Hollywood (10 page)

“As they drove through the cheering crowds, between the long rows of sombre troops at damp attention.” Spring Rice smiled at Caroline, “See how I like to add color to my cold political dispatches.”

“Like me.” Caroline nodded. “But, perhaps, if I may be editorial, fewer adjectives, more verbs.”

“More light,” was Adams’s contribution.

“What did he say?” Lodge was like an ancient terrier, sharp eye upon the hole to a rat’s residence.

“The President said, ‘Did you hear that applause …’ ”

“Vain schoolteacher! No. No. A vain
Maryland
preacher.” Lodge had found his worst epithet.

“But he was right,” said Caroline. “I was there. It sounded like thunder or—”

“The breaking of a dam?” Spring Rice provided a journalistic image.

“I have never actually listened to a dam while it was breaking.” Caroline was demure.

“What … 
what
did he say?” Lodge did a small terrier-like two-step.

“If you’ll stop interrupting me, Cabot, I’ll tell you. He said, ‘My message was a message of death for our young men. How can they, in God’s name, applaud that?’ ”

“Coward!” Lodge fired the word.

Caroline turned on Lodge and with none of her usual endless, or so she
thought, evasive tact, fired in turn: “That comes ill from someone too old to fight.”

“Caroline.” Adams put his arm through hers. “Take me in to supper.” But it was Adams who led the trembling Caroline; the old man was soothing: “It does no good to chide enthusiasts. They are like little automatic engines. They feed upon whatever energy is in the air, and today there is a great deal.”

“Too much for me. I’m sorry.” Adams patted her arm; then saw to his other guests.

The conversation was now general. The Allied leaders would soon be in Washington. Spring Rice’s chief, the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, would be the first to arrive
before
the French, Caroline noted, accepting from—what was her name? Lucy something—cold duck
en gelée
from the table whose candlelit splendor was more Faubourg Saint-Germain than Adamsesque Quincy, Massachusetts. But then each year, until the war began, Henry Adams would settle himself at Paris, where he paid court to Lizzie Cameron, meditated on twelfth-century music, and denigrated his own highly acclaimed
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
, so many decades in the making and now, ever since 1913, a published book that the public was not invited either to buy or to read by its prickly author. Yet Caroline could never have had an American life—or at least one in Washington—without the always wise, always benign Henry Adams, known to those not his “nieces” as sublimely caustic and harsh in truth’s high service.

“You don’t like Mr. Lodge?” Lucy’s voice was low and faintly Southern. She was a popular extra woman who was to be seen at large rather than small dinner parties in the west end of Washington. Who was she? Caroline, who cared nothing for those genealogical matters that sustained the city’s social life, had, in self-defense, learned the endless ramifications of who was related to whom and the famous question hence not asked when a name was brought to general attention: “So, then, who was
she
?”—establishing the wife’s place in the scheme of things. “Saint-Simon without the king” was a piece that she had wanted to write for the
Tribune
until Blaise had said, with a brother’s straightforward malice, “Without Saint-Simon, too.”

Lucy’s pale face gleamed in the lamp-light. “Camellia-petal skin,” a phrase much used by the
Tribune
’s Society Lady. Dark blue eyes. Eleanor must dote on Lucy, a beautiful version of herself. What would—indeed, would not—Mlle. Souvestre have said? “I’ve known Mr. Lodge too long to dislike him. He is one of the facts of life here. Naturally, I preferred his wife, Nannie. Sister Anne they called her, too.”

“Mr. Roosevelt admires him …”

“They are best friends …”

“I meant
your
Mr. Roosevelt.”

The eyes were very fine, Caroline decided. Mlle. Souvestre would have approved. Also Lucy—she was, somehow, a Carroll of Carrollton, which meant a Roman Catholic, which would also have pleased Mademoiselle, who, like most French atheists, respected the Church. Lucy
Mercer
. Caroline was relieved that she had remembered. After all, if she did not know her adopted city better than a native, she had no right to publish a family newspaper for largely political families. Lucy’s father, Major Carroll Mercer, had founded the city’s most fashionable country club, in the Maryland village of Chevy Chase, where membership was so highly restricted that Woodrow Wilson refused to play golf there while young Mr. Roosevelt did.

Aileen Tone had joined them. She was not at all dim, as companions were meant to be. “I keep trying to persuade Lucy to sing with us, with Mr. Adams and me, but she won’t.”

“Because you remember me in my youth. I am, now—in my old age—a baritone,” said Lucy. “You remember my girlish alto.”

“Perfect for Richard Coeur de Lion.” Aileen turned to Caroline. “We are studying the old musical notations, trying to work out how twelfth-century music must have sounded. We’re making progress, we think, with Richard’s prison song.”

“
Oh
,
Richard, oh, mon roi, tout le monde t’abandonne
,” Caroline croaked the French ballad, so beloved, for obvious reasons, by Marie-Antoinette.

“Eighteenth-century,” said Aileen. “Lovely, of course.…”

“I have been struck once today.” Senator Lodge was at Caroline’s side. “But I struck back a powerful blow with my right fist. Now …”

“You will use your vigorous left one on me?” Caroline smiled sweetly.

“No. I respond only in kind. You denounce me. I denounce you.”

“Oh, dear.” Aileen sounded alarmed. “Mr. Adams won’t like this.”

“I was only going to match Caroline’s observation that I am too old to fight with a compliment. She is too shrewd not to know why I called Wilson a coward. We should have gone to war at the time of the
Lusitania
but he was afraid that he would lose his hyphenates in the election. Because there is no Democratic Party without the Germans and the Irish.”

“The Germans usually vote Republican,” Caroline began.

“But if I’d favored a war against Germany then, they’d have
all
voted against him.” Lodge was smooth. “And there are twelve million of them
among us, including the German Jews, like Kuhn and Loeb and Warburg, who hate England and love the Kaiser, and now that our good Mr. Morgan is dead, there’s no one to keep them in line. Fear of them made Wilson pretend to be neutral. But once he’d got their votes—those of the Irish, too—he now comes in for the last act, to claim a great victory, so that he can then be our first three-term president.”

Caroline took pleasure in Lodge’s statesman-like plausibility. For all she knew—indeed, for all
he
knew—he believed what he was saying. But mischief was upon her. “After the speech, I saw you shake his hand. What did you say to him?”

Lodge was superb. “I said—what else?—‘Mr. President, you have expressed in the loftiest manner the sentiments of the American people.’ ”

“ ‘Sin boldly!’ ” Caroline had been reminded of the phrase by Wilson’s unexpected casting of himself as Martin Luther.

Lodge looked startled; then recalled the context. “Trust a Catholic to know Martin Luther.”

“
I
don’t,” said Lucy; and waved toward Eleanor.

“It is not only good Protestantism but it is good sense,” said Caroline.

“What, then, is the sin here?” Lodge sounded as if he were conducting a catechism.

“Pride, Senator Lodge.”

“What else, Mrs. Sanford?”

“What else is there? What else caused Lucifer to fall?”

“Lucifer was the son of morning. Wilson is a little schoolteacher, and nothing more.”

“He is the son of our morning, Cabot. And in full pride, too. And sinning boldly through this war, which you love and he—to his credit—does not.”

“How do you know that he does not—or that I do?” Lodge’s face was pale except for the red circle on his right cheek where pacifism’s fist had struck. “He is guileful. Deceitful. Bold, too, at least as sinner. Yes, you may be right. But if he does not love, as you put it, this war, you will admit that he loves himself and his glory, and so perhaps he is not unlike …”

“I concede, Cabot.
You
are Lucifer!” Caroline was giddy with fury; sorrow, too.

“I?” Lodge stepped back, as if to avoid a second blow in one day. “Lucifer?”

“Curious,” said Henry Adams, who had appeared as if by magic. “God has
nothing intelligent to say anywhere in
Paradise Lost
while Lucifer’s every word is ravishing, which makes him quite unlike our own dear Cabot.”

“You see?” Lodge beamed at Caroline. “I’ll let you assign to Mr. Wilson the grand sulphurous role. But remember, it is he—not I—who is fallen, falling …”

“But Lucifer took a number of other angels with him.” Milton had begun to go round in Caroline’s head.

“I promise you,” said Henry Adams, “Cabot would have remained safely behind in Heaven, close to God’s throne as angel-majority leader, singing hosannahs.”

“That is because I am from Boston, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots and
I
alone may speak to God.”

Caroline wondered whether or not anyone that she knew in America would now be killed in the war, which had claimed, the previous week, her favorite half-brother, aged fifty-four, the Prince Napoléon d’Agrigente. Plon had been at his regiment’s headquarters in a paper mill near the river Somme. During the night, there had been a bombardment. The next day his body was identified only because of a dented gold cigarette-case on which his initials were intertwined with those of a lady as unknown to Caroline as she no doubt was to his grieving widow. Although Plon had not been much younger than Senator Lodge, he had insisted on rejoining a regiment to which he had once been, ornamentally, attached. As Caroline smiled warmly at Cabot Lodge, she most sincerely wished him at the very frozen center of hell.

A
smell of frying country sausage delighted Jess’s nostrils as he let himself into the Harding half of 2314 Wyoming Avenue. The Duchess kept her husband well fed and as dry as she could, considering his passion for poker and bourbon and tobacco and the company of those insidious tempters, the politicians.

“That you, Jess?” The voice from upstairs was like a crow’s.

“It’s me, Duchess.”

“You have your breakfast?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re too late. Go and sit down.”

Jess sat in the modern bay window that looked out on a desolate yard. The house, still on the raw side, was not quite finished, unlike the gracious Harding home in Marion with its numerous subtle decorative touches reminiscent not only of all the other opulent Marionite households but of Jess’s mother’s own residence in nearby Washington Court House, not to mention
the long-planned but never completed nest for Roxy, who preferred apartment living, leaving Jess alone to face the horror of the downstairs closet. Jess felt tears come to his eyes as he thought of Roxy. The doctor had warned him that as a borderline diabetic case, with high blood pressure, he would be given to sudden floods of tears for reasons physical not sentimental. Harry Micajah Daugherty appeared from the study, unlighted cigar in his thick fist. “Jess, boy.”

“Whaddaya know?” This was Jess’s usual greeting to anyone he knew back home and, often, to those he didn’t know but happened to see in the vicinity of the courthouse, original center to his world that was now extended not only to Columbus and the state house, but to imperial Washington and the Capitol.

“I know there’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight, for sure.” Daugherty whistled tonelessly the song that had come to be associated with the Spanish-American War in general and with the hero of San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt, in particular.

“They say T.R. hit town late last night.”

Daugherty sat himself in a deep armchair whose antimacassar was slightly askew, like Daugherty’s eyes. Jess could never make up his mind whether to look into the brown eye or the blue one. On aesthetic grounds, he preferred the crystalline quality of the blue. On matters of trust, however, he preferred the homely dog-like sincerity of the brown, despite its slight inadvertent twitch and vestigial cast. Otherwise, Harry M. Daugherty was a perfectly ordinary thick-set, fifty-seven-year-old politician with a small quantity of straight gray hair; no facial hair and, save for an occasional odd squint, no facial expression either. Daugherty now began to whistle three notes in ascending scale.

“How’s the Missis?” asked Jess.

The notes were whistled now in a descending scale. Daugherty shook his head, unpursed his lips. “Not good, Jess boy. Not good. A martyr, that girl, to the arthritis.” And as he did so often at the mention of his invalid wife, Lucie, he began to whistle, with a slight tremolo, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” Even the tough Duchess was obliged to admit that theirs was a true love story, in marked contrast, Jess knew—delighted to know everything about his great friends—to the Harding marriage. But then the Duchess was five years older than the Senator. In fact, she was the same advanced age as Harry Daugherty; and plain women who were older than their husbands were accustomed, when dealing with sticks, to handling the short end, as they said in Fayette County.