The Golden Age (40 page)

“I think Father must have been involved with many women.”

“Including my Aunt Caroline. He’s supposed to be the father of the unspeakable Emma.”

“Good God! What an awful thought.” She started the car, and began the descent to the house. “Emma, the toast of the FBI, is my half sister?”

“So Blaise once told me. In his cups, of course.”

“Does Burden know?”

“I’m sure Aunt Caroline confides in him the occasional sentimental secret.”

Diana parked in the driveway. Peter took her arm and led her across a sheet of ice, glittering with large rough grains of salt.

Blaise and Frederika were in the drawing room, staring at the bedraggled Christmas tree, whose needles were gently falling off. The room had the exciting—to Peter still—Christmas smell of pine and peppermint.

“We are beginning to think about having it taken down.” Absently, Frederika kissed Diana and rather formally shook her son’s hand.

“Alice wants us to keep it here for the rest of the year.” Blaise turned to Frederika. “I’ve stopped thinking about it. Let’s get it out of here before she’s finished her nap.” Blaise led Peter and Diana into his library. “People are still talking about your Potsdam piece. I hear the White House is fit to be tied. That’s always the bull’s-eye. Why don’t you come work for me?”

“Oh, I like having my own little paper.”

“You’ll have mine one day.” He turned to Diana. “What’s happened to that husband of yours?”

“I have no idea. Someone said he may have gone to work for the
Wall Street Journal
.”

“A man of total principle.” Blaise chuckled.

“He left his coat and hat in the office,” said Peter, angling his chair so that Aaron Burr was not in his line of sight. “We may raffle them off.” Then he realized that he had so arranged his chair that immediately
in front of him, on a side table, he could enjoy the silver-framed portrait of Enid and Clay on their wedding day. He tried not to look at Clay and, of course, could not look at anything else as he envisaged the preposterously handsome face and body entwined with Diana on a bed—but where? When? How often?

“Your sponsor, Mrs. Samuel I. Bloch, paid me a call.” Blaise was in a good mood.

“My ideal sponsor. When I wanted to get rid of Billy Thorne, she discovered, quite on her own, a loophole in our agreement with him, and that was that.”

“Practical woman. She wants to buy the house.”

“Laurel House?” Diana sounded astonished.

“The very same. When I told her how much I wanted for it, she didn’t bat an eye.”

It was Peter’s turn to be astonished. “You’d really sell?”

“For the right price. Why not? We’re too far out of town. Your mother likes the idea of being able to walk to Woodward and Lothrop’s.”

“She’ll never walk there, or anywhere else.” Like so many indolent people, Frederika never ceased to celebrate the virtues of exercise, which, in her case, meant, once a week, a stately dog paddle across—never the length of—the pool.

“Where will you live?” Peter felt suddenly ejected from what had been for so long his home.

“There’s no hurry. Georgetown maybe. Or back to Massachusetts Avenue. Our old house is only rented for another year. Anyway, we must adjust to postwar America. We must simplify. We’ve always had trouble getting servants to work so far out of town. Now we won’t be able to get any. Besides, it appears that all the servants were killed in the war.”

“That means another monument at Arlington.” Peter had just done a piece celebrating Washington as the great necropolis of a nation so furiously dedicated to peace that it was almost never not at war to ensure ultimate peace for all time. “President Truman will dedicate it to the Unknown Upstairs Maid, sunk at Pearl Harbor, while polishing the brass.”

“What are you going to do about Pearl Harbor?” Blaise had lately shown more than a polite interest in Peter’s projects. Peter wondered if, perhaps, his father might not be poaching his ideas for the
Tribune
.

“It depends on what
your
father does.”

Peter turned to Diana, who simply shook her head and said, “He can’t hold hearings because hearings are being held. He could release his …” Diana paused, in search of a word. “… his findings. But who would testify in his favor?”

“What … findings?” Blaise was now the alert publisher of the capital’s finest morning newspaper.

But Peter was not about to give his father so potentially sensational a story. “It’s something that may or may not be relevant—the higher hearsay.”

“So I’ll have to wait until I read what you write?” Blaise’s attempt at a jolly smile vanished beneath disappointed jowls.

“If I write about it. How is Enid?” Peter changed the subject.

“We’re still trying to find a way for her to divorce Clay.”

“I thought it was going to be the other way around.” Diana was bold.

Blaise seemed surprised that she would be interested. “Well, yes, that’s been discussed, too. Which is worse for a young man in politics? To divorce a wife in a sanitarium or have her divorce him? Neither’s apt to be very desirable.”

“Particularly,” said Diana, “back home in the ultraconservative Second District.”

“Burden! Of course. Yes, he’ll be concerned, won’t he? He’s handling Clay’s campaign.”

“Very concerned,” Diana reprised, glancing at Peter, who looked away. He had still not absorbed the fact that she was back within Clay’s orbit. But then he had not believed the rumors—admittedly, before he knew her well—that she had been in love with Clay, who had then left her to marry Enid for the sake of his career while she had married Billy Thorne to show that her judgment in these matters could be as misguided as his. After all, Clay had finally lost Enid to alcohol and a lover in the Navy, but, in the process, he had obtained custody of Blaise Sanford and, presently, he would be free, one way or another, to return to
Diana, daughter of his mentor and campaign manager. Idly, Peter tried to hate Clay and was pleased to note that even a second-best effort was more than enough to start his blood pressure to rise.

“I’m going to New York,” Peter announced, somewhat to his own surprise.

“To live?” Blaise was politely neutral.

“No. To stay with Aeneas. Meet some of our contributors.”

“That’s
always
a mistake,” said the senior publisher. “They’ll ask you for more money which you don’t have.”

Mr. and Mrs. Aeneas Duncan and three-year-old Master Duncan lived five floors up in an old gray—for some reason—brownstone in Thirteenth Street west of Sixth Avenue. “We have a guest room,” Aeneas had admitted when Peter said he’d probably stay at the Gotham Hotel where Sanfords always stayed.

“Petesie!” Rosalind Duncan threw her arms around him. She, alone in the world, called him Petesie, but then she had pet names for everyone; indeed, she had a tendency, thanks to her profession as a child psychologist, to chatter away in baby talk, which no doubt delighted tiny patients but unnerved her contemporaries. “Isn’t him a bit porky-worky?” She patted Peter’s stomach, which he promptly drew in.

“Actually, I’ve lost four pounds. I play squash three times a week,” he added, defensively.

“Of course Petesie does.”

While Aeneas made them a drink, Rosalind showed Peter his room, which looked out on a windowless cement wall. Well, this was the New York of the intellectuals and Peter must get to know it since
he had finally raised enough money for
The American Idea
to increase its coverage of the arts. Although Peter had thought of Aeneas as a philosopher with a polemical bent, he was now discovering that that diligent sleuth, who had pretty much solved the Pearl Harbor mystery, was addicted to poetry; Aeneas had published his master’s dissertation on Pope’s
Dunciad;
he was now excited by a young poet, Robert Lowell, whose collection
Lord Weary’s Castle
was far too Roman Catholic for Peter’s taste. Aeneas was reviewing it at length in the magazine, thus launching the new arts section.

“It would be a lot easier to publish out of New York,” said Aeneas, not for the first time. In the next room Rosalind was now tending to Master Duncan, with many a coo and hoot from overbonded mother and child.

“We can’t. Every America idea is political. That means Washington.”

“Lowell … political?” Aeneas shook his head.

“A young Boston Puritan from that solemn clan becomes a conscientious objector in the war and then turns Roman Catholic. What could be more political? More weirdly American?”

“What a Marxist critic you would have made!” Aeneas chuckled and coughed on cigarette smoke. “Speaking of Marxists, there’s one who wants to meet you. He’s a fan of the magazine. Lives at the Chelsea Hotel. Stays up all night in nightclubs. Writes songs. Been married but there is always a young man around.”

“I have heard of the love that dares not whisper its name. Mother says it’s more of a New York sort of thing than a Washington one.”

“Mother’s not just, as we used to say in the Army, beating her gums.” Aeneas blew smoke at a Léger poster set in a somber bookcase crowded with review copies of recent novels and books of poetry. Peter saw to it that history and politics were sent to the Union Trust Building office, already too small for their increased circulation.

Peter had never before seen the Chelsea Hotel, an old building that had once given shelter to Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe. A suspicious man at a desk in one corner of the lobby shouted, “Where you going?” Aeneas told him. The man barked a number as they entered what
looked to be one of the first elevators in the city: a wire cage with a scarred wood floor, precariously set within a vast dark staircase that filled the center of the building.

“Grim,” said Peter.

“There are those who love it.”

At the end of a long corridor, Aeneas knocked on a door, which opened to the sound of an entire orchestra reverberating off high-ceilinged rooms. The voice of Paul Robeson was thundering the plangent question “Who am I?” then answering himself, in thunder:

“America!”

“Come in,” said John Latouche, a short barrel-chested, barrel-stomached man with a large head, bushy dark hair, bright blue eyes. “No one’s here yet. Except Paul Robeson. He often drops by to sing for me: it’s the acoustics in the Chelsea, he says. Better than the Ear of Dionysos in Syracuse, the one in Sicily not New York. I’ve never been to Sicily. But I know upstate New York like the back of my hand. Utica in the spring is why there were all those bloody footprints in the snow at Valley Forge. Why we fought!” During this, Latouche switched off Paul Robeson, who was currently inhabiting an old scratched record.

Latouche shouted, “Don!” A lanky young man came in from a bedroom that looked as if a tornado had been rehearsing among the bedclothes. “This is Don. He’s a poet from St. John’s College in Maryland. Currently, he’s my secretary. He also drives a taxi, for the sheer adventure of meeting exciting people outside his usual ken.”

“We’ve got whiskey or rum,” said Don. Peter and Aeneas asked for whiskey. Don went to the bar, which was a large tray uneasily balanced on the back of a life-size llama made out of innumerable bits of coiled plaster of Paris. “I call this,” said Latouche, “my llama in sheep’s clothing. The sculptor does only one work every five years. Like clockwork. He rolls what he calls his worms of plaster of Paris with his own hands and then, slowly, builds up his figures. This llama took him most of the thirties to complete. As you can see, very prewar in feeling. Better than Brancusi. For me, he is the Donatello of Macon, Georgia.”

Peter found the room somewhat hard to take in. There were posters advertising musical comedies and ballets. Apparently, Latouche
had written a film called
Cabin in the Sky
. A piano covered with sheet music was set in an alcove. Books were piled everywhere. He had the latest of everything, including every issue of
The American Idea
.

“I read your paper from start to finish. It’s perfect for the toilet if you have colitis which I do and so plenty of time to concentrate. Do you really think that the old gentleman who was for Taft was killed in Philadelphia?”

“You do read everything!” Peter was startled. “Yes, I do. But I could never follow up.”

“Don, is that friend of yours who works for Pinkerton still in town?”

“If he isn’t in jail.”

“Give him a call. We’ll get him on the case.” Don went into the bedroom and shut the door.

“Did you know,” Peter felt obliged to compete in the omniscient league, “that on the first day of the 1940 convention …”

“The Philadelphia Philharmonic played my ‘Ballad for Americans.’ Yes. I heard it on the radio. I’m sick of it. Here’s something new.” He sat at the piano and played a melodic tune and sang, “It’s the coming home together when the day is through, something, something boom and then to do, and the dah dah duh-duh that’s always you …”

He struck a great chord. “It will sound better when it’s actually written. Most pieces don’t. Schubert was on the right track. Of course, what’s never begun is always best. Like ‘The Madonna of the Future.’ ”

“The what?” Peter was being left far behind.

“A story by Henry James.” Aeneas was smug.

“James is coming back, according to my publisher friend Eileen Garrett. She was Conan Doyle’s last medium. What a good title.” He struck more keys while improvising a duet between Sherlock Holmes in the spirit world and the mysterious Eileen Garrett in Murray Hill.

Then the room began to fill up.

“Contributors, or contributors-to-be,” said Aeneas to Peter, who knew only a few of their names. One was a tall languid young man who could, at the drop of a hat, according to Latouche, sing all of Gertrude Stein’s opera
Four Saints in Three Acts
, playing all the parts. “But,” said Latouche ominously, “no hat will be dropped this night.”

In due course, the composer of the opera, Virgil Thomson, appeared. A fussy precise-voiced little man with a pink bald head, he introduced himself to Peter. “I live in the Chelsea, too. Touche provides us with twenty-four-hour entertainment. Amazing that they haven’t thrown him out yet. He never pays rent. It’s a principle with him. What do you do?”