Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “ ‘Research’?” The Chief stared blankly. “Oh, yes. That. Maybe. I know a lot now. But I can’t say how, or what.”

  As it turned out, two weeks later, Blaise knew what the Chief knew. The Tribune was now housed in a new building in Eleventh Street, just opposite the department store of Woodward and Lothrop. Blaise’s office was on the first floor, in one corner; Caroline was installed in the opposite corner; between them, Trimble; above them, the newsroom; below them, the printing presses.

  In front of Blaise stood a well-dressed young Negro, who had been admitted, after considerable discussion, by Blaise’s disapproving stenographer. In Washington even well-dressed Negroes were not encouraged to pay calls on publishers. The fact that the young man was from New York City had, apparently, tipped the scale, and Mr. Willie Winfield was admitted. “I’m a friend of Mr. Fred Eldridge.” Winfield sat down without invitation; he gave Blaise a big smile; he wore canary-yellow spats over orange shoes.

  “Who,” asked Blaise, perplexed, “is Mr. Fred Eldridge?”

  “He said you might not remember him, but even so I was to come see you, anyways. He’s an editor at the New York American.”

  Blaise recalled, vaguely, such a person. “What does Mr. Eldridge want?”

  “Well, it’s not what he wants, it’s maybe, what you want.” The young man stared at a painting of the gardens of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.

  “So what do I—want?”

  “Information about people, you know, bigwigs. Like senators and that stuff. You know John D. Archbold?”

  “Standard Oil?”

  “Yeah. The same. He looks after politicians for Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Well, my stepfather is his butler in the big house in Tarrytown, and Mr. Archbold, a very fine man, by the way, got me this job as office boy at Twenty-eight Broadway, where the Standard Oil is.”

  Blaise tried not to look interested. “I’m afraid we’ve no openings here for an office boy,” he began.

  “Oh, I’m out of that business now. Me and my partner, we’re opening up a saloon on a Hundred Thirty-fourth Street. Anyways, me and my partner, we went through Mr. Archbold’s files, where he has all these letters from the bigwigs in politics who he pays money to so they’ll help Standard Oil do different things. Anyways, I happened to come across Mr. Eldridge about that time, last December it was, and he asked me to bring the letters round to the American where he could photograph them, and then I could put them back in the files, so nobody’d know they was ever missing.”

  Hearst had the letters. That was plain. But how would he use them? More to the point, how would—or could—Blaise make use of them? “I assume Mr. Eldridge told you that I might be a customer for the letters …”

  “That’s about the size of it. Mr. Hearst paid us pretty good for the first batch. Then, a couple weeks ago, Mr. Archbold fired us, my partner and me. I guess we didn’t always put things back in the right order, or something.”

  “Does he know which letters you photographed?”

  Winfield shook his head. “How could he? He doesn’t even know that any of them was photographed. Because that was something only somebody like Mr. Eldridge could do, at a newspaper office—like this.”

  There was a long silence, as Blaise stared at the window, which now framed a most convincing rainstorm. “What have you got to sell?” he asked.

  “Well, when we was fired, I’d taken out this big letterbook for the first half of 1904. I’ve still got it …”

  “Then you’ll go to jail when Mr. Archbold reports the theft …”

  Winfield’s smile was huge. “He won’t report nothing. There’s letters in there from everybody. How much he paid this judge, how much he paid that senator, and other things, too. I offered to sell it to Mr. Eldridge, but he says the price is too high, and Mr. Hearst’s got enough already.”

  “Did you bring the letterbook?”

  “You think I’m crazy, Mr. Sanford? No. But I made out a list for you of some of the people who wrote Mr. Archbold thanking him for money paid, and so on.”

  “Could I see that list?”

  “That’s why I’m here, Mr. Sanford.” Two sheets of paper were produced; each filled with neatly typewritten names. Blaise put them on his desk. Where once railroads had bought and sold politicians, now the oil magnates did the same; and Mr. Archbold was Mr. Rockefeller’s principal disperser of bribes and corrupter-in-chief. The names, by and large, did not surprise Blaise. One could tell by the way certain members of Congress habitually voted who paid for them. But it was startling to see so many letters from Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio, the man most likely to be the Republican candidate for president in 1908. Blaise was relieved not to find Jim’s name on the first page. He picked up the second page. The first name at the head of the column was “Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Blaise put down the page. “I think,” he said, “we can do business.”

  FIFTEEN

  – 1 –

  ON MARCH 3, 1905, John Hay wrote a letter to the President, whose inauguration was to take place the next day. Adee stood attentively by, combing his whiskers with a curious oriental ivory comb. “Dear Theodore,” Hay wrote. “The hair in this ring is from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of the assassination, and I got it from his son—a brief pedigree. Please wear it tomorrow; you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln. I have had your monogram and Lincoln’s engraved on the ring.” Hay affixed one of his favorite tags from Horace to the letter, and hoped that he had got the Latin right. He sealed the letter and gave it to Adee, with the small velvet box containing the ring. “It is the laying on of hands,” he said, and Adee, who was staring at him, nodded. “You are the last link.” Once Adee had left the room, Hay walked over to the window and looked out at the gleaming White House, where, as usual, visitors were coming and going at a fast rate. The sky was cloudy, he noted; wind from the northeast. There would be rain tomorrow. But there was almost always bad weather at inaugurations. Hadn’t there been snow at Lincoln’s second? Or was that Garfield’s? He found it hard to concentrate on anything except the pain in his chest, which came and went as always, but now, each time it came, stayed longer. One day it would not go; and he would.

  Clara and Adams entered, unannounced. “We have seen the ring-bearer, on his joyous errand.” Adams was sardonic. Despite Hay’s best efforts, Adams had discovered the gift of the ring with Washington’s hair to McKinley. “You will be known to posterity, dear John, as the barber of presidents.”

  “You are jealous that you have no hair suitable for enclosing in a ring.”

  “We are booked,” said Clara, “on the Cretic, sailing March eighteenth.”

  Hay coughed an acknowledgment. Each January he was host to a bronchial infection, and this January’s was still in residence.

  “We land at Genoa on April third, by which time you should be dancing the tarantella on the deck.” Adams gazed thoughtfully up at his grandfather’s eyes, which stared down at them from the room’s fireplace. Except that each was entirely bald, there was no great likeness.

  “I’ve made arrangements at Nervi. With the heart specialist,” Clara declaimed idly.

  “Then on to Bad Nauheim and Dr. Groedel, but not with me,” said Adams. “As I am totally valid, I have no desire to join the invalid …”

  “Bad No Harm, Mark Twain calls it.” Hay was beginning to feel better. “Then on to Berlin. The Kaiser beckons.”

  “You won’t see him.” Clara was firm.

  “I must. He hungers to know me. And I him. Anyway, the President says I must.”

  “You are,” said Clara, “too ill, and he is far, far too noisy.”

  “That is the nature of kaisers,” said Adams, “and of at least one president …”

  “Henry, not on this day of days.” Hay held up a hand, as if in benediction.

  “All is energy,” said Adams abruptly. “The leader of the world at any given moment is simply the outlet for all the Ze
itgeist’s energy, all concentrated in him.”

  “Major McKinley was much quieter,” said Clara, thoughtfully.

  “Less energy flashing about in those days.” Hay indicated that Clara could help him up. “I have a feeling that it will rain tomorrow.”

  But though there was rain in the early morning, by the time of the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and the first inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt at the Capitol, the sky was clear, and a strong wind made it impossible to hear the President’s speech, which was just as well, thought Hay, for the speech was cautious and undistinguished. Theodore had made too many promises to too many magnates for him to sound a bugle note of any kind. For the moment, the square deal was in abeyance, and the progressive President retrogressive. Later, Hay was certain that Theodore would exuberantly betray his rich supporters. He could not not be himself for long.

  Hay sat with the Cabinet in the front row of the platform which had been built over the steps of the Capitol’s east front. Hay was grateful to have Taft’s huge bulk next to him, shielding him from the icy wind. Directly in front of him, Theodore Rex addressed his subjects, and, as always, Hay marvelled at the way neck became head without any widening at all.

  The President was not going to have an easy time of it. Now that Mark Hanna was dead, he would have difficulty getting so obvious a bill as the one regarding the inspection of meat through a Senate where nearly everyone had been bought or was himself, like Aldrich of Rhode Island, a millionaire buyer of votes, while in the House, Speaker Cannon was wedded to the rich, no bad thing in Hay’s eyes, himself a millionaire not only through marriage but his own efforts. Even more than Adams, he had always had a golden touch, a source of some surprise to one who had begun life as a poet.

  Although Hay deeply believed in oligarchy’s “iron law,” as Madison put it, he saw, as Roosevelt saw, the possibility of revolution if reforms were not made in the way that the new rich conducted their business at the expense of a powerless public. The Supreme Court and the police together ensured not only the protection of property but the right of any vigorous man to bankrupt the nation, while the Congress was, for the most part, bought. The occasional honest man, like the loud young Beveridge, was, literally, eccentric: too far from power’s center to do anything but make the public love him—and the all-powerful Steering Committee of the Senate ignore him.

  As for Cabot … Hay shuddered; and not from cold. Cabot’s vanity and bad faith were two of the constants of Washington life. Cabot will be the rock, Adams had once observed, on which Theodore wrecks himself. So far, Theodore’s barque had sailed the republic’s high seas without incident; yet Cabot was always there to try to block every one of Hay’s treaties. Cabot’s my rock, Hay murmured to himself, happy he would soon be sailing not on the republic’s viscous sea but on the Mediterranean.

  There was loud, long applause, as Theodore finished. In the north a black cloud appeared. Taft helped Hay up. To Hay’s surprise, Taft asked, “Was it here Lincoln gave his last inaugural address?”

  Hay nodded. “Yes. Right here. I remember now. There was rain at first. Mr. Johnson, the Vice-President, was drunk. Then the rain stopped, and the President read his speech.”

  Taft looked thoughtful. “I know that speech by heart.”

  “We never suspected, then, that we were all so—historical. We just saw ourselves caught up in this terrible mess, trying to get through the day. I remember there was applause before he had finished one sentence.” Hay had the odd sense that he was now, if not in two places at once, in the same place at two different times, simultaneously, and he heard, again, the President’s voice rise over the applause, and say with great simplicity the four terrible words “And the war came.”

  “We lost a generation.” Taft was oddly flat.

  “We lost a world,” said Hay, amazed that he himself had survived so long in what was now, to him, so strange a country.

  – 2 –

  THE DAY AFTER the Inaugural Ball, Caroline celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday with Blaise, and two lawyers, one her husband, John, the other Mr. Houghteling. The celebration began in her office at the Tribune, where various documents of transfer were signed and witnessed and countersigned and notarized. John asked pointed questions. Houghteling’s answers were as to the point as his innumeracy allowed. Blaise stared into space, as if he were not there. Caroline now had what was hers; while Blaise, in possession of half of what was hers, was marginally better off. To be a half-publisher of a successful paper was better than being a non-publisher, or the custodian of the Baltimore Examiner.

  “Now,” said Houghteling, as the last set of signatures had been affixed, and Caroline had become a number of times a millionaire, “in the matter of the Saint-Cloud-le-Duc property, the will of your late father neglects to make clear which of you inherits. In law then, a court would doubtless find that you own it jointly as you do the rest of the estate, and should the property be sold, you would divide, evenly, the money from the sale. Is that agreeable?” He looked at John, who looked at Caroline, who said, “Yes,” and looked at Blaise, who shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  “I want it for May and June,” said Caroline. “I miss the place.”

  “I’ll come in July and August,” said Blaise. “For my honeymoon.”

  “Good,” said Houghteling, who never listened to anyone except when specifically paid to.

  Caroline looked intently at Blaise, who was now wiping ink off his middle finger. “Frederika?”

  “Yes. We’re getting married in May.”

  “Then you must have Saint-Cloud. For May, that is.”

  “We can all stay there.” Blaise was equable.

  “Congratulations,” said John, and formally shook Blaise’s hand. Houghteling had now put away his documents in a leather case and, still unaware of his client’s approaching marriage, bade them all good-by with the sentiment that, after nearly seven years, all must be well that had ended so well.

  Blaise suggested that Caroline join him and Frederika for dinner that night at Harvey’s Oyster House. “And you, too, John,” he added; and left the room.

  In recent years, Caroline and John seldom looked at each other directly; nor very often aslant, either. “Well, it’s over.” John took out his pipe; filled and lit it. Caroline studied a mock-up of the Sunday Ladies’ Page. Princess Alice was featured yet again; and there were hints that she might marry Nicholas Longworth; and then, again, she might not. “How is Emma?” Caroline had been touched to find that John had taken to the child and she to him.

  “She flourishes. She asks for you. I’ve talked to Riggs Bank. They will start making monthly payments into your account, as we agreed.”

  John stood up and stretched himself. He looked years older than he was; and the face was now of the same gray as the hair. “I suppose you’ll want a divorce.” He played with the heavy gold watch chain, to which were attached emblems of exclusive clubs and societies. He, too, was Porcellian, a gentleman.

  “I suppose so. Would you like one?” Caroline was amazed at the tone that each had managed to strike, a mutual lassitude, like guests at a dinner party that would never get off the ground.

  “Well, it’s for you, really, to decide. You see, I have no future.”

  “What makes you think I have one?”

  John gave a wan smile; and exhaled pale blue pipe-smoke with the words: “Heiresses cannot avoid having a future. It’s your fate. You will remarry.”

  “To whom?”

  “Emma’s father.”

  “Out of reach. For good.”

  “Kitty might die.…”

  For the first and last time in their marriage John astonished her. “How did you know?”

  “I have eyes, and Emma has his eyes, and Emma can talk now, and she speaks of his Sunday visits, with pleasure, too.”

  “You haven’t spied on me?” Caroline’s face felt unnaturally warm.

  “Why should I? It’s no business of mine. What business I ever had with you
is concluded, and yours with me.”

  “I trust,” said Caroline, rising from behind her rolltop desk, “you will always be a—lawyer to me.”

  “And you a client to me.” John smiled, and shook her hand, formally. “You know I did want to marry you, when you first came over. I mean really marry you.”

  Caroline felt a sudden strong emotion, which she could not identify. Was it loss? “I’m afraid that wasn’t meant to be, no fault of yours—though, perhaps, of mine. You see, I wanted to be all myself, but had no real self to be all, or even part of. I think I make no sense.” Caroline was suddenly flustered. It was not her way to speak so personally to anyone, even Jim.

  “Well, the key to your—brief,” John was dry, “was that it wasn’t meant to be, and that certainly proved to be the case. I helped you, and, God knows, you helped me. Shall I divorce you, or you me?”

  “Oh, divorce me!” Caroline had regained her poise. “For desertion, that’s fashionable now. In the Dakotas, which should be lovely in the summer.”

  “I shall notify you legally. Here.” To her amazement, he gave her his handkerchief; then he left. To her amazement, she found that she was weeping.

  – 3 –

  BLAISE sat at the edge of an artificial lake, and watched the swans sail back and forth, greedy eyes alert for food, predatory beaks ready to strike at any land-creature that moved within range. A perspective had been carefully arranged by an eighteenth-century gardener who believed that nature could only be revealed in its essential naturalness through total artifice. Trees of various sizes gave an odd sense of a huge park that extended to what looked to be a second larger lake, which was, actually, smaller than the first. Roses in full bloom made bonfires of color in the dim greenness. Blaise was content. If he had no inherent talent for marriage, Frederika had more than enough for two. With every show of amiability, she and Caroline had each taken over a wing of the chateau, and each kept to her wing unless invited by the other for a visit.