Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  Caroline, aware that Adamsian gloom was about to overwhelm the bright room, said, “I just passed Alice and the Cassini girl bob-sledding on Connecticut Avenue. They start at Dupont Circle, and slide through the traffic, out of control.”

  “A metaphor, my child, for her father’s Administration.”

  “How,” asked Caroline, “does one get money?”

  For the first time in their friendship, Adams looked at her with true surprise. “In our world, you select parents who have money, and they, in turn, pass it on. If one has been careless in the selection of parents, one marries someone who was not so careless. I am very good about money, by the way. I can’t think why. But I do well in financial crises. Brooks, who understands the monetary system better than anyone alive, loses money, always. It is highly gratifying. Anyway, next year—is it?—you inherit your fortune—”

  “This year, I am desperate.”

  “Your husband has debts.” Adams did not phrase this as a question; but then everyone knew everything in their world.

  “More than I had bargained for.”

  “Go to your brother.”

  “He wants the paper.”

  “Go to the Jews.”

  “I have tried. But they don’t seem eager to lend, at a bearable rate.”

  “I could lend—”

  “I shall leave the room, and never return, if you ever hint at such—an impropriety.”

  Adams smiled, like a contented cat. “I knew you would reject me. Otherwise, I would not have made so rude a move. Why not sell Blaise your newspaper?”

  “Because it is all that I have, of my own. A child is never your own. It is also—the father’s.” Caroline enjoyed the irony. Jim had never once suspected, holding Emma on his knee, that she was his flesh and blood, blue eyes and curly hair.

  “Let us be subtle. Sell Blaise half the shares of the Tribune minus one, which will give you control.”

  Caroline had thought of this. “It would mean getting to know him rather more than I’d like.”

  “One boy is like another.” Adams disliked all males except a half-dozen aged ironists like himself. Caroline had never known a man to whom woman—if not women—was so necessary; and she wondered, as always, why had the brilliant wife killed herself, why had he never remarried, why did he maintain his peculiar, and plainly unrequited, passion for Lizzie Cameron?

  “You made do with a cousin as husband. You can certainly make do with a half-brother as—junior partner.”

  William was at the door, announcing “Professor Langley.” The accident-prone secretary of the Smithsonian Institution entered the room, without once, symbolically, slipping, Caroline noted. Although Henry Adams regarded Samuel P. Langley as the best scientific mind in the Western world (Adams particularly admired Langley’s invention of something called a bolometer, “which measures the heat,” he would say gleefully, “of nothing!”). The press had, lately, taken a good deal of pleasure out of Langley’s doomed attempts to fly heavier-than-air craft. He was always on the verge of freeing man from the earth; but man continued to be earth-bound, as far as heavier-than-air craft went. Lighter-than-air craft, on the order of gliders or balloons, somehow did not count. Caroline found mystifying Langley’s obsessions; but she had seen to it that he was often, and favorably, interviewed in the Tribune. As a result, he had mistaken her for an admirer like Adams; and she had done nothing to disabuse him. Whatever pleased Adams pleased her. Besides, Langley could be interesting, when not goaded by Adams into discussing the famous dynamo that they had together glimpsed at the Paris Exhibition four years earlier. Adams wanted to find a scientific basis to history, on the order of the second law of thermodynamics. Caroline, who knew little of history and nothing of science, was convinced that there were no laws applicable to the human race, a random affair that moved neither up nor down but, simply, on, in fits and starts, for no reason. She had always found it odd that men required coherent reasons for things that women knew to be non-reasonable.

  “There is a rumor that a pair of bicycle mechanics in North Carolina have flown in a heavier-than-air machine of their own devising.” This was Langley’s ponderous greeting to his old friend.

  “When?” Adams was alert, as always to the marvels of science. “And for how long did they fly?”

  “Three months ago. The story’s garbled. No one seems to have got it straight. Someone sent me a clipping from a Norfolk newspaper, that made no sense …”

  “We were notified,” said Caroline, recalling Mr. Trimble’s amusement at the message from two brothers to the effect that they were the first, ever, to fly in such a machine. In one day they had taken off and landed several times. She recalled that they had claimed to have flown a half-mile. She reported this to Langley, who seemed more depressed than elated. Plainly this disinterested man of science wanted for himself the glory of being the first to fly like—was it Icarus? she wondered, recalling Mlle. Souvestre’s injunction that one ought always to be ready with an apt classical allusion in order not to use it.

  “I’ve heard something very like that. I don’t see how it’s possible. I mean who—what are they?”

  “It is very odd that the press has not picked it up.” Adams turned to Caroline. “Why didn’t you use the story?”

  “Because we get so many stories like that, out of nowhere. Also, Mr. Trimble couldn’t tell whether the machine wasn’t just another sort of glider, like the one that took off from the Eiffel Tower.”

  “I shall write them, I suppose.” Langley was glum. “I am so close now, so very close to the workable machine …”

  “What use is a flying machine?” Caroline was genuinely curious, not so much about the tinkering with machinery, a male madness, but the uses to which something so impractical might be put.

  “Flight will change everyone’s life,” said Langley. “People can be transported at great speed over long distances.”

  “I suppose that’s a good thing.” Caroline was dubious; her magnolia tree had died as a result of Alice Roosevelt’s assault upon it with a highly powered swift-moving arrangement of metal.

  “It will change warfare.” Adams was thoughtful. “One could carry explosives over the enemy’s territory and blow up—anything, I suppose.”

  Langley nodded. “Even in our Civil War, balloons were used, most effectively. Now, with powered air-craft …”

  “But they will promptly discover a way of knocking them out of the sky.” Caroline recalled one of the President’s recent arias. He was talking of the Kaiser, whom he had come to like, thanks to Speck, the ever-charming link between the two bellicosities. Speck, according to Roosevelt, had described how the ingenious maker of munitions Krupp handled the Kaiser. “Apparently Krupp is a superb statesman.” The President’s pince-nez glittered with a light all its own. “He goes to the Kaiser and says, ‘I’ve invented a steel plating that no bullet can pierce.’ So the Kaiser immediately orders quantities of steel plating. Then, a year later, Krupp, looking very sad, comes back to the Kaiser and says, ‘I’m afraid we’ve invented a bullet that will pierce the impenetrable steel plating.’ So the poor Kaiser must order several tons of these magical bullets, to be followed by ever-newer impenetrable plating that will eventually be penetrated by newer bullets. The Kaiser has warned me not to be taken in, the way he’s been.” When Caroline repeated this to Adams and Langley, they exchanged knowing glances; and Langley said, “The Kaiser wants us to fall behind, which is why, should there be war, we must have the first flying-machine.”

  “But if they find a way to shoot it down …”

  “We will invent something that cannot be shot down …” began Langley.

  “Until it is,” said Caroline. “If I may give you a matronly view, this sort of contest is endless.” Caroline had been much impressed by the President’s story.

  “Progress, once started, is endless.” Langley was sententious.

  “Progress,” said Caroline, “implies that one is moving from one known place to an
other. Isn’t the problem, here, not knowing the proper terminus?”

  “Serendipity is sovereign.” Adams was not his usual candid, pessimistic self.

  “We proceed because we must,” said Langley. “It is like evolution.”

  “You have reminded me that I am Catholic, and in no way connected, genealogically, with any monkey, no matter how charming.” Caroline rose to go.

  “You were taken from Adam’s rib, as we all know, to our delight.” After Caroline had said her farewell to Langley, Adams led her out onto the landing, which smelled of out-of-season lilies-of-the-valley; in fact, the house, always overheated and filled with flowers, reminded her of the White House conservatories, now a thing of the past. “Sell Blaise a part of the paper.”

  “He will try to get all of it.”

  “Don’t let him. You are a clever child.” Adams patted her hand; and William showed her out.

  – 3 –

  JOHAN HAY sat alone in his moving parlor, and watched through newly washed windows the United States rush by. The Casetts of the Pennsylvania Railroad had provided the Secretary of State with their ornately furnished private car, and specially trained Negro attendants. At the President’s insistence, Hay had agreed to attend the World’s Fair at St. Louis, where he would make an address which, high-minded, witty and elegant, would be the opening gun in the coming battle for the presidency. There was no doubt that Theodore would be nominated by the Republican Party in June; there was little doubt that he would beat Bryan or Hearst or Parker or any Democrat in November. But Theodore saw lions everywhere in his path; and so he had sent the now always ailing Hay to the West. Clara had insisted that Henry Adams, an aficionado of world fairs, accompany them; and Adams had insisted on bringing his real-life niece, Abigail, a plain but interesting and interested girl.

  Hay wrote slowly in a notebook. Speech-writing no longer came easily to him; but then nothing did. In addition to the pleasures of a diseased prostate, he had now developed angina pectoris, a new and boisterous ailment which could be counted on to stab him in the middle of a speech, leaving him breathless and faint. He had always known that life would end; he was constantly amazed that so many of his acquaintances were astonished when death at last came their way. On the other hand, he had not counted on all the games that were being played within his body, which seemed to him now rather like one of Henry’s dynamos, breaking down for lack of whatever it is that keeps a dynamo serenely humming.

  Theodore was one of those who could not imagine his own death, or anyone else’s, which explained, perhaps, his unnatural passion for war. The one time that Theodore was forced to look death not once but twice in its bony face—when wife and mother simultaneously died—he had literally fled, like that traveller to—or was it from?—Samarra. He had abandoned his just-born daughter, career, world; to hide in the Wild West, where, presumably, the distances were so great and the terrain so flat that death could be seen coming and so avoided, by further flight, if necessary. The fact that the Secretary of State was now dying did not in the least distress Theodore, who thought only of the coming election, and his own continuing glory. John Hay was now the fine figurehead of the Republican Party, which would be a half-century old in July. Therefore, Lincoln’s young secretary and Roosevelt’s aged minister must be borne like an icon about the country, mouthing platitudes so that Theodore might become, in his own right, president, and no longer His Accidency.

  Hay’s rather loose handwriting seemed to grow ever more loose with age, as he constructed his pieties and platitudes, and reined in his wit, which would never do in so crucial a year. As usual, there was the problem of the people—those famous people that the Ancient had so mysteriously exalted that hot muggy day at Gettysburg; government of, by, and for the people? Had ever a great man said anything so entirely unrealistic, not to mention, literally, demagogic? The people played no part at all in the government of the United States in Lincoln’s time, and even less now in the days of Theodore Rex. Lincoln had tended to rule by decree, thanks to the all-purpose “military necessity” which gave legitimacy to his most arbitrary acts. Roosevelt pursued his own interests in his own surprisingly secretive way; he was for empire at any cost. The people, of course, were always more or less there; they must be flattered from time to time; exhorted to do battle, or whatever the Augustus at Washington wanted them to do. The result was a constant tension between the people at large and a ruling class that believed, as did Hay, in the necessity of concentrating wealth in the hands of the few while keeping the few as virtuous as possible, at least in appearance. Hence the periodic attacks on trusts. But labor was a more delicate matter, and though Theodore was as hostile to the working-man’s demands as any Carnegie, he knew that he must appear to be their tribune, and so, to Hay’s amusement and annoyance, Roosevelt had given, in 1903, a Fourth of July speech at, significantly, Springfield, Illinois, where he had declared, “A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.” This breathtaking announcement had caused rage in the better clubs of the republic and less than euphoria amongst those to whom the mysterious square deal had been promised. They would vote for Bryan anyway.

  Even so, Hay wrote, in large letters, “The Square Deal,” with slightly embellished capitals; then he ran his pen through the phrase. He was not up to such a speech. Let Theodore do his own ranting. At the last Cabinet meeting, Root had declined the honor of serving as campaign manager; and Theodore had been plainly rattled. The post had gone to the secretary of commerce (a needless new department, created by Roosevelt), Mr. Cortelyou, a soothing presence, and reminder of McKinley’s golden age, now as remote to Hay as Lincoln’s time of blood. There would be no talk of a square deal at St. Louis.

  Hay stared out the window, as one lonely village after another moved by the train’s window, an endless cyclorama of sameness. The pale spring light made the houses seem more than ever shabby, in contrast to the bright yellow-green foliage of trees and spring wheat. Was it April 15 or 16? he wondered. Without Adee—or a newspaper nearby—he never knew the date any more. If it was April 15, then it was the thirty-ninth anniversary of the murder of Lincoln. Hardly anyone was left from that time. Mary Todd had died, mad, at Springfield in 1882; her death long since preceded by that of the beloved child Tad. Only the eldest son, Robert Lincoln, survived; a chilly railroad magnate, largely indifferent to his father’s memory. Once Hay and Nicolay had finished their life of Lincoln, Hay’s connection with Robert was, for all practical purposes, at an end. They were no longer comfortable with each other; yet thirty-nine years ago, they had been drinking together when the White House doorkeeper had rushed into the room, with the news. “The President’s been shot!” And together they had gone to the boardinghouse near Ford’s Theater, to watch the Ancient die.

  Hay was beginning to find concentration difficult. Usually, the familiar act of setting pen to paper caused him to think precisely. But now he wool-gathered, lulled by the regular metallic clicking of the train’s wheels on the rails. Foreign affairs would be a safer subject than the evanescent square deal. The war between Russia and Japan was of great significance; but how was he to explain it to the public, when he could never explain it to the President? He found alarming the fact that Kaiser and President were growing altogether too friendly; they were not unalike in their sense of imperial charismatic mission. Each tended to regard the collapse of the Tsar’s eastern empire as a good thing. On the other hand, Hay thought that a victorious Japan in the Pacific would mean nothing but trouble for the United States, and its new bright Pacific empire.

  “Open Doors,” Hay wrote, without his usual pride in the famous histrionic formula that had worked once; and might again. Dare he mention the mysterious enlargement of the German fleet? Was there, as some suspected, a German plot to destroy the British empire, and undermine the United States by means of all those—how many millions now?—G
erman immigrants, with their own newspapers, communities, nostalgia? But the President put no credence in such a plot. He thought he understood the Kaiser and the Germans. Hay knew that he understood this barbaric tribe; and Hay feared them. With Russia crippled by Japan to Germany’s east, the Kaiser could move west. “Piece,” wrote Hay; was he losing his mind? He crossed out the word; wrote “peace”; then “meat.” At least he spelled that right. Ever since the tainted-meat scandal during the war with Spain, government action had been called for, and, finally, Roosevelt had come up with a Meat Inspection Act, which Congress had rejected. This was definitely good government, but Hay rather doubted if he could extract much rhetorical magic from the subject.

  Henry Adams coughed politely. “Do I intrude on the creative process?”

  “I was trying to make lyrical the Meat Inspection Act. But nothing scans.” Hay shut the notebook. A steward appeared with tea. “Mrs. Hay says you are to drink this, sir.”

  “Then I shall.”

  Hay and Adams stared out the window, as if expecting to see something of great interest. But all was a sameness, thought Hay.

  “Theodore Rex worries about his—Rexness,” said Hay, at last.

  “No need, even with Mark Hanna dead.” The monster of corruption had died in February, busy collecting a war-chest for the nomination not of himself but of Roosevelt. The two enemies had long since come to an understanding. As for the Democratic side, their paladin William C. Whitney had also died in February. Without Whitney, there was no one—except Hearst—who could finance a winning campaign. Everything would flow Roosevelt’s way; yet Adams was puzzled. “Why didn’t Root take on the job as campaign manager?”

  Hay took morbid pleasure in his reply. “He was—is, perhaps, still—convinced that he has a cancer of the breast.”

  Adams’s look of surprise was highly pleasing. “Surely, only the ladies have been chosen for this especial mark of God’s favor.”