Harold spoke of a meeting he had had with Adlai Stevenson who was, apparently, receptive to the idea of Clay as a running mate; the Governor, however, had made no promises since, as he pointed out, there was no assurance that he himself would be nominated for a second time. Both men reflected on their party’s titular leader. Harold found Stevenson’s style appealing but Clay did not. It was too impassioned. Clay particularly disliked the constant moralizing which sounded as if the politician might really mean what he was saying, and that was impossible. But, hypocrite or not, there was no denying Stevenson’s appeal to the young. They flocked to him. While Eisenhower’s banality reassured the middle-aged majority, Stevenson’s rhetoric thrilled those who, rightfully, ought to be Clay’s admirers. But time was on Clay’s side. He could afford to wait in all things—except for the girl in the cardroom.

  Clay left Harold and crossed quickly to the door to the cardroom, where he stopped, astonished: the room was so filled with painting and sculpture that it resembled an art gallery in which guests moved self-consciously from exhibit to exhibit, as though not certain whether or not the objects were on sale.

  In front of a squat stone figure with pendulous ear lobes, she stood, quite alone, apparently absorbed by the sculpture. After first making sure that no one was watching either of them, Clay walked up to the girl (was there a man alive who did not want her?) and said, “Hello!”

  III

  Blaise stood alone at the end of the hall, looking out a frosted window at what had been his realm.

  “I suppose she’ll build a Chinese pagoda or perhaps a Japanese teahouse,” said Peter as he joined his father at the window. For a moment they were in harmony. Blaise denounced Irene’s works until he reminded himself that, “when something’s sold, forget about it.”

  “Very sensible.” Peter drew a cross on the icy window pane. “I just talked to Aeneas.”

  “Yes, he’s agreed to help out. I thought it was a good idea.” Blaise was blunt.

  “It certainly is, for you and Clay.” Peter was serene. “Sad for me, of course.”

  “Yes.” Blaise put an end to that. “Irene’s a bit on the spot, too.”

  “Because she’s involved with both Clay and me?”

  Blaise nodded.

  “You aren’t by any chance going to suggest that she get off the spot?” Peter was curious to see just how far his father would go in Clay’s behalf.

  “No. I never advise, unless asked. She hasn’t asked.”

  “But if she does?”

  “Clay must be President.” Blaise was surprisingly and for him, uniquely, still.

  “He has taken you over entirely, hasn’t he?” Peter matched his father’s calm. “Enid was right.”

  With one hand, Blaise swept the cross from the window pane, as though erasing his son’s last words. “Enid…” he began.

  “I don’t know how right she was and I don’t want to know. But you have gone too far with Clay.”

  With a certain pleasure, Peter saw the familiar rage begin but before Blaise could speak, Peter cut him short. “All I’ve said is what everybody thinks only they are too afraid to speak out.”

  “Then I suggest you learn fear, too.” The color had risen in his father’s face.

  “Too late for that.” Peter was cold.

  “You are so…vain!” Blaise gave the word the full force of his voice, causing newcomers in the hall to whisper among themselves.

  “There is always a price to be paid for survival.” Peter was delighted at his father’s emotion. “Anyway, vanity is natural to us both.”

  But Blaise was still capable of surprise. He continued his own thought. “Because you think you understand everything, you took Enid’s side, without ever knowing what she had done.” Peter was startled. Used to having his simple statements of liking and disliking accepted as law, Blaise did not have the habit of explanation.

  “What had she done that I should take into account?” Peter regarded his father curiously.

  “That she was the one who broke up the marriage. She had the affair, not Clay. He caught her not the other way around and then, for her sake, for the family’s sake, he took the blame.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Peter was surprised not at what Enid had done for she had been capable of anything as he knew best but at Clay’s taking upon himself the blame. It was out of character unless he had altogether misjudged the enemy, which was unthinkable. Even so, he experienced a moment of panic.

  “Ask your mother. Enid told her everything, just before she…before the end. So you see, none of it was Clay’s fault.”

  Peter caught a glimpse of what he took to be the truth. “Perhaps not. Perhaps he did protect her…not a stupid thing to do since that was the best way of winning you, the sort of gesture you would approve of, and did. But even if that is what happened, he is still the man who had her put away and because of that she is dead.”

  “I put her away. The responsibility is mine.” Blaise gave full weight to the proud pronoun.

  Peter respected his father’s inability to misrepresent himself and so, for telling the truth, he gave Blaise precisely what he deserved. “Then Enid was right. You do love Clay. And you are mad.” Before Blaise could respond Peter flung open the door to the terrace. A cold wind chilled them both. “Not that there’s anything to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary. You’re to be envied. I don’t love anyone except Diana, and that’s not really in your grand style at all. I just wish it had not been Clay. He is not worthy. But then it’s no business of mine. Anyway,” he smiled, recalling something Aeneas had once said, “it is the quality of the passion that matters, not the object.” Peter stepped outside, and shut the door after him.

  Peter stood on the terrace and took deep breaths, as though wanting to clear his lungs of all the air he had ever breathed in Laurel House. Then light-headed from too much oxygen and not feeling the cold at all, he crossed the lawn. Beneath his heavy tread, frozen grass made a crackling sound as he proceeded past the marble Venus and the plaster Pan, last relics of Frederika’s time.

  To his surprise, Peter found himself thinking of Billy Thorne whom he had met by accident a few weeks before at the house of a conservative banker whom Peter saw from time to time, partly because he had always known him but mostly because he could, in a matter of minutes, determine by his host’s conversation the spiritual weather not only of the conservative establishment but of their President, a confused and confusing figure who had, by agreeing to a truce with the North Koreans (while seeming to prosecute with vigor the holy war against Communism) delighted Peter both in the deed, which he thought admirable, and in the word which he found perfectly American in its unconscious hypocrisy. He was not surprised to find Billy in the banker’s house for though Billy was not yet a convert to Catholicism (the usual last harbor for disillusioned absolutists of the Left), he did talk a good deal on television about the Communist conspiracy. Yet for all his activity, Billy seemed oddly subdued when Peter greeted him. They spoke of McCarthy and Billy said that crude as the man was, he had done good work in bringing to light the extent of the Communist conspiracy. To which Peter responded by saying that, personally, he had been shocked at how small and poorly organized the Communist conspiracy was, assuming that McCarthy had revealed any of it. Then he asked Billy what it was that had convinced him finally that Marx was wrong and Eisenhower right. Wanting to appear consistent, Billy twisted and turned his arguments in such a way that Marx and Eisenhower became briefly the Castor and Pollux of a new order. But then he was candid. “I realized that you cannot change anybody except at the point of a gun and I didn’t want to hold that gun.” But Peter’s suggestion that perhaps change might be accomplished less dramatically, was not acceptable to Billy’s extremist nature. When one god failed it was necessary to choose another, and Peter, godless, thought it tactless and cruel to censure a temperament so unlike his own.

  Now he stood at the edge of the pool in which a log of wood had been placed to keep expanding ice from cracking the cement. For an instant the sun shone, and the pale rays warmed him; then clouds hid sun and sky; soon snow would fall. He crossed to the poolhouse and tried the door to the men’s changing room but it was locked. At the far end of the terrace, he paused and looked down at the half-frozen river and thought of James Burden Day.

  It had been a desperate time for them all, particularly when Diana had tried to persuade Ed Nillson to bring suit against Harold Griffiths and Nillson had told her bluntly that the story of the land sale was true. Diana had not mentioned her father again to Peter except once when they were trying to determine exactly how much money Blaise had spent on Clay’s election to the Senate. The figure they arrived at was close to two million dollars. Deploring not only his father’s extravagance but the system that made it necessary, Peter denounced both until Diana said, “They all do it. So why shouldn’t Clay and your father?”

  “For one thing it is—not that I suppose anybody cares—illegal.”

  “What on earth does that mean?” She was contemptuous. “Law does not apply to them. And no one is in the least distressed except you and me, and poor Father who felt that he had to play the game their way and, when he did, was promptly caught. That’s what killed him.”

  “Being caught?”

  “No, trying to be like them. He really believed that there were some things one ought not to do while Clay realizes that the only thing one ought never to do is lose the game. That’s why he’ll win. He’s exactly what the times require.”

  To which Peter had responded, inevitably, “Then we must see to it his winning is not easy.”

  She had agreed to that. The longer they knew one another, the closer they became, and Peter was now certain that the moment was almost at hand when he could make the gesture that at last she required and he had always wanted but was not about to make until he was certain that her distaste for Clay was not simply one of the usual masks for love. Now he was as certain of her as he could be of anything and though he had begun by caring more for her than she had cared for him, by withholding a part of himself, not to mention the fact of marriage, her feelings had shifted into balance with his own. Finally, not only was she what he wanted, she was what he needed for she alone understood the sudden storms of revulsion against his own kind which periodically caused him to despair, and though she shared with him his disgust, she never even briefly ceased to think it worth the effort to continue to say and do what ought to be said and done. Loving her for this constancy, he was often able in her company to forget for long moments what he knew to be the human case: that the generations of man come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.

  8 May 1962, Barrytown, New York— 15 September 1966, Rome

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.

 

 

  Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
Share this book with friends