by Gore Vidal
“It would appear that Mrs. Smith’s siesta, interrupted by the excitement of our arrival, has been resumed upon the drugget.”
“Ah, poor woman!” Smith shook his head. “It is the new medicine the village doctor gives her, not at all what she’s used to in London, in Harley Street.” During this, Smith had pulled his smiling unconscious wife to her feet, and sleep-walked her to the door. “Hers,” Smith declared proudly, “is … a highly sensitive sort of organism.” They were gone. Henry Adams had succeeded in not laughing but the tip of his neat beard was twitching. Henry James looked endlessly melancholy, even Byronic, thought Caroline, who said, “But surely, Mr. James …”
There was a terrible crash at the back of the house: plainly, both Smiths had surrendered to gravity’s stern law. “They are indeed, surely, as you put it, to put it finely, the Smiths, a couple richly experienced in domestic matters, but prone in the wastes, as it were, of unfamiliar country life to exceed—go past, even the earliest of warning signals …”
“Drunk!” Henry Adams’s laugh was so startingly loud and uninhibited that Caroline could not stop herself; nor could Del.
The Master, however, was a study in polite anguish. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that your introduction to Lamb House should be so spoiled by the Dionysian—no, Bacchic—transports of the loyal good Smiths whose transference from their native London to the unfamiliar countryside has tended to overstimulate them, in every sense.…” The sound of crockery crashing caused James’s large smooth brow delicately to furrow.
But Henry Adams then took the lead; and the Smiths, as a subject, were banished; as a fact, however, they did produce a respectable tea, and Mr. Smith, having got a second wind, served efficiently.
Adams was curious about the neighborhood. Was there sufficient company? “As you prefer solitude to company, this means that you must have some very good company nearby so that not seeing them will be all the more agreeable and inspiring.”
“Well, there is the Poet Laureate.” James passed a plate of heavy cakes to Caroline, who refused; to Del, who took two. “I find that every day that I don’t see him is a pleasure. In fact, I see no one here. I did join the golf club, for the tea that they serve, not for the curious lonely game that precedes it, and though unanimously elected as vice-president of the cricket club, I declined the election, as the game is even more incomprehensible to me than golf, and no tea is served. I thought to embrace my solitude this summer little realizing that the Camerons, the Hays, the Adamses should all descend upon me, like a … like a …”
“I cannot wait to hear what he will say we’re like,” said Adams to Caroline, who rather wished the windows onto the garden were open: the room was close, and flies circled the cakes.
“I am torn,” said James, “between the image of a shower of gold and the lurid details of a passion play. In any case, were it not for you passionate visitors, I would be chained to my desk, writing …”
“Dictating …”
“The image is the same. I am chained to Mr. McAlpine, who is chained to his Remington, while I copiously dictate book reviews for Literature, a biography of William Wetmore Story …”
“That crushing bore?”
“You have put in a single phrase what I must make a book of. But as the heirs have paid me a useful sum to memorialize our old and, yes, boring friend, I must do the work to pay for these sticks and stones that compose the first—and last—house I shall ever own.”
Del asked James if he had met Stephen Crane, the young American journalist who was said to be living nearby. James nodded. “He is at Brede Place. He came to call before he went to Cuba, to describe the war. He is most talented, with a wife who …” James glanced at Caroline, and she realized that whatever the wife might be she, as a virginal girl of American provenance, was not about to be told. “… once kept an establishment in Jacksonville, Florida, I believe, named, most evocatively, the Hotel de Dream. Poor young Mr. Crane is also chained to his desk, only his desk is now in Havana—where he writes for a newspaper …”
“For the Journal,” said Caroline. Blaise had told her how Hearst had managed to get Crane away from the World, where he had described, tactlessly, the cowardice of the 71st New York Volunteers. In a series of headlines, Hearst had denounced the World for insulting the valor of America’s brave fighting men; then he hired the author of the canard to write for him.
Henry Adams wondered how someone who had never seen a battle could have written such a fine war novel as The Red Badge of Courage. James reminded him that “the titanic Tolstoi” had, after all, not been alive during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, yet he could imagine that War as well as Peace, to which Caroline felt mischievously obliged to add, “Although Mr. Crane has never been a girl of any kind, much less one of the streets, he did create for us Maggie.”
“Dear, dear!” Henry Adams looked more than ever like an uncle. “You are not supposed to know of such things. Mlle. Souvestre has been lax.”
“But Miss Sanford is a product, Adams, of Paris, where everyone knows …” James’s voice dropped very low on the word “knows” and his eyes became very round and comical. Caroline and Del laughed. Adams did not because it was now time to talk of Thee-oh-dore. Caroline wondered if all Americans, of this particular set anyway, were obliged to speak of Theodore Roosevelt at least six times a day, rather the way convent nuns told their beads at regular intervals. She herself had never met the Colonel, as he was currently known, thanks to what John Hay had dubbed, publicly, “a splendid little war,” giving offense in many quarters, not all of them Spanish. But although Theodore and his Rough Riders had caught the popular imagination, Caroline found it odd that he should be so interesting to his social equals, not to mention elders. Adams sought to explain him: “He is all energy. I suppose that is his attraction …”
“For those who find crude mindless energy attractive.” James put three teaspoons of sugar in his tea.
“Well, he is not mindless, entirely, that is.” Adams was judicious. “He wrote an excellent history of our Navy in the War of 1812 …”
“A subject that even at this far remove, causes my pulses to slow. Was that the war where the participants were exhorted not to shoot until the whites of certain distant hostile eyes were visible?”
“Oh, you expatriate! You will not allow us what history we have.”
“Of course I will. I just want a lot more of it; and written always by you. But what will become of the hero of our Cuban Iliad?”
“He is running for governor of New York State,” said Del. “The Republican machine had to take him. You see, he isn’t corrupt. And they are. So he will make them respectable.”
“But surely, they will make him corrupt, too, if they elect him.” Obviously, thought Caroline, Mr. James was more interested in American matters than he let on.
“I think he’s far too ambitious,” said Adams, “to be corrupted.”
“Then, there it already is! The true corruption. I’m afraid I cannot, dear Adams, in my heart, endure your white knight, Theodore. I have just—tell no one—reviewed his latest … latest … well, book for want of a description other than the grim literal paginated printed nullity, called American Ideals, in which he tells us over and over—and then over once again—how we must live, each of us, ‘purely as an American,’ as if that were something concrete. He also warns us that the educated man—himself, no doubt—must not go into politics as an educated man because he is bound to be beaten by someone of no education at all—this he takes to be some sort of American Ideal, which he worships, as it is American, but which, he concedes, presents a problem for the educated man, whom he then advises to go into the election as if he had had no education at all, and presenting himself to the electorate—yes, you have grasped it!—purely as an American, in which case he will win, which is what matters. There is, dear Adams, as far as I can detect, no mind at all at work in your friend.”
“Perhaps it is not mind so much as a necessary, highl
y energetic cunning. After all, he was useful at Washington on the Civil Service reform commission. He has also made a name as a reformer of the New York Police.”
“My father says that he has yet to meet a reformer who did not have the heart of a tyrant.” Del made his contribution.
“Let’s hope he keeps that cruel conviction a secret from Theodore.” Caroline could see that Adams wanted to defend Roosevelt but James’s contempt for his celebrated friend was plainly disturbing to him. “At least,” Adams rallied, “when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, he got the fleet ready, something the secretary and Congress were not about to do. He also ordered Admiral Dewey to the China coast, just in case of war. Then, when the war came, by resigning to go fight, he showed that he was entirely serious.”
“Serious?” James frowned. The light in the garden was turning from silver to deep gold. “Serious, as a jingo—yes, he is that. And also serious, I suppose you mean, purely as an American …?”
“Oh, James, you are too suspicious of a man who after all embodies the spirit of our race, as we now move onto the world stage, and take our part, the leading part, which history’s law requires.”
“What law, may I ask, is that?” James was mischievous.
“That the most efficient will prevail.”
“Ah, your brother’s law! Yes, that the world will go to the … uh, cheapest economy. Of course. And why not? We should do well to get ourselves an empire on the cheap, assuming that the British will let theirs go, which I don’t see them ever doing, not while German kaiser and Russian tsar and Japanese mikado are all rattling their sabres in the once peaceful stillness of the Orient.…”
“A stillness we have broken. You know, Brooks is close to Theodore. Brooks is also close to Admiral Mahan. The three of them are constantly plotting our imperial destiny.”
“According to Brooks’s immutable laws of history?”
“Yes. Of course he likes to apply laws. I don’t. I prefer to understand them.”
“The Adamses … !” James’s exclamation was both comic and fond; and on that note, tea ended; and the electrical-motor car returned them, without incident—though not without numerous warnings from James that they might yet become the martyred subjects for one of Hay’s dread Transportation Ballads—to Surrenden Dering.
When Caroline came down to dinner, she found Clara Hay, swathed in pastel colors that made her large bulk seem more than ever monumental, at a desk, writing letters. “I am never caught up any more,” she said, smiling at Caroline. Is she to be my mother-in-law? Caroline wondered. Am I, at last, grown-up? She asked herself this question a dozen times a day. It was as if the prison door of childhood had simply opened of its own accord and she, without thinking and, certainly, without a plan—had stepped into the outside world. She had always wanted to do as she pleased; had never dreamed that such a thing was possible. Then the Colonel vanished, which was how she thought of his death; and she had slipped through the open door.
“Did you meet Clarence King this summer in Paris?” Clara continued to write.
“No. I met a George King, who had just married a girl from Boston.”
“That was Clarence’s brother. They were all together. Then Clarence went off—someplace. To look for gold, or whatever. He is our brilliant friend.…”
Caroline saw that the letter-paper was the same that Elizabeth Cameron had confiscated. “The Five of Hearts,” she said.
Clara put down her pen; and looked at Caroline. “How do you know about that?”
“I saw the letter-paper, on the desk. Mrs. Cameron was very mysterious. She said I was not to mention the subject to Mr. Adams.”
“She’s right. You mustn’t. You see, once upon a time there were five of us, and we called ourselves the Hearts. This was in the early eighties, in Washington. There was Mr. Adams, Mr. King, Mr. Hay. There was also Mrs. Adams—now dead—and me. So there are only four Hearts left, of which three, I am happy to say, are here in this house, as I write to the fourth, in British Columbia.”
“But did you have—do you have a secret society? With passwords, and curious handshakes, like the Masons?” Colonel Sanford had been devoted to Masonry.
Clara laughed. “No, nothing like that. We were just five friends. Three brilliant men, and two wives, of whom one was brilliant and the other’s me.”
“How—nice that must have been.” Caroline was aware of the inadequacy of the word “nice” but then she was equally aware of the inadequacy of Clara’s explanation. “Mr. Adams never speaks of Mrs. Adams?”
“Never. But he does like it when people speak of the memorial to her, Saint-Gaudens’s statue in Rock Creek Cemetery. Have you seen it?”
“I’ve never been to Washington.”
“Well, we shall alter that soon, I hope.”
Brooks Adams entered the drawing room, talking. “A nation that faces two oceans must have colonies everywhere in order to protect itself.”
“Oh, dear,” murmured Clara Hay, folding the letter to King and placing it in an envelope. “Dear Brooks,” she added; and fled the room slowly.
“That is not just my view,” said Brooks, staring hard at Caroline. “It is Admiral Mahan’s. When was the last time you reread his The Influence of Sea Power upon History?”
“I’ve never actually read it once,” said Caroline, trying not to lose her balance and fall into those mad flinty eyes. “Or,” she added, finally detaching her gaze from his, “heard of it till now.”
“You must reread it at least once a year.” Brooks listened to no one but himself and Henry. “The logic is overpowering. Maintain a fleet in order to acquire colonies. Then, in turn, the colonies will provide you with new wealth in order to maintain an even larger fleet in order to acquire even more colonies. Theodore has finally learned this lesson. It took me years to bring him around. Now he understands that if the Anglo-Saxon race is to survive—and prevail—we must go to war.”
“With whom?”
“With anyone who tries to stop us from the acquisition of China. We shall need a different president, of course. McKinley has been superb. But now we need a military man, a dictator of sorts. I’m instructing the Democratic Party to support General Miles. He’s a war hero, after all. He’s commanded all our forces. He’s deeply conservative.”
“Will the Democratic Party do as you tell them?” Caroline was now convinced that Brooks Adams was more than a little mad.
“If they want to win, of course. Wouldn’t you vote for General Miles?”
“Women do not vote, Mr. Adams.”
“Thank God. But if you could?”
“I don’t know him.”
“You don’t know who?” Mrs. Cameron was brilliant in watered blue silk.
“Mr. Adams’s candidate for president, General Miles.”
“Nelson?” Mrs. Cameron’s eyebrows contracted.
“That’s right. He’s willing. We’re willing.”
“Then that’s that, I suppose.” Don Cameron and Henry Adams entered the room together, and Brooks abandoned the ladies for the real quarry. “Poor Brooks,” said Mrs. Cameron. “But then poor Nelson, too, if he’s got the bug.”
“Is Nelson, General Miles?”
“Yes. He’s also my brother-in-law. I can’t imagine him as president. But then I can’t really imagine anyone until, of course, they are. Del says you are leaving tomorrow.”
Caroline nodded. “I must talk to lawyers. In New York.”
“Our summer’s ending far too soon. You to New York, Mr. Hay to New Hampshire. Mr. Adams to Paris …”
“Mrs. Hay just told me who the Five of Hearts are.”
Mrs. Cameron smiled. “So now you know who they are. But did she tell you what they are?”
“What they are?” Caroline was puzzled. “But weren’t they just five friends, to begin with?”
“No. They were not just friends.” Mrs. Cameron was suddenly, annoyingly, mysterious. “It is what they are that most matters.” Then Mrs. Cameron turned
to greet two strange ladies, who had just arrived. Could it be, wondered Caroline, much intrigued, that these five—now four—elderly people are the gods of Olympus in disguise?
TWO
– 1 –
BLAISE DELACROIX Sanford had little appetite for food and less for drink, and so he had got into the habit of turning the lunch hour into a long walk up Fifth Avenue, starting at the Journal office and ending with a visit to the Hoffman House bar in Madison Square. Here he would drink a mug of beer and dine off the vast buffet, the only tariff, as it were, the expected twenty-five-cent tip to the waiter, which insured the solid clientele of New York’s most sumptuous bar against the hordes of hungry dangerous men who lived beneath the elevated railroad along Sixth Avenue a block away. Although there was an unwritten treaty that there be no traffic between wealthy Fifth and depraved Sixth Avenues, the idle stranger had been known to appear in the bar-rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that acropolis among hotels, and wolf down a complete meal from the celebrated “free lunch,” some sixty silver platters and chafing dishes containing everything from terrapin stew to a boiled egg.
Blaise, in his sturdy youth, preferred the boiled egg to any other food. He had been so spoiled by great cooking all his life in France that simplicity at table was a bleak joy he could now indulge in. As he stood at the bar, beer mug in hand, he looked about the glittering high-ceilinged rooms that ran the hotel’s length. Slender, fluted Corinthian columns supported an elaborately coffered ceiling. Every square inch of wall was vividly decorated: half-pilasters in elaborate stucco, painted Arcadian scenes in gilt frames, cut-crystal gas-lamps now electrified, and in the place of honor over the mahogany bar the famed nude woman, the notorious masterpiece of a Parisian unknown to the Parisian Blaise, one Adolphe William Bouguereau. The painting was still regarded by New York men as “hot stuff.” For Blaise it was simply quaint.
As Blaise studied the stout burghers who came and went, talking business, he was relieved to see none of his fellow journalists. Although he enjoyed their company, to a point, that point was often too swiftly reached whenever a bottle was produced. He had known a few heavy drinkers at Yale; had even been drunk himself; but he had never encountered anything quite like the newspapermen, as they called themselves. It seemed that the more talented they were, the more hopeless and helpless they were in the presence of a bottle.