by Gore Vidal
Blaise looked up at the clock. It was now nine-fifteen. The President had been speaking for almost half an hour. Magic had been unleashed in the chamber, and ancestral voices had begun their whisperings, and old battle songs sounded in the rain’s tattoo: for we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again, shouting the battle cry of freedom.
The warlock now spun his ultimate spell. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts.…” Oh yes, thought Blaise. Let us kill for peace! Frederika had broken the spell for him; yet he recognized its potency; saw it work upon the savages beneath who gave the wizard not only their belief but their fury as well, which, in turn, fueled the warlock’s own. Thus, magic begets magic. “… with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood …” There it was, at last, the exercise’s object, blood. They were sinking now into pre-history, around the blazing fire. Blood. Now for the sky-god’s blessing upon the tribe. It came, in the last line. “God helping her, she can do no other.” So there it was: Protestant Martin Luther at the end. Never had Blaise felt more Catholic.
Wilson looked up at the gallery. The eyes were wide and bright, and—was he now all alone to himself or was he as one with the hunters all round him? Blaise could not tell, for everyone was on his feet, including Blaise, and the drooping Ned, arms knotted loosely about Evalyn’s neck.
Blaise leaned over to watch the President’s progress down the aisle to the door. Lodge stepped forward—the face was definitely, satisfyingly swollen—to shake Wilson’s hand; and murmur something that made the President smile. Just behind Lodge, the great La Follette sat, arms crossed to show that he was not applauding the witch-doctor, as he chewed, slowly, rhythmically, gum.
“Who would have thought,” said Blaise to Frederika, as they pushed their way through the crowded corridor, “that only yesterday there was a majority for peace?”
“Do you think they really know what they’re doing? I mean, it’s such fun—for men, and I suppose there’ll be money in it.”
“A lot, I should think, for those who are …” Who are what? wondered Blaise. After all, he was son and grandson of the rich. Because he had not the urge to increase his wealth—as opposed to the circulation of the Tribune—did not mean that he was any different from Mr. Baruch, the New York speculator who had bought himself a high place in the Democratic Party as money-giver to the President himself, in order to benefit from the exchange. But Mr. Baruch was no more to be censured for his straightforward desire to make money than all the paid-up millionaire members of the Senate club who differed only in their approach to transitivity from the paid-for members.
Caroline intercepted them in the painted corridor, which smelled of damp wool and whisky. Ned McLean’s had not been the only flask. “I promised Uncle Henry that I would report to him. He will feed us, he says.”
Blaise said no; Frederika said yes; and so they all embarked in Caroline’s Pierce-Arrow.
“How did you end up with the Wilsons?” Frederika often asked Blaise’s questions for him.
“I am cultivating Mr. McAdoo because he means to be president, too, and I always like my moths better before they break out of the cocoon.”
“How do you go about cultivating someone like Eleanor McAdoo?” Frederika had old Washington’s sense of unreality when it came to the Federal theater that changed its program every four or eight years—sometimes sooner if a player happened to be, excitingly, assassinated.
“I begin by being inordinately kind to her very plain sister Margaret. This gains me points with everyone in the family.”
“How sly you are.” Frederika was equable. Blaise was constantly disappointed by the lack of friction between the sisters-in-law. He had hoped for more drama between the two Mistresses Sanford, particularly in so small a city. But each kept to her own set; and when the grand Frederika Sanford held court at Blaise’s Connecticut Avenue palace, Caroline often appeared, most graciously, to smile upon old Washington, Frederika’s world, and those Republican magnificoes who courted Blaise, who feted them. Caroline’s court in Georgetown was smaller and more selective. Dinner was never for more than ten. Caroline’s guests were notable for their conversation; this meant rather more foreigners than Americans and of the Americans more New Yorkers than Old Washington inhabitants.
The departure of the Roosevelts from the White House had restored the city to its traditional countrified dullness. Although the fat, bad-tempered President Taft was depicted as highly lovable and cheery, thanks to the journalists’ inability to break with any cliché, he and his proud pompous wife had not provided much of a center to the Federal drama. The arrival of the Wilsons had been exciting; but then she became ill and he, remote at best, simply became his office. This meant that the eloquent President was most visible and successful in public, while the private bookish Woodrow Wilson was hidden away upstairs in the White House, nursing a sick wife; and adored by daughters.
Caroline’s efforts to penetrate the Wilson White House had been half-hearted at best. As people, they had not interested her, but now, with this new development, everything was to be seen in a different, lurid light. History had begun to lurch forward or backward or wherever; and Wilson was astride the beast, as old John Hay used to say of poor McKinley. Suddenly, even Edith Wilson began to glow in the middle distance, while the war had created a definite nimbus about the equine head of Miss Margaret Wilson.
Henry Adams’s ancient servant—as old as he? no, no one could ever be so old—showed them into the study, which had been for Caroline the center of her entire Washington life, a schoolroom and theater all in one, and presided over by the small, rosy, bald, snow-bearded Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of two occupants of the White House across the street. He was the historian of the old republic and, with his brother Brooks, a prophet and a seer of the world empire-to-be, if it was to be.
The old man greeted them in front of his modestly spectacular fireplace carved from a block of Mexican green onyx shot with scarlet over whose mantel hung William Blake’s drawing of the mad Nebuchadnezzar eating grass, a constant reminder to Adams of that ludicrousness which tends to shadow human grandeur. In the twenty years that Caroline had known Adams, neither the beautiful room with its small Adams-scale furniture nor its owner had much changed; only many of the occupants of the chairs were gone, either through death, like John and Clara Hay, joint builders of this double Romanesque palace in Lafayette Park, or through removal to Europe, like Lizzie Cameron, beloved by Adams, now in the high summer of her days, furiously courting young poets in the green spring of theirs. To fill his life and rooms, Adams had acquired a secretary, Aileen Tone, a gentlewoman as dedicated as he to twelfth-century music, visibly represented in one corner of the library by a Steinway piano, the equivalent of a wedding ring to Caroline, who was delighted that the old man should be so well looked after. As always, there were “nieces” in attendance. Caroline had been a niece in her day. Now she had settled for friendship, the essential passion of the Adams circle.
Adams embraced Caroline like a niece; and bowed to Blaise and Frederika. Like royalty, he was not much of one for shaking hands. “He has done it! I am amazed. Now tell me, what was he like?”
Adams sat in a special chair so angled that the firelight was behind him; even so, the eyes kept blinking like an owl’s at noon. Caroline encouraged Blaise to describe what had happened at the Capitol; and Blaise, as always, was precise, even sensitive to detail. Caroline was particularly struck, as was Adams, by the scene before the mirror. “What could it mean?” Caroline affected innocence, the one quality Adams liked least.
“He’s in too deep. That’s what it means.” Adams was delighted. “Anyway, it’s done at last.”
“You approve?”
Caroline expected the usual Adams ingenious negative; instead she was surprised by the old man’s enthusiasm.
“Yes! For once in my life I am with the majority—of the people we know, that is—and I don’t dare say a single critical word. All my life, I’ve wanted some kind of Atlantic Community, and now—here it is! We are fighting side by side with England. It is too good to be true.” He smiled the famous bright bitter smile. “I can now contemplate the total ruin of our old world with more philosophy than I ever thought possible.”
“You see it all ending in ruin?” Blaise was still handsome, Caroline decided; a large concession, since, like Lizzie Cameron’s, her taste was now beginning to run to youth in men.
“Well, things do run down. After all, haven’t I predicted that from the beginning?—of time, it seems like now. And haven’t I been right? The Russian Revolution—all mine. Well, Brooks can take some credit, too. Odd how proprietary one feels about one’s prophecies …”
“Unless they are wrong,” said Caroline.
Then Eleanor Roosevelt and her social secretary, a blond pretty girl, entered the room, bringing the cold with them. “It’s Caroline’s fault.” Eleanor was apologetic. “I was going straight home from the Capitol, in such a state, when she said you might receive us, and who wants to be alone right now?”
“Where’s your husband? No. Don’t tell me. At the Navy Department, ordering Admiral Dewey to seize Ireland.”
“We buried the Admiral two months ago.” Caroline found Eleanor’s secretary uncommonly charming; and wondered at Eleanor’s courage in engaging someone so much more attractive than herself. Unless, of course, Eleanor was in love in the Souvestrian sense.
“Send the coffin to Ireland.” Adams was exuberant as William passed around champagne. In the next room, a buffet had been set. Eleanor stared at it closely, even longingly. She liked her food, Caroline had noticed; yet she kept the worst table in Washington.
“Franklin is at the Navy Department, with Mr. Daniels. Everything’s starting to happen. My head goes round. I am grateful, though, we have Mr. Wilson living across from you.”
“Oh, child.” Caroline recognized Adams’s special ancestral voice, prophesying doom. “It makes no difference to the course of history who lives in that house. Never has. Energy—or its lack—determines events.”
“Don’t say that to my Franklin, please.” Eleanor was unexpectedly firm. “You ought not to discourage any young person with ideals, who might accomplish something very fine.” When Eleanor realized that she suddenly had the room’s attention, the silvery skin turned to deepest rose—the Puritan rose, thought Caroline, fond of so much sweet humorless high-mindedness.
“I think maybe he’s just the one I should say it to. Ah, the magnificoes have arrived. Like the Magi. My star, no doubt. Welcome, to my manger, or manger à la fourchette.” In the doorway stood the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, whose swollen, red cheek gave much delight to Adams, who enjoyed tormenting his one-time Harvard pupil. As Blaise and Frederika and Eleanor moved toward the buffet table, Caroline and the social secretary remained to greet the magnificoes.
Spring Rice was an old friend of old Washington. He had been posted to the embassy in youth; had penetrated the heart of the Adams circle, known as the Five of Hearts; had become Theodore Roosevelt’s closest friend, and best man when the widower Roosevelt remarried. Now, old and ailing, he had returned in triumph as British ambassador to Washington. He wore a blond-steely beard like that of his king; he had eyes not unlike those of his President. He was, it was thought, most energetically, dying.
“You have prevailed.” Spring Rice gave Adams an exuberant French sort of embrace.
“I always do, Springy. Who hit you, Cabot?”
“A pacifist. But you should—”
“See him. I know all the latest argot of your charming Scollay Square. Who would have thought Wilson would ever have had the courage?”
Spring Rice indicated Lodge. “There’s his backbone. With some help from Theodore, our work is done. That is, just started.” He took champagne from William and raised his glass. “Now it begins.” Their end of the room drank solemnly.
“Our last hygiene session.” Lodge smiled within his beard at the Ambassador, who explained.
“For the last two years, whenever I was about to burst, as Mr. Wilson delayed and delayed, Cabot would let me come to his office and denounce your government, until the fit had left me—hence, hygienic.”
“Poor Springy,” said Adams.
“Happy now,” said Lodge.
“Will the Allies want American troops?” Caroline knew the answer that the readers of the Tribune did not know and that the President had avoided, except for the one reference to the “privilege” of spending America’s blood.
“Surely we shall be the forge,” said Lodge. “Providing arms. Food. Money. No more.”
Spring Rice smiled at Caroline. “No more,” he repeated, and then added with the eager indiscretion of the professional diplomat to the right audience, “but Mr. Wilson did say something odd to Mr. Tumulty on the drive back to the White House.…”
“You know already what he said?” Adams looked like a jovial gnome, blinking in the light.
“British intelligence never sleeps, unlike British governments.…”
“What did he say to Tumulty?” Lodge was suddenly alert. While it was understandable that his friend Roosevelt would not like the pacific professor who had taken his place as chief of state, Lodge’s dislike had something queer to it, Caroline had always thought, as if a scholar from superior Harvard had been bested by one from inferior Princeton; in fact, Lodge’s worst condemnation of any Wilson address was to say that although suitable, perhaps, for Princeton it was not up to Harvard’s standards. Of course, Lodge had been the only intellectual in the higher politics until Wilson had, in two years’ time, gone from Princeton to the governorship of New Jersey to the presidency. There had never been so high or so swift a rise for anyone not a general. Although it was natural for Lodge to be jealous, why to such an extent? Perhaps Alice Longworth had been right when, at the funeral of Mrs. Lodge, the previous year, she had said, “Cabot will turn merciless without sister Anne.”
“As they drove through the cheering crowds, between the long rows of sombre troops at damp attention.” Spring Rice smiled at Caroline, “See how I like to add color to my cold political dispatches.”
“Like me.” Caroline nodded. “But, perhaps, if I may be editorial, fewer adjectives, more verbs.”
“More light,” was Adams’s contribution.
“What did he say?” Lodge was like an ancient terrier, sharp eye upon the hole to a rat’s residence.
“The President said, ‘Did you hear that applause …’ ”
“Vain schoolteacher! No. No. A vain Maryland preacher.” Lodge had found his worst epithet.
“But he was right,” said Caroline. “I was there. It sounded like thunder or—”
“The breaking of a dam?” Spring Rice provided a journalistic image.
“I have never actually listened to a dam while it was breaking.” Caroline was demure.
“What … what did he say?” Lodge did a small terrier-like two-step.
“If you’ll stop interrupting me, Cabot, I’ll tell you. He said, ‘My message was a message of death for our young men. How can they, in God’s name, applaud that?’ ”
“Coward!” Lodge fired the word.
Caroline turned on Lodge and with none of her usual endless, or so she thought, evasive tact, fired in turn: “That comes ill from someone too old to fight.”
“Caroline.” Adams put his arm through hers. “Take me in to supper.” But it was Adams who led the trembling Caroline; the old man was soothing: “It does no good to chide enthusiasts. They are like little automatic engines. They feed upon whatever energy is in the air, and today there is a great deal.”
“Too much for me. I’m sorry.” Adams patted her arm; the
n saw to his other guests.
The conversation was now general. The Allied leaders would soon be in Washington. Spring Rice’s chief, the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, would be the first to arrive before the French, Caroline noted, accepting from—what was her name? Lucy something—cold duck en gelée from the table whose candlelit splendor was more Faubourg Saint-Germain than Adamsesque Quincy, Massachusetts. But then each year, until the war began, Henry Adams would settle himself at Paris, where he paid court to Lizzie Cameron, meditated on twelfth-century music, and denigrated his own highly acclaimed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, so many decades in the making and now, ever since 1913, a published book that the public was not invited either to buy or to read by its prickly author. Yet Caroline could never have had an American life—or at least one in Washington—without the always wise, always benign Henry Adams, known to those not his “nieces” as sublimely caustic and harsh in truth’s high service.
“You don’t like Mr. Lodge?” Lucy’s voice was low and faintly Southern. She was a popular extra woman who was to be seen at large rather than small dinner parties in the west end of Washington. Who was she? Caroline, who cared nothing for those genealogical matters that sustained the city’s social life, had, in self-defense, learned the endless ramifications of who was related to whom and the famous question hence not asked when a name was brought to general attention: “So, then, who was she?”—establishing the wife’s place in the scheme of things. “Saint-Simon without the king” was a piece that she had wanted to write for the Tribune until Blaise had said, with a brother’s straightforward malice, “Without Saint-Simon, too.”
Lucy’s pale face gleamed in the lamp-light. “Camellia-petal skin,” a phrase much used by the Tribune’s Society Lady. Dark blue eyes. Eleanor must dote on Lucy, a beautiful version of herself. What would—indeed, would not—Mlle. Souvestre have said? “I’ve known Mr. Lodge too long to dislike him. He is one of the facts of life here. Naturally, I preferred his wife, Nannie. Sister Anne they called her, too.”