Hollywood (29 page)

Tim smiled his altar-boy smile. “Now the war’s over—and won—I think I’d like to do something on Eugene V. Debs.”

Creel was taken aback. “Debs? But he’s on his way to prison.” The leader of the Socialist Party had never much interested Caroline, but now that she was obliged to see some of the world some of the time through the eyes of her lover, she had become interested in Debs, who had received a million votes for president in 1912. Then, with violent rhetoric, Debs had opposed the war as well as capitalism. He was also given to praising if not, perhaps, reading Marx and Lenin, and he did not view the Bolshevik revolution as inimitable. Briskly, the United States government had charged Debs with violating, through the exercise of free speech, the Espionage Act of 1917. As briskly, a court had sentenced him to ten years in prison. Currently, he was free on appeal. But everyone knew that the Supreme Court would unanimously find him guilty, invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s celebrated condition of when speech was free and when it was not. Speech was absolutely free, he had ruled, except when there was “a clear and present danger.”

If nothing else, Tim had confronted Caroline head-on with the realities of
this, more than ever, strange country whose harsh contradictions she had tended to take for granted. Although she was not as sentimental as he about such abstractions as justice, her Cartesian education made her wary of illogical propositions. Either one could speak freely of political matters or not; if not, do not claim that there is freedom of speech when its exercise means ten years in prison. The “clear and present danger” proposition was, to Caroline, itself a clear and present danger to freedom itself. She had argued as much to Blaise, who had said that she had misunderstood the nature of a republic whose contradictions were, in some mystical way, its strength.

Meanwhile, Creel’s swift energetic crude mind had now taken up the idea of a film about Debs; and found it good. “You know, it’s inspired, Mr. Farrell. You’re quite right. You’ve shown us the Huns from Hell. Well, we’ve taken care of them. So what’s next? The Bolsheviks, communism, socialism, labor agitators, the enemy within our own country. That’s where the real danger is now. Show Debs and Trotsky, working together to enslave every American, something not even the Huns thought of doing because we’re both Christian nations with the same capitalistic systems. But the Bolsheviks have got a new religion that could just take off in this country. Look at the railroad strikes, the coal strikes—you can’t tell me someone somewhere isn’t manipulating our workers in order to destroy our freedoms …”

“Of which,” Caroline was sententious, “freedom of speech is the most important.”

“Absolutely …”

“Even when danger is clear and present …”

“Exactly!” Creel was beside himself with a new crusade. Caroline gave Tim a reproachful look. Tim shrugged. It was inevitable that the Creels would find a new enemy to take the place of the Huns. As Tim described the searing indictment of Debs that Creel would want him to make and that he would not, Edith Wilson drew Caroline into the President’s orbit. “You know, that marvellous actress looks quite a bit like you. Naturally, she’s older.” That was the closest people ever came to working out the identity of Emma Traxler. At first, Caroline had been mystified to discover that no one realized that she was Emma. But Tim had explained it to her: “It’s because people don’t really look at other people if they know them.” Tim’s life work was to see precisely what he saw. “But a stranger who doesn’t know Caroline Sanford will see you on a street and realize that you are Emma Traxler.” This had happened more than once in New York and Washington. But so clearly was she identified with herself among those who knew her that she simply could not be anyone
else. Also, Emma’s hair was different; and her luminous Madonna face was the result of careful lighting which real life—light—cruelly refused to supply.

“Emma Traxler is Swiss, from Unterwalden in Schweiz. A very old family. I knew her in Paris when she was on the stage.” Caroline loved inventing Emma. But then so did the press, who had changed her provenance to Alsace-Lorraine, that lovely divided borderland which had reputedly given the world so much, not least the creator of the Universal movie studio, Carl Laemmle, from neighboring Wsürttemberg.

Colonel House took Caroline’s hand in both of his. Edith withdrew. Like a kindly gray rat, House whispered compliments into Caroline’s ear, particularly for the
Tribune’s
editorial policies. Behind him, the President held court.

“The Allies will be difficult, won’t they?” Caroline had never been able to determine the nature of House’s influence over Wilson. Plainly, the little man was an adroit flatterer in the lay-it-on-thick Texas style; plainly, he was disinterested in the sense that he did not want money or public office, which impressed everyone but Caroline, who knew that to exert power in the world was the most exquisite of all interests; plainly, he was intelligent. The mystery, if mystery there was, had more to do with Wilson’s singularly remote personality than any design, no matter how interested and interesting, of the Texas Colonel. Wilson had no men friends because he believed, as only a university professor could, that he had no equals; certainly this was the impression that he had made on the leaders of his own party, men who took themselves quite as seriously as he took himself. For someone so isolated by his own forbidding rhetoric and by the Constitution’s war-time powers, a Colonel House was a necessary link to the world outside himself.

“… I sail on the fourth of December. I expect, before I go, we’ll be hearing good news from Germany.”

“What about from France and England?”

“We have most of the cards, Mrs. Sanford. Fact, maybe all of the cards, for now. The real problem is afterwards, making peace.”

“I’ve met some of your young men. They are formidable.”

“The Inquiry?”

Caroline nodded. A year earlier House had set up a board of young scholars whose task it was to make plans for the new world that would emerge from the peace conference. Historians were put to work studying Europe’s boundaries, language groupings, religions; also, they were allowed to study the secret treaties that the Allies had made with one another and with interested countries like Italy, which had been promised a large chunk of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in return for a collusive neutrality followed by war. The Bolsheviks had published the lot, embarrassing the President, who pretended that he had not known of the treaties. Since the Fourteen Points meant redrawing Europe’s map, the unenviable task of the Inquiry group was to conform Wilson’s generous “peace without victory”—a phrase invented by one of the Inquiry men, a
New Republic
editor, Walter Lippmann—and the secret treaties, which represented total victory for the Allies and not much peace.

The soft whisper was eminently soothing. “… the Kaiser will abdicate, and there will be a republic, and an armistice, and then the peace conference, where, I hope I’m not bragging too much, we’ll go in, those boys of mine, certainly, the best prepared of the lot. We’re ready for anything, including, if we have to, the partition of Schleswig-Holstein, along racial lines.”

“How amazed the French will be! They think us totally ignorant … of European politics,” she added, quite aware of France’s jealous contempt for everything American.

“The British Foreign Office has a sort of French mentality, too.” The gray rat’s eyes gleamed with good humor. In the background the President, eyes half-shut, seemed to be giving a sermon.

“Who will negotiate for us?” Caroline expected no answer but often the way that a question was not answered was revelatory.

“I suppose we’ll continue as we are.”

“With you in Paris—or wherever …”

“And the President here, telling me what to do.”

“No Lansing?” The President’s dislike of his secretary of state was common knowledge.

“Well, maybe, not too much Lansing.” House chuckled. “Anyway, it shouldn’t take very long. We’re ready for once.”

“The President stays here?”

House nodded. “This work isn’t for the chief of state. After all, he’s the British king and prime minister all rolled into one. He’s too huge for our sort of a conference. He should come over, briefly, show the flag—they think he’s God, you know. Then vanish into the empyrean, just like God.”

On the way back to Georgetown, Tim was both exultant and impressed. “If the South End of Boston could see me now.”

“They were mostly South Enders there.” Caroline was melancholy, and did not know why. “They just got out long before you did.” The chauffeur came to a stop in Wisconsin Avenue, as a long line of dull black hearses slowly
crossed the street en route to—or from—the morgue. “I wonder if everyone will die?” Caroline took her gauze mask from her handbag and slipped it in place over her nose and mouth. Most people were masked when out of doors or in a public place.

“That would solve a lot of problems.” Tim was light-hearted. He did not wear a mask.

“They say more people have already died of flu than died in the war. Frederika’s got it, my sister-in-law.”

“Serious?”

“Yes.”

An authentic Emma was waiting for them in the drawing room. She was large and fair and very like Burden. Obstinately, she had missed beauty wide. Caroline longed to do something with her but Emma was not to be altered by anyone. She was happy as a mathematician, a field forever shut to her mother. Now, because all the schools had shut down, Emma had come home. Caroline was glad that their relationship was sufficiently polite that no questions would be asked when Tim stayed over. Emma took everything in stride. Whether this was a sign of intelligence or of perfect indifference, Caroline could not fathom. But then she, too, had reserves of indifference ever ready to be called upon. “Five thousand people died yesterday, that they know of,” was Emma’s cheery greeting. She was curled up on a sofa beside a fire now fallen to coals and ash.

“In the country?” Caroline removed her mask.

“Here. In the District. Hello, Mr. Farrell.”

“Hi, Emma.” Tim was still euphoric from his White House success. “Did you see Creel’s face when I said I wanted to do a movie about Debs?”

“I saw it. Luckily, he misunderstood you.”

“Democracy should begin at home.” Tim made himself at home; poured whisky neat into a glass. “The Chicago race riots last summer …”

“Aunt Frederika’s worse,” Emma cut in.

“Oh, God.” Caroline sat beside the fire. Perhaps it
was
the end of the world after all. The plague would come to every house until everyone was dead. “Uncle Blaise?”

“He’s with her. He’s all right. He thinks he’s already had it, a mild case.”

“How seriously are you Catholic?” Tim turned, seriously, to Caroline.

“Not at all, ever. It’s
this
life I fear, not the next, which isn’t there.”

“Lucky you to think that.” He changed the subject. “I think the President recognized you. I caught him staring at you after the crucifix …”

“We’re old acquaintances.” Quickly, Caroline broke in: Emma did not know of the mythical Emma. Fortunately, Emma did not go to movies. “What are you reading?”

Emma held up the book in her lap. “Uncle Henry’s last book. About his education. I went to see Miss Tone today. She’s still in the house. It’s all very sad.”

“Sadder for us than for him. He died in his sleep.” She looked at Tim, as if this were, somehow, significant.

“He was smiling, Miss Tone said, when they came to wake him up.”

“So much history—gone.” Caroline wondered if now she would begin to speak in movie title cards, with numerous dashes and exclamation marks.

“The whole Negro question is really interesting, and no one’s done it.” Tim was not about to mourn Henry Adams.

“Why interesting?” For someone so deeply flawed with the politeness of class, Emma was curt.

“Look at the fix they’re in. Twelve million of them live here in a country that’s fighting to make the world safe for democracy, and most of them can’t vote or have the same rights as white people.”

“Maybe they don’t want them.” Emma was not of an imaginative or, indeed, generous nature, thought Caroline, who was not generous either but sufficiently imaginative to be able to understand what others felt. Perhaps it was this odd gift that had made it possible for her to become so easily the mythical Emma Traxler, who could become Madeleine, a mother at the Front.

“If they didn’t want the same rights, why do you think hundreds of people were killed or hurt last summer in Chicago?” Tim was looking at Emma with interest.

“Perhaps,” said Emma, “the white people thought that the Negroes wanted something which they shouldn’t have, and so they attacked them first, the way they do in the South when they lynch one.”

“Ingenious.” Caroline applauded. Much of Washington’s charm for her had been its Africanness both in climate and population. Racial equality had not meant much of anything to her or, she thought, to most Negroes, who ignored the white world as the white world ignored them, or so it seemed to her, each race living in separate if contiguous universes in two separate but simultaneous Washingtons.

“No. They want the same rights. Particularly now they’ve been in the Army, fighting for democracy …”

“Such a meaningless word.” Although Caroline’s teeth were set on edge by all political rhetoric, the reverent intoning of the national nonsense-word “democracy” most irritated her. The much-admired Harvard professor George Santayana, now retired and withdrawn to Europe, had noted the curiously American faculty for absolute belief in the absolutely untrue as well as the curiously American inability to detect a contradiction because, as he had written, an “incapacity for education, when united with great inner vitality, is one root of idealism.” That was it—American idealism, the most unbearable aspect of these people. For the first time in years, Caroline wanted to escape, go back to France, or on to Timbuctoo, anywhere that these canting folk were not.

Tim did not cant; but he came perilously close in his espousal of the rights of man—liberty, equality, fraternity. But where he believed or believed that he believed in these things, the French regarded them as mere incantations to ward off unpleasant disturbances like revolution. “Of course, democracy doesn’t mean anything for them. There was this sign they were carrying in Chicago—a wonderful picture, crowded street, howling whites, blacks huddled together, police with guns, sticks—and this sign that says—like a title card, you know?—‘Bring Democracy to America Before You Carry It to Europe.’ ”