The Golden Age (41 page)

Peter gave him a brief report on his few attainments. “I’m not reading about politics this season.” Thomson was crisp. “There’s been too much history lately. Hate it. Not good for the arts. That’s why I’m so glad you’re giving more pages to the arts. Who will you get for music?”

“You?”

“No, baby. I’m taken.
Herald Tribune
forever. What about Paul Bowles?”

Peter had not heard the name before. Fortunately, Thomson liked to answer his own questions. “He spells me at the
Trib
when I’ve got a concert. He’s a real critic. Knows what
not
to write about. Rare gift. Also,
never
gives his opinion. Who, outside maybe your mother, wants to know what you think about Mahler? Just describe for the reader exactly what you hear. That’s the trick of it. Paul and Jane—his wife—are staying up at Libby’s in the country. You know—Libby Holman. She killed her husband, the Reynolds tobacco man. Singer. Good Singer, Libby. She’s hired Paul to make an opera of
Yerma
. Paul and Jane have a dowsing rod for money. But then you have to, if you’re a serious composer. Anyway, when they come back to town, you must meet them. You do pay?” Thomson’s eyes were suddenly very sharp.

“Oh yes.”

“Baby, you only get what you pay for in this world, as I always tell Mrs. Reid at the
Trib
.”

Latouche brought over a Dracula-pale man with eyes that seemed to be permanently half shut. “Here’s your film critic. Parker Tyler. There’s no one like him.”

“Is it true that you are the nephew of Emma Traxler?” The voice was pansy-eager with an ironic intermittent base—bass?—to it that captured Peter’s full attention. He confessed that he was.

“Someone—Julian Sawyer over there, I think—said he saw her in
the lobby of the St. Regis the other day. He does the lobbies of all the grand hotels, hoping to see stars. He saw her, obviously.”

“She was in town for Harry Hopkins’ funeral.”

“I’ve seen twenty-seven of her films, including the one she made in Tunisia with René Clément, a mistake because he’s not in her class. I regard
Mary Queen of Scots
as a touchstone for film criticism. A sort of high mark never to be reached again by any actress with such primitive lighting and dentistry.”

“I must tell her. She did say that that film ended her career in Hollywood.”

“
Two-Faced Woman
did the same for Garbo, and that was a negative masterpiece, too. I wrote about it in
View
.”

Peter wondered what
View
was. There was, obviously, a vast intricate world in New York, as distant from Washington as moon from earth. Were the two compatible? Aeneas thought so but then Aeneas belonged to both and Peter was at sea with Parker Tyler if not with the merry Latouche, who introduced him to a round little woman with squirrel-bright eyes.

“Peter. This is Dawn Powell. The economist. She’s longing to write for your magazine.”

“It’s been my dream ever since your first issue. But I warn you, I’m a post-Keynesian. I’m also postmenopausal as of last September at Doctor’s Hospital. I’ve got the scars to prove it. So I’m giving a party to celebrate. A carnival. Carne-vale, dear. That’s Latin for …”

“Flesh farewell.”

“Go to the head of the class.” She turned to Latouche. “Yesterday Mary McCarthy paid a call on Bunny Wilson.” To Peter: “Her ex-husband. And when he locked himself in his study to escape her, she set fire to a wastebasket and tried to smoke him out. It was a metal wire basket, by the way. Always get details like that right. Otherwise your listeners start to wonder why the house didn’t burn down.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” said Latouche, moving away.

“Why smoke him out?” asked Peter.

“Because he’s made so much money out of
Memoirs of Hecate County
and, of course, Mary’s envious. In fact, envy’s sort of a religion with her, which really makes
her
to be envied as someone with something
to believe in. To cling to in the bad times when the living isn’t—‘ain’t,’ I should say—easy. All my friends are communists. But then so am I. And all of them are eaten up by envy, too. The Golden Calf is their god. Of course, I’d love to make money, too. No. Not make it. I’d love to be
given
a lot of money.”

“Are you really an economist?”

“Oh, no, child.” Suddenly, she became a gracious grandmotherly crone, presiding over a cookie jar. “Not poor old Dawn, trying to get that ole debil checkbook in order. No. I’m simply a purveyor of home truths, the more devastating the better. A mere teller of tales. About exotic places that make the reader’s heart—hearts—pound. ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’—oh, there is nothing about the literary art that your old granny don’t know in her bones.”

“What exotic places?”

“Ohio, you silly-billy. That’s where everyone in Greenwich Village comes from. I’ll write you a monthly ‘Letter from Ohio.’ About real folks who sit on front porches, incest and depravity forever on their narrow minds. I can’t think how Faulkner gets away with it and I don’t. Of course, he doesn’t make any money either except when he prostitutes himself by writing for the movies. He sold out years ago to Hollywood. Now, God knows, I’m perfectly willing to sell out, but I can’t find a buyer. Just top the rum, Touche, and be quick about it. Auntie Dawn is parched.” She gave Peter a lascivious wink. “So tell me exactly what it is about George Sand you
don’t
like. And tell me exactly how you finally fell out with her. Oh, her promiscuity is a given. You must have known that going in. Even so, I want
all
the details. And remember this—you can trust me, dear,” she added with a Satanic leer. “Mum’s the word, cross my heart and hope to die. Your secrets are my secrets. The word ‘mongoloid’ will never pass my lips. That is a solemn promise.”

By midnight, Aeneas and Peter were running out of money as they followed Latouche from nightclubs in the Village all the way up to those on the East Side. Wherever he went, at his entrance, musicians would play “Taking a Chance on Love.” He also acquired, along the
way, a train of admirers, some actually known to him, and like a Pied Piper he led them from dark place to dark place until he arrived at the elegant door to the Blue Angel in Fifty-fifth Street. When Latouche shouted, “Cover charge!” he lost most of his entourage.

As the smiling doormen held the door open, Touche said to Peter, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

The Blue Angel occupied a thin brownstone. The front part of the ground floor contained a bar on the left and shiny black plastic booths on the right. The back part was full of round tables set before a small stage where comedians practiced their desperate art and musicians played, all in an onyx-black room with hanging plaster angels backlit in pink. “It’s just like Juliet’s tomb,” said Touche as the tall pale green manager, Herbert Jacoby, a Frenchman who had once been secretary to Léon Blum, greeted Touche and his party, to which had been added a beautiful black singer who had joined them at some point in the Village along with a stout banker named Reg Newton, “A veritable Midas, aren’t you, Reg?” Touche was exuberant. “Give him an apple and it turns to twenty-four-karat gold. So, Reg, we’ll let you pick up the bill. But just this once. Mustn’t spoil you.” Reg beamed.

The surprise was at a booth opposite the bar. Peter’s first cousin Emma Sanford and her husband, Timothy X. Farrell, were greeting Touche, who introduced Peter to Emma. “I just know you two will have a lot in common.”

Two parties now became one. The lugubrious Jacoby suggested supper for the newcomers. Sadly, he told them his menu. Glumly, he gave their orders to a maître d’. Despairingly, he moaned, “I must go introduce Alice Pearce. She is,” he gasped, “funny.” He left them for the crowded back room

“Herbert missed his calling,” said Touche. “He’s a born funeral director.
Pompes funèbres
grow out of his ears like celery. He has all the joie de vivre of an open grave. Yet he gets the funniest people in the business to play the room for next to nothing.” Touche finished a large snifter of brandy; then cleared his throat. “Now I suppose you’re all wondering why I asked you here tonight. Tim Farrell and I are doing a movie together. A musical, actually. The story of Ulysses—except this
Ulysses is an American farm boy who goes off to the Spanish–American War and gets lost on his way back home …”

At a pause in the ongoing monologue, Peter turned to Emma. “I suppose I should congratulate you on your marriage.”

“It was sudden, I think.” Emma, the new blonde, was handsomer than Emma, the old brunette. “I do know that I was just bowled over by Tim when we first met.”

“But that,” said Peter in the interest of major mischief, “was years and years ago when he was with the Black Pearl of the Baltic.”

“Alsace-Lorraine,” said Emma. “Yes, I knew him as a child when he and Mother … You know? Then I met him again years later, after they had broken up, and he was a different person. I was a different person.” The waiter asked her what she wanted on the supper menu. “Oh, the lobster Newburg! I love it! But instead of the Newburg sauce, I’ll have it with just plain mayonnaise. Hellman’s, if you have it. Though I despise Lillian’s politics. I’ll start with the onion soup. Really thick, if you have it. And could I have a glass of dry white wine with ice on the side? Not
in
it but
on
the side. And some butter right now.”

While Peter ordered a minute steak, his cousin proved not to be much changed since she had headed Fortress America. She was now in full flow while Latouche and her husband conferred, Aeneas and the spectacular black girl—could she be Thelma Carpenter?—laughed together, something Aeneas rarely did with anyone; Reg smiled happily, wallet at the ready.

“Tim and I are both interested in the
Hometown
series.” Emma sliced the butter squares into triangles; and ignored the bread.

“Aunt Caroline’s dream.”

“Well, it was Tim who made the pictures. We’re looking for something offbeat. But with the right sort of message, you know?”

“No, I don’t,” said Peter, who did know what she meant. When he had heard of the surprise marriage between Emma and Tim, he had decided that either she had changed for the better or Tim for the worse. He had no way of judging the weather of Tim’s soul, but Emma was as wildly overwrought as she had been in her prewar campaign against the Russian Bolsheviks, only now her fight had shifted to the menace of communism within the United States itself.

“We’re safe from the Russians. For the moment. We have the atomic bomb. By the time they have it, we’ll have the hydrogen bomb and then, one day—when they go too far—we’ll drop it. Pow! No more Moscow.” Methodically, she broke the crust of her onion soup and, voluptuously, stirred the contents of the bowl clockwise, inhaling the steam with distaste. “It’s all so clear. They want to conquer the world. Just the way Hitler did. It’s also clear—now, anyway—that we should have let Hitler destroy them first. Then we could have dealt with him. But my mother’s Red friends like Harry Hopkins were too busy working for Stalin. Now the life-and-death struggle for Iran’s begun. Stalin’s on the march in Azerbaijan. We must stop him. By force. And we will. This year, anyway.” Now the spoon which had been going clockwise was going counterclockwise. Was this some coded message American patriots used to identify one another?

“You and Tim,” Peter was tentative, “will make a film about Stalin?” Was this the right response to the onion soup code?

“No. No. We wouldn’t dare. I mean, tell the truth. Hollywood is honeycombed with communists.”

“Like L. B. Mayer?”

“Not the studio heads. Except, in a way, they are the worst. They only want to make money. They turn a blind eye on communists like Capra and Myrna Loy because they are box-office. Mother’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt gives them their orders—directly. I’ve heard Mother on the telephone with Eleanor. Thick as thieves.” The waiter asked if Emma was through with her now well-exercised soup. “Yes, thank you. It was delicious. Could I have
more
ice. And white wine?”

The butter, untouched, was melting on its chaste plate.

“Our plan is to do a
Hometown
film with what look to be true-blue Americans who turn out to be secret Reds. They take over the schools. At least one classroom, anyway, where they subtly question capitalism.”

“It hardly seems possible!”

Peter was rewarded with an angry glance. “Don’t think your magazine isn’t being thoroughly examined by the Justice Department.”

“For typos?”

“No. For un-American ideas. We’ve been lobbying President Truman and he’s promised to set up a Loyalty Review Board in the next
few months. Everyone in government must swear a special oath of allegiance to the country and vow to fight communism in all its forms.”

“That’s what Hitler made the Germans do. It’s not very American, Emma.”

“Well, it’s going to be. Thank heaven. You have to fight fire with fire. Besides, why should a loyal American fear a loyalty oath?”

Peter was amused. “Why should a disloyal one fear an oath?”

“Perjury. Three years in prison.” Emma was prompt.

Peter saw that her powerful emotions had swept her far past mere common sense. Had it swept the President too? If so … “Dewey may well be elected in ’48 as the freedom candidate.”

“This is bipartisan. Everybody’s aboard. We’ve got them all.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“That would be telling.” Emma giggled as she scraped the mayonnaise off her lobster and onto the edge of the plate. “I’ll give you one clue. Senator Bingham’s with us. He may be heading up the whole thing. Look! We have to do it. We’ve no choice. The propaganda is so heavy on the communist side. So weak on ours. That’s how I convinced L.B. that our picture has to be made if we’re to win this war against the Reds.”

“And Myrna Loy?”

“You should take those matters more seriously, Peter. When they break up the great fortunes, that will be the end of
you
. Go ahead, laugh. You won’t when it happens. The IRS is in the hands of a cell of dedicated Marxists.” Delicately she removed a lobster claw from its shell and placed it neatly on the side of the plate opposite to the mayonnaise. It was then that Peter realized that she was not going to eat anything. As a sign of her specialness, the most expensive items must be brought her; then as a sign of her … of her what? Ascetic character?… everything she’d ordered would be thrown out. Since she was on the verge of plumpness, she obviously nourished herself plentifully when not on view.