“Yes. He’s in the library with Mr. Sanford. They’re watching Clay on television, on tape, being interviewed.”

  “You should join them,” said Lucy to Peter, who said that he would rather not. “Anyway, don’t miss what Irene’s done to the room. She has hung the walls with burlap. I wonder how Blaise feels, coming back to Laurel House and finding it so changed.”

  Though Lucy had challenged Peter, it was Elizabeth who responded. “Mr. Sanford adores Irene and he thinks she’s done wonders with the house.” Elizabeth looked at Peter, daring him to contradict her.

  “Of course,” said Peter placidly. “Irene has always been one of Father’s favorites. In fact, you were here the first time she ever came to dinner.”

  But Elizabeth did not recall the occasion. With a smile, she whispered that she wanted champagne. Peter and Lucy watched as she made her way across the room, all eyes upon her.

  “She is marvelous to look at,” said Peter.

  “But not in Enid’s class.” The mother was unexpected.

  “No,” Peter agreed. “But let’s hope she has a better time of it.”

  “She will, if she doesn’t take to drink like her father. Anyway they are a perfect couple.”

  Peter nodded. “She’s always been keen on Clay.”

  “I don’t know about Clay but she’s certainly keen on glory. She would do anything to be noticed.” Lucy’s usual ironic tone was suddenly missing.

  Peter looked at her with some surprise. Then he said non-committally, “Most people would.”

  “Most people would do something but not anything.”

  “Well, if there were not people like Elizabeth and Clay, there would be no history. The great things go to the voracious.”

  “Must we have history?” Lucy suddenly grinned; in the hot lighting of Irene’s drawing room, she resembled a desiccated lizard.

  “It passes the time.”

  “Oh, that passes anyway. Actually, I’m filled with admiration for my child. She’s got exactly what she wanted, and I can’t think of any woman I’ve ever known who has except…”

  “Irene!” Both spoke the name at the same time.

  “Tante Irène,” Lucy repeated happily. “Poor Ogden! He was always such a snob and now look at him! But then the Watresses were born to be humiliated by women. I certainly gave his brother a hard time of it.”

  The entrance of Millicent Smith Carhart put an end to their intimacy. Lucy joined her old friend and as the two ladies made their progress through the crowded room, Peter meditated on the nature of the game all played, which was, simply, war. A conquers B who conquers C who conquers A. Each in his own way was struggling for precedence and to deny this essential predatoriness was sentimental; to accommodate it wrong; to change it impossible. Yet Peter was not prepared to accept the fact that, even for him, there might exist no alternative to being fierce carnivore in a jungle war plainly destined to continue, with or without him, until man’s end.

  Not happy, Peter went into the dining room, where, as he had hoped, a buffet had been set out beneath an elaborately ugly mobile of bronze which appeared to revolve of its own accord, in perpetual motion. Though the table was dominated by the inevitable smoked ham and smoked turkey, a row of silver chafing dishes looked promising. His mood improved as he lifted a cover to reveal a combination of what appeared to be chicken livers and water chestnuts. He ate one, burning the roof of his mouth. Despite the pain, he ate another, marveling at whatever genius had first thought to combine two such complementary textures.

  As Peter helped himself from a second dish, Harold Griffiths said, “Irene’s cook is Armenian. But he’s rather good at bogus Canton dishes.”

  “Not so bogus,” said Peter, his mouth now filled with snow peas and black mushrooms.

  “Wait until you’ve tried the real thing on Formosa. Chiang Kai-shek’s chef is perhaps the best Cantonese cook in the world.”

  “Waiting to be unleashed, no doubt.”

  But Harold was now far too serious a figure to acknowledge this sort of pleasantry. The most war-minded of the columnists, he favored an immediate invasion of the Chinese mainland, as he always did after his annual pilgrimage to the deposed warlord on Formosa. Only that morning in his column he had extolled the wisdom and vigor of the Generalissimo, the beauty and subtlety of his wife, the fine masculinity of their golden troops, ever on the elert to reconquer the land they had lost to darkness.

  Harold asked, politely, if Diana was coming and, as politely, Peter said that she was. But despite their apparent ease with one another, Harold had not forgiven Peter for having revealed what had happened in the Philippines, nor had Peter forgiven Harold for having taken revenge not upon himself but upon Burden Day, whose death was announced in the same edition as Harold’s column revealing the Senator’s corruption. Promptly, sympathy had gone to Burden, who was thought to have killed himself in despair, although Diana maintained that he had drowned accidentally, since he would most certainly have sued Harold Griffiths for libel, as in her grief she had wanted to do, until she was told that one cannot libel the dead.

  Now though Harold Griffiths invariably asked him about Diana (in Washington Peter knew that he and Diana were regarded as an old married couple who had somewhat eccentrically avoided the conventional ceremony), she still did not speak to Harold, which made him sad, since what he had done was no more than his job in which chips must fall, as he liked to observe, as chips will, where they may. Peter himself had never discussed the matter with Harold or with Blaise if only because in a sense he thought himself to be as guilty as they. Had he not written his piece, Harold would not have struck at the Senator.

  While Peter devoured butterfly shrimp and Harold ate turkey, they discussed McCarthy, the one subject on which they could agree. Each hoped that the Senate would vote for censure. “In fact,” said Harold, “Clay’s discussing it right now on television.”

  “Does he favor censure?” Peter could not resist adding. “At last?”

  Harold’s response was predictable. “You don’t understand what pressure Clay’s been under.”

  “But that’s the one thing I do understand. If he wants to be nominated for Vice President, he must pick up support in the Northern cities, particularly among the Irish, who regard McCarthy as chosen by God to shield them from civilization.”

  “Clay will vote against McCarthy tomorrow.” Harold was stolid.

  “Then that means it’s the safe thing to do, which is good to know.” He ate a shell of pastry containing crab; the sauce was too bland; it needed mustard. “Tell me, do you think Adlai Stevenson will want Clay to run with him in ’56?”

  “Why not? He’ll certainly have to take someone like Clay to balance the ticket, someone who is, well…”

  “Reactionary?”

  “He’s not that and you know it.”

  “Then just how would you describe Clay’s politics? I’m really serious. I want to know.” Although he had found the pastry shell somewhat too heavy for the crab, Peter ate a second one; and this time he detected in the sauce a delicate trace of curry.

  “He’s a pragmatist. He has to put this thing together with what he has to deal with.” The answer was prompt.

  Peter speared a chicken liver with a silver toothpick. “Pragmatist really means opportunist, doesn’t it?”

  “If you are not an opportunist, how can you possibly become President?” Harold sounded brisk and tough. Peter had noted in his years as a publisher that a great many of those who wrote about politics were, like Harold, drawn to the ruthless, the brutal and the autocratic. Since clerks deal so much in ink, Peter had once rather fancily written, they yearn for blood.

  “Perhaps one can’t.” Peter was distressed to find grit in the chicken liver. “Actually it’s Clay’s hypocrisy I mind the most. Those righteous little sermons he gives while he is forever wheeling and dealing…”

  “Come off it!” Harold was sharp. “That’s the way it’s done.”

  “But I don’t like the way it’s done.”

  “That’s too bad of course.” With his fingers, Harold trimmed the fat off a slice of smoked ham. “Because the world’s not apt to change.”

  “That’s good to know.” Although in recent years Harold had become nearly as gluttonous as himself, Peter found this likeness not at all endearing; if anything, it made Harold less sympathetic to him. “I suppose, all in all, you do like the world the way it is. Clay is rising. The West’s declining. What more could you want?” But Harold did not answer; instead he helped himself to turkey, while Peter devoured ham. Then they were joined by two pretty girls, who were hungry. Harold, courtly and flirtatious, embarked upon an elaborate discourse on Chinese cooking, punctuated by a loud barking laugh which caused the girls, fed, to flee.

  Harold pretended to find them attractive. “Cousins of Ogden Watress. Damned good-looking girls, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Peter, amused as always by Harold’s strenuous display of heterosexuality. “But I prefer food, you know. I must say we’re both a bit like Eugene Pallette, remember? In that film where he died of overeating…”

  “It was Guy Kibbee.” For an instant, the old Harold surfaced, to be promptly recalled by the new. “Odd thing happened the other night,” said Harold, mouth full of shrimp. “Clay and I were at the Sulgrave and he was looking out over the dance floor at all the girls when suddenly he said, ‘How many have you gone to bed with?’ and I said ‘Oh, one or two’ and he said, ‘I’ve been to bed with the whole damned lot!’ ”

  “Where was Elizabeth when he said this?”

  Harold looked suspiciously at a dish of saffron rice. “He was speaking of the past.”

  “The present, from what I hear. How does she put up with it?” But Peter’s question was rhetorical, since Elizabeth’s acceptance of Clay’s promiscuity was already a part of Washington’s folklore. She had even been known, on occasion, to place good-looking girls next to her husband at dinner as though by deliberately thrusting a girl in his way, she might share indirectly in a sexual life from which she was so notoriously excluded. Washington was about evenly divided between those who thought her a woman of stone and those who thought her uniquely clever and, in the best sense, un-American. Peter tended to admire the way she handled a difficult situation. But then she and Clay were more allies than lovers, her ambition every bit the equal of his.

  The dining room began to fill with people who, unlike the girls, were eager to listen to Harold. He obliged them. As Harold discussed the news of the day, Peter suddenly realized that he existed only as a performer responding to occasions. With equal facility Harold could be failed poet and friend of the press lord’s son or the G.I.’s chronicler or wise counselor to a nation which must soon prepare itself for the final war between the atoms of light and those of darkness. Aware at last of the other’s nature, Peter was relieved that what he had regarded with some distress as a lost friendship was merely an old performance dropped from repertory.

  Peter left Harold to his audience and went into the hallway just as a group of guests arrived. But once he saw that Diana was not among them, he started to go into the drawing room. At that moment Blaise emerged from the library. Simultaneously, father and son each decided to avoid physical contact; they did not shake hands. Instead Peter indicated a huge vivid splotch of a painting on the opposite wall. “Things are not what they were!”

  “It’s horrible!” Though Blaise was now politically allied with Mrs. Ogden Watress, he was not about to embrace all her works. “Thank God Frederika isn’t here to see it.”

  “How is Clay? He is in there, isn’t he?” Peter pointed to the library door.

  “Yes.” His father seemed uneasy. “We’ve been watching him on television. Have you seen what Irene’s done to the cardroom? Looks like a horror museum.”

  Aware that his father did not want him to go into the library, Peter said, “I haven’t seen Clay in months. I suppose I ought to say hello.” And he left Blaise to the usual clients who had begun to gather.

  Clay sat in front of the television set. Beside him was Aeneas Duncan, who said, “I just got to town this morning. I was going to call you later.”

  Peter said that it was quite all right, wondering, as he spoke, what Aeneas was doing in the enemy’s camp.

  Peter greeted Clay, who gave him a boyish smile in sharp contrast to the grave face of Senator Overbury which looked out at them from the television set. The program was ending and the participants were being identified. In the gray unsteady light of the cathode tube, Clay looked mature and responsible, quite unlike his present self, which was unexpectedly youthful, as though he did not have a care in the world. “I had a couple of close calls there,” he said, indicating the television set. “They were really out to get me. You’d’ve enjoyed it.” It was part of Clay’s new charm that he treated avowed enemies with the same confiding ease that he treated allies.

  “Did they smoke you out on McCarthy?” Peter was equally light. “Will you vote for censure?”

  “There’s nothing to smoke out. I said I favored condemning him. No, where they tried to trip me up was…”

  Peter caught the change of verb. “You favor condemning but not censuring him?”

  “It’s all the same thing.” The distinction seemed not to interest Clay.

  “But it is not the same. Is it, Aeneas?” Peter turned to his editor and friend.

  “Well, no, it’s not.” Aeneas might be tortuous in his reasoning and perverse in his responses, but he could not be anything but accurate when facts were involved. “In the Senate, to condemn is much milder than to censure. In this case, it’s a device to get everyone off the hook.”

  “And Clay wants to get off the hook.”

  But Clay seemed not to have heard. He was staring thoughtfully at himself on the television set. “Those lights are murder,” he said at last. “And look at the way they keep shooting me from below. It looks like I have a jowl!”

  “Obviously a liberal cameraman.” Peter noticed that where the portrait of Aaron Burr had hung, an elaborate collage of old newspapers had been arranged.

  “No,” said Clay suddenly, switching off the set. “I’m not on any hook. McCarthy’s finished.” He tapped the television set. “And that’s what did him in. He had a bad television image, poor bastard. I feel sorry for him.”

  “But you do condemn him, in the Senate at least.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. I’ll dance on his grave like everyone else.” Clay had lost interest in the subject. It was not in his character to waste time on theory or in analyzing what had ceased to be relevant. “I’m writing a book,” he said just as Peter sat down on what looked to be a bench but was actually a Chinese lacquered tea table; it crashed beneath his weight.

  Clay laughed. Aeneas smiled worriedly. Peter remained where he was on the floor, the fragments of the table all about him. With dignity, he crossed his legs and asked what the subject of the book was.

  “The American idea, what else? But with a small ‘i.’ Why don’t you throw the pieces in the fire? Nobody will miss it.” Clay was amused by the accident, which Peter chose to ignore.

  “And what is your idea of the American idea?” From his position on the floor, Peter was judicious.

  “I hope the book will make it plain.”

  “But make what plain?”

  “What I believe to be the way we are and the way we ought to be.”

  “What are we?”

  “For one thing, the best alternative to Communism.” Clay was brisk.

  “Well, Aeneas can set you straight on that one. And what ought we to be?”

  “Good,” said Clay.

  “Oh, that!” Peter snorted. “That’s easy, isn’t it? At least to say.”

  “Not easy at all,” said Aeneas worriedly. “Actually, it’s the hardest thing there is to define. Even Wittgenstein…”

  “Hard for us, yes, but for Clay to be good means to contain Communism, balance the budget…”

  “I think he’s more ambitious than that.”

  At last aware of what was happening, Peter did not try to disguise his astonishment. “Aeneas! You’re going to write the book for him!”

  “I said I’d help. You know, an idea here, an idea there.” Aeneas was uneasy but not apologetic.

  “But which of your ideas? The necessity of abandoning the two-party system, the similarity between the orgasm and the Bomb, the fact that television advertising is the principal cause of cancer?” Peter found Aeneas’s defection not only astonishing but curiously exhilarating. He turned to Clay. “Aeneas is filled with ideas. You must pick and choose carefully.”

  “I plan to.” Clay was very much at ease. “I don’t expect to be too far out…”

  “Naturally.” Peter looked at the nervous Aeneas and asked, quite gently, “But why, Aeneas, do you want to be so far in?”

  “That’s not the way I look at it. After all, I’m just helping out.” But Peter could see that Aeneas was suffering; his inner dialogue furious, to say the least.

  “He’s first-rate, too,” said Clay. “And philosophically we’re not as far apart as you might think.”

  “A philosopher king!” Peter got slowly to his feet. “Well, you are stunning. Both of you.”

  “Thank you.” Clay rose, too. He smiled. He was most winning. “Don’t look so worried, Peter. It will all come right in the end.”

  “For you, or for the country?”

  “Oh, it’s the same thing. Didn’t I ever tell you that?” But though Clay’s manner was teasing, Peter knew that he meant exactly what he said.

  “No, it is not the same thing.” Peter held his ground like some unwieldy obstacle fallen by accident in the other’s path.