The Golden Age (64 page)

A.B. laughed. “Nothing so historic. So fundamental. ABC TV has a new series—
dialogues
. With the old and the wise. I’ve got the green light for you and your old friend Gore Vidal to chat together.”

“Which one is old? Which one is wise?”

“You both are both. Two survivors of the now forever vanished twentieth century. ‘The American century.’ Can you tell from the way I just said that that I was putting quotes around it?”

“Now you mention it, yes. But at least you didn’t make quotation marks with your fingers on either side of your newly ironic face as the young like to do. I must say, I wish Henry Luce had been more tongue-in-cheek when he minted that bit of fool’s gold. Has Gore agreed?”

“If we come to Italy. Next month. Yes.”

Several lively journalists from the Internet from—what was it called? Saloon? Salon?—had arrived. He would have to play host. “Well, Italy was—is—part of our global empire. At least we won’t end up posing against the Jefferson Memorial.”

“Or standing in Arlington Cemetery.” This was sharp. Definitely a Burr.

“We are ancestral voices, prophesying …” Peter began.

“War?”

“No. That game could be over. For us, if not others.” For the entire twentieth century, from the sinking of the
Maine
to Serbia’s intolerable defiance, whenever American leaders could think of nothing else to do, war was the diversion of choice. But ever since conscription had been abandoned, few Americans now voluntarily chose to take up arms for their nation; they were also laying down ever sterner rules in order to ensure not only their physical safety but comfort as well. Under none of the traditional circumstances (particularly, war far from home in places hitherto unknown) were their lives to be put at risk either by an overwrought enemy with no sense of irony or by maladministered vaccinations. During the last of the century’s Balkan adventure, American bombers had flown so high above their targets that they had missed nearly everything of military consequence while doing considerable damage to random civilians in the way below.

“Since we have too much fire and nuclear power, I suspect we’ll leave the actual fighting to our third-world clients. Let them provide the evening news with rich luminous reds.”

A.B. grinned. “Let TV be our Colosseum and the third-worlders our gladiators? Say that to camera.”

“You say it.” The television reporters were starting to converge on Peter. He braced himself.

“Will you do the program?” A.B. asked. “Last week in February?”

A nameless yet familiar television face was now eye to eye with Peter; others joined them. Questions and Answers. Q and A. Most urgent of all the questions was whether or not the President’s wife would be elected to the Senate. Yes? No? Maybe? The journalists fired more names at him. He felt as if he were the wall against which various worthies were to be executed by a “World News from Washington” firing squad. Briefly, very briefly, the great subjects were addressed. The price of a campaign for president. The price of a
winning
campaign for president while, just under the surface of such dull trivia as foreign affairs and the public welfare, lurked those issues that would determine the leadership of nation and globe, drugs and adultery.

It was A.B. who changed the subject to something even more
interesting to the questioners than the approaching presidential election. Television. Its role. Its power. To a man, the journalists praised the anchorperson who had, the day before, stayed on air to follow the sun for twenty-four—or was it forty-eight?—hours. Endurance was admired. The sameness of everything around the world was also duly noted, to Peter’s surprise. Were they really so observant? Somewhat timidly, he remarked upon last night’s apparent absence anywhere on earth of that mournful Scottish air “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Perhaps,” said A.B., “our century was one old acquaintance that no one wants to bring to mind, ever again.”

“But now that we’ve got to the morning after, will anyone from our time be remembered?” Since Peter could see that the most familiar of the television faces had a list of sure-to-be-immortal names to submit, he headed him off with, “Our President is said to be worrying about his place in history. It’s as if he had a reservation which might not be honored if the hotel changes management. But shouldn’t he really be wondering if the United States is going to be remembered? You know, for old time’s sake? Or for any other sake that comes to mind.”

Since none of the journalists had ever before encountered such a nonsensical question, Peter’s animating thought did not register. They instead continued to fire names at Peter-the-wall.

A.B. to the rescue. “What politician today, not just here but anywhere, is going to be remembered? It’s the global economy, stupid, as the President might be tempted to say now that we’ve got to the year 2000 in one piece and with the Dow Jones over ten thousand.”

Peter made his move. “Certainly, those of you who make the news—or those who hire you to create it—are literally history-makers, as William Randolph Hearst was the first to discover.”

“But who,” asked the best-known face, “would remember Hearst today if it weren’t for Orson Welles?”

“Arson who?” asked a puzzled latecomer to the old century.

Peter avoided the endless trap of who was who. And promptly crashed into a new one. “You are Shelley’s dream come true …” Shelley! Talk fast. Get swiftly free of that elephant pit. “You—the media—are
what he wanted poets to be, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

This, happily, went unrecognized and unacknowledged; and emptied their corner of the room just as Peter’s smile gave out. He turned to A.B. “Yes. I’ll go to Italy … to … Rapallo?”

“Ravello.” The black eyes glittered like polished onyx. “That will be the true confrontation.”

“Do you think so?” Peter had his doubts.

“Yes. Time to come full circle.” A.B. led Peter to the street, where Dr. Sturtevant helped him into the car.

Old Vernon’s stoop was empty. So were the streets around the Capitol: a strangely empty New Year’s Day. An omen?

Dr. Sturtevant had had a great deal to think about since the previous evening. “Concerning Clay Overbury’s … uh, death …”

Peter now regretted his late-night appearance of candor. “What,” he shifted the subject, “was Aeneas’s theory?”

“If he had one, he never told me.” They passed the Commerce Building, whose basement contained the aquarium where Billy Thorne’s wartime coven of agents met in secret conclave. Then, slowly, the car’s driver took the long way around the cordoned-off White House area. Thanks to something called terrorism, officials lived under siege. Early in the present regime, the First Lady of the Land had complained to him that presidents were now prisoners of the Secret Service. “We’d be a lot happier, he told me, if the President lived in a bunker and only rode in a tank when he goes out. He wasn’t joking either.” Peter thought of President Roosevelt in his open car, being driven around the city with no guards to speak of, a lady beside him and a battered felt hat in hand to wave cheerily for his subjects. At this recollection, the inner custodian outdid himself. Unbidden, he superimposed upon FDR in his car another image: a golden godlike man wearing an elaborate crown.

“Pacal!” Peter exclaimed with delight. “That’s his name.”

“Whose name?”

“A Mayan emperor. They found his tomb at Palenque. In Central America. He lived almost a thousand years ago. Now that we can read
what the Mayans wrote, we can bring him back to life for us. For those who are interested, of course.”

“You are—of course.” Sturtevant was staring at him intently. “Do you feel that history repeats itself?”

Peter was annoyed by the verb. Intellectuals were not meant to feel. They were meant to think. To imagine. To deduce. “I
feel
nothing except interest in the fact that there have been other empires before us in this part of the world and that Pacal’s people, in time, became too many and when they did, they devoured each other.”

“You feel … I mean you
think
that cannibalism will be our fate?”

Peter laughed. “There are many more ways of devouring one another than culinary and I’m quite sure that we’ll try them all out. Anyway, nothing ever really repeats itself except …” An acidic fireball in his stomach burst. “… my sainted mother’s eggnog.”

Dr. Sturtevant withdrew a bound manuscript from his briefcase. “I found this waiting for me at the Cosmos Club. Aeneas’s daughter was going through his papers and …”

Peter opened to the title page.
The Golden Age
. Subtitle,
1945–1950
. He was aware that Sturtevant was watching him intently.

“Did you know about this?”

Peter nodded. “Aeneas was always threatening to write something along this line.”

“Was it really so short a time?”

“Well, he thought it was, obviously. I’m more interested to know if there ever was such a thing.” Peter suddenly thought of something. Randall Jarrell had written in that long-ago time: how, in the most glorious of golden ages, there would always be someone complaining about how yellow everything looked. He chuckled at the thought, which his biographer was plainly eager for him to share, but Peter was not about to break his rule, which was never, ever, demoralize with a joke the literal, the dogged Robert L. B. Sturtevant, Ph.D.

After an aggressively dismal winter, one now wakes to what at first looks to be spring but then, by misty noon, the cold sun goes, and the false spring with it. From my study window, the Gulf of Salerno is a battleship gray that exactly matches the sky except where the bright morning sun has burned an imprecise round hole in high clouds. The far shore of the gulf is enveloped in a gray mist that obscures the temples of Paestum rising from their field of artichokes. In Italo Calvino’s last book he describes refracted sun rays on the sea as “a sword of light” that seems to remain pointed toward the watching eye from every angle. This morning, the sword is more a highway of glittering spangles, connecting the seashore some four hundred meters beneath my window to the broad deep gulf that ends in a wall of gray nothingness. Silver sequins glittering against gray-black. Where have I seen this effect before?

Childhood memory. I am in “a wood near Athens.” It is Midsummer Night’s Eve. Sun is setting. Mortals are lost in woods where magical creatures now awaken; among them, Puck—boy actor Mickey Rooney, role model to my tenth year. At full moonrise, two towering
figures on horseback ride through black woods toward each other, long trains billowing and sparkling against every shade of gray, against absolute black for foil. The sword of light, as I look southward to the Tyrrhenian Sea, is now producing the same effect that Max Reinhardt created on film in 1935.

“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” At the window, I repeat to myself Oberon’s cold greeting as he meets his estranged wife, Titania. Oberon is the somber hawk-faced lord of the night; Titania his queen. I was never to forget them. Forty-one years later, I flew from Rome to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the touring company of a play of mine in revival. The Oberon of 1935 had metamorphosed into a former president, invented by me. But then transformation is the name of the acting game; of life, too, if one stares long enough, as I did this morning, at the sword of light, realizing that Shakespeare’s Oberon and my President Hockstader were the same actor, Victor Jory, at different times. As luck would have it, the midsummer night forest king has been preserved on film while my president has long since gone to dust along with his protean impersonator.

At supper, the star of the national production of
The Best Man
, E. G. Marshall, told me that “Victor found true love last night. In a singles bar.” I smile, with some wonder. Victor was the same age in 1976 that I am in the year 2000; that is, ancient, with dyed black hair. But the image I shall always retain of him is one of shimmering light emergent from grays and black, aquiline face most regal as he summons Puck to fetch him an herb called “love-in-idleness.” Puck takes to the air with a shout, “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes …” And does.

It has taken the television pickup crew from Rome more than forty minutes to set up in the salone where, over the years, I have done so many programs.

A.B. is admirably professional. He has already learned enough Italian to be able to tell the crew what he wants. Today, he is producer-director; questioner.

While A.B. and the crew move furniture about and arrange their lights, I set out for the piazza, which can only be reached by foot; this
detail astonishes American visitors not used to walking. But Ravello is a mountain village and we walk almost everywhere, usually up and down steep gray steps.

The long cypress alley from villa to gate glows in the morning sun, dark greens and pallid golds, just as it did that other February morning when I first walked its length and decided that, somehow or other, I would acquire the villa—as yet unseen—at its end. A cypress alley and a view: demure title for an Edwardian novel by one of the young English writers who spent time in Ravello at the start of the century. E. M. Forster wrote “The Story of a Panic” about our woods.

After many attempts at beautification in the last few years, the piazza now has a brand-new pale stone paving whose dark lines suggest a painting by the early Chirico while the ruthlessly restored cathedral looks somewhat astonished, like a recently raped nun. Our retired priest, Don Peppino, strolls on the high porch above the piazza; at least eighty, he looks half his age. When he came to bless the villa one winter, room by room as is the local custom, he was received by an American girl who was house-sitting for us. When he came to her room, she remembered too late that she had left her vibrator on a table. With a straight face, Don Peppino carefully blessed Satan’s instrument, then, as he was leaving the house, he gave her a cheery smile and said, in English, “Be a good girl now.”

At the Bar San Domingo, I order coffee. I am often astonished by the neatness of coincidence in my life. When I look unsuccessfully for one thing, I usually turn up another that is much more useful. Graham Greene used to say that if he couldn’t unravel, at his desk, a tangle in a narrative, the solution would arrive the next morning, after a good night’s sleep. He was, of course, what movie scriptwriters call an “early settler”: one who tends to settle for whatever he thinks of first.