American Quartet by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online

dark Spanish lady.
    Because he treated his possessions with a self-deprecating humor, he was able to soften the awesome effect of its spectacular profusion.
    “Here,” he would tell guests. “Take the catalogue and look around. I’m bored being the museum director.”
    He was fond of stitching together his history, as if following some intricate needlepoint pattern, although the morgues of various California newspapers contained fairly documented accounts of his official, personal and family background. There were nonofficial accounts, too, mostly dredged up during his ill-fated Senate race in 1964, a year too late for the other golden boy, mowed down by Oswald’s bullet, to be of much help to him.
    He had done rather badly in that contest. Postmortems attributed it to his boyish, patrician manner. The voters didn’t take him seriously enough and his opponent had somehow got the message across that there was something Scott Fitzgeraldish about him. He had tried to point out that he was not Gatsby, that he came from three generations of authentic old money, cattle, oil and real estate, but the voters went cold. Perhaps he was too handsome, too rich. His mother blamed his defeat on jealousy, the press, the ignorant voters, the communists. Because he had divorced when he was twenty-three and never remarried, the rumor mill portrayed him as kinky, or homosexual. It was, his mother assured everybody, a deliberate attempt at character assassination.
    “One thing about him,” some of his ex-girl friends had later confided, always with a sigh of regret, “he knows how to make a woman feel good.” But even that kind of comment carried with it something mysterious and provocative. It certainly didn’t keep the girls away.
    “He takes them to the best places. He gives them a glimpse of an elegant life-style, and when he travels he lets them have their own room. That’s class.” Perceptive Washingtonians agreed.
    To the senators, congressmen, ambassadors, cabinet ministers and others in the high ether of Washington society, he carried a glow of undefined importance, earned by fifteen years of glossy entertaining. His invitations were heeded less for himself than because a guest was sure to make an important connection, the real currency of the capital. He was a catalyst, his lavish home a crucible, even though everyone knew that real power was denied him.
    Aside from charm, most of his guests agreed he was interesting and slightly eccentric, an image he assiduously cultivated, and a going joke was that if reincarnation existed the men would be happy to return as Thaddeus Remington III. When he heard the joke, he took it as a compliment and retorted that he would foreclose on that possibility by living forever.
    Bruce had described him to Fiona long before the July Fourth fireworks party; because he had been single for more than five years, Bruce was an ideal extra man when Remington invited unattached females to his elaborate dinners. When he became attached to Fiona, the invitations ceased temporarily, but now that the Washington grapevine had officially recognized the liaison, the invitations came again, appropriately stated: The Honorable Bruce Rosen and guest .
    “Well, we made it,” he told her.
    To Fiona, Remington was an apparition, foreign to her social world which, up to then, had revolved around cops and their milieu. She had learned early that Bruce, despite all his high-minded liberalism, loved the closed circle of the Wasp world and enjoyed the privileged social access to important people.
    “I admit it,” he had agreed. “I’m bathing in bat dung and loving it.”
    He was also a gossip. She had found that hard to accept; it was too rarified, too inside, as hers had been when she talked about the eggplant, the chief, the black mafia in the department and some juicy morsels gleaned from the sex squad.
    “Sometimes I dated the girls he did,” Bruce once confessed during a long postcoital discussion.