“I can’t get over the way the town’s changed, can you? Since the war began and all these new people arrived it’s got so you can’t get a hotel room for love or money or go to see a show or eat out. Why, Harvey’s is jam-packed for every meal. That’s my favorite place. The Occidental was my husband’s. They still have his picture on the wall. No, I’m afraid our lovely gracious Southern city has been engulfed by all these…” She opened her arms wide to take in all the guests as though to crush them, but instead of malediction she wisely chose to give a tactical blessing: “these charmin’ people who’ve opened our poor eyes to so many things undreamed of in our philosophy.”

  “Such as?” Burden got one phrase in, as he looked about the pavilion. One of the most rabid of the old New Dealers was talking to Blaise, his manner significantly meek now that the source of his greatness had been removed by that extraordinary accident (there was no other word) which now occupied the White House. Burden knew that he was being unfair to the new President, whom he had liked well enough in the Senate. Yet there was no getting around it, Roosevelt’s revenge on all of them had been in character. Aware that he might not live out his term, he had shattered in death as he had in life the hopes of better men. He had eliminated them all, friends as well as enemies, by the elevation of a mediocrity who could now take pleasure in observing his splendid betters fade, one by one, as new men emerged. I shall but hate thee better, Franklin, after death.

  “Music…Churchill…foreigners…Queen Wilhelmina…diplomats…theatre…everything!”

  “I suppose the city has changed.” Burden stemmed the tide. “Lord knows it’s crowded.”

  “Where is Mrs. Day?”

  “Home. She’s not a party girl.”

  “Adore her! My idea of a truly great lady, but in our old Southern tradition, not like those highfaluting Yankee ladies you can’t tell apart from the English. And Diana, how is that pretty girl?”

  Aware that anything he said was for the archive, Burden indicated that Diana’s marriage was superbly happy and that she was at this moment working…

  “On her magazine, I know! I like to fainted when I saw that first issue, so extreme politically…”

  Frederika materialized. “Mrs. Barbour, what a surprise!” She made no effort not to sound surprised.

  “Oh, Mrs. Sanford, I’ve never seen such a gatherin’! And this tent, and all these lovely appointments!”

  “Blaise wants to see you, dear.” Frederika turned to Burden. “Excuse us, Mrs. Barbour.” Frederika pulled Burden away, leaving Mrs. Barbour in mid-sentence. “She wasn’t invited.”

  “But she works for Blaise.”

  “I hate gossip writers, even ours.” At that unpropitious moment, Irene Bloch darted out from behind a pair of admirals. “Dear Mrs. Sanford, what a glorious fěte! I came with Admiral Cheyney,” she added carefully.

  “So happy to see you.” Frederika, meaning to smile, frowned. “Peter is here,” said Frederika, her face a tragic mask.

  “I know. I’ve seen him. What a success he had had with our magazine. Have you seen it, Senator? But what am I saying, of course you have, because of Diana, une jeune fille très raffinée. But don’t let me keep you from your guests, Mrs. Sanford.” Graciously, Irene turned back to her admirals, as though the day were entirely hers, even to the victory in the West.

  “It’s just no good,” muttered Frederika, holding tight to Burden’s arm as they approached Blaise. “You can’t keep anybody out nowadays.”

  “Not if you hold an open house. It’s your own fault.”

  “Peter’s fault. I’ve accepted her for him.”

  “For which we’re duly grateful. Diana is also a beneficiary of Irene’s wealth…and social ambition.”

  Frederika stopped a moment and looked Burden full in the face. “Is Diana getting a divorce?”

  “Not that I know of.” The truthful answer sounded false.

  “I’ve heard she was. I’ve also heard…”

  “…that Peter and Diana…?”

  “…yes. He’s too young. Here’s Blaise.”

  Burden was unexpectedly hurt. Did she mean that Diana was not good enough to marry Peter? He put the thought out of his mind. Of course she meant only what she said but even so he was, he knew, unexpectedly touchy lately, insisting on prerogatives, suspecting slights where none was.

  Fortunately Blaise did not treat him as a falling star; at worst he seemed to regard Burden as a sun in momentary eclipse, to be propitiated in the knowledge that once the lunar shadow passed there would be light again. With a gesture Blaise shooed away those lords in immediate attendance and drew Burden close to him. Just behind them one of the fans slowly stirred the warm air.

  “…bond tour…governor…all set…what about you?”

  Burden said the expected. “I’ll be there, of course.” Indeed he would. He was still one of the masters of the state’s political machinery. No star could rise above the flat horizon of that volatile region without his blessing, real or feigned. In any case, he could not afford to be ignored even though the choice of candidates was no longer entirely his as it had been in the years before the war, when a word from him to half a dozen leaders meant a seat in the Congress for some eager (but not too eager) politician whose total loyalty he could then count on for all of one term of office.

  “We’re trying to fix it so he’s unopposed in the primary.” The “we” was like a dagger in the back. What right had Blaise, a Washington publisher, to speak of “we” in referring to political arrangements within Burden’s state?

  “But how is this to be…done?” Burden was mild. “The incumbent will want to remain where he is. A most ambitious man, not old either.”

  The word “old” had begun to obsess Burden. In his last race, he had been called old, even though to himself he was exactly the same as he had been the day when he first arrived in Washington with two suitcases made of wicker and a reservation at a hotel midway between the station and the Capitol, where, on a bright afternoon, trembling with tension, he had been led down into the well of the Senate by a Senator long since dead, to take the oath of office, as Kitty watched proudly in the gallery, wearing a huge hat with a bird on it and puffed sleeves of striped bombazine. Old!

  “I think we’ve taken care of him.” Burden writhed again at the “we”; he kept smiling. “There’s a Federal judgeship. He wants it. Now my spies tell me the President will appoint him but only if you and Momberger…”

  “Of course I’ll recommend him,” said Burden, who was already committed to someone else for the judgeship in question.

  “Good! Good! Knew we could count on you!” Blaise pounded his shoulder. “Momberger’s no problem. So, there it is. Our boy is in!” Burden took final solace in the knowledge that no one in life was ever “ours.” Time would break Blaise.

  * * *

  —

  Below the terrace, an outcrop of rock marked the beginning of the cliff’s precipitous fall to the river far below. Here Harold Griffiths, war correspondent, brooded, heavy face resting upon two small fists, as Peter approached, careful to make no noise, wanting to startle. He succeeded. Harold leaped to his feet, eyes wide with alarm.

  “Peter! God, never do that!” He held one hand to his heart while shaking Peter’s hand with the other. “In the jungle when somebody did that…it was for real.”

  “Our jungle is for real, too,” said Peter, matching the other’s theatrical grimness.

  “It was our lives there.” Harold had always been quite impervious to any irony but his own.

  “Ours, too. As well as sacred honor pledged and fortune committed. What a long time!” He looked at Harold fondly, confident that beneath the awesome façade of the G.I.’s Homer he would soon find the old friend who had once played stout Falstaff to his dour Hal.

  “I’ve got malaria,” said Harold with irritable pride, and he did look ill, the whites of his eyes bronze, the face livid.

  “You wanted to go to the war.”

  “I’m not complaining,” he complained. “I’m glad I went. Best thing ever happened to me.”

  “To the Tribune, too. You’re famous.”

  “I know.” Harold nodded gravely and Peter wondered if perhaps the old Harold had been murdered and in his place an imposter had set up shop as shrill journalist. But Peter was careful to be tolerant. Bad prose or not, Harold had been in the midst of death for two years and stronger men than he had come back not at all themselves, old persons erased by what they had witnessed in the damp heat of jungles.

  “Somebody had to tell what it’s like. And I happened to be the guy. That’s all.” The new Harold tended to speak in short sentences, reminiscent of Hemingway.

  “Like Ishmael, you were there.” The new Harold’s terseness made Peter want to be elaborate, true Corinthian as opposed to sham Doric. “But now the wars are ending, what next? You can’t go back to what you were.”

  “The war’s not over yet.” Harold looked across the Potomac as though by some cartographer’s error the green chiggery hills of Maryland had become the mainland of Japan. “I’ll go back where the fighting is. Where they are, I am. Right to the end.”

  “Like Ruth amid the alien corn, you follow the troops.”

  This penetrated. Harold turned to look at Peter and for the first time seemed actually to see him. “You’ve…filled out,” he said, indicating Peter’s thickset torso which, despite a strenuous diet, continued to expand autonomously.

  Peter gave him the round. “Yes, I’m getting fat, like you.” But in actual fact Harold’s paunch had been reduced by fever. He was now thin and fragile-looking; only the huge lion’s head remained unchanged.

  Yes, Harold had read the first issue of The American Idea and, no, he had not liked it. He attacked the contributors, denounced all Communists (even as he had once defended them). Then, obsessively, he spoke of them and their sacrifice. Rapidly he dictated for Peter’s benefit a half dozen columns until Peter said, “You have found religion,” arbitrarily putting “30” at the foot of what was by no means the final column. “But when the war does end, what will you do?”

  “It’s bad luck to make plans when you’re out there.”

  “But at the moment you’re not out there, you’re here and I’m sure Father’s trying to tie you up for life, but to do what?”

  “To write a column. Politics. ’Dateline Washington.’ ” The response was quick. Despite his commitment to war, Harold was ready to be converted to peacetime uses.

  “Politics! But you…” Not wanting to say “know nothing,” Peter quickly shifted to “…couldn’t care less about politics. ‘What is more trivial than a United States Senator?’ you once asked James Burden Day, and did not stay for an answer.”

  “A lot has happened to me since then.” Harold looked out across the Potomac, chin held high, like Douglas MacArthur. “I found out what was real.”

  “Senators are real?”

  “They’re real because they are real, the little guys who get pushed around. And I feel kind of responsible for them.” Harold indicated the opposite shore, proudly assuming the responsibility for the inhabitants of Rock Springs. With wonder Peter realized how time had altered their roles. Prince Hal was turning into King Cole while Falstaff had become Polonius. Amused and appalled, he listened to the somber jester discuss just what it was he felt for the G.I.s, the subject of the book he was writing. Would Clay figure in the book? Yes, he would.

  “I hope you realize what you’ve done, writing about him the way you did.”

  “I did nothing. He did everything. I just told the story.” Harold’s style in print was bearable since one could at least laugh out loud, but face to face the deadpan monotone was unendurable. Peter wanted to shake the little man, restore him to his senses, assuming of course that the sympathetic companion of before the war had indeed been the true Harold, a puzzling point since it was quite possible that even then this solemn melodramatist had been the reality, waiting impatiently to be revealed by large events.

  “He was like a figure out of legend, like a knight in a tapestry of jungle green,” said Harold, suddenly revealing what might prove to be a fancier postwar style. “We all felt it. Everyone who was with him out there knew he was something special.”

  “Clay? Special?” Peter could not disguise astonishment. It was one thing deliberately and cold-bloodedly to turn a man into a legend but it was quite another to mistake one’s own artifice for the real thing.

  “You never liked him, did you?” Harold was tolerant.

  “Of course I did. You were the one who made fun of him. Thought he was stupid. Said so.”

  Harold shut his eyes and shook his head with a small smile. “No. No. No. Now you’re projecting onto me your own feelings.” He opened his eyes. “I always found him interesting. But I admit I never thought there was anything larger than life about him until we met again in the Philippines and I saw how he had changed.”

  “And he saw how you had changed.”

  No sharpness could penetrate the armor of Harold’s new self-love. “Men do in war,” he said quietly and Peter wondered what would happen if he were to shove his one-time friend off the cliff and into the swift river below. If nothing else, the world would be spared “Dateline Washington.” But the fit passed, and Peter listened politely as Harold once again started to evoke the day when Clay committed his act of heroism. But just as Clay was due to run from the flaming hangar with the dying man in his arms, Peter said, “I must go. Business.”

  “That magazine?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry you don’t like it. I thought you would.”

  “Maybe once. But the world’s not as simple as the Aeneas Duncans suspect.”

  “Maybe once,” said Peter, unable to contain his sense of the ridiculous. “But actually the world’s quite simple now. The tyrants are dead. Virtue reigns in the West. And the survivors must all be good. We try to be very good. Do you?”

  “I have faith in the final purpose of history,” said Harold, raising high the Hegelian standard.

  Peter laughed. “Are you still a Marxist? After those things you write for Father?”

  “No matter what you and your friends may think of my politics, I’ve always been opposed to the exploitation of man by man.”

  “Yes, I remember.” In the days before the war everyone had talked like that. But now new phrases gave a different tone to the old sentiments. Harold was out of date. “Today,” said Peter, reveling in cant, “there are other necessities.”

  “You haven’t joined the party, have you?” Out of date or not, Harold recognized the Stalinist “necessities.”

  “No,” said Peter. “I’m still a Republican.”

  “Dilettante!” Harold had the popular writer’s unerring ability to select the one word which vulgarizes even as it characterizes, sacrificing accuracy to mere vividness.

  Peter responded with a serenity he did not entirely feel. “But where would artists be without dilettantes? You must have us to appreciate you, to define you, to delight in you. The word delight comes from the Latin, you know.” Peter smiled grimly. “Delectare, to delight. Or in Italian, dilettare. You delight us all, Harold.”

  “You have changed.”

  “Not enough.” Beyond the bank of laurel that separated their rocky meeting place from the terrace, a familiar voice sounded. “Peter, who are you with?” Between branches of laurel appeared the white face of Irene Bloch, hunting lions.

  “Harold Griffiths. You must meet him,” said Peter. “History requires you to be friends.”

  V

  Against the façade of the house, two special night lamps attracted insects in order deliberately to incinerate them in a yellow glow. On the terrace, beneath the lamps, Blaise and Clay sat in straight iron chairs and listened to the soft Southern voice of Dr. Paulus.

  “She is deeply disturbed, as any layman can plainly see, and her pattern of behavior is in many ways highly abnormal. But there is a certain disagreement among my colleagues as to the precise nature of her problem.”

  “I should have thought that the problem was perfectly apparent, even to your colleagues.” Blaise took the lead as Clay intended he should. Completely at peace, Clay smoked one of Blaise’s cigars and stared at the exact spot where, a few hours earlier, Burden had told him that he was certain to win the primary because the incumbent would soon be appointed to the judiciary. “It was not easy to arrange,” said the older man with that curious dying fall to his voice which Clay had often tried to imitate and sometimes unexpectedly achieved, ceasing, whenever he did so, to be himself, becoming wiser and gentler in manner, which meant infinitely more dangerous in action.

  “The President…how strange it is to call that man the President…and I are not intimate, to say the least. But…” Light as a feather, Burden’s hand had rested on Clay’s arm. Sitting in the dark, Clay saw himself as he had been that afternoon, listening eagerly to the details of the elaborate plot which Burden had spun in order to trap incumbent Congressman and naïve President. He had apparently succeeded. “The announcement will be made to coincide with the ceremonies at the State Capitol.”

  “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Possibly not.” There was mischief in Burden’s smile, noted by Clay, who had also been observing how much the Senator had aged in his absence. The mouth had settled permanently into tragedy while the eyes were dull.

  “You’ll enjoy Congress. I did when I was your age.”

  “Meaning that you don’t now?”