“Stay with us then; for a few days,” said the Senator generously. “Got plenty of room. Give us a chance to talk strategy.”
“I’d appreciate that, sir. By the way I happen to know your daughter slightly. I came down on the train with her this morning.”
Was it my imagination … no, it wasn’t; the Senator sighed rather sadly. “A wonderful girl, Ellen,” he said mechanically.
“She seems very pleasant.”
“Like her mother … a wonderful woman.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The Senator rose. “I’ll see you this evening then, at the house. Got a committee meeting now. Rufus will show you around. Remember: this is a kind of crusade.”
3
A crusade was putting it lightly. It was an unscrupulous and desperate effort of one Leander Rhodes to organize the illiberal minority of the country into a party within his party … and, I suspect, if he’d been younger and a little more intelligent he might very well have got himself into the White House. As it was, from what little Rufus Hollister would tell me, the Senator had some impressive backing; he also had some very sinister backing. I disguised my alarm, though, and by the time I took a taxi to the Senator’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, Mr. Hollister was convinced that I too was a crusader for Good Government and True-Blue American Ideals.
The house on Massachusetts Avenue was an heroic imitation of an Italian villa, covered with yellow stucco and decorated with twisted columns and ironwork balconies. The Senator, I soon discovered, was a very wealthy man though the source of his income was not entirely clear to me. Mr. Hollister spoke vaguely of properties in Talisman City.
A butler showed me to my room on the third floor and, as I went up the marble staircase, I caught an occasional glimpse of ballrooms, of parquet floors, of potted palms, all very 1920 Grand Hotel chic. Dinner would be announced in an hour, I was told. Then I was left alone in a comfortable bedroom overlooking the Avenue.
I was dozing blissfully in a hot bath, when Ellen marched into the bathroom.
“I’ve come to scrub your back,” she said briskly.
“No, you don’t,” I said, modestly covering myself. “Go away.”
“That’s hardly the way for my fiancé to act,” she said, sitting down on the toilet seat.
“I haven’t been your fiancé for almost a year,” I said austerely. “Besides, the bride-to-be is not supposed to inspect her groom before the wedding.”
“You give me a pain,” said Ellen, lighting a cigarette. She wore a very dashing pair of evening pajamas, green with gold thread, quite oriental-looking … it made her look faintly exotic, not at all like a simple girl from Talisman City. “By the way, I told Mother we were engaged. I hope you don’t mind.”
I moaned. “What is this allergy you have to the truth?”
“Well, it was the truth a few months ago … I mean time’s relative and all that,” she beamed at me. “Anyway it should help you with my father.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said, recalling the Senator’s look of pain at the mention of his only daughter.
“The house is full, by the way,” said Ellen, exhaling smoke. “Some of the dreariest political creatures these old eyes have seen in many a moon.”
“Constituents?”
“I suppose so. One’s rather sweet … a lovely boy from New York, a newspaperman. He’s doing a profile of Father for some magazine, very Left Wing I gather, and of course poor Father doesn’t have the remotest notion that he’s being taken for a ride. Did you ever see the piece the Nation did on him?”
I said that I hadn’t; I asked her the name of the lovely boy who was doing the profile. “Walter Langdon … a real dream. I had a quick drink with him in the drawing room, before I dashed off to make violent love to my prospective groom.”
“I have a feeling that our engagement isn’t going to last very long.”
“You may be right. Oh, and you’ll never guess who’s here … Verbena Pruitt.”
“My God!” I was alarmed. Anyone would be alarmed at meeting the incomparable Verbena, the President of the Daughters of the War of 1812 as well as National Committeewoman for her party, one of the most powerful lady politicos in the country.
“She’s from Daddy’s state, you know. She has the hairiest legs I’ve seen since that football game at Cambridge last week.”
“I had better get myself a hotel room quick,” I said, letting the bathwater out and standing up, my back turned modestly toward Ellen as I dried myself.
“How do you keep so slim?” asked the insatiable Ellen.
“No exercise is the secret,” I said flexing a muscle or two in an excess of male spirits.
“You’re really not bad at all,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder why we ever fell out.” She rose and came toward me, a resolute expression on her face.
“None of that,” I said, making a dash for the bedroom. I had my trousers on before she could violate me further. She relaxed and we went on talking as though nothing had happened. I dressed more slowly.
“Then there’s an old buddy of Father’s staying here, Roger Pomeroy and his wife, a poisonous creature. I don’t know what they’re doing here. He’s an industrialist back in Talisman City, makes gunpowder or something like that.…”
“Sounds like a chummy gathering.”
“Grim … awfully grim. That tiresome Rufus Hollister, Father’s secretary, also lives in. I have often said that he was the reason I left home. Did you ever feel his hands? like an uncooked filet of sole … which reminds me I’m hungry, which also reminds me I desperately need a drink. Do hurry … here, let me tie your tie … I love tying a man’s tie: gives me such a sense of power when I think with just the slightest pressure I could choke him to death.”
“Darling, have you ever been analyzed?”
“Of course. Hasn’t everyone? I went every day for three years after my annulment … Mother insisted. When it was over I was completely normal; I had passed my course with flying colors: no more inhibitions, no frustrations, an easy conscience about alcohol as well as the slightly decrepit body of a middle-aged analyst named Breitbach added to my gallery of conquests.” She finished tying my tie with a flourish which made me jump. “There! You look such a lamb.”
4
The drawing room was a large draughty affair with French windows which looked out on a bleak garden of formal boxwood hedges and empty flower beds, black with winter. Several people were seated about the fire. Two men rose at our entrance. A woman in black lace rose, too, and approached us. It was Mrs. Leander Rhodes.
“Mother, I want you to meet my fiancé, Peter Sargeant.”
“I’m so happy to see you, Mr. Sargeant. I’ve heard such a great deal about you … such a coincidence, too … the Senator engaging you without knowing about you and Ellen.” She was an amiable-looking woman of fifty, thin and rather bent with, as far as I could tell through the swatches of black lace, no bosom and no waist. At her throat old-fashioned yellow diamonds gleamed. Her eyes were black; only her wide full mouth was like her daughter’s. “Let me introduce you around,” she said; and she did.
Verbena Pruitt was worse than I’d expected: a massive woman in mauve satin with henna-dyed hair, bobbed short over a red fat neck, large features, small pig eyes and a complexion not unlike the craters of the moon as seen through a telescope. She gave my hand a vigorous squeeze. So did Roger Pomeroy, a tall silver-haired man of distinction. His wife, Camilla, a fairly pretty dark woman, smiled at me winningly, one heavily veined hand at her smooth neck, fondling pearls. Ellen’s lovely boy Walter Langdon, a red-haired youth, mumbled something incoherent as we shook hands. He was obviously uncomfortable. And well he should be, I thought righteously, coming into a man’s house like this with every intention of axing him later in a magazine.