The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 6

"What about the big birds?" Burden could not guess what Wilson would do.

But the President was still bemused. "I always found him charming, personally. But there is now a sort of sweetness about him that was not there before. Four sons, he has," Wilson's voice lowered, "and he wants them all to go to war, with him. ... I'm glad I have daughters." Wilson's mood lightened. "Anyway, he's hard to resist. I can see what it is the people love about him." Wilson sounded, to Burden, wistful. As a public man, Wilson aroused admiration-and hatred-but no affection.

"But what will you do?" Burden was direct. "Does he get his division of volunteers?"

"Senator Harding wants him to have three divisions," said Tumulty.

Wilson spread wide his arms and stretched his back. "If it were up to me, why not? But I leave the military to the military. At the moment, they fear that special volunteers-like these-will wreck our whole system of drafting men. Also, he's no general."

Wilson's hand rested now on a large bronze head of Abraham Lincoln. "Thank G.o.d for Lincoln! You know, when I taught history, I taught Lincoln. And I was struck how, when the war came, he made every mistake it was possible to make. Well, thanks to his bad example, we won't make the same mistakes now."

"One of his mistakes," Burden was now trying to draw Wilson out, "was the appointment of opposition politicians as generals."

"Yes," said Wilson, turning to Tumulty. "See if the coast is clear. I don't want any photographs of me with the Colonel."

Tumulty and Burden left the Red Room. The Colonel could be seen through the open door, talking to journalists. Tumulty turned back into the Red Room. "He's got the Pathe news-reel cameras photographing him, and won't be budged."

Wilson then appeared in the doorway, and with a comic timing worthy of a Mack Sennett movie, he tiptoed across the hall to the elevator, with mock-terrified glances over his shoulder, as if pursued by a ghost in a graveyard.

And that was that. The Colonel would not get his division. But there was an excellent chance that he might get another four-year lease on the White House. In a curious way, with or without military glory, Theodore Roosevelt could no longer lose. After a decade's absence, luck was now with him again, which meant, at his age, to the end.

3.

KITTY SAT ON A BOULDER OVERLOOKING Rock Creek, her eye on the baby, as it tottered ever closer to a clump of shiny poison ivy at the foot of an English walnut tree whose green fruit glowed in the summer sun. "Why not," said Kitty, "put the parlor here, over the creek, and our bedroom over there?"

"The road's too near." Burden had taken off his jacket and unb.u.t.toned his shirt, and felt free of all things worldly except Kitty, who had become surprisingly pretty as she aged; she was no longer the somewhat hard-faced young woman that he had felt obliged to marry because her father was the master of the Democratic Party of their state. If nothing else, Caroline had taught him never to disguise his motives from himself. In early days, Caroline had shocked him. Now he shocked her whenever he chose to reveal just how the affairs of the republic were conducted. Admittedly, the shock to her system was not moral: rather, she appeared to resent the lack of form to American life, so unlike France, where everyone knew what to expect, including the exact nature of the almost always predictable unexpected.

On the other hand, Kitty was a natural politician, true heiress to her father, the legendary judge, not only as a political tactician but now as possessor of her late father's fortune soon to be transformed from abstract stocks and bonds into wood, brick, stone.

Burden himself had never been able to acquire money. Somehow or other the munificent seventy-five hundred dollars a year salary of a United States senator was hardly enough for them to live on, even though their large house in American City was always profitably rented. When it came time to go home to vote or to campaign, they would check into the Henry Clay Hotel across from the state capitol, and pretend that they had been living in town all year, just folks, with only the odd trip to Washington.

The first installment of Kitty's inheritance had gone to buy one and a half acres of Rock Creek Park, mostly wooded hills whose undergrowth was as green and thick as any jungle. In fact, the park was almost too much of a jungle for Burden's taste, as he seized his daughter's pinafore just as she was about to bury her face in a cl.u.s.ter of poison ivy which could, within hours, cover its victim with oozing itching blisters, torment for an adult, h.e.l.l for a child.

"Diana!" Kitty's voice sounded too late. "What is it about poison ivy? Jim Junior had a dowsing rod for the stuff."

Burden settled himself on a fallen log opposite Kitty, Diana on his knee. Birds silently circled overhead, their singing-mating season past. Now they were solicitous parents and providers, as well as flight instructors to the young-and mourners for those who fell to earth.

"The architect says that this should be the parlor, facing south." Burden tried and failed to imagine a room where they were sitting. Jungle or not, he preferred the open. Unlike most boys brought up on a farm, he did not prefer the indoors, as long, of course, as he did not have to do ch.o.r.es. "She'll grow up here," he added, looking down at Diana, a grave as yet speechless child, who sighed.

Kitty took a crust of bread from her handbag. Then, bread in hand, she extended her arm. The miracle, as Burden always thought of it, occurred in a matter of seconds. A large thrush made several close pa.s.ses in order to get a good look at Kitty before he settled on her wrist. Then he took the bread in his beak, shook it free of enc.u.mbering crumbs, and rose to a branch of the nearest tree, where he ate the crust and watched Kitty.

"How do you do it?"

"I've always done it." Kitty's relationship with the animal world was intimate, collusive, extra-human. All creatures came to her without fear; and she was there. As a girl, she had befriended a full-grown wolf, dying of hunger during a hard winter. The wolf had followed her about like a dog; then, according to the Judge, while she was at school, the wolf had attacked the hired man and the hired man had shot the beast in self-defense. To which Kitty had replied with a terminal coldness, "No, Father. You just had him killed." Father and daughter never spoke of the subject again but father and son-in-law did discuss the matter years later, and the Judge had said, with puzzled awe, "How did she know-how could she know that I killed the brute when there was no one there to see me?" It was decided then that Kitty was psychic, at least with animals and birds. She seemed less interested in people as opposed to voters. She knew as much of Burden's alliances and arrangements as he did; yet he was certain that she knew nothing of Caroline. He also suspected that if she did know, she would be indifferent. Odd, he thought, not to know your own wife as well as-a thrush did. When Jim Junior had died at six, it was Burden who had wept. Kitty had simply busied herself with the funeral arrangements; then she had quarrelled with her Negro cook over the refreshments for the wake, a bit of Romanism popular in their Protestant state. That was the end of their son.

Although a cool west breeze was rustling the branches of the taller trees, Burden was still uncomfortably hot. But then everyone said that this was the hottest summer in memory, the first war-time summer. "High ceilings." Kitty looked up at the tallest tree, an oak.

"The highest." Burden was knowledgeable. "A Norman facade. Gray stonework. A terrace. A pond. A porch to the side ..."

"Let's hope the war won't interfere."

"Building goes on. Even if food doesn't." Burden moved from log to ground; and the inevitable gra.s.s stains on his trousers. "The President's fit to be tied over Section 23."

"You can't blame him." The animal psychic was now the political psychic, having skipped any sort of rapport with those human beings between the two poles of her life.

"They're trying to do to him what they did to Lincoln when they set up that joint congressional committee to oversee the war."

"Same thing." Kitty nodded. "And all tucked inside the food bill, which is sly. But you won't let it go through?"

"No. But there'll be a real fight. Can't you just hear the talk? Oh, the talk!" More than ever, the Senate encouraged personal oddity. Originally intended as a house of lords for the American patriciate or its a.s.signs, the members of the upper house were selected by the various state legislators that were themselves paid for by the moneyed cla.s.s. But since 1913, senators were now popularly elected. As a result, a new breed of lordly tribunes of the people had appeared in the sleepy chamber; and they delighted in tormenting the gentlemanly old guard of the patriciate. Also, since any senator who had got the floor to speak could speak as long as he was conscious, a great new age of filibuster had dawned, and a leather-lunged senator might, in the last hours before adjournment, talk to death a piece of legislation or threaten to do so in exchange for favors.

Even so, Burden was delighted to belong to so powerful a club, in which he had found his place as chief conciliator of his party's chief, the schoolmaster president, whose control over the Senate's Democratic majority was fragile at best. This meant constant work for Burden, who must placate-when not outright bribe-the Bryanites, the isolationists, the pro-Germanites and all the rest, who chose to reign in committee rather than serve their president.

"I wonder who she'll marry." Kitty gazed fondly at Diana, almost as if she were a plump racc.o.o.n arrived at the kitchen door for a handout.

"Isn't that tempting fate?" Burden felt a swift chill; and shuddered. He had once speculated on Jim Junior's future and promptly lost him to diphtheria.

"No. She'll marry in this house, or from this house." Kitty had a sort of second sight. "I suppose she'll be happy, too."

"Yes." Burden was noncommittal. Kitty was fond of him; he of her; no more.

"Did your father like your mother?" This was sudden.

"That was so long ago. I don't recall." Burden had grown up on a farm in Alabama, surrounded by veterans of the lost war like his father. Burden had always been amazed at how Mark Twain had managed to make so idyllic that harsh crude muddy-always mud-world of mosquitoes and chiggers and wet-heat and poisonous snakes the color of the mud. Of course, Twain had been writing of an earlier generation before the war, but even so Burden had been aware all his childhood that this was not the way life was meant to be. There had been a very great fall, which his father, unlike so many veterans, was eager to explain and describe, the pale blue eyes fierce and crazy, as they must have been that day at Chickamauga when the bullet felled but did not kill him and he was taken prisoner. Later, among the ruins, Obadiah Day had begun his life all over in the delta mud. Of his children-seven, eight? Burden did not know the count-all but two had died of b.l.o.o.d.y flux, as the cholera was known. Burden did recall how much of his childhood seemed to have been spent in the local cemetery, watching small boxes being hidden under red dirt. He also recalled hours spent listening to his father speak of how They had ruined the South, corrupted the Negroes, foreclosed on the land of the best true stock of the country. They were a shifting ent.i.ty composed of all Yankees and bankers and railroad men and, sometimes, of plain aliens, of whom Catholics and Jews were the worst. Curiously, the Negroes, no matter how out-of-hand, were never held directly responsible for their behavior. If a n.i.g.g.e.r went bad it was They who'd gone and turned him.

In time, the defeated Confederates turned to politics, the only weapon that they could use against Them. The political picnic and the under-canvas rally became the true church of those who had been dispossessed in their own land, and Obadiah was among those who had helped form the Party of the People in order to redress the people's wrongs, and the party flourished everywhere in the South, and Obadiah himself was elected to a series of small state offices. Then came the day when he heard the fourteen-year-old Burden speak at a rally, and joyously he had welcomed his son to the great struggle, much as the Baptist had received the Messiah on Jordan's shining bank. So, at Alabama's edge, James Burden Day had come into his kingdom to do his father's work and rout Them in the people's name.

Clearer to Burden now than the crowd itself-and every crowd to Burden was like a lover met and lost or, more likely, ravished and won-was the image of his father, still surprisingly young in appearance, despite white hair, still brilliant of that bright blue eye not covered by a patch, still lean enough to be able to wear the b.u.t.ternut-gray patched Confederate uniform that he had come home in, with the bullet that struck him at Chickamauga on a string about his neck after he had insisted that it be gouged from his thigh by a friendly doctor so that, should he die, no part of Them would be eternally mixed with his bones. Together, father and son had fought in the ranks of the People's Party until Burden had gone west to a new state to practice law; and though he never ceased to be, he swore to his father and murmured to himself, a true Populist, he had been obliged to start an entirely new life in a brand-new dry dusty state as opposed to his old wet, muddy one. Obliged to use a family connection to get an appointment at Washington in the Comptroller's Office, he had disappointed his father. But they were reconciled when Burden had promised the old man that he would never give up the struggle and that when the time was right he would go back to his new state and lead their party. When the time was right, he did go back and marry Kitty, and with her father's help, he was elected to Congress not as a Populist but as a Bryanite Democrat. Father no longer spoke to son. Yet Obadiah and a second wife continued to live in Alabama; and though Burden had sent him a message after his election to the Senate-where, after all, did he not continue to fight Them?-he got no answer from the old man, who was still, at heart, the furious boy struck down a half-century earlier at Chickamauga-two minutes before noon, he had noted the time before he lost consciousness. To live without such a father's pride was, to Burden, unendurable; particularly when he himself had never lost their common faith in the people, their people. What was a party label? What was-anything?

"Will it be you?" Kitty rose. She took Diana from him. The child was falling asleep in the warm sun. The sweet heavy odor of honeysuckle was everywhere, as was the vine itself, a yellow-green tapestry clinging to the laurel.

"Me? What?"

"If Mr. Wilson does not run for a third time, which no one has."

Kitty never ceased to calculate, despite the distractions of a child, house, the wild beasts of the field and-the what?-of the air. "It's far too soon to even guess. The war will be short. That's one thing-in his favor. He'll be a victorious war president. And not too old. So if he wants it, he'll probably have it."

"It does no harm," said Kitty, removing the drowsy Diana's thumb from her mouth, "to place ourselves in position in case something goes wrong. If it does, our only compet.i.tion will be Mr. McAdoo."

"That's a lot of compet.i.tion." Burden frowned, as he always did, when he thought of the enormous advantage that the President's son-in-law and secretary of the Treasury had over everyone else in the party. McAdoo had already so positioned himself to inherit the Wilson legacy that it would be impossible to contest him unless the whispers of corruption that always surrounded the vast gray granite Treasury Building proved true.

"Then there's the Colonel."

"Surely, he must die sometime." Kitty was sweetly relentless.

"At sixty-one? With the nomination already his? If ever there was a life-restorer, it's that. Almost as good as a Federal pension to insure longevity. There are," said Burden, as always bemused by the fact, "seventy-three widows of the War of 1812 currently collecting pensions from the government."

"Young girls who married old boys."

"Now they are old girls made immortal by a pension." Their Negro driver, Albert, joined them. He was a native Washingtonian, and a consummate sn.o.b. For years when Burden was in the House of Representatives, Albert would refer to his employer, behind his back, as "the Senator." Burden's eventual election to the Senate was, Kitty maintained, more thrilling for Albert than either of them. "I always felt we were common," Albert would say, "when we were in the House with all that tobacco-chewing white trash from nowhere." Albert's mother had been called Victoria, after the queen; and she had called him Albert, after the consort. "Very psychological," Kitty would say, looking wise. "He's very much a mother's boy."

Albert reminded Burden that he had agreed to go out on the river with the a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy. So Burden collected Diana while Kitty collected laurel to decorate the Mintwood parlor; and then they descended the hill to the road, and the waiting car.

The Sylph looked its name-a swift slender craft of a type unknown to Burden, but then he was the perfect landsman and could not tell one boat from another. But he was grateful for the day's outing, anything to escape Washington's airless heat.

The a.s.sistant Secretary was all in white and most nautical-looking, as was Gary Grayson, the President's physician, and Grayson's young wife, Altrude, Edith Wilson's closest friend. Obviously, the a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy had discovered that the most direct route to the President was through the Graysons, and as Franklin Roosevelt's luck would have it, Grayson was Regular Navy. He was also a very small man; and the gracious Altrude, very much in the Edith style, loomed over him. There was another couple whom Burden did not know-"fashionables," as he thought of the eastern gentry whom he had met, from time to time, in Sanford-land. Finally, in the new uniform of a woman sailor, yeoman third cla.s.s, the charming Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's social secretary. Lucy's escort was a young man from the British emba.s.sy.

Once they were under way, Burden relieved himself of jacket and tie and enjoyed the cool, somewhat rank breeze off the Potomac River as they headed downstream toward Mount Vernon and the Chesapeake. For a moment, the frantic war-time city seemed remote; war, too, except for a pair of destroyers, if that's what they were, anch.o.r.ed off the Navy Yard.

As Burden accepted a mint julep from a steward, Franklin smiled contentedly. "If only Josephus Daniels could see us now."

"Surely his prohibition of alcohol does not extend to guests of the Navy."

"To everyone, including the President." But Burden noticed that Franklin drank only lemonade, while the others were now all forward, waiting for the ship to draw abreast Mount Vernon, which the Sylph would duly salute, as antique Navy custom required.

Franklin made agreeable small talk. He had far more charm than his presidential cousin, at least for Burden, who was something of a connoisseur in these matters since everyone in Washington wanted to charm senators, particularly those, like Burden, of the majority party. Ordinarily, Burden and the Navy had no links. Burden's committees were Agriculture first last and always; with Foreign Affairs for amus.e.m.e.nt, and Banking for grave necessity, since that committee, a twin to the House Ways and Means Committee, was the fountain of all expenditure; hence, government patronage. But as Burden was only in his first term, he carried no great weight other than the power that accrued to him as the link between the Bryanite senators and the President, a position recently relinquished by the blind Senator from Oklahoma, who could abide neither President nor war. But the true link between Burden and the young Roosevelts was Caroline and, to a lesser extent, Blaise. The Roosevelts tended to move in high fashionable circles, keeping their distance from such low showy fashionables as the Ned McLeans.

"Where's Mrs. Roosevelt?" The mint julep was uncommonly pleasant; and the sun, filtered by a heavy white haze, was, for the first time in days, bearable.

"She's gone up to Canada, with the chicks. I'm supposed to join her in August. Only ..." Franklin stared at the Virginia sh.o.r.e.

"Only what?" But Burden knew. Franklin was planning to run for the Senate from New York in the fall election.

"Do you think I should run?"

"I don't know that much about the state. But if I were you, I wouldn't quit this job first. Just take a leave of absence."

Franklin laughed without much joy. "I will. If I can get away with it. I think old Josephus would like to see me well and truly gone."

"But the President-"

"-has been most understanding. Everyone tells me I've a safe berth here if I lose, only ..." Again the pause; the word "only" seemed to provide a barrier for Franklin, who, while appearing to have no secrets, managed to evade all intimacy with considerable grace.

"Only you'd rather not lose."

"Exactly."

"Do you have Tammany's support?"

"No. They've got their candidate. So I shall be reform, I suppose. Another Uncle Tee in Democratic clothing." He swallowed some lemonade; and grimaced. "I've a sore throat. Too much talking. I argue and argue and n.o.body listens. You see, I've worked out a way to bottle the German submarines. But the British can't be budged. And our admirals are so slow, so slow. The solution, Burden, is this."

Burden never much liked being called by his first name, particularly by someone who was not only a decade his junior but so far beneath him in the national hierarchy. Yet it was a part of this Roosevelt's considerable charm to lift, spontaneously, others to a level of intimacy with himself, a member of that sovereign patriciate that still held a number of seats in a Senate which had been entirely theirs until democracy had so rudely sprung the chamber's door and let Burden, among others, in.

"It's so clear. We seal off the North Sea with a mine barrage from Scotland to Norway so that no submarine could ever get through, which would seal them up tight in their own ports. Well, it took me weeks to get to the President, who's now given the go-ahead. But the British are still dragging their feet even when I said we'd do the same for the Dover Straits, which would protect their home waters. But they are sound asleep." He scowled, as he drank more lemonade. Burden noticed that Franklin's face was now glistening with sweat despite the cool breeze. The handsome head with its thin chiselled nose looked fragile; the small eyes were not only too close together but due to the face's asymmetry one was higher than the other.

Suddenly, they were athwart the pillared mansion of the first president. Franklin sprang to his feet, as did Burden, who remained at self-conscious attention while a bugler "aft" played taps.

When the fashionable couple joined Franklin in the stern, Burden made his way forward to where the English diplomat and Yeoman Third Cla.s.s Lucy Mercer were seated. Both rose in deference to senatorial rank.

Burden sat between them. A steward plied them with Josephus Daniels's lemonade. Like everyone else in the small Washington world, Burden found Lucy uncommonly attractive, and mysterious. Why hadn't she married? Of course, she was a member of Maryland's Catholic gentry and there were not so many Catholic bachelors available in the capital. On the other hand, a short trip to Baltimore and she would be surrounded by her own kind. Yet she had chosen to live in Washington and work for Eleanor Roosevelt and fill in at dinner parties until she had joined the Navy. "Now you are a fighting woman," said Burden.

"It was Mr. Roosevelt's idea." She smiled, and looked away.

"Your military service," said the Englishman, "is distinctly selective."

Burden had more than once claimed credit for the sublime euphemism "selective service." The word "conscription" was taboo, reminding everyone of the Civil War's b.l.o.o.d.y riots. But since Wilson could no more rely on volunteers than Lincoln, a new phrase was devised. A few years earlier when it looked as if the border troubles with Mexico might turn into a full-scale war, Wilson had issued a ringing call for volunteers: and hardly anyone had rallied to the colors. This time he was taking no chances. Conscription was to be swift and absolute and under another name. On June 5, ten million men between twenty-one and thirty had been registered under the National Defense Act for "selective service" in the armed services, which sounded rather better than, say, cannon fodder in France.

Privately, Burden hated the whole enterprise. The wounded of the Civil War had been all round him in his youth, and the general poverty of the delta during that time was directly due to the loss of manpower and money in the war. Publicly, Burden supported the war; yet he could never rationalize to himself the brutal manner in which the United States had violated its own sacred Monroe Doctrine in order to fight a war in Europe, something the original republic had guaranteed to all the world that it would never do. However, as a practical politician, he had been able to rationalize the necessity of making the world safe not for democracy-a quixotic enterprise, since the United States had yet to experiment with so dangerous a form of government, as those militant women who wanted to vote never ceased to remind their s.e.xual masters-but to enrich the nation. This had already begun, as the Englishman, Mr. Nigel Law, reminded him. "Your speech in committee, sir, was much applauded in London."

"It was just plain old common horse sense." British accents tended to cause Burden to a.s.sume the folksy, down-home style of a vaudeville rube comedian. He chewed an imaginary piece of straw. "Can't let our best buddy go broke."

"What speech was that?" Lucy's blue eyes shifted from the blue-green Virginia sh.o.r.e to Burden's imaginary straw.

"About the loan to England. Last month the President was told that without quick help from us, England could no longer support the pound. Fact, in twenty-four hours, they would have had to go off the gold standard, so I said to my fellow statesmen, who don't much care for foreigners in general and the English in particular, if the pound goes, the dollar's going to go, too, so we better prop them up, which we did, and which we're still doing, thanks to Mr. McAdoo and his Liberty Loans, which are gathering up every spare dollar in the country." The rhetoric of the Liberty Loan campaign-all Hunnish ghoulishness-had got on Burden's nerves. Even a Republican hack like Harding had complained about it, to no avail.

"To your everlasting credit, Senator." Mr. Law was slightly overdoing it, for England, of course.

Burden smiled. "Actually, it is to your everlasting debit. Anyway, we've got everybody's money now, which is most satisfying." He turned to Lucy. "Mr. Roosevelt's sick. You ought to get him to a doctor."

For the first time, she looked at Burden with interest. "You could tell?"

"From the way he's sweating."

"He says it's just a sore throat. Yes, I'll get him to a doctor when we're ash.o.r.e."

"Will the Lever bill pa.s.s the Senate?" The diplomat did not believe that sore throats and fevers should be allowed to thwart diplomacy.

Burden nodded. "But we'll cut it up a bit first." The President had wanted to control the price and distribution of food; and he had chosen that successful mining engineer Herbert Hoover to be its director. But in a recalcitrant mood the Senate had made it a provision of the bill that a joint congressional committee on the war be set up, to monitor the President. The historian-president was quick to rally his troops in the Senate; and it was Burden who was now in the throes of eliminating Section 23 from the Lever bill.

"Your president has the most extraordinary powers, doesn't he?" Mr. Law looked somewhat wistful.

"Only in war-time."

"Then, if I were an ambitious president, I'd keep the country forever at war."

"It couldn't be done." Burden was flat. "Our people don't like war. Why should they? We've got all the s.p.a.ce we need right here. All we want is open doors everywhere so we can go and do business. Any president who tried to get us into an unpopular war would soon be an ex-president. Look how hard it was for Wilson to get us into this one." Burden realized that he had said too much.

Mr. Law looked at him as if he expected him to continue. But Burden was not about to place on Wilson responsibility for a war that he had done rather more than not to stay out of. "If Germany had not been so stupid and provocative, we might still be at peace and the pound sterling ..."

"Fallen into the dust," said Mr. Law.

"Your family's from Washington, aren't they?" Lucy diverted the conversation.

Burden nodded. "Part of them. The part that stayed on in the District while my branch went west. I lived for a time with relatives here, when we lost our farm in the panic." Comfortably, they sank into genealogy, which meant Burden's connection with the ubiquitous Apgar clan. Lucy, too, was connected to them by marriage, as was Caroline, as was everyone that was worthy from Albany to New York City to Washington, D.C. Burden stared into Lucy's beautiful eyes and felt a sudden pang, a need to be loved yet again by a girl, not necessarily one who was Catholic, complicated and, probably, virginal. But he must start again, soon. In three years, he would be fifty and at the end of anything remotely like youth. There was Caroline still, but that was known country. Also, with time, she had shown her true nature, which was that not of a wife or lover but of sister and friend. He valued her, but she was not what he now furiously craved, skin, flesh.