But Clay had been chilled by the child’s response. Unreasonably, he could not bear to lose the idea of her even though the fact of her moved him not at all. He was conscious that it was my daughter that mattered, not her father, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  Blaise believed that the war would last at least another year. Clay said that he thought that the worst was still ahead. “With the Germans defeated, the Japs will only fight harder.”

  The kamikaze plane circled the ship. Then, as in a nightmare, the plane came at them. For an instant, Clay saw the young pilot, mouth wide, shouting or screaming, praying or singing, he could not tell. Then the explosion rocked the ship and he was thrown against a bulkhead. But he had lived; the ship had not sunk; the kamikaze pilot had died in vain, and the invasion of Luzon proceeded according to plan.

  “We’re so stupid.” Blaise denounced the late President’s policy of “unconditional surrender,” which had so effectively kept the German Army from capitulating while strengthening the fanatic element in Japan. “Yet he thought of himself as a superb international statesman, like Wilson. Well, he was right. He was every bit as disastrous as Wilson.”

  “But he did get his League of Nations.” Since the war began, Clay had come to admire the elegant, ravaged old President who continued to pursue, even as he was dying, the high business of reassembling the fragments of broken empires into a new pattern with himself at center, proud creator of the new imperium. Now, though he was gone, the work remained. The United States was master of the earth. No England, no France, no Germany, no Japan (once the dying was done) left to dispute the Republic’s will; only the mysterious Soviet would survive to act as other balance to the scale of power. Clay thought he understood the shape of this new world. In any case, he did not regret the passing of the old America, unlike Burden, who truly believed his own rhetoric and was moved by his own sentimentality. Burden wanted to bring to all of those without the law that sense of common dignity which was, he believed, America’s peculiar gift to the world. But to Clay there was no dignity of any kind in the race of man, nor was the United States anything more than just another power whose turn at empire had come, and in that empire he meant to wield power entirely for its own sake. In this he resembled not Burden, the flawed idealist, but the old President who had prevailed by mingling cant with shrewdness in such a way as to inspire his followers and confuse his enemies none of whom quite realized what he was up to until, by dying, it was suddenly plain to all but the totally deluded that the author of the Four Freedoms had managed by force of arms and sly maneuvering to transform an isolationist republic into what no doubt would be the last empire on earth. Clay thought him great.

  “I’m afraid Burden didn’t play his cards too well,” remarked Blaise. It was well known that Burden had expected to be part of the American delegation to the first United Nations meeting at San Francisco. But just before he died, the old President had rejected him, while any hope of being appointed by the new President was dashed by “that damned thing Burden said the day the President died, did you hear about it? He called Truman a first-rate second-rate man.” Blaise chuckled. “Announced it to everybody in the Senate cloakroom. Needless to say little Harry heard it before nightfall and that was the end of Burden.”

  Blaise puffed on his cigar. Smoke wreathed the lamp, slowing the death dance of insects. Clay studied Blaise, trying to divine his mood. One had to proceed carefully with him, assuming nothing, wait for the weather report to be verified before venturing out: hail had been known to fall on the clearest day.

  Blaise looked at him through cigar smoke, as though counting ribs against some inventory. Protectively, Clay pulled the sheet high on his chest. Suddenly Blaise pulled a magazine out from under a stack on the night table. It was The American Idea. He turned to Clay. “What do you think?”

  “Lively.” Clay was neutral, waiting.

  “ Communist! The whole lot of them. Like that Aeneas Duncan. I had him checked. But…” Blaise let the magazine drop to the floor. “I’m all for it.”

  Policy was now established. Clay could respond. He did. “Wonderful for someone like Peter…to have something to do…that’s different.” Clay made the expected noises.

  “He’s clever. Watch out for him.”

  Clay was taken aback. “Why?”

  “A hunch. That’s all.”

  “Enid?”

  “Yes. He’ll take her side no matter what.”

  “But what side is there to take? I go. She stays as she is.”

  Blaise was oblique. “Met a fellow from New York, very brainy. Couldn’t have been more impressed with Peter’s magazine, said it was better than The New Republic. He meant that as a compliment.”

  “Peter’s clever,” Clay repeated. That was the now-agreed-upon characterization for his soon to be lost brother-in-law.

  “Funny. I thought he’d be just another playboy and I was ready for that. Wouldn’t have minded at all, if he did it in style. Sometimes I wish I had stuck to horses and women and having a good time. Naturally I’d never tell him that. You can’t. Anyway, she put a stop to it. She launched him.”

  “Diana?”

  Blaise nodded. “Your old girl friend.” He brushed aside smoke with a thick paw to get a closer look at Clay, who realized how vulnerable he must look, stretched out like a victim awaiting sacrifice, the golden chest ready for the stone knife’s cut and the baring of the living heart, to be torn from the body as offering to the sun. “She’s clever,” said Clay, unhappily aware of the inane repetition.

  “Whatever she is, she’s after my son and I suppose he could do worse. She did worse. That one-legged bastard. Why didn’t you marry her?” The stone knife tapped at a rib.

  “I told you that day at the pool. Enid.”

  “You really liked Enid? Or me?”

  “Meaning your money?”

  “Is that me?”

  Clay sat up straight (the victim struggled); the sheet fell to his waist (the victim struck back at the executioner). “That’s what you said that day, not what I said, when you offered me money to get lost.”

  “Just a test.”

  Clay had no choice but to pretend to believe Blaise. As he cajoled, sweating nervously, he found it harder and harder to breathe in the close room, blue with cigar smoke and full of the cloying odor of night-blooming jasmine.

  “You’re right.” Blaise nodded in response to whatever it was Clay had said, his gaze shifting thoughtfully to the victim’s pubic hair, which in the heat of the struggle had come into view. Clay pulled the damp sheet over himself. Blaise came to the point. “Divorce is political suicide in that state of yours. Not to mention later.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “If you agree I can have her declared insane and committed to an institution for life.”

  A rapid series of images raced through Clay’s mind. Enid dressed for a garden party, with a ladder in one stocking. Enid holding out bare arms which smelled of lemon. Enid hobbling on one high heel; the other broken. Enid among twisted sheets that smelled of love and cigarette ashes. Enid drunk and shouting, “Let’s face it!” Well, now they were about to face it, all of them. Blaise waited for Clay to answer but Clay deliberately chose not to. The other must take all responsibility.

  Blaise sounded uneasy when at last he broke the silence. “I know it’s drastic. But she’s hopeless. She really is. I sent her to a psychiatrist last spring. Did she tell you? Well, she went to him half a dozen times, then stopped. He gave what’s wrong with her some name, of course. And he’s willing to see to it that she is…well, put away. There’s a place not far from here, in Maryland, where he says they’ve had good luck with her kind of case.” At least a half million dollars, Clay decided, carefully disguised as a new annex to a hospital; although a straightforward cash payment could not be ruled out. Blaise was direct in these matters.

  Clay prolonged the next silence until he had the satisfaction of seeing Blaise’s hand tremble as he stamped out the unraveled stub of a now-dead cigar. Then Clay asked, “Committed for life?”

  Blaise nodded.

  “But aren’t there review boards? Wouldn’t they let her out eventually? After all when she doesn’t drink, she’s perfectly normal.”

  “That’s the point. She’s not. He says she’s not.”

  “One doctor’s opinion?”

  Blaise shifted uneasily. “Others will be called in.”

  “And concur?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been arranged?”

  “Yes. For her sake.”

  “And ours?”

  “Clay, she is sick. You can’t deny that. And if she isn’t put away, she’ll only suffer, kill herself…you know what she’s like.”

  “And so with a wife declared insane…”

  “We won’t say she’s insane. Just that she needs help.”

  “I could never remarry, could I?”

  Blaise’s response was swift. “Do you want to? Is there somebody?”

  “No, I meant in theory.”

  “No, you couldn’t. Ideal situation, isn’t it? Married but single. Free but safe. Well?”

  Now Clay was master and Blaise must learn to bear the unfamiliar chains of slavery. Clay looked at Blaise, saw the black eyes large with fear. Power at last, thought Clay; and he continued to stare until the older man’s eyes watered and he looked away.

  “All right,” said Clay.

  They agreed to act immediately. Papers would be drawn, medical testimony sought. “Should be all over in a week or two. Poor girl,” added Blaise, not without feeling, Clay noted, but also not without the self-consciousness of a man professing to feel something he knew others would think eminently natural.

  “Yes. Poor girl.” Clay coolly mocked him. The master dismissed servant: “Tired…need sleep…busy day.” To which: “Yes, of course…damned sorry…busy day.”

  Blaise left, and Clay turned out the light. For a long time he lay awake in the hot darkness of the room, aware that at last everything was possible. Enid had lost. Yet he himself was perfectly in the clear, for Blaise not he had dealt the final blow.

  IV

  On the eighth of May, Germany surrendered and Blaise celebrated as though he were the victorious leader of the nation, not the small colorless President who had never once set foot in Laurel House nor was apt to, despite the fact that fate had placed him so ludicrously on high.

  “No one will be at the White House today,” exclaimed Elizabeth Watress, looking across the lawn at the pavilion put up especially for Blaise’s “open house.” “They are all here, including that gruesome Mrs. Bloch.”

  Indeed they were all present, converging upon the tent which contained a bar, Blaise, Frederika and the military hierarchy whose day it was, since indirectly (very indirectly, thought Peter sourly) they were responsible for the victory.

  “Oh, look! There he is. I must meet him. Oh, please!” Elizabeth turned to Peter, arms extended in appeal. Invariably when they went out together, there was some celebrity she “must” meet. “What will you do with him once you’ve said hello?” Peter teased her. “Ask for his autograph?”

  “I shall look into his eyes and think: this man is a hero, an authentic hero.”

  “But then what will you do?”

  “You are cynical!” She gave him her slow handsome smile. Then her voice dropped. “Doesn’t anybody impress you?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “It’s living here that’s done it, surrounded by all this.” She looked out across the Sanford lawn, her hunger obvious.

  “Very early,” Peter began, aware too late of the pedantry in his voice but unable now to alter the emerging sentence, “I saw the difference between what these people seem and what they are, which is…”

  “…is often fabulous.” She broke his stately line impatiently.

  “What is fabulous?” With relief, he became Socratic inquisitor.

  But Elizabeth preferred direct statement. “What you’re saying is that they are all phony, which isn’t true.”

  “No more phony than the rest of us, I agree. But their scale is so much larger.”

  “But that’s what makes them marvelous. Anyway, I admit when I’m impressed while somebody like you…”

  “…a true phony denies the shiver of excitement he experiences when he shakes the horny hand of a man who was killing Japs a few weeks ago.”

  “I don’t believe you’re that cynical. I can’t believe it.”

  “But I am. People who profess virtues do not necessarily lack them.”

  “That’s hardly a virtue…There he is!” She gasped as Clay appeared on the terrace. “Stop him!”

  Peter called to Clay. He joined them, his rows of ribbons diminishing Peter, who, for lack of other clothes, still wore his uniform even though he was soon to be separated from the service, on the valid ground that with one of the two wars ended, there was no need at all for him or for any of the other dissidents to continue at the Pentagon, their wastebaskets regularly studied by intelligence officers, eager to crack the code in which Aeneas’s poems were composed.

  Elizabeth was cool. Clay was warm. Each appeared as his own opposite, which was as it should be. Elizabeth spoke not at all of heroism. Instead she told in a hushed voice of her love for Enid and asked where she was today. Peter wondered how Clay would handle this. Straightforward: “She’s been a bit under the weather lately. She’s at a clinic now, having some tests.”

  “Poor Enid. I’d love to see her.”

  “Easy to arrange. I’m sure she’d like to see you.” Clay turned to Peter and each inquired about the other’s military status. Clay would leave the Army as soon as he had completed a bond-selling tour of the country.

  “Will the tour include your home state?”

  Clay was unabashed. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I end the tour in the State Capitol, in the rotunda, receiving a citation from the governor.”

  “You are shameless.” Peter ventured humor.

  “Not entirely.” Clay maintained his equable smile.

  “How wonderful.” From Elizabeth, a sigh.

  “What?” Clay had not yet discovered how to listen to Elizabeth. Those phrases others spoke loudly, she tended to whisper. But she never repeated; she simply went on. “There’s to be a book about you, I read…”

  “Not a book really, a long piece in a magazine. It’s pretty dull. But useful.” Peter admired Clay’s directness. He seemed genuinely unimpressed with himself, as he realized that the sort of publicity he was getting—though necessary to a political career—was in itself nonsense. That he was actually a hero and deserving of praise never seemed to occur to him.

  “Book…propaganda…whatever, it’s so rare to meet anyone definite, who actually exists.” Peter listened with some awe to an Elizabeth he did not know. “Who knows just what he wants.” In a rush she had become eloquent. This was Clay’s moment, no doubt of that, and Peter could think of no way to spoil it, short of announcing to everyone, “My father and my brother-in-law want to commit my sister, who is not mad, just messy. She drinks too much and she makes scenes but she should not be put away.”

  But then Peter had already made that speech to his father, shortly after Enid had told him, hysterical but sober, what they planned to do with her. Blaise had heard him out. His response was surprisingly reasonable. It was up to the doctors to decide what was to become of Enid. He hoped she would not be put away. But she did need help, didn’t she? And Peter had been forced to agree. Meanwhile she would go into a clinic for tests.

  Only that morning the tests had been completed and Blaise had rung Peter (an astonishing thing to do; neither ever telephoned the other). “It looks like she’s all right. She may need a few months of drying out, but that’s all.” When Peter asked about the divorce, his father had hesitated before answering. Then he said, “I don’t think Clay ought to leave her in the lurch just now. Maybe later, when she’s well. But that’s their business. Anyway, Enid’s coming home today, and we’ll see how she is.”

  Peter’s suspicions were allayed. After all, Enid had always had a paranoid side to her and fantasies of persecution were consistent with her madness, and that she was somewhat mad Peter never doubted. Who was not? The night before, quite alone, he had devoured an entire jumbo Hershey chocolate bar, weighing at least a pound, and as a result slept fitfully, and woke up sick. Virtuously he had skipped breakfast, and now refused to enter the tent where food was. Enid needed alcohol; he needed food; each demanded more than the normal amount of assurance that all was well. They could of course blame Blaise, Frederika, Washington, life. And at one time or another Peter had blamed each but only halfheartedly, for he had accepted early in life that there were no specific villains. One was what one was, and there was no malice in eternity.

  “Yes, I would like something to drink.” Elizabeth whispered to Clay. She turned to Peter, and mocked him with a splendid smile.

  “You win,” said Peter graciously, to both of them.

  * * *

  —

  Sun seared the canvas roof, and despite large fans the interior of the pavilion was hot. Burden took refuge in front of a life-size swan carved in ice. Waiters circulated with trays of glasses, and a number of people were already quite drunk. With Mussolini and Hitler gone, Japan would soon fall and life would begin again.

  “Senator Day!” He did not recognize the plain woman with bright eyes and large unsuitable hat. “Helen Ashley Barbour,” she drawled helpfully, used to not being remembered. Burden told her how much he enjoyed her column.

  “Aren’t you the nicest thing!” She was effusive. “I can’t tell you what an idol you are of mine! I’m a Jeffersonian Democrat, too! Unlike my employer, who is a perfect angel but gettin’ awful do-goody lately.” She indicated Blaise who stood beneath crossed American flags at the back of the tent. “But we’re old Washington, aren’t we? My husband was in the House in…” Burden recalled Mr. Barbour with a favorable phrase as the flow continued.