“I had the impression that she…that Enid was somewhat in her cups.”

  “I can remember when women never drank in public.” Burden pursued a tangent, a bad habit, he knew, a sure sign of age.

  “I never drink.” A quick careful smile kept smugness to a minimum.

  Burden continued to recall early days in Washington. “Before the war, there was no such thing as the cocktail party. There were tea parties, and that was it. Some of the grand houses served wine, of course, and after dinner the men might drink but not the women. Enid was drunk, you say?”

  “I don’t know her well enough really to say but I think she was. There had obviously been some sort of trouble between her and Clay.” She looked at him shrewdly, knowing that he knew.

  “Trouble?” Native caution exerted itself, even with her.

  “I’ve heard it said—you know how people will say anything—that Clay has been involved with a woman who’s married, a South American.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” Burden wondered if Clay might not be, unexpectedly, a fool. No woman was worth the loss of a vote, much less a career.

  “I was told that after I left Laurel House there was a dreadful scene and that Blaise struck Enid in front of everyone.”

  “Struck her? Oh, I doubt that!” Blaise was hot-tempered but he was also daughter-dazzled, like himself. Burden tried not to think of Billy Thorne; his blood pressure was already too high.

  “But he did. People who were there saw it happen.”

  “People often exaggerate. What did Enid do?”

  “She left with Clay. Most upsetting.”

  “I should think so.” Suddenly exuberant, he put his arm around her, kissed lips, neck. She returned his embrace with so much fervor that a hairpin came loose in the sweep of hair that covered her right ear. But, uncannily, she knew it was loose and fixed it with one hand while she pushed the tea table away with the other.

  Burden leaped to his feet, muscles unexpectedly supple. Sex was rejuvenating. Bernarr Macfadden was right. He was light-headed with desire. “I can’t wait,” he said.

  Her face went suddenly pale. As he reached out to take her, her eyes grew round with horror. She stepped back, as though in the presence of an executioner.

  “What’s wrong, Irene?” His own voice sounded faint and far away. What was wrong? he asked himself as his face turned to ice and he fell slowly, leisurely toward the floor, catching at the cloth of the tea table on the way down and pulling the plates and saucers after him. For a long moment he lay at the bottom of a pit, with the not uncomfortable sensation that he was, literally, floating away on a vast tide. From far above him the white face shone and he heard a voice through the noise of the blood’s surf. “Quick! It’s the Senator. Call a doctor! He’s fainted!” Perfectly at ease and not in the least alarmed, Burden floated away. If this was death, he thought languidly, it was easy.

  FOUR

  I

  Through bare winter trees, a white sun. The bridle path was thick with decaying leaves, slick and dangerous, hiding rocks. Peter’s horse suddenly stumbled, hoof striking stone.

  “Be careful!” said Diana, irritating him.

  “What do you mean, be careful?”

  “Well, there are rocks,” she said diffidently.

  “Nothing to be done about them. We break our neck or we don’t.”

  They had come to a stream, a tributary of Rock Creek. Carefully the horses forded the shallow water. Breathing fast, thighs holding tight, Peter waited for the slip and sprawl of the horse and the breaking of his skull. But the horse was a placid gelding not in the least prone to desperate adventures. Safely they reached the far side of the ford where picnic tables, set permanently in a grove, provided a sad prospect on a December day.

  Relieved at the successful fording, Peter was suddenly happy. “What a good idea, to go riding.”

  “I love it. Especially in the park, this time of year. No people.” Diana had recently acquired an aversion to people in crowds, noncontagious agoraphobia, she would say, shying away from strangers.

  “And a sunny day. We must be near your father’s house.”

  She pointed toward an iron-colored hill, dense with brown trees. “Just there, on the top. How Father loves that house! He built it himself, you know. Before the crash.”

  “How is he feeling?” Peter acknowledged the existence of no house but Laurel House.

  “Physically, he’s all right. Whatever it was the stroke did to him went away.”

  “What’s wrong, otherwise?”

  She frowned. “The world, I suppose. He doesn’t much like it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Hardly. But I’m in it. I don’t think he believes that he is, anymore.”

  “I think my father’s running him for President in ’44.”

  “That’s over.” She was emphatic.

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Times change.” She was ruthless. “He no longer matters to people now.” She was also loving. “He is very good, you know. And as much as I disagree with his politics, his instincts are the right ones.”

  “Don’t tell Billy that.”

  “Billy.” She said her husband’s name neutrally. Her cheeks glowed in the cool air. Mounted, in jodhpurs, Diana looked uncommonly healthy and except for Enid he enjoyed her company more than that of anyone else he knew. For one thing, they were entirely used to one another; for another, the fact that they had never been lovers made being together pleasantly potential.

  “Does Billy like his job?” asked Peter, hoping she would say no.

  “Oh, yes.” She spoke too quickly. “We’re so grateful to your father.” After a year’s unemployment, Billy Thorne had gone to work on the Tribune as a rewrite man. At almost the same time Peter, a bachelor of arts, had gone to work in the advertising department, where he was given the task of selling space, an activity he found as empty as it sounded. But since he had no alternative in view and it was not considered right to do nothing, he sold space and lived on his income. Ordinarily, he would have gone to Europe. But there was no longer a Europe to go to. Hitler had absorbed most of it. Only the Iberian Peninsula was unoccupied and that was to be invaded once Russia surrendered. Since the German Army was only thirty miles from Moscow, the absolute end of Europe was near. Like so many of the American magnates, Peter’s father vacillated between despair at Hitler’s continuing success and terror that Hitler might fail in Russia.

  “Does Billy seem to like what he’s doing at the paper?”

  Peter told her, correctly, that he seldom saw Billy, “but everyone thinks he’s capable.”

  “Oh, he is.”

  “And unbearable.”

  “Oh, well, there’s that of course.” Diana sounded more weary than hurt. Some women, Peter had noticed, reveled in having a husband no one likes. But not Diana. She had wanted to be the wife of the editor of The American Idea, and settling for so much less had not increased her love for a difficult man.

  As they rode across the main road, they saw two cars stopped; a radio blared in one, while the occupants of the other gathered about and listened. Peter’s horse shied at the noise. Angrily Peter spurred him forward.

  Not until they returned to the rental stable at three o’clock and gave their horses to the groom did they learn that the Japanese had bombed the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands.

  “We’re in the war now!” Diana’s first response was jubilant. Like Billy and all the New Dealers, she was eager for the United States to join the war.

  “Yes, we’re in the war now,” Peter repeated, gauging his own response as best he could. First there was shock. It was inconceivable that a small clever country like Japan, known only for its manufacture of small clever toys that fell apart, would strike at God’s country, which had given birth to the automobile, the skyscraper, Boulder Dam, Jefferson’s serpentine wall at Charlottesville, cellophane and the hamburgers Diana and he had bought for lunch (advertised as “Not the best but better than the rest”). All this could not fail. Yet suddenly he saw Japanese soldiers among the California orange groves and Nazi troops along the Potomac. The prospect of national defeat was infinitely thrilling. In the hills of the Shenandoah Valley, he would organize a guerrilla force in order to harass the mechanized Nazi convoys as they proceeded from Washington to Norfolk and the new German Sea. But then he saw himself dead among the Blue Ridge Mountains, and that pleased him not at all. Hopefully he added a musical score to the scene and a grave narrator’s voice: “Heroism took on a new meaning when Peter Sanford, alone, unaided, stormed an enemy position…” A quick cut to himself armed with rifle, hand grenade, gas mask…no, the gas mask covered his face. He tore it off.

  “Let’s go see Father.” Diana was businesslike. Peter decided that if anyone could give a new meaning to heroism, it would be she.

  The Senator and Kitty were staring furiously at the radio in the upstairs study.

  “It can’t be true!” said Diana.

  “I’m afraid it is.” The Senator looked up, very pale. “Hello, Peter.”

  “Would you like some coffee?” asked Kitty. “Did you two have a proper lunch? I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you ate something greasy, from a store.”

  “Oh, Mother, do shut up, please!” Peter and Diana sat down in front of the radio.

  Kitty, however, was not yet finished. “Children eat so stupidly nowadays. And just look at them! Peter’s fat as a pig.”

  Through the world crisis, Peter experienced a sudden flash of rage. He knew, as did everyone, of Kitty’s strange habit but that did not make her pronouncements any the less wounding. He was overweight and he hated it but food was such a pleasure, and since girls seemed to find him no less attractive, he continued to eat as much as he liked, distressed only on those rare occasions when he looked in the mirror and observed the rounded belly and the hard but unmistakably overdeveloped breasts. Yet he had gone riding nearly every Sunday this winter and in the spring he would play tennis regularly. No one could say that he was not doing his best to keep in trim.

  “…President has scheduled a meeting of the Cabinet for this evening, as well as a bipartisan meeting of Congressional leaders.”

  “I’d better go down to the Hill,” said Burden, standing up. “They’ll want me at the meeting.”

  “…to address a joint session of Congress some time tomorrow. The President is expected to ask for a declaration of war.”

  “And he’ll get it. The thing he’s always wanted.” The Senator positively snarled at the thought of that delinquent President who had so cunningly involved his country in a war whose end was in no way calculable.

  “Who would have thought it!” The news had finally got to Kitty and, briefly, she was concerned with something outside the family round.

  The Senator switched off the radio and got to his feet. “I’ll be at the Senate Office Building.” He kissed Kitty.

  “Shall I come?”

  This was obviously unexpected, and the Senator appeared to be touched as well as surprised. “No, dear. Thank you.”

  “But suppose they bomb Washington?” Kitty looked faintly troubled. “They could, couldn’t they?”

  “Of course not.” Peter answered without thinking. He turned to the Senator. “I mean it’s not possible, is it?”

  “Depends on the position of their carriers and the risks they’re willing to take. But it would seem to me that if they could do what they’ve done to our largest naval base, they can probably do pretty much what they please to undefended cities. You see,” he gave the smallest of smiles, “we are not ready. For all this talk…and hope…of war, we have nothing to fight with. As we used to say on the Chautauqua Circuit, the President has reaped the whirlwind.”

  On this high note, the Senator departed. Unable to compete with such drama, Peter told Diana that he would take her home. Solemn at the thought of history being made, they left the house, refusing Kitty’s offer of coffee and upside-down cake. For Peter, this refusal of pastry was to be the beginning of a new and austere time in his life; he would replace sloth and greed with vigor and abstinence, and so write a chapter in heroism.

  II

  At the Senate Office Building there were a number of Senators and aides. No one quite knew why he was there. After all, war or no war, it was Sunday and there was nothing anyone could do but sit by the radio and wait for the news. But like soldiers assigned to some redoubt that must not fall, certain Senators converged upon Capitol Hill and took up positions, speculating darkly on the fate of a nation so rudely and apparently so successfully challenged.

  In response to a journalist in the downstairs corridor, Burden said, “Naturally we are all behind the President. This Sunday there are no isolationists or internationalists. Only…Americans.” The small hairs at the back of his neck rose. He had thrilled himself. It was a superb if dangerous moment for all of them.

  He was stopped by a familiar figure just opposite the door to his office. “Hello, Senator.”

  “Oh, hello!” He had forgotten the old man’s name but he did recall that thirty years earlier he had been a power in the Senate and one of the most awesomely impressive men Burden had ever known. Now, frail and diffident, the old man haunted the Capitol, as though searching for his early self. Like all former Senators, he was allowed the courtesy of the floor and often when the Chamber was nearly empty, he would sit very straight at his old desk, listening solemnly to a dull speech. To Burden’s chagrin he still could not recall the other’s name, and so he compromised by calling him “Senator,” that sonorous title each would carry, in office or out, to the grave.

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” began the old man.

  “Come in, Senator. Happy to see you.” Burden, wanting company, any company, led the grateful ghost into the inner office.

  “Now whose office was this?” The old man pondered, white brows drawn together, making deep grooves in the pale forehead. Burden was at the telephone, ringing Clay.

  “Could it have been Mr. Vardaman, of Mississippi? Yes, I think so. Yes, I’m sure it was his office.” He chuckled. “Wore his hair long, all the way to the shoulders, he did. A fine looking man, if you didn’t object to the long hair.” The old man sank slowly into one of the leather armchairs. He wore the frock coat and striped trousers of an earlier time; on the right lapel, a fragment of dried egg resembled the rosette of a foreign order.

  Clay was not at his room in the Wardman Park Hotel. Burden debated whether or not he should telephone Enid. Deciding not to, he telephoned Blaise.

  “Well, the bastard’s done it! He got us in the war.” Blaise’s voice sounded thick as though he had been drinking. “I’m looking at the wire now. We’ve lost the whole Pacific Fleet. There’s nothing between Japan and Los Angeles. Nothing! Not a boat, not a gun. Oh, he’s a military genius!” Burden asked for other news, alarm growing. Apparently the Japanese were attacking the Philippines, Malaya, Guam, Wake Island and Hong Kong and neither the British nor the Americans seemed able to resist. “We’ve lost the Pacific. We’ll be lucky if we can hold the line at the Rockies. I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up. Burden’s head swam. This could not be true. Then Clay rang to say that he would be right over.

  “Very different from 1917,” said the old man placidly. “Of course, Mr. Wilson had been conniving for a war too, just like Mr. Roosevelt. Remember the Sunrise Conference or was that before you came here? No, you were here then. Yes, I remember distinctly. That fellow will go far, I said to Senator Lodge, and I’m happy to say I was right. You’ve certainly stayed the course, and kept the faith.”

  While Burden tried to telephone the majority leader, the old man talked of the First War and Mr. Wilson’s perfidy, as though it were yesterday: then he spoke of the present and how times had changed. “Look at the Senate now and just think what it was then! Aldrich, Jim Reed, the first LaFollette. We had orators then. True debate.” The old voice grew suddenly firm, becoming what it must have been in those halcyon days before the public address system when a politician’s unaided voice had to be able to fill the largest hall like sounding brass. The majority leader’s line was busy.

  The door to the inner office opened and Jesse Momberger looked in. “Thought you’d be here. I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  “No,” said the old man, aware that the moment had come for ghosts to be exorcised. He rose and took Burden’s hand in his papery one. “You must come see us soon, Senator. We’re at the Congressional Arms, the wife and I. It will be like old times, when we used to discuss monetary reform. Remember? Only now I’ve really got the problem licked. I’ve had the time, you see, to think it through. No more flat money, no paper. Only copper and platinum coinage. That’s the key to sound finance.” Gracefully, he left the living to their turmoil.

  “There but for the grace of God,” said Momberger, “go I. Or you.”

  Burden shook his head. “When I leave this place, I’ll never come back. Too painful.”

  “They all say that, and they all come back. If there’s a more useless article than a defeated U.S. Senator, I’ve yet to see it on display. You got the call yet?”

  Burden shook his head. “I’ve been trying to get through to the majority leader. All the lines are busy.”

  “Nothin’ from the White House?”