Hollywood (43 page)

“He’s edgy these days. He’s easily flustered. He was sick in Paris …”

“Encephalitis.” Like God, Borah was nothing if not well-informed.

“I hadn’t heard that. But he’s still pretty weak, and shouldn’t go to the country now, not in this heat.”

“I suppose he’ll be your candidate, won’t he?” That was why Borah had arrived early, Burden decided. Even God needed an occasional political tip.

“Yes,” Burden lied. “He is, barring accidents.”

“You’ll be his running mate?”

“He hasn’t got that far. But he means to sweep the country for the League.” As Burden improvised, he was somewhat disappointed to discover that his spur-of-the-moment lie, calculated to confuse the enemy, was the plain truth. Of course Wilson was preparing for re-election as the first three-term president. Of course he would need someone like Burden to balance the ticket. Would, Burden wondered, lightning strike? If it did, could he also, as insurance, run for the Senate as well? State law was ambiguous while political
opinion was severe. Whoever ran for two offices would probably lose both, and, of course, Wilson would be ill-pleased at so public a lack of faith.

“You’ll be a big help to him.” Borah nodded in god-like acknowledgment of one of his own minor works.

“You’d be a big help—to whom?” With Roosevelt’s unexpected death on the eve of his political rebirth, the Republican Party was a leaderless group of feudal lords like Penrose and Piatt, with no hero—as opposed to a deity like Borah, who was too large for the presidential office, while Lodge was too old and odd and shrunken.

“I don’t think I’d look right as vice president.” Borah did not smile. “As for president, I’ll have to wait till everyone catches up with me and realizes what a mistake this war was.” At the doorway, Kitty gestured for the statesmen to join the party.

Kitty had managed to collect a bit of everything for their housewarming. The Senate was on hand in collegial force. The Lansings and the Phillipses represented the State Department. The Longworths and the Mombergers stood in for that vast herd, the House of Representatives. The ever-present lobbyists of the war years were no longer to be seen, smiling and waiting to present their petitions. Of old Washington, there were the usual Apgars, paying court to the ancient Mrs. Marshall Field of Chicago, who had recently, mysteriously, settled her court at the capital.

Blaise and Frederika stood in front of the carved stone fireplace filled with pots of flowers, something Burden had first noted years before in Caroline’s house and, gradually, brought Kitty round to. Frederika was now wearing her own somewhat thin gray-blond hair. She looked younger than she had before the flu. “I’m trying to convince Blaise to be cool, like this, in the country.”

“If Connecticut Avenue isn’t country, what is?” Blaise was brusque.

“Virginia is.” Frederika was prompt. “The Potomac Heights. We already own a hundred acres just past Chain Bridge. I want to build where you can hear the sound of water, cool water, like here …”

“Water? All I can hear is iced tea,” said Blaise, reaching for a champagne glass, another of Caroline’s importations that Kitty, temperance like most of their constituents, had long resisted.

“We can hear the creek when there isn’t company. Where’s Caroline?”

“Gone west. To be a cowboy.” Blaise was mildly drunk.

“Movie star.” Frederika was wistful. “I envy her. All that energy. Emma’s married, you know.”

Burden was startled that Caroline had said nothing. “When?” he asked, meaning to whom.

“A professor at Bryn Mawr,” said Blaise, getting the order straight. “Just now. She brought him home to Caroline’s, and they quarrelled. They are now honeymooning with us in Connecticut Avenue.”

“He is critical of Caroline’s movie director,” said Frederika.

The arrival of Henry Cabot Lodge obliged Burden to break away and greet the great man, who had grown frail in recent years. Without his wife, he seemed only half a person, and that half all senator. “There aren’t many people left to talk to,” he observed to Burden, with perfect if unconscious rudeness.

“There’s history.” Burden spoke with exaggerated deference.

“History,” said Lodge, “does not respond. I love the park,” he added, looking about the airy room. “We wanted to live here but didn’t. And if you don’t, early on, you won’t. Colonel Roosevelt and I used to ride across your property, coming up from the ford.”

“I remember.”

Kitty brought the Attorney General over to Lodge, who graciously received him. A. Mitchell Palmer had been in a state of euphoria ever since his house had been blown up. The enemy was everywhere, and he had been singled out to save the democracy from Bolshevism. With practiced charm, Lodge strung him all the rope that was needed, while Burden continued his rounds, greeting the guests and making an appearance of making conversation.

“Jess Smith, Senator,” said a voice he never could place. “I’m here with Mrs. Harding. The Senator’s laid up.” Jess Smith was owlish and slack of jaw. Mrs. Harding was slack of nothing; sharp cornflower-blue eyes glittered behind a pince-nez. “Really nice home, Mr. Day. Really nice. Which proves you’ve always got to build it yourself if you want something nice.”

“I thought Wyoming Avenue was pretty grand.” Burden’s politician’s memory seldom deserted him. He had been to their house once; and remembered everything, including her maiden name, Kling, and the fact that she had been divorced from a first husband before she married Harding, some years her junior, and that she had had a son by the first husband, and that her well-to-do father had disapproved strenuously of Harding on the ground that he was supposed to be several parts Negro. One could not know too much, was Burden’s theory; or, more precisely, one could not forget too much.

“You must see us when Warren’s back from Chautauqua. How he loves the circuit. The crowds—the hotels, the boardinghouses—and the hundreddollar fee for each appearance, which is pretty important now that everything
costs so much. You don’t do Chautauqua, do you?” Mrs. Harding made it seem like a kind of religious observance, not lightly unobserved.

Burden said that he seldom had the time, much less Harding’s gift of oratory. Mrs. Harding was not listening; she was staring at the Longworths, who were at the door to the dining room, where Cissy Patterson Gizycki stood, red hair set off by classic jade green. Alice looked grim for all her toothy smile. Cissy looked seductive, and Nick Longworth looked seduced, and drunk. “The Countess sure is a sketch,” observed Florence Harding.

“She’s no duchess, that’s for sure,” said the amiable Jess.

“She’s always been popular here.” Burden sounded to himself like one of his prim old-guard Apgar cousins instead of his usual rough Western tribune-of-all-the-people self. But then he had been in politics in Washington for more than twenty years; he had known, as girls, Cissy and Caroline and, for that matter, Alice the Great.

“It’s a good thing the folks back home don’t know what goes on here.” Mrs. Harding fixed him with a hard stare just as his natural daughter, Emma, entered the room.

“I’m sure Washington’s no different than Marion, Ohio, when it comes to—secrets,” said Burden, scoring a bull’s-eye.

Mrs. Harding turned a mottled red. Jess cleared his throat of nonpresent phlegm. “Marion is so correct it’s dead,” Jess said. “Now Columbus is something different, I’ll say.”

Burden, as host not to mention collegial senator, had gone too far. Warren Harding was known to indulge himself carnally, and it was not for Burden to betray the secrets of a lodge whose members were known by the women they kept. He changed the subject. “We asked your friends the McLeans—”

“She don’t go out yet. At least not much since Vinson died. They thought the world of that boy. Always had guards with him so he wouldn’t be kidnapped, and then this car runs bang into him. She’s like a madwoman on the subject and of course she knows and I know that it’s those diamonds of hers—that Hope one, in particular—but she won’t part with them and now Vinson’s dead.”

“Tragical,” moaned Jess.

Burden found Emma at the buffet table in the dining room. “Where’s your husband?”

“You know?”

Burden gave her a senatorial kiss on the cheek. “Yes. Congratulations. Why such a hurry?”

“I had to. Marry, that is. We quarrel. Mother and I. We really tore it this time.” Burden looked down into his own blue eyes, as she looked up into
her
own eyes, without recognition. This was simply her mother’s old friend, not her father, demi-creator.

“These things pass.” He was soothing. “Is he here, your husband?”

“No. He had a meeting. With a committee. Against Bolshevism. So many are in the history departments. One of the reasons. Particularly Henry Adams.”

“Henry Adams?” Burden had not entirely followed her rapid delivery, and put it down to the noise in the room.

“Harvard’s the worst, you see. But Hollywood’s Red, too. Mother’s a dupe, or worse. I hope not. If you draw it now, and you will.
We
will! Must …”

“Draw
what
, Emma?” Burden wondered if his own mother’s hereditary deafness had finally claimed him.

“
The line!
We must draw the line.” As she continued to speak rapidly, eyes narrowed as if observing her own thoughts rush by like the fastest of trains, Burden saw deliverance approaching him.

“The very man you should be talking to …”

But Emma was now out of control. “Laughed after the Winter Palace, 1917. Our opportunity. Kerensky told us. Did we listen? No! China. The final apple to fall from the bough …”

Burden seized the Attorney General by the arm, and drew him close, for protection.

“Emma Sanford … I haven’t yet learned her married name, it’s so new,” Burden said to the Attorney General. “You know her mother, Caroline Sanford …”

“Oh, yes. This is a pleasure.”

“Emma, this is Mr. Palmer. Mr. A. Mitchell Palmer.”

“At last!” Emma was ecstatic. “I’m from Bryn Mawr. A letter. All of us. The June-second bombing. Trotsky—who else? Your anti-radical division. Superb. Wrote Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the right person. In spite of—”

“Yes. It was pretty noisy, I’ll say that. The explosion, I mean.” But A. Mitchell Palmer had no idea what Burden had unleashed upon him. Emma has finally found her tongue, Burden thought, as he moved away, greeting guests; unfortunately, her mind now moved too rapidly for her tongue to express so many urgencies.

Burden completed his tour of the party where he had started, on the porch. A fragment of a waxing moon decorated the black-purple sky and the last of
the season’s fireflies glided lazily on the west wind. From the grape arbor, two figures entwined, approached, unaware that he was watching. Tactfully, he stepped behind a column as Cissy Patterson, lipstick smeared, stepped onto the porch, followed now by the slightly dishevelled drunken Nick Longworth. They went inside. Burden was not surprised. Nick was a compulsive womanizer, made uninhibited by the drink, while Cissy was restless, to say the least. Then, as fate, or herself, would have it, Alice Longworth stepped onto the porch from the far door. She could not have avoided the sight of her husband and Cissy together.

“What a cool night, after such a hot day.” Alice sat in a chair with her back to the party.

“I’ve always loved the park,” said Burden, with rather more feeling than so neutral an observation deserved.

“I can’t think of
anything
I love.” Alice was grim. When she did not smile the Rooseveltian toothy smile, the thin lips made a pursed sombre line, while in the half-light her gray eyes were dull. “This is no place to live.”

“In our line of work, we must.”

“
Your
line. Nick’s line. I have no line.”

“Go away.”

“Where? I always thought I’d live somewhere else when father was gone. But now that he’s really gone, there is no place. I shall be a fixture, like one of those awful Apgars.”

“My cousins.”

“Poor you!” Alice leapt like a cat to her feet; self-pity quickly sloughed off. Kitty came out on the porch.

“Mr. Lansing wants to talk to you, Burden …”

“I shall listen in,” said Alice, “and report every word to Cabot. You know, when Wilson came back to the White House, I stood in the crowd on the sidewalk and I put a murrain on him, a very serious murrain …”

Burden was now at the door.

“What is a murrain?” asked Kitty.

“A hex. A curse. I am a witch, you know.”

“Can you see the future?” asked Burden.

“Of course,” said Alice. “But I never look. I don’t dare. Would you, if you could?”

“No,” said Burden; and crossed to the corner where Lansing and Hitchcock were waiting for him in the present that enveloped them all like the night with its half-moon and idle fireflies.

T
he President was standing in his open car. Edith sat beside him, clutching flowers. The President held his hat in his left hand, and waved with his right. The smile looked genuine; fatigue, too. Then the car with its Secret Service outriders pulled into a street lined with working-class people. As the President waved, they crossed their arms over their chests and looked away. Suddenly, one man held up a sign: “Release Political Prisoners.” The President’s hand dropped to his side. The smile vanished. Edith stared up at her husband, with a fixed awful smile, as the car, like a hearse, made its way through the sombre crowd.