Hollywood (30 page)

Emma looked at Tim curiously. “Are you a Red?” she asked.

“No. Catholic.” Tim smiled at Caroline. “A believing one.”

“Tim has a feeling for the masses only because he makes photo-plays for them.” Caroline’s voice had set itself in the gracious-hostess register.

“So does Griffith, and
The Birth of a Nation
did more to revive the Ku Klux Klan than anything in years.”

“Mr. Griffith,” said Caroline, rising to the occasion, “makes movies for the white masses who are willing to pay as much as three dollars to see a very long photo-play.”

“My history teacher was at Princeton when Mr. Wilson was president there.” Emma was now stirring up the coals with a poker. She was too red in the face for Caroline’s taste. Fever? Flu? Death? “He said that whenever a Negro applied for admission to Princeton, Mr. Wilson would write a personal letter saying that he was happy that the colored man had qualified but he felt it only his duty to warn him that as many of the students were from the South, he’d have a hard time of it if he came.”

“They didn’t come.” Tim finished his whisky.

“They didn’t come.” Emma put down the poker and stared into the revived fire.

“I’m going to France,” said Caroline, rising; then she heard herself, a fraction of an instant later. “Why did I say that? When all I meant was I’m going to bed.”

“You mean,” said Emma, “you’ll do both. You
should
go. Uncle Blaise says he’s going. He’ll be at the Peace Conference.”

“ ‘Peace without victory.’ ” Tim remained in his chair. Caroline looked forward to a bed to herself. Lust came in cycles; departed the same way. Besides, she refused to brood morbidly on flu’s silent sudden death in the act of love. Was it possible that Frederika, the serene, the competent, the droll, would die?

From the bedroom, Caroline rang Blaise. He sounded tired. “She’s the same. The crisis hasn’t come, whatever that is. These damned doctors are hopeless.”

“Is she conscious?”

“She drifts back and forth. She makes no sense. What happened at the White House?”

“The Fourteen Points have won the war, and Colonel House sails to France in four days, to make eternal peace.”

“Is he the official negotiator?”

“So he implies. Helped by all those bright young men at that boarding-house in Nineteenth Street …”

“All Jews and Socialists.”

“I’m going to Paris, as soon as it’s possible.” Caroline stemmed the familiar tirade.

“Should both publishers be there?”

“Mr. Trimble would be relieved to have us both out of town permanently.”

“We’ll see.” Blaise sounded exhausted. “
I’ll
have to see.”

“Of course,” said Caroline; and said good night. Before she turned out the light, she stared a long time at the painting of her mother, Emma the First. The lady’s resemblance to the Empress Eugénie had not gone unremarked by the painter. Although the dark eyes stared at Caroline, there was no message, only a painted simulacrum of a woman that she had never known; yet Caroline had twice bestowed her mother’s name upon her own inventions as if there were some unfinished business in the past to be completed if not now later.

Burden sat in his office, signing letters, while Miss Harcourt, old and gray and silent, perched on a straight chair beside his desk. She wore a man’s shirt, tie and jacket; only a reluctant skirt was concession to the prejudices of her unhappy time and place. Miss Harcourt lived with her mother in northeast Washington; she had worked, superbly, grayly, silently, for Burden ever since he had first come to Congress as the old century turned to the new, now almost one-fifth done.

The letters were appeals to various leaders about the country to support the Democratic Party in the coming election. Since Burden himself was not up for re-election, he could appear personally disinterested in requesting aid for the party. But the list, of course, carefully compiled over a decade, represented his own potential backers when and if the time should come for him to seize the crown. He was maintaining connections.

The last letter signed, he sat back in his high leather swivel chair; and felt somewhat light-headed. The afternoon sun cast a beam of light on the bust of Cicero opposite his desk. On either side of the white marble fireplace glass-doored bookcases contained law-books as well as statute books of the United States of America. Over the mantel hung an engraving of Lee surrendering at Appomattox, which did not displease his constituents, most of whom, though Westerners now, descended from Confederate soldiers. On the mantel was the bullet that had struck his father at Chickamauga—a skewed bit of black metal set on a marble stand. When the old man died, he had, with some bitterness, left his son the bullet as a reminder of who he was and what war was, a reminder of the people, the people, the people. Lately, words had a tendency to repeat themselves oddly in his head: maddeningly, unwanted series of echoes would start and then, mysteriously, stop.

The best thing to do was talk through the echoes. As “the people” tolled in his head, he spoke to Miss Harcourt. “Is Congressman Momberger in his office?”

“No. He too has been stricken. The Spanish flu. Late last night, Mrs. Momberger said.”

“We must adjourn. Remind me to talk to Senator Martin today.” “The people” stopped, leaving him with a headache.

“I called the Sanford house,” said Miss Harcourt, who either knew everything and thought nothing of it or knew nothing and thought not at all. “
She
is past the crisis, they think.”

“Oh, good. I must—tell Kitty to pay her a call when she’s better.” At first, he was positive that Frederika would die. Fate did that sort of thing to one. But she had clung to life or life had clung to her; and when he saw Blaise at the nearly empty Cosmos Club, Blaise had said that she’d be all right.

The telephone rang. Miss Harcourt answered it, then turned to Burden. “Mr. Tumulty wants to know if you could see the President this afternoon.”

“Five o’clock.” While Miss Harcourt so instructed the President’s secretary, Burden got up and went to the tall window with its view of Capitol Hill. But he looked not through the glass at the familiar view but at his unfamiliar pale, old face reflected in the glass. He must take more exercise, like horseback riding. He thought of Caroline, as he always did when he thought of all those Sundays that he had ridden along the canal beside the Potomac, ending the morning at her house. Since they were not married, the affair had been allowed to come to a pleasant, natural end. Neither was jealous of the other. Gradually, they had come to meet less and less in secret and more and more in public. Finally, after the hard-fought election of 1916 when Burden had spent weeks touring the country, without a word spoken on either side, the affair had stopped.

“Tell Kitty I’ll be home for dinner.”

Miss Harcourt inclined her head. Like most of the Senate secretaries, she was at permanent odds with the Senator’s wife. After all, the secretaries spent more time with the senators than the wives did; and the wives were jealous of all those hours, days, years from which they were excluded.

The President and Admiral Grayson were putting on the south lawn of the White House, just back of the executive offices. A Secret Service man greeted Burden by name.

Burden crossed to the improvised putting-green. As he did, Wilson said to Grayson: “That’s enough fresh air, Admiral.”

“Never enough, sir.” Grayson took the President’s putting-iron. “I’ve got neuritis in my shoulder, so the doctor prescribes golf. True agony.” Burden had never seen Wilson so relaxed, even boyish, despite aches and pains. “Let’s look at the sheep,” he said.

The south lawn of the White House was a miniature park that Edith Wilson had turned over to a flock of Shropshire Downs sheep, whose wool had sold for a good deal of money around the country as an encouragement to American women to knit for peace—without victory.

“How close is it, Mr. President?”

“An armistice? Maybe a week, two weeks. There’s no trouble on the
German side or our side …” Wilson left the thought unfinished. Halfway down the lawn, a bench had been so situated that passersby could not see it through the iron fence while the Secret Service man could see both passersby and bench. Burden had often daydreamed about the presidency; yet the actual reality of it never ceased to bemuse him, a combination of banality and grandeur, of dullness and true terror at the thought of so much energy concentrated in one man, in one place, time.

“They say I never consult the Senate. But I always consult you, don’t I?”

“
Sometimes
you consult me.” Wilson’s dislike of the Senate was warmly reciprocated. Each senator was to himself a microcosm of the government and, combined with his fellows, sovereign, a state of affairs that the true sovereign, Wilson, was not about to acknowledge.

“I haven’t discussed this with the Cabinet.” Wilson gave Burden a statement, typed neatly on his own blue-ribboned typewriter. “But I want to get your view first. Tumulty approves. So does Colonel House. But they’re not politicians—like us,” Wilson added graciously. As Burden read the text, Wilson hummed a song from the last vaudeville program at Keith’s before the flu closed it down. As the cheerful song droned in his ear, Burden experienced nightmare. The master political manager of their time and country had committed, at least to paper, a major political catastrophe.

Burden carefully folded the text twice, as if he could twice dispense with it. Wilson had stopped humming. “You disapprove?”

“Yes.” There was no point in the usual evasive demur, suitable for the greatest autocrat in the world, as Wilson himself had referred to his constitutional war-time self. “You are making a direct appeal to the people to give you—you, personally, it sounds like—a Democratic majority in Congress so that you can single-handedly—I’m anticipating Lodge and Roosevelt—make the peace.”

Wilson was sweet reason. “I also have reminded the electorate of all those domestic reforms which we—the Democratic Party—have made and which would be unmade if the Republicans were to win.”

Burden gazed bleakly at the grazing sheep. What to do?

Wilson was surprisingly placating. “Vance McCormick and Homer Cummings and the whole National Committee, or so they tell me, want this statement now.”

“Mr. President, without any sort of statement from you, we will organize the Senate with anywhere from a five- to ten-vote majority and, maybe, fifteen to twenty in the House. But if you interfere and tell the country that the
Republicans can’t make the sort of peace you can, that’s a red flag to a bull—”

“Lincoln, McKinley, even Colonel Roosevelt made similar appeals.”

“I haven’t read their calls to arms lately, but a mild comment to the effect that you don’t change horses in midstream is very different from warning, lecturing …” He had used the fatal verb. Wilson the lecturer stiffened. But Burden plowed on, “… the people by telling them that if they don’t vote the way you want them to the Europeans will think that you’ve been repudiated. You are too personal, if I may say so.”

The two familiar red smudges appeared at the top of each high cheekbone. “The office does have its personal side, Senator.”

“All the more reason to depersonalize it as much as possible. Don’t make yourself the issue—”

“I am the issue. If we lose the Senate, Lodge will be majority leader. He’ll also be chairman of Foreign Relations. When I bring home a treaty, he can delay it, just the way he used to delay—and finally kill, I’m told—his friend John Hay. So you see why I must do everything possible to keep our majority in Congress.”

Burden nodded. “I agree. And the best way of keeping our majority is to tear that thing up. Then speak humbly to the people, from whom your power comes, because you know that in their essential rightness they will, as always, or at least as in 1912 and 1916, do the right thing. You know the spiel.”

Wilson stared at the sheep, who were, even to Burden’s rural eye, remarkably uninteresting. Then the President sighed, and stood up. “They say one American in every four has or will have the flu.”

Burden also rose. “They think, around the world, twenty million will die.”

Together they walked slowly back to the executive offices, where the Secret Service man kept watch. “I wonder if I should wear a mask when I talk to Congress next.”

“Or plugs in your ears.”

“How they talk! How they talk. Anyway, so far, they haven’t given me flu.” Each man touched the same oak tree for luck. “How did my last speech go down?”

“Those who hate women’s suffrage were not moved. But women are bound to get the vote in a year or two.”

“I’ve always been against letting them vote. But then I thought to myself women cannot be stupider than men.”

“We are as one on that.”

“Also, I noted that in those areas where women are allowed to vote they tend to support me. I find this a sign of the highest wisdom.”

“Well, Mr. President, it
was
Eve who ate the apple of knowledge.”

Wilson laughed. “What a peculiar story that is, between us, of course.”

The next morning Burden awakened with a high fever, aching muscles, and an uncontrollable cough. The doctor declared him a victim of flu. With that, he entered a nightmare realm where at times Kitty was ministering angel and at others demon-in-residence. One of his nightmares was that the President had released the text of what Burden had read; and nothing was altered. Later, the nightmares involved Roosevelt and Lodge campaigning across the land, denouncing Wilson. But bells also rang. There was an armistice that was celebrated prematurely; then there was an armistice that meant war’s end. All this swirled about in Burden’s fever-dreams, where, time and again, he was visited by his father in his corporal’s uniform, young and fierce, and on his father’s lips, over and over and over again, the words “the people.”