Hollywood (5 page)

While Mrs. Bingham told her of scandals too squalid even for the
Tribune
to publish, Caroline noted that her lover was growing stout, that the once thick bronze curls were now gray in front and fewer, and the blue eyes smaller in a lined face. Yet they still made love at least once a week: and, more important, there was always a good deal to talk about. But now she was forty, with a fleet of ships ablaze behind her. There was no going back in time, while what lay ahead was less than comforting if only because she did not know how to be old; and rather doubted that she’d ever develop the knack.

Everyone, even Blaise, urged her to marry again, as if one simply went to a party and selected a husband. But the few possibilities were always married, as her first lover had been and still very much was. Of the possibilities, she had allowed herself several short affairs, without great joy. Now she found that she was attracted to men half her age, which would have been acceptable in France but not here, where she could well be burned at the stake. Women were not allowed such vile license in the Puritan republic. Women were not allowed much of anything unless they were rich in their own right, her one glittering advantage, seldom taken advantage of.

Mrs. Bingham accepted the worship of two new congressional couples who, when they heard Caroline’s name, saw, as it were, divinity. Aware that a newspaper proprietor was the source of all life to the politician, Caroline encouraged lit candles, murmured prayers, whispered confessions because, put simply, she liked power very much.

Suddenly she felt less sorry for herself, as Mrs. Bingham, punch cup in hand, told her with acrid breath that one of the he’s of her story was standing across the room, a stout dim-looking man named Randolph Boiling, brother to the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. “Which,” said Mrs. Bingham, delighted with the horror of it all, “is why
he
is with
him.
”

“
Who
is with
whom?
” Caroline had always had difficulty following Mrs. Bingham’s higher gossip. Now, half in half out of her dotage, Mrs. Bingham no longer bothered to identify with a name those free-floating pronouns that bobbed in such confusion on the surface of her swift sombre narratives.

“He—
her
brother.” Mrs. Bingham frowned with annoyance. She disliked the specific. “Randolph Boiling. Over there. With the sheep’s head. Well, he brought
him
. The great speculator. Over there. The Jew. Quite handsome, to give the devil his due.”

Caroline recognized Bernard Baruch, a very tall, very rich Wall Street speculator who affected a Southern accent so thick that it made Josephus Daniels sound like a Vermont Yankee. Baruch was a New Yorker of Southern origin. He had made a fortune by remembering to sell those stocks which he had bought
before
they cost less than he paid for them, a gift Caroline entirely lacked. She had sat next to Baruch once or twice at dinner and enjoyed his flow of gossip, in which every one of
his
pronouns was firmly attached to a famous name. Like so many newly rich men of no particular world—he was a Jew, she had gathered, only when it suited him—Baruch had been attracted to Washington, to politics, to the President. It was said that he had personally given fifty thousand dollars to Wilson for the election of 1912; it was also said that he used his White House connections to get tips
on what stocks to buy. Caroline was hazy about all this. But not Mrs. Bingham, who was now in full swift torrent. “
Mrs. Peck
,” she said the name accusingly, much preferring
she
. “The President’s old mistress—she’s in California now—was threatening to sell the President’s letters to the papers last fall before the election, and so Randolph Boiling got Mr. Baruch to go to her and buy the letters for seventy-five thousand dollars, and that’s how the President could marry Edith Boiling Galt, who’s getting fat, and the President could win the election, just barely.…”

A plain small woman with a large head marched toward Mrs. Bingham, followed by a plump bespectacled man with a moist palm, as Caroline discovered when it closed all round her own hand. “Mrs. Harding!”

Mrs. Bingham produced her most ghastly smile for the wife of Ohio’s junior senator, Warren Gamaliel Harding, who, after James Burden Day, was the handsomest man in the Senate. “This is an old friend.” Mrs. Harding pushed her escort forward. “From Washington Court House, in Fayette County. Jesse Smith. Say hello to Mrs. Bingham. Say hello to Mrs. Sanford, Jesse.” The hellos were duly said. Then, to make conversation, Jesse said to Caroline, “I’m a friend of Ned McLean. And Evalyn, too. His wife, you know. With the diamond.”

“I’m not.” Caroline was gracious. “A friend, that is. I wish,” she was expansive in her insincerity, “that I was.”

“I can fix it,” said Jesse. “Any time.”

“Jesse can fix anything.” But Mrs. Harding sounded dubious.

“Where’s the Senator?” Mrs. Bingham came to the only point that mattered: wives were to be tolerated, no more.

“He’s gone to Palm Beach. With the McLeans. He hates the cold. So do I. But I’ve got so much to do here. You see, we went and bought this big house on Wyoming Avenue that’s in two parts. We live in the one part and we rent out the other. Well, there’s no end of bother with tenants, isn’t there?”

Mrs. Bingham said, “I wouldn’t know.”

“You must come see us when we’re settled in. You, too, Mrs. Sanford. I’ve been to your brother’s lovely home.”

“Almost as big as the McLeans’.” Jesse made his contribution.

“My daughter finds it quite large enough these days.” With her usual swift thrust, Mrs. Bingham reminded them that Mrs. Blaise Delacroix Sanford was none other than her own daughter Frederika—my protégée, thought Caroline, who was more glad than not to have got Blaise married to someone who
could put up with his uneasy temper, so like their father’s, though unlike that once larger-than-life now smaller-than-death monster, Blaise was not yet mad. Caroline quite admired her sister-in-law’s strength of character, particularly the way she had, socially at least, dropped her mother once she had leapt to the top of their world. Neither Blaise nor Frederika ever appeared at Mrs. Bingham’s “at homes” to the Congress, nor was Mrs. Bingham invited to the Sanfords except for a private meal in the bosom of the family, the very last place that Mrs. Bingham ever wanted to be. Caroline herself was less strict than Frederika. Also, Mrs. Bingham was her invention; and never to be abandoned. She was good value, too, if one could separate her inventions from those shiny disreputable truths for which she had a magpie’s eye.

Mrs. Harding was staring at Caroline. She had left her card upon first arrival in the city in early 1915; and that had been that. “You must come to us, Mrs. Sanford. We’re simple folk, but I know you’re a friend of Nick Longworth …”

“And here,” said Caroline, saved by the appearance of a handsome creature all in blue, “is Mrs. Longworth.”

“Caroline.” The women embraced. “Mrs. Bingham.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s cold gray-blue eyes were aslant with controlled laughter. Mrs. Bingham had that effect on her. “Mrs. Harding!” Alice’s eyes went suddenly wide; laughter was choked off at the source.

“I was just telling about your Nick and my Warren.” The “Warren” came out in a staccato roar of “r’s” which sounded to Caroline like “Wurr-rren.”

“They play poker,” Alice announced brightly. “In your apartment …”

“
House
, in two parts,” began Mrs. Harding with a look of steel in
her
cold gray-blue eyes. Caroline was not certain which of the two would win if war came. Alice’s wild sense of humor was a sword on which she might yet herself fall. While Mrs. Harding—what was her name?—Florence—would never give way. Ordinarily the two ladies would not have met but for the fact that Alice’s husband was a congressman from Ohio, whose senator was Warren Harding: as a result, neither lady could ignore the other. But thus far Alice had collected the most points. “I must come see your apartment—I mean house. I don’t go,” she turned to Caroline, “because I’m not invited to the poker games. Only boys allowed. Even though I’m a very good poker player.” She turned to Mrs. Harding. “Maybe you and I should have all-girl all-night poker games, Florence.” Alice said the name with sufficient space all round it to leave room for a shroud.

“I’m Jesse Smith,” said Jesse Smith, taking Alice’s hand. “From Ohio, too.”

“Lucky,” said Alice, “you.”

“I think you know my friends the McLeans. She plays poker, Evalyn does. Pretty good, too.”

“Oh, God!” Alice had long since ceased to attend the Ohioans. “Cousin Eleanor! She’s like a lighthouse, isn’t she? So tall, so full of light. I must go tease her.” Alice left them for the fireplace, where Eleanor stood, listening politely to Mr. Baruch. They were the only couple in the room in proper scale to each other. Like kindly giants, they stood before the flames and greeted Alice.

Mrs. Bingham knew all. “Her father will run again, in 1920. He’ll be nominated, too. He’s made his peace with the regular Republicans.”

“My Warren thinks the world of Colonel Roosevelt.” With a hunter’s eye, Mrs. Harding studied Alice in the distance, the quarry that had got away so far. “The Colonel needs Ohio, if he’s going to go anywhere at all, and my Warren can swing it for him.”

“But surely Mr. Wilson will run again, and win again.” As Caroline spoke, she wondered if she ought to try to have another child; or was she too old? Menopause had not yet begun; even so, the
Tribune
’s Society Lady never ceased to warn its readers against having a child so late in life and so long after the first. Of course, there was no husband, but nowadays a respectable widow could simply take a long trip around the world and return with an adopted child, and an elaborate story of a family retainer, in France, at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, dead in childbirth. Last wish for baby: America. Adoption.
What else could I do?
Every four years, coincidental with the presidential election, she thought of having a baby or going back to France for good or entering, at last, upon a furious love affair. Also, any mention of Theodore Roosevelt had the effect of turning her inward. Although she quite liked the former President despite—or because of?—his noisy absurdity, the thought of his absolutely requited self-love made her affections turn not toward him but herself. He aroused the competitive instinct in her. She could still start over. She had not lost her looks; she might still find … what?

“I think I shall go to California,” she said, to the general astonishment of her companions and self. With that, she abandoned them for the father of her daughter, Burden Day, who had come to the Senate in 1915, the same year as Warren Harding. Before that he had been in the House of Representatives, where during his first—or was it second?—term he had deflowered her,
for which she was in his debt. Otherwise, she might have been like Mlle. Souvestre, a vast untended garden, gone to seed.

“Jim,” she murmured. He had just left the group around Alice and Kitty.
Kitty: The Unsuspecting Wife
. Caroline tended to think in headlines, capitals, italics, and bold
bold
Roman. She might no longer be much of a woman but she was truly a good and inky publisher. “Or should I call you Burden now?” With Jim’s elevation to the Senate, Kitty had decreed he be known as Burden Day, which had a presidential sound, she thought, though to Caroline the name suggested a spinsterish old gentleman, at Newport, Rhode Island, in exuberant thrall to needlepoint.

“Call me anything. You look beautiful. What else?”

“I do have something else in mind. The beauty’s only nature’s trap. I want another child.”

“By me?” Burden’s smile was immaculate; but his voice had dropped to a whisper. Nearby, the Austrian ambassador spoke of peace to the secretary of the interior, who cared only for oil.

“By you. Of course. I’m hardly wanton yet.”

“I suppose it could be arranged.” He grinned; reminded her of the boy that he had been when they first met. “Funny,” he added, and she smiled broadly, aware that when anyone said “funny” it was fairly certain that all mirth had fled. “Kitty said almost the same thing to me last year.”

“And you obliged.”

“I obliged. She never really got over Jim Junior’s dying.”

“Now?”

“Happy. Again. How’s Emma?”

“Our daughter wants to go to college. She is very brainy, not like me.”

“Not like me, either.”

“Come see her. She likes you.” Actually Emma was perfectly indifferent to her actual father, so much for the mystical inevitable tug of consanguinity. But then Emma was indifferent to most people; she was withdrawn, self-absorbed, neutral. She read books of physics as if they were novels. Surprisingly, the one person that she had liked was Caroline’s husband of convenience; of course she had thought that John Sanford was her father. But as he was now dead, that was that. Caroline did find it unusual—even unfeminine—that Emma had never once noticed the physical resemblance between herself and her mother’s old friend James Burden Day. But then Emma never looked at a mirror in order to see herself as opposed to hair or hat.

“She’s made friends with the Roosevelt girl.” At the fireplace, Alice was holding forth to cousin Eleanor, whose patient smile was beginning to resemble Medusa’s petrifying rictus.

“Hard to imagine, a
Democratic
Roosevelt.” Burden stared at the cousins, alike in appearance, unlike in character.

“What do you think of him?”

Burden shrugged. “He doesn’t come my way. He’s a bit too charming, I’d say. He’s also too much the warrior. He can’t wait to get us in.”

“You can?”

“I’m a Bryan Democrat. Remember?” Burden stretched his arms, as if measuring them for a cross of gold. “The war’s not popular where I come from. Maybe the Easterners should go and fight it and let us stay home …”

“And fight Mexico?”

“Well, at least we’d get some loot out of it. There’s nothing for us in Europe except trouble.” Mrs. Harding marched by, Jesse Smith two paces behind her. She greeted Burden; then affixed herself to the Russian ambassador, Bakhmeteff, whose wife was the aunt of Ned McLean, Caroline’s friendly competitor at the
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