Gore gives a talk at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1991: a rousing “State of the Union” address. But in the morning, at his request, I drive him to the old house in Rock Creek Park that had belonged to his grandparents. “I haven’t seen it in a while,” he says as we enter the drive at 1500 Broad Branch Road. “It’s now the Malaysian embassy, but they know we’re coming.”
The circular drive has a fountain in the middle. “That wasn’t there,” he says, annoyed. “You could look across the street to the woods and see what we called the flags, pale irises. There was a rose garden somewhere, and it didn’t belong to the president. The creek itself was often orange-brown, and I used to wade there with my trousers rolled up to the knees. You’d never know a city lay nearby, on the other side of the park.”
It’s a large and lovely house on a hill, built of gray-yellow Baltimore stone, much larger than I’d imagined. A Malaysian secretary meets us at the door. “Mr. Vidal, this is an honor,” she says, bowing. She shows us to a white sofa in a room nearby, and two servants in white jackets bring tea and coconut macaroons. We talk with her for a while, and she apologizes for the absence of the ambassador, who apparently lives here. But Gore is itching to wander. “We’ll just have a look upstairs,” he says.
The woman seems unsure about this, but doesn’t interfere. Suddenly the decades fall away—and Gore is eight or nine years old, stepping into the hallway outside of his grandfather’s study. “He had so many books, which was an irony, because he was blind. In the attic were thousands of volumes, old yellow copies of the Congressional Record. My grandmother said to pay no attention to my grandfather when he grumbled. But he rarely grumbled. I was the child of their dreams, as I was quiet and liked to read. I read aloud to my grandfather in his study. We sat there night after night, working our way through Roman or American history. He would stop me, ask questions, making sure I understood what I read. Could there be a luckier boy in the world?”
He shows me a favorite place, this tiny alcove where he spent hours. “I would hear voices downstairs, and I would close my book and crouch on the stairs, hiding, listening. I could hear the voice of Huey Long—a low Southern drawl—or some other senator or congressional aide. I knew the sorts of thing they were saying, even if I couldn’t hear the words. My grandfather was the master of ceremonies, but he always convinced everyone in the room that he was right and, no doubt, Franklin Roosevelt was wrong.”
We step to the back door. “My grandfather kept chickens in the yards, so we had fresh eggs,” he says. “My job was to fetch the eggs. They seemed the most precious and wonderful things in the world to a boy of seven or eight. I didn’t eat chicken for a long time because I would think of those chickens, and it worried me that they had to lose their lives to feed us.”
Gore stands in the driveway for a long time, looking across the road to the park. Then he shakes his head and steps into my car. “It never pays to go back,” he says. “And you misremember it anyway.”