Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  McLean’s hiccups returned, louder than the fire’s hissing and sputtering. “I didn’t expect to lose. It was close. The President’s on spongy ground back home. This empire business isn’t popular with the folks.”

  “But prosperity is, and the President’s clever. That war of his ended the bad times, and even the farmers are complaining less than usual, which means that McKinley will defeat Bryan again.” How proud, Caroline thought, Mlle. Souvestre would be: one of her girls dealing with a man on equal terms.

  McLean stared at Caroline with true wonder. “Somehow or other, I got the impression that you were only interested in the more revolting contents of our city’s morgue.”

  Caroline laughed. “I’m not entirely ghoulish. In fact, I don’t like the contents of the morgue at all. But I am curious as to how living people manage to end up on marble slabs, and I share my curiosity with our readers, few as they are.”

  “Mr. Hay—the father—must talk freely with you.”

  “I listen—freely—to everyone.” Caroline stood up. “We’ve been here too long. I am compromised. Shall I scream?”

  “I would be deeply flattered, and Mrs. McLean would be deeply proud—of me.” McLean got to his feet. They stood in front of the fire. Over the mantel hung a splendid fraudulent Rubens. Caroline had seen two exact copies of the same painting in New York. In dealing with innocent Americans, Old Europe’s forgers had grown careless. “You are interested in our political life, and I am surprised. Most young … most women are not. How did this happen?”

  “I went to a good school. We were taught to question everything. I do. Now then, Mr. McLean, which of us—the Enquirer or the Tribune—shall question the war?”

  “The war?” McLean blinked. “What war?”

  “The Filipino war of independence, what else? We seem to be losing it.”

  “Losing it? I guess you didn’t see this morning’s Associated Press wire. General Otis has captured the president of the so-called Philippines Congress, and has made secure all of central Luzon. The war, as you call it, is just about over.”

  “Aguinaldo is still free. But you know far more than I about all this.” Half-heartedly, Caroline turned herself into polite jeune fille. “I had only hoped that someone might explain just how the … the morgues in those islands got so filled up, and why.”

  McLean took her arm; he was suddenly paternal, and almost, for him, affectionate. “You know more than any young woman I’ve ever met. But you haven’t quite got the clue to all of this …”

  “Clue?”

  McLean nodded. They were at the door. “I’m not going to tell you, either. You’re too smart as it is.”

  The door was flung open, and there stood Mrs. John R. McLean, small of chin, blue of eyes, dark of skin. “You two are a scandal,” she observed mildly.

  “We are at that.” McLean was wry. “But then that’s our business. Now, young lady, a question.”

  “Before my very eyes,” said Mrs. McLean, plainly not disturbed.

  “And ears,” her husband added. He turned to Caroline. “Do you mean to sell out to Hearst?”

  “No. I also don’t mean, if I can help it, to sell out to my brother—half-brother—Blaise.”

  “If you can help it?” McLean watched her face closely, as though studying a clock which may or may not be keeping correct time.

  “Blaise has tied up my share of our inheritance. I may not get what is mine until 1905. It is possible that I shall run out of money before then.…” Caroline could see that Mrs. McLean was far more shocked by this talk of money than she would ever have been by the thought of a romantic interlude between husband and young woman. But McLean had seized the point.

  “If you ever need money for the Tribune,” he said, “come to me.”

  “Pop!” Mrs. McLean’s dark complexion seemed smeared with ash by firelight. The pale eyes protruded.

  “Mummie!” McLean responded in kind, their princely eminence abandoned for the homely lowland of the common hard pan. McLean turned to his wife and took her arm. “Don’t you see that the best thing in the world is for me to have this lovely child running the Tribune, with my money, than have her go sell it to that bastard …”

  “Pop!” The voice resounded like thunder.

  “I have heard the word,” said Caroline. “In Market Square,” she added, demurely.

  “… William Randolph Hearst.” McLean concluded; and led the two ladies back into the ballroom.

  Caroline was greeted by her new friends of the diplomatic corps. Jules Cambon was a lively cricket of a man, always pleased to see what he regarded as a countrywoman. He was also, he liked to say, an American bachelor: Madame Cambon had refused to join him in the Washington wilderness. Lord Pauncefote was a lawyer turned diplomat; he had been posted to Washington for ten years, and knew the intricacies of the capital even better, Hay liked to say, than the Secretary of State. Pauncefote’s face was wide, made even wider by fleecy side-whiskers, whose white was emphasized by the rich red claret color of the huge face. Pauncefote was also an expert on the legal intricacies governing international canals. He had been involved in the creation of the Suez Canal; now he was again at work, with Hay, drawing up the protocols which would govern the canal that the United States was planning to build across the Central American isthmus. Once Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected, America’s military power would be doubled, while, it was whispered in the Senate cloakroom, England’s would be halved.

  “We are hopeful,” said the old man to the group of government officials surrounding him. As Congress was not yet in session, there were few tribunes of the people present to celebrate the hero of Manila Bay. Pauncefote bowed to Caroline. “Miss Sanford. I am speaking shop, and will now desist.”

  “Don’t! Go on. It is my shop, too. The Tribune has already thundered its approval of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.”

  “Would that the Senate will do the same next month.” Actually, the Tribune editorial, the work of Trimble, had suggested that since the United States was building—and paying for—the canal, the United States must have the right to fortify the canal, which the treaty, out of deference to an 1850 convention between England and the United States, would deny. But just as Pauncefote began to express his government’s views of canals, Mrs. Admiral Dewey joined them, a sumptuous doll, Caroline decided, who had at last found herself a proper doll’s house. She explained to Caroline, “We couldn’t live in that tacky house in Rhode Island Avenue. So I’ve bought Beauvoir, a pretty place in Woodley Lane. Do you know it?”

  Caroline did not.

  “It’s like being in the country, but still in the town. I can’t wait to start fixing it up. For years I’ve owned quantities of the most lovely blue-and-white Delft tiles, and now I’m going to be able to use them.”

  “In the kitchen?”

  Mrs. Dewey’s huge doll’s eyes blinked like—a doll’s. “No. In the drawing room. Of course, the house is rather small, but then we don’t need anything large. There are no children now. Only my husband’s trophies. And what trophies! You saw the gold sword the President gave him at the Capitol?”

  “From a great distance.” The ceremony had been impressive, if somewhat bizarre. Never before had a reigning president sat in front of the portico while the center of attention was not himself, the sovereign, but a military man. McKinley had carried off his difficult assignment with his usual papal charm, and Caroline had accepted, gratefully, Hay’s characterization of the President as a medieval Italian prelate. While the Admiral was being celebrated by the vast crowd, the President had smiled beautifully at no one. Only once was he utilized. He was obliged to present a gold sword to the Admiral, with a few murmured words, no doubt in Church Latin.

  “The sword’s only gold plate, by the way. Too shocking! Congress said that it was to be solid gold, of the highest quality …”

  “And from the hardest pan?” Caroline could not resist.

  But Millie Dewey seemed not to know the phrase. �
��I would have thought solid gold would be the only thing suitable for the first admiral we’ve had in thirty years. The Admiral now outranks every military man in the country,” she added proudly. “Which is causing all sorts of problems, I can tell you. You see, General Miles,” and, indeed, Caroline could, literally, see that warrior, formidable in appearance with his equally formidable wife, Mary Sherman, the older sister of Lizzie Cameron, “well, General Miles may be chief of staff of the Army but he is only a lieutenant general, while my husband is admiral of the Navy, the first to hold that rank since Farragut, who only won a little victory in Mobile Bay during the War of Secession while my admiral gave us all Asia …”

  “Surely, not all. There is still China.”

  “We shall have that, too, he says, if the Russians and Japanese don’t get there first. Speaking of Russians, this is my Aunt Mamie.” They were joined by a small, fat woman with dyed red hair; quantities of huge jewels, set in massive gold, were attached to her ears, bosom, waist. She looked Byzantine; and she was. “Madame Bakhmetoff lives in St. Petersburg, far, far from home.”

  “About as far as one can get,” Caroline agreed. The ramifications of the hard-pan families never ceased to amaze her. One sister might be a farmer’s wife in Iowa; another Duchess of Devonshire.

  “The Russians aren’t civilized,” said Madame; then added, unexpectedly, “That’s why I feel at home there. We’re so much alike, Americans and Russians. Here’s mine.”

  Mamie’s Russian was as ugly as she. He wore a monocle; and presented to the world a gargoyle’s face, scarred deeply from smallpox. He kissed Caroline’s hand; and without thinking—or did he calculate?—slipped into French, presumably excluding Mamie and Millie. “You are an unexpectedly splendid apparition for this bleakest of capitals.” Bakhmetoff’s tone was agreeably flattering; and sharp.

  “How could you tell I am not a native?”

  “First, I know who you are …”

  “You have been to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc …”

  “No. But I admired your mother a century ago. You must come see us one day, at the edge of the Arctic Circle.”

  “I prefer the equator, for now.”

  Mrs. Dewey, in perfect if heavily accented French, said, “I understand every word. After all, my late husband and I were at the Austrian court for ages …”

  Del saved Caroline from further displays of international glamour. “They are Beales, and can never forget it.”

  “What’s a Beale? And why can such a thing never be forgotten?”

  “Their father. He was a general in the war, and then he struck it rich in California …”

  “To strike …” Caroline paused. “What a funny expression, ‘to strike it rich,’ like a blow of some kind against someone else.”

  “Well, many people never recover from those strikes.”

  “I think,” said Caroline, “my father might have been one.”

  “But he was very rich to start with.”

  “He made more, like Mr. McLean.”

  Lord Pauncefote stopped Del at the door to the ballroom. “We have had good news from South Africa,” he said. Caroline turned her back on them, so that the old man could tell whatever it was that he wanted Del, in turn, to repeat to his father. As Caroline surveyed the room, she saw the exquisite figure of the Cassini child, as elegantly dressed as a Paris lady of fashion, with a round chubby face, small features, and the bright eyes of a young fox. “They say,” said Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, “that she is neither daughter nor niece but,” the low excited voice dropped even lower and became more excited, “mistress.”

  “Oh, surely not!” Caroline was mildly shocked. She might have been even more shocked had she not known Mrs. Bingham altogether too well. Mrs. Bingham was Galatea to Caroline’s Pygmalion, monster to Caroline’s Baron Frankenstein. Ever since she had so off-handedly thrust Mrs. Bingham and her fabulous jewels, aristocratic lineage, magisterial presence onto the front page of the Tribune, she had received not only a number of advertisements for the Silversmith Dairies but a large number of invitations to Mrs. Bingham’s “sumptuous mansion,” where, at last, Caroline met all of her Apgar connections as well as much of pre-hard-pan Washington. The cave-dwellers, or cliff-dwellers as they were alternately known, seldom mingled in the new palaces of the West End and never in the world of official Washington. But Mrs. Bingham, and one of the Apgar ladies, were twin poles of Washington’s high if dowdy social world, to which Cousin John had assigned Caroline her place, a place she filled as little as possible and then only on condition that in return for the pleasures of her company she be given advertising for the Tribune. As a result of her relentlessness, she had increased the paper’s revenues by twelve percent, much to Trimble’s amazement. “It is a charge,” Caroline had explained, “for my appearance at their functions. They think I am rich, so they are willing to give me money. If they knew how poor I really am, I’d be cut dead.”

  As it was, every mother of a marriageable son wanted to entertain Caroline, with due pomp and gravity; the present mootness of Caroline’s heiressdom was either not known or not understood. The fact that her brother Blaise was never to be seen had been noted by all, and the Apgars, rehearsed by Cousin John, spoke sadly of an estrangement. Meanwhile, Caroline’s proprietorship of what was, after all, the cave-dweller’s favorite unread newspaper was considered a charming folly due to her European upbringing.

  Certainly, Mrs. Bingham revelled in the fact. Until Caroline’s highly creative account of the Connecticut Avenue robbery, Mrs. Bingham had led a decorous life, a monarch of much of what she surveyed, including the ancient dairyman, her husband. But once identified as a sort of Mrs. Astor disguised as a Washington milkmaid, there was now no stopping her. She courted the press. Every visiting celebrity was summoned to her mansion; and those few who obeyed her summons were then written up at length in the Star, Post and Tribune. All in all, Caroline quite enjoyed her monster. For one thing, Mrs. Bingham was a treasury of scandal. There was no one that she did not know something discreditable about; best of all, there was no one whom she would not slander, joyously, to her inventrix, Caroline, who now stared at the lean, yellow-faced woman of sixty, whose moustache was like fluff of the sort that Marguerite constantly found under Caroline’s bed, and could not persuade the African either to acknowledge or identify, much less remove.

  “How can you tell? I mean that she’s his mistress?”

  The deep voice sounded like a cello when a bass chord is, mournfully, struck. “My butler’s sister is upstairs maid at the Russian embassy. She says, late at night, there are footsteps from his room to hers.”

  “A heavy Cossack tread?”

  “Booted and spurred!” roared Mrs. Bingham, delighted at her own wit. Caroline suspected her of constant improvisation. Mention Queen Victoria, and she would promptly give lurid details of the Queen’s secret marriage to a Scots servant, in a cottage at Balmoral; and mourn the fact that the Queen, once a symbol of fertility for all the world, was now so many decades past the ability to conceive: “Otherwise, there would be Morganatic Claimants to the Throne!” This said in a hushed voice, awed by the grandeur of her subject.

  “You must ‘do’ society for me, Mrs. Bingham. You know everything.”

  “But I say nothing,” said Mrs. Bingham, who said everything but not to everyone. “Another proof that she is his mistress,” she began, true artist, to ornament her invention, “is the fact that he insists she act as his official hostess, and attend state dinners. One doesn’t do that with a daughter …”

  “In Russia, always,” Caroline smoothly invented. “The wives are left home in their, ah, dachas, and the oldest daughter always escorts her father to court.”

  “Curious, I have never heard that before.” Mrs. Bingham gave Caroline a suspicious look. Unlike most liars she was seldom taken in by the lies of others. “I’ll ask Mamie Bakhmetoff,” she said, ominously.

  “Oh, she will lie. To save face. They all do.” With that, Del took Car
oline’s arm, but before they could escape, Mrs. Bingham struck hard.

  “Mr. Hay can tell you all about Mlle. Cassini. He sends her flowers.”

  Del coughed nervously. In Washington, when a man sent flowers to an unmarried girl, it meant that he was courting her. “I didn’t know,” said Caroline.

  “I’m sorry for her, that’s all. Poor girl.” As they crossed the room, he bowed to the Cassini girl, and whispered to Caroline, “Father wants me to keep an eye on the Russians.”

  In the carriage, en route to Caroline’s house, Del told her that, contrary to what Pauncefote had told him, things were not going well for the British in Africa. “The Boers are on the warpath, which is good for us.”

  “Aren’t we—your father, anyway—pro-British?”

  “Of course. But we’ve got the treaties to think about. When England’s riding high, they oppose us everywhere from habit. When things go badly for the English, they are very agreeable. This means they’ll accept Father’s treaty, without fuss.”

  “But will the Senate?”

  “Why not? Lodge is there, and the President’s popular.”

  “But next year’s election …”

  Del was staring out the window at the Treasury, like a granite mountain in the rain. “There’s talk in New York, of Blaise and an older woman, a Frenchwoman.”

  “Madame de Bieville? Yes. I know her. She has great charm. They are old friends.”

  “But isn’t she married?”

  “Not seriously,” said Caroline. “Anyway, she is now a widow.” Caroline was obliged, always, to conduct herself with rather more caution than was natural to her whenever this sort of subject came up. Did Americans really believe what they said or were they simply fearful of that ominous majority whose ignorance and energy set the national tone? They certainly never ceased to pretend in public that marriage was not only sacred but the stately terminus to romance. Although she constantly heard, and not just from Mrs. Bingham, of this or that bad marriage, adultery was seldom alluded to within the pale of respectability.