Washington D.C. Read online

  The Senator paused and got his reward. “No such thing,” said Mrs. Sanford. The guests laughed again. The Senator smiled tolerantly. Then, unexpectedly, he spoke of the recent death of his friend Joe Robinson, the majority leader of the Senate. He described how he had helped Joe on the floor of the Senate when he had felt the beginning of the heart attack which was to kill him later that night. He described sitting beside Joe in the cloakroom, and as his friend rocked back and forth, struggling for breath, they spoke of the Court bill which Robinson had sworn to deliver to the President. He believed he had a majority. Burden Day knew for certain that he had not; but suspecting that Joe was dying, he assured him that the bill’s passage was certain because “I loved Joe Robinson. We all did.”

  “I loved Joe Robinson. We all did.” Peter repeated this to himself in his own inner voice. Some words sounded in his head; others turned to script; many translated to pictures. But whenever he tried to decide exactly how it was that his mind worked, he lost all sense of himself, the way he did on those clear nights when, staring at the sky, he was overwhelmed by the thought of an infinitude of suns and nonhuman worlds. Sky. Night. Stars. Mars. Tars Tarkas of Thark, the green giant, was beside him, as they crossed the red desert of ancient Mars to the place where cowered the beautiful Princess Thuvia. Red dust appeared on the horizon. “Here they come,” he muttered grimly to his green comrade-in-arms. “We’re ready for them, O Peter,” said Tars Tarkas, and with his four arms he removed four swords from their scabbards.

  “We buried Joe last week in Little Rock. I don’t think I give away any secrets when I say that on the train back to Washington, the Vice President turned to me and said, ‘Well, that’s the end of Franklin. And I hope you boys find some decent way of layin’ this bill to rest.’ We did. Today. And I have a hunch that the President may have learned a lesson he won’t soon forget. That not even he can upset the system of checks and balances which our forefathers…” But Burden Day, obviously aware that his voice had gone from that of drawing room guest to politician, abruptly finished with a few muttered words that without the Washington Tribune and Blaise Sanford there might be at this very moment thirteen rather than nine Justices of the Supreme Court. After a round of applause, the talk became general.

  Alone beside the fireplace, Peter drank sarsaparilla and ate potato chips while killing the last of the white-wigged Martian Priests. Then he turned to Thuvia, who lay among the red dunes of Mars, waiting for him with parted lips and silver legs spread wide…He knew whose legs those were.

  In a jonquil yellow dress his sister Enid materialized in the room, pale face flushed, eyes huge from pleasure, hair still full of rain despite a recent combing. Her return had gone unnoticed, a fact unusual in itself since the whole point to Enid was that she was always noticed, with no effort on her part. She glided to the bar and poured herself whisky, again unusual: Enid seldom drank. Peter looked toward the hall to see who it was she had been with. But the man with the garters had either gone home or would reappear later, to avoid suspicion. Fiercely, Peter tried to recall who had been at dinner. He shut his eyes, the better to concentrate.

  Enid twirled his hair against the central cowlick, causing sudden tears of pain.

  “Stop it!” He struck away the hand. Each was experienced in the torturing of the other. Although she had the advantage of being older than he by three years, his biological age had now made him physically stronger than she but to no purpose, since in the process he was now no more able to touch her physically than he could hold fire in his hand. It was too dangerous, as they both knew well.

  “Where have you been?”

  “At the poolhouse.” He was startled by her candor, and then by the swift serenity with which she lied. “I took a walk after dinner and got caught in the storm. My hair’s still wet. Listen to that thunder.” But Peter could hear nothing but the dull rapid thud of his own pulse beat.

  “Who’d you go with?”

  “My lover, who else?”

  Against his will, Peter found her unexpectedly impressive. “You have a lover? Here?”

  Enid laughed and twisted the cowlick right way round, a not unpleasant sensation. But he could not bear to have her touch him. He leaped from the chair. “Which one is he?”

  But Enid merely smiled and stretched languorously before the fire and Peter, confronted by the fact of her body, was furious. “Who?” He could barely get the word out.

  Enid looked at him hard, no longer smiling, more puzzled than suspicious. “Who do you think I was with, you idiot? I was alone.”

  “Were you?” His tone was so inquisitorial that Enid laughed at him. “All right. I wasn’t alone. I was with Harold Griffiths. We made love on a rubber mattress in the poolhouse, in the men’s dressing room, while listening to the radio. I forget which station. Are you satisfied?”

  Peter looked past her at Harold Griffiths who was short and barrel-chested with a great lion’s head and pale agate eyes. He was a poet from New York who worked as critic for the Tribune. He almost never stopped talking and Peter thought him the most brilliant man in Washington. But he was certain that Harold had not left the house. In any case, those short bowed legs were not the ones he had seen in the poolhouse.

  Peter shook his head. “It wasn’t Harold.”

  “But it was. And I’m going to marry him, too. He’s got to make an honest woman of me, after what we did.”

  Peter turned from her. “Go to hell,” he murmured, suddenly neutral. He selected and ate the largest of the potato chips. After all, it was no business of his.

  He was about to leave the room when his mother motioned for him to join her and Senator Day and Diana. All three were lined up side by side on a sofa, like rifle targets at Glen Echo Amusement Park. Peter wished suddenly that he had a gun. Bang bang bang, down they would go. One two three, and he would win a stuffed bear. But then they would pop right up again, ready for the next customer.

  He sat down opposite them, and looked attentive. He knew that whenever his mother summoned him to join the grownups it was because Important Things Were Being Said.

  The Senator was speaking of the President. Peter had seldom heard him speak on any other subject. The President was the Senator’s white whale, to be pursued to the death and after. “It’s too simple to say that he wants to be a dictator. Actually, I don’t think he knows what he wants. He has no master plan, thank God. But all his improvisations, all his gestures are those of a man who wants to center in himself all power.”

  “But why?” Diana Day, who seldom spoke, blushed; obviously she had startled herself, while delighting her father, who beamed at her as Mrs. Sanford said, “Because he’s that sort of man!”

  “What I meant was,” and Peter noticed that Diana spoke with a slight stammer, “perhaps he thinks it right, what he’s doing, the way it was in 1933 when he had to create jobs.”

  “Conceited!” exclaimed Mrs. Sanford, linking her new interjection with the last as if Diana had not spoken at all. “The way he throws his head back, and that horrible grin! It’s all because he’s a cripple,” she added with finality. “The brain was affected. Everyone knows.”

  “That’s too easy.” Senator Day twirled his highball glass first clockwise then counterclockwise. Peter’s cowlick hurt. “Diana,” and the Senator gave his daughter a curious smile, “I suspect you of being a secret New Dealer.”

  The girl turned a deeper red; tears came to her eyes. Though Peter had known her all his life, he had seldom heard her say more than a conventional phrase or two. He had always thought her dull as well as plain. But now that she was grown up he decided that she was not really plain, only shy, and grimly turned out. Under one arm he saw the fastener of a zipper, and mentally he gave it a tug. The cloth parted, to reveal…With an effort he recalled himself. It was plain that he was going mad. He could think of nothing but rape.

  The Senator said, “I don’t see Roosevelt himself as bad…”

  “Bad!” One of Mrs. Sanford’s best effects was the repetition, in a different key—and often meaning—of a single word.

  But the Senator knew his competition. He continued. “Good and bad are relative, of course. But I do see him as more helpless than most people think. I see him riding the whirlwind.” Peter thought of lightning; thought he heard thunder beyond heavy curtains and rose-red brick; thought of the poolhouse….Desperately he concentrated on the Senator’s words. “Since then the Executive has grown stronger, while the Legislature and the Judiciary grow weaker.”

  “Which is their own fault, isn’t it, Father?” Diana stammered on the first syllable of “Father.”

  The Senator nodded. “To a degree. We don’t have the leaders we used to have when I first came to the Senate. And though in some ways, I’m glad the Aldriches are gone…”

  “I love Senator Borah.” Mrs. Sanford looked absently about the room to see if the guests were mingling, laughing, gossiping, as they ought.

  “Now there are those who think this process is inevitable in our form of government. I don’t.” Peter was aware that since his mother’s attention had strayed to the room, the Senator was speaking directly to him and he was embarrassed to find himself the sole recipient of so much wisdom and courtesy.

  “You see, I think our kind of government is the best ever devised. At least originally. So whenever a President draws too much power to himself, the Congress must stop him by restoring the balance. Let him reach too far and…” The long white hand moved abruptly toward Peter who gave a start as though the hand were indeed a tyrant’s, grasping power. “We shall…” The Senator’s other hand, rigid as a knife, made as if to chop the tyrant’s hand from its wrist. That was pow
er, thought Peter, chilled. Fortunately the Senator was far too skillful a performer to end on too high a note. He broke the tension with a laugh. “On the other hand, no pun intended, F.D.R. has a lot more tricks up that sleeve of his. I just hope we can always manage him as well as we did today.”

  Across the room someone struck a chord on the grand piano. The room was silent. As in most Washington drawing rooms, the piano’s essential function was to serve as an altar on which to display in silver frames the household gods: photographs of famous people known to the family. The Sanford deities were suitably impressive, consisting mostly of royalties whose signatures slanted in bold letters from lower left to ascending right, unlike those of presidents and other democratic figures who favored long inscriptions suggesting intimacy.

  But now the Washington correspondent of a London newspaper had seated himself at the altar, and others gathered around him. In honor of the day’s victory, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was played, though none but the Englishman was certain of the words. This was followed by a powerful rendering of “Old Man River,” the Englishman’s party piece, in which even the lowest notes were accurate. Half the group was now gathered about the piano, proposing songs and singing. The rest accompanied Blaise to the adjoining cardroom.

  Then Harold Griffiths, exuberantly drunk, usurped the Englishman’s place as song leader. To everyone’s delight, because Harold was fun, as Mrs. Sanford often said, even if he was probably a Communist. Harold knew theatre people; he wrote a lively column; and once he had been a poet, though no one that Peter knew had ever read Harold’s poems, or those of anyone else except Ogden Nash.

  Mrs. Sanford joined the singers, leaving the Senator and Diana to Peter. The Senator finally looked at him, as opposed to facing him.

  “What,” began the Senator, and Peter knew already the ritual question, “do you plan to do when you’re…” With that charming hesitance which had won him so much favor, he paused and exchanged the traditional “grown up” for the more flattering “finished with school?”

  “I wish I knew.” Peter looked at Diana, as though for guidance; she nodded encouragingly. “Politics…”

  “Don’t!” Feigning horror, the Senator sat back in the sofa; the white hands clapped together with a sharp retort.

  “But I like it.”

  “Like it but don’t practice it. Of all the lives I can think of, politics is the most…the most…” This time the hesitation was not for effect. The Senator was actually searching for a word. “The most humiliating.” The smile faded. Peter believed him. “You must be accessible to every fool who wants to see you, since the only person who can never escape a bore is the man who needs his vote. Woodrow Wilson used to say that the worst thing about being President was continually being told things you already knew. Well, it is the same for all of us. And then, at the end, your place is taken by someone else and you’re forgotten, and nothing you ever wanted to get done at the beginning seems anywhere near fulfillment. The lucky man is the one who dies during a victory, like Lincoln, though even he had that dream—what was it? Something about a ship in a dark sea, far from shore, lost.”

  “But the ship was moving,” said Diana.

  “Yes, it was moving.” The Senator recalled himself, with a laugh. “Was there ever such a gloomy old politician as me? Pay no attention. I’m just offering a nervous hostage to fortune. You see, today is an extraordinary day for me. I’ve actually managed to do something I thought important. I proved a point.” He stopped, recalling how the conversation had begun. “If you like politics, publishing the Washington Tribune is a good way of being political, without pain.”

  Peter grinned. “I don’t think my father wants me to run the paper just yet.”

  “You should study journalism.” Diana took the conversation seriously in a way neither Peter nor the Senator did.

  “If I ever graduate, I will.” Though Peter was entered at Harvard, he could not bear the thought of New England, cold weather, hard work. Since he was Southern and lazy, he preferred a college closer to home. Unexpectedly his mother agreed with him. Frederika wanted only for her children to fit with ease into a society she thought exactly right the way it was: the world of the estates that ringed the city of Washington, of the Italianate palaces on Massachusetts Avenue, of the small restored houses in the Georgetown slums which had lately become fashionable. For all Frederika’s seeming vagueness, she had a precise sense of what the world was, and she had made it plain to both Peter and Enid that she was prepared to put up with any sort of behavior as long as it was not openly eccentric or disruptive of what the newspapers called Society, a word never used by those so designated. In her way, she was a splendid social tactician. Not idly had she married for money. It was an old Washington joke that Blaise Sanford had paused once too often and that Frederika had filled the silence with a swift “I do.” Peter smiled, recalling this story. He was used to hearing gossip about the family, though he realized that the worst of it would not be said in his presence.

  “Well, you look happy, Peter!” It was Clay Overbury, Burden Day’s administrative assistant. “The Senator been telling you one of his stories?”

  “Nothing so good,” said the Senator. “I was boring him with the news that power is bitter and dominion terrible.”

  “It certainly is for the President tonight.” Clay sat beside Diana on the sofa. Although he was only a senatorial assistant, Clay was often invited to great houses, largely because of the way he looked: tight blond curls, violet eyes, and a short nose somewhat thickened as a result of a recent fall during a Warrenton hunt. An excellent athlete and a good listener, he was expected to go far, if only as the future husband of Diana Day. No one had ever been able to think of anything to say against him except Frederika, who once remarked that Clay was too good-looking, as though to be too good-looking were somehow wrong for a man, like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit or using a cigarette holder like the President. But Peter was well-disposed toward Clay who treated him as a fellow adult.

  “I understand the President’s gone off on his yacht.” Clay smiled at Diana who smiled back.

  “One wonders, will it sink?” said the Senator with a sigh.

  “We can always hope.” Clay mopped his brow though the room was no longer warm. Someone had opened the French windows and cool rain-smelling air had begun to circulate. Peter strained to hear thunder, but there was none. The storm was over and a nightbird sang, its harsh voice audible despite Harold Griffiths’s loud rendering of “Once There Were Four Marys.” Harold knew by heart a thousand songs, and was willing to sing them all in his dramatic if somewhat nasal tenor.

  “But just before he left, he opened a television studio in Washington. Television! He’s wonderful. He says that in a year or two we’ll be able to see the news as well as hear it”

  “He can hardly wait, I’m sure.” The Senator shook his head sadly. “Imagine having to watch him day after day! It’s enough just to hear him, that terrible patronizing voice. Why do I find him so unbearable?”

  “Because he’s the President.” Diana was unexpectedly direct.

  The Senator looked at her with respect “I hope you’re wrong, but you may be right. I have never liked the President, no matter who he was. Familiarity, I suppose. And then we are natural antagonists, Senate and White House.”

  Clay nodded briskly at what was obviously a familiar argument. “Another thing I just heard on the radio…”

  “Heard where?” Peter was suddenly alert.

  “On the radio. The President plans to appoint…”

  “What radio?”

  Clay’s violet eyes went wide with annoyance. “The radio in your father’s library.” Then he told the Senator what he had heard, and Peter was fascinated by the boldness of the lie. There was no radio in the library. There was no radio downstairs. But there was one in the poolhouse. As Peter stared at Clay, a single drop of rainwater detached itself from the golden curls and streaked toward the chin, as close to the ear as though it were indeed perspiration; even random nature contrived to shield Clay who suddenly crossed his legs; Peter wondered if the garters were now properly adjusted.