The Golden Age (15 page)

Meetings were now being held all over Philadelphia as delegates called upon Taft and Willkie in their Benjamin Franklin headquarters; on Thomas E. Dewey at the Walton; and a few, presumably, on Senator Vandenberg at the Adelphia Hotel. For reasons so far mysterious to Peter some once promising candidates were now out of the running; Vandenberg was one. But the great man seemed not to mind, as he continued to receive admirers in his suite while bright young women handed out palmetto fans with the legend “Fan for Van” on them: the ever-increasing summer heat ensured a good deal of fanning on the part of the delegates, of whom very few would cast so much as a vote of gratitude for Vandenberg. When Peter had asked the Senator why he had gone into so few primaries, the round owl eyes looked up to heaven. “Imagine killing yourself for
Vermont!
”

Peter saw glowworms as he stepped from bright sunlight into the dim arena with its huge upper-tier gallery that could seat as many people as the floor itself, according to his own dogged notes. The floor in front of the stage was marked off for the state delegations; each of the forty-eight states had a standard and beneath the state’s name an elephant with an American flag in its trunk. Alongside the standard, uncomfortable folding wooden chairs were ranked, one for each
delegate—seventy-two chairs for Pennsylvania, a half-dozen for tiny Delaware.

Peter circled the hall, notebook in hand. The large stage was dominated by a massive bronze eagle more suitable, Peter thought, for a Third Reich rally than for the rustic republic that gave such kindly shelter to the common man—a turkey would have been a cozier symbol. Certainly, more symbolic. From balconies to left and right of the stage the coats of arms of the states were hung, and red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere. With full lighting, the effect would be cheerful but now, in the half-darkness, the effect was somewhat ominous, the circus out of season.

Peter dutifully noted that Maine and Vermont, the only two states to vote for the Republican candidate Governor Alf Landon in 1936, were given places of honor in the first row, alongside huge Michigan and Indiana. Peter sat in a Maine chair and noticed that the hall smelled a bit like the Barnum and Bailey Circus before the animals—and the people—filled the tent. Dust. Old canvas.

There was a surprising amount of activity on the floor and in the great upper tier. Numerous worried-looking police were conducting some sort of search which involved little more than marching about, looking worried. A number of members of the press were also wandering up and down, as Peter had been doing, getting the feel of the hall.

Journalism was not to be Peter’s life, he decided. Blaise had always said that the
Tribune
would be his one day
if
he proved to be really interested. The “really interested” had always sounded a bit like a threat while the “proved” sounded as if he was on probation. Next year, at twenty, he would graduate from the University of Virginia; then, at twenty-one, the trust fund of his maternal grandmother would bring him untold wealth, thirty thousand dollars a year. Blaise had been furious when he saw the terms of the old lady’s will but Frederika had been pleased. “He won’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“Suppose he does nothing at all?” Characteristically the conversation was held in Peter’s presence, for maximum effect.

“Oh, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?” Frederika’s joy was
intermingled with the friendly malice that she always displayed toward her husband. “Aren’t too many people doing altogether too much nowadays? Imagine having a gentleman in the family.”

“A wastrel!”
Blaise was now red in the face.

Peter was thrilled. “What exactly,” he had asked, “does the average wastrel do?”

“He wastes money! Produces nothing!”

“The money he wastes will be his, not yours, dear. And why should poor Peter produce anything at all? The world,” Frederika proclaimed in her best gracious hostess manner, “is already crowded with useless productions.”

Blaise retreated, raging. But then father and son were seldom at ease with each other. Blaise much preferred his daughter, Enid. She was older than Peter; drank too much; gave the family only trouble. Yet Blaise doted on her as well as on her ambitious young husband, Clay Overbury, a budding politician. Blaise and Clay were far more like indulgent father and grateful son than Blaise and Peter, who was more pleased than not that Blaise and Clay had found, as it were, each other, letting him off the hook. In principle, he had no great objection to Blaise as a father. Ordinarily, their relations were amiable, thanks, Peter had come to realize, to his own phlegmatic nature. He was a born observer; and to observe the world about him required not only tact but a sort of emotional neutrality unknown to his father or, indeed, to any of his family except the enigmatic Caroline, whom he observed with near-obsession: could anyone be so serenely neutral—that word again—as his aunt? Even with her appalling daughter, she never lost control; never gave away her game, whatever that game might be.

Peter daydreamed in a convention hall that would soon be the center of the American political world. He definitely had no gift for journalism, if journalism required any special gift. But then he had grown up in a newspaper family and the trade, hunting down famous people in search of secrets, did not appeal to him, nor did he want for himself to be a quarry for others. He would rather watch than himself be watched, unlike Clay, who was already scheming to be president later on in the century, with Blaise’s passionate help: this meant being forever reinvented by the needs of each observer. One must entirely
lack a character of one’s own to submit to so many eyes. As a subject, history attracted him most, largely because there was always something wrong with it. Caroline had known Henry Adams and his circle, and although Peter found the Adams pessimism too stylized for his taste, he liked the thought of someone who never ceased to observe and ponder and formulate all through a long life only to throw up his hands at the end and say, “I never cared
what
happened, only
why
it happened. Couldn’t find out. Gave it up.” That was very much the right spirit. But Peter sensed a flaw in the Adams conclusion. Why assume there is a why? Why even ask why? Why not simply describe and then let the description answer all the “why” that anyone could want? Of course, Adams had had an odd, for an Adams, religious turn to his mind: the Virgin and the Dynamo. Why the one? Why the other? Why either?

“Would you like to meet your father for lunch?” The rich Rooseveltian voice emerged from a plump young man who had been, until recently, a very, very fat younger man, the quintessential insider-journalist who, with a partner, wrote a political column for the New York
Herald Tribune
. Peter got to his feet and greeted Joe Alsop. “I was thinking about history.”

“About writing it or making it?”

“About what it is, if it is anything at all except different versions of something that probably never was.”

“Detroit! That’s the place for you, Peter. Henry Ford. ‘History is bunk,’ he says. And so is he. Your father’s at the Union League for lunch, with the Willkie people. What they decide today might well be historical. So come along. Watch them closely. I think Willkie has a good chance of defeating Cousin Franklin. Of course, we won’t allow that. But if he’s the candidate, we’re still safe.”

“You mean England’s safe.”

“That’s
we
, dear boy. Same boat.”

“Did you know Henry Adams?”

“If he had a morbid turn of mind, it is possible that he saw me in my crib. No, Peter, I’m not that old. Ask your aunt. The old man doted on her.”

They stepped out into the heat. “We shall now take a streetcar,”
said Joe, reveling in their plebeian adventure. “This is how you get to understand the people, up close, doing their useful sordid tasks.”

With great dignity, Joe leapt onto a streetcar, followed by Peter, who soon realized that they were going in the wrong direction. “Surely they all end up passing the same places.” Joe was not one to admit error.

The Union League was pleasantly old-fashioned. Blaise was holding court in a corner of the club’s dining room with Thomas W. Lamont, Russell Davenport, the onetime boxer Gene Tunney, and Walter Lippmann, whose political columns read like the meditations of an unnaturally benign deity. At the next table sat the young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. He was, like his father in the Great War, a leading isolationist.

Joe and Peter were introduced by Blaise to the table. Chairs were brought. Peter had not seen his father so animated in a long time. Obviously, conventions were good for him. At first, Peter thought he should be taking notes; then quickly realized that he would be seen as a spy, which he was in the sense that the others had come together to make sure that their man was nominated while he was entirely indifferent except as a spectator.

“Cousin Alice is for Taft,” Joe announced. Mention of Alice Longworth always made people smile. Possibly because they knew that a joke was on its way; and so it was. “When I told her not to be such a reactionary snob, that at last we had a true grassroots candidate, she said, ‘Yes, from the grass roots of ten thousand country clubs.’ ” Everyone laughed, including Lamont, who said, rather mildly, “Wendell’s just retired from the board of the First National Bank.”

“Not a moment too soon.” Blaise was brisk. “We don’t want this to be a House of Morgan election like 1916.”

“Then,” said Lamont, “you must all deny that I was in Philadelphia today.”

“I’ve had a long talk with Willkie about the draft.” Lippmann’s Chinese mandarin eyes gleamed above two large pouches. “He’ll support selective service whenever the President is ready to send it to Congress.”

There was a pleased murmur at the table, possibly because, of those present, only Joe Alsop and Peter Sanford were of draft age. “In fact,”
Lippmann continued, “Willkie wishes the President would move more quickly toward rearmament.”

“Will he say this?” Gene Tunney was large, solid, slow; he was considered an intellectual because he had once had tea with George Bernard Shaw. Peter wondered why Shaw was interested in the world’s champion heavyweight prize fighter; wondered how history could ever be written without knowing the motivations of those who appeared to be making it. How to know the unknowable obviously had been too much for Henry Adams. But suppose that personal motivations were unimportant. Peter tried to recall what Hegel had written; then realized that he’d never read Hegel but only recalled what his professor, a sort of T. S. Eliot monarchistic Anglican, had said on the subject. So much to know. So many bad teachers.

The table found it amusing that Willkie had only just switched, officially, from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Joe Alsop, as the table’s know-it-all, acted as instructor, though it was clear to Peter that Lamont, plainly the leader of this enterprise, knew the full story. “He was an Ohio delegate to the 1924 convention, where he acted as a floor manager for Newton D. Baker. A sign of flawed taste.” Peter had forgotten who Baker was. “Then in 1932 he was again a delegate, but this time a floor manager for—ah, you’ve guessed it I can see!—for Newton D. Baker.”

“Thank God he wasn’t for Franklin,” said Lamont.

“Oh, he explains that eloquently.” Joe was eating scrapple, a peculiar Philadelphia dish, not unlike tinned dog food. “When he voted for Roosevelt in 1932 the New Deal wasn’t on the ballot. Had it been, he shouts, he would never have voted for a socialist.”

“A born politician.” Lamont tried to make this sound like a compliment.

The table then discussed the candidate’s private life and whether or not it would become public. For two years Willkie had been having an affair with the book editor of the
Herald Tribune
, Irita Van Doren, once wife to a popular historian, Carl Van Doren. Willkie was eager for culture and Irita was eager to be his muse. “I don’t see any great harm coming of this,” said Lippmann, which sounded to Peter as if he did fear scandal.

Joe, as always, knew most. “When somebody suggested that he stop seeing her—once he’s nominated next Thursday—he said, ‘Oh, every newspaperman in town knows about us.’ ”

“I,” said Russell Davenport, “was the somebody who said that, and I still think it’s potentially dangerous.”

“If they try that,” Blaise was grim, “we’ll discuss Franklin’s affair with Missy Le Hand.”

Lamont turned to Blaise, in mock horror. “Don’t you dare. The President is our savior. Willkie is only our insurance.”

Even Lippmann laughed. Suddenly it occurred to Peter that Lippmann, Alsop, and the mistress of the Hoosier candidate were all employed by the New York
Herald Tribune
. Was this a coincidence?

Blaise shrugged. “The only person we should fear in a matter like this is William Randolph Hearst. He lives for scandal.”

“Happily his palace at San Simeon,” said Joe, “is made of such exquisite crystal that an unkind word could shatter it.”

Blaise turned to Davenport. “Do you still have your headquarters in New York?”

Davenport nodded. “We’re still at the Murray Hill Hotel. We’ve been there since January.” He gave Blaise a card.

So much, thought Peter, for the spontaneous candidacy of the grassroots candidate. He wondered if he would be allowed to write anything of interest. “Who,” he asked Alsop, “is Sam Pryor?”

“From my home state of Connecticut. He’s our Republican state committee man. Why?”

“I keep running into him.”

“He’s working hard for Wendell. He’s also in charge of credentials.” Joe chuckled. “The most important man in Philadelphia, this week.”

“Who is Ralph E. Williams?”

“I don’t know everyone, dear boy.” But Peter had a definite impression that the name had indeed registered. After all, Joe did know everyone that he thought worth knowing. Peter now saw himself as a fearless investigator, making his way through the Philadelphia morgue, where he pried open a metal filing case from which he removed a yellow manila folder—this particular daydream was in full color—containing
an autopsy form with the name “Ralph E. Williams” at the top. Below the name, in bright red letters, was the word “Murder.”