Gore Vidal (138 page)

As he began writing
Palimpsest
, he became aware of how warm his feelings for St. Albans were. When Wid Washburn encouraged him to come to his fiftieth class reunion at Exeter, he found an excuse to decline. At the same time he began to toy with the idea of willing La Rondinaia to St. Albans as a study center. He had been eager, as he thought about
Palimpsest
,
to reestablish contact with the only school at which he had been even moderately happy. In 1989, a young St. Albans Latin teacher, Wallace Ragan, had visited him in Ravello, then again in summer 1992 with John Davis, a retired English master who had known Jimmie Trimble after Gore had left for Los Alamos. He liked them both and particularly admired Davis, a fine short-story writer who intrepidly carried on despite increasing loss of vision. For a short time they were enthusiastic about possibly creating a memorial book in honor of Jimmie and other St. Albans boys who had died in World War II. Keen to learn as much as he could about Jimmie's life and death, Gore sought information and anecdotes. He was a welcome visitor at St. Albans, eagerly greeted by faculty and staff. Alfred True, the lower-form headmaster when he had been there, still had all his wits and told “Gene” Vidal stories at a dinner at which Gore Vidal was the guest of honor. With the help of an excellent researcher in Washington, Heidi Landecker, Gore collected documents and details, including eyewitness accounts of Jimmie's last days in the South Pacific and some of the brutal details of his death, though it was not yet clear whether he had been bayoneted or blown apart by a grenade or both. “
Two unnerving first-hand
accounts of JT's death,” he wrote Davis, “one from a bitter member of his company who thinks it was all pointless and they forgotten. Jimmie wanted to know what to do if they were outnumbered. Surrender? No. They'd be tortured to death. So J stayed to the end. First a grenade then endless bayonet wounds.” To Halfpenny he confessed that “it has been painful bringing him back to life, but it is also exhilarating, something salvaged of that glittering youth.” John Davis contributed a recollection about the Jimmie that Gore had known, the schoolboy who unself-consciously provided for others the opportunity to project their own desires and personalities onto his presence. “My own memories of Jimmy are those of unrequited libidinousness,” Davis recalled. “He usually, at 17, moved through the Lane Johnston halls briskly, but when he idled along, he had a generous roll of the hips—the flexible hips of the athlete—that promised, like the Anglican definition of faith—'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.' But I was too much the unsure 27-year-old master to do more than cast my eyes demurely down, probably not too far down, as he passed by. Over the years since 1945, there have been a number of beautiful St. Albans boys who went the same road in Korea and Vietnam.”

The memorial, which had seemed a good idea, soon ran into a major problem. When Vidal mentioned Jimmie's name to an interviewer for
Vanity Fair
, Jimmie's Washington classmates and friends became aware that Gore had made, and was going to make in greater detail in
Palimpsest
, the claim that he and Jimmie had been lovers. Worse, Jimmie's mother, Ruth Sewell, was still alive, someone well known to and of concern to Gore and Jimmie's St. Albans classmates. Friends called the ninety-year-old Washingtonian to ask whether she had seen the
Vanity Fair
article, which she had not. Naturally, they insisted on bringing it to her attention. To Mrs. Sewell and to friends of Jimmie's like Barrett Prettyman—a successful attorney, an avid collector of rare literary first editions, a trustee of St. Albans and the Folger Library, where he was to introduce Gore's talk on film in June 1993—Gore's claim seemed outrageous, offensive, and incompatible with the Jimmie they had known. If it were true, why had he not proclaimed it before? They were unaware that he had done so indirectly in
The City and the Pillar
and
The Season of Comfort
. It seemed as if Gore, exercising his imagination rather than adhering to truth, was “outing” Jimmie, and they felt protective of Mrs. Sewell. Gore pointed out to Prettyman that if he changed Jimmie's and other names, everyone in their Washington world would know who they were anyway. Prettyman “asked me, ‘you mean Jimmy wasn't what he seemed to be, what he was?' I said, ‘I'm not saying that he was a woman in a man's body, for God's sake. He was a man in a man's body. Men are like this. It is not an unnatural activity, except when proscribed by various religions that I'd thought we'd outgrown.'” The surviving remnants of Jimmie's Washington world wished Gore and the subject would go away. In October 1992, with Wally Ragan an uneasy facilitator, Gore had lunch with Mrs. Sewell and others, hoping to soothe troubled waters, if he could. There were Jimmie's last letters and some photographs he was eager to have copies of. It was a tense, unpleasant few hours. The circumspect Ragan was distressed to discover, when
Palimpsest
was published, that it contained an almost literal account of what had been said. “
Disconcertingly, I had lunch
in DC with his mother aged 90 but like 50,” Gore wrote to Judith Halfpenny. “A wispy-hard Southern woman of considerable beauty. She was angry about the context the mag had given Jimmie and me. But agreed it was the busy-ness of her friends all over the world who checked in to see how shocked she was. ‘Well, we both loved him,' she said at last.”

March 1993. A gray, mild St. Patrick's Day in Rome. Howard greeted the half dozen movers who would work all day carrying down from the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment to the van that blocked the narrow street all their furniture and the innumerable cartons they had spent days packing. Always alert to the long arm of coincidence, Gore, waiting at La Rondinaia with Miss Miao—who after seven years with them often kept him company while he wrote, posing happily on his shoulder for photographs—noted it was the forty-fourth anniversary of his grandfather's death. To their great relief they had decided to give up the apartment they had occupied for almost thirty years. Since June 1973, when they had taken possession of La Rondinaia, it had gradually become the more comfortable of their two Italian residences. In the mid-1980s they had put in a swimming pool, a long, sleek, blue-brilliant rectangle two thirds of the way to the house from the entry gate, olive groves on the right, a vast view of high hills and the descent to the sea on the left. On the slope of the cliff, beneath the pool terrace, were rooms for changing, one decorated with original posters advertising Gore's plays and movies. “
The pool is paradise
at last,” he wrote to Claire Bloom in 1986. “Thus, the world ends. Do come here soon.” Between 1990 and 1993, in preparation for the change, they had replaced all the windows in the villa, an expensive venture essential to making it habitable during the cold months. In Rome, Howard, who had supervised the installation of the pool and the new windows, struggled with the final details of the move for which they had been preparing for some time, mostly because they found Rome less and less satisfactory.

What had seemed urbanely irresistible in the 1960s had become unlivable by the 1980s. For the last decade they had been spending on average only about three months a year in Rome anyway; the price for that was high, not only a full year's rent but the cost of attending to a deteriorating apartment at their own expense. The landlord refused to pay even for basic repairs. They were constantly interrupted by harsh banging on pipes and at their entrance door by a neighbor immediately below who expressed unintelligible, and sometimes irrational, grievances. Leaky windows and thin walls subjected them to Roman winter chill. In addition, they had become a target for burglaries, five of which had occurred in recent years, each requiring that Howard come up from La Rondinaia or fly in from
wherever else he might be to attend to the details, including visits to the police station, where the authorities had no interest in being helpful. Roman street life, it seemed, had become more chaotic, less communal, their social and cultural world of less interest. Worst of all, noxious pollution became inescapable. Always a busy intersection, the corner of Via Di Torre Argentina and the Corso had become a traffic nightmare, spewing noise and dirty effluvia, suffusing the air even six stories above with what they felt in their throats and eyes to be lethal fumes. The terrace became unusable. By comparison La Rondinaia was paradise. George Armstrong, who was to leave Rome for residence in New York in July 1993, wondered if they could possibly fit into the villa all the furniture from the apartment. When the movers finally left for the drive to Ravello, Howard, in a car, carrying some of the most breakable of the precious items, was driven down quickly enough to be there before they arrived. Gore met them at the village square. One of his most precious possessions was a second-century Roman bust, after Antinous, which had been with them since Edgewater days. He had bought it decades earlier at a gallery in New York where Joe O'Donohue had worked, the only job, Gore joked, O'Donohue ever had in his life. Afraid the movers would break it, Gore carried the bust down the long path from the piazza to the house that he and Howard felt would be their last home. They had no desire to move again. They had no intention of doing so. When they left La Rondinaia, they would leave the Roman bust behind.

From the terrace at La Rondinaia the view was various, permeable, breathtaking. The routine and the visual splendor coexisted, sometimes one more important than the other. The life they had led there for twenty years remained the same, other than that it went on all year, except for trips. Neither desired to go to Rome, and went only for the dentist and similar necessities. They went to Bangkok again, to Los Angeles, to La Costa, to New York and Washington for business. Gore was a guest at the White House for the presentation and celebration of a documentary about Thomas Jefferson. He found the evening boring, the documentary only slightly less so. For British television he did a three-part presentation of his own script on the history of the American presidency. When it was shown in the United States, it provoked establishment distress. Arthur Schlesinger was asked if it were not evidence that Vidal disliked his country. He replied that
Vidal didn't dislike his country: he was disappointed in it. The nation's capital seemed changed for the worse, and depleted. “I realized everybody I know in Washington is dead. There's nobody to call anymore.” Even if inaccurate, it was accurate enough to express an inescapable reality. Fortunately, he had great success with younger people as diverse as Christopher Hitchens, the British-born radical journalist who had moved to America, and the actress Susan Sarandon, whom he knew from her performance in
An Evening with Richard Nixon
. Sarandon and Tim Robbins, her companion, became friends and visitors to La Rondinaia. When, in 1992, Robbins was directing and starring in a political film,
Bob Roberts
, he had induced Vidal to play the role of a United States senator. He was not hard to persuade. He got ironic satisfaction and great pleasure at suddenly becoming a sought-after cameo performer in movies as diverse as
Honor
and
Gattaca
, in his latter days finally the Mickey Rooney he had wanted to be as an adolescent. He also got to be a godfather again, this time to Sarandon and Robbins's child, as he had been before to Claire Bloom's daughter, Ken and Kathleen Tynan's daughter, and one of the Newmans' children. “Always a godfather, never a god,” he liked to joke.

Gore wrote
Palimpsest
, and Miss Miao gradually died of skin cancer. Since it affected her ear and her balance, he carried her around constantly. Bad dreams sometimes brought together past and present as he worked at
Palimpsest
through 1993. “
Last night I dreamed
of Dah for the first time in many years. We are aboard a ship. There is no stateroom ready for him, and I have no ticket, passport. I can't find Dot. The ship pitches slightly, and I hold on to his arm as I used to do when we negotiated difficult terrain…. I am worried that he will fall…. Dah is not well; wants to lie down. I help him into a bunk. I'm afraid that the occupants will come back at any moment. Then I notice that my white cat is missing. More anxiety. I search the ship; cannot find the cat; cannot find my way back to Dah's stateroom. Wake up.” Miao died in summer 1995, as
Palimpsest
made its way through publication. “For nearly two years the cancer ate away at the right ear,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, “then began to cross her face (but never went into the system). The smell was terrible but she ate heartily. Toward the end, I would hold her six or seven hours a day as I read or wrote. One morning she could not walk—equilibrium destroyed. We sent for the vet who had rebuilt her other ear. He gave her a shot to sleep while I held her. This did not put her out. I insisted on a second. She tottered over to me on
the sofa and into my arms for a nap. He said, ‘She's out—it's enough to knock out a St Bernard.' I said, ‘She's not out.' Finally, he lifted her off me, and the long claws came easily away from my sweater: he arranged her on her back, raised her left forepaw, inserted the needle in her heart and she gave the most horrendous scream. He said, ‘O Dio!' I said, ‘O shit' … she wriggled once, knocking the needle out. A minute later she was gone and we wrapped her in the tweed jacket I always wore when I was with her (ripped by her nails, soaked in blood and pus as was the rest of the studio). My last glimpse was the small triangular still-kitten face, eyes shut. We buried her in the garden. I am still having nightmares. As Howard says, now we have no one to talk to.” They were soon given a present of two kittens.