Free Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan

reading lessons as well as entertainment. “Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo.’” When, just after his sixth birthday, he began first grade at the Potomac School on California Street near Connecticut Avenue, he could read somewhat, mostly because of his grandmother, partly because his grandfather had, during the previous year, already pounced. Every possible reader had for years been pressed into service for the eight hours or so each day that the Senator “read.” “‘Milton’s daughters,’ he would say with a sweet smile … ‘went blind reading to
their
father.’” When his own two children had proved abysmal readers, Mrs. Gore continued as she had for thirty years. So too did the Senator’s longtime secretary. Mrs. Gore had developed the skill of reading to her husband while her mind was totally someplace else, but she longed for relief. To those who read to him, he was “a gentle and amusing tyrant … hard going, if you did not.” At last, the blind man decided, he could start to reap the benefit of having an intelligent grandson. Little Gene could start fulfilling the role his grandfather had had in mind for him from the moment he had been cradled in a bureau drawer at Rock Creek Park. Actually, Nina and Gene now, finally, had an apartment of their own, on Bancroft Place above Dupont Circle, close to the Potomac School. But Deenie still spent much of his time at Broad Branch Road, looked after by his grandmother. Falteringly, he had begun to read out loud to his grandfather, applying the rudimentary skills his grandmother had taught him. The Senator slowly, patiently, nurtured his oral reading and his enthusiasm for books. In a house filled with bookshelves, the Senator knew the location of each volume. He would ask the boy to go to a particular shelf and get such-and-such a book down. Then he would tell him where to turn to in the book. Then the command was, “Read!”
    Little Gene did his best, sounding out long or difficult words syllable by syllable. Gradually he improved his facility and speed. The boy had the advantage of the Senator having to teach him phonetically. When he stumbled, his grandfather would sound out the syllables. “ I can still remember pronouncing long words, syllable by syllable. Not until I had got the sense would we move on.” As a reward for what was initially, at five, hard and sometimes boring work (he could understand only part of what he read), the Senator would tell him stories, which he had started doing long before the boy could read at all. “Baby Gene,” said a Washington newspaper featurearticle about the Senator, “runs among the stacks of books…. ‘Tell me a story, Dad,’ begs little Gene, bored with playthings. The Senator, eyes tightly closed, says nothing. ‘Dad,’ insists the boy, shaking him. ‘Oh, Dad! Please tell me a story!’ Silence. Baby Gene regards his grandfather with interest, observes naïvely: ‘Why do you keep your eyes closed? You can’t see anyway.’ Sen. Gore, amused, opens his blind eyes, begins sententiously: ‘Once upon a time….’” And the Senator would invent stories, “just to take the curse off some of the stuff I had to read … about boys who lived up a tree in Mississippi and how they lived in the woods. He would interject these amidst bimetallism, to hold my interest with it.” The Senator loved fact, information, analysis, the
Congressional Record
. He also, paradoxically, was a “passionate sight-seer…. One of my first memories is driving with him to a slum in southeast Washington. ‘All this,’ he said, pointing at the dilapidated redbrick buildings, ‘was once our land.’ Since I saw only shabby buildings and could not imagine the land beneath, I was not impressed.”

    Potomac School was mostly, in