Free The Golden Age by Gore Vidal Page A

performance as those two put on over which one was
not
going to pay that check! Finally, around noon, they got out all these nickels and dimes and pennies, piled them up on the table, and split the bill.’ ” Cuneo shook his head. “They make millions, those two misers!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card on which had been written a name and a New York City telephone number. “This fellow should be very interesting for you to talk to. Lively. Bright. He’s tied in with the Morgan Bank. He’s also on the executive board of Fight for Freedom …”
    “Another interventionist.” Tim was flat.
    “But with a difference. He’s heartland American.”
    “With the House of Morgan?”
    “Every house must have a heart, as the old ditty goes.” Cuneo rose. “If you like, keep in touch. I might be helpful with this. And with that, too. Now I’ve got to soothe Drew over there in the corner, cowering behind the palm tree.” They shook hands, then Cuneo crossed the room, greeting every other table, while a bemused Tim looked at the card in his hand. “Who the hell,” he said aloud, “is Wendell L. Willkie?”

TWO
1
    Caroline’s old office in the
Tribune
building had been kept exactly as it was when she had finally sold out most of her remaining shares in the newspaper to Blaise, with the understanding that even as a minor stockholder she would be considered, when she chose, what indeed she was: the creator of the modern
Tribune
, and its co-publisher. Blaise seemed more pleased than not to have her back, if only as a pipeline to the White House.
    On one wall there had been placed a map of Europe; each day, Harold Griffiths would move about different-colored pins to show the advance of the German armies across the Rhine and the retreat of the French and British armies toward the sea. Above the map there was a modernistic clock, first revealed at the World’s Fair in New York the previous summer. It told the hour in every one of earth’s zones as well as the dates. Thus far, it was May 10, 1940, in Washington, D.C.
    As Caroline entered the office, it was six p.m. in Saint-Cloud-le-Duc and noon in the District of Columbia; she noted that the Germanswere deep into France itself. Harold was busy putting blue British pins in a diagonal line, running south of Belgium toward the English channel. “Well, the Maginot Line was impregnable after all,” he said, turning to face Caroline, who enjoyed his unrelenting good humor—even wit—as the world fell apart.
    “So it was.” Caroline sat in a leather armchair next to her elaborately carved Victorian desk, the property of the founder of the original
Tribune
back in the days of Andrew Jackson.
    “Clever of Hitler to just go around it and then come down from the north.” Griffiths sat beneath the map.
    “Why didn’t it occur to the French that he’d occupy Belgium and Holland first?” Caroline was genuinely puzzled. “No one ever thinks of the obvious, I suppose. Except a military genius.”
    “Genius!” Harold was contemptuous. “If
I
thought of it, anyone could. They simply don’t think of anything, and now who cares about French politicians?”
    But Caroline was apprehensive about her friend Léon Blum; he was a Jew, and if Hitler should … She put the thought out of her mind. France was still a world empire and a great military power. Hitler would be stopped, just as the Kaiser had been twenty years earlier. She saw it clearly: the fighting would drag on until the United States finally came into the war. Then trenches. Mud. Barbed wire. Poison gas. But could history repeat itself? For one thing, the speed with which the German tanks were moving through Europe was something new under the sun. She looked at the map. In April, in a few hours, Denmark had been overrun. Norway had taken a little longer. Now the Germans were approaching Paris as the defeated British troops raced for the English Channel and what would be, for the lucky ones, a most