by Gore Vidal
They were joined by Don Cameron, who smelled of whiskey, and by the stout, bald, bearded figure of Henry James, who had just arrived from his house at Rye. When Caroline was very young, the novelist had been brought to Saint-Cloud by the Paul Bourgets. She had been impressed when James had spoken to her entirely in unaccented French; she had also been intrigued by an American whose two Christian names were affixed to no family name—Henry James What? she asked her father. The Colonel neither knew nor cared. He disliked literary men, except for Paul Bourget, whose aggressive snobbism gave Sanford quiet pleasure: “Can’t read his books. But he knows le monde de la famille.” When the Colonel did use a French phrase, it was always eerily mispronounced; yet the Colonel had a good ear; and loved music if not musicians. He had even written an opera about Marie de’Medici, which no one would put on unless he himself paid for the production. But as he was the sort of man who would never spend a penny that might give himself pleasure, there was no production of the opera in his lifetime; no life, either. Caroline vowed that she would not make the same mistake.
Don Cameron’s voice was slow, rumbling, hoarse. “Well, you could at least try it out.”
“But, my dear Senator, I am already so beautifully machined. At Lamb House, I am fitted out like the latest, most modern manufactory, geared for the most intense production, with a chief engineer who is hopelessly wedded to that intricate, fine-grinding mill that he performs upon with a positively virtuoso’s touch …” Henry James spoke in a low, deep resonant voice, well-produced by a huge barrel of a chest that contained a singer’s lungs, thought Caroline, for his breath never gave out, no matter how long and intricate the sentence.
Cameron was persistent. “You’ll never regret trying it out. I know. I tried it out. I’m no writer but it could change your life.”
“Ah, that!” began James.
Adams broke in. “What is it?”
“I already showed you.” The small, red, suspicious eyes turned toward Caroline now. “I’m selling the thing—the rights, that is—for Europe. Exclusive rights.”
“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; thanks to the Colonel, she knew rather a lot about the tricks of opera singers as well as opera, “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”
“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
“It’s this typewriter I’ve been promoting,” said Senator Cameron.
“For an instant, I thought it was some sort of home guillotine,” said Caroline.
“Homely utensil?” Adams asked; then answered his own question. “Well, why not? We could certainly use one in Lafayette Square.”
“Now if Mr. James would just give us an endorsement,” began Senator Cameron.
“But I am wedded, Senator, to another. I am—let me pronounce once and for all the honorable name—united to the Remington typewriter-machine, and have been for close to two wonderfully contented and happy years.”
“You manipulate it yourself?” Caroline could not visualize the ponderous Mr. James confronting a metal machine, stubby fingers tapping.
“No,” said Henry Adams. “He paces about the garden room of his house and unfurls his sentences into the ear of a typewriter-machinist who turns them into Remingtonese.”
“Which is, at its best, so like English,” added Henry James, eyes sparkling. Caroline vowed that she must one day really read him. Except for Daisy Miller, required reading for every American girl in Europe, Caroline had always steered clear of the books of the man that so many knowing Americans in Paris referred to as the Master.
“I’ll bring it over to your place anyway.” Cameron was dogged. “Get your man to try it out. There’s a fortune in these new gadgets. Where’s Lizzie?”
No one knew. She was not in the room. As Cameron made his way through a group of children to the hallway, Mr. Eddy bowed low to the statesman, who did not see him.
“Our good Don is persistent,” said Henry Adams; and though the tone was agreeable, the expression of the face was not. Caroline saw that James had noticed, too.
“It must be very hard, no longer being in the Senate, after so many years, at the center.” James was uncharacteristically tentative.
“Oh, I think he has a good enough time. He’s rich, after all. He’s got the place in South Carolina to worry about …”
“It must be even harder for La Dona, as you, not I, call her.” James was studying Adams’s face with acute interest.
“She has not been well.” Adams was neutral; flat. “That’s why Don and I formed our syndicate, to take this place for the summer, to unite us all.”
“She is thriving then?”
But Henry Adams was saved from answering by the butler, who was at last permitted to come into his brilliant own. The long cadaverous figure of Mr. Beech stood very straight in the doorway, as his basso voice ecstatically proclaimed, “His Excellency, the Ambassador of the United States of America, and Mrs. John Hay.”
“I shall now say ‘hurrah’ three times, I think,” said Henry James, “and very loud, too.”
“Don’t,” said Adams.
The Hays were a curious-looking couple. He was small, slender, bearded, with, at a distance, a boy’s face that, close up, was like a delicate much-wrinkled beige chamois skin. Hay wore a pointed beard, like all the others; his full head of hair was parted in the middle and dyed the same dull chestnut color as the hair of his tall, fleshy, large-faced wife, who looked even larger and more formidable than she was when standing beside her husband. Caroline could see Del’s face peering out of Clara’s; but except for the turned-up nose, saw no resemblance to Del at all in Hay, who came toward them, hand outstretched to greet Henry James. They were old friends.
“In fact,” said James, more to Caroline than to anyone, “when I needed employment on this side of the water, Mr. Hay—this was a quarter-century ago, and the world was younger, as were we, to strike the Dickensian note of spacious redundancy—Mr. Hay, as an editor of the New York Tribune, persuaded, with who knows what wiles, that worthy paper to take me on as its inadequate Paris correspondent.”
“Easily the wisest thing I ever did.” Hay’s voice was low and precise and, that rare thing to Caroline’s critical ear, agreeably American. “Now you are become so great that I have your bust in my library, along with Cicero’s. Adams often compares the two of you—the originals, that is, not the busts. Every day he thinks up something new to say, when he pays me a call.” Del had told Caroline a good deal about the curious Hay-Adams living arrangements at Washington.
Ever since the Civil War, Hay and Adams had been friends; the wives, too, had liked each other, a source of amazement to Caroline, who said as much, amazing Del, who was innocent. When the Hays at last abandoned Cleveland, Ohio, where Hay had first worked for—and then with—Mrs. Hay’s father, they had come to Washington to live, largely because Henry Adams lived there; and he lived there because, as he had told Caroline, it is a law of nature that Adamses gravitate to capitals. Since he would never be president like his two ancestors, he could at least live opposite the White House, where each Adams had, so disastrously, presided; and thus, close to “home,” he could write, think, and ev
en make—through backstage maneuvering—history.
In due course, Hay and Adams had built a double house in Lafayette Square, a red brick Romanesque affair, whose outside Caroline already knew from photographs and whose inside Del intended for her to get to know. But though the two houses were physically joined, there was no connecting inner door. In this joint house, Hay had finished his interminable life of Lincoln while Adams had written much of his long account of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, demonstrating, as Del had observed, how the Adamses, though seldom mentioned in the text, had almost never been wrong—unlike their opponents, Jefferson and Madison and the terrible Andrew Jackson, whose statue at the center of Lafayette Park was daily visible to Henry Adams, who, daily, chose not to look at this ungainly reminder of his grandfather’s political ruin, not to mention that of the republic. For was it not with Jackson that the age of political corruption which now flourished began? But despite the city’s ever-present mephitic corruption, the two wealthy historians lived contentedly side by side, influencing events through various chosen instruments, among them Senator Don Cameron, hereditary czar of Pennsylvania. When Lincoln wondered if Don’s father, Simon Cameron, would steal once he was secretary of war, a Pennsylvania colleague observed that, well, he would probably not steal a red-hot stove. When Simon had heard this, he demanded an apology. The congressman complied, with the words “Believe me, I did not say that you would not steal a red-hot stove.”
Hay’s career had seemed at an end when he moved into the Romanesque fortress opposite the White House. But then, as the political dice were again cast and Ohio, yet again, was about to produce a president, the obvious candidate was the state’s governor, one William McKinley, known as the Major—pronounced Maj-ah. A Civil War veteran and longtime member of the House of Representatives, the Major had sworn eternal loyalty to the tariff, the creed of the higher Republicans, and so gained the attention and loyalty of the party’s leaders, the merchant princes. For them, McKinley was immaculate. He was poor—hence, honest; eloquent but without ideas—hence, not dangerous; devoted to his wife, an epileptic who always sat next to him at table so that when she went into convulsions, he could tactfully throw a napkin over her head and continue his conversation as though nothing had happened; when the convulsions ceased, he would remove the napkin and she would continue her dinner. Although Mrs. McKinley was not entirely an asset as a potential first lady, the fact that she was an “invalid” (and he deeply devoted to her) counted for a great deal in the republic’s numerous sentimental quarters.
Unfortunately, McKinley went bankrupt at the start of the campaign. Out of friendship, he had signed his name to a note, which the friend in question could not redeem, to the amount of $140,000. The McKinley campaign was about to end before it started, giving the election to the so-called boy-orator of the Platte, that fire-breathing populist and enemy of the rich, William Jennings Bryan. As blood would obscure the moon for a generation if Bryan should prevail, McKinley’s campaign manager, a wealthy grocer named Mark Hanna, appealed to a number of other wealthy men, among them Hay, to pay off the note and save the moon from a sanguinary fate. The Major was grateful. Hay, who had been passed over for high diplomatic office by an earlier president because “there was just no politics in appointing him,” now found himself in high favor with the latest Ohio management across the road.
The Major appointed Hay ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; and Hay had arrived in London the year before, accompanied by Henry Adams, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had each held the same post. The ambassadorial party had been met at Southampton by Henry James, who was never seen anywhere near the world of politics or near-politics or even plain celebrity. But there he most loyally was at the customs house, crushed by the international press. After observing Hay’s dextrous handling of the thorny flower of the British press, James had whispered to Hay, in a voice audible to more than a few, “What impression does it make on your mind to have those insects creeping about and saying things to you?”
“I do not know this man,” Hay said with mock severity, getting into his carriage.
“Anyway,” Del had told Caroline, summing up, “the firm of Hay and Adams prospered from the day they moved into their joint house.”
But Caroline had been conscious of an omission. “Weren’t there, to begin with, two couples who were friends?”
“Yes. My father and mother. And Mr. and Mrs. Adams.”
“What became of Mrs. Adams?”
“She died before they could move into the house. She was small and plain. That’s all I remember. People say she was brilliant, even witty, for a woman. She took photographs, and developed them herself. She was very talented. Her name was Marian, but everyone called her Clover.”
“How did she die?”
Del had looked at her, as if uncertain whether or not she was to be trusted—but trusted with what? Caroline had wondered. Surely he knew nothing that others did not know. “She killed herself. She drank some sort of chemical that you use to develop pictures. Mr. Adams found her on the floor. It was a painful death.”
“Why did she do it?” Caroline had asked, but there had been no answer.
As the lunch party began to drift toward the dining room, with its southern exposure of quantities of Kentish Weald, Mrs. Cameron hurried toward John Hay. “He’s come! He says you invited him …”
“Who?” asked Hay.
“Mr. Austin. Our neighbor. Your admirer.”
“Oh, God,” murmured Hay. “He thinks I’m a poet, too.”
“But so triumphantly you were—” began James.
“Tell Mr. Austin there’s been a mistake.…”
But there was no telling Mr. Beech, who was now declaiming, “The Poet Laureate of All England and Mrs. Alfred Austin!”
“What joy!” Hay exclaimed so that all could hear and relish. Then he hurried to greet what many believed was the dullest poet in all England.
Caroline sat at table between Del and Henry James. The dining room was easily the most agreeable of the old house’s state apartments, and here Mrs. Cameron presided efficiently over children, young adults, statesmen and—now—a dim poet, wreathed in courtly laurel. “Mr. Austin is under the impression that our friend Hay is the American poet laureate,” said James, doing justice to a quantity of turbot in fresh cream. Across the table a very small Curzon girl sniffled next to a nanny who had apparently invoked an unfair prohibition.
“Father keeps telling Mr. Austin that he hasn’t written a line since …”
Like the low rumbling note of an organ the voice of Henry James began, through a last mouthful of turbot, to intone.
“And I think that saving a little child,
And fetching him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around The Throne.”
At the quatrain’s end, half the table applauded: Mr. James’s voice was unusually sonorous and compelling.
“I always find that part the most moving,” said the Laureate, “if not theologically tactful.”
“I hate it,” said Hay, who looked most embarrassed.
“I am sure that Dante must have felt the same whenever the Inferno was quoted.” Adams was most amused.
“What on earth is it?” Caroline whispered to Del, but Henry James’s ear was sharp.
“ ‘Little Breeches,’ ” he boomed, “the poignant narrative—nay, epic—of a four-year-old boy saved from the wreckage of some sort of rustic conveyance that was drawn, most perilously, as it proved, by horses, the sort of conveyance, ill-defined, I fear, and of vague utility, what one might term …”
“A wagon?” Caroline contributed.
“Precisely.” James was enjoying himself. The first of several roast fowls had now appeared, further brightening his mood. “The small boy—hardly more than what Adams would call an infant, except to Adams an infant is any unmarried maiden who might be his niece, and this child—Little Breeches,” aga
in the name vibrated in the air and Caroline could see Hay cringe, and even Del cleared his throat, preparatory to drowning out James’s inexorable voice, “—apparently, this small untended rustic person fell from the moving conveyance and was saved by a rustic hero, who deliberately sacrificed his own life for this pair of, as it were, small trousers, or, rather, its contents, and for this noble act, despite a terrestrial life of some untidiness—even sin—he was translated to Paradise.”
“The churches still complain about Father’s poem.” Del was more than ready to change the subject.
“But it sold, as a pamphlet, in the untold millions,” said James, dislodging with a forefinger a morsel of chicken from between his two front teeth. “Like the later and, perhaps, more profound ‘Jim Bludso,’ your father’s most celebrated ballad, the hero of which gave his life to save those of his passengers aboard a—this time nautical—conveyance, the Prairie Belle. Mr. Hay’s fascination with the hazards of American travel was very much the spirit of the seventies. In any event, this steam-propelled barque explodes, if memory serves, in some wild American river, enabling the paragon to give his life for innumerable little breeches, not to mention other garments, including maidenly costumes, all the passengers in short, thus ensuring himself a direct passage to Paradise on the democratic ground—highest of all grounds—that ‘Christ ain’t going to be too hard on a man who died for men.’ ” But this time James dropped his voice dramatically and no one but Caroline heard. To her left, Del was talking to Abigail Adams, one of Henry’s actual nieces, a large plain girl, recently broken out of a Paris convent.
As boiled beef relentlessly followed fowl, and the conversation in the dining room grew both louder and slower, Henry James said that, yes, indeed he had met Caroline’s grandfather. “It was in ’76.” He was suddenly precise. “I had decided to make my … deliberate removal to Europe, like Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, who had made his thirty years earlier. He had always intrigued me, and I had noticed, most favorably, for The Nation, his Paris Under the Communards. I can still see him in bright summer Hudson riparian light, on a lawn at river-side, somewhere north of Rhinecliff, a Livingston house behind us, all white columns and cinnamon stucco, and we spoke of the necessity, for some, of living on this side of the Atlantic, some distance from our newspapered democracy.”