The Golden Age (12 page)

“Are you going to marry Hopkins?” He asked the intimate question as if he were inquiring about the length of her stay in what local radio had recently taken to calling “the Nation’s Capital.”

“No. I’m much too old for marriage. Why did you and Felicia break up?”

It was his turn to be taken aback. Like all prying journalists, he treasured his privacy. He stammered something incoherent.

“Now, now,” said Caroline. “Here is why.” She had recognized Luvie Pearson, the second wife, who smiled and took Caroline’s hand. With blond hair and equine features, Luvie was elegant in a non-Washington way. “Your husband was explaining to me how he left Felicia for you and I said that now I can see why.”

Pearson’s response was sharp: “I said no such thing!”

Caroline realized, happily, that she had made an enemy of a Quaker who wrote a daily column in which he mixed personal vendettas with, occasionally, actual news.

“Cissy is at it again.” Mrs. Pearson addressed both husband and Caroline.

“At what?” Pearson gazed about the room, in search of ever more interesting quarry.

Luvie turned to Caroline. “Occasionally, she exercises
droit de seigneur
—or is it
madame?
”

“Tell me what
it
is and I’ll try to translate.”

“She picks someone—usually from the paper—someone she wants to go to bed with. Then she asks him to the party with the understanding that he’s to sleep over.”

Drew Pearson had moved on. Luvie pointed to a rugged young man in evening clothes; surly face flushed with drink. “
Droit de madame
, I’d say. But I’m afraid he won’t be able to fulfill her rights if he drinks much more.”

“She’s already told him to go up to bed. That was after he pulled up his trouser leg to show us that he’s wearing silk pajamas and Cissy said, ‘Oh, God, my crepe-de-chine sheets are ripe peach and your pajamas are burgundy red.”

“Will he be spared if the colors clash?”

“No. Look, he’s heading for the stairs.”

“I never knew Cissy had this Catherine the Great side to her.” Caroline was more admiring than not.

“She’s very regal. And Drew’s very rude to her. They only see each other because of the child by Felicia.”

“But he works for her.”

Luvie shook her handsome head like a thoroughbred horse at a race’s start. “He doesn’t work
for
anyone.”

“There are other papers …”

“Many other papers.”

“There are also contracts.” Caroline knew that Cissy would not let the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column go without a fight.

They were joined by a large-boned pink-and-white woman in her late thirties, who said, “Mrs. Sanford?”

“Yes.” Caroline was gracious. But then so few people any longer recognized her in what had once been very much her city.

“You look so well. Remember me?” A bright smile. “I’m Emma. Your daughter.”

“Well!” Luvie Pearson was the one who gasped.

“So you are. So you are.” For this quiet reading of lines, Caroline awarded herself an Academy Award, if only for lifetime achievement. The two women embraced formally.

“I had heard you were in town,” said Emma.

“And I had heard from your Uncle Blaise that you were out of town. That you live in New York now.”

Luvie excused herself, to go spread the news.

“I heard that you were staying in the White House.”

“I was there for a few days. I’m at the Wardman Park now. You must come see me.” There was, Caroline realized, no proper etiquette for dealing with a daughter that one hardly knew, and if she was at all
the same sort of woman that she had been when they last met, nearly twenty years earlier, a renewed acquaintanceship was bound to be unpleasant.

“I should like that.” Emma
seemed
quite sane. But one never knew; one moment she could charm even her mother; then, the next, she would begin a tirade worthy of Bernhardt in Racine, usually on politics, where she had passionate views about the need for total order in the lives of the common people. Caroline wondered, somewhat nervously, if Emma might have found her hero in Hitler, who seemed to sum up all the virtues that she had most extolled in the past when she was married to a conservative academic. “You know, I’m divorced,” Emma contributed to Caroline’s reverie.

“Oh, yes. I think you wrote me. In France. Yes. Am I to have another son-in-law soon?” Caroline hated her own kittenish tone. But then she had never played the part of a mother with a daughter; on screen she had comforted only sons, usually as they lay dying in the trenches of the First War.

“Oh, I think not. Hope not. Too busy. You have a grandson at Princeton. Aaron Burr Decker. Very brilliant. Giles—my ex-husband, remember?—got friendly custody. I’ll tell A.B. to call on you. That’s his nickname. Keep the name alive. You know, I’m president of Fortress America. We have ten thousand members. Growing every day. We’re doing our best to keep us out of this war, which you probably want us in.”

“Who do you mean by
us?
” Caroline began to focus on the face of her daughter, who had improved, in appearance at least, with age. Caroline could not recall if she had ever told Emma who her real father was. Pregnant by a married politician, Caroline had been obliged to marry John Sanford, a complaisant cousin, who had provided the child with a suitable name and place in the Sanford clan of New York. Upon arrival in Washington, Caroline had intended to tell her daughter—if she saw her—who the father was, but now she decided to withhold so fair a gift from one who would, no doubt, denounce her for this ancient adultery.

“Us! America?” Fortunately, Emma kept her voice down. “That’s
why it’s so important that we keep your friend FDR from running again. He’ll get us in, but Jim Farley won’t. We’re all for Farley. Byrnes will do, of course, and even Senator Day …”

Caroline kept a straight face as her daughter, unwittingly, named her father. As Caroline suspected, she had neglected to tell Emma that James Burden Day had been her first lover when he was a young ambitious congressman, much too happily married to the daughter of the boss of his state’s Democratic Party to marry Caroline. She had only seen him once since her return. He was now like the amiable whole brother she’d never had. He was also certain that if Roosevelt did not run again, he himself could be nominated and elected. After all, he was as against the war as the rather shadowy American people, who were, with each new poll, giving even more Delphic responses to interested pollsters who asked their questions in ever more complex ways, responding to the urgencies of British agents, operating out of Rockefeller Center in New York.

“We also work with Martin Dies. I don’t know where we’d be without that Un-American Activities Committee of his. You know, he single-handedly got Warner Brothers to drop that
March of Time
film about life inside Germany. We’ve also learned that Mr. Farrell is making a propaganda film, too.”

She had always called Tim “Mr. Farrell,” thus expressing her displeasure at her mother, who had lived for so long a time in sin.

“He is doing some sort of documentary.” Caroline was deliberately vague. “About the election, I think.”

“What are
you
doing?” Emma’s gaze was direct, as befitted an informer.

“I’ve come home to talk to Mr. Macrae at E. P. Dutton in New York. About the publication of my grandfather Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler’s reflections on the election of 1876 …”

“Didn’t his daughter …”

“Yes, my mother seems to have murdered the first Mrs. Sanford. Too sad!” Caroline could not resist this tinkling drawing-room note to offset the general darkness of the first Emma now reincarnated, rather dully if what she saw was truly representative, in her own daughter. “Is your Uncle Blaise here tonight?”

“No. He’s feuding with Cissy this season. She tried to steal his Sunday comic strips. How did my grandfather …”

“How like her!” Caroline cut her daughter off. In the middle distance Harry Hopkins’ sharp predator bird’s eyes were fixed, somewhat desperately, on Caroline. “You must pay me a call, Emma. I’m off.” With a little wave, Caroline started across the room to be met beneath the main chandelier by a tall young man who identified himself as her nephew, Peter Sanford.

“It is,” said Caroline, after he had introduced himself, “literally old home week. I was just chatting with a charming, if somewhat mature, woman who claims to be my daughter.”

“So I saw. I didn’t dare interrupt. Even if I could.”

Caroline laughed, for the first time spontaneously. “A nephew after my own heart. Yes, Emma is a deeply serious and committed woman, with much of a disturbing nature to tell the world.”

“But then these are deeply serious and committed times.” Peter had charm, she decided. But then so had Blaise, in youth. But Blaise’s charm had always been without ease, unlike his son’s. The eyes, she noted, were blue, like his mother’s. “I see you brought Mr. Hopkins.”

“Have you read Saint-Simon?”

“Only about him.”

“He writes in his diaries about Louis XIV and Versailles and the court, about his grievances as a beleaguered peer of France—a sort of civilized Drew Pearson—anyway, something rather similar is happening in this once small sultry African city with its dowdy court …”

“We grow more like Paris then?”

“We are growing more like an empire. It is exciting. I’ve decided Franklin is Augustus. You live here. Keep a diary.”

“He’ll need a war first.”

“That comes.” Caroline thought of France with pain. “Sad to say. You’re still in school?”

“University of Virginia. But I expect to be in the Army next year. I want an early seat at the show. Have the Germans taken your house?”

“I think so. I hear nothing, of course. Ambassador Bullitt was useless before he fled, if he’s fled. I do hope the Germans catch him.” She changed the subject abruptly. “So what will you do with your life?”

“I must wait and see if I’m going to have one.” He was serene.

“It is like that, is it?”

Peter nodded. “Just like that. When you don’t know how long you’ve got.”

“I see.” Caroline stopped play-acting. Shut her eyes. Saw refracted light as so many glowworms back of the lids. “Perhaps the isolationists have a point after all.” She opened dazzled eyes.

“Of course they have a point. After all, the last war …”

“I know all the arguments. But this time …” Happily, she lacked the courage to lecture someone who, any day, would be called to service in a drama where she herself was, at best, an idly redundant spectator.

“I have to go, Aunt Caroline.” Then he stopped. “Father says you have some Aaron Burr papers.”

She nodded. “I’ve also got my grandfather’s journal for 1876. I’ve been putting the various pieces together. That’s the main reason I’ve come back, Hitler to one side. I want to publish.”

“I have a good many papers, too. Like Burr’s attempt at a memoir, and so on. I’ve always thought I’d like to publish one day, but if you …”

“I shall pay you diamonds. To borrow them. That’s all. You can still, one day …”

“If I have the time, of course.”

“Yes.” Caroline nodded, grandly. “If you have the time, of course. Which you will. So good a nephew must flourish.”

“I’m off.”

“So soon? Before Cissy’s terrapin?”

“Millicent Smith Carhart is receiving next door. I said I’d come.”

“She’s
still
alive!” Millicent was the ancient faded daughter of a nineteenth-century president whose name no one could recall except specialists in the rich field of White House occupants. Millicent herself held a bluestocking court, very high-minded and the exact reverse of that of her only rival in Washington, the notorious Alice Longworth, daughter of the ever-notorious president, Theodore Roosevelt. Alice’s running battles with her cousins Franklin and Eleanor made the small
city—as opposed to ever-expanding court—a joy for the well-placed bystander and something of a minefield for ambitious courtiers.

Caroline invited Peter to come visit her at Wardman Park. “This is a sincere invitation as opposed to all the others that I scatter about as I make my getaways.”

Caroline joined Harry Hopkins on a bench beneath a portrait of their hostess looking slender and decadent and wearing not a gown but shimmering bolts of material. “She looks as if she’s about to play Salome.”

“That’s a threat.” Harry was tired and pale and, as always, she had to remind herself he was only half alive, a half that was inhabited entirely by the President’s will. She wondered if there was anything at all left of the original Harry Hopkins. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Cissy really is the enemy now.”

“She’s for the third term.”

“This week. But she’s a Chicago isolationist. The worst.”

“She’s also very proud to be the Countess Gizycka of Poland, lost to Hitler—Poland is lost, that is. Cissy is forever at large.”

A tall man of middle age and middle height and middling appearance approached and greeted Hopkins politely. He was a Mr. William Stephenson from Canada, and Harry seemed to know him well.

Mr. Stephenson was the head of the British Passport Control Office in Rockefeller Center. “A humble job,” he confessed humbly.

“But fun.” Harry grinned. “He gets to stamp all those passports personally.”

Caroline was always amazed how, in a world where secrets were all-important, practically nothing was a secret from those few who were interested. Stephenson was thought to be in charge of all the British secret services in the United States and, personally, in charge of Mitzi Sims, who had been chosen to be the seductive Delilah who would, presently, shear Samson Vandenberg’s isolationist locks. In a sense, the whole thing was a perfectly open game. Attractive ladies would service elderly senators and learn their secrets while no doubt realizing, in the process, that few senators had any secrets worth knowing. But they did have votes in the Senate. If Vandenberg and Taft and
Dewey would abandon even a degree of isolationism those martyred ladies would undergo beatification by a grateful England. Of course, in the end, it was unlikely that anyone’s views would be changed by a seductress no matter how alluring, but there is always information to be gathered at the pillow’s corner and, if matters should ever get entirely out of hand, blackmail was a game of some allure.