Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  Like a stagecoach pursued by rustlers, the presidential carriage came hurtling down Massachusetts Avenue, horses steaming in the cold. Before the guards in front of the church could open the carriage doors, the President sprang out, wearing a silk top hat. Then Edith Roosevelt, more majestically, descended, followed by Alice, got up like a Gainsborough painting in dark blue velvet, with a dashing black hat. Hay stood, watch held before him like the host.

  “We are exactly on time,” the President lied.

  “Of course. Of course.”

  Church ushers appeared in the doorway. Quickly, their Republican majesties drew themselves up, and then, with hieratic—that is, to Hay’s eyes, waddling—gait, they proceeded down the aisle to their pew in the front row.

  The moment that the Roosevelts were seated, the wedding march began, and Hay, curiously weak of limb yet free of pain, went to collect the terrified Helen, magnificent in white satin and tulle but no—she wanted to be original—lace; then, in due course, under official Washington’s eyes, Hay delivered his daughter over to the tall, handsome Payne Whitney, while Clara wept softly in the background, and Henry Adams, surrounded by Asia, looked incredibly old and small.

  The wedding breakfast greatly appealed to Hay’s sense of drama, never entirely dormant. He had invited seventy-five guests, which meant overflow from dining room into his study, where, in the bay window, he had set a table at which, side by side, he had placed William C. Whitney and Oliver Payne. As the President and Mrs. Roosevelt were also at the round table, good behavior was assured. Hay had also added the Whitelaw Reids, whose never allayed ambition for social distinction would be temporarily sated. The President was at Clara’s right; and Mrs. Roosevelt at Hay’s right.

  There was no need to fear awkward silences. Theodore, very much aware of the two men’s enmity, delivered himself of a lecture on the trusts; an occasional glance at the two money princes acted as a reminder that today, at least, and in more ways than one, they were in the same boat. The handsome Whitney was, as always, calm, but Payne, a choleric man, could barely speak for rage.

  The situation was too curious for words, thought Hay, happy that Theodore’s flow of talk could not be deterred by mere curiosity of situation. For once, Edith did not give her husband a warning look, followed by a small cough, followed—if that did not staunch the flow—by “Oh, Thee!” in a stern voice. She, too, was awed by the hatred of the two men, who spoke, politely but briefly, to each other whenever the President paused for breath. The Whitelaw Reids, for once at rest in the still circle of perfect social preeminence, glowed benignly, as course after course was served, and the round table in the bay window became luminous with bright winter sunlight, an Arthurian table at the Arctic, thought Hay.

  “Helen loved your gifts, Mr. Whitney.” Clara made motherly sounds. “They are so very grand, the rings, the brooch.”

  “I’m glad.” Whitney was Chesterfieldian in his politeness. He had had a great deal to contend with lately. He had given up his political career. He was under fire for his various business connections. He had not been invited to his son’s bachelor dinner, held at the Arlington Hotel by Colonel Payne, the usurper. Yet he acted as if nothing in his world was amiss. On the other hand, Payne was incoherent with mysterious rage. Hay wondered why. The fact that after the death of Oliver Payne’s sister Whitney had remarried could not have been sufficient reason for so long-lasting a vendetta—long-lasting and infinitely resourceful. There was something positively Luciferian in the relentless way that Payne had gone about buying two of Whitney’s children, one of whom was now Hay’s son-in-law. Perhaps childlessness was at the root of it all. Envying Whitney’s charm and fecundity, Payne robbed him of two children; and tried to ruin him financially as well. But though Oliver Payne was the richer of the two, Whitney was the cleverer; and not made for failure.

  Edith Roosevelt made the error of asking Oliver Payne what he had given the young couple. “Not much,” he said, eyes on his plate, where a quail in aspic seemed, somehow, obscene. “Diamonds, the usual,” he mumbled. Whitney drank champagne, and smiled at Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. “The house in Thomasville, Georgia,” said Payne. “They’ll honeymoon there. Good hunting, Georgia.”

  The President, mouth full, could not let the subject of hunting pass unannotated. “Wild turkey!” he choked.

  “Thee!”

  But guns and wild turkeys were now the subject of that powerful energetic boy’s mind. “I’m also lending them my yacht,” said Oliver Payne to those of the table who were not entirely attentive to the presidential hymn to the slaughter of wildlife. “The Amphritite. They’ll go to Europe on it, this summer …”

  “An ocean-going yacht?” Mrs. Whitelaw Reid’s happiness was complete.

  “Yes,” said Oliver Payne, looking not at Whitney’s face but his far shoulder. Thus he emphasized his own greater wealth.

  “It’s the size of an ocean-liner,” said Hay, allowing Reid his moment with the President, who, sensing that he had lost the table in general, was now concentrating all the more on Reid, whose sycophantish smiles and bobs of the head caused the President to give a detailed history, from prehistoric times to the present, of the beagle.

  “I’m also building them a place in New York.” Oliver Payne turned to Clara, as an interested party. “Your daughter said she preferred New York to Washington …”

  “And you to us!” Clara’s sudden laugh cut the beagles just short of François Premier, and a hunting party at Poitier.

  “She never said that,” murmured the very rich man. “But New York’s right for Payne, and her. I’ve found them a lot on Fifth Avenue near Seventy-ninth Street, where I’ll build a house …”

  “And we can be,” said William Whitney, “all together, on Fifth Avenue.”

  That stopped both Oliver Payne and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay wished that Henry Adams could have shared this comic interlude.

  “How is young Ted?” asked Clara in the pause.

  “Weak but recovered. Groton’s looking after him well enough.”

  Young Ted had nearly died of pneumonia, and both Roosevelts had gone to Groton to be with him, leaving Hay as the acting president. Occasionally, he still day-dreamed of what it would be like should Theodore himself fall victim to pneumonia or an assassin’s bullet, or simply a trolley car, like the one that had smashed into the President’s carriage the previous autumn, killing a Secret Service man. Had Theodore and not the Secret Service man died, John Hay would have been the president. Old and ill as he was, the thought was not entirely without its appeal. Of course, he was too fragile to do much. On the other hand, he would have a free hand to guide the United States onto the world stage, as an equal party with England. Between the two fleets—nations, he corrected his reverie—the entire world would be theirs for the foreseeable future. Although Theodore was on the same course, he was fitful and easily diverted; he was also concerned with being elected president in his own right in 1904. Disturbingly, despite the closeness of his friendship with Cecil Spring-Rice, he resented, as only a Dutch-American could, England’s long ascendancy in the United States, achieved at the expense of his ancestors. He had even said to Hay, apropos Pauncefote, that the Englishman is “not a being I find congenial or with whom I care to associate. I wish him well but I wish him well at a distance.” This was most unlike McKinley, whose benign neutrality in the Boer War had been of such importance to England.

  Whitelaw Reid spoke of Russia, and the President gave Hay a quick glance. They were not to discuss the current problems with that, to Hay, mindless grasping barbarous nation. “We can say nothing, dear Whitelaw.” Hay made of his old colleague’s first name a sort of formal title, White Law, White Rod, Black Law, Black Rod, like those ancient ceremonial servitors of the British crown. “Because Cassini is lurking on the premises, and he will tell the Tsar everything.”

  “Did you see him avoid Takahira?” The President was about to be tactless.

  Hay intervened. “Cassini doesn’t see too clear
ly. It’s the monocle, I think …”

  “What will Japan do about Russia, and Manchuria?” Whitelaw had refused to take Hay’s hint. Thus a man lost a foreign mission.

  “We must ask the Japanese.” Hay was bland. “Certainly, none of us wants the Russians to occupy the industrial parts of Manchuria …”

  “Shansi province!” Roosevelt erupted; and Hay shuddered, as he heard Brooks Adams’s suave low voice turned into Rooseveltian falsetto. “The principal goal of every empire on earth today. Who holds Shansi province holds the key to the balance of power …”

  “Theodore, they are going to cut the cake.” Edith rose in tandem with Clara, and Hay was relieved. Although Hay did not in the least disapprove of the coming American hegemony, as outlined by Brooks in his soon-to-be-published polemic The New Empire, he felt that the Administration ought never to associate itself with such un-American concepts as empire. Let the empire come in the name of—the pursuit of happiness, of liberty, of freedom. If the United States was not always high-minded, the world might take less seriously the great new-world charter that set off this extension of the British empire not only from the motherland but from all other restless, expanding nations.

  Once the bay-window table had been abandoned, Whitney and Payne separated, as if by prior arrangement. The Hays escorted the Roosevelts into the dining room, where all the guests were standing, champagne glasses at the ready. Back of the huge white cake Helen and Payne stood, ready for the toasts; and the cutting of the cake.

  As a bridesmaid, Caroline wore a light gray silk crepe gown, a not entirely satisfactory color or non-color, but Helen had insisted that she be a bridesmaid, “since you were supposed to be my matron-of-honor.” To this appeal, Caroline had surrendered.

  Now Caroline stood between Henry Adams and Cabot Lodge, and the three responded to the various toasts, particularly an exhilarating one from the President, who had moved in between bride and groom as if, somehow, their wedding if not their marriage might have been incomplete without his nearness, even centrality.

  “Theodore,” murmured Adams, “is quite drunk with himself.”

  Lodge’s laugh was not the prettiest of sounds; but, under the circumstances, Caroline found it irresistible. “He can’t bear for anyone else to be the center of attention. He wants to be groom …”

  “And bride,” Caroline contributed.

  “Everything,” said Adams. “What, I wonder,” he added with a macabre smile, “will he be like at a funeral?”

  “In the coffin,” said Lodge.

  “If it’s a state funeral,” Adams agreed. “So much energy for everything, including death.”

  “We’re lucky.” Lodge was now grave. “To have him where he is, at such a time.”

  “Handing round cake?” Caroline was deflationary but Lodge was a true believer, and Theodore’s star was his star.

  To Caroline’s surprise, Frederika Bingham was in the room, uncommonly pretty in pale green. Although Mrs. Bingham had yet to enter the gilded gates of the highest society, the crooked smile of her daughter seemed, somehow, to open every door. Caroline was admiring. After all, the pursuit of a high social career was, perhaps, the only challenge that a wealthy American girl might ever meet and, with luck, overcome. “Alice invited me,” Frederika read Caroline’s mind.

  “Roosevelt?”

  “Hay. I never knew there were so many people in Washington I did not know and so few,” the smile was implicit rather than visible, “so wonderfully few, congressmen.”

  “You mother has them.”

  “She can keep them. I suppose these are New York people.” Frederika looked about the room as if she were in New York’s legendary lion house, where Clarence King had seen fit to go mad.

  “I’m a foreigner.” Caroline still fell back on this identity; but, of course, she was now, like it or not, old Washington. “There are many people here from Ohio. Like Colonel Payne. And the Stones. And Senator Hanna.” They were bowed to by the fat, pale Mark Hanna, who resembled, for an instant, all Ohio. “Is your brother here?” asked Frederika, as the two young women followed the newlyweds and the adhesive President into the drawing room.

  “No. He’s vanished. But he’s supposed to be building a house here.”

  “He’s not in Baltimore?”

  “Not if he can help it.” Caroline had just received, unofficially, an accountant’s report of the Examiner losses for the year just ended. The paper was going to be expensive to maintain. The Tribune, thanks to Mr. Trimble and her own inspired negligence, was profitable. Mr. McLean had even made a New Year’s offer to buy; and Caroline had declined, joyfully, to sell and, sorrowfully, he had said that he might now be obliged to buy the Post.

  “I think Mr. Hearst must be fascinating.” Frederika was unexpected. As a rule, nice young ladies deplored the national villain.

  “Well, if you think that, you and Blaise think alike. He’s drawn to him like … like …”

  “A moth to a flame?”

  “I’d hoped to avoid that phrase but then, as a publisher, I ought not, ever, to avoid the too familiar. Exactly. A moth to a flame. I hope he isn’t burned.” Caroline said exactly what she meant; but then she no longer regarded Blaise as an enemy. After all, had he not behaved as he had, she might have been simply another transatlantic young heiress of the sort that Mr. James wrote more and more elaborately about. Instead, she had made a place for herself like no other; and though Marguerite might mourn the irregularity of their situation, Caroline was delighted to be free, and—why deny it?—powerful in the world of Washington, which was becoming very much the world that mattered. She glanced at the ring that she wore on her left little finger. As Del’s fire opal had split in equal halves, she had had them set on either side of an irregular yellow sapphire. The effect was more evocative than beautiful; emblematic of a life that had broken in half, had not been lived.…

  At the door to the drawing room, Caroline was astonished to see Mrs. Jack Astor, like some celestial peacock—or was it hen?—in the Washington back yard. “It is like one of those Brueghel paintings,” the deep voice sounded in the crowded room. “The wedding of village swain to milkmaid.”

  “Attended by a fairy godmother, all in gossamer and jewels …” Caroline began.

  “ … witch, dear Caroline. What am I doing in so bucolic a place?”

  “It reminds you of Newport, Rhode Island, I suppose.”

  “No. Rhinebeck-on-Hudson when we give our annual harvest feast to the yokels, and I see to it that their trestle tables are wreathed in poison ivy.” Mrs. Jack’s laughter was enjoyable if not precisely contagious. All round them, awed Washington ladies were staring at the fashionable Mrs. Astor, never before seen in the capital city. Caroline was agreeably aware that her own stock was rising rapidly.

  “Are you a friend of the Hays?” asked Caroline.

  “No, not really. But I am enamored of this creature, so young, so potentially appalling …”

  Mrs. Jack had put out an arm and swept the imperious Alice Roosevelt toward her. “You see? I came. Your rustic revels are now complete.”

  “So proud the Astors!” exclaimed Alice, in no way, ever, to be outdone, even by the superb Mrs. Jack. “When they were nothing but German Jews, kosher butchers, when we Roosevelts …”

  “… were running away from the Indians, in your clumsy wooden shoes, which I see you’re wearing today,” she added, glancing down at Alice’s rather large squared-off slippers. “How suitable …”

  “Isn’t she foul!” Alice turned, delighted, to Caroline.

  “No, no. She is fair. But her bite is lethal.”

  “Rabid!” Alice gazed with delight on Mrs. Jack. It was no secret that the President’s oldest child was also, in his own words, “the only one of us with any money,” inherited from her dead mother. She was also bent on being a Fashionable, something unknown in Roosevelt circles, a family not unlike the Apgars when it came to dowdy self-satisfaction.

  There was a sudden murmur
all about them, as the President and Mrs. Roosevelt approached, led by John Hay, like an ancient chamberlain. “Alice, we’re leaving,” the President announced.

  “You’re leaving. I’m staying.”

  “Alice,” murmured her stepmother.

  “Mrs. Jack Astor.” Alice presented the swan to the barnyard geese.

  Mrs. Jack made an elaborate curtsey.

  “Do stop that!” The President was unamused.

  “She does it very well.” Edith smiled a queenly smile.

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Jack rose now to her full height. “Why do you call us ‘the idle rich’?” She gave the President a mocking smile. “We are never idle.”

  “Some are less idle than others,” began the President, plainly not comfortable.

  “While some are less rich than others,” acknowledged Mrs. Jack. “Even so, you must not generalize about your loyal subjects, or we shall all vote for Bryan next year.”

  “Then everyone will be less rich.” The President was now retreating from the room. Alice remained. If nothing else, Caroline found her refreshing. But then the entire Roosevelt family was a surprise to a world that had come to look upon the White House as a seedy boardinghouse for dim politicians emeriti. Caroline’s “Society Lady,” as the woman in question signed herself in the pages of the Tribune, was thrilled with the change in Washington’s ton, as she liked to call it, rhyming the French word, to Caroline’s immeasurable joy, with the English word that denotes a measurement of weight.

  “This place has possibilities.” Mrs. Jack was looking about the room. The diplomatic corps was its usual colorful self; and the few men of state were, if not actually gentlemen, got up as if they were. Only the wives—the poor wives, as Caroline thought of them—gave away the game. They were redolent of the back yards of small towns; and always frowning with anxiety, fearful of letting down the ton.

  Caroline had been disagreeably surprised to meet the wife of James Burden Day. For one thing, she had not expected him to marry so unexpectedly, and, for another, to marry someone from “back home” when he had already entered the relatively great world of Washington, where he was, relatively, related to those ubiquitous gentlefolk the Apgars. Caroline assumed that Day’s wife was the price of his congressional seat. None of this was her business.