Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia home overlooking the Potomac, becomes both a place of historical encounter and the setting for a sharp political reversal in the Roth family’s trip. The family arrives expecting a restorative visit to the house and grounds; they leave with the image of a crowd celebrating Lindbergh’s aircraft and Herman Roth’s distinction between a public dream and his family’s nightmare.

Setting and Approach

After lunch, the family travels south along the Potomac from Washington, D.C., into Virginia. Verlin M. Taylor, their guide, places the journey within the history of the American Civil War, explaining the Confederacy’s formation, battles in Virginia, the surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination six days later. His account makes the landscape around Mount Vernon a route through national history, not merely a drive to a celebrated house.

As Washington’s home comes into view, Verlin M. Taylor announces its arrival. Bess Roth responds to the porch and tall windows, emphasizing that the house is the original, not a replica. The distinction matters to the children: the historical figures they have encountered through books and objects belonged to a real household in this particular place. Verlin M. Taylor adds Martha Washington and her two stepchildren to the family picture, and later describes Martha’s earlier marriage, her children, and the fortune she brought to her marriage with Washington.

House, Grounds, and Objects

The narrator recalls the visit as the happiest part of the trip. The grounds, gardens, and trees, together with the house’s commanding position on a bluff above the Potomac, give the estate a beauty distinct from the political atmosphere around Washington. Inside, the family encounters unfamiliar furnishings, decoration, and wallpaper, whose details Verlin M. Taylor explains at length. The historical past becomes tangible at close range: the four-poster bed where Washington slept, the desk where he wrote, his swords, and the books he owned and read.

Mount Vernon remains open until four-thirty, allowing the family time to see the rooms and outbuildings, walk the grounds, and visit the souvenir shop. The narrator spends twelve of the fifteen cents saved for the next day’s visit to the stamp division of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on a four-inch pewter letter opener shaped like a Revolutionary musket and bayonet. Its small scale makes the purchase an intimate souvenir of the larger national history displayed across the estate.

Family Memory and Collecting

The visit also connects Mount Vernon’s history to the Roth family’s habits of collecting and looking. Bess Roth recalls that her younger son has a stamp depicting Martha Washington and asks him to show it to Verlin M. Taylor. The brown 1938 one-and-a-half-cent stamp shows Martha in profile; the narrator remembers his mother’s childhood description of her head covering as something between a bonnet and a snood. At the estate, the image on the stamp meets the historical woman associated with the house.

Sandy Roth makes a different kind of purchase. He uses his savings for an illustrated history of Washington’s life, intending to draw on its pictures for more portraits in the patriotic series kept in the portfolio under his bed. The brothers’ souvenirs thus carry the visit forward in different forms: one keeps a small image of Martha Washington, while the other gathers material for an ongoing sequence of patriotic portraits.

The Flyover

At the end of the day, as the family is about to have a drink in the cafeteria, a low-flying plane approaches. People rush onto the front lawn, wave, and celebrate what they take to be Lindbergh. The aircraft tips its wings as it crosses the Potomac. It is the same Lockheed Interceptor the family had seen over the city the previous afternoon, and the Roths stand with the crowd as it circles back over Washington’s home and heads north along the river.

The crowd’s first assumption gives way to a new story: someone claims to have seen into the cockpit and says the pilot was Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The claim could be true. She had learned to fly from her husband, had often accompanied him on air trips, and was widely admired for her aviation skill, her privileged upbringing and composed manner, and two published books of lyric poetry. People begin telling their children that they witnessed Anne Morrow Lindbergh flying an advanced American aircraft over Mount Vernon, turning an uncertain sighting into a historical memory.

Political Meaning

For the Roths, the flyover ruins what had been a nearly perfect outing. The family’s distress does not arise simply from an aircraft passing overhead for a second day in a row; it comes from watching the crowd’s spontaneous celebration and recognizing how far their own response differs from the surrounding enthusiasm. George Washington’s home, which had offered the family close contact with an admired national past, becomes the stage for a public display of loyalty to Lindbergh.

When the family returns to the hotel, Herman Roth immediately telephones friends to describe what he witnessed. His judgment, “They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare,” crystallizes the divide between public celebration and private fear. The narrator identifies it as the most eloquent line he had heard his father speak. Mount Vernon’s narrative importance lies in that reversal: amid Washington’s house and relics, the present intrudes in the form of a cheering crowd, and the family’s historical excursion exposes its isolation in Lindbergh’s America.