Hollywood (6 page)

“Now
he
has a problem. Warren Harding, that is.” Burden took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. It had been Caroline’s idea for Mrs. Bingham to break with Washington tradition and serve champagne as well as the inevitable tea and heavy cake. Official Washington was gratified except for such devoted teetotalers as Josephus Daniels, who had gone so far as to ban wine from the officers’ mess of the Navy. Currently, Mrs. Daniels was notorious for having presided over a tea where
onion sandwiches
had been served. She would never live that down was Mrs. Bingham’s considered judgment. Even in Washington there were limits to vulgarity.

“Are there so many hyphenates in Ohio?” Caroline found the whole problem of German-Americans and Irish-Americans fascinating. The Administration found it alarming. If the United States went to war with Germany, how would a million or so German-speaking American citizens respond?

“No more than I’ve got, proportionately. But Harding’s got one, a lady friend, who’s a dragon, they say. She’s threatened to expose him …”

“Expose him?”

“Both of them. She’ll tell all if he votes for war with her native land.”

“That is unusual.
Cherchez le pays.
”

“Senators are known by the women they keep.” Burden grinned. “Actually, he’s a nice fellow, if you don’t count his speeches.”

“That’s what we say about all of you. Except Senator Lodge. We like his speeches. It’s he that …” They were then joined by Mrs. Bingham, blind eyes agleam with excitement. “Mr. Tumulty’s here. From the White House. You’re being called back, Senator. All of you. All Congress.”

“Called back for what?” Burden looked, again, his age; and Caroline decided not to have another child—by him.

“A special session. To receive a communication by the Executive on Grave Questions of Internal Policy. Those are Mr. Wilson’s very words. I’m sure it’s war at last. So exciting, isn’t it?”

Caroline’s heart began to pound—from excitement? Burden’s face was suddenly ruddy. “I’m sure it isn’t war just yet. When is the special session?”

“April sixteenth, Mr. Tumulty says.”

Burden looked relieved. “That gives us a month. Plenty can happen.”

“Plenty is happening,” said Caroline, the editor. “The President’s busy arming those ships that you willful men in the Senate said he shouldn’t.” Although the celebrated American Constitution was a perfect mystery to Caroline, this did seem wrong. “How can he?” She turned to Burden.

“Oh, he can, if he wants to. He can call it ‘military necessity,’ the way Lincoln did.”

“Lincoln! War!” Mrs. Bingham was ecstatic. “I wasn’t born then, of course,” she lied. “But I’ve always wanted to live through a war. I mean
a real one
, not like the Spanish nonsense.”

“I suppose that’s all that anyone ever wants to do.” Caroline was not well-pleased. “Live through it.”

James Burden Day walked up the steps to the north portico of the White House, where he was greeted by an usher who led him across the entrance hall to the small electric elevator. “Mrs. Wilson will be waiting for you in the upstairs hall. The President’s in bed. The chill stays with him.”

Burden was struck by the calm of the White House. There was no sign of emergency. A few politicians could be seen, showing friends the state apartments. Of course, the executive offices were in a separate wing to the west of the mansion, and although telephones never ceased to ring in the offices, there was, as yet, none of that tension which he remembered from the days of McKinley and the Spanish war, not to mention the tremendous bustle of the Roosevelt era when children and their ponies were to be seen
indoors as well as out, and the President gave the impression of presiding simultaneously in every room with a maximum of joyous noise.

The Wilson White House was like the President himself: scholarly, remote, and somewhat lady-like. The President had been entirely devoted to his first wife. Now he was besotted by her successor. He was easily the most uxorious of the recent presidents; he also had the fewest friends. Ill-at-ease with men, Wilson preferred the company of women, particularly of his three daughters, gracious replicas of himself, ranging from the sad plainness of the spinster Margaret, who wanted to be a singer, to the dim beauty of Eleanor, married to the secretary of the Treasury, William G. McAdoo, to the equine-featured Jessie, married to one Francis B. Sayre.

The elevator stopped. The glass-panelled door opened. Burden found himself in the familiar upstairs corridor that ran the length of the building from west to east. In the old days, the President’s offices had been at the east end and the living quarters at the west, with the oval sitting room as a sort of no-man’s-land at dead center. But Theodore Roosevelt’s family had been big; ambitious, too. He had added the executive wing to the mansion, while converting the entire second floor for himself and his family: successors, too, of course.

The wife of the most despised of his two despised successors stood opposite the elevator, waiting for Burden. Edith Boiling Galt Wilson was a large, full-breasted woman whose wide face contained small regular features, reflecting the Indian blood that she had inherited, she claimed, from Pocahontas. The smile was truly charming. “Senator Day! Now tell me the absolute truth. Did the usher refer to me as Mrs. Wilson or as the First Lady?”

“I think he said ‘Mrs. Wilson.’ ”

“Oh, good! I hate ‘First Lady’ so! It sounds like something out of vaudeville, with Weber and Fields and me as Lillie Langtry.”

Burden was aware that she was the focal point of a heavy jasmine scent that ebbed and flowed in her wake as she led him to the end of the hall where a desk with two telephones had been placed beneath a great fanlight window that looked out on the executive offices to the west and the State War and Navy Building to the north. At the desk sat Edith’s social secretary, Edith Benham, an admiral’s daughter who had replaced the magnificent Belle Hagner, a queen of the Aboriginal City, and secretary to the first Mrs. Wilson as well as to Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Taft. It had been suggested that as Edith Boiling Galt had never been included in Mrs. Hagner’s list of those who were invitable to the White House, Miss Hagner herself was no longer
to be found there with her lists, her files, her telephones at the desk below the fan window. Kitty had talked of nothing else for a week; and Burden had listened less than usual.

“I do hope Mrs. Day will come to tea April twelfth.” This was Mrs. Benham’s greeting.

Burden said that he hoped that she would, too. “Edith is a treasure,” said Edith. “Of course, she’s Navy. We’re surrounded by Navy here. You know Admiral Grayson.” A small trim handsome man in mufti had come out of the southwest suite. “Senator,” he shook Burden’s hand; another Southerner, Burden duly noticed, more amused than not that it had taken Virginia less than a half-century to reconquer the White House with Woodrow Wilson, who had, as a boy, actually gazed upon the sainted features of Robert E. Lee in the days of their common country’s terrible ruin. Now the South had returned in triumph to its true home, city, nation; and the President was surrounded, as was proper, by Virginians. “He’s doing very well, sir.” Grayson spoke to Burden but looked at Edith. “Only don’t tire him. He’s strong as an ox but susceptible to strain. The digestive system …”

“… is the first to record the disagreeable.” Edith smiled, like a little girl, Burden noted; hence the President’s famous nickname for her, “little girl,” which had caused much mirth considering Edith’s ship-like tonnage, inevitably decorated, festooned, bannered with orchids. “I was horrified when I first learned about Mr. Wilson’s breakfast …”

“Two raw eggs in grape juice.” Grayson was prompt. “It solved the dyspepsia as much as one can. Anyway, let him conduct the conversation.” Grayson gave more instructions, to Burden’s deep annoyance. He was perfectly capable of talking politics in his own way to what, after all, was just another politician, no matter how elevated and hedged round with state. Then Edith led him into the bedroom.

Woodrow Wilson was propped up by four pillows; he wore a plaid wool dressing gown; and his famous pince-nez. Beside the bed, on a chair, sat his brother-in-law Randolph. Between them, on the coverlet, there was a Ouija board, and each had a hand on top of the table-like contraption that moved as if of its own will over a wooden board on which had been drawn the alphabet, stopping, as the spirit dictated, at this or that letter, which Randolph duly noted on a pad of paper. Wilson held a finger to his lips as Burden and Edith sat beside the bed, a huge affair of carved dark wood that Edith had had moved from the so-called Lincoln bedroom at the other end of the corridor. Actually, the “Lincoln bedroom” had been Lincoln’s office while
the bed, known reverently as
his
bed, was never used by him. All that anyone could recall was that Mrs. Lincoln had bought it for a guest room. In any case, Burden regarded the bed as singularly hideous despite its provenance; but then he disliked anything to do with the Civil War era. Red plush, horsehair stuffing, gas-lamps were mingled with his own memories of growing up poor in the Reconstruction South before his family had moved west.

While the two men played with the Ouija board, Edith whispered to Burden. “The place was—is—so run-down. You must ride herd on everyone here twenty-four hours a day, which poor Mrs. Wilson, being sick, couldn’t do, and Mrs. Taft was too grand to do. Now, of course, all the money goes to Preparedness and so we just scrimp along.”

But they scrimped most pleasantly, thought Burden. A fire burned in the fireplace, while above the mantel a splendid American landscape afforded some relief from all those replicas of dim politicians and their wives that gave the White House rooms a sense of being mere stage-sets for an audience of glum, peering ghosts. The window opposite Burden framed a wintry view of the becolumned State War and Navy Building, where lights were already burning. On a table, beneath the window-sill, the President’s Hammond typewriter was set. It was said that not only could he type as well as any professional but he alone wrote those high-minded mellifluous speeches that had so entranced the country, including Burden, who was generally immune to the oratory of others.

Both Edith and Burden watched the President intently. But then he was most watchable, Burden decided. Roosevelt was always in motion, and so always the center of attention. But there was nothing of particular interest in T.R.’s chubby face or the rather jerky movements of his stout little body. On the other hand, Wilson was lean, large-headed, and nearly handsome. The long face ended in a lantern jaw; the pale gray eyes were watchful; the thin gray hair cut short; the sallow skin deeply lined. Grayson kept him physically active, particularly on the golf-course, where Edith often joined him; reputedly, she was the better player. At sixty, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, re-elected to a second term five months earlier, looked quite capable (in Virginia’s interest?) of being elected to an unprecedented third term in 1920. Such was the nightmare of the professional politician; and Burden himself was nothing if not professional, and like the rest of the tribe, he too saw himself abed in this house, if not with a Ouija board. Mildly dismayed, he gazed upon what might yet be the first three-term president.

Randolph announced the message from the spirit world. “Use mines to sink German submarines. Signed Horatio Nelson.”

“I wonder how Nelson knows about mines. Or submarines.” The President’s voice was resonant, and only an ear as sharp as Burden’s could detect Virginia beneath the correct professorial diction. If Wilson had not written more books than his nemesis Theodore Roosevelt, he had written weightier ones—solemn histories that were used as university texts, which made him something of an anomaly. The historian suddenly torn from his study in order to make history for others to write about. Most politicians disliked him for this suspected—true?—doubleness. But Burden found it intriguing. The President seemed always to be observing himself and others as if he knew that sooner or later, he would be teaching himself—others, too.

The fact that there had never been a president quite like Wilson made him all the more difficult to assess. For one thing, did the professional historian, who preferred the British parliamentary system to the American executive system, inhibit the president in his duties? Certainly Wilson had begun his reign with a dramatic parliamentary gesture. Instead of sending a message to be read to the Congress like his predecessors, he himself went up to the Capitol and read his own message, the first president to do so since John Quincy Adams. He had behaved like a prime minister in the Congress, except no one there could ask him a question in that constitutionally separated place. He also enjoyed conferring directly with members of the press; thus, he could mitigate if not circumvent their publishers. Finally, as he could not alter the checks and balances of the Constitution, he was obliged to maintain his power through his adroit mastery of the Democratic Party, a delicate task for one who belonged to its minority eastern wing made up of Tammany Hall and Hearst and worse, while the party’s majority was Southern and Western and far too long enamored of William Jennings Bryan.

Burden knew that he had been summoned to the White House because, with his elevation to the Senate, he was now leader of the Bryanite wing of the party, which hated war, England, the rich, and, by and large, Woodrow Wilson, too. Wilson’s re-election had been a very close thing indeed, thanks to his own party’s suspicion that he wanted to join the Allies in the war against Germany. Only the inspired slogan “He kept us out of war” had, finally, rallied the faithful. Now war was at hand. What to do?

Wilson motioned for Randolph to remove the Ouija board; and himself. Edith also took the hint. At the door she said, “Don’t tire yourself.”

“That’s hardly possible, little girl, in a sickbed.” She was gone. Then
Wilson noted the elaborate bed, rather like a Neapolitan hearse that Burden had once seen at the base of Vesuvius. “Though I’m not so sure about
this
bed.” Wilson removed a sheaf of papers from his bedside table, and placed them on the coverlet.