by Dan Simmons
“Silver Blaze was a colt in the story anyway,” said Clara Hay. “Not a filly.”
Everyone laughed with her.
Guided by both Hay’s and Henry Adams’s hosting expertise, the attention soon moved away from Holmes, and localized conversations quickly began to include entire ends of the table and then everyone. Twelve diners was close to the perfect number for intimate and audible table conversation, especially with such reticent conversationalists in the group as Henry Cabot Lodge, Don Cameron, and smiling, attentive, polite, but mostly quiet Del Hay.
James was reminded that Adams and Hay—and the late Clover—were neither too educated nor too proud to pun.
“Our poor Vito Pom Pom came home with an injured eye today,” said Nannie Lodge, speaking loudly to be heard by Helen Julia Hay on the other side of James so that everyone at the table heard her.
There was no lag in response.
“How dreadful,” said Henry Adams. “Now, I forget, Nannie . . . is Vito Pom Pom one of the servants or a relative?”
“Henry,” sighed Mrs. Lodge. “You know perfectly well that Vito Pom Pom is our beloved Pomeranian.”
“Your beloved Pomeranian, my dear,” murmured Henry Cabot Lodge in disapproving bass tones that caused the crystal chandelier to tremble.
“How strange,” said John Hay. “And I had thought the new immigration acts had all but shut off the flow of Pomeranian refugees into this country. Tragic, tragic.”
Nannie Lodge frowned prettily at Hay sitting on her left.
“My diagnosis is that Vito Pom Pom is most likely suffering from a cataract,” said Henry Adams.
“Most likely a tom-cataract,” added Hay.
Those who allowed themselves to chuckle at such things—a group which certainly did not include Senator Lodge nor Senator Cameron, and to which Del Hay wasn’t sure to join or not—chuckled.
“It could have been much worse,” Henry James said softly. “Our friend Vito might have been completely curtailed.”
There was the briefest of pauses and then more chuckles. Lizzie Cameron laughed out loud—a fresh, gay, unselfconscious laugh.
Then, with the happy irrelevance of youth, Helen Julia Hay said to the table at large—“Is everyone looking forward to going to the Chicago World’s Fair this summer? I know I am! Everything I’ve read about the White City says it’s perfectly marvelous!”
“It’s not precisely a World’s Fair, my dear,” said her father. “Chicago is hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.”
“But the Exposition is opening in eighteen ninety-three,” said Del.
Henry James opened his palms. “Columbus missed finding America by . . . what? . . . some two thousand miles between here and Trinidad?”
“Two thousand one hundred and seventy-three miles from where we sit right now,” said Henry Adams.
“So Columbus missed discovering America by two thousand one hundred and seventy-three miles,” continued James. “The Exposition missed the anniversary of this non-discovery by only one year. Our aim is improving.”
Hay turned to Adams. “You’re sure about that extra one hundred and seventy-three miles?”
“Quite certain,” said Adams with a small, mischievous, and rather charming smile.
“Did you know that when Columbus landed on Trinidad, the island was occupied by both Carib- and Arawak-speaking groups?” said Helen, her tone not one of satisfaction at knowing such trivia but, rather, of anticipation.
“What does one call a resident of Trinidad?” asked Lizzie Cameron. “A Trinidadian?” She’d used the short vowel sound for the “a”.
“ ‘Dadians’ for short,” said John Hay.
“Miss Hay was correct about the natives speaking only Carib and Arawak,” said Theodore Roosevelt, his voice seeming to boom even when he spoke in low tones. “But that was only after the Pomeranian invasion of the island in fourteen thirty-nine A.D.”
They were on their fourth of nine wines to go with this dinner and the laughter was flowing more easily now.
“Vito Pom Pom understands only Arawak?” said Nannie Lodge. “How distressing.”
“Probably why that little hairball of a rat-dog can’t learn the simplest of commands,” grunted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
Nannie wiggled her lacquered fingertips at her husband.
“But I don’t want to miss the Fair and the White City and Mr. Ferris’s Wheel and Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show and . . . everything,” cried Helen Julia Hay in a voice that suddenly sounded 10 years younger than her 18 years.
“There’s no reason you should have to,” said Senator Don Cameron. “None of us is leaving for Europe until July. The Exposition opens on May first. Sometime in May, I’ll lay on a few private railroad cars and we’ll all go together for a few days. Are you game, Adams?”
Henry Adams grumbled but looked at Lizzie Cameron and then nodded his assent.
“Hay?”
“Absolutely. We’re with you, Don.”
“Mr. Holmes, will you join us?” asked Cameron. “We’ll park the cars right at the entrance to the Fair and there will be sleeping rooms for everyone.”
“Thank you for the invitation,” said Holmes with a nod. “I may have to be at the Exposition earlier than that. We shall see.”
Helen Julia Hay didn’t actually clap her hands, but she folded them like a little girl preparing to pray. Her smile, thought James, truly earned that tired descriptor of “radiant”.
In a departure from usual dining protocol, the remove, what Henry James knew as the relevé, this evening a saddle of mutton sliced very thin and set on a warm plate with a little gravy, was carved in the dining room by Chef Ranhofer and served between the two entrees. Servants glided in and refilled everyone’s champagne glass.
“I say,” said Senator Don Cameron, “this is smashing-good champagne. I seem to recognize it and then I don’t. What is it, John?”
“Royal Charter,” said Hay.
“I thought only Delmonico’s was allowed to lay in Royal Charter!” boomed Roosevelt.
“It is,” said Hay. “It does.”
“Well, I’d rather spend the whole summer at the Chicago Exposition than in boring old Europe, boring old Switzerland,” said Helen.
“I believe we’ll be in Zermatt and Lucerne this summer with the Camerons and the Lodges and Mr. Adams for only a few weeks,” said Clara Hay. “The July and August months of the Fair will just have to get along without us.”
“Best thing,” said Adams. “I went to the Bicentennial in ’seventy-six and, other than the warning that the telephone was about to invade our homes, the whole affair was overblown and useless. More boring than Switzerland, Helen.”
“Except for the part where they scalped Custer,” said John Hay. “That was entertaining.”
“John!” said Clara.
Hay folded his hands meekly in his lap and looked chastened.
“Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show will be at the Chicago Exposition,” said Roosevelt. “I hear that they may re-enact the Custer debacle with Sitting Bull acting his part. Sounds like great fun.”
“Wasn’t Crazy Horse with Sitting Bull when they ambushed Custer?” asked Del.
“Yes, yes,” boomed Roosevelt, turning his entire upper body so that everyone could be the recipient of his grin. “But we killed Crazy Horse in ’seventy-seven.”
“You have a history of the Wild West coming out soon, don’t you, Mr. Roosevelt?” said Lizzie Cameron.
Roosevelt nodded but also ducked his massive head almost shyly. “I do. It’s called The Winning of the West and Volumes One and Two should be published this summer. But even though I’ve spent years working on it, I hesitate to mention my scribbling in the company of the great historians at this table.”
It was true, thought James. Henry Adams was perhaps the most honored living American historian and his volumes on the Jefferson administrations were masterpie
ces of their kind. John Hay’s book about his former boss, Abraham Lincoln, written in collaboration with his old friend John Nicolay, had sold well in both America and Europe and was considered the reference book on Lincoln’s presidency. Henry Cabot Lodge’s ancestors had not only known George Washington on a first-name basis, but Lodge had just finished a magisterial history of Washington. Young Roosevelt, although obviously a dynamo of energy and intellectual accomplishment, had much to be modest about in this evening’s company of fellow historians.
Or in politics for that matter, thought James.
Suddenly Don Cameron piped up and his voice was surprisingly strong. James had almost forgotten that the Husband with the Doleful Countenance was also a U.S. Senator. “You have nothing to fear from me, Commissioner Roosevelt. I’ve not written a history of anything or anybody. Nor shall I. I prefer to read histories and biographies in the quiet of my study.”
“But you have so much you could write about, Don,” said John Hay. “You were Secretary of War under President Grant during the Great Sioux Wars, yes?”
Cameron nodded.
“It’s an interesting age we live in,” said Adams. “In a few years . . . or at least it seems like only a few years to an Ancient such as myself . . . we’ve gone from watching the Indians wipe out Custer’s entire troop and terrorizing the western territories to paying to watch Sitting Bull playacting himself in Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show. A massacre with no blood. A battle with no death.”
“Mr. Roosevelt,” said Nannie Lodge, “you have a ranch out west somewhere . . . or you did have one. Have you ever had to shoot at an Indian?”
James looked carefully at the young man. He knew that Roosevelt had bought and moved to that ranch when his beloved first wife, Alice, had died in February of 1884 just after giving birth to a daughter. As with Adams and Clover, Roosevelt had never mentioned his wife Alice again in public. Shortly after her death, Roosevelt had left his new daughter—named Alice—to be raised by his sister while he moved out to the Badlands of Dakota Territory to begin life anew as a rancher and cowboy.
Roosevelt gave Nannie an even larger grin than he’d shown so far, something Henry James would have not thought possible.
“Mrs. Lodge, I’ve shot at Indians, White desperadoes, drunken Mexicans, sober Mexicans, grizzly bears, wolves, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and a hundred more varieties of God’s most miserable creatures. And I tend to hit what I shoot at.”
“Do you think Indians are among God’s more miserable creatures, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Lizzie Cameron.
The bright candlelight reflected from the chandelier’s crystal prisms made Roosevelt’s pince-nez gleam like two round beacons of light as he turned his gaze toward Lizzie.
“As your husband knew well when he was Secretary of War, Mrs. Cameron,” said Roosevelt, his grin never quite disappearing, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages . . . though it’s true that such a war is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settlers who drove the savages from our western lands with Remington rifles and Bowie knives have laid all of civilized mankind under a debt to them.”
“So you think there’s no place for the various Indian nations in our national future?” asked John Hay, his voice soft but intense.
“American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,” barked Roosevelt. “In each case the White victor, horrible though many of his deeds had to be, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”
Chef Ranhofer had wheeled in his pièce de résistance for the evening—a rich and elaborate meat pie made from sliced goose-liver terrine and cooked truffles that were glazed in aspic and arranged in layers in a raised pastry shell that had been baked in an intricate mold in the shape of a nautilus—and now the servants were cutting the pie and setting the warmed plates in place, but no one but Roosevelt began eating even after everyone was served and an obviously piqued chef had retired to the kitchen. Everyone was waiting for Roosevelt’s next words.
Between large and voracious bites, he continued. “You see,” he said, glancing up from the steaming goose-liver pie to Lizzie Cameron, “as my modest volumes of The Winning of the West will show in detail, hard-earned White supremacy over the savages and savage lands of this continent has given birth to a new race of mankind . . . the American Race.”
Henry Adams cleared his throat. “My British publisher has sent me an advance manuscript copy of Charles H. Pearson’s new book—I believe it will be published early next year—titled National Life and Character. Oh, have you heard of Mr. Pearson by any chance, Mr. Holmes? Or met him perhaps?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” said Holmes. “I’ve not met him. I believe he only recently retired from Parliament.”
“Quite so,” said Adams. He was fumbling in his jacket and waistcoat pockets. “I’d copied down one of his . . . for possible reviewing purposes . . . just at . . . oh, here it is.” He removed a folded piece of paper, flattened it next to his untouched but still-steaming meat pie, leaned forward so the intense candlelight from the chandelier glowed on his bald pate, and said, “Mr. Pearson’s fear for the coming new century . . . and for the near future here and in Europe as well . . . was put this way.”
Adams’s reading voice was smooth and assured.
“ ‘The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the Europeans; when Chinamen and the natives of Hindostan, the states of Central and South America, by that time predominantly Indian . . . are represented by fleets in the European seas, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies in quarrels of the civilized world. The citizens of these countries will then be taken up into the social relations of the white races, will throng the English turf or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to inter-marriage. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated . . . We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be that the changes have been inevitable.’ ”
Adams folded up the paper and his tiny spectacles and looked down the length of the table to see young Theodore Roosevelt still grinning at him.
“You don’t agree, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Adams.
“Pearson’s speaking primarily about the Black and Yellow races,” said Roosevelt. “By the time they will have the capability of threatening us militarily or in trade, the descendants of the Negro and today’s Chinaman may be as intellectual as the Athenian. The American Race . . . and the English as well, of course . . . shall simply then be dealing with another civilized nation of non-Aryan blood, precisely as we now deal with Magyar, Finn, and Basque. This is as it should be, since White Europeans and Americans were never designed by their Creator to live and propagate permanently in the hot regions of Africa, South America, and India. It’s only here on our continent—and the White Russians on theirs, the White Australians on theirs—that we must essentially eliminate savages and their cultures so that the American Race shall rule in its own home.”
“Perhaps you’d like to review Mr. Pearson’s book,” said Adams.
“I would!” said Roosevelt with an even broader grin.
“I’ll ask his publisher to send you an advance copy.”
“In the meantime, I heartily recommend the pie,” said Clara Hay. “The truffles are especially tasty and I hope that everyone had a chance to notice their artful arr
angement by Chef Ranhofer. And after the pie, we shall have some sorbet and then . . . then . . . the teal duck, I believe.”
“Teal?” said Henry Cabot Lodge. “Not canvasback?”
“Evidently canvasback are all but impossible to procure these days,” said John Hay. “Possibly due to lack of their favored wild celery, or the disappearance of their wetlands, or some say due to overhunting.”
“It’s most likely a deliberate shortage,” said Henry Adams. “A ploy to raise the price of canvasback in the restaurants and butcher shops. Did you know that almost two-thirds of the decent restaurants in New York are owned, directly or indirectly, by Jews?”
No one paused in their eating save for Del Hay, who said, “Really?”
“It’s the truth,” said Adams. “Creating a canvasback shortage to drive up the price of the duck is precisely what those people—the Jews—are so clever at doing.”
There was another moment of silence.
“Well,” said Henry Cabot Lodge turning to his left to look at the obviously distraught Clara Hay, “teal is every bit as tasty as canvasback and I don’t believe anything could surpass tonight’s pâté de foie-gras, Bellevue that amazing goose-liver terrine. My compliments not only to the chef but to our lovely hostess.”
Clara smiled and blushed. Servants cleared glasses of Steinberger Cabernet that had accompanied the foie-gras and filled everyone’s new and larger glasses with Clos de Vougeot. The conversation at the table moved on.
* * *
It was almost two and a half hours since dinner had commenced and if everything simply ended now—if everyone had gone home immediately after the fromage course—several lives would have had different futures. But the glacée à la napolitaine had revived sagging spirits and the closing wines of the evening (before brandy in the library for the men, of course)—the Château Lafite and Old Reserve Madeira—were especially fine, although Del Hay looked as if he had drunk enough wine for the evening as early as the Duque Port with the fromage or even the Clos de Vougeot that had come with the teal pie. The eighth and ninth wines of the evening made Del grow quiet, perhaps even a little morose, but it loosened the already glib tongues of the majority of the people at the table. Only Sherlock Holmes and Senator Cameron were saying almost nothing; Henry Cabot Lodge had told a funny story with the fromage and was still in a talkative mood.