The Golden Age (6 page)

Next to the President, Mrs. Douglas continued her conversation into his right ear while he addressed, down table, the Youth of the Nation, radical division.

“I gather you young people distinguished yourselves this morning before Mr. Dies’s Committee …”

“Only he wasn’t there,” said Eleanor.

“He knew he had met his match when he heard you were coming.”

“Hardly. Actually, I was ever so mild.”

“I’m sure the rest of you were not so mild.” The President looked at the youthful witnesses—to what? wondered Caroline. Some were, no doubt, actual communists, or had thought they were, until communist Russia and Nazi Germany had made their alliance in August and the American left had behaved like an anthill struck by lightning. Before this astonishing event, the Youth Congress had, more or less, followed the communist line, supporting the New Deal at home while supporting France and England against Hitler abroad. Now, if Blaise was to be believed, directions from Moscow were instructing the faithful to join the isolationists. Mrs. Roosevelt, as one of the guiding spirits of the Youth Congress before the infamous pact, was in a delicate position. She had already been bitterly denounced by political conservatives as well as by pro-Nazi groups like the German-American Bund. Thus far, she had sailed serenely above the tempest, but the unexpected alliance of communists and Nazis could not be so easily sailed through.

“I must say they all behaved very well.” Eleanor was maternal but, again, Caroline caught the cold alert eye even as she dripped honey; she was constantly calculating and assessing. “Why, one of them even suggested …” She turned to the scruffy boy beside her. “Tell them, John, what you proposed to the committee.”

John was not as nervous as Caroline would have been at President Roosevelt’s table for the first time. “Well, Mr. President, I proposed to the committee that a resolution be submitted to Congress for the abolition of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities.”

“What happened?” Franklin was leaning forward, elbows on the table, a characteristic gesture when he was particularly interested in what someone else was saying.

“Well, sir, the acting chairman, a gentleman from Alabama, was very polite and he said that that was my right as an American citizen,
and he would let what I say go onto the record in spite of what he called my slanderous remarks.”

“I love it!” Franklin turned to Melvyn Douglas. “If I could only put a sheet over my head and hide in the back row.”

“I’m sure,” said Douglas in his most suave voice, “you would have been greeted as an honored emissary from the Ku Klux Klan.”

The conversation became general except for Mrs. Douglas, beautiful eyes flashing with intelligence and firmness of purpose, as she continued to speak into the President’s constantly moving right ear.

The food was, as always, inedible. Caroline had had a long experience of the infamous Roosevelt table, which dated back to when Eleanor had discovered that her husband was committing adultery with her social secretary, a Maryland beauty called Lucy Mercer. Eleanor had then moved like a conquering army onto a battlefield where she imposed her conditions of peace. If Franklin chose, she would grant him a divorce so that he could marry Lucy, who would then become the stepmother of their five children, and Eleanor would go her solitary way. At this point, onto the field came Franklin’s mother, the formidable Mrs. James Roosevelt, who told her son that if he went through with a divorce, she would disinherit him, which meant that he would have no money of any kind and lose forever the Hudson Valley estate at Hyde Park. Finally, no one needed to point out to him that a divorced man could not have a career in politics. “So,” Caroline murmured to Tim, “he gave up Lucy, I think.”

“You think?” As a rule, Tim disliked gossip of the who is with whom and why sort. But this was part of the history he was starting to record.

“I said
think
,” said Caroline, carefully drowning a heavily fried chicken croquette in a viscous sea of white cream sauce that was slowly coagulating into library paste, “because—I think—he still sees her, they say.”

“How do
they
know?”

“How do they always seem to know everything? Lucy married happily but apparently, every now and then, the two meet. She’s supposed to have sat in the back of a car at his first inauguration and watched it all.”

“How very romantic.”

“I think it is. Anyway, he and Eleanor lead separate lives. She’s always on the move. Even so, they are very much a team. I can’t fathom what they think of each other. There is a basket beside his bed and whenever she’s here, she fills it every night with notes, things to be done, people to see. Oh!”

Caroline had seen what she’d been longing for Tim to see: The Salad. It had materialized at the President’s end of the table. From afar, it looked to be a milky mound, studded with golden and red splotches like some rare disease. “Part of Eleanor’s revenge for Lucy has been Mrs. Nesbitt, a cook from Hyde Park, now the housekeeper who commands the kitchen where … Well, look!” Caroline gazed at the drowned but still intact chicken croquette. Tim had already eaten his.

“It wasn’t so bad. Just like Holy Cross.”

“I’m sure nothing like The Salad was ever seen at Holy Cross. It is Mrs. Nesbitt’s most belligerent creation.”

“It appears to have the stigmata, a very Holy Cross touch.”

“Watch the President.”

The black waiter had presented the huge mountain of a salad to the President’s back.

“What’s in it?” Tim had put on his glasses.

“Mostly mayonnaise from a jar, with slices of tinned pineapple, carved radishes—the ones with spongy interiors—and, sometimes, deep under the mayonnaise, there is cottage cheese decorated with maraschino cherries, to add gaiety to this Hudson Valley Staple.”

The President, aware of the waiter on his left, turned expectantly. When he saw The Salad his smile ceased; sadly, he shook his head, lips moving to frame: “No, thank you.”

“Now watch Eleanor,” Caroline whispered. Their hostess was watching her husband with relish. She had already got halfway through her own salad and now she was watching him grimly: would her husband take his punishment? He would not. When the waiter was obliged to move on, Eleanor simply looked more than ever resolute.

Tim was awed. “She is taking a great revenge.”

“It’s positively Greek, isn’t it? Euripides. The Furies.”

“Actually, I think I’m going to like this.” Tim helped himself generously to The Salad. Out of the corner of Caroline’s eye, she saw that Eleanor was smiling with approval: Tim was making a hit.

At the end of dinner, the President vanished and Mrs. Roosevelt and her brood retired to the oval study, the Douglases in attendance.

“I’m here,” said Caroline outside the door to the Queen’s room. “Come on in. We’re not expected to join the seminar. Eleanor has a nicely haphazard way with guests. You come and go as you please. Some have actually stayed a month or more. There are also a dozen rooms on the floor above.” They sat before an unlit fire. Rose was the predominant color in the room. “The President’s secretary lives up there above us, in a nice suite.”

“Missy Le Hand.” To Caroline’s surprise, Tim knew her name. But then he lived in America full-time and read the press, while she was now once more a foreigner.

“She’s the actual wife, at least when it comes to arranging his life, keeping the sons out of jail, running the office, telling him which angry letters not to send. She’s very wise.”

“Mrs. Roosevelt …”

“… is not jealous. Relieved, I’d say. They get on very well, the two wives.”

“Positively French,” said Tim, reprising Caroline.

Caroline found it curious to be once again in such close proximity to someone with whom she had, for the most part contentedly, lived and then, for no reason other than geography, parted from. “You see, I had to go back to France,” she heard herself say.

“I don’t think I ever asked you why you had to.” Tim was cool. “Why?”

“Did I never tell you?”

“If you did, I’ve forgotten.”

As they had parted for no reason, they were now for no reason reunited, each trying to inhabit a previous self, and each quite willing to say exactly what was thought if not necessarily felt.

“I suppose I felt, or thought,” Caroline edited herself, “that I’d come to the end with movies as I had with publishing the
Tribune
.”

Tim removed the cellophane from a small thin parchment-brown cigar; he bit off the end. “Nobody gets to the end with movies. But they do get to the end of us pretty fast.” He puffed blue smoke.

“I thought I was old then. I see now I wasn’t, really.”

“At least not so old as you are now.”

“Thank you. I needed that. Life is less than fair to women.”

“I don’t need to hear that. At least not from you to me. Maybe from Emma Traxler to Melvyn Douglas. What
are
you doing here?”

“I have found a book.”

Tim looked alert. “To be filmed?”

“No. To be published. A manuscript. It was in a box. At the chateau. The memoirs of my grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. The historian.”

Tim nodded. “Wasn’t he the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr?”

“The same. In 1876 he left Europe, where he lived, with his daughter Emma. She was a widow. He was a widower. They were flat broke. It was the year of the American Centennial. So he came home to write about his native land and she came looking for a husband.” Caroline wondered how much she should tell.

“She got the husband, didn’t she? Your father, with all that money and the French chateau and all those … was it railroads?”

“Yes. But to begin with he had a great many New England encaustic tiles. Whatever they are—or were.”

As Caroline told Tim her story, she began, inadvertently, to start turning the narrative into a movie, aware that she was now decades too old to play her dark—the adjective always used to describe her beautiful, but dark in every sense—mother. Perhaps she could cast herself as Mrs. Astor, the sovereign of New York society. “My father wrote his impressions of the country that legendary year when the Republicans stole the presidential election from the Democrats.”

“Political movies do even worse at the box office than baseball movies.” Tim parroted movie wisdom; yet he himself was always eager to show on the screen how people actually lived, a political action if there ever was one, and some of the time he had even attracted large audiences.

“Mr. Capra has proven otherwise.” Caroline knew how sincerely Tim disliked Capra’s syrupy films about Washington.

“I hope your story isn’t for him.”

“No. It is too … dark.” That adjective was now filling up her head. “Emma got William Sanford to marry her. That part was easy. But the hard part, the dark part, was when she killed her best friend, his wife, Denise, who died giving birth to my half brother Blaise.”

Tim whistled blue smoke; then stubbed out his cigar. “How did she kill her?”

“Deliberately withheld information, withheld the medicine that would have saved her. By the end of his memoir, my grandfather knows the whole story. He had found out what she had done and, worse, had not done. And it killed him.”

There was a long silence, broken finally by laughter from the oval study. “So Emma married Sanford, gave birth to you, and lived happily ever after.”

“No. After I was born,
she
died of complications. There’s a dark sort of symmetry in this story. Anyway, I shall publish it, though my daughter will be shocked.”

“What about Blaise?”

“It’s my mother, not his. Besides, the Burrs fascinate him. My grandfather once worked in Burr’s law office. He’s done a sort of biography of him, as hero, with Jefferson and Hamilton as villains.”

“That’s what Burr would think.”

Caroline nodded. Actually, she had always found her ancestor far more humanly attractive than any of the other founding fathers even though there was little doubt in her mind that he had been, at times, quite mad. “Now you know why I came back.”

“I’d hoped we could reopen the Sanford-Farrell Studio. After all these depressions and financial panics, rapes and murders and drug addictions that we have lived through, the movies are now a huge business. It takes real genius to fail—commercially that is.”

There was a rap at the door. It was Mrs. Roosevelt. Caroline and Tim rose. “I’ll wash out the ashtray,” said Tim, dutifully going to the bathroom with the remains of his dead cigar.

Eleanor laughed. “Don’t bother. This is an old politicians’ retirement home. People do nothing but puff cigar smoke at you, while Franklin smokes far too many cigarettes.”

Eleanor sat down. “I’ve just come to say good night. I hope my lame ducks—as Franklin calls them—weren’t too dull for you.”

“Fascinating, Mrs. Roosevelt. For me,” said Tim, “especially now.”

He told her about the documentary. Caroline was surprised at how knowledgeable Eleanor was about filmmaking, but then she had spent the last dozen years in front of newsreel cameras. Eleanor thought it would be a good idea for Tim to do a series of short interviews with some of the leading interventionists. “But only the very … uh, subtle ones, if you know what I mean.”

“I shall need a list.”

“That’s one thing we do rather well around here. I’ll see you get one.”

“Could I interview you?”

“Oh, I’m far
too
subtle on that subject. Also, my young people really hate the idea of any sort of war with anyone and I must say they tend to influence me—up to a point—rather than the other way around. After all, they know that they will be the ones who will have to fight.” She rose. “I’ll get you your list, Mr. Farrell. Good night, Caroline.” She was gone.

“Neither one ever says what he means and yet they both appear to be so candid, so …” Caroline tried for a new word: “Transparent.”

“I find him pretty opaque. But then I’ve only seen him in action once, fighting off The Salad.”

For an instant Caroline wondered if she and Tim could ever live together again. She was, of course, far too old for him, too old for any sort of sex, or so she had convinced herself. But that need not be the link or, indeed, anything at all, as she had observed in the case of the interesting, if sometimes baffling, friendship between Franklin and Eleanor. Each in a separate bedroom, and often city, yet sharing an entire nation between them while, privately, he had Missy Le Hand for an efficient selfless wife and Eleanor had, it was rumored, several lady friends, of whom a journalist named Lorena Hickok was the one that she most saw; traveled with; allowed to use a spare bed in her White
House suite as well as in her getaway cottage at Hyde Park. This sort of relationship came as no surprise to Caroline, who had attended the same girls’ school as Eleanor, the creation of a distinguished lesbian named Mademoiselle Souvestre. The atmosphere of the school had been something of a hothouse where usually nipped-in-the-bud emotions blossomed and flourished, all intensely described in an unpublished novel by one of the teachers, who had given it to André Gide to read, who had then given it to Caroline, with a smile: “Your old school, I believe.” But none of this had been, or would ever be, Caroline was certain, shared with the American people, although at least one journalist, Joe Alsop, cousin to Eleanor, liked to go on and on about her Sapphic attachments, which, he claimed, included a fan-dancer from the recent World’s Fair.