Gore Vidal (8 page)

From early on, his grandmother read to him. These sessions soon turned into 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 feature
article 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 his memory, a blur. His fictional alter ego had been “
sick to his stomach
the first day, and all his memories after that were a confusion: noise, paste, paper, sandboxes.” Later he recalled that “as we came downstairs, one of the teachers belted out ‘
Celeste Aïda'
on the piano. As a result, it is the only Verdi opera I don't care for.” Even first-grade classes in those distant days were highly structured. For some reason, his best grades were in citizenship, mathematics, and music, his lowest in composition, reading, and spelling, as if this were some alternative Eugene Luther Vidal, later to be exchanged for the real one. His handwriting was already dreadful. His mother suddenly became concerned about him, particularly his grades. Why wasn't he making more of an effort? If he didn't do better, he would be punished. She decided a change of school was called for. Abruptly, for the next year, he was enrolled in the second grade at The Landon School for Boys, though the record is as much a blur and a blank as his memory. His home address was now again 1500 Broad Branch Road, Rock Creek Park. For third grade, Nina moved him again, this time to the larger Sidwell Friends School, where he was to stay for grades three through five. He had occasional conversations with Mr. Sidwell himself, “an ancient Quaker whose elephantine ears were filled with hair while numerous liver
spots made piebald his kindly bald head.” At all three schools reading was taught phonetically. Early on, at Potomac or Landon, he was taught by the Calvert method. “With Calvert you cut out pictures of Greek gods and you glued them into books,” he recalled, “a form of teaching which doesn't exist anymore. They tried to make it interesting and visual, but you also had to know about syllables, that a sentence was made up of words which were made up of little syllables, like a train.” During his first two years at Sidwell Friends the real Eugene Luther Vidal materialized, with A's in reading, history, and spelling and respectable grades throughout, except for the constant dismal D's for penmanship. On the playing fields he was noticeably uninterested, his marks low. In fifth grade all his marks plunged. Though forced to be there in body, he had withdrawn his mind. At home, at Rock Creek Park, he read to his grandfather and now, also, for long hours to himself. He soon began to write, bits of prose stories and poems. He had decided to do at school only what he was forced to. What he wanted was to read. The Senator had no objections. On the contrary: reading had become a strong bond between them. Nina, though, was appalled. She did not want a son who shut himself up with books, who did not “mix,” one of her favorite words. Since she read little to nothing, a son who read a great deal worried her. He could not be up to any good or fit into her world. Irritated, she constantly urged him to play outdoors. She wanted him to get better grades, to be popular in ways that fit her values. School was the training ground, the entranceway to success, power, and glamour. Little Gene was simply not trying hard enough to do the right thing. Frustrated, disappointed, with an explosive temper, more volatile because of alcohol, she felt compelled to exhort, then criticize, then hit. His fictional surrogate in
The Season of Comfort
is beaten at least once a month, at one time with a switch from a dogwood tree “
until blood came
, until his bare legs bled…. The light of her cigarette burned red in the dark … and when he tried to hold the stick she burned one of his hands.”

Sometimes indifferent, at other times bossy, Nina was frighteningly unpredictable. Occasionally she was companionable, chatty in a way the boy liked, especially as he got older and more curious about the adult world. “My mother didn't play with me. But she talked. She was very 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 early
1930s 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, downstairs in the drawing room, by the fireplace, to the Senator. It seemed a touch of paradise. In a short story of his young adulthood he returns to the house in Rock Creek Park and meets his youthful self, as if that part of him were still there in what he came to remember as the place in which he had spent his childhood. He hears, from the top of the hill, his grandmother's voice calling him to dinner.

Observing his grandfather impressed him deeply. There was his massive appearance: elderly, dignified, a stentorian voice, pithy, colloquial, with the touch of a Southern accent, which became more pronounced when constituents visited. Suddenly he transformed himself into a folksy Southwesterner from the Bible Belt. A rather “subdued household” became lively with homey good cheer. The atheistic Senator, one of whose favorite jokes was that “the one thing that an all-powerful God can't do is make a year-old heifer in a minute,” suddenly seemed a good-natured believer. His wife was also a nonbeliever. “They saw the worst of religion in the Bible Belt. And he never let on that he was not with them,” his grandson recalled. “My mother would complain as a child that she couldn't read the funny papers on Sunday. A lot of things were forbidden on the sabbath. They were trying to conform for fear that the neighbors would find out if they didn't. A lot of snooping going on. If you were doing the forbidden things on the sabbath, you were in trouble in Oklahoma. I think there were only two or three times that I went with him to church. A Methodist church. It was only because he knew the preacher.” As soon as the constituents left, quietness returned. The accent became more Washington than Southwestern. His performance
might have been different for the various Oklahoma Indian chiefs who visited and whose interests Gore represented. Four Indian headdresses, gifts from grateful constituents, impressed the young boy. Later they were given to the Smithsonian. Then there was his grandfather's blindness. It was both familiar and fascinating, the mesmerizing glass eye, the Senator's earlymorning magical transformation into a dignified politician. His secretary recalled shopping with him in New York. “This store had thousands of glass eyes, different shapes, different colors. He'd put this one in and ask me, ‘Does it match?' One eye was gone. There was just a socket. The other one was there, but he couldn't see with it.” With his cane held in front of him, “he had a sense of the presence of things. I can remember only one time when he came in with a bump on his head. Someone had left a door open, and he ran into it.” His sense of smell and touch were keen. He humorously remarked that since he “could touch a piece of furniture and estimate its age … that if he ever ran out of a job he could make a living working for an antique dealer.” The mother of a classmate of young Gene's “would take him around the house and he'd touch things and say, ‘Oh, no, this is a new remake of an old design.' He could tell,” Wilson Hurley recalled, “by the flattening of the grain of wood in the furniture how long the furniture had been in use.”