Empire

by Gore Vidal

  “What are you laughing at?” John had looked hurt.

  “Not you, dear John!” Mrs. Fish’s not unpiscine face was now costive with attention. “At myself, in the world, like this.”

  Adams insisted that Caroline remain behind, as father and son departed together for the State Department across the street and what would doubtless be a very serious conversation indeed. “That,” said Adams, when the Hays had gone, “was a bit of a shocker.”

  “Mr. Hay seemed unenthusiastic.”

  “You felt that?” Adams was curious. “What else did you feel?”

  “That the father expects the son to fail in life, and that the son…” She stopped.

  “The son… what?”

  “The son has tricked him.”

  Adams nodded. “I think you’re right. Of course, I know nothing of sons. Only daughters-or nieces, I should say. I can’t think what it is that goes on or does not go on between fathers and sons. Cabot Lodge’s son George is a poet. I would be proud, I suppose. Cabot is not.”

  “It is sad that you have no heir.”

  Adams glared at her, with wrath. Whether real or simulated, the effect was disconcerting. Then he gave his abrupt laugh. “It has been four generations since John Adams, my great-grandfather, wrote the constitution of the state of Massachusetts, and we entered the republic’s history by launching, in effect, the republic. It’s quite enough that Brooks and I now bring the Adamses to a close. We were born to sum up our ancestors and predict-if not design-the future for our, I suspect, humble descendants. I refer,” he smiled mischievously, “not to any illicit issue that we have but to the sons of our brother Charles Francis.”

  “I cannot imagine humility ever devouring the Adamses, even in the fifth generation.” Caroline enjoyed the old man. It was as if Paul Bourget had been wise as well as witty.

  Adams now came to his point. “I am aware of your connection with Aaron Burr, and I seem to remember you mentioning, last summer, that you had some of his papers.”

  “I do. Or I think I do. Anyway, I don’t have to share them with Blaise. They came to me from my mother. They are in leather cases. I’ve glanced at them, but that’s all. It seems that Grandfather Schuyler persuaded Burr to write some fragments of memoir. Grandfather worked in Burr’s law office, when Burr was very old. There is also a journal grandfather kept during the years that he knew Burr. There is also,” she frowned, “a journal, which I’ve never looked at, because my mother, I think it was she, wrote on the cover, ‘Burn.’ But it is still in its case, and no one has ever burned it-or probably read it! At least I haven’t and I don’t think my father ever did.”

  “Clearly, your bump of curiosity is less than ordinary. It is not like my family, where everyone has been writing down everything for a hundred years, and if anyone were to write ‘Burn,’ we would obey, with relief.” Adams placed two small, highly polished shoes on the fender to the fireplace. “Some time ago I wrote a book about your ancestor Burr…”

  “Perhaps my ancestor. Though I am absolutely certain that he was. He is romantic.”

  “I thought him, forgive me, a windbag.”

  Caroline was startled. “Compared to Jefferson!”

  Adams’s laugh was loud and genuine, no longer the stylized bark of approval. “Oh, you have me there! Do you read American history?”

  “Only to find out about Burr.”

  “American history is deeply enervating. I can tell you that firsthand. I’ve spent my life reading and writing it. Enervating because there are no women in it.”

  “Perhaps we can change that.” Caroline thought of Mlle. Souvestre’s battles for women’s suffrage.

  “I hope you can. Anyway, I’ve done with our history. There’s no pattern to it, that I can see, and that’s all I ever cared about. I don’t care what happened. I want to know why it happened.”

  “I think, in my ignorance, I am the opposite. I’ve always thought that the only power was to know everything that has ever happened.”

  Adams gave her a sidelong glance. “Power? Is that what intrigues you?”

  “Well, yes. One doesn’t want to be a victim-because of not knowing.” Caroline thought of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling; thought of her father, whom she had known too little about; thought of the dark woman painted in the style of Winterhalter, who was completely unknown to her, and always referred to, with a kind of awe, as “dark.”

  “I think you must come join your uncle in Paris. I give graduate courses to girls, too; girls, mind you, not women.”

  Caroline smiled. “I shall enroll.” She rose to go. He stood; he was smaller than she. “I shall also let you read the Burr papers.”

  “I was going to ask you that. I destroy a good deal of what I write. Probably nowhere near enough. I have been considering adding my Burr manuscript to the ongoing bonfire.”

  “Why a windbag?” Caroline was curious. “After all, he never theorized, like the others.”

  “He was the founder of the Tammany Hall-style politics, and that is windbagging. But I am unfair. He made one prescient remark, which I like, when he said farewell to the Senate. ‘If the Constitution is to perish, its dying agonies will be seen on this floor.’ ”

  “Will it perish?”

  “All things do.” At the door Adams kissed her chastely on each cheek. She felt the prickling of his beard; smelled his cologne-water. “You must marry Del.”

  “And leave all this for Pretoria?”

  Adams laughed. “Except for my unique, avuncular presence, I suspect that Washington and Pretoria are much the same.”

  Del thought not. Caroline and Helen Hay dined with Del at Wormley’s, a small hotel with numerous dining rooms, both small and large, and, traditionally, the best food in Washington. Whenever the young Hays wanted to escape the medieval splendor of the joint house with Adams, they would cross Lafayette Square to the hotel at Fifteenth and H Streets, where the mulatto Mr. Wormley presided. As the senior Hays were committed that evening to the British embassy, Del and Helen invited Caroline to dinner, to celebrate Pretoria. They were joined in a small upstairs dining room by a lean young Westerner named James Burden Day. “He’s the assistant comptroller of the United States, for the next few hours,” said Del, as they took their seats in the low-ceilinged room with its view of the vast granite Treasury Building down the street.

  “What do you assist at controlling?” asked Caroline.

  “The currency, ma’am.” The voice was softly Western. “Such as it is.”

  “He’s a Democrat,” said Del, “and so he’s devoted to silver, sixteen to one.”

  “I,” said Helen Hay, large and comfortable-looking, like her mother, with dimples like Del, “am devoted to shad-roe, which is coming in now, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Helen had a habit of repeating phrases. The courtly black waiter, more family butler than mere restaurant worker, said that it was, it was, and proposed diamond terrapin, a house specialty, and, of course, canvasback duck, which would be served, Caroline knew, bloody and terrible. But she agreed to the menu. Del continued with the champagne, begun at Mr. Adams’s breakfast.

  “I should be giving the dinner,” said Caroline. “In the consul general’s honor.”

  “You must start to do things jointly.” Helen Hay even sounded like her mother, the amiable voice, which always spoke a command. In a well-run world, what splendid generals Clara and Helen Hay would have made. During the shad course, Caroline decided that she could do a lot worse than marry Del; on the other hand, she could imagine nothing worse than a season (unless it be a year) in Pretoria. Plainly, her interest in him was less than romantic. She had often wondered what it was that other girls meant when they said that they were “in love,” or deeply attracted or whatever adhesive verb a lady might politely use. Caroline found certain masculine types attractive, as types, quite apart from personality-the young man on her right, addressed by Del as Jim, was such a one. Del himself was too much, physically, created in his mother’s baroque mould. But had she
not always been taught that fineness of character is the best that any woman could hope for in a mate? And Del’s was incomparably fine.

  Thinking of Del’s fineness, Caroline turned to the figure on her right; he was definitely not baroque, she decided. Gothic, in fact-slender, aspiring, lean; she tried to recall Henry Adams’s other adjectives in praise of Gothic; and failed. Besides, the young man’s hair was curly and its color was not gray stone but pale sand; yet the eyes were Chartres blue. Was-what was his name? there were three, of course, to indicate noble birth in the South: James Burden Day-was his character incomparably fine? She was tempted to ask him; but asked instead how a Democrat enjoyed working for a Republican administration. “I like it better than they do.” He smiled; the incisors were oddly canine; would he bite? she hoped. “But it’s just another job to them, and that’s all government is-in this country, anyway. Jobs. Mine should belong to a Republican, and it will in September when I go home.”

  “To do what?”

  “To come back here,” Del answered for his friend. “He’s running for Congress.”

  “Don’t tempt the gods.” Day looked worried; and Caroline found this appealing.

  “Then you’ll have an elected job. The best kind,” she said.

  “Oh, the worst! The worst!” Helen was adding yet more shad-roe to a Berninian figure that threatened to erupt into extravagant rococo. The arms in their puffed sleeves already looked like huge caterpillars, ready to burst and spread huge iridescent wings. “Every two years Mr. Day will have to go home and persuade the voters that he is still one of them, that he’ll get the government to give them things. It’s a tiring business. Father’s job is best.”

  “But the Secretary of State must please the President, mustn’t he? And if he doesn’t, he goes.” Caroline addressed the question not to Helen but to Del.

  Predictably, Helen answered. “Oh, it’s more complicated than that. The Major must also please the Secretary of State. If Father should leave-let’s say before an election-that would hurt the Major. Truly hurt the Major. So they must please each other.”

  “Both,” said Del, “must please the Senate. Father hates the Senate and everyone in it, including his friend Mr. Lodge.”

  “Even so,” Helen had miraculously consumed, in a minute, ten thousand shad’s eggs, “secretary of state is the best of all the jobs in this funny place.”

  “I’m sure,” said Caroline. She turned to Del. “I keep forgetting to ask your father. What does a secretary of state do?”

  Del laughed. Helen did not; she said, “He conducts all foreign relations…”

  Del said, through her, “Father says he has three jobs. One is to fight off foreign governments when they make claims against us. Two, to help American citizens in their claims against foreign governments, usually fraudulent; and, three, to provide jobs that don’t exist for the friends of senators who do.”

  “What senator got you Pretoria?” asked Day.

  Del looked contented. “That was the President. Every now and then he gets a job he can give away himself, and so Pretoria is mine.”

  “We hate the Boers.” Helen helped herself to a roast, whose weight on the serving-dish was such a strain on the liveried butler that his forearms trembled; but without compassion she hacked and shoved at the lamb. “We are for the British everywhere.”

  “Maybe you are, but we’re not back where I come from,” said Day.

  “Actually, we’re neutral.” Del frowned at Helen. “That’s my job in South Africa, to be neutral.”

  “I won’t give you away.” Day grinned. “But Colonel Bryan’s positive your father and the Major have made all sorts of secret arrangements with the British.”

  “Never!” Del seemed truly alarmed. “If we have any policy it’s to get the British out of the Caribbean, out of the Pacific…”

  “Out of Canada?” asked Caroline.

  “Well, why not? The Major ran as a believer in the eventual, mutual, more perfect, union between Canada and the United States, because we’re all of us English-speaking, you see…”

  “Except,” said Caroline, “for the millions who speak French.”

  “That’s right,” said Del, not listening. It was a characteristic of Washington, Caroline had noticed-or was it politics?-that no one ever listened to anyone who did not have at least access to power. But Day had heard her; and he murmured in her ear, “Back home we figure these fancy folks here are no better than foreigners.”

  “I should love to go back home with you. Where is it?”

  Day listed, very briefly, the pleasures of his Southwestern state. Then the latest rumors about Admiral Dewey were discussed. Would he be the Democratic choice for president? Day thought that Dewey could defeat Bryan at the convention. But could Dewey then defeat McKinley? He thought not. The country was, suddenly, marvellously prosperous. The war had given a great impetus to business. Expansion was a tonic; even the farmers-Day’s future constituency-were less desperate than usual. Finally, Helen shifted the subject to Newport, Rhode Island, and Day fell silent; and Caroline held her own, as the uses to which the summer should be put were analyzed. Apparently, Helen and her sister, Alice, planned to divide the Newport season between them. They would not go together: too many Hays, as it were, on the market. Would Caroline join one or the other of them? Caroline said that she might, if she were invited, but no one, she lied, had invited her. Actually Mrs. Jack Astor, after making Caroline promise never to play tennis with her husband, had invited her for July, and Caroline had said that everything would depend on the state of some unfinished business. Mrs. Jack hoped that her bridge was good. Colonel Jack no longer played bridge: “It’s wonderful to be inside when he’s outside. Almost as satisfying as divorce.” Mrs. Jack was definitely racy. She had always played tennis when her husband played bridge. Now that he had taken to the courts she had taken to the card-table. “We cannot be together,” she would say, as if quoting some biblical text.

  Halfway across Lafayette Park, Del put his arm through Caroline’s. Helen and Day, not touching, were up ahead, long shadows cast in front of them by dull street lamps which emphasized the sylvan nature of the square’s confusion of ill-tended trees and bushes, crisscrossed by paths, all converging on General Jackson’s monument. “I suppose I must ask sometime.” Del was nervous.

  “Ask what?” Caroline felt, again, tears come to her eyes. Just who, she suddenly wondered, was she? Plainly, some part of her had never been introduced to the other.

  “Well, would you marry me! I mean-will you marry me?”

  The second invitation to a lifelong relationship had arrived, so to speak, in the mail. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed, astonishing both of them. “I mean, oh, no, not now.” She lowered her voice to a more lady-like level. “No, not now,” she improvised, feebly.

  “You don’t want to go to Pretoria, I can understand that.” Del sounded glum. To their right, St. John’s Church more than ever looked like a mad Hellenist’s dream of ancient Greece (the columned portico) and Byzantium (the gold-domed tower).

  “No, I don’t want not to go to Pretoria.” Caroline paused; the tears had dried on her face. “I think I have put too many negatives in that sentence.”

  “Well, just one is too many for me.”

  “It’s not Pretoria. It’s not you. It’s me. And Blaise. And business.”

  “We have all summer,” said Del, “to do your business in. Then…”

  “Well, then-anything. I want,” she said, to her own surprise, “to be married. To, that is,” she added, surprising herself for what she hoped would be the last time, “you.”

  So the unofficial engagement was unofficially arrived at in the dark shadow of the Romanesque monument of the Hay-Adams house, glaring like some medieval monk across the square at the rather sporty, slightly louche, White House.

  Unfinished business began the next day when Cousin John arrived at her house in a “herdic cab,” a local invention, consisting mostly of glass, like a royal coach.
“You can see everything,” he said, as they drove along Fourteenth Street, between Pennsylvania Avenue and F Street. “This was what they used to call Newspaper Row.”

  Caroline saw a line of irregular red brick houses, very much in the style of the rest of the old part of the city. At the end of the line was Willard Hotel, covered with scaffolding: it was to be enlarged, redone. Willard’s also faced on Pennsylvania Avenue and the recently completed-after a third of a century, everyone said with some awe-Treasury Building. At the other end of Newspaper Row was the Ebbitt House, a large hotel that stayed open even in the summer months, a true novelty. On the front of one of the red brick buildings was a faded sign, The New York Herald.

  “All the newspapers have offices here?”

  Sanford nodded. “During the war Washington was the news, for the first time, ever. So the journalists set up shop along here.” Then he pointed across F Street. “Your friend Mr. Hay’s Western Union is right across the street, and, of course, there’s Willard’s, where all the politicians used to gather-and still gather-in the bars and barber shops and dining rooms. Then when they felt particularly inspired, they’d wander across the street here, and talk to the newspaper boys.”

  “But the row has moved…”

  “Regrouped.” The carriage paused in front of the Evening Star’s building, which occupied the block between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, a four-story brick building painted yellow. “The color,” Caroline noted, “must be a recent tribute to Mr. Hearst.”

  “No doubt.” Sanford frowned. “Your plan…” he began.