by Gore Vidal
“Was my mother with him?”
James cast her a sidelong glance; and helped himself to horseradish sauce. “Oh, she was there, so very much there! Madame la Princesse d’Agrigente. Who can forget her? You are very like her, as I told you at Saint-Cloud …”
“But not so dark?”
“No. Not so dark.” James was then drawn by his other table partner, Alice Hay, who resembled her father—small, shrewd, quick-witted; also, pretty. Although Caroline had not found either of Del’s sisters particularly sympathetic, she did not in the least mind their company, particularly that of Helen, who sat across the table, next to Spencer Eddy, who seemed infatuated with Helen’s precociously middle-aged radiance. She was like her mother, large-bodied, with glowing eyes and quantities of glossy hair, all her own.
Suddenly, Senator Cameron shouted, “What’s this?” He sat at the head of the table, as befitted the married co-host. In one hand he held a silver serving-spoon from which hung a gelatinous mass, rather like a jellyfish, thought Caroline.
“A surprise,” said Mrs. Cameron, from her end of the table. The Curzon child promptly burst into tears: the word “surprise” had not a happy association.
“What is this?” Senator Cameron turned his small fierce eyes upon the butler.
“It is the … corn, sir. From America, sir.”
“This is not corn. What is this mess?”
From behind the coromandel screen that hid pantry from dining room, the cook appeared, like an actress who had been waiting in the wings for her cue. “It is the corn, sir. As you said to make it. Boiled, sir. Should I have left the seeds in it?”
“Oh, Don!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a most genuine sound in that often dramatically charged household. “It’s the watermelon. She mistook it for the corn.” In the general laughter, not shared by Cameron, the cook vanished.
“Father thinks now that we shall keep all the Philippines,” said Del. “The Major has come round, he says. But it hasn’t been easy. All those people who didn’t want us to take on Hawaii last summer are at it again. I can’t think why. If we don’t take up where England’s left off—or just given up—who will?”
“Does it make so much difference?” Although Caroline had been delighted by the war’s excitement, she could not see that there had been any earthly point to it. Why drive poor weak old Spain out of the Caribbean and the Pacific? Why take on far-off colonies? Why boast so much? It was not like Napoleon, who did appeal to her because he had, himself, wanted the world, which Mr. McKinley did not seem to want to be bothered with, unlike that friend of her hosts, a man to whom they all referred, with an inadvertent baring of teeth, as Thee-oh-dore, who had managed, under fire, to lead some of his friends to the top of a small hill in Cuba, without once breaking his pince-nez. The fuss in the newspapers over Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his so-called Rough Riders was as great as the fuss over Admiral Dewey, who had actually defeated Spain’s Pacific fleet and occupied Manila. For reasons obscure to Caroline, the newspapers thought “Teddy” the greater of the two heroes. Therefore: “Does it make so much difference?” was not idly posed.
Del told her of all the dangers that might befall the world if the German kaiser—whose fleet was even now in Philippine waters—were to acquire that rich archipelago in order to carry out the current dream of every European power, not to mention Japan, the carving up of the collapsed Chinese empire. “We had no choice, really. As for allowing Spain to stay on in our hemisphere, that was an anachronism. We must be the masters in our own house.”
“Is all the western hemisphere, even Tierra del Fuego, a part of our house?”
“You’re making fun of me. Let’s talk about the theater in Paris …”
“Let’s talk about men and women.” Caroline felt suddenly as if she had had a revelation about these two hostile races. The differences between the two sexes were known to her in a way that they could never be known to an American young lady. Although American girls were given a social freedom unknown in France, they were astonishingly sheltered in other crucial ways, their ignorance nurtured by anxious mothers, themselves more innocent than not of the on-going plan of Eden’s serpent. Del looked at her, startled. “But what shall we say about—about men and women?” Del’s flush was not entirely from the August heat and the heavy meal.
“I’ve thought of one difference. At least between American men and women. Mr. James called the United States ‘the newspapered democracy.’ ”
“Mr. Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a government without a press and a press without a government, he would choose a press without a—”
“How stupid he must have been!” But when Caroline saw Del’s hurt expression—plainly, he had identified himself with the sage of Monticello—she modified: “I mean, he was not stupid. He just thought that the people he was talking to were stupid. After all, they were journalists, weren’t they? I mean if they weren’t journalists of some sort, how would we know what he said—or might have said, or didn’t say? Anyway, back to men and women. We women are criticized, quite rightly, for thinking and, worse, talking about marriage and children and the ordinary people we have to deal with every day and the lives we have to make for our husbands or families or whatever, and this means that as we get older, we get duller and duller because we have, at the end, nothing left but ourselves to think about and talk about and so we become perfect—if we’re not already to begin with—bores,” Caroline concluded in triumph.
Del looked at her, quite bewildered. “So if you are—like that, then men are … what?”
“Different. Boring in a different way. Because of the newspapers. Don’t you see?”
“You mean men read them and women don’t?”
“Exactly. Most of the men we know, that is, read them, and most of the women we know don’t. At least, not the news—what a funny word!—of politics or wars. So when men talk to one another for hours about what they have all read that morning about China and Cuba and … Tierra del Fuego, about politics and money, we are left out because we haven’t read those particular bits of news.”
“But you could, so easily, read them …”
“But we don’t want to. We have our boredom and you have yours. But yours is truly sinister. Blaise says that practically nothing Mr. Hearst prints is ever true, including the story about how the Spaniards blew up the Maine. But you men who read the Journal, or something like it, will act as if what you read is true or, worse, as if, true or not, it was all that really mattered. So we are excluded, entirely. Because we know that none of it matters—to us.”
“Well, I agree newspapers are not always true, but if … foolish men think they are true—or perhaps true—then it does matter to everyone because that is how governments are run, in response to the news.”
“Then worse luck for foolish men—and women, too.”
Del laughed at last. “So what would you do if you could alter things?”
“Read the Morning Journal.” Caroline was prompt. “Every word.”
“And believe it?”
“Of course not. But at least I could talk to men about Tierra del Fuego and the Balance of Power.”
“I prefer to talk about the theater in Paris … and marriage.” Del’s lower larger face reddened; the small forehead remained pale ivory.
“You’ll be the woman? I’ll be the man?” Caroline smiled. “No. That’s not allowed. Because we are divided at birth by those terrible newspapers that tell you what to think and us what to wear and when to wear it. We cannot, ever, truly meet.”
“But you can. There is, after all, the high middle ground,” said Henry James, who had been listening, the ruins of an elaborate pudding before him.
“Where—what is that?” Caroline turned her full gaze on that great head with the gleaming all-intelligent eyes. “Why that is art, dear Miss Sanford. It is a kind of Heaven open to us all, and not just Jim Bludso and his creator.”
“But art is not for everyone, Mr. James.” Del
was respectful.
“Then there is something not unlike it, if more rare, yet a higher stage, a meeting ground for all true—hearts.”
On the word “hearts,” Caroline felt a sudden premonitory chill. Did he mean the specific mysterious five or did he mean just what he said? Apparently, he meant just that, because when she asked what this higher stage was, Henry James said, simply, for him: “Dare one say that human intercourse which transcends politics and war and, yes, even love itself? I mean, of course, friendship. There—you have it.”
– 2 –
IN WICKER CHAIRS, placed side by side on the stone terrace, John Hay and Henry Adams presided over the Kentish Weald, as the summer light yielded, slowly, very slowly, to darkness.
“In Sweden, in summer, the sun shines all night long.” Henry Adams lit a cigar. “One never thinks of England being almost as far to the north as Sweden. But look! It’s after dinner, and it’s light yet.”
“I suppose we like to think of England as being closer to us than it really is.” Carefully, John Hay pressed his lower back against the hard cushion that Clara had placed behind him. For some months the pain had been fairly constant, a dull aching that seemed to extend from the small of the back down into the pelvis, but, of course, ominously, the doctors said that it was the other way around. In some mysterious fashion the cushion stopped the pain from exploding into one of its sudden borealises, as Hay tended to think of those excruciating flare-ups when his whole body would be electrified by jolts of pain—originating in the atrophied—if not worse—prostate gland, whose dictatorship ordered his life, obliging him to pass water or, painfully, not to pass water, a dozen times during the night, accompanied by a burning sensation reminiscent of his youth when he had briefly contracted in war-time Washington a minor but highly popular venereal infection.
“Are you all right?” Although Adams was not looking at him, Hay knew that his old friend was highly attuned to his physical state.
“No, I’m not.”
“Good. You’re better. When you’re really in pain, you boast of rude health. How pretty Del’s girl is.”
Hay looked across the terrace to the stone bench where his son and Caroline had combined to make a romantic picture, suitable for Gibson’s pen, while the remaining houseguests—it was Monday—floated like sub-aquatic creatures in the watery half-light. The children had been removed, to Hay’s delight, Adams’s sorrow. “Do you recall her mother, Enrique?” Hay had a number of variations of Henry’s name, playful tribute to his friend’s absolute unprotean nature.
“The darkly beautiful Princesse d’Agrigente was not easy, once seen, ever to forget. I knew her back in the seventies, the beautiful decade, after our unbeautiful war was won. Did you know Sanford?”
Hay nodded. The pain which had started to radiate from the lumbar region suddenly surrendered to the pillow’s pressure. “He was on McDowell’s staff early in the war. I think he wanted to marry Kate Chase …”
“Surely he was not alone in this madness?” Hay sensed the Porcupine’s smile beneath the beard, pale blue in the ghostly light.
“We were many, it’s true. Kate was the Helen of Troy of E Street. But Sprague got her. And Sanford got Emma d’Agrigente.”
“Money?”
“What else?” Hay thought of his own good luck. He had never thought that he could ever make a living. For a young man from Warsaw, Illinois, who liked to read and write, who had gone east to college, and graduated from Brown, there were only two careers. One was the law, which bored him; the other, the ministry, which intrigued him, despite a near-perfect absence of faith. Even so, he had been wooed by various ministers of a variety of denominations. But he had said no, finally, to the lot, for, as he wrote his lawyer uncle, Milton: “I would not do for a Methodist preacher, for I am a poor horseman. I would not suit the Baptists, for I would dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man.” This last was disingenuous. Hay had always been more than usually susceptible to women and they to him. But as he had looked, at the age of twenty-two, no more than twelve years old, neither in Warsaw nor, later, in Springfield, was he in any great demand as a ladies’ man.
Instead, Hay had grimly gone into his uncle’s law office; got to know his uncle’s friend, a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln; helped Mr. Lincoln in the political campaign that made him president; and then boarded the train with the President-elect to go to Washington for five years, one month and two weeks. Hay had been present in the squalid boardinghouse when the murdered President had stopped breathing, on a mattress soaked with blood.
Hay had then gone to Paris, as secretary to the American legation. Later, he had served, as a diplomat, in Vienna and Madrid. He wrote verse, books of travel; was editor of the New York Tribune. He lectured on Lincoln. He wrote folksy poems, and his ballads of Pike County sold in the millions. But there was still no real money until the twenty-four-year-old Cleveland heiress Clara Stone asked him to marry her; and he had gratefully united himself with a woman nearly a head taller than he with an innate tendency to be as fat as it was his to be lean.
At thirty-six Hay was saved from poverty. He moved to Cleveland; worked for his father-in-law—railroads, mines, oil, Western Union Telegraph; found that he, too, had a gift for making money once he had money. He served, briefly, as assistant secretary of state; and wrote, anonymously, a best-selling novel, The Bread-Winners, in which he expressed his amiable creed that although men of property were the best situated to administer and regulate America’s wealth and that labor agitators were a constant threat to the system, the ruling class of a city in the Western Reserve (Cleveland was never named) was hopelessly narrow, vulgar, opinionated. Henry Adams had called him a snob; he had agreed. Both agreed that it was a good idea that he had published the book anonymously; otherwise, the Major could not have offered him the all-important embassy at London. Had the Senate suspected that Hay did not admire all things American, he would not have been confirmed.
“Money makes the difference.” Hay took a deep puff of his Havana cigar: what on earth, he suddenly wondered, were they to do with Cuba? Then, aware not only of the vapidity of what he had said but also of the thin blue smile beneath the thick blue beard in the chair beside him, he added, “Not that gilded porcupines would know—except by hearsay—what it is like to be poor and struggling.”
“You wrench my heart.” Adams was sardonic. “Also, my quills were not heavily gilded at birth. I have acquired just enough shekels to creep through life, serving the odd breakfast to a friend …”
“Perhaps you might have been less angelic if you’d had to throw yourself into …”
“… wealthy matrimony?”
A spasm of pain forced Hay to cough. He pretended it was cigar smoke inhaled, as he maneuvered his spine against the pillow. “Into the real world. Business, which is actually rather easy. Politics, which, for us, is not.”
“Well, you’ve done well, thanks to a rich wife. So has Whitelaw Reid. So has William Whitney. So, would have Clarence King had he had your luck—all right, good sense—to marry wealthily and well.”
Below the terrace, in the dark woods, owls called to one another. Why, Hay wondered, was the Surrenden nightingale silent? “Why has he never married?” asked Hay: their constant question to one another. Of the three friends, King was the most brilliant, the handsomest, the best talker; also, athlete, explorer, geologist. In the eighties all three had been at Washington, and, thanks largely to King’s brilliance, Adams’s old house became the first salon, as the newspapers liked to say, of the republic.
“He has no luck,” said Hay. “And we have had too much.”
“Do you see it that way?” Adams turned his pale blue head toward Hay. The voice was suddenly cold. Inadvertently, Hay had approached the forbidden door. The only one in their long friendship to which Hay had not the key. In the thirteen years since Adams had found his dead wife on the floor, he had not mentioned her to Hay—or to anyone that Hay knew of. Adam
s had simply locked a door; and that was that.
But Hay was experiencing vivid pain; and so was less than his usual tactful self. “Compared to King, we have lived in Paradise, you and I.”
A tall, tentative figure appeared on the terrace. Hay was relieved at the diversion. “Here I am, White,” he called out to the embassy’s first secretary, just arrived from London.
White pulled up a chair; refused a cigar. “I have a telegram,” he said. “It’s a bit crumpled. The paper is so flimsy.” He gave the telegram to Hay, who said, “Am I expected, as a director of Western Union, to defend the quality of the paper we use?”
“Oh, no. No!” White frowned, and Hay was suddenly put on his guard by his colleague’s nervousness: it was part of White’s charm to laugh at pleasantries that were neither funny nor pleasant. “I can’t read in the dark,” said Hay. “Unlike the owl … and the porcupine.” Adams had taken the telegram from Hay; now he held it very close to his eyes, deciphering it in the long day’s waning light.
“My God,” said Adams softly. He put down the telegram. He stared at Hay.
“The German fleet has opened fire in Cavite Bay.” This had been Hay’s fear ever since the fall of Manila.
“No, no.” Adams gave the telegram to Hay, who put it in his pocket. “Perhaps you should go inside and read it. Alone.”
“Who’s it from?” Hay turned to White.
“The President, sir. He has appointed you … ah … has offered to appoint you …”
“Secretary of state,” Adams finished. “The great office of state is now upon offer, to you.”
“Everything comes to me either too late or too soon,” said Hay. He was unprepared for his own response, which was closer to somber regret than joy. Certainly, he could not pretend to be surprised. He had known all along that the current secretary, Judge Day, was only a temporary appointment. The Judge wanted a judgeship and he had agreed to fill in, temporarily, at the State Department as a courtesy to his old friend the Major. Hay was also aware that the Major thought highly of his own performance, in which he had handled a number of delicate situations in a fashion that had enhanced the President’s reputation. Now, in John Hay’s sixtieth year, actual power was offered him, on a yellow sheet of Western Union’s notoriously cheap paper.