Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  But the next day, when Mr. Adams was indeed on hand, with John and Clara Hay, there was no opportunity to discuss anything in private except the fading away of John Hay, whose hair was now as white as his beard, the result, he said, still capable of his old humor, “of the waters of Bad Nauheim, which etiolate—my favorite word that I never get a chance to use—all things dark, not to mention false. Clara’s henna is all gone.”

  While Hay sat with Caroline in the sandstone thrones, Blaise and Frederika showed off the chateau, and even Henry Adams affected to be overwhelmed.

  Caroline had not had much experience with the dying. But one of her aunts had been something of a devotee of death-beds, and if she so much as heard of someone moribund within a hundred miles, she was on her way, in somber black with Bibles and prayer-books, with medicines to speed the terminal to terminus, and with cordials to assuage the survivors’ grief. “You can always tell when they’re about to pass on by a certain strong light in their eyes, just toward the end. Well, that’s the glory coming.” Late for a highly significant death-bed, the Sanford aunt had hurried down a flight of stairs, fallen, broken her neck; and so was robbed of her shining glory, so long awaited by her friends.

  But John Hay’s eyes were not in the least glorious. Rather, they were dull and glassy; he was also thinner and paler than he had been before the cure; but he had not lost interest in life, rather the reverse. He looked about him curiously. “I couldn’t imagine living in a poky house in Georgetown when you have all this. It even beats Cleveland.”

  “Well, the house is splendid but the company’s poky. So I stay on in Washington. Besides, we didn’t sort out the estate till this spring.”

  “Satisfactorily?” Hay gave her a shrewd look.

  Caroline nodded. “As satisfactory as anything ever is. Anyway, I like my new sister-in-law.”

  “I suppose you’ll get married again.”

  “You sound disapproving.” Caroline laughed. “But then I’m a divorcée. I’m told if I go to Cleveland, I shall be stoned to death …”

  “Only when taken, publicly, in adultery, by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. Oh, I shall miss this,” he said, with all sorts of resonance that tact required her not to explore.

  “You go on to London?”

  “Then Washington, then New Hampshire.”

  “Why Washington in the heat?”

  Hay sighed. “Theodore is there. Theodore is busy. When Theodore is busy, I feel constitutionally obliged to be on hand.”

  “The Russians?” Caroline could no longer forget, even in the company of the dying, that she was a journalist.

  “The Japanese, I should say. I’m so far removed from things. I have to read the foreign press with a sort of mental cypher-code to figure out what’s happening. Apparently, Theodore has been asked by the Japanese to arbitrate a peace treaty between them and Russia. But what is actually happening—if anything—I don’t know. Spencer Eddy—”

  “Surrenden Dering?”

  “The same. He’s posted in Petersburg. He came all the way to Bad Nauheim to tell me that Russia’s falling apart. It seems that the Tsar is a religious maniac, and so the thirty-five grand dukes are running the country, which is to say they create endless confusion. The workers are on strike. The students are on strike. Maybe Brooks is right, after all. They’ll have their French Revolution at last. Meanwhile, what government they have has instructed Eddy to tell me that they’d like a convention with us, and I had to tell him that, thanks to the Senate and dear Cabot, there is no way of getting such a treaty as long as any senator has one constituent who might object.”

  Adams joined them. He seemed immeasurably old to Caroline; yet, paradoxically, he never aged. He simply became more himself: the last embodiment of the original American republic. “I like your sister-in-law. She knows what not to show you on a tour of the house.”

  “There’s so much not to be seen. There is dry-rot …”

  “I think that’s what I’ve got.” Hay sighed. “I was finally examined by an austere Bavarian doctor who assured me, with touching Teutonic modesty, that he was the greatest expert on the heart in the world. As I believe everything I’m told, I said, ‘So what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You have a hole—or a bump,’ he was not consistent, ‘in your heart.’ When I asked why all the other great heart specialists had not noticed this hole or bump, he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t see it, or maybe they didn’t want to worry you.’ ‘Is it fatal?’ I asked. ‘Everything’s fatal,’ he said, with a confident smile. I must say he sort of grew on me. Anyway, he said he could delay the final rites, which, apparently, is a cinch for him.”

  “I hate doctors. I never go to one.” Adams was firm. “They make you sick. Anyway, you look no worse—and no better—for all the waters that have flowed through you …”

  “… and over me.” Hay stretched his arms. “I can’t wait to see Theodore, and tell him that I’ve been right all along about the Kaiser. Theodore thinks that because the Kaiser is, as Henry James says of Theodore, ‘the embodiment of noise,’ that he is mindless …”

  “Like Theodore himself?”

  “Now, Henry. Theodore has a mind that is chock-a-block with notions …”

  “Thoughts, too?”

  “Splendid thoughts. Anyway, the latest information is that the Kaiser, after pushing his stupid cousin, the Tsar, into declaring war on Japan, now realizes that Russia is too weak, even for his purposes, so he now is making frantic love to Japan, and to Theodore, too.”

  “They are made for each other.”

  “Not yet. But the Kaiser has a plan. Would to God I could go to Berlin to see him. He may be a reckless orator but he is a cold-calculator.”

  Two menservants appeared, pushing a tea-table; and the croquet players joined them. Frederika did the honors, while Caroline and Clara walked beside the lake, keeping a careful distance from the swans. “He seems better.” Caroline could think of nothing else to say on that subject.

  Clara was now huge, even monumental; her manner, as always, secure, declamatory. “He could live another year. Maybe more, if only he would leave Washington.”

  “He won’t?”

  “Not yet. We go to London, incognito, June second. Then we sail on the Baltic. Then he insists on going back to the State Department before we go on to New Hampshire. He does not trust Theodore.” Clara exhorted a willow tree’s reflection in the lake.

  “Perhaps it’s best, to keep on, till …” Caroline did not finish.

  “I wonder about you and Del.” Clara spoke for the first time to Caroline about her son. “I’m not sure—now—it would’ve been for the best.”

  “We’ll never know, will we?”

  “No. We never will. It’s when I see all this, I realize you are foreign. He was not.”

  “I’m both. Or, maybe, neither.” Caroline was amused that Clara was still making censorious divisions between what was foreign, and probably bad, and what was American and entirely good. “At least I don’t publish the Tribune in French.”

  Clara smiled, as she always did when she suspected that someone had made a joke. “Do you and Blaise get on?”

  “We do now. We probably won’t in the future.” Caroline was surprised, as always, when she said what she actually thought.

  “That’s my impression, too. The girl’s nice. But he does want to be like Mr. Hearst …”

  “No more than I do …”

  “Caroline! You are a lady.”

  “But foreign.”

  “Even so, you could never want to be like that dreadful man. Henry James returned our latch-key.” Clara’s mind was so constituted that she could make the leap from yellow journalism to the fact that Henry James, who had gone off with the key to the front door of the Hay house, had returned it; and make the non sequitur seem part of some significant whole, which perhaps it was, ungrasped by Caroline, who suddenly recalled her discussion of keys with Blaise, both real and metaphysical.

  “Will you see Mr. James in London?”
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  “If we have the chance. I don’t want John to see anyone except old friends. But the King insists. So we go to Buckingham Palace.”

  “The King is political.”

  “He likes John. I said, No food! The King eats for hours. We shall stay exactly one half hour, I said, no longer.” The two women sat on a bench, and watched the others at tea. Adams was walking up and down excitedly, a good sign. Hay sat huddled in his throne, a study in gray and white. Blaise sat on the edge of his chair like an attentive schoolboy. “Divorce still shocks me.” Clara hurled the commandment down the length of her figure, which even seated suggested Mount Sinai.

  “We were never really married.” Caroline started to tell the truth, but then, not wanting to spend the rest of her life in France, she told not the truth but something true. “I was alone, after Del died. So I married a cousin for—protection.” Caroline hoped that she could successfully portray herself as helpless.

  She could not, to Clara, at least. “I know.” She was peremptory. “Rebound. From grief. Even so, one might have waited until there was not a cousin but a true husband.”

  “That’s all past. I’m alone now, and quite content. There’s Emma. What,” asked Caroline, imitating the manner of Clara, the non sequitur without ellipsis, “ever became of Clarence King’s children by the Negress?”

  Clara blushed. Caroline knew victory. “They are still in Canada, I think. John and Henry help out. They tell me nothing, and I never ask.” Clara rose, ending the subject. Attended by Caroline, the mountain returned to the tea-table.

  Hay was describing his meeting with the French foreign minister. “I was expressly forbidden by the President to speak to him, since I hadn’t first seen the Kaiser. But I, too, must be allowed my diplomacy. All the troubles in Morocco—no, not Perdicaris, not Raisuli …”

  “Spare us your high drama.” Adams ceased pacing and sat in a chair too large for him. The two tiny glittering black patent-leather shoes were an inch from the ground.

  “… are coming to a head, and the Kaiser is imposing himself on the French, and threatens to go to Morocco himself to take it away from them. Poor Delcassé is filled with gloom. With Russia on the verge of a revolution, the Kaiser has the only important army in Europe. The French don’t breed enough, he complained, and the English army is too small, so the Kaiser can do as he pleases, unless Theodore puts down his great boot …”

  “Stick, isn’t it?” Adams interjected. “The one he says he carries when he speaks with a soft voice. The reverse, of course, is the case. He bellows, and there is no stick at all.”

  “A large navy, Henry, is a big stick …”

  “When war comes in Europe, it will be on land, and it will be won by land armies, and that will be Germany’s last chance to be king of the mountain.”

  “We,” Clara said the last word, “will stay out.”

  As the perfect day ended with a golden light breaking through the leaves of the west park, Caroline and Blaise and Frederika saw the last of the Hearts into their motor cars. Adams was off to join the Lodges, “part of my secret diplomacy to keep Cabot from John’s throat.” Caroline remembered too late that she had not mentioned to Adams the fragments of Aaron Burr’s memoirs. Fortunately, from the healthy look of him, there would be time during the winter in Washington.

  “You must come see us at Sunapee.” Hay took Caroline’s hand; she almost recoiled from the coldness of his touch.

  “I’ll come in July.”

  “Come for the Fourth. We will all be there.” Clara kissed Caroline’s cheek. Then they were gone.

  The young trio regarded the departure of the old trio with, on Caroline’s side, considerable regret. “They are the last,” she said.

  “Last of what?” Frederika gazed bemusedly at her, hair suddenly dark gold in the slanting light.

  “Last—believers.”

  “In what?” Blaise turned to go inside.

  “In … Hearts.”

  “I believe in hearts.” Frederika had misunderstood. “Don’t you, Caroline?”

  “I meant something else by Hearts, and what they were, and tried to be, made them different from us.”

  “They aren’t different from us.” Blaise was final. “Except that they are old, and we aren’t. Yet.”

  – 5 –

  JOHAN HAY sat in a rocking chair on the verandah of The Fells and stared across the green New Hampshire lawn to the gray New Hampshire mountains with Lake Winnepesaukee between, so much flat shining water that reflected the deep clear blue summer sky. Exhaustion did not describe his condition. He had returned on June 15, and after a day at Manhasset with Helen, he had gone on to Washington, despite firm instructions from the President to go home. For a week in the damp heat of the tropical capital, he had done the business of his department, and plotted with Theodore on how—and where—to get the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He had found Theodore more than ever regnant, and the mammoth Taft apparently indispensable. The last bit of business that they had set in motion was to put an end to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which earlier administrations had used to keep the Chinese from immigrating to the United States. With the rise of Japan, paradoxically, the Yellow Peril must be put to rest as a means for politicians to frighten the people.

  The house in Washington was depressing, with white sheets over everything, closed shutters and windows, and a musty smell. Clarence, now grown and amiable if not brilliant, kept him company, and together they had left the city on June 24 for Newbury, on the overnight sleeper, where Hay had caught his inevitable sleeper-cold. Today he was better; but mortally tired. He had also developed a habit of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, and dreaming vividly; then he’d wake up, disoriented, with the sensation, yet again, of being, simultaneously, in two places, even two epochs of time. But now Clarence sat beside him in a noisy rocker, made noisier by the instinct of the young to rock vigorously, while that of the old is to be rocked gently.

  “Of course, I’ve been lucky.” Hay stared at the sky. “There must be a kind of law. For every bit of bad luck Clarence King—for whom we named you—had, I got a prize. He wanted to make a fortune, and lost everything ten times over. I didn’t care one way or another, and everything I did, just about, made me rich, even if I hadn’t married an heiress.” Hay wondered if this was entirely true. When he had worked for Amasa Stone, he had been drilled thoroughly in business. Of course, he had been an apt student, but without Stone’s coaching he might have ended up as just another newspaper editor, earning extra money on the lecture-circuit.

  “I’ve never really been sick till now, or, as old Shylock says, ‘never felt it till now.’ The family’s turned out better than I ever had any right to hope,” He turned and gazed at the attentive Clarence. “I’d go to law school, if I were you. Also, don’t marry young. It’s a mistake for a boy to tie himself up—or down—too young.”

  “I’ve no intention,” said Clarence.

  “Good boy. Poor Del.” Hay’s chest seemed to constrict a moment; and his breath stopped. But, for once, there was no sense of panic. Either he would breathe again, or he would not, and that was that. He breathed; he sighed. “But Del’s life was splendid for someone so young. We got used to that, my generation, to dying young. Just about everybody I knew my age was killed in that terrible trouble. Name me a battle, and I can tell you which of my friends fell there, some never to rise again. Say Fredericksburg and I see Johnny Curtis of Springfield, his face blown away. Say …” But already Hay was beginning to forget both battles and youths. Things had begun to fade; past, present mingled.

  “I thought I’d die young, and here I am. I thought I wouldn’t amount to much and … I really believe that in all history, I never read of a man who has had so much—and such varied—success as I have had, with so little ability and so little power of sustained industry. Nothing to be proud of. Something to be grateful for.” Hay looked at Clarence, thoughtfully, and was somewhat surprised—and mildly irritated—to
find him reading a stack of letters.

  “You’re busy, I see.” Hay struck the sardonic note.

  “You should be, too.” Clarence did not look up. As he finished reading a letter, he would let it fall to the floor of the verandah, in two piles. Obviously one pile was to be answered; the other not. Who used to do that? Hay wondered. Then he thought of himself again, soon to be no self at all, and he wondered why he had been he and not another, why he had been at all and not simply nothing. “I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood,” he proclaimed. But that was not true. The poet John Hay, heir to Milton and Poe, had come to nothing but a pair of very “Little Breeches.” “My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualifications.” Who had said that that was the only proof of fame, as opposed to notoriety? It sounded like Root, but Hay had forgotten.

  Hay turned to Clarence, who was now on his feet. For the first time Hay noticed that the boy had grown a long pointed beard, not the style of the young these days. He must tell him, tactfully, that when the summer was over he must face the world clean-shaven.

  “The President wants to see you,” said Clarence.

  Hay leapt—to his own amazement—to his feet, and crossed the crowded corridor to the President’s office. Obviously he had been dreaming of New Hampshire while napping in the White House, awaiting Theodore’s summons. The Japanese …

  In the office, Hay found the President staring out the window at the Potomac, and blue Virginia beyond. The President was hunched over, and was unlike his usual exuberant noisy self. Over the fireplace, the portrait of Jackson glowered at the world.

  “Sit down, John.” The familiar high voice sounded deathly tired. “I’m sorry you’ve been sick.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” and Hay realized that he had made a mistake in hurrying so quickly across the corridor. Exhausted, he sat in the special visitor’s chair with all the maps of battle in full view, and a yellow curtain ready to cover them up, if the visitor was not to be trusted.