The Golden Age (51 page)

“Gore is angry with me because the editors, under the pseudonym ‘Shrike,’ attacked both him and Capote in the first issue.”

“Surely he’s used to attacks by now. After all, he and Dr. Kinsey have libeled the great republic as a land of sexual perversity.”

“Well, to be exact, he only objected to being linked with Capote.”

“He would have preferred Dr. Kinsey, I’m sure.”

“Mother thinks Shakespeare is more apt.”

As the shad roe arrived, Peter quizzed Cornelia about what seemed to him something of a recent phenomenon. He had noticed that most
of the writers for the
Hudson Review
taught at universities while even the politically minded
Partisan Review
was publishing an unusual number of schoolteachers. “We usually steer clear of them,” he said. “We prefer freelance writers like Dwight Macdonald or Edmund Wilson or artist-critics like Virgil Thomson.”

“Wasn’t it always like that? What you call schoolteachers writing about what they teach?”

“I don’t remember ‘always’ very well.” Peter put a strip of bacon over his shad roe. “But the English seem to be able to be writers and critics without becoming teachers or at least not admitting it if they are. I suppose the problem with most of our academics is that they don’t write very well.”

Cornelia frowned. “Possibly because they aren’t meant to write but to teach. But then I don’t suppose I know anything at all about ‘always,’ either. I mean I’m not really literary or political or … But maybe it’s because so many of the young men from the war went to college on the GI Bill of Rights and then decided they wanted to stay on in the colleges.”

“Putting down roots in Academe while writing for tenure?” Peter made a note. “But when will they ever get to see the world?”

“They saw the war.”

“Most of life is peacetime. Or was until last week.”

Peter was already at work on an analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: a permanent military alliance of West European nations under the control of the United States. This was supposed to be a deterrent to Stalin’s known ambition to conquer the earth—so eerily like Hitler’s—but actually it was plain to both Peter and Aeneas that NATO was to be nothing more than the outward and visible sign of the military annexation of Western Europe by the United States on the sensible ground that American bases in so many countries would intimidate any Western government from going to the left. NATO’s brain was the supersecret Central Intelligence Agency, which had managed, somehow, to take public credit for the defeat of the Communist Party in the Italian elections of April 1948.

A year later, the first secretary of defense, Forrestal, had installed a B-29 base in England in order to protect the British Isles from a surprise
nuclear attack: this would have been, Peter had written, a true surprise, since the Soviets still lacked nuclear weapons. Forrestal’s airy response to this argument had been that, even so, it was a good idea to get the British used to a permanent American military presence in their vulnerable islands. Forrestal himself was now in a military hospital, suffering from “nervous breakdown”: he had been captured running through the streets of Washington shouting, “The Russians are coming!” At least such was the whispering gallery’s version of why he was so swiftly removed as chief of the defense of the last free nation on earth. But Peter had then uneasily added: wasn’t the United States also as occupied as Great Britain by an ever-increasing military establishment that was costing the earth? Aeneas reminded him of the ancient vaudeville adage “Don’t make a joke on a joke.” Peter cut the line.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t go to the funeral.” Cornelia was tentative.

“I hate them, too.” Peter had developed several responses to condolences, of which the most effective was changing the subject, but since Cornelia had been a friend of Enid’s, he repeated yet again how his sister had fled from Dr. Paulus’s institution in the doctor’s car (he had left the key in the ignition); just south of Richmond, she had smashed into a farmer’s truck containing two cows. “Yes.” Peter anticipated Cornelia’s question. “She had been drinking. She must have stopped somewhere on the road. She was planning to divorce Clay.”

“She was very unlucky.” Cornelia ate an asparagus with her fingers.

“Very unlucky. Clay, on the other hand, has more luck than is usual.”

“What is usual? Faust?”

“Faust was supernatural. Blaise as tempter-in-chief is more usual. Except I can’t see my besotted father as anything so glamorous as Mephistopheles. I’d cast Clay for that.”

Cornelia was surprised. “He is so … blond. I mean bland.” She laughed. “I mean both.”

The sommelier poured them the last of the Chassagne-Montrachet. “Blonds can be diabolic, too. Not you, of course.”

“I’m borderline blond. Bland, too, I fear.”

Peter asked Cornelia to go to the movies with him. “I plan to see at least four today. I seldom get the chance to see even one in Washington.
Aeneas usually covers all the arts for us, searching restlessly for an
American Idea
. I’m beginning to think he thinks anything will do. We’ve given up on the
The
. Tell no one.”

Cornelia declined the invitation to go see
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo
, and then, at a small movie house on Broadway,
Fire over Luzon
, starring Audie Murphy “in a real-life story of heroism in war.” A larger-than-life-size poster showed Murphy, a handsome youth who had won, in real life, in the real war, the Medal of Honor for killing German soldiers; he was carrying a wounded marine out of a flaming building.

Clay Overbury was identified in the credits as the original hero of this “real-life story,” taken from the book by Harold Griffiths, “the GI’s Homer.” Peter rather doubted if the classical allusion, no doubt Harold’s contribution, had done much for the box office. Even so, for early evening, the theater was half full with adolescent males and a few matronly women. Voters.

Apparently Clay—the protagonist—was a youth from the American heartland. He had had his doubts about foreign wars but when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor he enlisted even though he was supposed to marry a girl who lived, for some unclear reason, far from the heartland in Washington, D.C. Audie Murphy’s astonishing feats in the real war made even the most bogus movie scenes of combat come to life. Reel after reel, Clay’s luck kept on holding. At the end, grateful neighbors sent the shy Audie with his new wife to Congress to make sure that there would never be another war in the new world that Audie-Clay had so famously risked his life to give birth to. The Harold Griffiths touch was everywhere as the young couple, at the end, loomed like archangels over the dome of the Capitol, a radiant alabaster skull set in lush green. Peter made a note: “Why are greens and yellows so phony in American films?”

Peter took a taxi to the East Side. The sun had just set and the sky was a bright electric April blue.

The offices of Hugh Pendleton, M.D., were on the ground floor of an East Side brownstone. Peter was immediately shown into the doctor’s
office by an irritable receptionist; it was almost eight-thirty p.m. and long past closing time in the land of healing.

Dr. Pendleton was professionally benign. “I hope you don’t mind this ungodly hour but I’ve had a heavy schedule today. At Memorial.” He added the chilling touch.

“Cancer’s on the increase?” Peter had a morbid if not quite hypochondriacal fascination with disease. Dr. Pendleton motioned for him to sit in a brown leather chair beneath several museum posters featuring Oriental art. On the wall next to his medical degrees, he had hung a Chinese scroll painting—bird in a willow tree, boldly rendered. “Well, it looks like we’re doing more surgeries but I suspect that’s only because we’re better at early detection.” He took off one pair of glasses and put on another. He looked to be Clay’s age.

“As you know,” said Peter, “I was given your name by my sister’s lawyer, Al Hartshorne.”

“At Mrs. Overbury’s funeral. Yes. Mr. Hartshorne told me that he’d spoken to you. Very sad. Very sad.”

“Yes. For some of us at least.”

“Yes.” Dr. Pendleton’s voice was neutral: inquiring for symptoms?

“I’ve just come from the movies. In the daytime. I’m afraid I feel a bit decadent.”

“I seldom go at all. Too tired.”

“But you saw what I just saw.
Fire over Luzon
.”

Dr. Pendleton nodded. “I’d been reading about Congressman Overbury these last few years. And I knew there was a book about him, which I didn’t read but
Life
or
Look
ran a section from it, about Lingayen Gulf. Naturally, I was interested.” Dr. Pendleton was eyeing Peter with some curiosity.

“And, naturally,” Peter picked up the conversational slack, “I was interested to hear that Mr. Hartshorne had been in touch with you. He was preparing my sister’s divorce case when she died.”

“Apparently it was not going to be an amicable divorce.”

“No.” Peter was not about to give any more details than necessary. “You had told a friend that you were there that day, when—Audie Murphy saved a marine from the burning hangar.”

Dr. Pendleton’s smile was very small indeed. His eyebrows grew
together in a straight line, mark of the devil Peter had been told in youth by certain members of the Laurel House domestic staff, ever on guard against Lucifer and all his works. “No. I wasn’t at the airfield that day. I was at a hospital in the jungle, ten miles or so away. Just a Quonset hut, really.”

Peter’s stomach began to churn from tension. A recent development. Dyspepsia?

“So if you weren’t there, how would you know—what happened?”

“I didn’t know. But I did know that Clay Overbury wasn’t there either. He had cut his foot and the wound was infected—gangrene’s always a problem, particularly in the tropics. I was busy trying out penicillin on him. We had just got our first shipment and I’m afraid we were really splurging. Reckless, considering how little we knew about side effects.”

“So he could not have been at the airfield when the Japanese bombed that particular hangar.”

“No.” An odd smile. “But I thought Audie Murphy very convincing. Of course
he
was actually there. I mean on the set, anyway.”

“How did Mr. Hartshorne find you?”

“We have a mutual friend. I’m afraid I’d told her how funny I thought the story was. She told Mr. Hartshorne.”

Peter was thinking hard. But then so, apparently, was Dr. Pendleton. “I’m quite aware of the political and ethical problems involved,” he said. “The political, for Congressman Overbury, is obvious. The ethical, for me, is difficult. We’re not supposed to talk about our patients, to put it mildly.”

“But you
have
talked, haven’t you?” Peter was gentle, almost apologetic. “So the story is not only now known but it would have figured, directly or indirectly, in my sister’s divorce suit. There’s really nothing to be done about what’s said and done. Tell me,” having made his gentle threat, Peter moved on, “how did the story get out, to begin with?
Was
there a wounded marine in the hangar? Did someone save him? In the presence of a cameraman?”

“At Lingayen Gulf there were many marines, dead and wounded.
And someone did carry one of them out of a burning hangar.” Dr. Pendleton removed a glossy photograph from his drawer. “I must say I was curious as to how the mistake was made. So I got this printed up from the original negative. United Press was very helpful. As you can see, there is no way of telling who the rescuer really is. The light from the fire’s back of him. So he’s in total silhouette. He wears no insignia. Officers didn’t in combat. So it could be Clay. It could be me. It could be—well, certainly it was whoever it was, of course. Only he’s never recognized himself, that we know of.”

“We? You know a lot about this.”

“Al got me curious. But the only person who really knows is the journalist who was there and invented the story. Henry—no.” He frowned. “I have a block about his name.”

“Harold Griffiths.”

“Yes. Personally, I preferred Ernie Pyle.”

“Who didn’t?” Peter rose to go.

At the door the doctor gave him a prescription form with a name scribbled on it. “This might be useful.”

Peter took the slip of paper.

“It’s the name of the photographer. He’s still alive, UP says.
You must lose weight
.”

The following day, Peter met Billy Thorne at the Brass Rail at Seventh Avenue and Times Square. By the time Billy limped in, Peter had already occupied a booth and ordered a roast beef sandwich on rye, a specialty of what was a feeding ground for carnivores. Through the restaurant’s plate-glass window, passersby could see chefs at work, slicing joints of beef, ham, turkey.

Peter knew that if he did not eat the famous Brass Rail cheesecake, he could not gain weight simply from lean beef. He felt virtuous already.

“I’ve never been here.” Billy lurched into the booth. He was unnervingly the same. “I’ve passed by many times. I always think of cannibalism when I look through that window.” He shuddered.

“You are simply a repressed vegetarian.”

“I’ll have a ham sandwich,” Billy told the waiter. Then he pushed his wooden leg away from Peter’s leg.

“How do you know when your leg’s next to mine?” Peter was genuinely curious.

“I always move it even if it isn’t.”

Peter noticed, with surprise, as he always had in the past, that one of Billy’s eyes was brown and the other blue. Although he preferred looking into the brown one, it was the blue that Billy now aimed at him. “How is Diana?” Peter asked the wrong eye.

Billy shrugged. “I guess you haven’t seen her since we agreed that she get the divorce. She may have gone to Reno by now. Doesn’t the Senator keep you up to date?”

“We’ve not seen each other for some time. She’s quit the magazine.”

“To marry Clay. Poor Diana.”

“Why—poor?”

“Poor because, among other things, she has no money and so, now that Enid’s dead, Clay is going to drop her and marry a fortune.”

Peter did not even try to simulate surprise. “Yes. That’s exactly what he would do.” He repeated, “Poor Diana.”