The Golden Age (34 page)

Caroline sympathized. “Will he ever be able to get rid of her?”

“Only if he divorces Eleanor first. Anyway, those White House guests who really matter know enough to get something to eat
before
coming to a meal here. Have you seen Franklin lately?”

Caroline shook her head. “He’s been somewhat busy. And I’ve been busy, too. Winding up things.”

Laura found a glass of sweet California sauterne, the Roosevelt staple wine. To Caroline’s horror, she dropped two tablets of saccharine into the wine and waited for them to dissolve. “I can’t say I care for the way he’s looking.” Laura sipped her enhanced wine. “He’s too thin. Cadaverous, really. Between him and Harry Hopkins it’s like a hospital ward.” Laura moved on to a group of relatives clustered by the fire.

Caroline sat beside Hopkins on the sofa nearest the door. “Where’s your wife?”

“Mingling with Roosevelts. This is family day.”

Hopkins’ face was so white that his eyes looked black. “We’re traveling soon.”

“Tomorrow, they say. Together?”

Hopkins did not answer. “He’s still insisting on unconditional surrender.”

“Doesn’t that prolong the war?”

Hopkins shrugged. “There are always special conditions for an unconditional surrender. Anyway, it has a nice sound of finality. And, of course, it’s what Lincoln and General Grant insisted on, back in the Civil War. Why do we never see you?”

“You are a couple. A family. In Georgetown. I am only a widow. And not so merry.”

“When I come back, try to stop in …”

“In Georgetown?” Since Caroline and Harry’s wife, Louise, had nothing at all in common except Harry and as he proved to be far too much for just one or the other, Caroline had properly left the field to the wife.

“Of course not in Georgetown.” Harry’s smile was sardonic. “I meant here. The White House. I’ve never seen the Boss so lonely. Eleanor has taken to the open road. Missy’s dead. And I’m hardly here anymore.”

“Health?”

Hopkins waved to friends across the room. Presently, Caroline would lose him to the great world. “Partly health. Partly fatigue. I’m viewed with suspicion. Too many people think I’m pro-British. Pro-Russian. Pro-communist …”

“Does that make the President nervous?”

“Hard to tell with him. He must deal so often with the appearances of things that you never know what actually matters to him as opposed to what
looks
to matter.”

“Surely they are the same thing. You must seem to get along with Stalin for the President’s sake, which means you must actually get along with him, I should think.”

The gnomelike sharp-tongued secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, joined them. He gave Caroline a perfunctory greeting; then, “What sort of speech did you write him?”

Hopkins shook his head. “I wasn’t asked. Sam’s on the case. It’ll be
short. That’s all I know. Short because he wants to stand the whole time.”

“Oh, God!” Ickes looked concerned. “I thought he couldn’t get up on those braces anymore.”

Ickes looked suspiciously at Caroline, who said, “I’m a fellow conspirator, too.”

Across the room, Eleanor was standing with a group of lady friends; she beamed and waved when she saw Caroline, who joined her.

“You’re here to cheer us up on this dismal day.” They embraced. “When they asked Franklin why he didn’t want a parade, he said, ‘There’s no one left in town to march.’ I’m afraid it’s going to be fearfully gloomy.”

“I’m sure the President will liven things up.”

Eleanor’s smile never faded, just as her eyes never ceased to watch the guests. Then a familiar figure approached. It was Caroline’s neighbor in the Wardman Park Hotel, the outgoing vice president, Henry Wallace, a tall, somewhat Lincolnesque figure who had been sacrificed to the party’s Southern conservatives.

“Dear Henry,” said Eleanor; she was known genuinely to like and admire this reputedly mystical, definitely intellectual figure, so out of place, Caroline had always thought, in American political life. Caroline asked after his black dog, whom she often met in the elevator.

“He hates the cold. I’m trying to invent some sort of slippers for him. I’m experimenting with rubber. From a tire inner tube. But so far they keep slipping off.” Wallace turned to Eleanor. “I’ve just been told that I’m to swear in the new vice president.”

Eleanor giggled. “You do have your priestly side, Henry. And think what a good start it will be for Mr. Truman. Oh!” she looked toward the fireplace, where the small, gray, thickly bespectacled Senator Truman was standing, unnoticed, with his very large wife. “There he is. There
they
are. I must say hello. I don’t think they’ve ever been up here before.” She crossed to the fireplace.

Caroline said, “Will you be leaving Wardman Park now?”

Wallace shook his head. “No. I’m supposed to stay on. In the Cabinet. Or so the President tells me. He tends sometimes to vagueness.”

The guests were now being guided inexorably to the chilly South Portico.

Caroline paused just inside the doorway; beside her stood the President’s eldest son, Jimmy, a tall man in uniform, going bald. “We’re almost ready for Pa,” he said. He and Caroline were old acquaintances.

Caroline was prepared to make idle conversation with Jimmy Roosevelt but, to her surprise, he had a good deal to say, all the while watching the closed door between the President’s bedroom and the oval study. “It’s going to be a nightmare when this war’s over. Because we’re going to have millions of hillbilly boys on our hands who don’t know how to do anything except to kill people.”

“Isn’t—wasn’t that—true after every war?”

“Not on this scale. Anyway, look what happened last time. When the veterans got hit by the Depression, they marched on Washington to ask for a bonus and General MacArthur shot at them. Pa also says it was even worse after the Civil War when the country was full of all these men with no work, riding the rails … hobos they called them. Well, this time we could have millions of hobos on our hands. And I know these boys. I’ve served with them. I know that if we don’t find something for them to do, all hell is going to break loose.”

Quietly, a valet appeared at the bedroom door. Slowly, he pushed the President’s chair into the now empty study. Roosevelt wore a lightweight suit and no overcoat. The outline of his heavy metal braces was visible through thin trouser material. In the year since Caroline had last seen him, he had lost weight and his shirt collar was loose. Most alarming, the head was so bowed that his chin rested on his breast, as if he were unconscious.

Jimmy heard Caroline’s sudden intake of breath. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The old warhorse is ready.” Within a yard of Caroline, the great head was slowly raised at the sight of her and the eyes came into focus. A blue-lipped smile was abruptly switched on. “Caroline!” The voice sounded strong.

“Mr. President.” Caroline shook his hand and then, to her own amazement, she did a full court curtsy.

“Bravo!” he said. “The same curtsy you did for Queen Elizabeth in
Mary Stuart
. Even so, I still prefer you in
Huns from Hell
.”

“I was certainly never nobler.”

When Caroline saw that valet and son were now preparing to lift the President from his chair, she started to slip out the door, but FDR said, “Stay. The more the merrier. Actually, since I’m going to walk, I’m going to need as much window dressing as possible. So you stay close to my side, next to Jimmy.”

The two men lifted the President a foot in the air: then, plainly a dead weight, he dropped back into the chair with a bump.

Caroline reached for a carafe of whiskey and filled half a tumbler. With shaking hand, the President took the glass and drank the contents as if it were water. Color returned to his face. “You can say what you will about the new ways in medicine but the old are still the best. Yet Eleanor never stops complaining about how bad it is for me to stay up at night with Winston drinking. Finally, I had to tell her, ‘The problem with drink is on
your
side of the family, dear, not mine.’ ”

Once again the two men, very carefully, tugged the President upright; and the valet locked his braces. FDR stood, swaying a moment. Then he said: “In my end is my beginning.” He smiled at Caroline. “I still remember your last words.”

Aided now by a Secret Service man, the President swung first one leg then the next, back and forth from hip to brace, like some sort of absurd toy.

As they appeared on the portico, the band played “Hail to the Chief”: the crowd below on the lawn cheered. Caroline stayed near the President, who was not so much standing on braces as being held in place all during the national anthem, a prayer, the swearing in of the vice president. Then the chief justice of the United States, Bible in hand, stood back of a lectern which the President now clutched and, in full view of crowd and cameras, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for the fourth time, swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, “so help me God.”

A short speech was on the lectern in front of him. The voice was hesitant at first; then it grew clearer as he held himself upright with two never very steady hands. Caroline was reminded of the Pope when he spoke to the city—Rome—and to all the world beyond.
Ad urbe et orbi
. “Things will not always run smoothly,” he warned. The paper made a
sound as it brushed the microphones; he pulled back. “The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward …” This ought to have been true in a Darwinian world but Caroline was agnostic on the subject. He did concede that “our own Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base …” A cold stillness seemed to envelop all the world; his voice alone sounding as, delicately, he alluded to the next task: “We cannot live alone at peace … our well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away …”

Caroline could hear a woman behind her softly sobbing. Who? Why? “We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community …” He quoted Emerson. “ ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’ ” How odd, thought Caroline, that the one thing that earth’s new master could never himself be to anyone, he now proposed that his nation be—or appear to be—to everyone, a friend.

At the end, there was a great burst of applause from the South Lawn below: strong applause from those on the portico. Simultaneously, Caroline and Jimmy met like two sides of a curtain coming together in order to shield the President from the view of the crowd. Then, once the valet knew that they were out of public view, he unlocked the braces and the President fell into his chair.

Caroline turned to the source of the sobbing. All in black stood the widow of Woodrow Wilson, confronted for a second time in her life with the pale horse that marks the death of kings. Caroline crossed herself; and shuddered in the cold.

Caroline had first known Lady Mendl when she was Elsie de Wolfe and, if not the first, certainly the most successful of the early century’s interior decorators. She was also one of the first professional women to live with another woman in a relationship that neither bothered to euphemize; there was no nonsense about a white or Boston marriage. They were, simply, a delightful couple who entertained interesting people in New York and Paris, always in small perfect rooms. Caroline thought of their settings as essentially dollhouses. Elsie’s friend was a literary agent and Elsie herself had literary inclinations. The never easily pleased Henry Adams himself delighted in their company during that long bright unbroken summer before the First World War. Then, in readiness for a new world, Elsie had married some sort of English civil servant called Sir Charles Mendl; as he was neither rich nor decorative, the marriage was an ongoing mystery that none bothered to solve. People came to Elsie for the other people that she had cast to decorate her rooms. During the Hollywood of the war years, she was counted
among such distinguished European émigrés as Stravinsky, Mann, Huxley, Schoenberg, and, like them, she was—though American—expected to go “back” to Europe now that, as of this morning, May 8, 1945, Germany had surrendered. Since most of the islands of the Pacific had been occupied by American forces and a huge new bomber called the B-29 had made rubble of much of Tokyo, it was assumed that Japan would soon collapse.

A joyous day, thought Caroline, walking up the dark red-brick path to Elsie’s latest dollhouse, a white frame building set among flower beds and exotic trees that produced Technicolor blossoms. The effect was like MGM’s notion of a humble cottage in the English countryside, no longer menaced by Hitler, who had killed himself the previous month just after President Roosevelt’s abrupt death at Warm Springs, Georgia. As the world stage was being emptied of the great players, what looked to be ill-rehearsed understudies were taking their places in the ruins of Berlin, the chaos of Rome, the echoing White House where a dim former senator with thick glasses seemed altogether too aware that he ought not to be there but, as he was there, he doggedly soldiered on.

“We must chat a moment
before
the others come.” Elsie had been firm on the telephone.

In the living room, banked with flowers, Elsie sat in a straight-back chair. In the ten years since they had last met, Elsie had acquired a smooth pink-and-white enamel face and, as if to fit more easily into her latest dollhouse, she had, startlingly, shrunk in the process; yet her energy was undiminished. She hurried forward to embrace Caroline. “You don’t change!” she said, almost accusingly.

“Neither do you.” Thus ladies lie, thought Caroline, reassured, even comforted, that the somewhat reduced Elsie was actually so little changed. There were not many left at that certain age which each of them had got to at her own pace and in her own way; able, at last, temporarily perched, to look about in some surprise at those who had made it, too, almost always—if not the wrong—the unexpected ones.

Caroline sat beside her hostess; took orange juice from a waiter. Elsie’s nose seemed to have got more arched and sharp with age; it
was now like that of an early Roman emperor or, perhaps, a paper knife.