Woody was thrilled to run into her. She was as alluring as ever. He wanted to keep the conversation going. ‘What are you doing here?’ Woody said.
‘I work at the State Department.’
Woody nodded. That explained her deference to his father. She had joined a world in which people kowtowed to Senator Dewar. Woody said: ‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m assistant to an assistant. My boss is with the President now, but I’m too lowly to go in with him.’
‘You were always interested in politics. I recall an argument about lynching.’
‘I miss Buffalo. What fun we used to have!’
Woody remembered kissing her at the Racquet Club Ball, and he felt himself blush.
His father said: ‘Please give my best regards to your father,’ indicating that they needed to move on.
Woody considered asking for her phone number, but she pre-empted him. ‘I’d love to see you again, Woody,’ she said.
He was delighted. ‘Sure!’
‘Are you free tonight? I’m having a few friends for cocktails.’
‘Sounds great!’
She gave him the address, an apartment building not far away, then his father hurried him out of the other end of the room.
A guard nodded familiarly to Gus, and they stepped into another waiting room.
Gus said: ‘Now, Woody, don’t say anything unless the President addresses you directly.’
Woody tried to concentrate on the imminent meeting. There had been a political earthquake in Europe: the Soviet Union had signed a peace pact with Nazi Germany, upsetting everyone’s calculations. Woody’s father was a key member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the President wanted to know what he thought.
Gus Dewar had another subject to discuss. He wanted to persuade Roosevelt to revive the League of Nations.
It would be a tough sell. The USA had never joined the League and Americans did not much like it. The League had failed dismally to deal with the crises of the 1930s: Japanese aggression in the Far East, Italian imperialism in Africa, Nazi takeovers in Europe, the ruin of democracy in Spain. But Gus was determined to try. It had always been his dream, Woody knew: a world council to resolve conflicts and prevent war.
Woody was 100 per cent behind him. He had made a speech about this in a Harvard debate. When two nations had a quarrel, the worst possible procedure was for men to kill people on the other side. That seemed to him pretty obvious. ‘I understand why it happens, of course,’ he had said in the debate. ‘Just like I understand why drunks get into fistfights. But that doesn’t make it any less irrational.’
But now Woody found it hard to think about the threat of war in Europe. All his old feelings about Joanne came back in a rush. He wondered if she would kiss him again – maybe tonight. She had always liked him, and it seemed she still did – why else would she have invited him to her party? She had refused to date him, back in 1935, because he had been fifteen and she eighteen, which was understandable, though he had not thought so at the time. But now that they were both four years older, the age difference would not seem so stark – would it? He hoped not. He had dated girls in Buffalo and at Harvard, but he had not felt for any of them the overwhelming passion he had had for Joanne.
‘Have you got that?’ his father said.
Woody felt foolish. His father was about to make a proposal to the President that could bring world peace, and all Woody could think about was kissing Joanne. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I won’t say anything unless he speaks to me first.’
A tall, slim woman in her early forties came into the room, looking relaxed and confident, as if she owned the place; and Woody recognized Marguerite LeHand, nicknamed Missy, who managed Roosevelt’s office. She had a long, masculine face with a big nose, and there was a touch of grey in her dark hair. She smiled warmly at Gus. ‘What a pleasure to see you again, Senator.’
‘How are you, Missy? You remember my son, Woodrow.’
‘I do. The President is ready for you both.’
Missy’s devotion to Roosevelt was famous. FDR was more fond of her than a married man was entitled to be, according to Washington gossip. Woody knew, from guarded but revealing remarks his parents made to one another, that Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, had refused to sleep with him since she gave birth to their sixth child. The paralysis that had struck him five years later did not extend to his sexual equipment. Perhaps a man who had not slept with his wife for twenty years was entitled to an affectionate secretary.
She showed them through another door and across a narrow corridor, then they were in the Oval Office.
The President sat at a desk with his back to three tall windows in a curving bay. The blinds were drawn to filter the August sun coming through the south-facing glass. Roosevelt used an ordinary office chair, Woody saw, not his wheelchair. He wore a white suit and he was smoking a cigarette in a holder.
He was not really handsome. He had receding hair and a jutting chin, and he wore pince-nez glasses that made his eyes seem too close together. All the same, there was something immediately attractive about his engaging smile, his hand extended to shake, and the amiable tone of voice in which he said: ‘Good to see you, Gus, come on in.’
