Hollywood by Gore Vidal Page A

inhabitants.
    The departure of the Roosevelts from the White House had restored the city to its traditional countrified dullness. Although the fat, bad-tempered President Taft was depicted as highly lovable and cheery, thanks to the journalists’ inability to break with any cliché, he and his proud pompous wife had not provided much of a center to the Federal drama. The arrival of the Wilsons had been exciting; but then she became ill and he, remote at best, simply became his office. This meant that the eloquent President was most visible and successful in public, while the private bookish Woodrow Wilson was hidden away upstairs in the White House, nursing a sick wife; and adored by daughters.
    Caroline’s efforts to penetrate the Wilson White House had been half-hearted at best. As people, they had not interested her, but now, with this new development, everything was to be seen in a different, lurid light. History had begun to lurch forward or backward or wherever; and Wilson was astride the beast, as old John Hay used to say of poor McKinley. Suddenly, even Edith Wilson began to glow in the middle distance, while the war had created a definite nimbus about the equine head of Miss Margaret Wilson.
    Henry Adams’s ancient servant—as old as he? no, no one could ever be so old—showed them into the study, which had been for Caroline the centerof her entire Washington life, a schoolroom and theater all in one, and presided over by the small, rosy, bald, snow-bearded Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of two occupants of the White House across the street. He was the historian of the old republic and, with his brother Brooks, a prophet and a seer of the world empire-to-be, if it was to be.
    The old man greeted them in front of his modestly spectacular fireplace carved from a block of Mexican green onyx shot with scarlet over whose mantel hung William Blake’s drawing of the mad Nebuchadnezzar eating grass, a constant reminder to Adams of that ludicrousness which tends to shadow human grandeur. In the twenty years that Caroline had known Adams, neither the beautiful room with its small Adams-scale furniture nor its owner had much changed; only many of the occupants of the chairs were gone, either through death, like John and Clara Hay, joint builders of this double Romanesque palace in Lafayette Park, or through removal to Europe, like Lizzie Cameron, beloved by Adams, now in the high summer of her days, furiously courting young poets in the green spring of theirs. To fill his life and rooms, Adams had acquired a secretary, Aileen Tone, a gentlewoman as dedicated as he to twelfth-century music, visibly represented in one corner of the library by a Steinway piano, the equivalent of a wedding ring to Caroline, who was delighted that the old man should be so well looked after. As always, there were “nieces” in attendance. Caroline had been a niece in her day. Now she had settled for friendship, the essential passion of the Adams circle.
    Adams embraced Caroline like a niece; and bowed to Blaise and Frederika. Like royalty, he was not much of one for shaking hands. “He has done it! I am amazed. Now tell me, what was he like?”
    Adams sat in a special chair so angled that the firelight was behind him; even so, the eyes kept blinking like an owl’s at noon. Caroline encouraged Blaise to describe what had happened at the Capitol; and Blaise, as always, was precise, even sensitive to detail. Caroline was particularly struck, as was Adams, by the scene before the mirror. “What could it mean?” Caroline affected innocence, the one quality Adams liked least.
    “He’s in too deep. That’s what it means.” Adams was delighted. “Anyway, it’s done at last.”
    “You approve?” Caroline expected the usual Adams ingenious negative; instead she was surprised by the old man’s enthusiasm.
    “Yes! For once in my life I am with the majority—of the people we know, that is—and I don’t dare say a single critical