Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  The state rooms were held in common, under the jurisdiction of the butler, who was also, in effect, the estate manager. M. Brissac had been at the chateau for thirty years; it was he who hired and fired and stole discreetly; it was he who had known both Mrs. Sanfords, and never had a word of the slightest interest to say about either. Now the old man approached Blaise from the central part of the chateau, an astonishing creation of rose-red brick, high mansard windows, gilded ironwork, and chimneys like so many monuments to Saint-Simon’s beloved peers of France.

  Brissac bowed low, and presented Blaise with a telegram, which he opened: “Millicent and I and four others will come to lunch May 30. Hearst.”

  It was typical of the Chief to give only a day’s notice. As Blaise gave orders to M. Brissac, Caroline and Emma appeared from the woods. They looked like figures on a Watteau fan, thought Blaise, once again thinking not only in French but with French malice, as he noted to himself that this fan could not be shut.

  Emma ran forward to her uncle, who picked her up, and listened to her chatter in a combination of French and English. She had her grandmother’s complexion, hair.

  “The Chief arrives tomorrow. For lunch. With four lords-in-waiting.”

  “He does us honor.” Caroline sat in one of the curious carved sandstone thrones that the builder of the chateau, in a frenzy of premature pharaonism, had sculpted beside the lake. “With the beautiful Millicent?”

  Blaise nodded. “He’s very respectable now. He expects to be elected mayor of New York in the fall.”

  “Poor man. But I suppose it will give him something to do. Frederika fits in very well.”

  Blaise was mildly disappointed that wife and half-sister got on so well. But then Caroline had known Frederika longer than he. “She has discouraged Mrs. Bingham,” he said, giving pleasure.

  “She would not fit in.” Caroline put out her hand. “The key.”

  “To what?”

  “Father’s desk. I want to read Grandfather Schuyler’s memoirs, or whatever they are.”

  “The desk’s open. They are in two leather-bound boxes.”

  “Have you read them?”

  “I don’t like the past.”

  “That’s where the key is. If there’s one, of course. Come on, Emma.”

  As Caroline collected her child, Blaise said, “Why did you divorce?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s very American of you.”

  “I am very American. Anyway, I wasn’t married in the church. It doesn’t count, really—for us, anyway. It’s just a legal convenience. Just another key, to just another lock.”

  Blaise was still mystified by the whole affair. “Was John with … someone else?”

  Caroline’s laugh dispelled any suspicion along that line. “I wish he were.”

  “Are you?” Blaise was convinced that Caroline had, for some time, been having an affair, but she was even more guarded than he about her life. He assumed that the man was married; otherwise, now that she was divorced, she would have been free at least to mention if not marry him. Blaise did not rule out a passionate liaison with a lady: Mlle. Souvestre’s powerful example was a fact of their world. But Washington seemed hardly the setting for so Parisian an activity.

  “I wish I were.” Caroline echoed herself and was gone.

  Blaise found the Chief rather less phlegmatic than usual. He had gained so much weight that had he been shorter he might have presented to the world a comforting McKinley-esque rotundity. But because of his height, the result was more ursine-menacing than McKinley-majestic. The two couples with the Hearsts were part of his publishing life. “I’ve just bought Cosmopolitan magazine,” he said, as Blaise showed him through the suite of state apartments.

  The Chief stopped at every painting, sculpture, tapestry, console. Blaise was pleased at the Chief’s awe. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hearst said, as they entered the grand salon, where windows opened onto the vista of lakes and forests, “outside of a royal palace or something. Those tapestries Gobelins?”

  “Early Aubusson. It was my father’s hobby, fixing up this place. When he bought it, in the seventies, it was a ruin.” Behind them Frederika was hostess to Millicent, whose moon face shone with pleasure, as she said in her tough New York Irish accent, “Don’t sell a stick of furniture to Willy, or he’ll buy it all and put us in the poorhouse.”

  “Warehouse is more like it.” Hearst enjoyed talk of his mania for acquiring everything on earth—including Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. “You’re not thinking about selling, are you?”

  “Never,” said Caroline, making a grand entrance on Plon’s arm. “We’re home at last.”

  After lunch, Blaise and Hearst walked together by the lake. “I want to know about Willie Winfield.” Blaise was direct.

  Hearst stopped in mid-stride. For an instant, Blaise was struck by the incongruity of the splendid seventeenth-century façade behind them, the swans and topiary and pale statues before them, and the American political squalor that was their all-consuming subject. Of course, the great duke who had built the chateau had been a notorious thief; on the other hand, he had spent his stolen money with a splendor yet to be rivalled on Fifth Avenue or even Newport’s Ochre Point. “How do you know him?”

  Blaise was cool. “He came to me, at the Tribune. He said he had been stealing letters from Mr. Archbold and that he’d taken them round to one of your editors at the American, and the editor would photograph them. Then you paid, he said.”

  Hearst scowled down at Blaise. “You paid, too.” A statement, not a question.

  Blaise smiled. “Not for the same letters, unfortunately. I bought a part of the first half of the 1904 letterbook.”

  “I didn’t buy that one.” Hearst sat in one of the sandstone thrones. In the distance Caroline and Frederika were playing croquet with the guests, the ladies’ clothes almost as bright as the tall roses, all around them. Emma had been borne off to her nap.

  “I thought we had enough. We got Foraker for good. You know, I’ve been pushing him for the Republican nomination. Then, just before the election, if he’s nominated, of course, I’ll spring the stuff. Now,” the Chief looked at Blaise sadly, “you can do the same thing, tomorrow morning, and someone else will get the nomination …”

  “Someone who won’t have written Archbold any letters?”

  Hearst nodded. “Like Root or Taft. Neither one’s in the file, so far’s I can tell. But all the small fry and a lot of the big-time politicals are being paid off. So what are you going to do?” Although Hearst’s physiognomy did not allow for displays of indecision or apprehension, the weak voice was suddenly, oddly tremulous. Apparently, Hearst was basing a considerable political strategy on the release—or withholding at a price—of the letters in 1908.

  “We could work something out.” Blaise was by no means certain what, if anything, he himself could do with them. Hearst was capable of anything: he was Hearst. But a Sanford, though not so well-defined, could hardly publish stolen letters unless they were used as background, say, to an investigation of one of Rockefeller’s judges. Standard Oil had the same proprietary feeling about judges that Blaise’s mother-in-law had about members of Congress, only Standard Oil paid large sums of money to make sure that the judges would always rule in their favor. In fact, most of the letters from politicians dealt not so much with pro-Standard Oil legislation as with judicial appointments. From the look of one letterbook, Archbold’s web of bought officials ranged from city halls to governors’ mansions to Congress and the appropriate courts and, finally, to the White House. But Blaise had been disappointed in the one letter to Archbold from Theodore Roosevelt. The letter could have meant anything, or everything, or nothing.

  “I don’t think I have any use for the letters.”

  Hearst’s physiognomy could not betray relief either; he stared blankly at Blaise, who said, “I don’t think that the Tribune, as a Washington paper, should get too mixed up in these things. If there’s a crusade f
or good government again, we might join in. Or Caroline might. I’m happy with bad government.”

  “You’re in, like it or not. There’s no alternative.” Hearst was flat. “You’ll sit on the letters?”

  “I think so.” But Blaise intended to keep Hearst in suspense as long as possible. “I’m only interested in one letter, one politician …”

  “Roosevelt?”

  Blaise nodded. “The letter I bought can only be interpreted in its proper context. Well, I don’t know the context. Do you?”

  Hearst hummed, in his usual high off-key voice, a few bars of “Everybody Works but Father,” the year’s popular song. Blaise was grateful there was no banjo to accompany that chilling voice. “I’ll tell you what I guess the context is. Hanna was in deep with Rockefeller. So was Quay. My letters are full of them. But then everyone knows about them, anyway. They got money from Rockefeller, from everybody, for the Republican Party, for Roosevelt, for themselves.”

  “For him, personally?”

  Hearst shrugged. “I don’t think he’s that big a fool. But he’s got to have money so he can go round the country at election time, attacking the trusts that are paying for his train. When was your letter dated?”

  “Last summer. After he was nominated.”

  “Well, that makes no sense. But then, Hanna and Quay are dead. So he’s got nobody with the nerve to go to old Rockefeller, or even Archbold, and say, ‘Give me half a million for the campaign, and I’ll go easy on you.’ I expect that when he wrote Archbold, he was fishing.”

  “Did he catch anything?”

  Hearst’s thin smile was slow and genuine. “It doesn’t make any difference if he did or didn’t, does it? I mean, it’s the way the thing looks that matters. You could make the case as to how Roosevelt’s managers have always been on the take from Standard Oil, then, by the time you get around to his being in touch with Archbold, when he was desperate, trying to raise money from Morgan and Frick and Harriman, everyone will believe Teddy’s on the take, too, which, I suspect, he is.”

  Ignobly, Blaise wondered how he could put together this story before Hearst did. Obviously, he could not unless he knew the contents of Hearst’s letters, all written before 1904. “I suppose you’ll use this when Roosevelt does something that favors Standard Oil, if he does.”

  Hearst shook his head. “I’ll use what I’ve got—or not use it—in connection with my own campaign in 1908.”

  Blaise did not use to himself the word “blackmail,” but that was indeed the Chief’s intention. As the owner of eight popular newspapers and the Archbold letters, he could make the leaders of the republic leap through any hoop of his choice. “There’s one more detail you should know,” said Hearst. “John D. Archbold is an old personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt.”

  “That is something.”

  “That is something.”

  “If,” said Blaise, doing his best not to sound eager, “you were to publish these letters, what excuse would you give, for having stolen them …?”

  Hearst attempted another chorus of “Everyone Works,” with invented words. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t say I’d stolen them. They came to my attention, that’s all. Then I’d also say that I do not consider that letters written to public men on matters affecting the public interest and threatening the public welfare are ever private letters.” At that moment, Blaise realized that Hearst might yet become president and, if he did, he might surprise everyone; in what way, of course, it was hard to tell.

  – 4 –

  CAROLINE sat at the large marquetry table, said to have been the very one that the Duke had used when he was the controller of the royal revenues, and opened the two letter-boxes. The first contained fragments of Aaron Burr’s autobiography, with a commentary by his law-clerk Charles Schemerhorn Schuyler. She glanced through the pages, and decided that Henry Adams, if no one else, would be fascinated. She skipped to the end of the book, written years after Burr’s death, and read what she already knew, of her grandfather’s accidental discovery that he was one of Burr’s numerous illegitimate children.

  The second leather box was a final journal by her grandfather, covering the year 1876. He had returned to New York for the first time since 1836, with his daughter, Emma, the Princesse d’Agrigente. This was the volume that she intended to read carefully.

  Once the Hearst party had left, Caroline spent every moment that she could reading her grandfather’s journal. She was charmed by his amusement at the strange American world, fascinated by his description of her mother’s campaign to find a wealthy husband, the object of the visit, appalled at her grandfather’s cynical complaisance. But then father and daughter were broke, and he was just able to support the two of them by writing for the magazines. Fortunately, Mrs. Astor took them up; and they were in demand socially, thanks to Emma’s beauty, and her father’s charm. At one point, Emma had almost married an Apgar cousin, for convenience, something her daughter had actually done.

  As Caroline read on, she began to see something alter in Emma’s character—alter or be revealed to the reader, Caroline, but not to the narrator, who seemed unable to understand the thrust of his own narrative. Sanford made his entrance, with wife Denise, who could not give birth without danger. As Denise and Emma became closer and closer friends, Caroline found that her fingers were suddenly so cold that she could hardly, clumsily, turn the pages. Caroline knew the end before the end. Emma persuaded Denise to give birth to Blaise. In effect, Emma murdered Denise in order to marry Sanford.

  Emma’s expiation was the long painful time she took to die after Caroline’s birth. But did Emma feel guilt? Did she atone? Confess?

  Caroline sent for Plon. It was late afternoon. She wanted to talk to Emma’s oldest son while the—crime was still vivid in her mind. Plon sprawled handsomely on a sofa. Caroline told him what their mother had done. At the end, somewhat dramatically, she held up the journal and waved it in the air; told him of the murder. “Brûlez,” Plon read from the cover. “That’s what you should have done, you idiot! Burn it. What difference does any of this make now?”

  “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  Plon shrugged. “I thought something had happened.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did she seem tragic or sad or—dark?”

  “She was adorable, as always, even at the end, when there was pain.”

  “Did she make confession, to a priest?”

  “She was given the last rites. She was conscious. I suppose she did.”

  Plon lit a cigarette from a new gold case. “You know, when someone becomes emperor of the French, and conquers all Europe, he doesn’t brood much about the people he killed.”

  “But she was a woman, and a mother, not emperor of the French …”

  “You don’t know how—I don’t know how—she saw herself. She had to survive, and if the sad lady, her friend, Blaise’s mother, must die, naturally, in childbirth, then die she must.”

  The next morning, Caroline invited Blaise to breakfast in her wing of the chateau. He knew why. Plon had told him. They sat in an oval breakfast room, with du Barry dove-gray walls. “Now you know,” he said, casually, “that your mother killed my mother for our father’s money. I’m sure it happens all the time.”

  “Don’t be—don’t make a joke of it. Now I know why your grandmother was so insistent with me. I am to expiate …”

  “You? Don’t exaggerate your importance. You weren’t even there. I, at least, was the direct cause of my mother’s death.”

  “I think these things go on, into the next generation, and further, maybe.”

  “You! The atheist from Mlle. Souvestre’s stable.” Blaise laughed into his omelette.

  “Atheists believe in character, and I certainly believe in cause and effect, and consequence.”

  “The consequence is that you and I are still fairly young by the standards of our world and very rich by any standard. This isn’t th
e house of Artois.”

  “Atreus.” She corrected him from force of habit. “Plon sounded as if he would have done the same.”

  “I doubt it. Men are never as cruel as women when it comes to this sort of thing. Look at your dismissal of John. That was very Emma-esque. I couldn’t have done that.”

  Caroline felt a chill in the room, which turned out to be not a ghost but a sudden cold wind from the lake; a summer storm was on its way. Blaise closed the window. “You prove my point then,” she said. “The old crime.”

  “Don’t be carried away. Think of all the new crimes we can commit. Let poor Emma rest in peace. I have never, once, thought of Denise. Why should you think of Emma, who, according to Plon, except for one nicely executed murder, was delightful, as a woman, and admirable as a mother?”

  “You are immoral, Blaise.” Caroline wanted to be shocked; but felt nothing at all.

  “I never said I wasn’t. I’m indifferent. You remember our last night in New York, at Rector’s? when you were so shocked by the way the whole room sang that song?—well, I was thrilled because I was just like the singers of that song.”

  Caroline shuddered at the memory. The latest Victor Herbert musical contained a highly minatory song called “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” On the night that she and Blaise came, as it were, full circle, in their knowledge of each other, they had dined at Rector’s, and when the singer from the musical comedy entered the restaurant, he boomed out, “I want …” and the entire restaurant took up the chorus, and on the word “want” everyone banged a fist on the table. It was like a war being conducted by very fat people against—the waiters? or everyone on earth who was not as fat or as rich as they? “So Emma was right, to want what she wanted?”

  “You have only one chance sometimes. Anyway, what she wanted,” Blaise brought down his fist on the table, and Caroline jumped in her chair, “she got, and that’s what counts, and because she did, you’re here.”

  So, in the end, Caroline, the successful American publisher, was not the acclimatized American that her brother, her appendage, was. She wished Mr. Adams was on hand, to delight in the irony.