Hollywood (14 page)

Kitty took a crust of bread from her handbag. Then, bread in hand, she extended her arm. The miracle, as Burden always thought of it, occurred in a matter of seconds. A large thrush made several close passes in order to get a good look at Kitty before he settled on her wrist. Then he took the bread in his beak, shook it free of encumbering crumbs, and rose to a branch of the nearest tree, where he ate the crust and watched Kitty.

“How do you do it?”

“I’ve always done it.” Kitty’s relationship with the animal world was intimate, collusive, extra-human. All creatures came to her without fear; and she was there. As a girl, she had befriended a full-grown wolf, dying of hunger during a hard winter. The wolf had followed her about like a dog; then, according to the Judge, while she was at school, the wolf had attacked the hired man and the hired man had shot the beast in self-defense. To which Kitty had replied with a terminal coldness, “No, Father. You just had him killed.” Father and daughter never spoke of the subject again but father and son-in-law did discuss the matter years later, and the Judge had said, with puzzled awe, “How did she know—how
could
she know that I killed the brute when there was no one there to see me?” It was decided then that Kitty was psychic, at least with animals and birds. She seemed less interested in people as opposed to voters. She knew as much of Burden’s alliances and arrangements as he did; yet he was certain that she knew nothing of Caroline. He also suspected that if she did know, she would be indifferent. Odd, he thought, not to know your own wife as well as—a thrush did. When Jim Junior had died at six, it was Burden who had wept. Kitty had simply busied herself with the funeral arrangements; then she had quarrelled with her Negro cook over the refreshments for the wake, a bit of Romanism popular in their Protestant state. That was the end of their son.

Although a cool west breeze was rustling the branches of the taller trees, Burden was still uncomfortably hot. But then everyone said that this was the
hottest summer in memory, the first war-time summer. “High ceilings.” Kitty looked up at the tallest tree, an oak.

“The highest.” Burden was knowledgeable. “A Norman facade. Gray stonework. A terrace. A pond. A porch to the side …”

“Let’s hope the war won’t interfere.”

“Building goes on. Even if food doesn’t.” Burden moved from log to ground; and the inevitable grass stains on his trousers. “The President’s fit to be tied over Section 23.”

“You can’t blame him.” The animal psychic was now the political psychic, having skipped any sort of rapport with those human beings between the two poles of her life.

“They’re trying to do to him what they did to Lincoln when they set up that joint congressional committee to oversee the war.”

“Same thing.” Kitty nodded. “And all tucked inside the food bill, which is sly. But you won’t let it go through?”

“No. But there’ll be a real fight. Can’t you just hear the talk? Oh, the talk!” More than ever, the Senate encouraged personal oddity. Originally intended as a house of lords for the American patriciate or its assigns, the members of the upper house were selected by the various state legislators that were themselves paid for by the moneyed class. But since 1913, senators were now popularly elected. As a result, a new breed of lordly tribunes of the people had appeared in the sleepy chamber; and they delighted in tormenting the gentlemanly old guard of the patriciate. Also, since any senator who had got the floor to speak could speak as long as he was conscious, a great new age of filibuster had dawned, and a leather-lunged senator might, in the last hours before adjournment, talk to death a piece of legislation or threaten to do so in exchange for favors.

Even so, Burden was delighted to belong to so powerful a club, in which he had found his place as chief conciliator of his party’s chief, the schoolmaster president, whose control over the Senate’s Democratic majority was fragile at best. This meant constant work for Burden, who must placate—when not outright bribe—the Bryanites, the isolationists, the pro-Germanites and all the rest, who chose to reign in committee rather than serve their president.

“I wonder who she’ll marry.” Kitty gazed fondly at Diana, almost as if she were a plump raccoon arrived at the kitchen door for a handout.

“Isn’t that tempting fate?” Burden felt a swift chill; and shuddered. He had once speculated on Jim Junior’s future and promptly lost him to diphtheria.

“No. She’ll marry in this house, or from this house.” Kitty had a sort of second sight. “I suppose she’ll be happy, too.”

“Yes.” Burden was noncommittal. Kitty was fond of him; he of her; no more.

“Did your father like your mother?” This was sudden.

“That was so long ago. I don’t recall.” Burden had grown up on a farm in Alabama, surrounded by veterans of the lost war like his father. Burden had always been amazed at how Mark Twain had managed to make so idyllic that harsh crude muddy—always mud—world of mosquitoes and chiggers and wet-heat and poisonous snakes the color of the mud. Of course, Twain had been writing of an earlier generation before the war, but even so Burden had been aware all his childhood that this was not the way life was meant to be. There had been a very great fall, which his father, unlike so many veterans, was eager to explain and describe, the pale blue eyes fierce and crazy, as they must have been that day at Chickamauga when the bullet felled but did not kill him and he was taken prisoner. Later, among the ruins, Obadiah Day had begun his life all over in the delta mud. Of his children—seven, eight? Burden did not know the count—all but two had died of bloody flux, as the cholera was known. Burden did recall how much of his childhood seemed to have been spent in the local cemetery, watching small boxes being hidden under red dirt. He also recalled hours spent listening to his father speak of how They had ruined the South, corrupted the Negroes, foreclosed on the land of the best true stock of the country.
They
were a shifting entity composed of all Yankees and bankers and railroad men and, sometimes, of plain aliens, of whom Catholics and Jews were the worst. Curiously, the Negroes, no matter how out-of-hand, were never held directly responsible for their behavior. If a nigger went bad it was They who’d gone and turned him.

In time, the defeated Confederates turned to politics, the only weapon that they could use against Them. The political picnic and the under-canvas rally became the true church of those who had been dispossessed in their own land, and Obadiah was among those who had helped form the Party of the People in order to redress the people’s wrongs, and the party flourished everywhere in the South, and Obadiah himself was elected to a series of small state offices. Then came the day when he heard the fourteen-year-old Burden speak at a rally, and joyously he had welcomed his son to the great struggle, much as the Baptist had received the Messiah on Jordan’s shining bank. So, at Alabama’s edge, James Burden Day had come into his kingdom to do his father’s work and rout Them in the people’s name.

Clearer to Burden now than the crowd itself—and every crowd to Burden was like a lover met and lost or, more likely, ravished and won—was the image of his father, still surprisingly young in appearance, despite white hair, still brilliant of that bright blue eye not covered by a patch, still lean enough to be able to wear the butternut-gray patched Confederate uniform that he had come home in, with the bullet that struck him at Chickamauga on a string about his neck after he had insisted that it be gouged from his thigh by a friendly doctor so that, should he die, no part of Them would be eternally mixed with his bones. Together, father and son had fought in the ranks of the People’s Party until Burden had gone west to a new state to practice law; and though he never ceased to be, he swore to his father and murmured to himself, a true Populist, he had been obliged to start an entirely new life in a brand-new dry dusty state as opposed to his old wet, muddy one. Obliged to use a family connection to get an appointment at Washington in the Comptroller’s Office, he had disappointed his father. But they were reconciled when Burden had promised the old man that he would never give up the struggle and that when the time was right he would go back to his new state and lead their party. When the time was right, he did go back and marry Kitty, and with
her
father’s help, he was elected to Congress not as a Populist but as a Bryanite Democrat. Father no longer spoke to son. Yet Obadiah and a second wife continued to live in Alabama; and though Burden had sent him a message after his election to the Senate—where, after all, did he not continue to fight Them?—he got no answer from the old man, who was still, at heart, the furious boy struck down a half-century earlier at Chickamauga—two minutes before noon, he had noted the time before he lost consciousness. To live without such a father’s pride was, to Burden, unendurable; particularly when he himself had never lost their common faith in the people, their people. What was a party label? What was—anything?

“Will it be you?” Kitty rose. She took Diana from him. The child was falling asleep in the warm sun. The sweet heavy odor of honeysuckle was everywhere, as was the vine itself, a yellow-green tapestry clinging to the laurel.

“Me? What?”

“If Mr. Wilson does not run for a third time, which no one has.”

Kitty never ceased to calculate, despite the distractions of a child, house, the wild beasts of the field and—the what?—of the air. “It’s far too soon to even guess. The war will be short. That’s one thing—in his favor. He’ll be
a victorious war president. And not too old. So if he wants it, he’ll probably have it.”

“It does no harm,” said Kitty, removing the drowsy Diana’s thumb from her mouth, “to place ourselves in position in case something goes wrong. If it does, our only competition will be Mr. McAdoo.”

“That’s a lot of competition.” Burden frowned, as he always did, when he thought of the enormous advantage that the President’s son-in-law
and
secretary of the Treasury had over everyone else in the party. McAdoo had already so positioned himself to inherit the Wilson legacy that it would be impossible to contest him unless the whispers of corruption that always surrounded the vast gray granite Treasury Building proved true.

“Then there’s the Colonel.”

“Surely, he must die sometime.” Kitty was sweetly relentless.

“At sixty-one? With the nomination already his? If ever there was a life-restorer, it’s that. Almost as good as a Federal pension to insure longevity. There are,” said Burden, as always bemused by the fact, “seventy-three widows of the War of 1812 currently collecting pensions from the government.”

“Young girls who married old boys.”

“Now they are old girls made immortal by a pension.” Their Negro driver, Albert, joined them. He was a native Washingtonian, and a consummate snob. For years when Burden was in the House of Representatives, Albert would refer to his employer, behind his back, as “the Senator.” Burden’s eventual election to the Senate was, Kitty maintained, more thrilling for Albert than either of them. “I always felt we were common,” Albert would say, “when we were in the House with all that tobacco-chewing white trash from nowhere.” Albert’s mother had been called Victoria, after the queen; and she had called him Albert, after the consort. “Very psychological,” Kitty would say, looking wise. “He’s very much a mother’s boy.”

Albert reminded Burden that he had agreed to go out on the river with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. So Burden collected Diana while Kitty collected laurel to decorate the Mintwood parlor; and then they descended the hill to the road, and the waiting car.

The
Sylph
looked its name—a swift slender craft of a type unknown to Burden, but then he was the perfect landsman and could not tell one boat from another. But he was grateful for the day’s outing, anything to escape Washington’s airless heat.

The Assistant Secretary was all in white and most nautical-looking, as was
Cary Grayson, the President’s physician, and Grayson’s young wife, Altrude, Edith Wilson’s closest friend. Obviously, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy had discovered that the most direct route to the President was through the Graysons, and as Franklin Roosevelt’s luck would have it, Grayson was Regular Navy. He was also a very small man; and the gracious Altrude, very much in the Edith style, loomed over him. There was another couple whom Burden did not know—“fashionables,” as he thought of the eastern gentry whom he had met, from time to time, in Sanford-land. Finally, in the new uniform of a woman sailor, yeoman third class, the charming Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s social secretary. Lucy’s escort was a young man from the British embassy.

Once they were under way, Burden relieved himself of jacket and tie and enjoyed the cool, somewhat rank breeze off the Potomac River as they headed downstream toward Mount Vernon and the Chesapeake. For a moment, the frantic war-time city seemed remote; war, too, except for a pair of destroyers, if that’s what they were, anchored off the Navy Yard.

As Burden accepted a mint julep from a steward, Franklin smiled contentedly. “If only Josephus Daniels could see us now.”

“Surely his prohibition of alcohol does not extend to guests of the Navy.”

“To everyone, including the President.” But Burden noticed that Franklin drank only lemonade, while the others were now all forward, waiting for the ship to draw abreast Mount Vernon, which the
Sylph
would duly salute, as antique Navy custom required.

Franklin made agreeable small talk. He had far more charm than his presidential cousin, at least for Burden, who was something of a connoisseur in these matters since everyone in Washington wanted to charm senators, particularly those, like Burden, of the majority party. Ordinarily, Burden and the Navy had no links. Burden’s committees were Agriculture first last and always; with Foreign Affairs for amusement, and Banking for grave necessity, since that committee, a twin to the House Ways and Means Committee, was the fountain of all expenditure; hence, government patronage. But as Burden was only in his first term, he carried no great weight other than the power that accrued to him as the link between the Bryanite senators and the President, a position recently relinquished by the blind Senator from Oklahoma, who could abide neither President nor war. But the true link between Burden and the young Roosevelts was Caroline and, to a lesser extent, Blaise. The Roosevelts tended to move in high fashionable circles, keeping their distance from such low showy fashionables as the Ned McLeans.