The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 43

"I'm not going." Jess looked at Martin, who looked somewhat guiltily away. Martin knew of his disgrace. Daugherty had told him. How many others knew?

"Shame. Sounds like it's going to be fun. Is the General coming?"

"No," said Martin. "He's staying put. He's been away from his desk almost three months." So Martin answered a question addressed to Jess Smith, Daugherty's b.u.mper and best friend. The curtain was coming down fast.

Jess drove his Cole sedan from Friendship to the Justice Department, where he was greeted as if nothing had happened. At least Daugherty hadn't told the guards. Jess cleared out the files in his sixth-floor office; then he drove to the White House, where, again as if nothing had happened, the guards waved him through the gate to the executive offices. In the reception hall, he told the usher in charge that he had an appointment with the President, which was not exactly true. But he was not kept waiting long. As he walked down the corridor, past the coat closet, he shuddered, as he did at the thought of any closet, so like a coffin, except that in this particular closet W.G. and Nan had made love-standing up? Or was there room enough for the two of them to lie on the floor?

The President was standing at his desk, looking out the window at the south lawn, a radiant green in the late-afternoon light. Then he turned and Jess was struck by how putty-gray his face was, by how fat he'd become. But the smile was as beguiling as ever, and the hand-clasp firm. "Well, Mr. President, I'm doing like I was told. I'm clearing out of town."

"Sit down, Jess." Harding remained standing, an unlit cigar in his right hand. "I'm really sorry it had to end like this. You've been a good friend to the d.u.c.h.ess and me, but we're in for a lot of trouble come October when Congress gets back. I've been too trusting, the d.u.c.h.ess says. But I don't think I am. I figure that people who're doing well doing the right thing won't be dumb enough to get themselves in trouble by doing the wrong thing."

"Yes, sir." Jess felt as if he was a disembodied pair of eyes resting high up in the chandelier, watching the two of them in the distance. "I don't think any of us in the K Street house ..."

"Jess, Jess." The President motioned for him to stop; then he sat behind the desk and cradled his head in his hand. "I know all about K Street. Or I know as much as I want to know, and I wish to G.o.d I didn't know what I do. I don't blame you. I guess it's my fault, thinking you'd know the difference between the capital here and Washington Court House, and what's seemly here and what isn't."

"Well, I did my best. For everybody, or tried to." Jess hoped that he would not start to cry.

"I know. I know. If it weren't for ... the Veterans Bureau mess ..." The President did not go on; he also could not say the name Charlie Forbes.

"What shall I do with the Ungerleider accounts?"

The President shrugged. "You can publish mine in the Post for all I care. It just shows that I've been as unlucky in the stock market as everything else. I'm selling the Star."

"I'm sorry, W.G." Somehow the thought of the Marion Star and Harding transported, if only briefly, the two figures at the far end of the oval office back to a happier better time when W.G. was a newspaper editor and Jess the proprietor of a dry-goods emporium in the next town. They had come such a long way, to this evil house and uncommon end.

"I had to. We need the money." The President stood up. Jess rejoined his ailing body at the desk and shook Harding's hand for the last time.

It was evening when Jess parked his Cole sedan in the garage beneath Wardman Park. Then he took the elevator to his floor. As he unlocked the door to the living room of the suite, he was aware that something was not right. Then he saw Martin, in his shirt sleeves, seated at the desk, talking on the telephone. ... "I won't know till he gets here." Then Martin must have heard the heavy sound of Jess's breathing. He said into the receiver, "I'll call you back." Martin smiled at Jess; he always smiled. He was a dozen years younger than Jess.

"The General was worried about you. So he asked me to sleep over, knowing how you don't like being alone at night."

"Fine," said Jess. There were two bedrooms in the suite with a living room between. Martin's suitcase was on Daugherty's bed.

Jess went into his own bedroom, and shut the door. Then he opened his briefcase and withdrew all the bank statements, receipts, letters. He had also collected everything that pertained to the President and Daugherty. Beside his desk, there was a large solid metal wastebasket. Methodically, one by one, he put the papers into the basket, and set them afire. A cool breeze blew the smoke out the open window. In the distance thunder sounded. Why, of all people, Martin?

Suddenly, Jess was inspired. He telephoned the McLeans in Leesburg. Evalyn came on the line. "It's Jess," he announced.

"Back from Ohio?"

"For a while. Listen. I wonder if I could come down there and spend maybe a couple, three days."

"Of course you can. There's plenty of room, Lord knows. Are you all right?"

"I'm a little upset. I guess you know, business, and things."

"I know," said Evalyn, who probably did know a great deal.

"I'll start soon as I can." Jess hung up. Thunder sounded even louder, rain started to fall in sheets.

Jess dozed off. The last of the papers was now ash. He woke up with rain in his face. He looked at his watch. It was after ten. He shut the window. Then he telephoned Evalyn again; told her it was raining too hard to drive. She told him to come in the morning. He would be there at seven, he said. On the dot. It would be light out then. He didn't like to drive in the dark or, indeed, do anything without a light on somewhere.

Jess dozed off again. He dreamed of monsters, closets, horrors that he could sense but could not see. He dreamed that he heard a key turning in a lock and a door being opened. Then came an explosive thunder-clap, lightning, darkness.

3.

WARREN T. MARTIN AND LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Joel T. Boone leapt to their feet as Brooks announced, "Gentlemen, the President."

Harding entered the oval sitting room. He was in pajamas and dressing gown, and only half his face had been shaved. With a towel he wiped shaving cream from the unshaven side. "What happened?" He motioned for them to sit.

"Well, sir," Martin began, nervously pulling at the fingers of his right hand with his left, "at about six-thirty this morning, I heard what sounded like somebody had slammed a door, or maybe thunder because there was this bad storm most of last night. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn't. Then I got up to see how Jess was. The door to his bedroom was open and I looked in and there he was, lying on the floor, his head in this wastebasket full of ashes, with this pistol in his hand. He had shot himself in the head, on the left side."

Harding held the right side of his own head, as if to shield it from a second bullet. "Did he leave a letter, or anything?"

"No, sir. He'd burned up a lot of papers in the wastebasket, before he ..." Martin's mouth was dry. He swallowed hard. "Then I called Mr. Burns, who lives in the apartment on the floor just below, and he called you, sir, and you sent Commander Boone here, as a medical man, and he saw the body."

Harding looked at Boone. "You must speak to the press. Tell them ... he shot himself because ..." Harding rubbed his eyes.

"Because, sir, he was in a diabetic depression, and had suffered from such depression ever since last year when his appendix was removed and the scar would not heal. As there was no reason for a post-mortem, I surrendered the body to Mr. Burns of the F.B.I."

"He's sending the remains back to Washington Court House for interment," said Martin.

Harding rose. "Commander, go down to the press office and make your statement. Thank you, both." Harding shook hands with each man, and saw them to the door.

Harding then sat at the window, and looked out at the Washington Monument, like a white needle in the bright morning sun. From the hallway, he heard a door slam shut. Then he heard Daugherty's voice. "What's wrong with this phone in my room? I can't get Mr. Smith on my extension."

Whatever the usher answered was not audible to the President. But from Daugherty's face, it was clear that he had been told: he stood in the middle of the oval sitting room, unable to speak.

"Jess did it," said Harding. "But first he burned a lot of papers. There was nothing left in his room. No message, nothing."

"He shot himself, with that gun he bought last week in Washington Court House."

"With a pistol, they said. Martin found him. He phoned me. I sent over Dr. Boone. Then Burns took over. The body's on its way home now."

"Where did he shoot himself?"

Harding placed his left hand against the left side of his head. "Here," he said.

"But Jess was right-handed," said the d.u.c.h.ess. She stood in the doorway, wearing an elaborate silk dressing gown.

"Perhaps I heard wrong," said the President. He shook his head. "First Cramer. Now Jess. There is a curse on us, I swear."

"And tonight of all nights we have the Sanfords for supper. I'll call them off."

"No, no. That wouldn't be seemly."

"Or wise." Daugherty gave a great long moan all on a single exhalation of breath.

BLAISE AND FREDERIKA HAD BEEN SURPRISED to be asked to a White House family dinner party, and even more surprised that after the front-page story of Jesse Smith's suicide, the dinner had not been cancelled.

The President was all grave politeness, but nothing more. He seemed distracted. The Attorney General spoke hardly at all. The First Lady of the Land did her best to make small talk. Since one publisher made her think of another publisher, she discussed Ned McLean at some length. "I think he's done well by the Post. I know people don't think he's serious. But over-all linage of advertising is three percent better than last quarter." Blaise recalled that Mrs. Harding herself had run a newspaper for years. They spoke of advertising rates, while Frederika tried to amuse the President.

"Has a president ever been to Alaska before?"

Harding stared at her blankly; then he appeared to play back her question in his head. "No. I'm the first. I can't wait to get out of here, let me tell you."

"I just saw your itinerary, Mr. President. You're very ambitious. All those stops along the way, in all that heat."

Mrs. Harding looked up at this. "Doc Sawyer doesn't want you to go at all. Says it's too much. I agree."

"It's my job." Blaise noted how sallow the President's face was; also, jowls had begun to appear; when he looked down, heavy jowls flowed over his stiff collar. Blaise wondered if there was any truth to the story of Harding's Negro blood; he also wondered why Jess Smith had killed himself. The Tribune reporter had been most suspicious of the fact that no one had seen the body except a White House doctor and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Also, it was remarkably convenient that Jess should kill himself in Daugherty's hotel suite with an agent from the Justice Department in the next room and Mr. Burns of the F.B.I, on the floor beneath. Then, instead of an examination by a police coroner as the law required, a White House naval physician had been called in. But why, asked Blaise, would Daugherty want his closest friend killed? Why, asked the reporter, were so many papers burned and then the one person who knew their contents killed?

Mrs. Harding proposed that they watch a film in the second-floor corridor, and everyone was much relieved that there would no longer be any need to make conversation.

As Frederika and Blaise followed the President and Mrs. Harding down the corridor, past the projectionist to where five arm chairs had been arranged, Frederika whispered to Blaise, "It's like an evening with the Macbeths."

"Do shut up," said Blaise.

The film was Monte Carlo, starring Emma Traxler. "We hope you haven't seen it," said Mrs. Harding.

"No," said Frederika, "we haven't. Caroline always asks us not to."

As Emma Traxler made her entrance in a ball gown at the Winter Palace, Mrs. Harding observed, "I guess that sister of yours is the best-looking newspaper publisher in Washington." For the first time that evening everyone laughed except Daugherty, who gave a long-drawn-out "Oh."

FIFTEEN.

1.

BURDEN AND HIS BLIND NEIGHBOR, FORMER SENATOR Thomas Gore, gazed upon the moonlit woods where Gore was building a house. Defeated in 1920 after three terms in the Senate, Gore was practicing law in Washington and for the first time making money. "The house will be just out of view, three hundred yards to the northwest of that hill." The blind man pointed accurately with his cane. Burden had always been delighted by the way that Gore would hold a ma.n.u.script in his hand when he spoke and, from time to time, would pretend to look at it, as if to check a statistic or the exact wording of a Latin quotation. Although two separate accidents had blinded him by the time he was ten, there was a legend that he had been elected Oklahoma's first senator by pretending not to be blind. Hence, the pretense of reading, of seeing.

During dinner the wives had talked, now the wives were talking in the living room and the men were enjoying the warm August night. Fireflies blinked in the dark woods. The moon was behind clouds. Burden shut his eyes to see what it was like not to see. Unbearable, he decided. They spoke of the investigation of Fall. "He's an old friend," said Gore. "I won't speculate on what he did or didn't do. But Sinclair and Doheny are hard to discourage once they've got you in their sights."

"Well, you turned them in." Some years earlier, Gore had created a sensation in the Senate by revealing that he had been offered a bribe by an oil company. No one had ever done that before and, privately, Gore's eccentricity was deplored in the cloakroom. "I'd starve if it wasn't for my friends!" a Southern statesman had declaimed.

"I wonder now if I would've done what I did if I'd been as broke as Fall is. You never can tell what you might do in a different situation."

"I don't think you or I would take a bribe, ever." Burden was firm.

"But then there are the contributions." Gore sighed. "That's where things can get right shadowy. You know, back in 1907, my first campaign, I had no money at all. Literally. Fact, I was in debt because instead of practicing law I'd been politicking, to get Oklahoma into the Union, and so on. Anyway, after I was nominated I was standing in front of the barber shop in Lawton, thinking what a fix I was in, when a stranger came up and said, 'Here, take this,' and gave me an envelope. Then he was gone. Well, inside that envelope was a thousand dollars." Gore laughed. "I love telling that story because I've never met anybody who believes it. But that's the way it happened."

"You plan to come back, don't you?"

Gore looked at him. In the moonlight his single gla.s.s eye shone, while the blind one was dull and reflected no light. "When I went down in the Harding sweep, I thought it was the end of the world. Then I pulled myself together and said to myself, Here you are, fifty years old, and you've been a senator since you were thirty-seven and never had a chance to make a penny. So take time off. Build a house in Rock Creek Park. Then go back. I wrote a note and hid it in the Senate chamber, saying I'd be back one day. Funny," he held his cane in front of him like a dowsing rod, "right after I hid that sc.r.a.p of paper, I went into the cloakroom to collect my gear-this was the last day of the session-and suddenly I felt two arms around me and I was being given a bear-hug and I said, 'Who is it?' and this voice said, 'Just an old duffer, going off to be hung,' and it was Harding."

Burden recalled how radiant Harding had looked on his last day as a senator, gently teasing those senators who had taken all the credit for his election. Now he was sick in a hotel room in San Francisco. Officially he was supposed to have contracted ptomaine poisoning. But ptomaine poisoning was quick to pa.s.s, and the President had been ill for five days, and the balance of his tour was cancelled. There was talk of heart trouble. "He had so much luck for so long," Burden said. "Now the people are getting ready to turn on him."

"Sooner or later, they turn on everybody." Gore sighed. "I tell you, if there was any race other than the human race, I'd go join it."

Burden had forgotten how much he'd missed Gore's black wit. When forced to take a stand on Prohibition, a dangerous thing to do for a Bible Belt politician, Gore had said that he thought the Eighteenth Amendment was a very fine thing. "Because now the Drys have their law and the Wets have their whisky, and everybody's happy."

Kitty came out onto the porch. "The White House is calling. Mr. Christian's office."

"So late?" Burden went into the hall; he picked up the receiver. "This is Senator Day."

An unidentified voice said, "I'm sorry to bother you so late but Mr. Christian thinks you should know that the President is dead."

"Dead? What?" Burden sat down on top of the refectory table, something not allowed in Kitty's by-laws.

"Apoplexy, they say. Mr. Christian wanted you to know before the papers report it." Burden thanked the unknown man. Then he rang Lodge. Had he heard the news? Lodge had not. When Burden told him, Lodge exclaimed, "Oh, my G.o.d! This is terrible. Unthinkable." He seemed truly shattered.

"Well, yes, it's pretty awful, at his age and everything. But I didn't know you two were so close."

"We weren't." Lodge's voice had regained its usual cold balance. "I'm upset because Calvin Coolidge is now the president. Calvin Coolidge. What a humiliation for the country, that dreadful little creature in his dreadful little two-family house."

In the living room, the Gores and Kitty responded more sympathetically. Kitty was not surprised. "You could tell he was getting sicker and sicker this last year. He was always a bad color, and so swollen-looking. I'm sure it was an old-fashioned stroke."

Gore thought that Harding was probably well out of it. "He was much too nice a man for the presidency."

Burden sat on a sofa, and drank Coca-Cola. "You know, he wasn't going to run again with Coolidge."

"Who did he want?" asked Mrs. Gore.

"Charlie Dawes. So Dawes told me. He couldn't stand Coolidge. n.o.body can. In the Cabinet he just sits and stares."

"Now he has it all," said Gore. "You'll be running against him, I expect."

"If nominated ..." Burden felt the familiar tide of ambition begin its rise. Who else was there? c.o.x would not be acceptable after his disastrous defeat in 1920. Franklin Roosevelt was a cripple from polio and would never walk-much less run for office-again. The governor of New York, Al Smith, was a Roman Catholic. Hearst was dead politically to all but himself. McAdoo had no following. James Burden Day against Calvin Coolidge seemed now to be inevitable, with the inevitable result. Burden shuddered with delight and fear; and thought of his father.

2.

CAROLINE STOOD ON THE TERRACE OF Laurel House and looked down at the river. "It is All Souls' Eve," she observed to no one but herself. Blaise and Frederika had decided to entertain everyone in Washington, and, somehow, they had picked the evening of November 1, when the souls of the dead were abroad or asleep or somewhere, waiting to be-what?-propitiated: she could not remember exactly what. Mlle. Souvestre had driven all religion out of her soul, including the attractive pagan.

The night was ominously warm, and a last summer storm was approaching the house. Time of equinox, she thought, time of change. But then was this the equinox? The science teacher had not been as successful in filling the niches in her mind which Mademoiselle had so ruthlessly emptied of their idols.