The Golden Age by Gore Vidal Read Free Book Online Page A

like the German-American Bund. Thus far, she had sailed serenely above the tempest, but the unexpected alliance of communists and Nazis could not be so easily sailed through.
    “I must say they all behaved very well.” Eleanor was maternal but, again, Caroline caught the cold alert eye even as she dripped honey; she was constantly calculating and assessing. “Why, one of them even suggested …” She turned to the scruffy boy beside her. “Tell them, John, what you proposed to the committee.”
    John was not as nervous as Caroline would have been at President Roosevelt’s table for the first time. “Well, Mr. President, I proposed to the committee that a resolution be submitted to Congress for the abolition of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities.”
    “What happened?” Franklin was leaning forward, elbows on the table, a characteristic gesture when he was particularly interested in what someone else was saying.
    “Well, sir, the acting chairman, a gentleman from Alabama, was very polite and he said that that was my right as an American citizen,and he would let what I say go onto the record in spite of what he called my slanderous remarks.”
    “I love it!” Franklin turned to Melvyn Douglas. “If I could only put a sheet over my head and hide in the back row.”
    “I’m sure,” said Douglas in his most suave voice, “you would have been greeted as an honored emissary from the Ku Klux Klan.”
    The conversation became general except for Mrs. Douglas, beautiful eyes flashing with intelligence and firmness of purpose, as she continued to speak into the President’s constantly moving right ear.
    The food was, as always, inedible. Caroline had had a long experience of the infamous Roosevelt table, which dated back to when Eleanor had discovered that her husband was committing adultery with her social secretary, a Maryland beauty called Lucy Mercer. Eleanor had then moved like a conquering army onto a battlefield where she imposed her conditions of peace. If Franklin chose, she would grant him a divorce so that he could marry Lucy, who would then become the stepmother of their five children, and Eleanor would go her solitary way. At this point, onto the field came Franklin’s mother, the formidable Mrs. James Roosevelt, who told her son that if he went through with a divorce, she would disinherit him, which meant that he would have no money of any kind and lose forever the Hudson Valley estate at Hyde Park. Finally, no one needed to point out to him that a divorced man could not have a career in politics. “So,” Caroline murmured to Tim, “he gave up Lucy, I think.”
    “You think?” As a rule, Tim disliked gossip of the who is with whom and why sort. But this was part of the history he was starting to record.
    “I said
think
,” said Caroline, carefully drowning a heavily fried chicken croquette in a viscous sea of white cream sauce that was slowly coagulating into library paste, “because—I think—he still sees her, they say.”
    “How do
they
know?”
    “How do they always seem to know everything? Lucy married happily but apparently, every now and then, the two meet. She’s supposed to have sat in the back of a car at his first inauguration and watched it all.”
    “How very romantic.”
    “I think it is. Anyway, he and Eleanor lead separate lives. She’s always on the move. Even so, they are very much a team. I can’t fathom what they think of each other. There is a basket beside his bed and whenever she’s here, she fills it every night with notes, things to be done, people to see. Oh!”
    Caroline had seen what she’d been longing for Tim to see: The Salad. It had materialized at the President’s end of the table. From afar, it looked to be a milky mound, studded with golden and red splotches like some rare disease. “Part of Eleanor’s revenge for Lucy has been Mrs. Nesbitt, a cook from Hyde Park, now the housekeeper who commands the kitchen where … Well,