The taxicab stopped in front of a large house on Connecticut Avenue. Duffel bag slung over one shoulder, he entered the building, the property of a lady who had recently lost a husband who, unknown to her, had lost her fortune. But the lady believed in survival, too, and with Frederika’s help she had converted her house into the District Club, a successful venture thanks to the excellence of the cook, the resolute exclusiveness of the board of directors, and the need for just such a place where the gentry of Washington could give discreet parties or simply have a quiet lunch while charting the course of a love affair or, more likely, threading the maze of government bureaus in pursuit of treasure.

  Peter’s duffel bag was taken by John, a butler long known to him. “You look mighty nice in your uniform, Mr. Peter,” said John, perfunctorily playing the part of family retainer. It seemed as if all the butlers of his generation had gone to the same school where ante-bellum charm was applied to them like spar varnish. But when Peter asked how business was, John showed an unexpectedly commercial side.

  “We turn ‘em away at lunch,” he said with some satisfaction, hiding Peter’s duffel bag in a closet. “Then most every night there’s at least a couple parties. Of course we get a lot of new people.” John betrayed his schooling by the pinched way in which he said “new people.” Although the city’s leaders were entirely the creation of the voters—at least to begin with—there had always been a division between “us” and the new people, who of course might be very nice but only time would decide whether or not “they” would translate to “we.” Time of course was not on the new people’s side. The voters were fickle. Many new people were forced to return to the provinces; while others moved on to New York and the big money. Yet of those rejected by the voters, an astonishing number remained in Washington to practice law, to lobby, to live the good life and eventually become “us,” or “cliff-dwellers” as they were known to the prosperous class which existed to serve them as realtors and insurance salesmen, doctors and morticians.

  “Mrs. Sanford isn’t here yet.” John showed him into the sitting room, empty at this time of day. Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of the dead husband who had squandered the fortune. He looked as if he had enjoyed the going of the money. His widow’s maid, an old German woman, put her head in the door to say how glad she was Mr. Peter was home from the war, and still alive. Peter, who had come no closer to the enemy than Tallahassee, Florida, did his best to look doomed but the poignancy of early death did not really interest anyone in a city concerned almost entirely with shortages. “Madam says we cannot stay in business this winter unless that liebe general who was here last night helps us get more oil!” She disappeared.

  On an English hunt table, magazines were filled with photographs of the Battle of Midway, in which the Japanese fleet had received its “first defeat in three hundred fifty years.” What, Peter wondered idly, had happened in 1592? There were also aerial photographs of Cologne burning, the result of a Royal Air Force raid in which a thousand bombers had done to Cologne what the Luftwaffe had done repeatedly to London. Obviously the Allies would win the war, but when? He saw himself putting pins in a map forever, a sergeant (clerk non-typist) for the rest of his life or certainly youth.

  Happily the longest period of his life was over, and already half-forgotten. Basic training in Georgia, cretinous Southern non-coms, shouting commands in a non-language. Missed the Saturday dance, beard they crowded the floor. Jukeboxes blared in country stores converted to dance halls for the pleasure of a million recruits. Bright-eyed, long-haired girls danced together until they were cut in on. Gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own. Then the furtive tugging and feeling in the warm night. Only a paper moon. Veneral disease films, in which diseased penises dangled from troubled youths as kindly but stern doctors explained the arcane workings of the foreskin and the necessity of prompt post coitum attention to the exposed glans and urethra, all in technicolor. Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. The jolting train rides with shades drawn. The betting: four to one it’s New York. No, L.A. Got to be West Coast. Why? Look, we got our suntans, right? Well, they can’t send us to no place cold. Why not? Laughter. Troops in summer uniform had indeed been sent to winter while those with parkas and thick wool clothing had gone to summer. Situation normal, all fucked up. Peter applied to officers’ candidate school, and was rejected: eyesight not good enough, though adequate to fire an M-1 rifle and remain in the infantry. Queen of battles. But he was found useful in Intelligence. Promoted to sergeant, he put pins in a map of Europe after reading Intelligence reports, based on dispatches from the New York Times. Germans now attacking Sevastopol. Roll out the barrel. Weak coffee in the mess halls. Food bad except for pork chops. He once ate twelve while on twenty-four hour K.P. which, despite the grease and the noise, was preferable to being night fireman and sleeping on a cement floor beside furnaces constantly in need of stoking. Again the small towns. The bars. The girls with too much hair and bold shiny eyes. They’re either too young or too old. And as it must to every American fighting man, clap came to Peter Sanford, and the cure was by no means as disagreeable as the kindly but stern doctor in the film had said it would be.

  “But you’re thin!” With those welcome words, his mother embraced him. “You’re not sick, are you? You look pale as a sheet!”

  “Never felt better,” was the usual response; and accurate, too. The old fullness of breasts and thighs had gone; he was hard to the touch. Waist thirty inches. Height: six feet. Weight: one hundred seventy pounds. He would never be fat again.

  “Lunch, that’s what you need. What I need! I’ve been shopping. It’s hell with all this rationing. And apparently we’ve lost all those rubber places in Asia. Blaise is furious.”

  They went into the garden where the lunchers sat beneath trees whose leaves made a green dappling light on white tablecloths. He recognized perhaps a dozen of “us”; the rest were “them,” for the most part in uniform.

  While Peter ate rolls and butter, Frederika waved to friends and received the homage of various generals and admirals, introducing each to “my enormous son,” and Peter felt a certain pride in being, if only through family, one up on the world of military rank in which he was so obviously one down.

  “Your father’s in Watch Hill this week. I told him he could open up the house by himself because I was not about to leave town with you coming home.” She beamed at him; he beamed back at her. They were fond of one another. Unfortunately, they had nothing much to talk about. Since neither had ever given the other serious cause for distress, true intimacy had not occurred, nor was it apt to in a family where the normal passions of childhood had been visited not on parents but upon servants. It was Peter’s theory that Blaise’s interest in Enid began only when she married Clay. Since then father was exquisitely aware of daughter, and as they sparred, each waited hopefully for that sudden opening through which familial love might find its ultimate expression, with a knockout.

  The first course arrived: avocado containing crab meat. The crab was good but there were too many tiny membranes that got caught between his teeth. The Russian dressing was neither too bland nor again too peppery.

  “You have no idea the wires your father pulled to get you to the War Department.” Frederika took it for granted that influence was a thing to be used quite openly.

  “I can imagine,” said Peter who chose not to imagine Blaise at work to make his life more comfortable.

  “I think he tried for a commission, too.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “I thought so.” She was direct. “But I think it irritates him, your being only a soldier, a sergeant.”

  “But I like it.” Peter did enjoy being merely a sergeant, particularly now that he would not have to live in barracks. More rank would have meant more involvement in a war that he refused to acknowledge. He had shut it out. And though he was bored working in an office, he did not in the least crave action. For one thing, he was certain that he would be killed. This set him apart from most of his contemporaries, who seemed quite unable to visualize their own deaths. But he could imagine his altogether too vividly, and so chose life. Let others do their duty.

  “Clay’s coming home on leave. He’s just been promoted to…” She interrupted herself. “What…what are we going to do with Enid?”

  Peter was flattered to be included at last in the ranks of grown-ups who must always do something about someone.

  “You must talk to her!” Frederika acted as if she had thought of a marvelous solution. “Yes! She listens to you. She never listens to me and as for Blaise, they hardly speak.” She gasped. “My God, it’s Mrs. Bloch!” Peter watched with amusement as Irene Bloch crossed the garden, head held high; she was in enemy territory, and she knew it.

  “She’s everywhere, that woman!” Frederika was genuinely anguished. “One of the reasons we started this club was to keep her out.”

  Irene Bloch joined a table of generals and their ladies.

  “That seems a frivolous reason for starting a club.” Peter found his mother’s passion touching.

  “Also,” Frederika added, for no reason, “she’s having an affair with Burden Day.”

  “I don’t believe it! He’s old.”

  “Sixty is not that old.” Frederika’s hand flew to her throat to hide the years. “As you’ll find out for yourself.” She spoke again of Enid, while Peter ate his avocado and found it stringy. But the main course was splendid: breast of chicken folded to make a cutlet. As his fork speared the browned surface, hot butter spurted from the interior.

  Apparently Enid was seeing too much of a Naval officer. She had not answered any of Clay’s letters. Clay was now willing to divorce her but she refused to discuss the matter with anyone.

  “Is she drinking?”

  Frederika, unexpectedly, went on the defensive, a mother prepared to commit perjury. “What do you mean, drinking? Of course she drinks, like everyone else.”

  “Well, she seemed to be doing more than her share last winter.”

  “Oh, everyone does, now and then. It’s the…tension,” she said vaguely as Lucy Shattuck kissed her cheek and Peter rose, still chewing, and Lucy said, “Frederika, isn’t this one a little young for you? Unless it’s Peter. My God, it is! And I’d hoped your mother had become a Victory Girl, doing her bit for our boys!”

  Of the tough Washington ladies, the sardonic Lucy was the one who most amused Peter. Her husband was one of the leaders of the Republican Party, a fund raiser and optimist. Lucy was a pessimist. “We are doomed this year, as usual.”

  “That awful Roosevelt.” Frederika’s response was automatic.

  “I think he’s immortal. Anyway, that’s what I tell Lawrence: you may just as well face the fact that we are doomed to a century of dreary social workers, like Harry Hopkins. And speaking of darling dreary Harry, did you hear what happened last weekend at Middleburg?” She told them, eyes glistening. History is gossip, thought Peter sagely, but the trick was in determining which gossip is history.

  As soon as Lucy paused for breath, Frederika indicated Mrs. Bloch. “She’s here.”

  “Well, so she is. Big as life and twice as rich. I’ve ordered Lawrence to be nice to her. We must wring the money out of her, for the party.”

  “Only Burden Day gets her money, and the Democrats.”

  “Old goat,” said Lucy Shattuck. “He’s going to have a primary fight, by the way. They say Roosevelt’s backing someone against him and…”

  “So vindictive!? Frederika checked in.

  “Absolutely savage, if you disagree with him. The knife is always out, isn’t it?” Lucy looked to Peter for comment, causing him reluctantly to put down a spoon containing homemade vanilla ice cream with a dense chocolate sauce, and declare, “He treats others as he fears they would treat him, given half a chance.” Then the spoon made it to safe harbor.

  “It’s a shame,” said Lucy Shattuck narrowly, “that my Elizabeth is so young.” She turned to Frederika. “I want her to marry a very great deal of money.” She patted Peter’s hand warmly. “You’re just what we have in mind.”

  Frederika frowned as she always did at the mention of money. “Peter’s much too young…”

  “Elizabeth is younger, only fifteen.” Lucy got to her feet. “You’ll be at Enid’s party tomorrow night, won’t you? It’s only her father who snubs her, isn’t it?”

  Peter paid Lucy Shattuck the tribute of putting down his spoon. She was sharp, no doubt of that.

  “Yes, of course,” said Frederika brightly, and it was plain to Lucy Shattuck as well as to Peter that she knew nothing of her daughter’s party. “It’s for Harold Griffiths,” said Lucy. “He’s going to the Pacific…to be a war correspondent.”

  “I know.” For once Frederika came in too late; her timing deranged by the news. In any case, Lucy Shattuck was gone.

  Frederika turned to Peter. “It’s up to you,” she said, sending him into battle, shield and all. “You must talk sense to Enid.”

  * * *

  —

  But Enid was not about to be talked sense to. For one thing, she was not drinking. For another, she was happy. She embraced him warmly. “You’ve lost weight! And about time!” Then she showed him about her new house, small but comfortably furnished. She had a gift for decoration which she often talked about commercializing. It had always been her dream to have a shop with a handful of devoted employees and a large ledger in which she kept invoices and outvoices or whatever one keeps in ledgers. According to Harold Griffiths, “While everyone else tries to forget their origins in trade, Enid is atavistic. She wants to go back to the family origins and keep a shop, to know that when the cash register rings it is not for every man but for herself.”

  “It is nice,” she said, sitting on a sofa beneath a bay window which looked out on a walled garden. “House and Garden is coming to take pictures this week which ought to be good for business. I’m quite serious about working. I’ve even got a card.” The card rested on a coffee table which had once been a nineteenth-century sled. “Enid Sanford, Interiors.”

  “What happened to your last name?”

  Enid frowned. “I’m not using it. That’s all over. I’ve taken up painting again, too.”

  “Clay’s coming home on leave. He wrote Mother.”

  Enid sipped Coca-Cola. “I’m going to divorce him.”

  “All because of what he did with that one girl, the South American?”

  “But that was nothing! Since then, the things I’ve heard! You know, people never tell you a damned thing until something happens and then they never stop telling you. Anyway, we weren’t right for one another, not really. He tried to make up just before he went into the Army and I said that I would only if he gave me his solemn promise that he would never put me in that sort of position again. Well, he wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t promise?” Peter was skeptical. The man always promised.

  “Oh, let’s not talk about it. Stay for dinner. A few friends. You don’t know them. Washington’s really changed. It’s full of new people who are fun.”

  The people were indeed new to Peter, if not fun. An Army Air Force brigadier general and his wife, a Navy captain (married but with a girl friend), and Joe Bailey, a divorced Navy captain, who was Enid’s lover. They all drank too much, except Peter, who drank beer, and Enid, who drank Coca-Cola. The conversation, which had been as banal as Peter had anticipated, just before midnight suddenly turned fantastic.

  “Easiest thing in the world.” The Air Force general’s naturally ponderous manner had become leaden with drink, while his wife, though she never spoke, from time to time would punctuate his slow discourse with occasional shrill cries, whether of appreciation or despair Peter could not determine. “And you wouldn’t need more than maybe one regiment of M.P.s.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d use Marines,” said Joe Bailey. “They’re tough and they wouldn’t ask questions.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right. We’ll put you in charge of that phase. Send in the Leathernecks!” The general’s wife shrieked briefly into her bourbon. The other couple looked pleased.

  Enid said, “But that’s only for the White House. What about the rest of the country?”

  “That’s the simplest part. You see, we have our chain of command,” said her lover. “Everyone’s trained to take orders from the echelon above, no questions asked. So once we nail down the White House and the Pentagon…”

  “That’s where we’ll need your second regiment,” said the Air Force general. “We make our move on a Sunday. And while we’re putting the Chiefs of Staff under house arrest, you’ll be locking up the President. Then on Monday, bright and early, we hold our press conference at the White House and explain what we’ve done, and win the war.”

  “What have you done?” Peter wondered if he himself might not be mad.

  “Saved the country,” said the general quietly. “From your New Deal Commies.”

  “It’s up to us!” Enid was splendid. “There’s no one else.”

  Joe Bailey nodded. “You see, Peter, the point is,” he swished whisky and ice with a flourish, “the Japanese are the real enemy, not the Germans. Fact, you might even say we’re on the same side as the Germans because they’re against the Commies and so are we, excepting for maybe a handful of New Dealers.”

  “Who will have to go.” His Naval colleague looked stern.

  “Tell him about the message, the one your friend in Intelligence got from Switzerland!” Peter had never seen Enid quite so exuberant. He wondered if it was love or simply the prospect of treason.

  “If we help Hitler in Russia, he’ll help us with the Japanese. And in a proper geopolitical division of the world, we get Asia and he’ll keep Europe, and everybody’s happy.”