Gore Vidal Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Madison. He died there in 1925, a dapper old man who liked to drink, who loved going to the movie theater downtown in a spiffy white suit, carrying an inflatable rubber cushion into which he blew air before ostentatiously sitting down, and who had invented Rewalt’s Elixir, an all-purpose heavily alcoholic patent medicine that he and his favorite daughter manufactured in vats in the kitchen, bottled for sale from the porch, and packaged for the Brown Drug Company in Sioux Falls. In Gene’s years in Madison, though, it was a house without grandparents. Some family lived nearby: Margaret’s sister and her husband and, almost within reach, her brother Frank in Minnesota. A sociable rather than a religious woman, Margaret attended the Episcopal church every Sunday and participated in innumerable church activities. When Chattauqua made its regular visits to Madison, the Vidals attended all the lectures. Margaret, who belonged to a women’s reading group, kept sets of books in the house, The Wonder Book and The Book of Knowledge. If her politics were her husband’s, she had one separate plank: she strongly favored the vote for women. She marched in a suffragette parade in Madison and had herself photographed, dressed in semimasculine clothes, banner in hand, her principles clearly visible. But, as the keeper of the domestic keys, she did not manage economically enough for her husband. She had none ofthe German thrift he admired. She might well have wished that the Spanish debt (in family legend now worth millions) would allow her never to have to count pennies again. “By the time they told and retold that story,” her grandson later remarked, “we were the Perhapsburgs waiting for our throne to be returned to us.” She also had a disastrous tendency to gain weight: the pretty young bride allowed herself to become transformed into a matronly massiveness that her husband disliked and that later made her children uncomfortable.
    In his mother’s eyes, Gene could do no wrong. She beamed in his presence and, later, at the mention of his name. If his father took pride in him, he apparently never told his son. When the time came for the son to make judgments, the case was clear-cut. Eventually he seems to have disapproved of his father, perhaps for his temper, his emotional stinginess, his treatment of his wife. “‘I don’t know why he was such a stinker,’” Gene later said to his own son. “That’s the word he used,” Gore Vidal recalled. “I think a lot of it had to do with his devotion to his mother. He felt that his father was rude to his mother and unpleasant. They apparently quarreled quite a lot, and Gene took his mother’s side.” Later, as he and his sister Lurene rose in the world, their mother’s obesity became an embarrassment. But though they preferred to keep her out of sight, they undoubtedly loved her. As Gene did Lurene. Two years older, smart, willfully decisive (nicknamed “The Sergeant” by her critics in the family), and a great gossip, Lurene became the sibling to whom he was closest. They shared a childhood and its memories. When he went from grade school to Madison High, which had about three hundred students, his handsomeness made him popular with the girls, his athletic achievements and good temper with the boys. Early in the 1910 football season the starting quarterback broke his nose, Gene took over, and the quarterback never got his position back. Soon Gene had an attractive girlfriend on his arm, Leila Love, later a physical-education teacher in Madison. The boys did the usual behind-the-house and locker-room things, small talk, cigarettes, fantasies, bonding, perhaps some sex.
    Like his mother’s, Gene’s temperament was placid, unargumentative, though somewhat impersonal. He charmed and impressed people, a combination of striking good looks and intelligence with shyness and dreaminess. He liked to