Hollywood (15 page)

“Where’s Mrs. Roosevelt?” The mint julep was uncommonly pleasant; and
the sun, filtered by a heavy white haze, was, for the first time in days, bearable.

“She’s gone up to Canada, with the chicks. I’m supposed to join her in August. Only …” Franklin stared at the Virginia shore.

“Only what?” But Burden knew. Franklin was planning to run for the Senate from New York in the fall election.

“Do
you
think I should run?”

“I don’t know that much about the state. But if I were you, I wouldn’t quit this job first. Just take a leave of absence.”

Franklin laughed without much joy. “I will. If I can get away with it. I think old Josephus would like to see me well and truly gone.”

“But the President—”

“—has been most understanding. Everyone tells me I’ve a safe berth here if I lose, only …” Again the pause; the word “only” seemed to provide a barrier for Franklin, who, while appearing to have no secrets, managed to evade all intimacy with considerable grace.

“Only you’d rather not lose.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you have Tammany’s support?”

“No. They’ve got their candidate. So I shall be reform, I suppose. Another Uncle Tee in Democratic clothing.” He swallowed some lemonade; and grimaced. “I’ve a sore throat. Too much talking. I argue and argue and nobody listens. You see, I’ve worked out a way to bottle the German submarines. But the British can’t be budged. And our admirals are so slow, so slow. The solution, Burden, is this.”

Burden never much liked being called by his first name, particularly by someone who was not only a decade his junior but so far beneath him in the national hierarchy. Yet it was a part of this Roosevelt’s considerable charm to lift, spontaneously, others to a level of intimacy with himself, a member of that sovereign patriciate that still held a number of seats in a Senate which had been entirely theirs until democracy had so rudely sprung the chamber’s door and let Burden, among others, in.

“It’s so clear. We seal off the North Sea with a mine barrage from Scotland to Norway so that no submarine could ever get through, which would seal them up tight in their own ports. Well, it took me weeks to get to the President, who’s now given the go-ahead. But the British are still dragging their feet even when I said we’d do the same for the Dover Straits, which would protect
their
home waters. But they are sound asleep.” He scowled, as he drank more lemonade. Burden noticed that Franklin’s face was now
glistening with sweat despite the cool breeze. The handsome head with its thin chiselled nose looked fragile; the small eyes were not only too close together but due to the face’s asymmetry one was higher than the other.

Suddenly, they were athwart the pillared mansion of the first president. Franklin sprang to his feet, as did Burden, who remained at self-conscious attention while a bugler “aft” played taps.

When the fashionable couple joined Franklin in the stern, Burden made his way forward to where the English diplomat and Yeoman Third Class Lucy Mercer were seated. Both rose in deference to senatorial rank.

Burden sat between them. A steward plied them with Josephus Daniels’s lemonade. Like everyone else in the small Washington world, Burden found Lucy uncommonly attractive, and mysterious. Why hadn’t she married? Of course, she was a member of Maryland’s Catholic gentry and there were not so many Catholic bachelors available in the capital. On the other hand, a short trip to Baltimore and she would be surrounded by her own kind. Yet she had chosen to live in Washington and work for Eleanor Roosevelt and fill in at dinner parties until she had joined the Navy. “Now you are a fighting woman,” said Burden.

“It was Mr. Roosevelt’s idea.” She smiled, and looked away.

“Your military service,” said the Englishman, “is
distinctly
selective.”

Burden had more than once claimed credit for the sublime euphemism “selective service.” The word “conscription” was taboo, reminding everyone of the Civil War’s bloody riots. But since Wilson could no more rely on volunteers than Lincoln, a new phrase was devised. A few years earlier when it looked as if the border troubles with Mexico might turn into a full-scale war, Wilson had issued a ringing call for volunteers: and hardly anyone had rallied to the colors. This time he was taking no chances. Conscription was to be swift and absolute and under another name. On June 5, ten million men between twenty-one and thirty had been registered under the National Defense Act for “selective service” in the armed services, which sounded rather better than, say, cannon fodder in France.

Privately, Burden hated the whole enterprise. The wounded of the Civil War had been all round him in his youth, and the general poverty of the delta during that time was directly due to the loss of manpower and money in the war. Publicly, Burden supported the war; yet he could never rationalize to himself the brutal manner in which the United States had violated its own sacred Monroe Doctrine in order to fight a war in Europe, something the original republic had guaranteed to all the world that it would never do.
However, as a practical politician, he had been able to rationalize the necessity of making the world safe not for democracy—a quixotic enterprise, since the United States had yet to experiment with so dangerous a form of government, as those militant women who wanted to vote never ceased to remind their sexual masters—but to enrich the nation. This had already begun, as the Englishman, Mr. Nigel Law, reminded him. “Your speech in committee, sir, was much applauded in London.”

“It was just plain old common horse sense.” British accents tended to cause Burden to assume the folksy, down-home style of a vaudeville rube comedian. He chewed an imaginary piece of straw. “Can’t let our best buddy go broke.”

“What speech was that?” Lucy’s blue eyes shifted from the blue-green Virginia shore to Burden’s imaginary straw.

“About the loan to England. Last month the President was told that without quick help from us, England could no longer support the pound. Fact, in twenty-four hours, they would have had to go off the gold standard, so I said to my fellow statesmen, who don’t much care for foreigners in general and the English in particular, if the pound goes, the dollar’s going to go, too, so we better prop them up, which we did, and which we’re still doing, thanks to Mr. McAdoo and his Liberty Loans, which are gathering up every spare dollar in the country.” The rhetoric of the Liberty Loan campaign—all Hunnish ghoulishness—had got on Burden’s nerves. Even a Republican hack like Harding had complained about it, to no avail.

“To your everlasting credit, Senator.” Mr. Law was slightly overdoing it, for England, of course.

Burden smiled. “Actually, it is to
your
everlasting debit. Anyway, we’ve got everybody’s money now, which is most satisfying.” He turned to Lucy. “Mr. Roosevelt’s sick. You ought to get him to a doctor.”

For the first time, she looked at Burden with interest. “You could tell?”

“From the way he’s sweating.”

“He says it’s just a sore throat. Yes, I’ll get him to a doctor when we’re ashore.”

“Will the Lever bill pass the Senate?” The diplomat did not believe that sore throats and fevers should be allowed to thwart diplomacy.

Burden nodded. “But we’ll cut it up a bit first.” The President had wanted to control the price and distribution of food; and he had chosen that successful mining engineer Herbert Hoover to be its director. But in a recalcitrant mood the Senate had made it a provision of the bill that a joint congressional committee on the war be set up, to monitor the President. The historian-president
was quick to rally his troops in the Senate; and it was Burden who was now in the throes of eliminating Section 23 from the Lever bill.

“Your president has the most extraordinary powers, doesn’t he?” Mr. Law looked somewhat wistful.

“Only in war-time.”

“Then, if I were an ambitious president, I’d keep the country forever at war.”

“It couldn’t be done.” Burden was flat. “Our people don’t like war. Why should they? We’ve got all the space we need right here. All we want is open doors everywhere so we can go and do business. Any president who tried to get us into an unpopular war would soon be an ex-president. Look how hard it was for Wilson to get us into this one.” Burden realized that he had said too much.

Mr. Law looked at him as if he expected him to continue. But Burden was not about to place on Wilson responsibility for a war that he had done rather more than not to stay out of. “If Germany had not been so stupid and provocative, we might still be at peace and the pound sterling …”

“Fallen into the dust,” said Mr. Law.

“Your family’s from Washington, aren’t they?” Lucy diverted the conversation.

Burden nodded. “Part of them. The part that stayed on in the District while my branch went west. I lived for a time with relatives here, when we lost our farm in the panic.” Comfortably, they sank into genealogy, which meant Burden’s connection with the ubiquitous Apgar clan. Lucy, too, was connected to them by marriage, as was Caroline, as was everyone that was worthy from Albany to New York City to Washington, D.C. Burden stared into Lucy’s beautiful eyes and felt a sudden pang, a need to be loved yet again by a girl, not necessarily one who was Catholic, complicated and, probably, virginal. But he must start again, soon. In three years, he would be fifty and at the end of anything remotely like youth. There was Caroline still, but that was known country. Also, with time, she had shown her true nature, which was that not of a wife or lover but of sister and friend. He valued her, but she was not what he now furiously craved, skin, flesh.

Franklin joined them, pale in the heat but supremely jaunty. “The Lock Tavern Club,” he announced. “For a late lunch on the pier. With a sunset.” As the large hand rested idly on Lucy’s shoulder, Burden realized that the two were in love, and he was not.

Blaise was also at sea; alone, too, if not in the least furious. Frederika had proved to be the best of all possible wives. She was present when needed and otherwise engaged when not. She was also uncommonly shrewd about people and Blaise was not. From Connecticut Avenue, they presided over the grand life of the capital, their paths intersecting with that of the other Mrs. Sanford, Caroline, who generally chose to emulate the Henry Adams circle, now reduced to Adams himself and a handful of what he called “nieces.”

“At least there is air to breathe.” Blaise turned and saw Mrs. Wilson, in a fresh nautical sort of gown, looking much refreshed. The presidential party had gone aboard the
Mayflower
just before noon, when all the air had been burned away by a bronze disk of a sun. The President had been unusually subdued. Mrs. Wilson had been flushed and somewhat breathless, while a number of her relatives cooled themselves vigorously with palmetto fans and murmured to one another in their soft Southern accents. The
Mayflower
was headed toward Chesapeake Bay and, thanks to war-time censorship, no one in Washington suspected that the President, defeated by the heat, had temporarily abandoned the capital.

“Do sit, Mr. Sanford.” Graciously, Edith indicated one of two chairs side by side on the stern. She took the other. “As far as I can tell this is about the only pleasure they allow the President, though I’d say this comes more under medical necessity than anything else. Not,” she was quick to add, “that he isn’t made of the purest iron. I do enjoy your sister.”

“And she you.” Blaise was equally quick at Washingtonese.

“We don’t see enough of her or of you and Mrs. Sanford. She’s in Newport?”

Blaise nodded. “I stay on to memorialize the government, and the war.”

Edith chuckled, a pleasant low sound. “I must say, on the one hand, there is nothing worse for a president than to have Congress in session all summer, making trouble, but then when you think of this terrible heat and some of those terrible men and their wives, I rejoice that they are stuck here with us.”

“Poor Cabot Lodge wanted so much to go to the North Shore, to be near Henry Adams at Beverly Farms …”

“Poor Cabot Lodge,” Edith took up the refrain as if they were part-singing. Then she started a new verse. “Beverly Farms,” and stopped. “Isn’t that the house Mr. Adams built … ?”

“With Mrs. Adams back in the seventies. After she died, he never went back, until now.”

“Of course it wasn’t murder, was it?” Edith looked suddenly eager, like a child about to be told a favorite story.

But Blaise could not satisfy her. “She killed herself, as far as anyone knows. She drank that stuff you develop photographs with. He’s never referred to her since, as far as I know. But then my sister is his great friend. He just tolerates me.”

“He doesn’t even know me.” But Edith did not seem distressed. Astride the world, it is possible to overlook any and every slight. From the beginning Blaise had been amused at how wholeheartedly Edith had taken to her royal estate, sprouting ever more orchids as well as ever more gracious, kindly, regal airs.

“Washington is not a city but a dozen villages,” observed Edith, as everyone who lived there sooner or later observed more than once. “And there are no connections between most of them.”

“Except for Pennsylvania Avenue, which connects all the villages to the White House.”

“That’s what I always thought. But it really isn’t true. We’re very isolated, you know.”

“The war …”

“Doesn’t help. But I think of the presidents as sort of ceremonial prisoners. And
my
village, the Galts and the Bollings and all the rest, hardly ever notice who’s in the White House. I must thank you, by the way, for your treatment of us, of the President. We don’t get to read much about us that’s pleasant nowadays.”

“Perhaps,” Blaise remembered to smile, “censorship has something to do with it.”

“Mr. Creel is aboard. You told me you’d like to meet him. See? I never forget.” The smile was, as always, girlish and beguiling. Blaise thanked her. George Creel had suddenly appeared on the national scene in the wake of a storm of legislation, mostly inspired by the President, to establish control over every aspect of American life. Censorship of the press came under Mr. Creel, who had, in April, been designated chairman of the Committee of Public Information. Mr. Creel was a young journalist from the West. As a publisher, Blaise was extremely wary of how the various newly legislated powers of censorship might be used. In the first thrill of war and Hun-hatred, an Espionage Act had been passed, which made it possible to put in jail for
twenty years, and to fine ten thousand dollars, anyone who conveyed “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies.… Or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or … willfully obstructing recruiting or enlistment service.”