The Golden Age by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal [Vidal, Gore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81661-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

1

Caroline had first known Lady Mendl when she was Elsie de Wolfe and, if not the first, certainly the most successful of the early century’s interior decorators. She was also one of the first professional women to live with another woman in a relationship that neither bothered to euphemize; there was no nonsense about a white or Boston marriage. They were, simply, a delightful couple who entertained interesting people in New York and Paris, always in small perfect rooms. Caroline thought of their settings as essentially dollhouses. Elsie’s friend was a literary agent and Elsie herself had literary inclinations. The never easily pleased Henry Adams himself delighted in their company during that long bright unbroken summer before the First World War. Then, in readiness for a new world, Elsie had married some sort of English civil servant called Sir Charles Mendl; as he was neither rich nor decorative, the marriage was an ongoing mystery that none bothered to solve. People came to Elsie for the other people that she had cast to decorate her rooms. During the Hollywood of the war years, she was counted among such distinguished European émigrés as Stravinsky, Mann, Huxley, Schoenberg, and, like them, she was—though American—expected to go “back” to Europe now that, as of this morning, May 8, 1945, Germany had surrendered. Since most of the islands of the Pacific had been occupied by American forces and a huge new bomber called the B-29 had made rubble of much of Tokyo, it was assumed that Japan would soon collapse.

A joyous day, thought Caroline, walking up the dark red-brick path to Elsie’s latest dollhouse, a white frame building set among flower beds and exotic trees that produced Technicolor blossoms. The effect was like MGM’s notion of a humble cottage in the English countryside, no longer menaced by Hitler, who had killed himself the previous month just after President Roosevelt’s abrupt death at Warm Springs, Georgia. As the world stage was being emptied of the great players, what looked to be ill-rehearsed understudies were taking their places in the ruins of Berlin, the chaos of Rome, the echoing White House where a dim former senator with thick glasses seemed altogether too aware that he ought not to be there but, as he was there, he doggedly soldiered on.

“We must chat a moment before the others come.” Elsie had been firm on the telephone.

In the living room, banked with flowers, Elsie sat in a straight-back chair. In the ten years since they had last met, Elsie had acquired a smooth pink-and-white enamel face and, as if to fit more easily into her latest dollhouse, she had, startlingly, shrunk in the process; yet her energy was undiminished. She hurried forward to embrace Caroline. “You don’t change!” she said, almost accusingly.

“Neither do you.” Thus ladies lie, thought Caroline, reassured, even comforted, that the somewhat reduced Elsie was actually so little changed. There were not many left at that certain age which each of them had got to at her

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