The Golden Age (63 page)

Education. SAT: that was the acronym for the tests that were now given every schoolchild in the country. To measure intelligence. To determine further “education,” if any. Peter was still looking to publish the ultimate analysis of a test that he was convinced had been devised by the mediocre to advance the mediocre through a common educational system designed to maintain in passive ignorance the general sub-population for which there was nothing much of interest to do and nothing at all of interest to think about once they had learned what little they were expected to know to get through dull repetitive days; to
float
through like … From childhood, he recalled one of the aquarium tanks in the basement of the Commerce Building. Large flat brown fish floating in cloudy water. Electric eels slumbering on pebbles. He used to wait hours for them to light up but they never did. Fish in tanks. Mayans crowded together …

“Who was
Time
magazine’s man of the year for 1999? Or was it the century?” he asked the new editor, Doris Oenslager, a onetime history professor at the same university in Oregon where her mentor, and Peter’s late unique contributor, the historian William Appleman Williams, had taught. The current fashion to hire women for all highly visible jobs had been a lucky one for Peter. He was more at ease with them than he had ever been with Billy Thorne or Aeneas Duncan. The fact that President Clinton had made so many terrible rainbow-hued melting-pot appointments did not undermine the principle, at century’s end, not so much of “equality,” an impossible notion at best, but of interchangeability, modern society’s one valuable discovery. It was not that a member of a minority could now be proudly hailed as every bit as good as a member of the old white male ruling class; rather, one could say proudly, that the current woman secretary of state had achieved gender parity by proving to be every bit as bad as her male predecessors. Once the idea of excellence had been abandoned and
competence was judged by SAT scores or IQ tests, the mediocre could then move freely from foreign affairs to hospital administration to brain surgery … perhaps not brain surgery just yet. But most of the showy occupations were as easily filled with interchangeable citizens as the less showy jobs had always been, while the huddled masses … How did the Mayans maintain order in their crowded tenements?

Apparently,
Time
‘s man of the year had “invented” the retailing of consumer goods on the Internet, selling things from farthest space over telephone lines and off satellites. Well, that must be changing the way people lived; certainly, the way they bought and sold things. From out of a mostly lost past he heard the voice of Herbert Hoover at Laurel House on a summer’s day, prescribing an antidote to depression as well as to civil and world wars. “What America most needs now is a great poem,” he had said. Peter had been too astonished to ask, A poem like what?
The Man with the Hoe
, of an earlier America?
The Waste Land
of the time before theirs? No. Not Eliot. Frost? Folksy, yes, but perhaps too dark for a would-be age of gold. He must ask Jimmy Merrill, the best of the midcentury poets. Then he recalled that after communing for years with the dead, in verse, by Ouija board, Jimmy was dead, too.

“Doris, we need a great poem. And we need it now.”

Doris was making tea in her office. In the conference room next door, editors and contributors were gathered for eggnog made from an eighteenth-century recipe, inherited from Frederika.

“So hard to come by,” said Doris vaguely. “Assuming one knows what is great when one sees it. I’ll ask Helen Vendler. She’s bound to know if someone has written one, or could write one.”

“On commission?” Peter sat at the partners’ desk that had been in the editors’ office since the beginning. “But then I suppose Pindar also worked on commission.”

“He just did athletes, didn’t he?” Doris poured them tea; laughter from the conference room. “Winners of the Olympic Games. That sort of thing.”

Grimly, Peter pressed the various go-buttons of a mind that had once, so swiftly, summoned words onto … There was a slight hitch as the weary custodian within sought the latest word as it rattled about, probably unfiled.
Kaleidoscope?
Word-pictures as projected on the … 
what? Inner
—screen?
No.
Computer
screen. Bull’s-eye: A late arrival in his consciousness, unlike Pindar, who was an old secure memory. No problem there. He recalled a discussion with … The custodian was put to work. On the screen loomed a round bald freckled man. In bathing suit. Body covered with apish orange hairs. Maurice Bowra. Classics don. Translated Pindar. Sardinian beach. Wind. Cloud of flies. Bowra’s beautiful unstoppable voice. Great gossip. Great Britain. Greats …

The custodian is now showing off. Produces ravishing if pointless picture of an all-black sea with whitecaps, wind- rather than tide-driven. Picnic lunch at a trestle table on a beach. The young Peter and Diana and a half-dozen others. Umbrellas. Slyly, the custodian zooms in on bottles of black peasant wine—black due to memory’s eccentric lighting. Sudden glimpse of the melancholy pug-dog face of Cyril Connolly … once edited a “little” magazine. Which?
New Writing
?
Hudson Review
? No.
Hudson
was Cornelia Claiborne’s. She was long since lost to a marriage that had taken her life, in another country. Now Pindar is on the soundtrack. The custodian is showing off.

“Who, in his tenderest years, / Finds some new lovely thing, / His hope is high, and he flies on the wings of his manhood: / Better than riches are his thoughts.—/ But man’s pleasure is a short time growing / And it falls to the ground / As quickly when an unlucky twist of thought / Loosens its roots …”

Peter spoke aloud the next line even before the custodian could get to it: “
Man’s life is a day. What is he? / What is he not? A shadow in a dream / Is man
—is man …” The malicious custodian switched off the audio. “I can’t recall another line.” Peter sighed.

“That was better than I could do.” Doris was impressed, as Peter had intended her to be. “Was that Bowra’s translation?”

“I think so. It’s flat enough. He had no ear. But I like ‘an unlucky twist of thought.’ Diana and I saw a good deal of him one summer back in … when Sardinia first opened up. He was a friend of friends. Grand friends. Those old English dons seldom missed a trick. I never learned Greek.” Peter did not listen to Doris’s response.

Sturtevant’s ash-blond hair was windblown into a small haystack set atop a round, Mayan skull which meant Mongolian or, Peter rather hoped, possible Egyptian ancestry. “Are you going to join the party?” He was holding a silver cup of eggnog.

“
I
am,” said Doris, rising.

“I’ll be in presently. Sit down.” On the wall opposite Sturtevant was the framed cover of the Potsdam issue that had been the making of
American Idea
. Billy Thorne. Wooden leg. Ill-matched eyes. Unasked, the custodian perfunctorily flashed odd bits of information onto the screen. Peter asked the biographer if he had, as yet, netted this peculiar fish.

“No.” Sturtevant switched on the recorder. “I suspect Mr. Thorne’s dead. I was told that there’s an ex-wife who might know. So I tracked her down to a nursing home. She has Alzheimer’s. There’s no record of him after 1980.”

“We should try—
you
should try the Freedom of Information Act. I’m sure he has an imposing dossier. I’d be curious to know if he was actually CIA, or just a fellow …” The word fell off the screen. The custodian, taking a well-earned nap, hurriedly punched out “voyager,” which Peter irritably rejected, along with a dozen other wrong words. By the time “traveler” appeared, the need for any word was gone. Aunt Caroline had said that Eleanor Roosevelt had taken concentrated garlic pills every day of her life for memory. Should he?

“I’ve got a friend from Langley looking into it. Thorne also stayed close to Clay Overbury even though he and Aeneas never got on. Had Overbury become president instead of Kennedy, Thorne would have been a key player. He was known to be a great cross-puncher …”

At the thought of life in the real world, Sturtevant tended, like so many sheltered academics, to indulge in Darwinian metaphors and jock-style language. Peter suspected that “cross-puncher” was probably the wrong phrase but he was not about to ask his exhausted custodian to check it out. But “check it out” gave him unexpected pleasure. Obviously, he himself was still with it,
with it
. So much so that he did not hear Sturtevant’s question. All that he caught was the end: “… hope to solve the mystery?”

Peter stalled. “Mystery?” What was? Clay’s death? Yes.

“Aeneas knew more than he ever let on. But I could never get anything out of him. I know that Aeneas had fallen out with Clay the year before Clay’s death.”

The year before what? Peter’s normally slow pulse was beating faster. “Did Aeneas ever tell you why, exactly, he broke with Clay?”

“I came into his life long after. But you knew him then, knew him all along. From what you said last night, I assume it was over Rosamund. I mean Rosalind.”

Peter guiltily drank heavy cream and egg with cinnamon from the silver cup. “We saw very little of each other those last days. Obviously, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the Clay for President movement. I preferred Adlai Stevenson. Yes, he couldn’t make up his mind, but at least he had one to make up or not. I think Aeneas came to see me, to ask us to support Kennedy.”

In the chair beneath the Potsdam cover, a gray Aeneas materialized. He was nervous. He chewed on the stem of a pipe. No more cigarettes. Emphysema. “I suppose you’ll say, I told you so …”

Peter had been quietly smug. “I’m never so obvious. Anyway, you lasted longer with Clay than I thought you would. Jack Kennedy is much more your style.”

“I think he’s what we need now.” Aeneas twirled his wedding ring only, Peter had noticed with some surprise, he was wearing no ring at all: this was now an automatic gesture, like a tic.

“And what do we need now?”

“Energy. A new generation …”

“Yes. Yes. Everyone’s agreed. So we have a choice between two young men with rich fathers. Only Clay’s rich father is actually my rich father. On loan, you might say. Anyway, you’ve gone over to Kennedy …”

“I hope I can persuade you to do the same.”

“Don’t even try. I’m forever Stevenson’s man because he turned down both Clay
and
Jack to run with last time.”

“For Estes Kefauver!” Aeneas’s coughing fit filled, first, Peter’s memory and then merged into the noise of the party next door. Iris had opened the door.

“Time to shine,” she said. “Everyone’s waiting.”

With Sturtevant not quite clinging to him, Peter made his way into the party, where he was given, for no apparent reason other than longevity, a small but apparently sincere ovation.

Then Peter held court with the contributors that he knew. Thanks to the intensity of Aeneas’s early efforts, they still had the best arts section
of any review, liberal or otherwise. “I think,” said Peter, quizzed on the subject by the stylized skeptic from the Washington
Post
, “that this is partly due to the fact that we keep politics, when not relevant, out of our reviews. We also keep on and on with those good critics who want to keep on and on with us.”

“That means,” said the man from the
Post
, “you must pay them better than the other magazines.” Peter chuckled; changed the subject. He was, of course, in Aunt Caroline’s debt for the salaries he could pay that others could not. But no one need know.

Over the fireplace someone had placed a banner with
2000 A.D
. emblazoned in gold on red. Someone else had, predictably, tacked
C.E
. under the
A.D
. Much energy was spent conforming to ever-shifting fads in a language that each year lost more and more words, particularly useful irreplaceable ones.

Peter sat in a throne in front of the window that looked out on the backyard, now front yard to the modern annex, their miniature “publishers row.” Doris brought him people to talk to. He did not, he decided, regret in any way his life. Except for Diana, he missed none of those who had defected to death. Old people sobbing in graveyards struck him as either the height of hypocrisy or else of solipsism, since they were mourning nothing more than their own approaching change of estate.

Suddenly, a small dark-haired young man appeared. Peter had not seen him earlier, or ever before. “Mr. Sanford.” As they shook hands, Peter stared into a sharp intelligent face. Dark hazel eyes glittered beneath dark hair combed straight back from a brow which, due to youthful baldness, was higher than nature had intended. A white smile was framed by full lips. “A. B. Decker.” He identified himself. Peter recognized the name; found the face mysteriously familiar. “I am your something-or-other cousin, sir.”

“Emma’s son. Aunt Caroline’s grandson …”

“Great-grandson.”

The generations were sweeping over him like the great wave at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, that had nearly drowned him when he was six years old, a powerful memory that stimulated the custodian, unbidden, to roll some stock footage of a huge wave, as seen by a child,
a great green collapsing white-laced wall that fell with a heavy crash upon him: flung him hard against the coarse sand of the beach. “You are the very image of …”

“Aaron Burr. I know. So people tell me, the few who know who he is.” The young man sat in the chair next to Peter.

“The last time I saw your grandmother Emma …”

“Was at the funeral of her real father. Senator Day.”

“You know everything?” Peter was mildly irritated not to be able to break so much sensational news to this supremely self-assured young man.

“A. B. Decker,” Peter repeated the name. “Aaron Burr Decker?”

“Yes. I was even assigned the name. I can’t think what nature is up to.”

“Or what your grandmother Emma was up to. Well, Burr started our nineteenth century off with a bang. He elected Jefferson president and himself vice president, and heir. How do you plan to start up our twenty-first century?”