by Gore Vidal
“As in the case of Mr. Hamlin?” Adams was mischievous.
“He kept his word; and let Mr. Hamlin pick the New England Cabinet officer. Was your father … displeased?”
“My father is never displeased. He is, also, never pleased.”
“I hope he gets the London post.”
Adams shrugged. “As I said at Willard’s, this is the place to be. London is simply our hereditary post.”
“Like the presidency?” Hay was mischievous, too. It was hard to realize that this small young man was grandson and great-grandson of two presidents.
“Oh, don’t get me on that subject! If my father does not go to London, I think I’ll stay here as …” He paused.
“As what?”
Adams sighed. “I suppose a … journalist. That’s all I’m suited for, really. I simply want to observe the world’s grandest zoo.” Adams drifted off.
In due course, the shaking of hands came to an end, while M. Gautier’s feast came to an end in a matter of minutes, as did the Goddess of Peace herself. Hay overheard two journalists comparing notes. “What did old Abe say to you that made everybody laugh?” asked one.
“When I asked him if he had any message for Mr. Bennett of the New York Herald, he said, ‘Tell him that Mr. Weed now knows that Seward was not nominated at Chicago.’ ” They laughed; moved on.
Hay stationed himself at the entrance to the ballroom as Scala’s Marine Band struck up “Hail to the Chief” and Lincoln entered the ballroom on the arm not of his wife but of the mayor of Washington. Despite the fatigue of the day, Hay thought that Lincoln looked moderately tickled by this incongruity. Behind Lincoln, Mary made her entrance on the arm of Senator Stephen Douglas, whose large face was dulled by an unhealthy pallor. There was applause as the political symbolism of this pairing was duly noted: the chief of the northern Democratic Party was now as one with his ancient rival the new Republican President.
As Madam swept by Hay, he saw in her bright, round face a rare and perfect happiness. She was on the arm of the man she might have married; and she was the wife of the President whom she did marry. There will never be such a night, thought Hay, yielding to that melodrama he had learned from Mr. Poe—and melancholy, too.
Lincoln stationed himself at one end of the room and watched the dancing with benevolence—at least, with one benevolent eye, for the lid of the left was beginning to fall. Hay danced waltzes, a quadrille, a polka, even a square dance; and worked up a good sweat. But when he saw the President slip away just before twelve-thirty, Hay also left. In the courtroom, he joined several dozen furious men in the search for coats and hats. After half an hour, he found only his hat, and abandoned the search.
Hay walked from City Hall to Pennsylvania Avenue, which he crossed. On the south side, Marble Alley ran a short distance between Pennsylvania and Missouri avenues, not far from the odiferous canal. The night was chilly and he regretted the loss of his coat as the sweat on his body turned icy; but the thought of earthly pleasures to come made bearable the chill. The avenue was filled with carriages and hacks waiting to take home the revellers. There were also ominous sounds of “Dixie” being sung in dark barrooms; while in the side streets gangs of fierce-looking young men staggered about drunkenly—how drunkenly, he could not help but wonder. In future, he decided, he would carry a gun. Luckily, tonight, the Federal police—some fifty strong—were all in the area between the City Hall and the White House, while good General Scott had every soldier within a hundred miles of the city stationed in Washington this night. From the Long Bridge to the Capitol to the White House, the troops stood guard.
The previous night, Hay had gone to the Wolf’s Den, an agreeable house kept by the eponymous Mrs. Wolf; she had been most agreeable, but far too talkative. “Everyone of distinction comes to me,” she said. She named senators by name until Hay began to grow uneasy; and once he had had his passage-at-arms, as he liked to think of these venereal encounters, he had left, with no intention of returning. He did not want his name added to her glittering list. Meanwhile, he had made casual inquiries in the bar at Willard’s and, of the lot, Sal Austin had been most highly praised for discretion as well as for the richness of her waiting rooms, for the comfort of her bedrooms, for the variety of her food and drink, and, finally, for the marvelous choice of girls. “There is even,” said a knowledgeable youth, “a doctor who comes twice a week to see if they are free from pox.” Brandy-snifters were raised to Sal Austin.
Now Hay stood in front of a dark building in a dark alley where a number of restless pigs slept in a cluster near a pile of garbage, like applicants for political office. After a single deep breath, Hay rapped on the door. A mulatto butler opened the door a crack, took in Hay’s evening clothes with practised eye, smiled and bowed and said, “This way, sir.”
There was a small vestibule with a narrow staircase, covered in red velvet held in place by golden rods, making ascent and descent agreeably silent. To the left and the right of the vestibule were parlors, elaborately furnished with mahogany and walnut; red plush predominated in the left parlor and royal purple at the right. Voices could be heard from both rooms, decorous men’s voices, carefully modulated female voices. The butler motioned for Hay to remain at the foot of the stairs while he went into the red parlor, returning a moment later with a tall, grave woman in her forties. She was dressed in black, like a widow. Although she wore no makeup, her most elaborately arranged hair was as glossy as a chestnut. She came forward, graciously, and extended her right arm, almost as if she expected the hand or the huge diamond ring on her second finger to be kissed. Hay shook the hand, grinning stupidly, as she said in a low gentle voice, “I am Mrs. Austin.”
“Yes, I know,” he said; stupidity had plainly gone to his head. “I mean, I was told of you. By friends.”
“Of course. Do come in and let us have a talk.” She was about to lead Hay into the red parlor when he pulled back. She looked surprised; then, to his relief and delight, she got the point. “Come to my office.” She led him to the back of the vestibule, where a small door led into a large study with a second door to the outside.
In a businesslike way, Sal sat at a rolltop desk and indicated that he sit beside her. “The advantage of this office—for certain visitors, that is—is the door to the backyard, which is over there. Then,” she pointed to a third door, “you can go through that door into what I call the alcove. It is at the back of the purple parlor. There, through a charming lattice in the Persian style, you can see what goes on in the parlor, and not be seen yourself. Then when you have observed someone who intrigues you, Chester, the butler, will arrange for you to meet her in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, which can be reached by the back stairs.”
“I was told that you were the best.” Hay was filled with admiration.
“I am,” said Sal. “But accidents have been known to happen even here. So, I would appreciate it if you’d give me a day’s notice as to the exact hour of your arrival. That way I can see to it that the alcove will be empty. There is nothing more embarrassing than to have two … friends meet on such a private occasion. Sherry?” she asked, picking up a crystal decanter on her desk. He nodded; she poured each a glass. As they raised the glasses to each other, Sal said, “In order for me to be entirely on the safe side, I should know which you are—Mr. Nicolay or Mr. Hay?”
Hay nearly inhaled the sherry. “What makes you think …?” he stammered.
Sal was motherly. “We all know that Mr. Lincoln—I am Union, by the way, but many of the girls are not, I must warn you—brought two young men with him. Three, counting his son. But you’re too old to be the son and too young to be anyone else except—Mr. Hay?”
Hay nodded. “You see, Mr. Nicolay is engaged to be married,” he said, with bright stupidity.
“I accept this intelligence in the spirit with which it is proffered but I do not actually seize, as it were, your point.”
Hay was now convinced that he was not made for the world of the de
mimonde. “Oh, I was just commenting on the fact that Mr. Nicolay’s bride-to-be was supposed to come to Washington for the inaugural, but she could not get away. That is why, ordinarily, he would be not here but with her tonight.”
“That is very modem,” said Sal. “I am not entirely sure that I approve. In my day, a young man and woman were chaste until their wedding night. I continue to think that this is a worthy custom of our race.”
Hay gulped down the rest of the sherry, conscious that he was making a fool of himself. But Sal rose to the occasion. “I misunderstood.” Sal got to her feet. “Now I shall show you to the alcove. But you will have only thirty minutes to choose because someone else—not actually engaged, I fear, but securely married—will be arriving.”
“You’re very kind,” said Hay, feeling as if he were reliving that first time in Providence all over again.
Sal opened the door to the alcove, which was done in the same royal purple plush as the rest of the parlor. Divans were placed on two sides, while the third was filled by a carved teakwood buffet, covered with food both cold and hot, and numerous bottles. Through the “Persian latticework” he could indeed see everything that was going on in the parlor.
“When you espy what you want,” said Sal, “tug this cord.” She indicated a purple velvet bellpull against the wall. “Chester will come and act as Cupid.”
“I could not have found a more amiable Venus,” said Hay, rallying.
“I think,” said Sal, “that, mythically, I am closer to Minerva.” With a smile, she was gone.
Hay poured himself a goblet of brandy; tore off the leg of a guinea hen; squatted on a chair and peered through the lattice. The parlor was divided by potted plants into four separate sitting areas, each providing a degree of privacy. He recognized a face or two of men who had been at the Union Ball, but could attach no names to any of them. Elegantly dressed waiter-girls, as they were euphemistically called, poured wine, carried trays of cocktails or, simply, bottles of bourbon to the customers, who sat about, for the most part, like club members, well acquainted with the rules of the house and the inmates. Chester and two elderly black women presided over the inevitable buffet. People ate quite a lot at Washington, thought Hay, suddenly very hungry himself. Over the last few days, the succession of mammoth meals at Willard’s had gradually taken away an appetite that was only now coming back.
Hay had started in on the boned turkey when he saw his destiny, as he liked to think of whatever girl caught his fancy. She was tall, slender of waist, high of bosom; she wore yellow watered silk that set off her black hair and eyes and café-au-lait skin. She was a mulatto; and Hay had never before crossed even this less-than-precisely drawn color line. Hay rang for Chester, who arrived, smiling. “Marie-Jeanne is a delightful creature, young master.” Either Chester or Sal had decided that it might enhance the magic of these parlors in this most Southern of cities to act as if the entire provenance had been changed to New Orleans in an earlier part of the century. As Hay ran three steps at a time up the back stairs, he was glad that he was not an out-and-out abolitionist and so able, in good faith, to enjoy the play-acting.
Marie-Jeanne received him in the bedroom assigned. She was filling two glasses with champagne. “Good evening,” she said; and smiled; she had good teeth. “Have some Widow.”
“Hello …, Marie-Jeanne?” Hay was not certain of the etiquette. But she took charge; gave him Veuve Clicquot—known familiarly as the Widow to Sal’s clients and employees.
“You’re French?” Hay made conversation rather more awkwardly than he might have done with even the fiercest governor’s fierce wife.
“Well, somewhere in the past, in Port-au-Prince, to be exact, there was very definitely a Frenchman. You’re new to town?”
Hay nodded, pleased that Sal had kept his secret. If the girl knew who he was she would not have asked. “I’m going to be at the Treasury. As a clerk,” Hay enjoyed lying to strangers, inventing a new personality, complete with such eccentric details as: “My mother came to live here while I was up north at school. She was an opera singer until she broke her hip in Paris. Now she’s in a wheelchair, in O Street in Georgetown. She gives singing lessons.” During this inspired, Hay thought, aria, he had slipped his arm around Marie-Jeanne, and pulled her back onto the divan. With a smile, she undressed him, to his pleased surprise; usually, he fell upon such girls with a lion’s roar and tore their garments, but now, out of respect for his invalid mother—should he give “Mother” a glass eye? No, that was too much—he was passive as she stripped away his clothes. Then, lowering the gas lamp to a mysterious harvest moon glow, she, too, undressed. The body was as marvelous as he had ever experienced, even in Chicago during the recent convention, much less Providence, Rhode Island.
As they lay, side by side, on the bed, he now pleasantly exhausted and she smiling and attentive, he thought that this was just what a poet should do, preferably several times a day. Hay caressed her pale-brown skin, and wondered if anything so beautiful had ever come Poe’s way. Actually, if what his poetess friend who had known Poe said was true, Marie-Jeanne was a bit old for the lover of Annabel Lee.
To Hay’s astonishment, Marie-Jeanne was thinking along the same lines. As she ran her hand across his smooth chest, she said, “You’re younger than I am.”
“Oh?” Hay looked down at himself. For some time, he had thought of himself as a nicely finished mature male in excellent working order. Now he wondered if, perhaps, he still looked too boyish. Should he be covered with more hair? or grow a moustache?
Marie-Jeanne quickly soothed him; and dark limbs entwined with white. “That’s what I like,” she whispered in his ear. She smelled faintly of sandalwood. He wondered whether or not that was her own natural smell. Certainly, she looked as if she ought to smell of some exotic wood or jungle flower or … Hay stopped thinking, as again she took control of him. He could not know that what she had said she had really meant; had, in fact, two years earlier, whispered something very like it into the ear of the seventeen-year-old David Herold.
TEN
THE DAY after the Inaugural Ball spirits were low at Sixth and E. Chase had not gone to the Senate that morning. Instead he had continued to arrange and rearrange the books in his study while Kate worked with an upholsterer in the front parlor. Servants came and went. Out of such confusion, Chase had said, darkly, at breakfast, there can come no order.
The arrival of Charles Sumner did not improve Chase’s mood. The two men were so much as one on so many of the great issues that they never had much of any interest to talk about; or, rather, the eloquent Sumner never ceased to declaim, while Chase, from time to time, would add a choric note to the great actor’s surging threnodies.
Sumner’s blue frock coat was ablaze with gilt buttons, which made him look slightly absurd to Chase, who preferred sober black. Sumner gave his outer coat to the manservant; kissed Kate’s hand without affectation—to Chase’s mild envy. But then he had not come to know Europe even better than he knew the United States; nor had he mingled with the most famous men and elegant ladies on both sides of the Atlantic. The famous men most intrigued Chase, whose hobby it was to collect the autographs of celebrated people. When Sumner once, casually, read him a note from Longfellow, Chase could not help but ask, humbly, if he might have, if not the letter, plainly no business of his, the signature at the bottom? Sumner had been amused; and generous. Chase got the entire letter. He was delighted; yet filled with self-disdain, the inevitable result, he told himself, echoing Bishop Philander Chase, of an unbridled passion: in this case, for the calligraphy of the great. “Remind me,” Sumner had said—this was two years earlier—“and I’ll give you a Tennyson letter.” Twice, Chase had discreetly reminded Sumner of his promise, but no autograph was forthcoming.
After ten years in the Senate, Sumner was now that body’s most brilliant figure; yet three of those ten years had been spent away from Washington, as an invalid. A Southern congressman had attacked Sumner with a stick whil
e he was seated at his Senate desk. A powerful man, Sumner had been able to rise to his full height, wrenching the desk from the floor to which it was nailed. Then he collapsed, with a concussion. After years of painful cures, Sumner had returned to the Senate.
As Sumner entered Chase’s study, he looked at the newly installed books, and took down a volume of John Bright’s speeches. “The most eloquent man in the British parliament.”
“Did you—do you know him?”
Sumner nodded; dusted off a chair from which a stack of books had just been moved; arranged his frock coat with some fastidiousness, as he sat, very straight, and intoned, “ ‘The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land.’ ”
Chase nodded; and recited the next line of the famed speech against the Crimean War, “ ‘You may almost hear the beating of his wings.’ But you couldn’t have heard that speech. He gave it only six years ago.”
“No. But I read and learn his speeches, as do you, I see. I met Mr. Bright at the time of the repeal of the Com Laws. He always dressed as a Quaker. I suppose he still does. We correspond occasionally.”
Chase’s heart beat more swiftly. “You would not happen to have … Oh, perhaps, a tiny scrap of paper with his name on it? A card is all, really.” Chase, who would not ask Lincoln for a post in the Cabinet, was on his knees to Sumner for an autograph.
“Of course. I’ll find you one.” Sumner looked vaguely at the portraits of two ladies. They hung side by side over the small fireplace.
“My first wife,” said Chase. “And my third. The second, Kate’s mother, hangs in the front parlor. Three times a widower,” Chase added, more with wonder than self-pity.
“As I am thricefold a bachelor,” said Sumner, which struck Chase as a somewhat heartless response to his own tragic fate.
“Have you never been tempted?” asked Chase.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t think I really notice women, unless we have a subject in common. I’ll tell you what a Boston lady once said to me.” Sumner almost smiled; since he had no sense of humor at all, no one ever knew just what his smile might mean. “She asked me some gossipy question about an acquaintance, and I said, ‘I fear that I no longer have any interest in people, as such,’ and she said, ‘Why, Senator, not even God has gone as far as that.’ ”