Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “I could not,” said Hay, breath regained, “be more thrilled, as Helen used to say when we’d go inside the monkey house at the zoo.” Caroline watched father and son with considerable interest. What she had always taken to be Anglo-Saxon lack of intimacy between males she now decided was antipathy on the part of the famously charming and affable father toward the equally affable and, in time, no doubt, equally charming son who had not, after all, been trained in the art of storytelling by the admitted master himself, Abraham Lincoln, who could make, it was said, a mule with a broken leg laugh.

  “I thought you’d be.” Del was impassive; he looked not unlike photographs of President McKinley. If this were Paris, Caroline would put the odd and the even numbers together and understand precisely the nature of the appointment. But Del had his father’s eyes, mouth; and there was little chance, she decided, of Ohio, known as the mother of presidents, having produced, through unlikely presidential lust, a consul to Pretoria, which was—where? Australia? She had not liked the geography teacher at Allenswood.

  “South Africa could be a turbulent post,” said Adams; he, too, was gauging Hay’s response to his son’s abrupt elevation. “What is our policy, between the English and those Dutch lunatics?”

  “Extreme benign neutrality,” said Del, looking at his father. “In public, that is.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Hay shook his head and smiled broadly. “Neutral on England’s side. The great fun will be if there’s a war down there …”

  “Splendid, perhaps?” Adams smiled. “Little?”

  “Little-ish. Hardly splendid. The fun will be how our own Irish Catholic voters will respond. They are for anyone who’s against England, including these Dutchmen, these Boers, who are not only Protestant but refuse to allow the Catholics to practice their exciting rites. I predict Hibernian confusion hereabouts. I also predict that though it’s only noon, and I must greet, soberly and responsibly, the Diplomatic Corps, there is champagne no farther than the flight of a porcupine’s quill. We drink to Del!”

  Adams and Caroline cheered; Del’s forehead remained, as always, oddly pale, while his face turned to rose.

  After champagne had been ceremoniously drunk to the new consul general, Caroline announced, “I can’t think why I am celebrating. Now that I’m settled into N Street, Mr. Adams deserts me for Sicily, and Del for South Africa.”

  “You still have my wife and me,” said Hay. “We’re more than enough, I should say.”

  “And I don’t go till fall,” said Del. “The President still has some work for me to do, at the White House.” Again Caroline noted the father’s perplexed look.

  “Then I have a few months of cousinhood if not unclehood.” Caroline was pleased that Del should still be at hand. She must learn Washington at every level, and as quickly as possible. “One must be like Napoleon, Mlle. Souvestre always said, never without a plan.”

  “Even a woman must always have a plan?” Caroline had asked.

  “Especially a woman. We don’t often have much else. After all, they don’t teach us artillery.”

  Caroline had indeed worked out a plan of action. John Apgar Sanford could not believe it when she told him. He begged her to think twice; to do nothing; to let the law take its course. But she was convinced that she could bring Blaise around in a more startling and satisfying fashion; assuming, of course, that she had Napoleonic luck as well as cunning. But the key to her future was here in a strange tropical city, among strangers. She needed Del. She needed all the help that she could get. John—as a cousin, she now called him by his first name—was more than willing to help her; but he was, by nature, timid. He was also, at last, a widower. One night at Delmonico’s showy new restaurant, and with the witty Mrs. Fish at the next table, straining to hear every word (for once Caroline blessed Harry Lehr’s never-failing laughter), John had lost his timidity and proposed that once his term of mourning was at an end, she take his hand in marriage. Caroline’s eyes had filled with genuine tears. She had done her share of flirting in Paris and London, but aside from Del no one, as far as she could determine, had ever wanted to marry her; nor had she met anyone that she wanted to marry; hence, the comfortable image of herself alone, and in command—of her own life. Yet Caroline had been touched by John’s declaration; she would, she had said, have to think it over very carefully, for was not marriage the most important step in a young woman’s life? As she began to unfurl all the sentences that she had learned from Marguerite, the theater, novels, she started to laugh, while the tears continued to stream down her face.

  “What are you laughing at?” John had looked hurt.

  “Not you, dear John!” Mrs. Fish’s not unpiscine face was now costive with attention. “At myself, in the world, like this.”

  Adams insisted that Caroline remain behind, as father and son departed together for the State Department across the street and what would doubtless be a very serious conversation indeed. “That,” said Adams, when the Hays had gone, “was a bit of a shocker.”

  “Mr. Hay seemed unenthusiastic.”

  “You felt that?” Adams was curious. “What else did you feel?”

  “That the father expects the son to fail in life, and that the son …” She stopped.

  “The son … what?”

  “The son has tricked him.”

  Adams nodded. “I think you’re right. Of course, I know nothing of sons. Only daughters—or nieces, I should say. I can’t think what it is that goes on or does not go on between fathers and sons. Cabot Lodge’s son George is a poet. I would be proud, I suppose. Cabot is not.”

  “It is sad that you have no heir.”

  Adams glared at her, with wrath. Whether real or simulated, the effect was disconcerting. Then he gave his abrupt laugh. “It has been four generations since John Adams, my great-grandfather, wrote the constitution of the state of Massachusetts, and we entered the republic’s history by launching, in effect, the republic. It’s quite enough that Brooks and I now bring the Adamses to a close. We were born to sum up our ancestors and predict—if not design—the future for our, I suspect, humble descendants. I refer,” he smiled mischievously, “not to any illicit issue that we have but to the sons of our brother Charles Francis.”

  “I cannot imagine humility ever devouring the Adamses, even in the fifth generation.” Caroline enjoyed the old man. It was as if Paul Bourget had been wise as well as witty.

  Adams now came to his point. “I am aware of your connection with Aaron Burr, and I seem to remember you mentioning, last summer, that you had some of his papers.”

  “I do. Or I think I do. Anyway, I don’t have to share them with Blaise. They came to me from my mother. They are in leather cases. I’ve glanced at them, but that’s all. It seems that Grandfather Schuyler persuaded Burr to write some fragments of memoir. Grandfather worked in Burr’s law office, when Burr was very old. There is also a journal grandfather kept during the years that he knew Burr. There is also,” she frowned, “a journal, which I’ve never looked at, because my mother, I think it was she, wrote on the cover, ‘Burn.’ But it is still in its case, and no one has ever burned it—or probably read it! At least I haven’t and I don’t think my father ever did.”

  “Clearly, your bump of curiosity is less than ordinary. It is not like my family, where everyone has been writing down everything for a hundred years, and if anyone were to write ‘Burn,’ we would obey, with relief.” Adams placed two small, highly polished shoes on the fender to the fireplace. “Some time ago I wrote a book about your ancestor Burr …”

  “Perhaps my ancestor. Though I am absolutely certain that he was. He is romantic.”

  “I thought him, forgive me, a windbag.”

  Caroline was startled. “Compared to Jefferson!”

  Adams’s laugh was loud and genuine, no longer the stylized bark of approval. “Oh, you have me there! Do you read American history?”

  “Only to find out about Burr.”

  “American history is deeply enerva
ting. I can tell you that firsthand. I’ve spent my life reading and writing it. Enervating because there are no women in it.”

  “Perhaps we can change that.” Caroline thought of Mlle. Souvestre’s battles for women’s suffrage.

  “I hope you can. Anyway, I’ve done with our history. There’s no pattern to it, that I can see, and that’s all I ever cared about. I don’t care what happened. I want to know why it happened.”

  “I think, in my ignorance, I am the opposite. I’ve always thought that the only power was to know everything that has ever happened.”

  Adams gave her a sidelong glance. “Power? Is that what intrigues you?”

  “Well, yes. One doesn’t want to be a victim—because of not knowing.” Caroline thought of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling; thought of her father, whom she had known too little about; thought of the dark woman painted in the style of Winterhalter, who was completely unknown to her, and always referred to, with a kind of awe, as “dark.”

  “I think you must come join your uncle in Paris. I give graduate courses to girls, too; girls, mind you, not women.”

  Caroline smiled. “I shall enroll.” She rose to go. He stood; he was smaller than she. “I shall also let you read the Burr papers.”

  “I was going to ask you that. I destroy a good deal of what I write. Probably nowhere near enough. I have been considering adding my Burr manuscript to the ongoing bonfire.”

  “Why a windbag?” Caroline was curious. “After all, he never theorized, like the others.”

  “He was the founder of the Tammany Hall–style politics, and that is windbagging. But I am unfair. He made one prescient remark, which I like, when he said farewell to the Senate. ‘If the Constitution is to perish, its dying agonies will be seen on this floor.’ ”

  “Will it perish?”

  “All things do.” At the door Adams kissed her chastely on each cheek. She felt the prickling of his beard; smelled his cologne-water. “You must marry Del.”

  “And leave all this for Pretoria?”

  Adams laughed. “Except for my unique, avuncular presence, I suspect that Washington and Pretoria are much the same.”

  Del thought not. Caroline and Helen Hay dined with Del at Worm-ley’s, a small hotel with numerous dining rooms, both small and large, and, traditionally, the best food in Washington. Whenever the young Hays wanted to escape the medieval splendor of the joint house with Adams, they would cross Lafayette Square to the hotel at Fifteenth and H Streets, where the mulatto Mr. Wormley presided. As the senior Hays were committed that evening to the British embassy, Del and Helen invited Caroline to dinner, to celebrate Pretoria. They were joined in a small upstairs dining room by a lean young Westerner named James Burden Day. “He’s the assistant comptroller of the United States, for the next few hours,” said Del, as they took their seats in the low-ceilinged room with its view of the vast granite Treasury Building down the street.

  “What do you assist at controlling?” asked Caroline.

  “The currency, ma’am.” The voice was softly Western. “Such as it is.”

  “He’s a Democrat,” said Del, “and so he’s devoted to silver, sixteen to one.”

  “I,” said Helen Hay, large and comfortable-looking, like her mother, with dimples like Del, “am devoted to shad-roe, which is coming in now, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Helen had a habit of repeating phrases. The courtly black waiter, more family butler than mere restaurant worker, said that it was, it was, and proposed diamond terrapin, a house specialty, and, of course, canvasback duck, which would be served, Caroline knew, bloody and terrible. But she agreed to the menu. Del continued with the champagne, begun at Mr. Adams’s breakfast.

  “I should be giving the dinner,” said Caroline. “In the consul general’s honor.”

  “You must start to do things jointly.” Helen Hay even sounded like her mother, the amiable voice, which always spoke a command. In a well-run world, what splendid generals Clara and Helen Hay would have made. During the shad course, Caroline decided that she could do a lot worse than marry Del; on the other hand, she could imagine nothing worse than a season (unless it be a year) in Pretoria. Plainly, her interest in him was less than romantic. She had often wondered what it was that other girls meant when they said that they were “in love,” or deeply attracted or whatever adhesive verb a lady might politely use. Caroline found certain masculine types attractive, as types, quite apart from personality—the young man on her right, addressed by Del as Jim, was such a one. Del himself was too much, physically, created in his mother’s baroque mould. But had she not always been taught that fineness of character is the best that any woman could hope for in a mate? And Del’s was incomparably fine.

  Thinking of Del’s fineness, Caroline turned to the figure on her right; he was definitely not baroque, she decided. Gothic, in fact—slender, aspiring, lean; she tried to recall Henry Adams’s other adjectives in praise of Gothic; and failed. Besides, the young man’s hair was curly and its color was not gray stone but pale sand; yet the eyes were Chartres blue. Was—what was his name? there were three, of course, to indicate noble birth at the South: James Burden Day—was his character incomparably fine? She was tempted to ask him; but asked instead how a Democrat enjoyed working for a Republican administration. “I like it better than they do.” He smiled; the incisors were oddly canine; would he bite? she hoped. “But it’s just another job to them, and that’s all government is—in this country, anyway. Jobs. Mine should belong to a Republican, and it will in September when I go home.”

  “To do what?”

  “To come back here,” Del answered for his friend. “He’s running for Congress.”

  “Don’t tempt the gods.” Day looked worried; and Caroline found this appealing.

  “Then you’ll have an elected job. The best kind,” she said.

  “Oh, the worst! The worst!” Helen was adding yet more shad-roe to a Berninian figure that threatened to erupt into extravagant rococo. The arms in their puffed sleeves already looked like huge caterpillars, ready to burst and spread huge iridescent wings. “Every two years Mr. Day will have to go home and persuade the voters that he is still one of them, that he’ll get the government to give them things. It’s a tiring business. Father’s job is best.”

  “But the Secretary of State must please the President, mustn’t he? And if he doesn’t, he goes.” Caroline addressed the question not to Helen but to Del.

  Predictably, Helen answered. “Oh, it’s more complicated than that. The Major must also please the Secretary of State. If Father should leave—let’s say before an election—that would hurt the Major. Truly hurt the Major. So they must please each other.”

  “Both,” said Del, “must please the Senate. Father hates the Senate and everyone in it, including his friend Mr. Lodge.”

  “Even so,” Helen had miraculously consumed, in a minute, ten thousand shad’s eggs, “secretary of state is the best of all the jobs in this funny place.”

  “I’m sure,” said Caroline. She turned to Del. “I keep forgetting to ask your father. What does a secretary of state do?”

  Del laughed. Helen did not; she said, “He conducts all foreign relations …”

  Del said, through her, “Father says he has three jobs. One is to fight off foreign governments when they make claims against us. Two, to help American citizens in their claims against foreign governments, usually fraudulent; and, three, to provide jobs that don’t exist for the friends of senators who do.”

  “What senator got you Pretoria?” asked Day.

  Del looked contented. “That was the President. Every now and then he gets a job he can give away himself, and so Pretoria is mine.”

  “We hate the Boers.” Helen helped herself to a roast, whose weight on the serving-dish was such a strain on the liveried butler that his forearms trembled; but without compassion she hacked and shoved at the lamb. “We are for the British everywhere.”

  “Maybe you are, but we’re not back where I come from,” said
Day.

  “Actually, we’re neutral.” Del frowned at Helen. “That’s my job in South Africa, to be neutral.”

  “I won’t give you away.” Day grinned. “But Colonel Bryan’s positive your father and the Major have made all sorts of secret arrangements with the British.

  “Never!” Del seemed truly alarmed. “If we have any policy it’s to get the British out of the Caribbean, out of the Pacific …”

  “Out of Canada?” asked Caroline.

  “Well, why not? The Major ran as a believer in the eventual, mutual, more perfect, union between Canada and the United States, because we’re all of us English-speaking, you see …”

  “Except,” said Caroline, “for the millions who speak French.”

  “That’s right,” said Del, not listening. It was a characteristic of Washington, Caroline had noticed—or was it politics?—that no one ever listened to anyone who did not have at least access to power. But Day had heard her; and he murmured in her ear, “Back home we figure these fancy folks here are no better than foreigners.”

  “I should love to go back home with you. Where is it?”

  Day listed, very briefly, the pleasures of his Southwestern state. Then the latest rumors about Admiral Dewey were discussed. Would he be the Democratic choice for president? Day thought that Dewey could defeat Bryan at the convention. But could Dewey then defeat McKinley? He thought not. The country was, suddenly, marvellously prosperous. The war had given a great impetus to business. Expansion was a tonic; even the farmers—Day’s future constituency—were less desperate than usual. Finally, Helen shifted the subject to Newport, Rhode Island, and Day fell silent; and Caroline held her own, as the uses to which the summer should be put were analyzed. Apparently, Helen and her sister, Alice, planned to divide the Newport season between them. They would not go together: too many Hays, as it were, on the market. Would Caroline join one or the other of them? Caroline said that she might, if she were invited, but no one, she lied, had invited her. Actually Mrs. Jack Astor, after making Caroline promise never to play tennis with her husband, had invited her for July, and Caroline had said that everything would depend on the state of some unfinished business. Mrs. Jack hoped that her bridge was good. Colonel Jack no longer played bridge: “It’s wonderful to be inside when he’s outside. Almost as satisfying as divorce.” Mrs. Jack was definitely racy. She had always played tennis when her husband played bridge. Now that he had taken to the courts she had taken to the card-table. “We cannot be together,” she would say, as if quoting some biblical text.