GORE VIDAL
I forget the subject of the film. In those days my father was
much photographed, usually advancing aviation
in
Roosevelt's ad- )
ministration and out. What struck me as he talked to the camera
was his youth. The hair which I had known for so many years as
white was hardly gray. He was younger than I was watching him.
I was both present in the theater and present in
his
office (as I
looked past
him
at the room, I knew which was the door to the
bathroom and which to the secretary's office, recognized the model
planes I used to play with in front of
tall
windows on whose ledges '
- out of view - starlings by the thousands lived, etiolating federal
property).
I was both child and man as the
film
progressed,
in
two places
at once, two continua - and at the end, in a scene showing my
(ather at an airport, I saw with sharp nostalgia that it was high
summer in the prewar world, the sort of day on which we would
all drive to Glen Echo amusement park, passing enroute a piggery
whose smell never failed to horrify and delight me.
