Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “When does Del move into the White House?”

  “In the fall. For now, he’ll be working with Mr. Adee at the State Department while I’m gone.… He plans to marry the Sanford girl.”

  “The Hays have a dowsing rod for money.”

  “Del is also a Stone …”

  “A golden Stone. Well, are you pleased?”

  Hay said that he was; and he was. “They will marry in the fall. Helen, too, I think, to the Whitney boy …”

  “We’ve come a long way from Illinois.”

  “I wonder.” With age, Hay was more than ever conscious of what might have been; yet could not conceive of any ladder that might have been better than the one that he had climbed, almost without effort, almost to the top. “I don’t think I ever wanted to be president.” Hay addressed the coal in the grate.

  “Of course you did. Have you forgotten you?” Nico addressed Hay.

  “I must have.”

  “I haven’t. You were ambitious. You tried, twice, to go to Congress. Surely it was not for the company you’d find there.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” Hay answered Nico’s not-so-rhetorical question. “Anyway, I have pretty much forgotten me. Even so, it is odd that for one year I was next in succession to the President. So I did get pretty high up that particular ladder, which I may—or may not—have wanted to climb.”

  “McKinley’s health is excellent.” Nico laughed; and coughed.

  “Unlike mine. After this trip, I go to New Hampshire for the rest of the summer. We’ll all be there. Del and Caroline, too.” Hay indicated the lithograph on the wall. “Do you ever dream of him?”

  Nico nodded. “All the time. I dream of you, too. As you were then.”

  “What sort of dreams?”

  “The usual, for those of us at the end.” Nico’s fragile fingers pulled at his wiry beard. “Things have gone wrong. I can’t find important papers. I go through the pigeon-holes in his desk. I can’t read any of the handwriting, and the President is anxious, and the trouble—”

  “ ‘This big trouble.’ ” Hay nodded. “He never said ‘Civil War.’ Fact he never said war at all. Only this big trouble. This rebellion. How does he seem to you in the dreams?”

  “Sad. I want to help him, but can’t. It’s very frustrating.”

  “I don’t dream of him at all any more.”

  “You’re not so close to the end as I.”

  “Don’t say that! But what’s the end got to do with dreams? I dream most of the night, and nearly everyone I meet in my dreams is dead. But I never dream of him. I don’t know what that means.”

  Nico shrugged. “If he wants to pay you a call he will, I suppose.”

  Hay laughed. “Next time you see him tell him I’d like a visit.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Nico with Germanic gallows humor, “face to face. In Heaven, or wherever it is we politicians end up.”

  – 4 –

  BLAISE and Payne Whitney crossed the quadrangle, festooned with banners celebrating various class reunions. This was their third reunion, and Blaise had agreed to attend only because Caroline had said that Del Hay would be there, the first member of their class to have made his mark in the world. “You will be envious,” she had said, well pleased. They would all meet in New Haven, and then Del and she and Payne would take a trip on Oliver Payne’s enormous yacht; then Del and she would go on together to Sunapee in New Hampshire, where Mr. Hay was enjoying his ill-health in the bosom of the family. When Blaise had told the Chief about the reunion, the Chief had said, “Cultivate young Mr. Hay.”

  Connecticut’s high summer was tropical in its heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of roses and peonies and the whiskey that the graduates were drinking from flasks as they hurried from party to party. Blaise wondered why he had not enjoyed Yale more than he had. “You were in too much of a hurry to get started,” said Payne, breaking into his thoughts. “You should’ve stayed long enough to graduate instead …” Payne broke off not so much out of tact as for lack of sufficient polite vocabulary to describe Hearst, devil incarnate to his class.

  “Graduate or not, it’s made no difference at all.” Blaise was accurate. They were now at the edge of the pseudo-Gothic campus. Beyond a row of trees was Chapel Street and their hotel, the New Haven House. A streetcar gasped to a halt. Men in straw hats and women in wide-brimmed hats and flowery dresses got off, and made their way onto the campus. Del and a group of classmates were still at the hotel, where there would be, he had assured Blaise, champagne, “to celebrate my victory over the Boers and the English.”

  “Are you Mr. Hearst’s partner?” asked Payne, as they crossed the street, filled with carriages and electrical cars, all converging upon the college.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Blaise was never entirely sure just what his relationship to the Chief was. Principally, he was a moneylender. He would have preferred to be an investor, but Hearst allowed no one to buy any part of a Hearst newspaper. Also, casual as Hearst was about money, he always paid back his debts to Blaise, with interest. Meanwhile, Blaise learned the business; learned it better, in a sense, than Hearst himself, for Blaise saw the business as just that, while Hearst, more and more, regarded his newspapers as mere means to an all-important end: his own presidency in 1904, followed, no doubt, by a Napoleonic dictatorship and self-coronation.

  Although Blaise had no political ambition, he quite liked the power that went with the ownership of a newspaper. A publisher could make and break local, if not national, figures. Blaise had also watched, with a degree of fury, Caroline achieving what he ought to have done by now. She was taken very seriously in Washington because her newspaper was read and she no longer lost money. Inadvertently, he had driven her to be what he wanted to be. The irony of the situation was peculiarly unbearable. More than once, he had considered handing over her inheritance in exchange for the Tribune; yet such an exchange would have been an admission that she had, totally, won. Also, he was by no means certain that she would agree to the arrangement. In a few years, she would not only have her inheritance but the newspaper, too—not to mention the President’s secretary for a husband, while Blaise would still be in Hearst’s shadow, holding a purse that was less and less needed, as gold flowed from the Dakotas into Phoebe Hearst’s account. At the corner of the hotel, Blaise vowed that he would buy the Baltimore newspaper, jinx though it was supposed to be. He must start his life.

  “I suppose the best time of my life was here at Yale.” Payne at twenty-four was nostalgic. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything to top having rowed for Yale at Henley, even if I was a substitute oar.”

  “Oh, I’m sure something else will happen to you, during the next fifty years.”

  “I’m sure it will, too. But don’t you see? I’ll be old by then. I was young here.” This threnody was cut short by a sudden eruption of young men and women from the hotel lobby into the street. Blaise and Payne were shoved against a wall. To Blaise’s amazement, one of the young people was Caroline; in her right hand she held high an empty champagne glass, as if she were about to propose a toast.

  “Caroline!” Blaise shouted. But if she heard him, she paid no attention, as she hurried to join the others, now gathered in a circle on the sidewalk opposite an ice-cream vendor. To an idle observer, it looked as if a dozen young people had been possessed, like so many medieval zealots, by an overpowering passion if not for God for ice cream. But then, as Blaise and Payne hurried to join the party, the ice-cream vendor abandoned his livelihood and joined the circle, from whose center a loud cry sounded, chilling Blaise’s blood. He had never before heard Caroline so much as weep, much less cry out like a wounded animal.

  Blaise pushed to the crowd’s center, where he found Caroline on her knees, still holding the empty champagne glass carefully balanced, as if she were fearful of spilling its long-since-spilled contents. In front of her, on his back, was Del Hay, arms and legs flung wide, akimbo, like a comic doll.

 
Caroline touched Del’s face with her unencumbered hand; Del’s mouth was ajar, and blood streamed down his chin, while the gray eyes stared, intelligently, upward at his recent friends.

  “Stand back! Stand back!” A voice of authority was heard. But no one heeded it. “Caroline,” Blaise murmured in her ear; she did not look at him but she did give him her glass to hold. “He fell, from the third floor,” she said. “He was sitting in the open window, talking to us, and leaned back, and fell. Like that.” Blaise helped her up. The others had now made a passage for two policemen, who stared, dumbly, at the figure on the sidewalk. Then one of them squatted down and felt for the pulse in the right wrist; as he did, the hand flopped over, revealing a gold ring, without its jewel.

  “My ring,” said Caroline. Blaise had never seen her so marvellously collected; or so entirely mad, from shock. “The opal’s gone.” While the policeman examined Del for signs of life, Caroline got down on her hands and knees on the red-brick sidewalk and searched for the missing jewel. Amazed—and embarrassed—bystanders stood back, as she, politely, said, over and over again, “I’m sorry. Do you mind moving? His ring is broken, you see. The stone fell out.”

  “He’s dead,” said the policeman, who was now checking the neck for a pulse; then he shut the staring eyes.

  “Oh, good,” Caroline exclaimed, “I’ve found it!” She got to her feet, triumphantly. “Look,” she said to Blaise, as the policemen carried away Del’s body, and the crowd dispersed. “Here’s the fire opal—for luck, for some, they say. But,” she frowned at the stone in the palm of her hand, “it’s cracked in two.” Sunlight struck the stone in such a way that for a moment Blaise’s eyes were dazzled by what seemed to be firelight. “I wonder if it can be fixed.” Caroline’s hand shut over the stone. Blaise took one arm. Payne took the other.

  “I’m sure it can,” said Blaise. “Let’s go inside.”

  The lobby was dim and cool after the bright heat of the street. Just inside the door, Caroline became herself again. She turned to Payne. “How do we tell Mr. Hay?”

  “I don’t know.” Payne was now in shock. “Thank God Helen isn’t here.”

  “Let Mr. Hay find out on his own.” Blaise was practical. “There’s nothing we can do …”

  “That we’ve not done.” Caroline put the broken stone in her handbag. “I should have taken the warning seriously, that opals are bad luck.” Happily, they were joined by Marguerite, loudly wailing; and as Caroline comforted her maid, Blaise knew that she would be all right. On the other hand, he wondered, briefly, about the universe. Was it all right? or was the whole thing meaningless and random, and insensately cruel?

  NINE

  – 1 –

  WHY,” ASKED LIZZIE, “are autumn flowers darker than summer flowers, which are darker than spring flowers?”

  “Is that a question?” Caroline sat on the lawn, a shawl between her and the damp grass. “If it is, you’ve asked the wrong person. I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there, and not be encouraged in any way.”

  “The French love flowers.” Lizzie was assembling bouquets of zinnias and early chrysanthemums; she, too, sat on the lawn, a blanket beneath her, a wide-brimmed straw hat pushed to the back of her head: she looked like a handsome country boy.

  “But we like to discover them indoors, in vases. You’re not afraid of chrysanthemums?”

  “No. But then I’m not afraid of anything,” said the niece of General Sherman; and Caroline believed her.

  “I’m glad Marguerite’s not here. She would make a scene. Chrysanthemums are only for the dead, we believe. She believes, that is.”

  “She will come back?”

  Caroline nodded. “The end of this month, when I go back to Washington. Thank you for my holiday.”

  “Thank you. Without you, I would have gone mad in this house, with only my loved ones to keep me company.”

  “The Senator’s less restless than he was.” Caroline was neutral. Don Cameron was ageing visibly; and drinking invisibly. Although never exactly drunk in their presence, he was never entirely sober. Daughter Martha was at what promised to be the sort of awkward age that might well last a lifetime. She was large, ungainly, unhappy; an exact opposite to her beautiful and gallant mother. Lizzie, wanting to do her best for the girl, did her worst. They had nothing in common but blood, that least of bonds. It was Henry Adams who had arranged that they take this house at Beverly, on Massachusetts’s north shore, not far from Nahant, where the Cabot Lodges summered. Only this summer, the Lodges and Adamses had gone to Europe, leaving the Camerons to their own devices, with only the Brooks Adamses for company, at not-so-nearby Quincy.

  Earlier in the year, Don had cut back Lizzie’s allowance. She had barely been able to live in Paris on eight hundred dollars a month. When she had asked for a thousand, Don reduced the eight hundred; and then decided, capriciously, that they should all economize together, in the United States, where Martha must soon take her place in society, not to mention at school. Father, mother and daughter were now situated on the aptly named Pride’s Hill, surrounded by rented rural beauty, with only Caroline for company.

  After Del’s death, Caroline had, with some misgivings, joined the Hay family in New Hampshire. She would have preferred to spend the summer in Washington’s heat, working at the Tribune, or even return to Newport, Rhode Island, and Mrs. Delacroix, but Clara Hay had been insistent; and so Caroline had gone, to Sunapee, to act the part of the widow that she might have been.

  Hay had taken the death hard. “I see his face all the time now, always before me and always smiling.” Then he had read aloud to Caroline a curiously intimate and uncharacteristic letter from Henry Adams to Clara. For the first time, according to Clara, Adams alluded to the suicide of his wife: “I never did get up again, and never to this moment recovered the energy or interest to return into active life.” He had cautioned Clara not to allow Hay to break down as he had done, with the result, he had duly noted with devastating self-knowledge, that “I have got the habit of thinking that nothing is worthwhile! That sort of habit is catching, and I should not like to risk too close contact at a critical moment with a mind to be affected by it.” Hay had been both touched and amused by the Porcupine’s sharp clarity, charity.

  When the Camerons had invited Caroline to Beverly, Clara had insisted that she go. “They are so deeply interested in themselves that you won’t have any time to think of yourself.” Caroline accepted the invitation; then sent Marguerite back to France to see the inevitable ailing mother that every lady’s maid possessed, even to her hundredth year, as a constant memento non mori.

  The Camerons were indeed full of themselves, but as Caroline could never get enough of Lizzie, she was content to drift with them to summer’s end. Now the sea-wind was sharp with an autumnal chill. Soon the house, always sea-damp, would be shut up, and the Camerons would go—where? They were like so many flying Dutchmen, each on a separate track, and only briefly, as now, did their courses coincide.

  They were joined by Kiki, Lizzie’s small overweight poodle, who leapt onto Lizzie’s lap and began, methodically, to lick Lizzie’s firm chin.

  “Martha’s problem is that she is both lazy and vain. Which is worse?” Lizzie appeared to be addressing Kiki.

  “I find both qualities endearing, at least in friends. Lazy people never bother you, and vain ones don’t involve themselves in your life. I wish I had such a daughter,” Caroline added, surprising herself; Lizzie, too.

  “You really want children?”

  “I just said that I did, so I suppose I must.” But, curiously, Caroline could never imagine having given birth to a child by Del. Worse, she had never been able even to fantasize what it might be like to make love to him.

  “She wears my last year’s clothes.” Lizzie was neutral. “Don delights in her. She is more Cameron than Sherman. We are not so large. I think that she would like to marry that Jew. But I got her away in time.”

  Earlier in the
year, at Palermo, Lionel Rothschild, a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, had affixed himself to Martha. “The odd thing,” said Lizzie, “is that he is absolutely enchanting but …”

  “A Jew.” Caroline had lived through the Dreyfus case in a way that no one who was not French could understand; and Caroline was, for all practical purposes, a Frenchwoman, impersonating an American lady. Caroline had favored Dreyfus in the civil war that had broken out in the drawing rooms of Paris. She had skirmished on many an Aubusson, heard the ominous hiss of enemy epigrams, the thudding sound of falling tirades; yet she herself knew no Jews. “At least the Rothschilds are very rich.”

  “Worse!” Lizzie pushed her straw hat even farther back on her head. “The boy’s charming. But the race is accursed …”

  “You sound like Uncle Henry.”

  “Well, that is the way of our world, isn’t it? Anyway, she’s too young to marry …”

  “And I’m too old.” Caroline got the subject back to herself. Since Del’s death, she had become more than ever interested in herself; and more than ever puzzled what to do about this peculiar person. She was apt to live a long time. But she had no idea how she was to occupy her time. The thought of half a century to be lived through was more chilling to her than the thought of an eternity to be dead in.

  “No, you’re not too old.” Lizzie was direct. “But you’d better make your move soon. You don’t want to be the first—and last—woman publisher in the world or Washington or whatever, do you?”

  “I don’t … I really don’t know. I miss Del.”

  “That’s natural. You’ve had a shock. But some shocks are good—after the pain, of course. Have you ever noticed a tree after lightning’s struck it? The part that’s still alive is twice as alive as before and puts out more branches, leaves …”

  “Unlike a woman struck by lightning, who is decently buried.”