Gore Vidal (3 page)

On the train chugging westward he read John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty
. The Declaration of Independence,
On Liberty
, and the Lone Star State seemed the right fit. Texas politics and opportunities glittered in the near distance. Perhaps there would not be as many people above him on the greasy pole as in Mississippi. First, though, he had to make a living. At the end of 1896, he and Dixie opened a law office; they soon had many cases but few fees. The nationwide depression of 1893 still pinched the pocketbooks of millions of people. Also, compared to oratory and politics, the law was dull, and he soon felt depressed. With his romantic dreams of high office on indefinite hold, he began to repeat to himself Cardinal Wolsey's lament, “Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.” Handsome, smart, and articulate, he was intriguingly attractive and attracted to women. In 1895 a blind girl in Corsicana accused him of having made her pregnant. Gore tried to get her to abort with medicines. They finally succeeded with a blunt instrument. For whatever his reasons, he would not marry her. Perhaps the thought of a blind man being married to a blind woman seemed devastating to the aspiring politician. Apparently hopeful that a jury would not convict a blind man for seduction and abortion, he defied her threat to take him to court. At the last minute he begged her not to testify against him. It would ruin his life. Perhaps he promised compensation. When she relented, the case was dismissed. As part of the arrangement, his parents, who had followed their sons to Texas, took the girl in for a short while. In August 1896 he turned down an invitation to give a series of speeches in the main town, Palestine, in nearby Anderson County, because it conflicted with a speaking engagement elsewhere, but his brother Dixie forgot to send the telegram of regret. On his way to the station he received a second telegram, reminding him of the invitation, and he wired to Anderson County that he would come for a week. In Palestine, driven past the large ranch of John Thomas Kay, a white-bearded fifty-four-year-old East Texas pioneer, he asked his host to describe Mr. Kay and his daughter, and a few days later, at a county picnic, he met the dark-haired, dark-eyed, trimly petite, engagingly lovely Nina Belle Kay. “
I fell in love
with her the moment we met and made up my mind that day to marry her one day if I could.” A serious circumstance conspired against the marriage: Nina's family did not want her to marry a blind man.

Probably of Scots origin, the Kay family had come to Texas from Anderson County, South Carolina. Born about 1842, the seventh child of James Warren Kay and his second wife, John Thomas Kay had fought at Bull Run. He had survived a long war. Like many, he eventually preferred the hard but independent life of a Texas pioneer to poverty at home. About 1875, after selling his interest in his family land to one of his brothers for fifty dollars, John, with wife (in late 1868 he had married Marcella McLaughlin, a beautiful Mississipian of Creole origin), three children, and livestock, traveled by covered wagon to Palo Pinto County in North-Central Texas. The fifty dollars was all the money he had in the world. Along the route the grass was lush, water and firewood plentiful. But West Texas was harsh. The first winter they burrowed into a sod dugout and cooked on buffalo chips. More at home in farming than grazing country, they soon resettled in East Texas, near Palestine, in Anderson County, which had been named after Kay's home county in South Carolina. The land was rich, the hills rolling and wooded. In 1877, while still in Palo Pinto, Marcella gave birth to twin daughters, one of whom died. The surviving twin was Nina Belle Kay. When she met Thomas Pryor Gore in the summer of 1896, Nina Belle was the attractive daughter of a now moderately prosperous East Texas farmer. Her mother had died the previous year. Her father and four brothers “told her that if you marry that blind boy you're going to end up on a street corner with a tin cup. Just begging. She went ahead and did it anyway,” her grandson later commented, “and never regretted it.” They married on December 27, 1900. Her family's opposition was overcome only at the death of Nina Belle's father in the summer of 1899.

Between 1896 and the beginning of the new century T. P. Gore worked hard at law and politics. At first things looked promising. While Dixie minded the office, Tom worked the political hustings. The brilliant blind orator was much in demand. But, as in Mississippi, the leaders of the Democratic Party did not favor divisive populists undermining them from the left. When, in 1898, he ran for the House of Representatives as the Populist Party candidate, he lost decisively. Texas soon began to seem another dead end, as did his allegiance to the Populist Party. Early in the new century he shed both. With his bride, he decided on a new start, this time not to the west but a short distance to the north. Oklahoma was still a territory, actually two, one of them reserved for Indians, including those
who had been driven from the Mississippi lands on which the Gores had settled. Politics and opportunity were more fluid there. Land could be staked. Everyone knew that the territories would eventually become a state. State political offices as well as land would be up for grabs. There would not be as greasy a pole to climb. With his bride beside him, Gore moved to the Oklahoma Territory. After settling in the new town of Lawton, about a hundred miles south of Oklahoma City, where he staked land and opened a law office with Dixie, he immersed himself in territorial politics and soon mastered its complications. Within a few years he became the best-known political orator in the area and a popular guest speaker in nearby states. The decision to shed his Populist Party affiliation came at the cost of his father's bitter criticism: when T.P. joined the Democratic Party, an angry Thomas Madison Gore denounced him at a public political meeting. “Guv” was still, though, against and for all the same things he had always been. But now he had a chance for political office, for the beginning of a real public career. Soon he was one of the most powerful political leaders in the territories, instrumental in the flourishing drive for statehood. In 1905 Thomas Madison died. In November 1907 the legislature of the newly created state of Oklahoma chose thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Pryor Gore as one of its two United States senators.

The Vidal family saga is quintessentially European. The name itself began to appear widely in Spain, France, and Italy about the twelfth century, either a corruption of the Latin
vitalis
or a translation of the Hebrew word for life. By the late Middle Ages some of the many Vidal families throughout the Mediterranean world were Catholic in origin, others Hebrew. Originally the latter may have been Jews living in the Roman Empire or Jews who had journeyed to and then stayed in the empire after its fall. Some Jewish Vidals became converts to Catholicism, often for convenience or safety. Many settled in France as well as Italy. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, large numbers of Spanish Jews also settled in France, Italy, and Greece. Like the Jews who already resided in the Roman world, some retained their Hebraic identity, others converted to Catholicism. After a time both the original and the new conversos often lost awareness of their family's origins. They usually became merchants, tradesmen, and manufacturers.
Some became priests. There was no better place to hide their origins than in the Church itself.

Eugen Felix Vidal, Gore Vidal's great-grandfather, who in 1849 emigrated from Feldkirch in German-speaking Austria to the American Midwest, was a Catholic whose ancestors for five hundred years were apothecaries and merchants. Some had married women whose names suggest they were from once Jewish families. Not unexpectedly, converso families often intermarried, and the pattern continued long after Hebraic origins had become only a rumor or been forgotten. Local oral memory kept alive the rumor that Eugen Felix Vidal's Catholic family was of
Jewish origin
. That the Vidals who emerged in the late eighteenth century in Feldkirch were apothecaries and merchants makes it likely that they descended from the Renaissance Vidals who were apothecaries, a profession that had orginally been largely in the hands of Jews. Eugen Felix Vidal's family in America inherited a sixteenth-century stained-glass medallion, about six inches in diameter, that shows a bearded man, wearing a hat, standing behind a counter, surrounded by jars, drugs, and other apothecary paraphernalia. His name is boldly printed: Casper Vidall. The date is 1589. This Casper Vidall had prospered as a pharmacist in Feldkirch in the late sixteenth century, the scion of a line of drug-manufacturing and -dispensing Vidals. The name then disappears from Feldkirch records, to reappear at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Johann Vidal, from nearby Forni Avoltri, reestablished the family name in Feldkirch. At first he was a successful grocer; then he bought the local pharmacy, first working with a partner who was an apothecary, then by himself. Most likely he hoped that one of his sons would become a doctor or a pharmacist and eventually run the business. After marrying a daughter of the former mayor, he bought a large, centrally located building, soon renamed Vidalhaus, for home and business. When his first wife died, he married Elizabeth Herzog, a German-speaking Catholic from the Tyrol. Their first child was born almost exactly nine months later, in October 1821. Twelve years later Johann Vidal died, leaving a widow who struggled to keep the business going and to support eight children. Around 1848 Elizabeth declared the pharmacy bankrupt and
sold Vidalhaus
.

In August 1849, a year of political turmoil in Europe, Johann Vidal's oldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Eugen Felix Vidal, a student at the University
of Lausanne on Lake Geneva, married the Swiss-born Emma Traxler von Hartman and began to look westward for better opportunities. What Eugen was studying at the university is not clear, though perhaps it was medicine, a speculation that surfaced years later among the American Vidals. That would have been especially plausible for the son of a pharmacist. Emma came from a Swiss family of some interest. Her grandfather, Josef Traxler, was a member of Louis XVI's Swiss guard at Versailles, who escaped the democratic slaughter and fled to Madrid, where he served Charles IV, the Spanish king. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Josef Traxler raised a regiment at his own expense to fight for King Charles and was killed in battle, leaving behind a widow, Isabel, and daughter, Caroline. Either before or after his death, the Traxlers claimed reimbursement from the Spanish crown for the cost of the regiment the lieutenant colonel had raised. Payment was not forthcoming, the Spanish treasury empty. Isabel returned to Lucerne, where she struggled with heavy debt and little income. In Switzerland, the young Caroline also became an Army bride. Eventually, she suffered the same misfortune as her mother. Having married one of her father's Swiss Army comrades, Colonel Ludwig von Hartman, she found herself, after some years, the Widow Hartman. She had three daughters to raise. If Spain, though, would repay Josef Traxler's heirs, all would be well. The Traxlers and their descendents never stopped hoping. In the meantime, Caroline Traxler Hartman's daughter Emma, born in Switzerland in 1828, met Eugen Felix Vidal. When, in 1849, they married in Feldkirch, the only money they had was the elusive Spanish repayment. They soon decided that America was a better bet. Having determined that the prospect of opening a cheese factory in Wisconsin appealed to him more than remaining in the land of his ancestors, he and his bride and his mother-in-law, with a subsidy from the city of Feldkirch, emigrated to the American Midwest.

Little is known about Eugen Vidal for the twenty years between his arrival in America and 1870. Like many other German-speaking Catholic immigrants, the Vidals apparently went directly to the Midwest, to South-Central Wisconsin, first to Monroe, then Sauk City and Bangor (where Eugen paid taxes from 1866 to 1870), and then to La Crosse, in western Wisconsin, across the Mississippi River from Minnesota. The family surfaces in the 1870 census, which gives the forty-nine-year-old Eugen's occupation as chemist (his family's old-world trade) and real estate. Three children were born, Hermania (Fanny) in 1858, Felix in 1862, and Mary in
1864. Caroline Hartman most likely lived nearby or even in her daughter's home. And one day, around the year 1870, Eugen simply picked himself up, left his family, and wandered away. Some years after his disappearance, he returned to Wisconsin, for he was sustained for a short time before his death in 1892 in a nursing home run by the Milwaukee Catholic Sisters of the Poor. One of his children must have attended to his remains, since his gravestone has “Father” engraved on it.

“Father,” but not provider. Emma struggled desperately, the New World even more difficult than the old. The 1880 census lists her as a drapemaker, a seamstress of sorts. Family legend says she worked as a translator “for foreign [-language] magazines and journals,” translating from English into German, French, and Italian. Even if so, it would have been erratic, poorly paid work. The Spanish inheritance must have glittered like even brighter fool's gold. Eugen and Emma's children struggled also. None of them received an education. In the 1880s Hermania worked as a clerk and later married respectably. Family legend says that Mary, who married young, went to Chicago, where she became at best a kept woman, at worst a prostitute. “This was the great family secret. Pure Dreiser,” Gore Vidal recalled. At the age of eighteen the patronymic heir was a laborer. Five years later, in 1885, still living with his mother in La Crosse, Felix Vidal became a machinist, the year after that a fireman for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway. Living at a boardinghouse in La Crosse, he presumably now stoked coal on trains in the upper Midwest. Caroline Traxler von Hartman died in 1883, as many years old as the century. Her daughter, sixty-three-year-old Emma, died eight years later in Hokah, Minnesota, across the river from La Crosse, where she had moved to live with her daughter Hermania.