Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  – 2 –

  THE BRONZE BUSTS of Henry James and William Dean Howells stared off into space, as did the earthly head of Henry Adams beside the fire. It was John Hay’s turn to be host to his friend and neighbor, and from his armchair he surveyed the three heads with a pleasure he was quick to identify to himself as elderly. Each belonged to a friend. If nothing else, he had done very well when it came to friends. Although he was not the man-of-letters that James or Howells was, or the historian that Adams was, he felt extended through them beyond his natural talents. Had he wanted to turn round in his chair, he could have stared into Lincoln’s bronze face, surprisingly life-like for a life-mask. But Hay seldom looked at the face that he had once known far better than his own. During the years that he and Nicolay were writing their enormous history of the President, Hay was amazed to find that he had lost all firsthand memory of Lincoln. The million words that they had written had had the effect of erasing Hay’s own memory. Nowadays, when asked about the President, he could only remember what they had written, so dully he knew, of that odd astounding man. Hay and Adams often discussed whether or not a memoir might not have the same effect—a gradual erasing of oneself, bit by bit, with words. Adams thought that this would be ideal; Hay did not. He liked his own past, as symbolized by the two busts, one life-mask. He had always suspected, even in moods melancholy and hypochondriacal, that he would end his days in comfort, with abundant memories, seated at his fireside on a February night in the last year of the nineteenth century, in the company of a friend not yet bust-ed. Of course, he had not counted on being secretary of state at the end of the road, but he did not any longer object to the dull grind, which he had turned over to Adee, or to the battles with the Senate, which he allowed Senator Lodge to conduct for him, with considerable help from Lodge’s old Harvard professor Henry Adams.

  Now the old friends waited for Mrs. Hay, and the dinner guests and “the shrimps,” as Hay addressed his children: two out of four were in the house. Alice and Helen were deeply involved in the capital’s social life. Clarence was away at school. Del was in New York, perhaps studying law. Hay had always found it easy to talk to his own father; yet found it impossible to talk to his oldest son. Some bond of sympathy had, simply, not developed between them. But then Hay had been a country boy like Lincoln, with nothing but his wits—and a connection or two; while Del, like Lincoln’s son Robert, was born to wealth. Lincoln father and Lincoln son had not got on well, either.

  “Will Del marry the Sanford girl?” Adams often strayed into Hay’s mind.

  “I was just thinking of Del, as you must have known, with those other-worldly Adams psychic powers. I don’t know. He doesn’t confide in me. I know he sees her in New York, where she’s set up for the winter.”

  “She’s uncommonly clever,” said Adams. “Of all the young girls I know …”

  “The brigade of girls …”

  “You make me sound like Tiberius. But of the lot, she is the only one I can’t work out.”

  “Well, she’s not like an American girl. That’s one reason.” Hay had found Caroline disturbingly direct in small matters and unfathomable when it came to those things that must be taken seriously, like marriage. There was also the problem, even mystery, of her father’s will. “I think she’s made a mistake, contesting the will. After all, when she’s twenty-five, or whatever, she’ll inherit. So why fuss?”

  “Because at her age five years seems forever. I hope Del brings her into the family. I should like her for a niece.”

  “He threatens to bring her here, for a visit. But he hasn’t.”

  The butler announced, “Senator Lodge, sir.” Both Hay and Adams rose as the handsome, were it not for a pair of cavernous nostrils that always made Hay think, idly, of a bumblebee, patrician-politician glided into the room. “Mrs. Hay has got off with Nannie. Neither one can bear to hear me say another word about the treaty.”

  “Well, we want to hear nothing else.” Hay did his best to be genial; and, as always, succeeded. The problem with Henry Cabot Lodge—aside from the disagreeable fact that he looked young enough to be Hay’s son—was his serene conviction that he alone knew what the United States ought to do in foreign affairs, and from his high Republican Senate seat he drove the Administration like some reluctant ox, toward the annexation of, if possible, the entire world.

  Worse, at a bureaucratic level, Lodge meddled so much with the State Department that even the patient Adee now found unbearable the Senator’s constant demands for consulates, to reward right-thinking imperialist friends and allies. But the President wanted peace at any price with the Senate, and the price in Lodge’s case was patronage. In exchange, however, Lodge had taken charge of getting the Administration’s treaty with Spain through the Senate, a surprisingly difficult task because of the Constitution’s unwise stipulation that no treaty could be enacted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate, an august body filled with men of the most boundless conceit, as Adams had so neatly portrayed in an anonymous, highly satiric novel which even now no one, except the remaining Hearts, knew for certain that he had written.

  Apparently, the Senators were, once again, running true to form, according to Lodge, whose British accent offended Hay’s ears. But then Hay still spoke near-Indiana, and deeply loved England, while Lodge spoke like an Englishman, and hated England. La-di-da Lodge was one of the less unkind epithets for Massachusetts’s junior senator, who was now denouncing his state’s senior senator, the noble if misguided anti-imperialist George F. Hoar, who had told the nation that “no nation was ever created good enough to own another,” a sly paraphrase of Lincoln. “Theodore writes me almost every day.” Lodge stood, back to the fire, rocking from side to side on short legs. “He says that Hoar and the rest are little better than traitors.”

  Adams sighed. “I would think that Theodore would have quite enough to do up in Albany without worrying about the Senate.”

  “Well, he does think of the war as his war.” Lodge smiled at Hay. “His splendid little war, as you put it. Now he wants to make sure we keep the Philippines.”

  “So do we all,” said Hay. But this was not strictly true. Hay and Adams had thought, from the beginning, that a coaling station for the American fleet would be sufficient recompense for the splendors and miseries of the small war. This was also the view of several of the American commissioners at the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, one commissioner—a Delaware senator—had written Hay a curiously eloquent telegram to say that as the United States had fought Spain in order to free Spain’s colonies from tyranny, the United States had no right to take Spain’s place as tyrant, no matter how benign. We must, he said, stick to our word.

  Hay had put the case to the President, but St. Louis, as it were, had inspired McKinley with a sense of mission. After ten days in the West, McKinley returned to Washington, convinced that it was the will of the American people, and probably God, too, that the United States annex the entire Philippine archipelago. He instructed the commissioners to that effect; he also offered Spain twenty million dollars; and the Spanish agreed. Meanwhile, something called the Anti-Imperialist League was breathing fire, and an odd mixture they were, ranging from the last Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, to the millionaire Republican Andrew Carnegie, from Henry Adams’s own brother, Charles Francis, a one-time president of the Union Pacific Railroad, to Mark Twain.

  “I wish, Cabot, I could be as certain as you are …” said Adams.

  “About everything?” Lodge was amused and slightly, thought Hay, patronizing. Hay had observed the phenomenon before: when the pupil has surpassed—or thinks he has—his teacher.

  “No. I have never wished for senatorial certitude.” Adams was dry. “That is beyond me. I’m always uncertain.”

  “You were certainly certain that the Spanish must be driven out of Cuba,” began Lodge; to be stopped by Adams, who suddenly raised a pale small poodle-like paw.

  “That was different. The only important contributio
n that my family ever made to the United States was the invention of the doctrine that is known by President Monroe’s name. The Western Hemisphere must be free of European influence, and the Cuba Libre movement was the last act—the completion—of my grandfather’s doctrine. Now, in the large sense, Spain is gone from our hemisphere, along with the French and for all intents and purposes, the British. The Caribbean is ours forever. But for us to end up with vast holdings in the Pacific, that strikes me as potentially dangerous, as more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve sailed the South Seas …”

  “Old gold,” murmured Hay, the phrase Adams had used to describe the entrancing native women of Polynesia.

  Adams affected not to hear. “Now you want us to take over a hostile population, made up of worthless Malay types, and Roman Catholics, as well. I thought you had enough of those in Boston without taking on another ten million or so.”

  Lodge was airy. “Well, unlike the ones in Boston, we won’t let your worthless Malays vote, at least not in Massachusetts elections. And they’re not hostile, at least not the ones who matter, the people of property, who want us to stay.”

  “Those are the tame cats, the ones who liked the Spanish. But all the rest follow this young man Aguinaldo, and they want independence.” Adams tugged at his beard, which was a white version of Lodge’s beard as Hay’s beard was a grizzled compromise. Hay was touched that a relatively young politician should want to emulate his elders when modern politics now required clean-shaven men like McKinley and Hanna, or the moustachioed Roosevelt. What did beards imply? he wondered. The early Roman emperors, like the early presidents, were clean-shaven; then decadence—and beards; then Christianity and the clean-shaven Constantine. Was McKinley to be a religious leader, as well as imperial consolidator?

  Hay gave the latest news of Emilio Aguinaldo, whose troops had fought with Admiral Dewey on condition that once the Spaniards were gone there would be an independent Philippine—or Vishayan—republic. But McKinley’s change of heart had put an end to that dream. Now Aguinaldo’s troops—mostly from the Tagal tribe—had occupied the Spanish forts. Aguinaldo had also occupied Iloilo, the capital of Panay province. Thus far, neither side had been eager to begin hostilities. “But this can’t last much longer,” said Hay, completing his tour of the archipelago’s horizon as viewed from the State Department. Elsewhere in Mullett’s wedding cake of a building, Hay knew that the War Department was contemplating games that he knew nothing of; and did not want to know about.

  “Obviously some sort of incident now would get us our two-thirds vote.” Lodge sat in the armchair opposite Adams and adopted the same meditative pose as his old professor—and editor. After Lodge had graduated from Harvard, Adams had hired his former student to be an assistant editor of the North American Review, with one standing instruction: when editing historians, strike out all superfluous words, particularly adjectives. Hay had always envied Adams’s continence in the matter of English prose. Adams wrote like a Roman, with an urgent war to report; Hay’s prose simply idled, waiting for a joke to turn up.

  “We had—you had—the two-thirds vote two weeks ago.” Adams scowled. “Then the whole thing was frittered away. How I wish Don Cameron was still in the Senate …”

  “And La Dona across the square,” Hay added. Without Lizzie Cameron, Adams was incomplete. But the Camerons were wintering in Paris; and Adams was more than usually irritable and restless in Washington.

  For once, Lodge did not make an excuse or, rather, more characteristically, blame someone else for the erosion of support in a Senate where the Republicans not only had a majority but he himself was the guiding spirit of the Foreign Affairs Committee. “I’ve never seen so much pressure brought to bear, never heard senators give so many positively crazed reasons for not doing the obvious. Anyway, we now have help from Mr. Bryan. Or Colonel Bryan, as he calls himself …”

  “And who does not, who can?” said Hay, himself a major in the Civil War, who had never fought because he was Lincoln’s secretary. Then, the war won without his participation, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel; hence, always and forever, he was Colonel Hay just as the President was always Major McKinley. But the President had actually seen action under his mentor, Ohio’s politician-general Rutherford B. Hayes, whose own mentor had been yet another politician-general, James Garfield, and Hay’s dear friend, as well. When General Garfield, the golden, had been elected president, he had offered Colonel Hay the position of private secretary; but Hay had gently declined. He could not be in middle age what he had been in youth. Now, of course, all the political generals from Grant to Garfield were dead; the colonels were on the shelf; and the majors had come into their own. After them, no more military-titled politicians. Yet every American war had bred at least one president. Who, Hay wondered, would the splendid little war—oh, fatuous phrase!—bring forth? Adams favored General Miles, the brother-in-law of his beloved Lizzie Cameron. Lodge had already declared that Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila was equal to Nelson’s at Aboukir. But of course Lodge would support McKinley, who would be reelected; and so there would be no splendid little war-hero president in the foreseeable future.

  Hay caught himself daydreaming; and not listening. In his youth, he could do both. What was Lodge talking about? “He holds court in the Marble Room back of the Senate. They come in, one by one, to get their instructions. He’s like the pope.” Bryan. Colonel Bryan was in town to persuade the Democratic senators to support the treaty on patriotic grounds; then, the treaty passed, they would support a separate resolution to the effect that, in due course, the Philippines would be given their independence. Hay decided that Bryan was probably clever. If imperialism proved to be as popular as McKinley sensed it was in St. Louis, Bryan could enter the next presidential race as one who had joined the army and then favored the treaty and temporary annexation; but if imperialism, for some reason, should not be popular, he was on record as favoring the independence of the Philippines while the Major was now firmly for annexation. “He’s also like the pope in that he is not a gentleman.” Lodge could not resist the double thrust. Hay, who had not begun life as a gentleman by Lodge’s standards, had become one; so much so, in fact, that he, unlike Lodge, never saw any need to use the dangerous word in any context. Politicians, no matter how patrician their birth, were a vulgar infantile lot. “We should be grateful to him, of course, wild man that he is. Because if the treaty passes …”

  “No ‘if,’ please.” Hay refused to envisage the treaty’s failure.

  “It’s going to be close, Mr. Hay, very close. But Bryan’s changing votes. I’m changing votes, I think, and …”

  “And Mark Hanna’s buying one or two,” said Adams. “Such is the way of our world.”

  “A very good thing, too. Corruption in a good cause is a good thing. So who cares that a senator’s been bought in the process?” Hay got to his feet, with some difficulty. Although the mortal ailment was, temporarily, in recession, he had lately developed an exciting new set of pains, both arthritic and sciatic; as a result, what felt like jolts of electric energy kept assaulting his nerve ends while odd tendons twitched quite on their own and joints, for no reason, would suddenly lock. “I’ve come around, Cabot. At first I thought it not only wrong but inconvenient to try to govern so many Catholic Malays. But time’s running out on us. The Europeans are partitioning China. The Russians are in Port Arthur. The Germans are in Shantung …”

  “I want us in Shanghai.” Lodge’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of yet more Asiatic victories.

  “Well, I want us in Siberia,” said Adams. “We have no future in the Pacific, but when Russia breaks up, as it must, there’s our opportunity. Who controls the Siberian land-mass is the master of Europe and Asia.”

  Happily, Hay was spared an Adams meditation on the world’s ever-shifting balance of power by the arrival of ladies. Hay greeted Mrs. Lodge, known as Sister Anne or Nannie, at the door, aware that her suspicious eye was on her husband. She did not entirely approve of L
odge when he was too much the senator; husband gave wife an innocent look. “Henry and I talk and talk about the treaty, while Cabot, who knows everything, just sits and listens, quiet as pussy,” said Hay, maintaining peace in the Lodge family. “In fact, cat’s got his tongue tonight.”

  “There is no cat,” said Nannie Lodge, “large enough to get Cabot’s silver tongue.”

  Meanwhile, Clara Hay and their two daughters quite filled the study, and Adams began to shine, as he always did when young women were present, while Lodge grew ever more courtly, and Sister Anne witty. Three of five Hearts in the same room: Hay was content. But contentment ceased in the midst of the bombe-glacée, Clara Hay’s ongoing masterpiece. Although cooks came and went over the years, Clara, who could not, as they say, boil water, nevertheless was able to pass on the secret receipts to a number of all-important dishes of which the bombe-glacée was the quivering, delicate, mocha-flavored, creamy, filigree-sugared piece, as Hay called it, of least resistance.

  Hay’s fork was posed for a stab at this perfection when the butler appeared in the doorway to announce, “The President, sir. He would like you to go over to the mansion.”

  The dining room was silent. Lodge’s dark eyes shone; and the bumblebee nose looked as if it scented pollen. Adams gave his old friend a mournful look. Clara was firm. “He can wait until we’ve finished dinner.”

  Hay had discovered a new and almost painless way of getting out of a chair; he used his relatively strong right arm rather than his relatively bad knees to get to his feet. Now he pushed hard against the arm of his chair; and was, almost painlessly, upright. “Henry, you be host. I’ll be back—when I’m back.”

  “I can’t think,” said Clara, “what the Major is doing up at this hour. Over there, they go to bed with the chickens.”