“Well, who’s to say?” Clay tried to step around Peter, who deliberately blocked the approach to the door, not yet willing for his quarry to escape.

  “I am to say, among others.”

  “Then say it! Explain to the world just what is so wrong with me. What is, by the way?” Clay continued to smile attractively.

  “I wrote it once,” said Peter. “I said it all, I thought.”

  “But no one believed you.”

  “But that makes it no less true. To be blunt, you are not what you seem. Of course most people aren’t either, but between what you are and what you appear to be there is a million dollars’ worth of publicity, trying to make us believe that you are a war hero, which you’re not, a serious and thoughtful Senator, which you’re not, a man inspired by the best motives, which…”

  “How can you possibly begin to know what and who I am?” The voice was hard while the face was now as gray as the one which a moment before had looked out at them from the television screen.

  “I know what you’ve done and what you’ve not done. Politically you play chess. If the polls indicate a move to the left you move to the left. A computer could anticipate your position on any subject.” Peter turned to Aeneas. “You were right about him all along. He practices politics in a vacuum. There is nothing to him but a desire to be first.”

  Clay stepped away from Peter and moved toward Aeneas, as though seeking an ally. But then suddenly he stopped, aware that he might seem to be retreating. He turned to Peter and said, “You envy me because your father is interested in my career and not in yours….”

  The unexpectedness of the attack made Peter laugh. “No! Try again. Never having had a father, you exaggerate their importance to those of us so equipped. I am not jealous of you for anything except perhaps your extraordinary luck; it’s awe-inspiring, but then it has nothing to do with you….”

  “You are jealous of me.” Clay was dogged. “Because of Enid.”

  Peter wondered if he had perhaps underestimated Clay. He knew that the enemy was bold but he thought him constitutionally incapable of truth. “I’m not sure,” he said, “that jealous is the word. But I will say that I can never forgive you or Father for murdering her.” With a clinical eye, Peter noticed that Clay’s face had become blank, as if cast in metal.

  When Clay spoke, his voice was without expression. “I did what I thought was best for her. She was an alcoholic and they told me that she was incurable. Perhaps we were wrong to put her away. I don’t know. But I did care for her, though perhaps not as much as you did.”

  Peter braced himself for the blow which he knew was about to fall.

  Clay was now prepared to go the full distance and bring down the house. “She told me what happened. She told me everything. That’s why she was always frightened of you. Because of what the two of you did that day in this house, in the basement, in the storage room, together.”

  In the room’s stillness, a clock struck the half hour. Clay picked up the remains of the lacquer table and put them on the desk. “I’ll tell Irene someone broke the table. I suppose she can have it fixed.” He crossed to the door. He paused. “Enid had no secrets. She was also a liar so perhaps…” But Clay did not finish. Instead, he left the room.

  “Well,” said Peter to Aeneas after a long silence, “the hero has found his author.”

  “It’s not that at all.” Aeneas was even more shaken than Peter by what he had heard. Between the middle class to which he belonged and the class whose existence he often denied, there was plainly a division more significant than any he had suspected: the guilty dreams of the one were suddenly revealed to be the essential acts of the other.

  “Good luck,” said Peter, starting to go, but Aeneas took his arm, as though for support.

  “Really it’s not what you think, my helping him.”

  “I haven’t told you what I think.” Peter was bland. “But tell me, why are you helping him?”

  “For one thing, I think he will be President.” Aeneas was uncharacter​istically straightforward.

  “That is certainly possible, which is why we must see…I must see that he fails.”

  “You don’t think people change or grow?” Aeneas echoed the latest publicity. According to magazine writers, Clay had in recent years both “grown” and “deepened,” until now it was admitted by all but the hopelessly partisan that he possessed a “new maturity.”

  “Of course people change: they change their tactics. Clay’s got the conservatives. Now he needs you. It’s perfectly simple.”

  “Assuming you’re right, then just to be practical, isn’t it a good idea to join forces with him, to try to influence him?”

  The case Aeneas was constructing was altogether too predictable and Peter cut him short. “Don’t be naïve.” He left his old teacher behind. “He will use you. You will never use him.”

  “You’re unfair.” Aeneas was dogged. “I think there is more to him than that.”

  “Well, write his book for him and then we’ll see.” Peter went to the door, not even bothering to inquire when and how and at whose initiative this remarkable alliance had been wrought.

  But Aeneas would not let him go. He wanted comfort. “If Clay were able to accomplish all the things that you think ought to be done, would you still oppose him?”

  “But he won’t. He’ll go on just the way he always has, making the obvious moves. But even if he were suddenly to be miraculously useful, I would still oppose him.”

  “Why? Because of…because of…” But ten years of Freudian analysis had prepared Aeneas only for symbolic behavior.

  “You know the reasons. After all, you taught me half of them. Nothing concerns Clay but himself, and that self is not good enough, particularly if things should go badly for us.”

  “Is there anyone else who’s any better? Aren’t they all the same?”

  Aeneas’s sudden gloom made Peter laugh. “You sound like I used to. I’m the one who was brought up to believe that all of this was just a game and no matter who takes the prize, life goes on—while you possessed the moral sense, saw purpose in history, wanted radical change…”

  “But I still do. I haven’t changed. I only…”

  “You have changed if you think that Clay is what you want.”

  “I think he is educable.” Aeneas was obstinate. “The fact that he’s come to me is proof…”

  “Proof that he’s not a fool.” It was now plain to Peter that despite Aeneas’s obvious unease the process of rationalization, already begun, would presently resolve itself in Clay’s favor. Power was irresistible even to this once incorruptible clerk. As last testament to an old friendship, Peter made a confession. “You know, in a dreadful way, I’m much closer in character to Clay than I am to you. I was brought up to respect deeds, not theories; victories, not virtues. I see politics as men improvising. You see it as a series of stately position papers, reflecting some vast historic process. In the long run, you may be right. But the prizes in the moment go to the busy empty men like Clay, and though I may be unfair to the breed I do have his range, something you will never get.”

  “But he’s not so empty. And he’s certainly far more liberal than you give him credit for, and with the help of people like us…”

  “Oh, Christ, Aeneas, you are a fool!” Peter had not meant to roar but he was very much his father’s son, filled with that magnate’s passion to impose his will upon others. But where his father had chosen a conventional path to familiar heights, Peter had tried to go down to the roots, hoping to find the source of his own discontent with a world altogether too eager to take him in and give him whatever he might in the usual way want. Yet he knew that that he really wanted was simply to know what was good, and since he could accept no absolutes he could do little more than resist what appeared to him to be altogether bad, aware that the moment he ceased to say “no,” he would sink like Aeneas to Clay’s level, which was: does it work or not, does one rise or fall? Now, dazzled by the prospect of actual power, Aeneas had been absorbed by Clay, to Peter’s sorrow if not surprise, for to be human is to be predictable. There was nothing left to do but apologize. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

  “I understand.” Aeneas was trembling. “You’re under stress of course, after what was said…”

  “I’m always under stress.” Peter smiled. “Well, good luck.”

  “I’ll be moving to Washington.” Aeneas looked singularly wretched at his own fine prospects. “He wants me here, full time.”

  “Then we shall see more of you,” said Peter, their friendship at an end. He opened the door to the hall. “Anyway you’ll enjoy the real thing,” he said, “no matter how it ends.”

  II

  Clay had not meant to say everything, but for a moment he had lost control. Goaded by Peter he had used his ultimate weapon, a rash thing to do for which, he knew, he would doubtless have to pay. But any defeat of Peter was irresistible, he told himself, in extenuation, as he entered the drawing room, becoming immediately the center of attention. During the last few months Clay’s publicity had become so intense that where people had once regarded him with interest because he was a young man on the rise he was now regarded with wonder as the young man on the rise. There was no one like him in the country, a fact which he had come to take for granted. It was all working out just as Blaise had predicted it would.

  Across the room, beneath a modern tapestry, stood a girl he had not seen before. She was tall, slender, with blond bright hair and freckles. Exactly what he needed at the moment, but he despaired at ever getting to her for between them was a room filled with people eager to talk to him, to see and to touch him; the space between him and the girl was like some desperate obstacle course in which buried land mines and twisted clumps of barbed wire had been ingeniously set. Nevertheless, he would attempt the dangerous passage for the girl was definitely worth it. Not once had she looked in his direction.

  “Blaise says you were superb on television!” Clay knew that Irene’s enthusiasms were impartial. She was equally enamored of Senator Taft, Governor Stevenson, General MacArthur, and of course the President, whom she had recently cornered at a reception and insisted that he speak French to her since had he not, single-handed, liberated that doux vert pays, France? But now that Irene was Mrs. Watress her enthusiasm for anyone celebrated was somewhat breached by the fact of her new relations, and as she had already made a significant contribution to Clay’s central fund, she tended to save her best hyperbole for the husband of her niece, the First Lady-to-be.

  Clay said that he thought he had not done too badly on television.

  “But of course you did well. You always do well because you are a complete person. That’s really the secret, you know, to everything!” Irene looked about the room she had created and at the people she had summoned to fill it. “One must be bold. But then one must be dans le vrai at the same time.”

  Millicent Smith Carhart joined them, with Lucy Shattuck in tow. Of all the old Washington ladies, Millicent was the one who most bored Clay but because of Elizabeth he went out of his way to charm her, not an easy task since he knew that she thought him responsible for Burden’s suicide.

  “They say that you are going to vote to condemn that awful man!” Mrs. Carhart clung to Lucy for support.

  “That’s my intention.” Clay gave her the most winning of all his smiles but her pebbly eyes, clouded with cataracts, did not see it.

  “I’m so glad! He went altogether too far, and we mustn’t allow that.” Millicent looked somber. “Things,” she said darkly, “are fragile enough as it is nowadays.”

  “Really,” said Lucy Shattuck, “you make us sound like one of your Meissen teapots, full of cracks.”

  “If only we were so distinguished,” said Millicent. “You know the last time I spoke to dear Burden Day, he wanted to censure Senator McCarthy and it was I who said no. I’ve never been so wrong.”

  “It might have been premature then,” said Clay, watching the girl who was talking now to a young man he did not recognize. He must somehow get to her before she was forever lost to the stranger. But though Millicent persisted in her talk of Burden Day, Clay refused to be distressed. What was past was past; he never looked back. At the time, however, not only had he been upset by Burden’s death but furious at Harold for having caused it. After all, Harold had known of his arrangement with Burden and simple loyalty—not to mention good sense—ought to have kept him silent. But Harold was vicious, as Blaise pointed out, and one must accept him the way he was or not at all. In any case, Burden’s death had come as a shock to Clay who had truly loved the man in whose company he had spent most of his youth. Even at the end, Clay had continued to like and admire the Senator, and he was confident that the old man felt the same way toward him; after all, Burden Day had survived a good many political wars and he knew that when the time comes for one to go, when the last battle is lost, there is nothing to be done but give way as gracefully as possible. Had he not proven, by taking Nillson’s money, that he was eminently practical, and understood the world he was living in?

  Clay tried to extricate himself from the ladies. He said that he must have a word with Harold Griffiths. But Millicent would not let him go. “Tell us first about the President. What does be feel about McCarthy?”

  “The President is a Republican,” said Clay. “He doesn’t confide in me. In fact, I hardly know the man.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Millicent sounded shocked. “Anyway the President must be delighted at what’s happening. He’s so much like my uncle, a friendly good man!”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Clay, who was quite sure that Eisenhower was neither friendly nor good. At their last meeting, the President had addressed him as “Overbury,” as if he were a junior staff officer and not a member of the august Senate whose constitutional weight was every bit equal to that of the First Magistrate.

  Clay finally escaped the ladies and made his way to Harold at the room’s center; en route he exchanged pleasantries with half a dozen strangers who, knowing him from television, assumed that he knew them. Just as he got to Harold, the girl and her young man, arm in arm, went into the cardroom.

  “Who is she?” asked Clay in a low voice, indicating the door through which the girl had just passed. “The tall one, freckles.”

  “A cousin of Ogden Watress…of your wife,” added Harold mischievously. “She’s here for the weekend. Engaged to someone in New York. Whether or not she will, as your Hollywood friends say, put out, I don’t know.”

  “Thanks for the résumé.” Clay was dry. The fact that the girl was related to Elizabeth might make things complicated—for the girl, rather than for himself since he regarded sex as an appetite, nothing more. But that, he knew, was not entirely true. As he grew older, he found that he needed more and more women; and not simply for pleasure. What delighted him was the victory not only over the woman who had consented but, indirectly, over all the other men who had ever wanted her. He was already excited at the thought of the girl’s engagement to “someone in New York”; through her, he would be able to conquer that mysterious “someone in New York,” not to mention the young man who had just escorted her into the cardroom.

  Clay wanted simply to overwhelm. And though there was always danger of scandal, he had no intention of changing, despite Blaise’s veiled warnings. Veiled because Enid’s accusation had made each man profoundly wary with the other. Neither confided in the other, outside politics. Yet Clay was reasonably certain that Blaise’s interest in him was not sexual. Rather, it was a living out of old ambitions. As Clay achieved power over men through the conquest of their women, so Blaise achieved a sense of power in the world through the manipulating of Clay’s career.

  Not unnaturally, Blaise was apprehensive. Recently he had indicated that perhaps Clay should not be quite so—as he put it euphemistically—“social.” But Clay was fatalistic. What would happen would happen; it was much too late, in any case, to change his nature, as Elizabeth had discovered.

  From the beginning Clay had made it a condition of their marriage that he would continue as he was and she had agreed, pretending to herself and to him that since her position as his wife could never be endangered, there was no rational reason for objecting to his brief pleasures. But of course she did object, though never directly. He was sorry to give her pain, but he was not about to be other than what he was. Besides, she had never not known just who and what she was marrying and though he liked her and took pride in her worldly success, she did not interest him as Enid had. In fact, unconsciously dramatizing the difference between the two, he had made it plain to Elizabeth (without ever directly saying so) that if she wanted discreetly to take a lover she could, and he rather suspected that she had for lately she had been unusually relaxed and easy with him, even in private; proving that their marital happiness would eventually depend upon the offices of others.

  “How did your meeting with Aeneas Duncan go?” asked Harold.

  “He’s with us.” The young man who had accompanied the Watress cousin into the cardroom returned alone, a hopeful sign.

  “Incredible!” Harold sounded truly amazed, and Clay wondered if he might not be jealous of Aeneas as a potential rival. “If you can con Aeneas Duncan, you can do anything!”

  “Con? I don’t know what the word means.” Clay was delighted that the girl was alone.

  “Peter will be furious.”

  Clay frowned; pleasure in the girl ceased. “He came into the library when I was with Aeneas. He knows everything, except that it was Aeneas who came to us.”

  “Well, he is being isolated bit by bit.” Grimly Harold predicted the end of The American Idea, but as he spoke, all that Clay could think of was Peter and Enid together, making love. He had not believed Enid when, drunk one night, she babbled the whole story. It was the sort of extravagant lie that appealed to her, like accusing him and Blaise of being lovers. He had quite forgotten the story until, confronted with Peter’s hostility, he had recalled it and, on impulse, struck, discovering as he did from the expression on Peter’s face, that for once Enid had—terribly—told the truth. But he refused to ponder the implications; refused to acknowledge what was, in effect, a victory for Peter, a victory too painful to contemplate, for to have been second with Enid was to have been nothing. He dismissed the past, plunged into the moment.