Read Online Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan - Free Book Online Page B

B came easily, frequently. So Mommy became “Bommy”; Grandpa “Dah”; his grandmother, whose nickname was Tot, “Dot”; his own name not Gene but “Deenie.” The mispronunciations delighted everyone so much, they became the intimate family nicknames. But he did not want other children to use this against him, to tease him in the playground and the school yard. To others he was Little Gene, but to the immediate family, when “I was a baby and young, it was Deenie,” an act of self-naming, the transformation of a transient speech defect into a creation that anticipated his later fascination with language as self-creation. His verbal skills were precocious, his physical coordination good. He walked at about the usual age, and soon rode his first tricycle around the terrace of the house at Rock Creek Park. From early on, he posed amiably for photos, full-figured, blond-haired, inquisitive-eyed, with a slightly round face, in the usual short pants and wool sweaters of the day. But by the age of four he not only spoke back to voices on the movie screen:he was an unstoppable conversationalist, “particularly in the kitchen with various black cooks. I dominated conversation with them…. Gertrude, one of the family cooks, used to lock me in the closet when she felt that I was being bad,” a punishment greater than she knew, since he had claustrophobic anxiety attacks when confined in small places. Finally, “about the third time I began to sing ‘Am I Blue?’ which I knew all the lyrics of from the radio, from
Amos ’n Andy
, … that broke her up and that was the end of the closet.” Soon he was the bard of the kitchen, making up stories to entertain himself and the cook.
    Outside in the back the Senator kept chickens, perhaps in deference to his rural origins or to impress his visiting constituents. Deenie fed them, played with them. One night at dinner his grandmother urged him to eat his food. Suddenly the connection between what he was chewing and the animals outside dawned on him. He spat out the mouthful immediately. To his grandmother it became a challenge to get him to eat chicken. She disguised it, mixing it with potato or spinach. “Is this chicken?” he would ask. “No,” she said. “It’s gazeboo.” “The gazeboo went straight into her face.” It became a family story Dot loved to tell. If Nina, more corrective than commending, spent much of her time pursuing her social life, Tot loved him, supported him, praised him. If Big Gene was matter-of-fact about his son and preoccupied with business, Dah and Tot were there every day. Once, boasting his son had perfect balance, Gene had him demonstrate, successfully, on a tightrope. To impress his grandmother, Deenie piled up chairs one on top of another. Climbing to the top, he raised himself up straight while Tot kept saying, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!” He responded, “I have perfect balance!” Suddenly the whole thing crashed down, “and I said, ‘Goddamn it!’ She had never heard a child swear before. She thought it was extremely funny.” Each morning he joined the blind Senator “ in the bathroom while Dah assembled himself for the day. It was a complicated ritual, because not only did he have to put in upper and lower plates of teeth but one of his eyes was glass, and I took exquisite and never-failing pleasure in handing it to him as the high moment of his toilette, the last part of the transformation from frowsy-haired old man … ‘to mellifluous statesman.’” Disappointed in their own children, the Gores were delighted to have an amusing, intelligent, and well-behaved grandchild, despite the cost and occasional inconvenience. “‘Never have children, only grandchildren,’” the Senator would later say.
    From early on, his grandmother read to him. These sessions soon turned into