll end up on television. No, I see the city with one morning paper, the Post. One evening paper, the Star, full of predictable opinions and wrong guesses. Then the evening paper will give way to television news and the morning paper will be a sort of court circular.”

  “You will go to television?” Caroline felt as if she were in an H. G. Wells science fiction story or, better yet, one of E. Nesbit’s glittering trips to the future or past. Hard to tell the two apart now that the room was filling up with dead faces while long-silenced voices were murmuring insistently from who knew what limbo, carried upon the persistent cold wind of Blaise’s terrible air-conditioning.

  “No. I’ll write history.” Peter was now looking at her curiously. She wondered if her mouth was on straight. She shivered in the wind.

  “Father doesn’t understand what I do,” Peter continued. “Doesn’t care. He does care about news, no matter how old. I don’t. I only care about history …” Peter’s voice was now drowned by a roar of icy air that announced the arrival of Henry Adams.

  “Dear Henry.” Caroline rose unsteadily to greet him but he had not seen her; he passed her by. She hobbled after him until, halfway across the room, the floor seemed suddenly the most desirable of resting places; and so she rested there: headache quite gone at last.

  3

  Blaise accompanied the body back to France. Emma had wanted to come, too, but Blaise forbade her with the relevant news that since she was not in her mother’s will, she need go to no trouble. Peter and Frederika saw Blaise and the oblong box off at the airport. On orders from the secretary of the Air Force, a military transport plane had been assigned to fly them to Paris.

  Blaise waved to wife and son at the top of the steps. Then he entered the plane. Frederika wept with no sound. Peter was still stunned. He had never seen anyone dead, much less anyone die in mid-conversation. Apparently, she had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, much like the one that had carried off her friend Franklin Roosevelt.

  “Well, it was quick,” he said, inadequately, as they got into the car.

  Frederika stopped weeping; told the driver to take them straight home. “Quick or slow is all the same when you go. There’s hardly anyone left now. But then if she had gone back to live in France, we probably would never have seen her again anyway. So it’s probably all the same to us.”

  “She thought she saw Senator Borah just before …”

  “How awful for her,” said Frederika, suddenly recovered. “We must remember that along with all the people we cared about who are dead there are millions and millions of crashing bores and, between us, Caroline and I must have met them all. I don’t think,” she said with a secret, knowing look, “that death is going to be all that relaxing for any of us.”

  Frederika got out of the car at Massachusetts Avenue; and Peter went on to Rock Creek Park.

  Everything was in flower at Senator Day’s house. Kitty was at the edge of the woods, feeding two squirrels a biscuit. She gestured to Peter: make no noise. He slipped into the house. Diana was in the living room.

  They embraced like the lifelong married couple that they had so abruptly become on her return from Reno. It was only during their time apart that Peter had become convinced that they were intended to be a permanent couple, to which Diana had agreed. Thus far, neither had mentioned Clay, and Peter hoped the subject might be permanently postponed.

  “Father’s in the loggia. Waiting for you.”

  Peter was surprised. “Isn’t the Senate in session?”

  “He wants to know about your aunt. He’s … very edgy these days. I don’t think he’s ever quite recovered from that fainting spell he had.”

  Diana led Peter into the loggia, where new green grapes were growing in tight hard jadelike clusters. Beyond the loggia Peter could see banks of deep purple irises in full lemon-scented bloom.

  “Forgive me for not getting up. I’m still a bit lame.” James Burden Day held a cane in his left hand while with the right he shook Peter’s hand. The grip was strong; and the old man seemed vigorous enough.

  “I gather you’ve just been seeing Caroline off to Europe.” He could not have been more matter-of-fact.

  Diana left them. “I must go back to the office,” she said.

  Peter sat in a wicker chair; a bright gold ray of sun fell diagonally across his chest like the chain of some celestial order.

  “Yes. Mother and I saw them off from Andrews Field. The Military Air Transport Service found room for them. Father’s … struck dumb. That doesn’t mean he’s stopped talking. Far from it. But dumb in the sense he doesn’t know what to do and say about what’s happened. There had been, after all, as Aunt Caroline would say, no rehearsal. I was the last to talk to her. She was fine. Except she kept seeing people who had not been invited to her farewell party. Literally, as it turned out, farewell.”

  “What sort of people?” Burden was unnaturally controlled, even casual.

  “The dead.”

  “Oh!” He frowned. “Anyone I know?”

  “Senator Borah crossed the room, or so she thought.”

  “Let’s hope Alice Longworth saw him too. Who else?”

  “She got up from the sofa to follow Henry Adams across the room. But she never caught up with him. Instead, she just sank to the floor. And never spoke again.”

  “Not bad.” Burde
n seemed to be scoring Caroline’s singular method of departure against those of others that he had known about. “I wish I’d been there.… But I had a session of the Finance Committee.”

  “Would you have persuaded her not to go?”

  “Hard to say. When it’s time … Funny, I once saw my own father a few years ago. His ghost, that is. Or, more likely, my hallucination. It was near the river at Fort Marcey. You know, up above the Potomac. Just north of Laurel House.” He shut his eyes. Shuddered. Then he looked at Peter. “I’ll be campaigning soon. That time of year. Back to the state to see if anyone remembers me.”

  “You’re sure to win the primary.”

  “Only fools are ever sure in this business.”

  “Your speech at the State Historical Society got you five points higher in the polls.”

  Burden smiled. “Didn’t use a single note, either. Didn’t have to. I just remembered what it was like when we were putting together a brand-new state so that we could join it to the Union that most of our fathers had tried to get out of. Did Emma go home with Caroline?”

  It took Peter an instant to remember who Emma was. Then he recalled the strong hand relentlessly scraping mayonnaise off a lobster at the Blue Angel. “She wanted to but Blaise said no.”

  Burden shook his head. “Pity they never got on. I should’ve done more.” This was the closest that he had ever come to admitting his paternity; then he changed the still, for him, dangerous subject. “Well, Peter, the big military buildup is underway. Except we haven’t given the President the money. And we can’t while McCarthy’s out of control. It would be nice,” said Burden, thoughtfully, “if someone shot him.”

  “Why doesn’t the Senate expel him?”

  “Too terrified. The whole lot of them. The whole lot of us. Come November he’s threatening to defeat Tydings and Lucas, and this one and that one. He may even pull it off. I’ve seen some very disturbing polls. Half the country think that communists have already taken over our government.”