Ceremony of the Innocent (41 page)

Jochan was distressed at the loss of the major part of his fortune, for now he could not spend as much on his mistress. She assured him it did not matter. But it mattered to Jochan, who adored her. So when Jeremy, after his first year in Washington, asked him to be his assistant there at a more than generous salary, Jochan was overwhelmed with gratitude. He felt, for Jeremy, the devotion and admiration the less assertive feel for the man who possesses great personal authority, and never doubts his puissance. Jochan doubted his, for Kitty had been very frank on the subject over the years of their married life, and he had a deplorable habit of self-deprecation. Jeremy, who knew Jochan’s dedicated character, was fond of his friend.

So Kitty, elated, and Jochan, anxious to be of the utmost assistance to Jeremy, moved to Washington, and settled in a small but charming house in Georgetown very near to the Porters’ larger and more elaborate establishment. Kitty, the socialite, soon made friends among Jeremy’s colleagues and their wives, and they were fascinated by her, as they were not by Ellen. Her worldliness, her startling wit, her original bons mots, her gracious desire to please—she was an expert at this when it was to her advantage—and her obvious sophistication, made her very popular almost immediately. Moreover, she had acquaintances in many of the embassies, and often spoke of her father, “the Senator.” She had ease and grace, gaiety and captivating manners, and her taste in clothes and jewelry and furnishings soon became famous, and she was consulted on dress even by the wives of Senators and ambassadors, and once the First Lady had asked her advice before a ball.

Kitty was jubilant over all this. She felt herself to be in her rightful milieu, among the potent and influential people of America. She loved the strong scent of power; it was more exhilarating to her than wine or fine dinners. She often regretted that women could not vote, and believed that if they were given the vote she would herself be a member of Congress.

She never stopped assiduously courting and deferring to Jeremy, who was, at last, becoming amused by her and more tolerant. She was now, more than ever, the confidante, guide, and devoted friend of Ellen, who was frightened by Washington and felt uneasy in assemblies, and trembled when invited to a large party in the White House. Ellen relied on her more and more, a trend which Kitty carefully cultivated. Kitty happily spent half her time in Washington, and half in New York, and could not understand Ellen’s dislike of the capital. “My dear,” she would say, “here is the very heart of the law of America. How is it possible you are not excited by all this?” Ellen was definitely not excited. She would look about her in strange fear during churning parties, and she rarely spoke, while Kitty moved about sinuously and rapidly, exquisitely arrayed, her conversation glittering and full of humor. She was a great favorite with the gentlemen, but she was very careful to bewitch their wives, too. No one noticed that she was really ugly; her vivacity even overcame the enormous white teeth which usually filled her small dark face. There were some who, first calling those teeth “horse’s fangs,” came to admire them and consider them very attractive. Ellen would watch and listen to her with awe, and would feel crude and clumsy and stupidly mute.

Kitty had been deeply tempted, at first, to guide Ellen in the purchasing of unbecoming clothes, clothes too tawdry and “actressy,” so that Ellen would be even less popular than she already was, and would be severely criticized. Then Kitty’s clever mind dissuaded her. She knew that Jeremy would be the first to notice and would blame her at once. Jeremy’s goodwill was the most vital element in her existence, both for her ambition and for her lust. However, most skillfully, she was undermining what little self-confidence the girl possessed, so that Ellen could hardly endure her brief visits to Washington, and came to believe that her presence there was detrimental to Jeremy’s career.

When Ellen was absent, in New York, especially during the months of her second pregnancy, Kitty would give faultlessly appointed dinners for Jeremy in her Georgetown house. Even Jeremy was astonished at her range of acquaintances and friends. She was careful to flatter him and admire him in the presence of others, who would otherwise have been alienated by his “queer ideas” and his brusqueness, and as her flattery and admiration were quite sincere, and she daintily avoided fulsome obsequiousness and servility, even Senators began to approve of him, if with some caution and reservations. Because of Kitty—and this also amused Jeremy—he was invited to houses where he otherwise would not be a guest, and he was grateful to her for this. He, too, had ambitions, not entirely for himself but for his country. When President Roosevelt singled her out and called her “Kitty,” Jeremy thought that she deserved some little cultivation from him, if only in gratitude.

After the birth of little Gabrielle, Ellen’s health remained precarious for several months, and she spent those months almost entirely in New York under her doctors’ anxious care. Jeremy was very busy in Washington during the Panic, and Jochan found himself being sent to New York for extended periods to manage Jeremy’s affairs there. Kitty was secretly overjoyed. She knew all about Jeremy. She knew that Jeremy had been faithful to his wife during the years of their marriage, with only one or two lapses, and those transient. She also knew that Jeremy was more than ordinarily attracted to blithe and amusing women, and that his masculinity and sexual urges were greater than in most men, for all his fastidiousness. She knew, too, that he felt obligated to her, and she easily guessed, from what Ellen had timidly confided to her, that marital relations between Ellen and her husband had been forbidden by physicians until Ellen’s health had been restored. Kitty’s elation became almost unbearable. Her passion for Jeremy was now total; as much as she could love anyone she loved Jeremy, and lived for the sound and sight of him.

The inevitable, of course, happened, five months after Ellen’s last child had been born, and Ellen was confined at home in New York, listless and in pain and suffering long weaknesses, and Jochan himself was in New York on Jeremy’s business. Jeremy, during those austere months, had indulged in some meaningless affairs in Washington, with random women, carefully avoiding any entanglements with the wives or daughters of his colleagues. He did not consider that he was betraying his beloved Ellen, for the women were of no significance to him, and he hardly remembered their names when he was tired of them. He knew he was a full-blooded man, and that he could not do his best work when plagued by powerful urges, and he had never been abstemious even from puberty. He was a man, and women were women, and he enjoyed the pleasurable encounters and never felt guilty, for he was never deeply involved with his women and never felt more than a passing affection for them. He also tired of them regularly, and looked for others and for variety. It never crossed his mind that Ellen would be devastated by his activities, for he loved her more now than ever he had done, and his women were only necessary substitutes for her until she recovered. Besides, he was a man and Ellen was a woman, and she would not understand, he once thought, when he gave the matter any thought at all. As with all lusty men, women were a necessity to him, and were as much a hunger as any other physical hunger, and it must be satisfied. Moreover, he observed that his colleagues, the majority of them, were almost as actively engaged in sexual pursuits as he was, and so long as they were discreet no one was offended.

So Kitty quite casually became his mistress. He was not very much tempted by her, but he knew her well and was distracted by her, and she was intelligent and diverting and collected all the gossip of the city, and her observations were acute and frolicsome and lively. She did not bore him, as other women bored him even before he was done with them. She was invariably interesting and her sharp wit made him laugh at the very times he was the most disgusted with Washington. Kitty had well learned the art of pleasing, even when she had been a young girl. She had polished it to fine accomplishment, and her love for Jeremy gave it extra luster.

He began to look forward to the lighthearted and merry dinners she had prepared for him, with all his favorite dishes, for with the sensitivity of love Kitty had long noted what he most preferred, and the wines he enjoyed. After a wretched and frustrated and enraged day in Congress, he felt relaxed and contented in Kitty’s house, and did not feel that he was betraying his friend Jochan. Kitty had delicately made it plain that she and Jochan had “nothing in common any longer. We are just friends—and have been so for a long time. It is a—platonic—relationship, and I am still quite fond of Jochan, in a sisterly way.” So Jeremy, in the most casual way possible, availed himself of Kitty’s unmistakable invitations. When, in her bed, she had been transported and had whispered ardently of her love for him, he thought it only amiability and a momentary ecstasy. He had heard the word “love” too many times from too many other women to give any credence to Kitty’s honest and blissful avowals. Had he actually believed that Kitty did, indeed, love him to despair, and only him, he would never have come to her again for solace and entertainment. He believed that with the exception of Ellen the majority of women used the word “love” as a gay and self-exonerating password to the rompings in a mutual bed. It was just a rapturous complimentary exclamation under the blankets and sheets, and really meant nothing. He was well aware that Kitty felt a most urgent attraction to him, but he was convinced only that she was a light woman of many secret affairs, and had much of his own importunate lusts. The affair would only last until Ellen was well, he would say to himself. Kitty would feel no stronger ties to him than he felt for her, and they would part, grateful for a pleasant interlude but nothing more. He had not robbed Jochan and Kitty had not robbed Ellen. He and Kitty temporarily enjoyed each other, and that was all.

Kitty, however, was now overwhelmed by her love for Jeremy. She was certain that Jeremy loved her in return, and that the affair would become permanent. Any other alternative would have been unendurable to her. We belong together, she would think in joy and surfeit. We are the same sort of person, my darling Jeremy. Fulfilled, she began to bloom and even acquired a sort of dark prettiness, and her spirits were so elated, and so ardently engaged, that she became more and more fascinating to her friends. She literally gleamed, as she had never gleamed before.

C H A P T E R   19

THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE rose in pontifical majesty and surveyed the crowded ranks of Congressmen, and his appearance was forbidding and ominous. He looks, thought Jeremy Porter, like a hanging judge about to pass sentence, with sadistic relish half concealed by a menacing piety. Jeremy had never admired the Speaker, whom he considered an old fraud, always mouthing aphorisms tinged with evangelistic fervor, and frequently calling upon “Almighty God.” He usually gave the impression that he had just emerged from a long and secret colloquy with the deity, and he would often cast down his eyes humbly as if listening to a divine prompting audible to no one but himself.

He was a small thin man but his voice was like that of a bass drum and so he was called, irreverently, the Fart. He invariably wore black, summer and winter, and always of the same dull broadcloth. “If he sweats at all,” Jeremy once said to some of his colleagues, “he does it through his bladder.” His laughing colleagues most naturally and eagerly informed the Speaker of this small witticism and in consequence of this, and other witticisms concerning him from Jeremy, the Speaker hated Jeremy with the venom possible only to a hypocrite who considered himself a man of God, and a lover of his fellow man.

After calling the House to order the Speaker stood in silence, staring at his lectern. His wrinkled face was very solemn and judicious and expressed a deep sadness tinged with stern resolve.

He said, and his voice boomed through the Chamber, “We are called here today in a preliminary investigation of allegations made against the Congressman from New York City, Congressman Jeremy Nathaniel Porter. It is our unquestionably terrible duty, imposed on us by the Laws of the Land. We are empowered by conscience as well as by law to conduct this investigation, and to answer the demands that the Congressman be censured, if not impeached.”

Jeremy sat back on his seat and his expression was grimly amused. He folded his arms across his chest. His colleagues carefully avoided looking at him, even his few friends. It was a hot May day, as only Washington can know such a day, humid and dusty and unbearably heavy. The windows of the Chamber were open; a white hot sky blazed beyond them and everything glittered outside, from the harness of the horses to the pavement itself. Great fans moved sluggishly from the ceiling of the Chamber, which disturbed clouds of flies and moved the dust about in golden whirlpools where the sun struck. The assemblage wiped its collective rows of faces, all of them wet and red, and sometimes there was a discreet fluttering of papers as some fanned themselves. Those inclined to favor Jeremy, the very few, were irritated by the fact that it was because of him that they were confined here when they longed to be home in cooler places or resting in their gardens, or napping in the shadowed beds of their mistresses.

The Speaker continued, “Congressman Porter of New York City has been impugning this Congress to the press. It is beneath my dignity as the Speaker of the House to repeat the canards, open accusations, and direct calumnies Congressman Porter has incontinently uttered to the press, without regard for truth or verity or courtesy towards his colleagues, whom he at one time castigated as ‘bought’”—the Speaker cleared his throat, let his voice drop dolorously—“whores or country jackasses who would not recognize a bandit even with guns pressed to their heads, or conspirators against the People of these United States. These are the very least of his accusations, blurted to the yellow press. No newspaper with any sense of decorum or respect would repeat his charges. One would ignore these charges had they not been picked up by various irresponsible journals throughout our country, and had they not caused malcontents to gather in city halls to discuss them.