The Golden Age by Gore Vidal Page A

and Hazel Vandenberg knows everything and simply smiles.”
    “Grand Rapids is very like Paris in these matters.” Blaise was amused. “How do you know she knows?”
    “I’ve been with the three of them. In Hazel’s kitchen. We
all
have our kitchens. I think Mitzi—the charmer’s name—is not what she seems.”
    Blaise sat in a chair opposite Caroline. She noticed that he had developed a tremor in his left hand. “What is all this about?”
    Caroline tried to look mysterious but realized that she had failed: her face was no longer the youthful pane of glass behind which she could produce so many moods—even thoughts or near-thoughts—for the mass audience that had once been hers until age had struck her down in much the same way that the executioner’s ax had taken care of Mary Queen of Scots on the screen while a giant philharmonic orchestra thundered the somewhat too folksy “Loch Lomond.”
    “I’m not sure,” she said, looking out the window at Ninth Street, crowded now with traffic and, despite stern city ordinances enjoining quiet, much horn-blowing. She must speak to the composer, she thought, her mind slipping, for an instant, backward in time to Hollywood days. She realized now—decades too late—that all she hadneeded for the scene was a single bagpipe upon whose dying mournful note the ax would fall, transferring Emma Traxler forever from the constellation of living film stars to those of legend, radiant old light from a long-dead star.
    “Can I trust you?” Caroline liked impossible questions.
    “It depends on what.”
    “Do you want us in the war or out?”
    “Oh!” He made a snorting sound. “I’m on the fence.”
    “A mugwump.”
    “No. Of course I want the Allies to win. Of course, but …”
    “It is the ‘but.’ Always. Isn’t it?”
    They sat in silence while the various clock faces on the wall recorded different times around the world. History was rapidly moving no matter how still they sat.
    “The French government—wherever it may now be—sent me here
pour influencer
 … English!”
    “To influence. I assumed that. Between you and Tim you should be … well, influential. Do you plan to influence me?”
    Caroline smiled at her half brother, whom she had come to like once the fierce war over their father’s estate had ended not long after she had become, all on her own, a successful newspaper proprietor, fulfilling what had been
his
dream.
    “I shall try, of course.…” She was demure. “But you are hardly an isolationist. It’s Franklin I try to work on.”
    “The President!” Blaise laughed. “He knits socks for England. He sends them bundles.”
    “I don’t think so. He is so secret.”
    “Is that why he talks so much?”
    “What better way to keep a secret than to talk all the time? The problem is he can never get too far ahead of popular opinion, particularly in an election year.”
    “Will he run his political fixer, Farley?”
    “Dear Blaise, it will be Roosevelt, again.”
    Blaise stood up smartly. “You
know
this?”
    “I don’t
know
anything, but I can … work things out. First, he’s the only person, he thinks, who can get us through a war. But, moreimportant, to him at least, if he goes home to his beloved Hudson River, he’ll be dead in a month.”
    “What’s wrong with him?”
    “Nothing. Everything. While I was staying at the White House, I invited Dr. Ericson to come by, to look him over. Obviously without his knowing it. But they had a long loving handshake, while Ericson looked deep into his eyes and took his pulse and told him just how much the country needed him. Diagnosis: dangerously high blood pressure. Perhaps angina, too. Deadly fatigue as well as a possible melanoma—that black mole over his left eyebrow.”
    “I shouldn’t think running for a third term was the best sort of cure.”
    “It is the only cure for someone who has nothing to live for except power. In this case supreme power when the war