The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 15

"The Inquiry?"

Caroline nodded. A year earlier House had set up a board of young scholars whose task it was to make plans for the new world that would emerge from the peace conference. Historians were put to work studying Europe's boundaries, language groupings, religions; also, they were allowed to study the secret treaties that the Allies had made with one another and with interested countries like Italy, which had been promised a large chunk of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in return for a collusive neutrality followed by war. The Bolsheviks had published the lot, embarra.s.sing the President, who pretended that he had not known of the treaties. Since the Fourteen Points meant redrawing Europe's map, the unenviable task of the Inquiry group was to conform Wilson's generous "peace without victory"-a phrase invented by one of the Inquiry men, a New Republic editor, Walter Lippmann-and the secret treaties, which represented total victory for the Allies and not much peace.

The soft whisper was eminently soothing. "... the Kaiser will abdicate, and there will be a republic, and an armistice, and then the peace conference, where, I hope I'm not bragging too much, we'll go in, those boys of mine, certainly, the best prepared of the lot. We're ready for anything, including, if we have to, the part.i.tion of Schleswig-Holstein, along racial lines."

"How amazed the French will be! They think us totally ignorant ... of European politics," she added, quite aware of France's jealous contempt for everything American.

"The British Foreign Office has a sort of French mentality, too." The gray rat's eyes gleamed with good humor. In the background the President, eyes half-shut, seemed to be giving a sermon.

"Who will negotiate for us?" Caroline expected no answer but often the way that a question was not answered was revelatory.

"I suppose we'll continue as we are."

"With you in Paris-or wherever ..."

"And the President here, telling me what to do."

"No Lansing?" The President's dislike of his secretary of state was common knowledge.

"Well, maybe, not too much Lansing." House chuckled. "Anyway, it shouldn't take very long. We're ready for once."

"The President stays here?"

House nodded. "This work isn't for the chief of state. After all, he's the British king and prime minister all rolled into one. He's too huge for our sort of a conference. He should come over, briefly, show the flag-they think he's G.o.d, you know. Then vanish into the empyrean, just like G.o.d."

On the way back to Georgetown, Tim was both exultant and impressed. "If the South End of Boston could see me now."

"They were mostly South Enders there." Caroline was melancholy, and did not know why. "They just got out long before you did." The chauffeur came to a stop in Wisconsin Avenue, as a long line of dull black hea.r.s.es slowly crossed the street en route to-or from-the morgue. "I wonder if everyone will die?" Caroline took her gauze mask from her handbag and slipped it in place over her nose and mouth. Most people were masked when out of doors or in a public place.

"That would solve a lot of problems." Tim was light-hearted. He did not wear a mask.

"They say more people have already died of flu than died in the war. Frederika's got it, my sister-in-law."

"Serious?"

"Yes."

An authentic Emma was waiting for them in the drawing room. She was large and fair and very like Burden. Obstinately, she had missed beauty wide. Caroline longed to do something with her but Emma was not to be altered by anyone. She was happy as a mathematician, a field forever shut to her mother. Now, because all the schools had shut down, Emma had come home. Caroline was glad that their relationship was sufficiently polite that no questions would be asked when Tim stayed over. Emma took everything in stride. Whether this was a sign of intelligence or of perfect indifference, Caroline could not fathom. But then she, too, had reserves of indifference ever ready to be called upon. "Five thousand people died yesterday, that they know of," was Emma's cheery greeting. She was curled up on a sofa beside a fire now fallen to coals and ash.

"In the country?" Caroline removed her mask.

"Here. In the District. h.e.l.lo, Mr. Farrell."

"Hi, Emma." Tim was still euphoric from his White House success. "Did you see Creel's face when I said I wanted to do a movie about Debs?"

"I saw it. Luckily, he misunderstood you."

"Democracy should begin at home." Tim made himself at home; poured whisky neat into a gla.s.s. "The Chicago race riots last summer ..."

"Aunt Frederika's worse," Emma cut in.

"Oh, G.o.d." Caroline sat beside the fire. Perhaps it was the end of the world after all. The plague would come to every house until everyone was dead. "Uncle Blaise?"

"He's with her. He's all right. He thinks he's already had it, a mild case."

"How seriously are you Catholic?" Tim turned, seriously, to Caroline.

"Not at all, ever. It's this life I fear, not the next, which isn't there."

"Lucky you to think that." He changed the subject. "I think the President recognized you. I caught him staring at you after the crucifix ..."

"We're old acquaintances." Quickly, Caroline broke in: Emma did not know of the mythical Emma. Fortunately, Emma did not go to movies. "What are you reading?"

Emma held up the book in her lap. "Uncle Henry's last book. About his education. I went to see Miss Tone today. She's still in the house. It's all very sad."

"Sadder for us than for him. He died in his sleep." She looked at Tim, as if this were, somehow, significant.

"He was smiling, Miss Tone said, when they came to wake him up."

"So much history-gone." Caroline wondered if now she would begin to speak in movie t.i.tle cards, with numerous dashes and exclamation marks.

"The whole Negro question is really interesting, and no one's done it." Tim was not about to mourn Henry Adams.

"Why interesting?" For someone so deeply flawed with the politeness of cla.s.s, Emma was curt.

"Look at the fix they're in. Twelve million of them live here in a country that's fighting to make the world safe for democracy, and most of them can't vote or have the same rights as white people."

"Maybe they don't want them." Emma was not of an imaginative or, indeed, generous nature, thought Caroline, who was not generous either but sufficiently imaginative to be able to understand what others felt. Perhaps it was this odd gift that had made it possible for her to become so easily the mythical Emma Traxler, who could become Madeleine, a mother at the Front.

"If they didn't want the same rights, why do you think hundreds of people were killed or hurt last summer in Chicago?" Tim was looking at Emma with interest.

"Perhaps," said Emma, "the white people thought that the Negroes wanted something which they shouldn't have, and so they attacked them first, the way they do in the South when they lynch one."

"Ingenious." Caroline applauded. Much of Washington's charm for her had been its Africanness both in climate and population. Racial equality had not meant much of anything to her or, she thought, to most Negroes, who ignored the white world as the white world ignored them, or so it seemed to her, each race living in separate if contiguous universes in two separate but simultaneous Washingtons.

"No. They want the same rights. Particularly now they've been in the Army, fighting for democracy ..."

"Such a meaningless word." Although Caroline's teeth were set on edge by all political rhetoric, the reverent intoning of the national nonsense-word "democracy" most irritated her. The much-admired Harvard professor George Santayana, now retired and withdrawn to Europe, had noted the curiously American faculty for absolute belief in the absolutely untrue as well as the curiously American inability to detect a contradiction because, as he had written, an "incapacity for education, when united with great inner vitality, is one root of idealism." That was it-American idealism, the most unbearable aspect of these people. For the first time in years, Caroline wanted to escape, go back to France, or on to Timbuctoo, anywhere that these canting folk were not.

Tim did not cant; but he came perilously close in his espousal of the rights of man-liberty, equality, fraternity. But where he believed or believed that he believed in these things, the French regarded them as mere incantations to ward off unpleasant disturbances like revolution. "Of course, democracy doesn't mean anything for them. There was this sign they were carrying in Chicago-a wonderful picture, crowded street, howling whites, blacks huddled together, police with guns, sticks-and this sign that says-like a t.i.tle card, you know?-'Bring Democracy to America Before You Carry It to Europe.' "

Emma looked at Tim curiously. "Are you a Red?" she asked.

"No. Catholic." Tim smiled at Caroline. "A believing one."

"Tim has a feeling for the ma.s.ses only because he makes photo-plays for them." Caroline's voice had set itself in the gracious-hostess register.

"So does Griffith, and The Birth of a Nation did more to revive the Ku Klux Klan than anything in years."

"Mr. Griffith," said Caroline, rising to the occasion, "makes movies for the white ma.s.ses who are willing to pay as much as three dollars to see a very long photo-play."

"My history teacher was at Princeton when Mr. Wilson was president there." Emma was now stirring up the coals with a poker. She was too red in the face for Caroline's taste. Fever? Flu? Death? "He said that whenever a Negro applied for admission to Princeton, Mr. Wilson would write a personal letter saying that he was happy that the colored man had qualified but he felt it only his duty to warn him that as many of the students were from the South, he'd have a hard time of it if he came."

"They didn't come." Tim finished his whisky.

"They didn't come." Emma put down the poker and stared into the revived fire.

"I'm going to France," said Caroline, rising; then she heard herself, a fraction of an instant later. "Why did I say that? When all I meant was I'm going to bed."

"You mean," said Emma, "you'll do both. You should go. Uncle Blaise says he's going. He'll be at the Peace Conference."

" 'Peace without victory.' " Tim remained in his chair. Caroline looked forward to a bed to herself. l.u.s.t came in cycles; departed the same way. Besides, she refused to brood morbidly on flu's silent sudden death in the act of love. Was it possible that Frederika, the serene, the competent, the droll, would die?

From the bedroom, Caroline rang Blaise. He sounded tired. "She's the same. The crisis hasn't come, whatever that is. These d.a.m.ned doctors are hopeless."

"Is she conscious?"

"She drifts back and forth. She makes no sense. What happened at the White House?"

"The Fourteen Points have won the war, and Colonel House sails to France in four days, to make eternal peace."

"Is he the official negotiator?"

"So he implies. Helped by all those bright young men at that boardinghouse in Nineteenth Street ..."

"All Jews and Socialists."

"I'm going to Paris, as soon as it's possible." Caroline stemmed the familiar tirade.

"Should both publishers be there?"

"Mr. Trimble would be relieved to have us both out of town permanently."

"We'll see." Blaise sounded exhausted. "I'll have to see."

"Of course," said Caroline; and said good night. Before she turned out the light, she stared a long time at the painting of her mother, Emma the First. The lady's resemblance to the Empress Eugenie had not gone unremarked by the painter. Although the dark eyes stared at Caroline, there was no message, only a painted simulacrum of a woman that she had never known; yet Caroline had twice bestowed her mother's name upon her own inventions as if there were some unfinished business in the past to be completed if not now later.

2.

BURDEN SAT IN HIS OFFICE, SIGNING LETTERS, while Miss Harcourt, old and gray and silent, perched on a straight chair beside his desk. She wore a man's shirt, tie and jacket; only a reluctant skirt was concession to the prejudices of her unhappy time and place. Miss Harcourt lived with her mother in northeast Washington; she had worked, superbly, grayly, silently, for Burden ever since he had first come to Congress as the old century turned to the new, now almost one-fifth done.

The letters were appeals to various leaders about the country to support the Democratic Party in the coming election. Since Burden himself was not up for re-election, he could appear personally disinterested in requesting aid for the party. But the list, of course, carefully compiled over a decade, represented his own potential backers when and if the time should come for him to seize the crown. He was maintaining connections.

The last letter signed, he sat back in his high leather swivel chair; and felt somewhat light-headed. The afternoon sun cast a beam of light on the bust of Cicero opposite his desk. On either side of the white marble fireplace gla.s.s-doored bookcases contained law-books as well as statute books of the United States of America. Over the mantel hung an engraving of Lee surrendering at Appomattox, which did not displease his const.i.tuents, most of whom, though Westerners now, descended from Confederate soldiers. On the mantel was the bullet that had struck his father at Chickamauga-a skewed bit of black metal set on a marble stand. When the old man died, he had, with some bitterness, left his son the bullet as a reminder of who he was and what war was, a reminder of the people, the people, the people. Lately, words had a tendency to repeat themselves oddly in his head: maddeningly, unwanted series of echoes would start and then, mysteriously, stop.

The best thing to do was talk through the echoes. As "the people" tolled in his head, he spoke to Miss Harcourt. "Is Congressman Momberger in his office?"

"No. He too has been stricken. The Spanish flu. Late last night, Mrs. Momberger said."

"We must adjourn. Remind me to talk to Senator Martin today." "The people" stopped, leaving him with a headache.

"I called the Sanford house," said Miss Harcourt, who either knew everything and thought nothing of it or knew nothing and thought not at all. "She is past the crisis, they think."

"Oh, good. I must-tell Kitty to pay her a call when she's better." At first, he was positive that Frederika would die. Fate did that sort of thing to one. But she had clung to life or life had clung to her; and when he saw Blaise at the nearly empty Cosmos Club, Blaise had said that she'd be all right.

The telephone rang. Miss Harcourt answered it, then turned to Burden. "Mr. Tumulty wants to know if you could see the President this afternoon."

"Five o'clock." While Miss Harcourt so instructed the President's secretary, Burden got up and went to the tall window with its view of Capitol Hill. But he looked not through the gla.s.s at the familiar view but at his unfamiliar pale, old face reflected in the gla.s.s. He must take more exercise, like horseback riding. He thought of Caroline, as he always did when he thought of all those Sundays that he had ridden along the ca.n.a.l beside the Potomac, ending the morning at her house. Since they were not married, the affair had been allowed to come to a pleasant, natural end. Neither was jealous of the other. Gradually, they had come to meet less and less in secret and more and more in public. Finally, after the hard-fought election of 1916 when Burden had spent weeks touring the country, without a word spoken on either side, the affair had stopped.

"Tell Kitty I'll be home for dinner."

Miss Harcourt inclined her head. Like most of the Senate secretaries, she was at permanent odds with the Senator's wife. After all, the secretaries spent more time with the senators than the wives did; and the wives were jealous of all those hours, days, years from which they were excluded.

The President and Admiral Grayson were putting on the south lawn of the White House, just back of the executive offices. A Secret Service man greeted Burden by name.

Burden crossed to the improvised putting-green. As he did, Wilson said to Grayson: "That's enough fresh air, Admiral."

"Never enough, sir." Grayson took the President's putting-iron. "I've got neuritis in my shoulder, so the doctor prescribes golf. True agony." Burden had never seen Wilson so relaxed, even boyish, despite aches and pains. "Let's look at the sheep," he said.

The south lawn of the White House was a miniature park that Edith Wilson had turned over to a flock of Shropshire Downs sheep, whose wool had sold for a good deal of money around the country as an encouragement to American women to knit for peace-without victory.

"How close is it, Mr. President?"

"An armistice? Maybe a week, two weeks. There's no trouble on the German side or our side ..." Wilson left the thought unfinished. Halfway down the lawn, a bench had been so situated that pa.s.sersby could not see it through the iron fence while the Secret Service man could see both pa.s.sersby and bench. Burden had often daydreamed about the presidency; yet the actual reality of it never ceased to bemuse him, a combination of ba.n.a.lity and grandeur, of dullness and true terror at the thought of so much energy concentrated in one man, in one place, time.

"They say I never consult the Senate. But I always consult you, don't I?"

"Sometimes you consult me." Wilson's dislike of the Senate was warmly reciprocated. Each senator was to himself a microcosm of the government and, combined with his fellows, sovereign, a state of affairs that the true sovereign, Wilson, was not about to acknowledge.

"I haven't discussed this with the Cabinet." Wilson gave Burden a statement, typed neatly on his own blue-ribboned typewriter. "But I want to get your view first. Tumulty approves. So does Colonel House. But they're not politicians-like us," Wilson added graciously. As Burden read the text, Wilson hummed a song from the last vaudeville program at Keith's before the flu closed it down. As the cheerful song droned in his ear, Burden experienced nightmare. The master political manager of their time and country had committed, at least to paper, a major political catastrophe.

Burden carefully folded the text twice, as if he could twice dispense with it. Wilson had stopped humming. "You disapprove?"

"Yes." There was no point in the usual evasive demur, suitable for the greatest autocrat in the world, as Wilson himself had referred to his const.i.tutional war-time self. "You are making a direct appeal to the people to give you-you, personally, it sounds like-a Democratic majority in Congress so that you can single-handedly-I'm antic.i.p.ating Lodge and Roosevelt-make the peace."

Wilson was sweet reason. "I also have reminded the electorate of all those domestic reforms which we-the Democratic Party-have made and which would be unmade if the Republicans were to win."

Burden gazed bleakly at the grazing sheep. What to do?

Wilson was surprisingly placating. "Vance McCormick and Homer c.u.mmings and the whole National Committee, or so they tell me, want this statement now."

"Mr. President, without any sort of statement from you, we will organize the Senate with anywhere from a five- to ten-vote majority and, maybe, fifteen to twenty in the House. But if you interfere and tell the country that the Republicans can't make the sort of peace you can, that's a red flag to a bull-"

"Lincoln, McKinley, even Colonel Roosevelt made similar appeals."