Gore Vidal Read Online Free PDF

therewere few modulations, little nuance. The Vidal household was part of the landscape. It quietly belonged. Anchoring a corner lot of about an acre, the house the young couple bought was an efficient three-story box, its plain lines relieved by a porch, with four bedrooms upstairs and the usual rooms below. Heated by ineffective air ducts, it felt cold in the winter, warm in the summer. Outside was often either bone-chilling or torrid. In the growing season a small garden flourished, devoted to vegetables, except for corn, which the vast fields of this farming world provided in such abundance that it made growing your own pointless. The Vidals walked the less than a mile downtown all the years that Gene, their eldest son, born in April 1895 and baptized Eugene Luther Vidal, was a child. The grade school and the high school were about four blocks from the house, with an athletic field on which, soon after the turn of the century, the eldest son began to play. When he showed medical evidence of an enlarged heart, euphemistically called an “athlete’s heart,” or perhaps tuberculosis, his father put up exercise bars in the backyard. Gene soon had an athlete’s body and a heart for competition. Football, basketball, track, baseball—by his teenage years he was the premier all-around athlete at Madison High School.
    Corn and wheat fields dominated the landscape. Most of Madison’s approximately five thousand residents made their living as farmers or serving the farming community. Whether he was still a fireman or now an engineer running a train or had graduated to the administrative-clerical job he held in later years, Felix Vidal and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul helped make the Midwest work. They transported what farmers grew and what farmers needed. The railroad brought Sioux Falls nearer: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois were part of the larger network. When on duty, Felix was away every second night. At home, Margaret ran the house and bore children. Two years before Gene, the first Vidal child, Lurene, had been born, then Amy in 1903, a new Margaret in 1910, a new Felix (nicknamed Pick) in 1912, when Margaret Ann was forty-two, a late pregnancy that shocked family and friends. They did not suspect that some of the long silences between husband and wife were being filled, at that late date, by lovemaking. The household finances were modest but stable. Unlike his father, Felix kept his nose to the grindstone. As far as his eldest son could tell, he had no ambition to accomplish anything more than to work obscurely as a minion of the railroad empire. As the World War approached, he concealed, outside of the household, his German sympathies. Though heput up exercise bars for his son, he had no interest in athletics. As Gene got older, Felix rarely attended his son’s games. If he had any passion at all, it was politics: deeply moralistic and conservative, he was remembered for abhorring dishonesty in politicians and always voting for the Republican candidates whom he read about in the newspapers to which he subscribed, the
Sioux Falls Argus Leader
and the
Madison Leader
. Capitalism appealed to him. Religion did not. A nominal Episcopalian, he rarely went to church. Thin, taciturn, with icy blue eyes and a temper that sometimes burst into household dramatics, he was not a man who gave or showed love readily. From early on there seems to have been a chill between the father and his oldest son.
    As a young mother, Margaret was attractive, full-figured, and broad-faced. Unlike her saturnine husband, she contributed constant good cheer to the household, the proverbial sunny disposition. Her own mother had died the year after Gene’s birth. Felix’s parents were already long gone. Gene never saw the paternal grandfather to whom he was indebted for his first name. Later, in old age, Luther Rewalt, for whom Gene had been given his middle name, came to live with his daughter and son-in-law