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  ACCLAIM FOR GORE VIDAL AND

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Moves with reckless speed…fascinating…an intelligent and irreverent commentary on American political life.”

  —Life

  “A serious novel, written by a man who understands what politics is about….One must applaud—with vigor.”

  —Chicago Daily News

  “A page turner….Vidal picks an assortment of on-target political themes, adds several pinches of off-beat sex, and cooks it all over a good melodramatically licking flame.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Exciting stuff….Gore Vidal’s Washington is…a Sodom of political corruption and diseased ambitions wherein the life expectancy of a good intention is about that of a snowball in hell.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Vidal can take history and make it powerful and astonishing.”

  —Jimmy Breslin, Harper’s

  “Vidal is the best all-round American man of letters since Edmund Wilson.”

  —Walter Clemons, Newsweek

  GORE VIDAL

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. He subsequently wrote twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and two memoirs. He died in 2012.

  NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE

  BY

  GORE VIDAL

  Burr

  Lincoln

  1876

  Empire

  Hollywood

  Washington, D.C.

  The Golden Age

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2000

  Copyright © 1967 by Gore Vidal

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1967.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Vidal, Gore, 1925–Washington, D.C.

  I. Title.

  (PZ3.V6668Was7) (PS3543.I26) 813′.5′4 75–42768

  Vintage ISBN: 9780375708770

  Ebook ISBN 9780525565819

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  FOR

  BARBARA AND FREDERICK W. DUPEE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Gore Vidal

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  ONE

  I

  The storm broke over the house. Rain fell in dark diagonals across the summer lawn. An abrupt wind bent willow trees, tore sumac, shook elms. The storm’s center was now so near that the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder almost coincided, ending darkness, shattering stillness. At rapid intervals, spears and tridents and serpents’ tongues of blue fire showed trees bending, rain falling, and the black rush of the river at the foot of the hill on which the house stood.

  Peter Sanford took cover beneath an elm, and wondered what the odds were of being hit by lightning. Excellent, he decided, as three snakes of fire intertwined, vanished among the trees at the far end of the lawn, and a heartbeat later thunder sounded. Too late he clapped hands to ears; his head rang painfully from the sound.

  Then the wind shifted. Rain splattered his face. He pressed hard against the bole of the tree and through narrowed eyes watched the mock-Georgian façade of the house appear and disappear in rapid flashes like an old movie print, jerky and overexposed. Within the house, the party continued, unaware of the beautiful chaos outside.

  “Go on!” he shouted to the sky. “Go on!” The storm went on. Excited by this obedience, he stepped out of the shelter of the tree and, opening wide his arms, threw back his head and let the rain fill his face. At last he was nature, and a thing to be feared in the night.

  Suddenly with a sound like an ax splintering wood, blue lightning shattered the sky, setting his teeth on edge, enveloping flesh in a vast tingling web. Then he smelled sulphur. A tree had been struck nearby.

  “Come on!” he roared into the next roll of thunder. “I dare you! Here I am! Strike!” But this time there was only darkness for answer, and a dropping of the wind.

  The circuit of power broken, he ceased to be a god and so, like Lucifer before the dreaded hordes of Light, he ran across the lawn. But shoes filled with water slowed his progress, like the dream in which he knew that he could never outdistance pursuers. Breathing hard, he galloped slowly past a marble Venus and a plaster Pan; then down a flight of shallow steps to the swimming pool, where he stopped and took off his shoes.

  Barefoot, he crossed to the poolhouse. The door to the men’s changing room was open and in the darkness music sounded: someone had left the radio on. As he started to go inside, lightning revealed a man and a woman making love on a rubber mattress. The man wore nothing except shoes and socks and garters that hung half on and half off as he went about his single-minded work between long legs which circled him like those of a wrestler in the terminal bout. No faces were visible, only the necessary bodies. Then lightning ceased, and the revelation ended.

  He stood in the rain, unable to move, not knowing if the lovers were real or simply creations of the lightning and when it stopped, they stopped; unless of course he was dreaming one of those dreams from which he would awaken in that pain which is also sharpest pleasure, having loved in sleep. But the cold rain was real; and so was the sudden soft moan from the poolhouse. He fled.

  He entered the big house through the back door. At the far end of a dim corridor that smelled of beef stock, he could see the kitchen, a square white room full of light and heat and the sound of the French cook raging at his Swedish helper. Unobserved, Peter climbed the back stairs to the second floor where, like a thief, he opened the soundproofed door which separated the servants’ quarters from the main house and darted across the landing to his own room at the head of the staircase. Then he paused, perversely hoping that someone might see him: Where have you been? You’re soaked! But there was no one in sight and so, unchallenged, he stepped into the bedroom, shut the door, and turned the key; safe at last.

  Pulling off wet clothes, he rubbed himself with a towel, in front of the mirrored bathroom door. There was no getting around the fact that he was sixteen and not yet old enough to begin a grownup life. He had been a child forever, an intolerable state of affairs that could not last much longer. Rough towel on skin together with the memory of what he had seen excited him. Should he or should he not? Deciding not, he did pushups until the moment passed. Martyred daily by the flesh, he knew that if he did not soon hold another body in his arms, he would explode, like one of those white novae whose final starry burst destroys a thousand worlds, just as he in his solitary state would like to do. Sometimes at night he would strike the pillow again and again with the force that kills
, all the while knowing that there was as yet no one anywhere on earth for him to love, or to murder.

  Glaring at himself in the mirror, he let loose a long harsh Tarzan roar that hurt the throat but soothed the spirit. And as he did, with a stranger’s detachment, he watched the veins knot at the temples, while neck and cheeks turned scarlet. For an instant he and the thunder sounded together. Then he stopped; the thunder went on.

  Relieved, he dressed in a white suit identical with the one he had worn earlier at dinner. No one must know that he had been out of doors, least of all the lovers, who had been, he was convinced, if not at dinner, among those who had come in after. In any case, he must now track them down ruthlessly, like the inspector in Les Misérables. And when at last he found them…He paused in his reverie, wondering just what he would do. But of course he did not have to do anything. It was enough that two new images could be added to his gallery of phantom lovers, substitutes for what surely must soon materialize as solid flesh.

  Peter Sanford entered the drawing room, just as his father was about to propose a toast.

  “All right now. Quiet everybody! This is a victory toast.” Blaise Delacroix (pronounced “Della Crow”) Sanford was swarthy and fierce with a harsh New England accent dissonant not only to Southern ears but to those of his own son Peter who spoke the soft speech of Washington, D.C., with its slow long vowels and quick slurred consonants. But Blaise Sanford could have spoken Latin and been listened to respectfully, for he was uniquely rich. His grandfather had clothed the women of the West in gingham, making it possible for him to leave a fortune to Blaise’s father, an indolent and melancholic man who had doubled his inheritance by accidentally investing in the right railroad. Unnerved by this coup, he forsook America for France, settling at Saint Cloud where he did his best to enjoy the Belle Epoque; with his second wife Emma, Princess d’Agrigente, only daughter of the American historian Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, himself the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr, a connection that delighted Blaise who liked to claim, inaccurately, descent from the saturnine Vice President: Blaise’s mother was not Emma but a Southern lady who had died while giving birth to Blaise. Nevertheless, a portrait of Aaron Burr hung in the library; and a bundle of papers belonging to Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler was locked in Blaise’s desk. The papers were said to be scandalous. Although they were often discussed in the family, no one had ever actually read them.

  In due course Blaise’s father was again a widower (oddly, the beautiful Emma died much as his first wife had died, giving birth; but then, Emma had not been young). Sanford went into a deep depression that did not end until one day while riding, he was thrown from his horse onto a railroad track just as the Blue Train hurtled past, giving, wits said, added significance to the stylized locomotive he had incorporated into the Sanford coat of arms. As soon as Blaise inherited the fortune, he returned to the United States with every intention of dominating that easygoing if somewhat out-of-the-way Republic (the First War had not yet happened and Americans abroad were still a novelty and source of amusement). But as a family friend had once observed to Peter, though his father had the ambition of Caesar his political style was unfortunately that of Coriolanus. Too fierce and proud to show his wounds in the marketplace, he was forced to seek the same world elsewhere.

  Blaise bought a moribund newspaper, the Washington Tribune, and made it a success, largely because he was fearless where those of less income tend to be timid. He became a power in politics. On the Virginia side of the Potomac he built a mansion in the Georgian style, and named it Laurel House. Here he received Senators and Cabinet members, Justices and diplomats; the great and the rich, the quick and, had he the power, he would have summoned the dead as well. Even the powerful backwoods politicians, proudly uncouth (red suspenders, collarless shirts, cowboy boots: each had his folksy trademark), gladly discarded demotic trappings in order to go to Laurel House and become, if briefly, a part of that magic circle which was true center. If Paris was worth a mass, Laurel House was worth a dinner jacket.

  Peter admired his father without liking him, just as he liked his mother without admiring her. But then, ever since June when school let out, he had been playing god, studying those about him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. But though they were properly diminished by his scrutiny, he still found the adult world puzzling; he was particularly confused by those who gathered in his father’s drawing room. They seemed to be engaged in some sort of charade, known to them but not to him, and though there were times when he thought he knew what they were up to, something odd would happen and the mystery would resume. Yet he was confident that one day it would all be plain to him. When it was, he would call out across the room to the players, “All right! I’ve got it. I know the game. I win! You can all go home!” But for now he was back at “Go,” and the game would obviously be a long time playing before yielding him its secret.

  At the room’s center, Blaise stood short and straight beneath the chandelier with its three crystal feathers, emblem of the Prince Regent, Mrs. Sanford always remarked to those visitors who admired it.

  Peter joined the group that had gathered about his father like wolves circling a sheep. No, he decided, like sheep circling a wolf, eager to serve the carnivore. That was the one aspect of the game Peter had always understood. Blaise was rich, others were not. Yet money in itself did not impress Peter as much as what he had seen at the poolhouse. Unbidden, the vision returned and he was forced to put a hand in his trousers pocket. As he did, he looked about the room, wondering whether or not the lovers had returned. If not, who was missing?

  There had been a dinner for twenty; afterwards another dozen couples had arrived. It was the usual Laurel House mingling of politicians and diplomats and visitors from the distant world of New York. The mood was high and some of the most dignified of the men and the most glittering of the women were talking and laughing much too loudly; his father, however, made silence.

  “Everybody got a glass? You, Burden? No? Damn it! Give Senator Day a glass. He’s why we’re celebrating!” The butler poured Senator Day a glass of champagne.

  Of all the Senators, James Burden Day most resembled Peter’s ideal of the classic Roman Senator. White-haired and stately, Burden Day moved with a conscious dignity that beguiled rather than appalled. With a flourish, the Senator held his glass high. But though he smiled a politician’s smile, his eyes were those of a man who had just seen the hour and date of his death written upon a wall, a somberness of expression Peter found most attractive for he too was something of a melodramatist, having read Poe the previous winter.

  “I won’t give Burden all the credit…” began Blaise.

  “Naturally,” said his wife. Frederika Sanford’s fair hair and gentle expression put new acquaintances so much at their ease that they were quite overwhelmed when they discovered that not only did Frederika have a sharp tongue but that she was also quite unable to permit a silence or even a pause in someone else’s speech to go unfilled. She was a mistress of the sudden interjection; the small hard word, delivered like a stone from a slingshot. As a result, those who lived with her had become powerful conversat​ionalists, never pausing for a word in terror that she might give them the wrong one.

  Blaise spoke through his wife’s “naturally.” “The distinguished Senator from the American heartland, helped by the Washington Tribune!” Mock applause and hooting as Blaise indicated himself.

  Peter looked about the room to see who was missing. On a sofa sat Diana Day, the Senator’s daughter, whose legs he had for one moment thought he recognized in the lightning’s flash. But it was unthinkable. Diana was far too shy to give herself to a man with falling garters in a strange house, during a party. Besides, she was plain, with no makeup, and her hair was like the feathers of a brown hen. But though she dressed in clothes too old for her, Peter was aware of a good body beneath dull cloth.

  “But Burden and I and a few other men of principl
e…”

  “Hear! Hear!” from the room.

  “We managed to stop our distinguished President, the dis-Honorable Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” Boos and cheers from the room. Most of those present were enemies of the Administration, although, as usual, there were a few New Dealers in attendance, eager to show Blaise Sanford that their horns were detachable, their hooves hearsay, and their need for publicity as poignant as any man’s.

  “This is a big day for us. For the country. For our kind of government. We must all remember it. July twenty-third, 1937.” Having blundered, Blaise was forced to contend with his wife’s uncanny memory for dates and numbers.

  “July twenty-second, dear.” Frederika came in hard on “1937,” abandoning her usual policy of waiting for the natural pause.

  For an instant Blaise scowled; then he laughed. As always, others laughed, too. “And here I was about to inscribe the wrong date on everyone’s heart. All right, July twenty-second, 1937, in the Senate of the United States the President’s bill to pack the Supreme Court and subvert the Constitution was buried for all time. Which means that the dictatorship Mr. Roosevelt dreams of has been at least delayed. And for this respite, we have to thank Burden Day and his Judiciary subcommittee. Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Day!”

  The toast was drunk seriously because politics was taken seriously at Laurel House. Peter knew that his father believed everything that he said for the simple reason that he himself believed the same things. Not once had Peter even questioned the wickedness of the President or the virtue of his enemies, of whom James Burden Day was now the most conspicuous.

  Senator Day responded to the toast, affecting a diffidence which did not strike Peter as altogether satisfactory in one who only this morning had humiliated a President in full view of the world. “Blaise, friends…I won’t say ‘my friends.’ ” He mimicked the President with startling exactness and everyone laughed. “We have done good work today. According to the papers, I was out to ‘get’ the President because I don’t like him. Well, I don’t like him. But that wasn’t what was at stake. And even though I’m a good Democrat…”