by Gore Vidal
Helen was now thinner; and altogether lovely to her father’s prejudiced eye. It was taken for granted that, in a year’s time, she would marry Payne Whitney, a handsome son of a handsome father, who was also deeply corrupt politically, and a master of Tammany. William C. Whitney was also a maker of money and, like Hay himself, a marrier of money, in the form of the large—why were heiresses always so large?—Flora Payne, who had died, leaving not so much a bereaved husband as a bereaved bachelor brother, Oliver Payne, the wealthiest of the lot. Then when Whitney remarried, Oliver Payne declared war on his one-time brother-in-law and with extraordinary and elaborate monetary bribes detached two of Whitney’s four children from their father: a daughter, Pauline, and a son, Harry Payne Whitney. Happily, the stormy brothers-in-law that once had been both approved of Helen, who behaved like a minister plenipotentiary as she made her way between the warring houses. William Whitney, once spoken of for president, was now being investigated by Governor Roosevelt because he owned streetcar lines in New York City. Whitney had been in Cleveland’s Cabinet; was an ally of Bryan; was, thought Hay, more than a match for Teddy, whose reforming tendencies, thus far, were more rhetorical than real.
“Colonel Payne is coming, isn’t he?” asked Helen, with more anxiety than her father felt warranted.
“He is doing me the honor, dearest infant. But then I hold open house for all Ohio, always. It is the Adams destiny in the fourth generation.”
Clara laughed. “One Stone and one Payne are hardly all Ohio.”
“But one Mark Hanna and one McKinley are one nation,” said Hay.
“One Republican Party, anyway. It seems,” said Adams, brightening, “that all presidents now come from Ohio. Garfield, Hayes, the Major. And they have quite obliterated the founders with their Western Reserve glory.”
“Dear Henry,” murmured Hay, “you do lay it on.”
The room filled up. Adams had invited twenty guests, the optimum number, he felt, for a dinner party. There was a possibility of general conversation, if someone other than the host proved to be brilliant. If no such paladin emerged, guests could speak across the table if they chose, an impossibility at a vast formal dinner where conversation, in Noah’s Ark twos, shifted to left and right with each course.
Hay noted several senators of the sort that Adams would never have invited were it not for Hay’s treaty: he appreciated the Porcupine’s sacrifice. Dowdily, Lord and Lady Pauncefote arrived, an equally dowdy daughter in tow.
Adams—the worst of guests; in fact, guest no longer of anyone except the Hays—was the best of hosts. Expertly, he moved his menagerie around the study like a sheepdog. But Del got past him to speak to his father. As they talked, Hay studied his own nose at the center of Del’s face; thus, nature would continue him through Del and, after Del, their plainly unlosable nose would be carried on into future generations, a reminder of one Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, master of all trades, as he once vaingloriously proclaimed to Adams, and a jack of none.
“The President says you’re to instruct me, Mr. Secretary.”
“You have no instructions, Consul-General, except the general one that I always give. What you have never said cannot be used against you.”
“I shall be silent to the Boers and silent to the English …”
“But write long reports to me and—to the President?” Hay was curious to know just what the Major expected of Del.
“I am to keep him informed, he said. Nothing more. You know how he is.”
“Not as well as you.” Del blushed at this. “You have his confidence.” Hay was aware of the sententious note in his voice. “Do not abuse it.” Why, Hay wondered, was he so expert at always striking the wrong note with Del when, with everyone else, he had always had—owed his career to, in fact—perfect pitch?
“Why should I?” The gentle Del was now angry; and Hay could not think how to placate him. He looked for a diversion, and one stood in the doorway, the last of the guests, wearing a splendid dark gold gown. Caroline was greeted by Adams, who kissed her hand, something he rarely did with nieces, but then she was more fine Paris lady than humble American niece. Hay had always thought her a splendid catch, unlike Clara, who was less than enthusiastic but could give no reason why Del ought not to marry someone so extraordinarily rare. Yet Clara still went on and on about foreignness as if she had never left Amasa Stone’s house in Cincinnati. It was Hay’s fear that Caroline would take the year of Del’s absence and find someone more grand. Hay did not have the usual American nouveau riche conviction that to be new and rich was a sign of God’s anointment and so to be preferred to quarterings and coronets and money that had been aged in land. He had come from nowhere, like his father-in-law, and he could, he always feared, revisit nowhere at a moment’s notice. Fortunes lost were less of a novelty at century’s end than fortunes won.
Caroline joined them. “You’re late,” said Del.
“I have been,” suddenly Caroline stammered, “at the office. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a woman to say?”
“Say or do?” asked Hay, charmed.
“Both. At first, the fact that I have an office was a novelty here. Now it is a source of—chagrin.” She used the French word.
“The other girls are just jealous,” said Del.
“Oh, the ‘other girls’ rather like the idea. It means that I am completely out of the way, and no competition. It’s the men who grow distressed.”
“We are the superfluous sex.” Del looked at her more than fondly. If he was as much in love as Hay suspected, he was to be envied; at least, by his father, whose fondness for Clara had never once resembled love. Of course, he and Clara had been older when they met; and the world much younger; and marriage a matter, mostly, of sets of silver and linen, and relatives to be shared and propitiated, and money.
“What kept you at this sinister office of yours?” Hay quite liked the idea of a young woman publishing a newspaper in sordid Market Place.
“You,” said Caroline; the hazel eyes looked directly into his own. Wildly, he imagined that he, not his son, was engaged to this splendid creature, who had, on her cheek, like a beauty mark, a small delicate charming smudge of printer’s ink. Hay had spent much of his own youth among printing presses.
“What about Father?” Del seemed anxious. Hay could only delight in the pale rose-pink cheek with its coquettish dot of blue-black ink.
“Wouldn’t you rather wait until after dinner?” Caroline started to back away, and stepped into Root, who was approaching them.
“I won’t be able to eat unless I know what horrors the press plans to rain down upon my head.” Hay could not make up his mind which he despised more, the loud ignorant venal Senate or the equally loud ignorant venal press. On balance, as he had been both a journalist and an editor, he despised the press more. He understood the journalist in a way that he could never understand the egomaniacal senator, who saw himself as the nation incarnate and mindless, and loud, loud, loud.
“Miss Sanford, don’t keep us in suspense. What has come over the wire?” Root looked at Hay. “The War Department has been cut off from the world ever since the last freeze. We could be invaded, and never know it.”
“The New York Sun would probably keep you informed,” said Caroline, producing from her handbag a press cutting. “This is tomorrow’s Sun. Governor Roosevelt has attacked your treaty.”
Hay took the cutting, and pretended to read, though he could see nothing without the pince-nez which rested on his chest. “I suppose,” he observed mildly, “that this is why Cabot did not come tonight.”
“I grow bored with Teddy,” said Root, baring his teeth. He took the cutting from Hay. “He wants the canal to be armed, by us.”
“If the Senate does not accept the treaty,” Hay’s words sounded to himself as if from a great distance, “I shall have no choice but to resign.”
“If you do,” said Root thoughtfully, “you will take Teddy down with you. The President will never forgive him.�
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“Then I shall have done two excellent things.” Hay remembered to smile. “Let us not,” he said, “discuss this with the others. Let them read of my shame tomorrow.”
He turned to Caroline. “You are publishing Teddy’s statement?”
“On page three …”
“Where it belongs,” said Root.
“I have an entire family murdered by a single ax, on page one,” said Caroline.
“Good girl!” Hay was amused at last. “First things first, always. Is Del’s nose like mine?”
“Yes. A perfect copy. I’m fascinated at the way physical features continue in families from generation to generation.” She echoed, nicely, his own perception.
“Your mother …”
“I know.”
But Hay was certain that Caroline did not know the rumors about the famous Princesse d’Agrigente.
After dinner, Caroline and Del and Helen Hay were bundled into the back of a sleigh for a long moonlight ride to the hamlet of Chevy Chase.
“Russia must be like this. Just like this!” Helen exclaimed, as they passed from town into open snowy country: a world without color, only black, white and shades of gray, and sudden flashes of diamond-glitter as moonlight struck ice. Clara had insisted, without subtlety, that Helen join them on their last ride, and Caroline had been as pleased as Del was displeased. Caroline got no joy from having her hand pressed beneath a sable rug, while a stolen kiss, anywhere, simply depressed her. She was not like other girls; she had accepted her uniqueness without distress; she was prepared, or so she thought, for everything, including the whole business of two anatomies entwined, and the prickling of fig-leaves or whatever, but she could not bear the step-by-careful-step American courtship. At least in Paris, marriages were business affairs, like the mergers of railroads.
Helen chattered incessantly of Payne. How he and his sister Pauline had chosen their bachelor uncle, Oliver, over their handsome—band-some, she repeated—father. She would make no judgment, while the other brother, Harry, and sister, Dorothy, chose to remain with their father. “You cannot know, Caroline, what it is like to live in a family with such, such Shakespearean emotions, emotions!”
“But I can imagine, Helen.” Actually, Caroline suspected that there had been something Jacobean about her own parents. Why did her father never mention the, always, “dark” Emma? Why had Blaise told her that Mrs. Delacroix’s eyes entirely vanished at the mention of Emma? Then, back of all, there was Aaron Burr, worth a dozen Whitneys, a gross of Paynes. Nevertheless, old Oliver Payne, who seemed to Caroline to be all malignancy, coming between father and children and buying two of them outright from their father because the father had remarried three years after the death of Oliver’s sister, Flora, deified by brother, it was said, as once he had deified or at least revelled in his handsome, handsome, as Helen would say, brother-in-law. “But then we always think our own families more original than anyone else’s.” Caroline thought that she had scored a point as their driver hurtled over a smooth untracked ivory field, close by a farmhouse where a single window filled space and time with a square of yellow light, the only color in their night world.
“Oh, we’re not original,” said Helen. “We are very dull, aren’t we, Del?”
“Some of us more than others.” Del was judicious. Under the robe his hand, a trifle damp, held Caroline’s.
“But your father’s life has been so interesting.” Caroline was now working herself up to the eventual embrace that their last evening together required. At times, she felt that she was involved in an elaborate peasant dance, which had not been entirely explained to her. Now the hand is held; now the heel is stamped; now the head turns; and then the kiss.
“I don’t think Father really believes he lived it,” said Helen, unexpectedly.
“Who does he think did?” Caroline stared at Helen’s profile, back-lit by snow-glare.
“I don’t think he thinks about that. He’s always in the present, you see; and there’s something always wrong, so he’s disturbed. I showed him a copy of that famous picture of him with Nicolay and President Lincoln. You know, sitting in front of the fireplace in the President’s office, and he said he had no memory when it was taken, but he was certain that he’d never once laid eyes on the skinny young man who called himself John Hay.”
“He remembered enough about the picture to say it was made in a studio and that the background was painted in later.” Del clutched hard Caroline’s hand. Should she clutch back?
“I hope I’ll never be so old.” Helen sounded as if she meant what she said. “I think he will resign, if the Senate rejects his treaty.”
“I don’t,” said Del; and Caroline withdrew her hand, and made a fist. “The President needs him. And what would he do if he went? Hatred of the Senate keeps him alive.”
In Chevy Chase, they stopped at an eighteenth-century tavern; and drank hot buttered rum in front of a great fire. At the next table what looked to be four local farmers played cards in silence. Helen, tactfully, excused herself.
“I wish you were coming to Pretoria.”
“So do I.” Caroline was almost sincere. After all, was there anyone nicer than Del? “But I’ve got the paper, and I’ve got Blaise to deal with.”
“Why does he take so hard a line with you? After all, you’ll inherit anyway in a few years.”
“Because my plan misfired. He’s more like me than I suspected. I thought he’d give way once I had something that he wanted. Now, of course, he’ll never give way.”
“Are you like that?”
“If tested, yes, I think so. Anyway, that is the way I am with him. Mr. Hearst is also very angry with me,” she added happily.
“When we’re married …”
The dance had started up again; a moment of panic; what was her next step? “Yes, Del?”
“You won’t go on, will you?”
“You’d rather I didn’t?”
“Do you think it’s the sort of thing a wife should do?”
“There are,” said Caroline, sagely, “wives and wives. Wouldn’t I be more useful to your father and the President with a paper than without?”
“Would you be more useful to me?”
“I don’t know.” Caroline had given the matter no thought. She realized that she was now several steps behind in the mating dance. “If you’re to be a diplomat and live abroad—well, no. But you say you’d rather be here after Pretoria—in politics!”
“Or business. I don’t know. Pretoria’s for the President. He wants someone there he can trust to tell him what’s really going on between the English and the Boers. He thinks Father is too …”
“Pro-British?”
Del laughed. “I can’t say that to a newspaper publisher, can I?”
“Fortunately, you don’t have to. The Tribune is already on record. Remember?”
“When some senators complained to the President that the Secretary of State was a product of the English school …?”
“The President said, ‘I thought he was a product of the school of Abraham Lincoln.’ Yes, we got that story first. And everyone’s copied us.”
“Was it true?”
Caroline laughed. “The gist of it, yes. I am in too deep at the Tribune, for now.”
“But if I were to buy it …?”
“Oh, I’d warn you against buying! I owe you that much.”
“You lose a great deal?”
“We make a small amount.” Actually, between the increase in the newsstand sales and the additional advertising revenue relentlessly extorted by Caroline from Mrs. Bingham’s friends, not to mention all of Apgardom, the paper was for the first time, if barely, in the black. Mr. Trimble was suitably awed; and Caroline suitably conceited. “I have something for you.” Caroline now chose to adapt the dance to her own measure. She removed a small package from her handbag; and noted that Del was astonished at this change in the dance’s familiar pattern: a german had become a waltz. He opened the package;
and took out a heavy gold ring in which was set a dark fire opal. “This was my father’s,” said Caroline, suddenly uneasy. Had she gone too far? “Opals bring bad luck but it brought him good luck and if it’s your birth-stone …”
“As it’s mine,” he said, and slipped on the ring, and kissed her, as indifferent to the card players as those solemn men were to the young, now engaged, couple. Caroline had been openly wearing her sapphire, without explanation, for a month. Marguerite had complained, as had the ancient Miss Faith Apgar, who now lived under the eaves of N Street, an official duenna, put in place by the Apgars. Without a formal engagement, no man’s ring could be worn. Now a woman’s ring was in place on a man’s finger; and the scandal, if anyone were to know, would echo from flashy Lafayette Square to stolid Scott Circle. Apparently, no girl had ever given a man a ring before.
But Del did not mind; quite the contrary. “Look!” He showed Helen the ring, as she sat down.
“Good Heavens! How beautiful! How daring! How unlucky!”
“Not for me, the opal,” said Del.
“My father wore it, and lived a long time; happily, I suppose.”
“He died in an accident,” Helen began.
“Rather a better end than most of his contemporaries made,” said Caroline. “He was old,” she added.
“As a poet, I am thrilled. Thrilled!” Helen had published one volume of verse quite as good, if not as popular, as her father’s youthful work. “As a sister, I think we should take a mutual vow of silence until you two are safely married.”
The three drank to that, and Caroline felt herself, suddenly, part of a most agreeable family, something she had never known at home and only caught glimpses of on visits to the houses of school friends. Was it possible, she wondered, as they took the sleigh back to the city, that she would not always be alone?
SEVEN
– 1 –
BLAISE stood in front of the four-story brownstone on Twenty-eighth Street, off Lexington Avenue. New-planted trees were in somewhat mangy leaf on either side of the chocolate-colored steps. The old Worth House was now a muddy hole in the ground. But Hearst, with his usual flair—or was it good luck?—had managed to buy the townhouse of that most fastidious and fashionable—if not the only fastidious and fashionable—of presidents, Chester Arthur.