The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 16

"I haven't read their calls to arms lately, but a mild comment to the effect that you don't change horses in midstream is very different from warning, lecturing ..." He had used the fatal verb. Wilson the lecturer stiffened. But Burden plowed on, "... the people by telling them that if they don't vote the way you want them to the Europeans will think that you've been repudiated. You are too personal, if I may say so."

The two familiar red smudges appeared at the top of each high cheekbone. "The office does have its personal side, Senator."

"All the more reason to depersonalize it as much as possible. Don't make yourself the issue-"

"I am the issue. If we lose the Senate, Lodge will be majority leader. He'll also be chairman of Foreign Relations. When I bring home a treaty, he can delay it, just the way he used to delay-and finally kill, I'm told-his friend John Hay. So you see why I must do everything possible to keep our majority in Congress."

Burden nodded. "I agree. And the best way of keeping our majority is to tear that thing up. Then speak humbly to the people, from whom your power comes, because you know that in their essential rightness they will, as always, or at least as in 1912 and 1916, do the right thing. You know the spiel."

Wilson stared at the sheep, who were, even to Burden's rural eye, remarkably uninteresting. Then the President sighed, and stood up. "They say one American in every four has or will have the flu."

Burden also rose. "They think, around the world, twenty million will die."

Together they walked slowly back to the executive offices, where the Secret Service man kept watch. "I wonder if I should wear a mask when I talk to Congress next."

"Or plugs in your ears."

"How they talk! How they talk. Anyway, so far, they haven't given me flu." Each man touched the same oak tree for luck. "How did my last speech go down?"

"Those who hate women's suffrage were not moved. But women are bound to get the vote in a year or two."

"I've always been against letting them vote. But then I thought to myself women cannot be stupider than men."

"We are as one on that."

"Also, I noted that in those areas where women are allowed to vote they tend to support me. I find this a sign of the highest wisdom."

"Well, Mr. President, it was Eve who ate the apple of knowledge."

Wilson laughed. "What a peculiar story that is, between us, of course."

The next morning Burden awakened with a high fever, aching muscles, and an uncontrollable cough. The doctor declared him a victim of flu. With that, he entered a nightmare realm where at times Kitty was ministering angel and at others demon-in-residence. One of his nightmares was that the President had released the text of what Burden had read; and nothing was altered. Later, the nightmares involved Roosevelt and Lodge campaigning across the land, denouncing Wilson. But bells also rang. There was an armistice that was celebrated prematurely; then there was an armistice that meant war's end. All this swirled about in Burden's fever-dreams, where, time and again, he was visited by his father in his corporal's uniform, young and fierce, and on his father's lips, over and over and over again, the words "the people."

BURDEN RETURNED TO LIFE: AND DECIDED THAT he preferred death or whatever realm it was that he had occupied when the dreaming stopped and there was nothing. He opened his eyes and saw Kitty, reading a newspaper beside his bed. "What time is it?" he asked.

"Oh-hurray!" Kitty threw the newspaper into the air; she was entirely out of character. But then everything was not as it should be. For one thing, he had been transferred from his own vigorous body to an old man's wasted frame. The sunlight hurt his ancient eyes. He shut them. "The fever's all gone, the doctor said. But it takes time to get your strength back. Are you hungry?"

"Thirsty."

Kitty gave him a gla.s.s of water. With a great effort he sat up and drank, with difficulty because his lips were blistered from fever. Then he fell back on the pillow. "I've been sick," he said stupidly.

"Very sick," Kitty agreed. She smiled at him, but her face was haggard and the blue eyes dull and there was more gray than usual in her once-blond hair. "But now you're all right. Ever since late last night when you ... you were all right again."

Burden held up one of his hands; a strange hand that he'd never seen before, gray skeletal fingers except for the large knuckles, which were red.

"You've lost weight." Kitty picked up the newspaper from the floor. "I'm your nurse now. We had two for the whole time, day and night."

"How long-was the whole time?"

"Two weeks."

"My G.o.d." Two weeks out of time, flesh, life. Death is nothing at all was the message.

"It's November twelfth now, and Germany has signed an armistice. See?" She held up the newspaper. A headline declared peace. The President would address Congress at noon; and give the terms. "There was such disappointment last week when everybody felt the war was really over because the Kaiser had abdicated and someone said the armistice was agreed to but then it wasn't. This time it's real. Everyone," she added, "has written or called." Kitty indicated piles of letters and telegrams and calling-cards on the secretary beside the window. "The President rang me twice, to see how you were."

Burden wanted to ask about Frederika; but with his old man's body he now had an old man's caution. "The election ...?"

The election had been held on November 5. "Well, you were right." Kitty frowned, once more in her proper character as total politician. "The Senate has gone Republican by one vote and the House by forty-six."

In his astonishment, Burden forgot his great age. "It's not possible! What happened?"

"First, the President's idiotic appeal, as you called it-to his face, I hope. Then T.R. and the Republicans had a glorious time, accusing Mr. Wilson of trying to be world dictator, and that lost us the Germans and the Irish voters, and the women that could vote-"

"Why the women?"

"Because of all the Southern Democrats in the Senate who had voted against giving them the vote ..."

"I told them. I told them."

"And then there were all the wheat farmers who felt we had paid more attention to supporting cotton, which is you ..."

"Who was defeated?"

Kitty repeated the entire list by heart. But then she knew every senator not only as a man but as a senator, knew how he voted and why he voted as he did. As Burden listened to the names, he felt the usual combination of joy and dismay. Dismay for the friends ousted from the club; joy at his own survival. What Wilson had managed to do was create for himself, at a moment of military victory, the same sort of hostile Congress that Lincoln had been faced with during the last weeks of his life; and that his heir was to be impeached by.

"A disaster." Burden's lips were like sandpaper. He motioned for more water; she held the gla.s.s to his lips.

"Yes," she said. "And he has himself to thank for it. Of course, the National Committee wanted him to make a strong statement, but why remind everyone of why they don't like you? They say he's secretly pleased so many of the Southerners were defeated."

"Without them, Bryan's party is no party. Without Bryan, Wilson's n.o.body. I don't think he understands."

"There's been talk of you out in California. Two papers put you first on the list for 1920."

Burden sighed: would he ever again be strong enough to walk across the room, much less run for President?

Kitty then read to him from the various messages. She kept those that had political significance in a special box. She started with governors; then party leaders. He was building support, he decided. With Wilson handicapped by a Republican Congress, anything could happen in two years.

"McAdoo?" he asked.

"Very nice. Positive, I think." Burden and Kitty never needed to spell out anything of a political nature. They completed each other's sentences. The McAdoo letter was very positive, and it meant McAdoo-Day. How to reverse the order? Kitty read on. There was a letter from Blaise. "Poor Frederika," she said suddenly and without malice. She did not know. He was certain of that. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, he did not keep love letters in his pockets. Unlike Lucy Mercer, Frederika would not dream of writing one. Poor Frederika. But she was supposed to have recovered. Now he saw her dead; and his heart raced.

"All of her hair fell out, such lovely hair it was. No one knows if it will ever grow back."

Burden breathed more easily. "She recovered ..."

"Like you. She was lucky." Then Kitty gave him the latest list of the dead, the dying, the ill. "What a winter this has been! But they say the epidemic is stopping now, n.o.body knows why."

Burden allowed oblivion to recall him. He slept and dreamed that he was, with many frantic gestures of his arms, airborne above a field where people had gathered to hear him speak not fly but fly he now did to their amazement and his joy.

3.

FREDERIKA LOOKED ETHEREAL, THOUGHT BLAISE, who had never before known that word to come to him of its own. She wore an evening gown that was mostly black with some silver, and on her head a splendid bejewelled turban. They met in the study, where the Maltese butler-Washington's population was becoming exotic, thanks to the war-time increase of population-poured them sherry. Tonight would be Frederika's first social outing since death's reminder that there would one day be an invitation that could not be politely declined.

"I feel that the turban's transparent," said Frederika. "And everyone will be able to see the bald egg in all its wispy glory."

"No one will suspect." Blaise was soothing. "Tell them you've decided to be like-what's her name? The President's wife who always wore a turban."

"Dolley Madison. The doctor's just looked at Enid. She's all right. No cause for alarm, he says."

Blaise wondered if he would ever learn to accept his daughter's common name, bestowed at the christening because his ferocious mother-in-law had insisted that the child be named for her; and there was no denying Mrs. Bingham.

The butler said that the car was ready. They were to dine with Secretary Lansing, a man in every way the ant.i.thesis of the President, who seldom consulted him. Where the President was all intuition and the higher goals, the Secretary of State was the complete lawyer-dry, logical, often but not always predictable. For instance, to Blaise's surprise, Lansing deeply hated the Germans, and he could be very boring indeed on the subject of autocracy versus democracy, as if either nation was really the one or the other. But Lansing had been convinced that the Germans were bent on world conquest and that had the United States not gone to war, the Kaiser would have occupied the White House. Blaise actually enjoyed Lansing's company because the Secretary was a bore very much after his own heart. Also, Lansing could be surprisingly shrewd, which meant he saw things Blaise's way. Lansing was particularly interesting on that Yellow Peril with which Hearst periodically frightened the American people. Essentially, the Secretary was a lawyer whose specialty was international law and boundary disputes, and he wanted very much, as did Blaise, a detente between the United States and j.a.pan, whose expansionism into China offended Wilson's sense of morality. When the j.a.panese representative, Viscount Ishii, had come to Washington to find out what the United States intended to do in eastern Asia, Wilson had spoken vaguely of Open Doors and China's integrity, while Lansing had tried to regularize relations between the two expanding empires. Lansing saw the need for good relations with j.a.pan as well as China because of the markets that American industry would require after the war. He was also willing to accept j.a.pan's presence not only in Shantung but in Manchuria and Mongolia as well. The resulting agreement was a masterpiece of evasion, which could not be entirely published, out of deference to j.a.panese public opinion.

Mrs. Robert Lansing received them at the door to the drawing room. Blaise had known her slightly when she was Eleanor Foster, the daughter of Harrison's secretary of state, whose house the Lansings now occupied. "You're practically hereditary now," Blaise had observed when Lansing was unexpectedly promoted after Bryan's departure.

Frederika was told how well she looked, and the turban was admired. Among the guests, there were the William Phillipses from the State Department and the inevitable Jusserands, representing French glory and civilization. Lansing himself was courteous and precise and, as always, a trifle long of wind, to which Blaise responded with a sense of bliss. He had always been attracted to bores, and when, in youth, Henry James came to call on his father, he had sat enraptured as those long sentences wrapped round and round him like skeins of comforting wool. Lansing's sentences were shorter but there were a great many of them. "The McAdoos were coming. Now they aren't coming."

"Most royal," Blaise observed. "Very French," he added for no reason except that Jusserand was holding a group of ladies in thrall to his exquisitely accented English.

"More British. More Hanoverian."

Blaise looked into the Secretary's handsome gray face with its near-invisible gray, clipped moustache. "Trouble between sovereign and ... Prince of Wales?"

"I think," said Lansing, discreet too late-deliberately?-"that Mac's going to resign now that the war's over. They disagree too much, in a friendly way. But ..." The sentence was strategically abandoned.

"What will he do between now and 1920?"

"I'm told that at such times politicians have a tendency to travel a great deal, and make speeches." Lansing had now done Blaise a favor. And Blaise would respond in due course. McAdoo's resignation meant that Wilson would be the candidate and, if he was, there was no presidential future for the Prince of Wales.

After dinner, the ladies went back to the drawing room. Port went round the table, cigars were pa.s.sed. Blaise sat between Lansing and Jusserand. The Spanish flu had dominated the dinner-party conversation. The after-dinner talk was of the coming Peace Conference. Lansing was guarded, Jusserand diplomatic, Blaise inquisitive. "Will Colonel House represent the United States at the Peace Conference?"

"Well, he's already there." Lansing pushed his port gla.s.s back and forth. "With his Inquiry Group. I'm told that M. Clemenceau is eager to begin." Lansing looked at Jusserand, whose white-bearded face gave him the look of a benign Zeus.

"There is so much work to do." Jusserand was vague.

"Our Paris correspondent tells me that M. Clemenceau has said that as it will not be possible for President Wilson to meet with the European premiers on an equal footing, he expects the secretary of state, Mr. Lansing, or some delegate with high rank, to lead the American delegation." Blaise enjoyed telling people what they already knew but did not care to comment on.

With a smile, William Phillips observed, "A Texas colonel does not rank very high outside of Texas."

"He does," said Blaise, "if the President turns him into a special high amba.s.sador."

Lansing nodded. "The Colonel got the premiers to accept the Fourteen Points-anyone who can do that can probably negotiate. Besides, the President has the const.i.tutional power to delegate to anyone he pleases. More interesting will be the delegation that goes with the negotiator ..."

"Republican senators, if he's wise," said a Republican senator, the sharp-tongued Brandegee from Connecticut.

"I suggested my predecessor Mr. Root." Lansing was cool. "But the President thinks him too old and, perhaps, too conservative ..."

"Only for M. Clemenceau." Blaise winked at Jusserand, who murmured to Blaise in French, "Happily, I am deaf in my right ear."

Suddenly, Mrs. Lansing was at the door, motioning for Lansing to come with her. He excused himself. Jusserand and Blaise continued to speak to one another in French. Jusserand had been a part of Blaise's life for so long that he thought of him as a permanent fixture, not to mention a reminder of his own French origins.

"We enjoyed-that is, my wife and I-your sister Caroline's photo-play. It was amazing how very like the Front it is. All the details were right, and that actress with the crucifix was superb, absolutely superb."

Blaise alone knew that the actress was Caroline, and she had sworn him to secrecy. Thus far, no one that they knew had identified Emma Traxler, while the national press had not caught the scent. In time, of course, they would. Meanwhile, of their Washington acquaintances, only Caroline's half-brother had immediately identified the soulful mute giantess on the screen. "She says the movie is playing in Paris now. They like it, apparently ..."

"Too close to life, I should think, for great popularity. You know, they are mad not to send us Root." Jusserand lowered his voice. "He has authority. He is respected. He's old but ..."

"He's younger than M. Clemenceau, who is-what?"

"Seventy-seven. I agree, privately, of course, with Mr. Lansing that we should get the peace treaty settled, a difficult matter all by itself, and then, separately, later, go on to the creation of some sort of world league-a popular idea here, thanks to Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft, but not taken very seriously in our wicked old Europe. What news of your place at Saint-Cloud?"

"Still a hospital. I'm trying to go over next month. ..." Blaise felt in sudden need of relief: a congenitally weak bladder had, with age, grown weaker. He excused himself.

Blaise opened the door to the downstairs bathroom to behold Woodrow Wilson, comb in hand, standing at the mirror. "Mr. President," Blaise began.

Wilson quieted him with a gesture. "I'm not here," he whispered, and put away his comb. At the bathroom door, he paused. "Could you step by the library for a moment?"

When Blaise entered the library, he found Lansing seated by the fire; and Wilson standing in front of it. A portrait of Secretary of State Foster glowered down upon them.

"Come in." The President turned to Lansing. "Forgive me. But Mr. Sanford saw me, and I wanted to make sure he'd say nothing ..."

"As a publisher?"

"As a gentleman." Wilson smiled an attractive smile. "Come, sit down. The Tribune has supported us n.o.bly, most of the time, at least."

"One can never entirely please an administration."

"Politicians demand quite a lot of pleasure," Wilson observed genially. He seemed both perturbed and delighted. "That's why I let Tumulty read the press for me. I see what he thinks I should-pleasurably-see."

Blaise was appalled; and smiled his own attractive smile. In a country like the United States it was dangerous for a president not to study the press if only to determine what superst.i.tions were abroad and what potential panics beginning. Plainly, Wilson was much insulated from the world by wife, doctor, secretary. "I hope he gives you T.R.'s column from the Kansas City Star."

"I see those." Wilson smiled. "But then I must always listen to him and Taft. They are my predecessors, my ancestral voices ..."

"... prophesying war," Blaise completed the quotation.

"Exactly, Mr. Sanford. Mr. Lansing, do you mind if we put the problem to someone as knowledgeable as our mutual friend here?"

Although Lansing looked as if he minded very much, he nodded. "By all means, Mr. President."

"I have decided to go to Paris next month. Mr. Lansing would rather I not go. That is," Wilson antic.i.p.ated Lansing's demur, "he sees nothing wrong with my making an appearance but he believes that I should not take part in the Peace Conference on the ground that I am on a higher plane-const.i.tutionally, that is-than the premiers. They are chiefs of government, I am chief of state. Now, Mr. Sanford, you know the French far better than I. You know the issues as well as anyone. Should I take part or not?"

Blaise was not prepared for so weighty an after-dinner dialogue. He saw, as did the President, the dramatic possibilities of the legendary leader from across the seas whose never-ending supplies of men, weapons, food had more than any specific battle caused Germany to stop the war and replace the Kaiser with a republic. "If you could do it quickly, I'd say go."

"Why quickly?" asked Lansing.