Death Before Bedtime

DEATH BEFORE BEDTIME
Gore Vidal
as
EDGAR BOX

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-four novels, six plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His
United States: Essays, 1952–1992
received the National Book Award.

Books by Gore Vidal

NOVELS

Williwaw

In a Yellow Wood

The City and the Pillar

The Season of Comfort

A Search for the King

Dark Green, Bright Red

The Judgment of Paris

Messiah

Julian

Washington, D.C.

Myra Breckinridge

Two Sisters

Burr

Myron

1876

Kalki

Creation

Duluth

Lincoln

Empire

Hollywood

Live from Golgotha

The Smithsonian Institution

The Golden Age

AS EDGAR BOX

Death in the Fifth Position

Death Before Bedtime

Death Likes It Hot

NONFICTION

Inventing a Nation

SHORT STORIES

A Thirsty Evil

Clouds and Eclipses

PLAYS

An Evening with Richard Nixon

Weekend

Romulus

On the March to the Sea

The Best Man

Visit to a Small Planet

ESSAYS

Rocking the Boat

Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

Homage to Daniel Shays

Matters of Fact and of Fiction

The Second American Revolution

At Home

Screening History

United States

The Last Empire

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Imperial America

MEMOIRS

Palimpsest

Point to Point Navigation

In the early 1950s, Victor Weybright, then an editor at E. P. Dutton, suggested that Gore Vidal try writing a mystery novel under a pseudonym. Inspired by writers like Agatha Christie, whose work he knew well, Vidal took the suggestion and began writing mysteries under the name “Edgar Box.” (Edgar suggests Poe, of course, but also Edgar Wallace; Box reminds one of a coffin, although Vidal had recently met an actual family by the name of Box.) In all, he wrote three books as Box, each of them featuring the dashing public relations man and amateur sleuth, Peter Sargeant II.
Death Before Bedtime
was the second book starring Sargeant, who needs to use his considerable charm to hold his own against some of Washington’s toughest politicians.

Victor Weybright, now sadly departed, was delighted with my reincarnation as a writer of mystery stories, and after the commercial success of
Death in the Fifth Position
he insisted that I write another one as soon as possible. I asked: What about? Even a mystery writer does, after all, require a subject.

He had a wheezing chuckle, the product of too much good living, and as he wheezed, red faced, he said in the voice of a schoolteacher, “Write what you know.” So what did I know? I was the grandson of Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and I grew up in the world of politics. At one point my divorced mother remarried Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy man, and we lived grandly for a time on the Potomac in a fine house called Merrywood. After a few years, my mother divorced Auchincloss, who in turn married the mother of Jacqueline Bouvier. What I
knew well was the world of Washington, the world of the ruling class. This world becomes the subject, or at least the setting, for
Death Before Bedtime.

It’s the story of Senator Leander Rhodes, who chairs the committee on Spoils and Patronage—a committee I invented for my own purposes. As you will see, Rhodes suffers an untimely death in his stately home. And so I call again on Peter Sargeant II, my public relations man from New York, who will set out to solve the mystery at hand.

When I think back to this novel, published in 1953, I’m reminded of a dinner party at the White House, some years later. Jack Kennedy was a serious student of mystery novels—which at times interfered with his reading of the latest James Bond epics—and I remember his telling me the plot of an Edgar Wallace novel. In the story, a British prime minister has been warned that after twenty-four hours on a certain day he would be assassinated. I know it sounds macabre, but Jack was fascinated by assassination stories; he was also very relaxed about it and his line was: there is no way you can avoid assassination if your would-be killer doesn’t mind being killed himself. This turned out to be prophetic.

I can still hear Victor wheezing in my ear, repeating advice backward schoolteachers give to young writers: Write what you know. So I wrote what I knew, delivering a story set in Washington, D.C., in the house of a senator (not JFK, who came later in my life). The senator in question is preparing to run for president if one of many enemies does not terminate him before that joyous event. For me, it was amusing to mix politics and murder, which of course have always gone together in this country, often with terrible results—as we discovered on November 22, 1963.

—Gore Vidal, 2010

“You know, I’ve never gone to bed with a man on a train before,” she said, taking off her blouse.

“Neither have I,” I said, and I made sure that the door to the compartment was securely locked.

“What innocents we are,” she sighed, then: “I wish I had a drink.”

“I think you’re an alcoholic.” I was very severe because Ellen Rhodes is an alcoholic, or at least well on her way to becoming one: but of course her habits are no concern of mine; we are just playmates of the most casual sort.

“I wish you’d call the porter … he could get us something from the club car.”

“And have him see us like this? a young man and a young woman enjoying an intimacy without the sanction of either church or state. You’re out of your mind.”

Ellen sighed as she unsnapped her brassière. “There are times, Peter, when I suspect you of becoming a solemn bore.”

I enjoyed, with my usual misgivings, the sight of her slim nude body. She was a lovely girl, not yet twenty-five, with only one marriage (annulled at seventeen) to her credit. Her hair was a dirty blond, worn long, and her eyebrows and eyelashes were black, naturally black, and the brows arched. Her skin was like ivory, to worry a cliché … and her breasts were small and jiggled pleasantly from the vibration of the train as she arranged her clothes in the closet of our compartment. I watched her back with some pleasure. I like backs … only aesthetically: I mean I don’t
make a thing of it, being old-fashioned; yet I must say there is nothing that gives me quite such a charge as a female back, especially the double dimple at the base of the spine, the center of balance a dancer friend of mine once assured me; although in her case the center was a trifle off since she was usually horizontal when not dancing.

“Darling, will you get my bag out from under the bed? the small one. I seem to recall having hidden the better part of a fifth in there just before we left Boston.”

“Very provident,” I said, disapprovingly, but I got the bottle for her and we both had a drink, sitting side by side on the bunk, my bare leg touching hers.

“I feel better,” she said, after gulping a shot. And indeed she even looked better … her eyes shining now, and her face wonderfully rosy. “I love blondes,” she said, looking at me with embarrassing intensity. “I wish I were a real one like you … a strawberry blond exactly.…” But then we rolled back onto the bunk. From far away a conductor shouted: “New Haven!”

“Ellen.”

She moaned softly, her face entirely covered by hair.

“We’re almost there. The train’s just leaving Baltimore.”

“Oh.” She sat up and pushed the hair out of her eyes and blinked sleepily at me.

“I hate men,” she said simply.

“Why?”

“I just do.” She frowned. “I feel awful. I hate the morning.”

“ ‘Morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone which put the stars to flight.…’ ” I quoted sonorously as we dressed.

“Is that poetry?”

“Indeed it is,” I said, pushing up the shade and letting in the cold white light of a December morning. “Picturesque Baltimore,” I remarked, as the train passed slowly through that city of small shabby houses with white doorsteps.

“Coffee,” said Ellen, sitting down with a thump; she is a miraculously fast dresser for a woman … a quality I find both rare and admirable in the opposite sex.

If the waiter thought anything amiss when he served us breakfast in the compartment, he did not betray it; not that I minded particularly, nor for that manner did Ellen … rather, I had a job at stake and I didn’t want to be caught in a compromising position with the daughter of my new client, the incomparable, the reactionary Senator Leander Rhodes, the only adult American male to be called Rhodes without the inevitable nickname Dusty.

“Now I feel better,” said Ellen, after she’d finished two cups of black coffee, the alcoholic fumes of the night before dispelled.

In the year that I had known her she was either just coming out from under a hangover or else going into one, with a moment or two, I suppose, of utter delight when she was in between, when she was high. In spite of the drinking, however, I liked her. For several years she had been living in New York, traveling with a very fast set of post-debutantes and pre-alcoholics, a group I occasionally saw at night clubs or the theater but nowhere else.

I am a hard-working public relations man with very little time for that kind of living. I would never have met Ellen if she hadn’t been engaged for eight weeks last year to a classmate of mine from Harvard. When the eight blissful weeks of engagement to this youth were up, she was engaged to me for nearly a month; I was succeeded then, variously, by a sleek creature from the Argentine, by a middle-aged novelist,
and by a platoon of college boys to each of whom she was affianced at one time or another and, occasionally, in several instances, at the same time. Not that she is a nymph. Far from it. She just likes a good time and numerous engagements seem to her the surest way of having one.