Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “No. I meant that I haven’t been with anyone since we …” The voice trailed off.

  “Well, I have been with no one at all.” She broke the news, as his hand strayed toward her groin. The hand froze where it was; she thought of the petrified citizenry of Pompeii, each last act caught and preserved in lava. Druscilla, virgin, with Marius, gladiator: in her end was her beginning.

  “I’m the first?” He stared at her with unattractive amazement.

  “Surely, it’s no martyrdom for you. One has to begin sometime, with someone …”

  “But if I’m the first,” he repeated, eyes most unattractively fixed upon the source of all life, which Henry Adams never ceased, euphemistically, to celebrate.

  “Why is there no blood?” Marguerite had explained all this to her; and she explained to him, with growing irritability, her years as a youthful equestrienne with its eventual reward not of trophies won but of hymen ruptured.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” he said.

  Although Caroline had not expected romance, neither had she expected so clinical a discussion after what had been, nearly, ecstasy. Firmly, she placed one hand over the faun-like mouth; with the other, she began experiments of her own, of an hydraulic nature; plainly, ecstasy was going to take a good deal of patience, not to mention hard manual work.

  The second time was better than the first, and Caroline saw definite possibilities in the famous act. She was critical, however, of the Great Artificer who had designed both men and women with too little attention to detail, and too much left to chance. Nothing was quite angled right. Junctions, though possible, involved acrobatics of an undignified nature. Only childbirth, which she had witnessed, was less dignified, and, of course, exquisitely painful. Fortunately, there was no pain in all their maneuverings upon the bed; while pleasure, when it arrived, was sharp and unexpected and quite obliterated the sense of self, an unanticipated gift of Eros. Obviously, the Great Artificer intended that each be a conduit for the other, as well as for the race itself, which He had so haphazardly designed to go on and on, doing what they were doing in order to achieve pleasure, the small reward that the Artificer had thrown in, as they, doggedly, fulfilled what was the only perceivable purpose of the exercise: more, ever more, of the same until earth chilled or caught fire, and no one was left to couple.

  Later, Jim, as she now called him, lolled contentedly in the tub, while Caroline followed Marguerite’s instructions with an elaborate douching in a Lowestoft china basin, involving a cold tisane guaranteed to discourage any little stranger from assembling itself in her no longer virginal loins.

  Aware that Jim was watching her perhaps too expert handling of herself, she said, “Marguerite has given me full instructions. She’s also a midwife, though I pray we won’t ever need her for that.”

  “Frenchwomen know an awful lot, don’t they?”

  “Some know more awful things than others. But when it comes to the basic things, yes, they know a lot, and they tell one another, mother to daughter, for generations.”

  “Americans never talk about—those things.”

  “That is why newspapers are so necessary. We give people something to talk about. Politics, too,” she added, remembering her manners. Now, as she put on a silk peignoir, she wondered if she was going to be in love. She rather doubted it. After all, she lacked the first requisite: she was without jealousy, she had noted, watching him get into the tub. Kitty got to see this homely but also exciting spectacle every day while she could only attend the miracle play on Sundays; yet she did not envy Kitty. To have a man always with you, even one as well-proportioned and charming as Jim, was not a dream that she had ever wanted to come true. She had been a bachelor too long. Of course, she had ceased to be a virgin only an hour earlier, and who knew what fires hitherto banked—why did sex require so many similes, metaphors?—might flare up out of control, and devour her with lust, for that particular body, and no other? Je suis la fille de Minos, et de Pasiphaë, she murmured, and thought it curious that the great celebrators of woman’s lust had been men like Racine and Corneille. Nothing much was left of burning Sappho’s celebrations, while the other ladies who had written on the subject were careful not to give away the game, if indeed there was a game to be given away. Perhaps the whole thing was an invention of idle poets—of men with nothing better to do, unlike women, who had to bear and raise children and keep house, and rapidly lose their charms, leaving idle men free to invent love. But then Caroline thought of the various women that she had known who had been in love, and as she recalled their sufferings, she decided that they could not all have been acting. There had been pain or at least chagrin d’amour, which was probably worse. She wondered if she would ever suffer so much for any man, or woman—she must be honest with herself, as a pupil of Mlle. Souvestre. She doubted it; she was too used to being just herself, watchful, engrossed by others, amused by vanity, and was not jealousy simply vanity writ large? Yet when she saw Jim, fully clothed, the beautiful body that she was beginning to learn how to work for her own pleasure now covered up, she did feel a mild pang that she could not start all over again, and unveil the godhead, as she had come to think of that absurd-looking but entirely necessary organ. She would have to wait—impatiently?—until next Sunday.

  The faun-lips were surprisingly soft, while the surrounding skin was scratchy, a nice contrast. He smelled of cedar, and the horse that he had been riding. “You and Kitty must come here to dinner,” said Caroline, leading him to her bedroom door.

  Jim looked amazed. “Both of us?”

  “Well, it is usual to invite married couples together, or so my Society Lady instructs us.”

  “You’d like Kitty here?”

  “Very much. We have,” Caroline smiled, “so much in common.”

  “I guess you do at that.” He could be as cool as she, and that would make their relationship all the easier, she decided; and smiled, when she heard the front door slam. As it did, Marguerite, arthritis forgotten, hurtled into the room like a witch on the devil’s breath; and embraced Caroline, weeping loudly, shouting her congratulations, mixed with cautionary do’s and don’t’s and did she remember? and how was it, it, it?

  “I have come through, Marguerite.” Caroline spoke to her in French; and felt a bit like Joan of Arc at the crowning of the Dauphin. “I am a saint—I mean a woman, at last.”

  “Praise God!” Marguerite positively howled.

  ELEVEN

  – 1 –

  JOHAN HAY looked out over the Atlantic, and thought of Theodore Roosevelt; but then practically everything reminded Hay of the President, who had summoned him to the strenuous confusions of Oyster Bay to concert a policy toward Russia, which had refused to accept a protest, forwarded by the President, deploring the Easter massacre of the Jews of Kishineff. American Jewry, headed by one Jakob Schiff, was up in arms; and, on the opposite side, so was Cassini in Washington. The President, like the Atlantic, obeyed his own tides, mindless tides, Hay had decided, entirely directed by the moon of his destiny. In the confusion of children, ponies, neighbors, it was decided to make no official remonstrance to the Tsar, but to play up, in the American press, the refusal of the Tsar’s government to accept a message on the subject.

  “I believe the country would follow me if I were to go to the extreme.” Roosevelt was standing before his house, jaw held high; but since jaw and neck were all of a piece, Hay thought, queasily, of a chunk of roast beef.

  “You mean war with Russia?” Hay leaned his back against the bole of a sycamore tree; and the pressure relieved, somewhat, the pain.

  “I could lead the people in such a war …”

  “Well, if you couldn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a war, would there?” In a year the Republicans would hold their convention, and Roosevelt dearly wanted to be the nominee. As a war leader, at the head of his legions in Manchuria, he would be, he thought, another Lincoln and so, overwhelmingly, elected. Hay lived now in dread of Theodore’s activism, like the
Atlantic when the moon was at the full and the wind north-northwest.

  “I favor only splendid little wars, as you know …” Hay began.

  But Theodore Rex was now in full repetitive flow. “Who holds Shansi province dominates the world.” Hay wished that Brooks Adams had been born mute or, better, not at all. As Theodore trumpeted the Brooks Adams line, Hay made the usual demurs; then, inspired, he said, “Now if you want a useful small war, there’s Colombia.”

  “I’d hoped you would say Canada.” Roosevelt suddenly laughed; and stopped playing emperor. “Yes. We’ve got good cause to send the troops to Bogotá. They are endless cheats. I know you’d just as soon place the canal in Nicaragua, but Panama’s the more likely spot, and if the Colombians don’t come to terms …” More Atlantic menace flowed up and down the lawns of Sagamore Hill; then the President went off to play tennis, and Hay fled to Edith for comfort.

  Now Hay was again at Newport, Rhode Island, in the house that Helen and Payne had rented for the season. “The sea-air will do you good,” even Henry Adams had said that, as he fled to France; and the sea-air had indeed done him so much good that he had, that very morning, written out his resignation as secretary of state. The strain of keeping Theodore in line was too much for a sick man. Root was far better suited than he; also, Root rather frightened Theodore, which Hay certainly did not. Finally, Root was planning to give up his post as secretary of war; therefore, the graceful thing for Hay to do would be to stand aside, allowing Root to take his place, as Theodore’s keeper.

  “I shall be free.” Hay addressed the Atlantic, which indifferently glittered in the bright July light. “I shall be able to enjoy life.” Then he laughed aloud when he recalled what Henry Adams had said when he had heard Hay fretting that by the time he left office he might have lost all zest for life.

  “Don’t worry, sonny,” said his old friend, with exuberant malice, “you’ve already lost it.”

  Slowly, Hay descended the curved marble staircase to the round marble entrance hall—inspired by Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Colonel Payne rented only the best for his stolen Whitney son. Hay did not like Colonel Payne; but, to the Colonel’s credit, he did not thrust himself upon the family of Helen Hay Whitney. Thus far, he had not been seen in Newport; nor had William C. Whitney. Each maintained the symmetry of their feud through absence.

  In a panelled study that resembled the interior of a cigar box, Clara was writing letters beneath the portrait of the house’s owner, a railroad magnate, gone abroad. “You have resigned,” she said, without looking up.

  “How did you know?” Hay was no longer astonished by Clara’s astonishing knowledge of him.

  “The way you walk on your heels when you think you’ve—put your foot down. I’m writing Edith. Shall I say anything about your resignation?”

  “No. No. Theodore must hear it only from me.” Hay produced the letter. “My freedom.”

  “Yes, dear.” Clara continued to write; and Hay felt robbed of all drama.

  “It’s not every day the secretary of state resigns,” he began.

  “Well, it seems like every day in your case. I wish,” Clara signed her letter with a flourish, and turned the entire huge bulk of her body toward him, “that you really would go through with it. I want to get you back to Bad Nauheim, to the treatments, to …”

  “Clara, I’ve done it! We can leave for Europe next month. Adee keeps the department running smoothly whether I’m living or dead, and the President …”

  “… will stop you, as always. He wants you for next year, for the election. You’ll have to stay on, worse luck. Of course, the sea-air …”

  “… agrees with me. But, how can I take another year of the Senate and Cabot …?” Hay shuddered at the thought of that narrow pompous man whom he had once thought of as a friend.

  “We must put up with him because of Sister Ann. She’s worth a dozen of him …”

  “And he is a dozen truly dreadful senators rolled into one …”

  Helen swept, very like her mother, into the room. Marriage had enlarged everything about her. “Mrs. Fish gives a reception for the Secretary of State Saturday. So Mr. Lehr has decreed, decreed …”

  “What dogs are to be asked?” Hay had been rather more pleased than shocked by the Lehr-Fish dinner party for the dogs of the Four Hundred. Roman decadence had always appealed to his frontiersman soul. The fact that decadence so enraged Theodore was also a point in its favor, particularly now that Theodore was himself showing late-imperial signs.

  “Alice is arriving.” It was no longer necessary to ask which Alice. The Alice always arriving was Roosevelt. The press revelled in her; and called her Princess Alice. She delighted; she shocked; she powdered her nose in public, something no lady was supposed to do even in private, and it was even whispered that she, secretly, smoked cigarettes. Plainly, late, very late, Roman decadence now luridly lit up the White House, and the President had even joked to Hay that he himself had been taken to task by a lady in Canada who had read that he had actually drunk a glass of champagne at Helen Hay’s wedding, thereby placing in jeopardy his immortal soul.

  “Your father has resigned.”

  “I suppose she’ll stay at the Stone House. But we could always have her here …”

  “Is that all that you have to say at the close of my long career?” Hay realized that his affectation of melancholy was too close to the real thing to be convincing.

  “Oh, you won’t resign. You won’t really. Don’t be silly, Father. You’d have nothing at all to do. Anyway, the President won’t let you. So that’s that, isn’t it?” Helen appealed to Clara, who nodded, with sibylline dignity.

  Hay was ill pleased, for he had, indeed, meant to resign once and for all, and now every omen was wrong. Only death could free him of office; and that would come soon enough. “You two are merciless,” he observed.

  “You must also see to it that we get that canal from Colombia,” said Helen, adjusting her hair in a mirror. She was now nearly as large as her mother; and dressed in the same dramatic style. “Why are they being so difficult?”

  “They are dawdling because next year the old French Concession for a canal, which we took on, runs out, and then they’ll want us to pay all over again.”

  “Thieves,” said Helen, curling a lock of hair with a finger.

  “To put it mildly. We may have to—intervene. The people who actually live in the isthmus, the Panamanians, hate the Colombian government.”

  “We must give them their freedom.” Helen was emphatic. “That is the least we can do, the very least.”

  “You and the President think alike,” said Hay. “Four times in the last two years the Panamanians have revolted against Colombia …”

  “The next time we’ll help them, and then they can enter the union like … like Texas.”

  “Oh, surely, not like Texas,” said Clara, obscurely.

  “One Texas may be too much.” Helen was reasonable. “But if Panama wants to belong to us, we should let them.” ’

  “Or,” said Hay, “we should say that we’ll build the canal in Nicaragua. Just the threat will bring Colombia round.” This had been Hay’s policy; and Roosevelt had concurred, for the time being. “I shall resign,” he repeated, as he left the room. Neither lady responded. Helen’s hair had fallen, disastrously, down her back, while Clara’s letter-writing totally absorbed her.

  In the marble hall, Hay gave the butler his letter to be mailed to the President at Oyster Bay; and the butler presented Hay with a newly arrived dispatch-case, full of business from Cinderella at Washington.

  As Payne came down the stairs, Hay gave the dispatch-case to the Butler. “I’m playing hooky today,” he said. “Put this in my room.”

  “I’ll take you driving, sir.” Payne gazed down at his tiny father-in-law. “The Pope Toledo’s just arrived.”

  “The what?”

  “The Pope Toledo, my new motor car …”

  “It sounds like a picture you might see ha
nging in the Prado.”

  “Shall we ask the ladies?” Payne looked toward the study.

  “No,” said Hay. “I’m no longer speaking to them. I’ve resigned as secretary of state, and they simply won’t accept it—my resignation, that is.”

  “Let’s drive by old Mrs. Delacroix’s. Caroline and Blaise are there.”

  Had Payne heard him? Hay wondered, as he followed the young man through the front door to the porte-cochère, where stood a marvellously intricate, shining piece of machinery.

  The butler helped Hay into the front seat beside Payne, who showed as little interest in Hay’s resignation as the ladies of the family. Perhaps I am already dead, thought Hay, and everyone’s too polite to tell me. Perhaps I am dreaming all this. Lately, Hay’s dreams had been getting more and more life-like—and unpleasant—while his waking life was more than ever dream-like, and almost as unpleasant. Surely, it was all a dream that young Teddy was president and that he had just been to see him at Sagamore Hill and Teddy had discussed the possibility, even desirability, of a war with Russia. This sort of thing happened in dreams. In real life, there were real presidents, like Lincoln and McKinley; and real secretaries of state like Seward, not himself in masquerade, little Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, barely grown, with a new moustache, in a horse and buggy, driving down the rutted mud main street of Springfield, not being sped along inside an elegant contraption on rubber wheels that gave the sense they were floating on air, as Bellevue Avenue slipped past them, its palaces more suitable for Paradise—or Venice—than mere earth.

  The Secretary of State was recognized as he was borne by Pope Toledo to the Delacroix cottage, and hats were raised, and he nodded graciously at the strangers who held him—or rather, his office—in such awe. When one was dead did one actually know it? as in the sort of dreams when the dreamer knows he dreams? That seemed an urgent question to put to Henry Adams, who knew everything.