adrip with picturesque charm. It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over.
However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document-and it is plenty dubious-it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, 'Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.' But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.
A lot of Williamsburg isn't as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of Colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration-$9o million so far. The problem now is that you never quite know what's genuine and what's fanciful. Take the Governors Palace. It looks to be very old-and, as I say, no one discourages you from believing that it is-but in fact it was only built in 1933. The original building burned down in 1781 and by 1930 had been gone for so long that nobody knew what it had looked like. It was only because somebody found a drawing of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that they were able to make a reasonable stab at reproducing it. But it isn't old and it may not even be all that accurate.
Everywhere you turn you are confronted, exasperatingly, with bogus touches. At the Bruton Parish Church, the gravestones looked like they were faked or at least the engravings had been reground.
Rockefeller or someone else in authority had obviously been disappointed to discover that after a couple of centuries in the open air gravestones become illegible, so now the inscriptions are as fresh and deep-grooved as if they had been cut only last week, which they may well have been. You find yourself constantly wondering whether you are looking at genuine history or some Disneyesque embellishment. Was there really a Severinus Dufray and would he have had a sign outside his house saying, GENTEEL TAILORING? Possibly. Would Dr. McKenzie have a note in florid lettering outside his dispensary announcing, DR. MCKENZIE BEGS LEAVE TO INFORM THE PUBLIC
THAT HE HAS JUST RECEIVED A LARGE QUANTITY OF FINE GOODS, vlz: TEA, COFFEE, FINE SOAP, TOBACCO, ETC., TO BE SOLD HERE AT HIS SHOP? Who can say?
Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly.
(This is something else they don't tell you.) He called the college and hospital 'rude, misshapen piles' and the Governor's Palace 'not handsome.' He can't have been describing the same place because the Williamsburg of today is relentlessly attractive. And for that reason I liked it.
I drove on to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home for most of his life. Washington deserves his fame. What he did in running the Colonial army was risky and audacious, not to say skillful.
People tend to forget that the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years and that Washington often didn't get a whole lot of support. Out of a populace of 5.5 million, Washington sometimes had as few as 5,000 soldiers in his army-one soldier for every 1,100 people. When you see what a tranquil and handsome place Mount Vernon is, and what an easy and agreeable life he led there, you wonder why he bothered. But that's the appealing thing about Washington, he is such an enigma.
We don't even know for sure what he looked like. Almost all the portraits of him were done by, or copied from the works of, Charles Willson Peale. Peale painted sixty portraits of Washington, but unfortunately he wasn't very hot at faces. In fact, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, Peale's pictures of Washington, Lafayette and John Paul Jones all look to be more or less the same person.
Mount Vernon was everything Williamsburg should have been and was not-genuine, interesting, instructive. For well over a century it has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and what a lucky thing it is we have them. Amazingly, when the house was put up for sale in 1853, neither the federal government nor the state of Virginia was prepared to buy it for the nation. So a group of dedicated women hastily formed the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, raised the money to buy the house and two hundred acres of grounds, and then set about restoring it to precisely as it was in Washington's day, right down to the correct pigments of paint and patterns of wallpaper.
Thank God John D. Rockefeller didn't get ahold of it. Today the association continues to run it with a dedication and skill that should be models to preservation groups everywhere, but alas are not.
Fourteen rooms are open to the public and in each a volunteer provides an interesting and well-informed commentary-and is sufficiently clued up to answer almost any question-on how the roorn was used and decorated. The house was very much Washington's creation. He was involved in the daintiest questions of decor, even when he was away on military campaigns. It was strangely pleasing to imagine him at Valley Forge, with his troops dropping dead of cold and hunger, agonizing over the purchase of lace ruffs and tea cozies. What a great guy. What a hero.
CHAPTER 12
I SPENT THE NIGHT on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Washington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities in America before airconditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it-wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans. Even at night there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze, but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I can remember lying awake in a hotel in downtown Washington listening to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns, the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling, people being shot.
We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4-3 at Griffith Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd
of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the blood that was draining out of the hole in his head. My parents hustled us past and told us not to look, but we did of course. Things like that didn't happen in Des Moines, so we gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programs like 'Gunsmoke' and 'Dragnet.' I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed such a strange thing to do, to stop someone's life just because you found him in some way disagreeable. I imagined my fourth--grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had hair on her upper lip and evil in her heart, lying on the floor beside her desk, stilled forever, while I stood over her with a smoking gun in my hand. It was an interesting concept.
It made you think.
