Free Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan Page B

interesting. I knew all about being a kid. I wanted to know about being an adult. She gave a crash course….” His father was as smooth, as soft-spoken, as ever. Consequently, Nina sometimes was furious at both of them, and by the early1930s Gene and Nina found it increasingly desirable to spend time apart, much more than business and different social schedules dictated. When Gene did not act decisively enough to meet Nina’s demands, her nervous system always required that she do something, such as change Deenie’s school or come up with some slogan or strategy. What she hotly favored one day she often seemed to have forgotten the next. One thing her son could count on, though: she would be neither approving nor dependable. The action or word that on one occasion would produce no response on another would result in what he began to identify as a Nina-like scene. He could see it coming: a carping, self-aggrandizing tone, an abruptness of gesture, a twist of her cigarette. At the Bancroft Place apartment the mahogany coffee table had two deep burns from Nina’s cigarettes. It seemed best to stay away from her as much as possible. He had an attractive alternative. At Rock Creek Park he could play in the woods and walk down the steep lawn to the stream filled with salamanders, water moccasins, crayfish, frogs. It was rock-littered, iron brown. At the edge of the woods stood a dilapidated slave cabin, somehow connected to a war from long ago that the boy soon began to romanticize, unlike his grandfather, who detested the war from whose aftermath his entire generation had suffered. His grandmother thought that the Confederate boys had reaped well-deserved disaster, the result of their love of fighting, gambling, whoring, and shiftlessness. In the center of the woods a spring bubbled up from the gray sand out of which “ I used to build elaborate sand cities, usually in the style of those I read about in …
Arabian Nights
, a book I never ceased to read and reread.” He liked to sculpt in sand and soon to paint. Near the house, which had a circular drive in front and a small fountain, stood a sweet-smelling rose garden. Toward the border of the woods a small vineyard of purple grapes glowed, clusters of which he would cut for his grandfather and himself to eat. Inside, in the entrance hall, smells from the kitchen met the other odors of the house: the perfume of cut irises in a bowl, newly applied floor wax, the musty mysteriousness of thousands of dusty books.
    He began to read voraciously, in good weather by the stream, otherwise in an attic alcove window from which he had a view of the grounds. Newspapers covered almost every inch of the attic floor, old clippings, the
Congressional Record
. Undusted shelves lining the room were heavy with books that the Senator incessantly collected. When “campaigning, the first thing he would do is get a telephone book and locate the used bookstores,”with the help of his secretary, his last assistant, Roy Thompson, recalled. “If there was one close by, we went to that. Many times he knew the bookstore and the proprietor. He’d say, ‘What have you got?’ Meaning what have you got in the fields that I want, history, government, and so on. Finally, he’d have six or eight books. The Senator would pile them up and say, ‘Now, how much for the lot?’ Then he’d pay, have them wrapped up and have them sent home to him—to his house, not his office…. These books, usually still in their original packages, would be at home in Washington. He’d say to me, ‘Do you know where the books are that we got in Cleveland?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, Tot will know. There’s a book in there I want.’ We’d open the package, and there would be the book. He always remembered what books he had.” Soon the boy could find them as readily as his grandfather. Upstairs or outside he would read to himself,