by Gore Vidal
“The courts-”
“No, Blaise. The clock. The calendar. Each breath I breathe brings me closer to what is mine.”
“Don’t tempt fate.” Blaise made the sign to ward off the evil eye. “My mother was dead before she was twenty-seven.”
“I shall not have children. That’s one safeguard.”
“You’ll never marry?”
“I didn’t say that. But I don’t want children.”
“Such things are not so easily arranged.”
“How is Madame de Bieville?”
Blaise responded serenely. “At Deauville. What news of Del?”
“At Pretoria.”
“The Chief’s giving Mr. Hay a hard time.”
“But that’s the Chief’s specialty, isn’t it?”
“This summer, anyway. He’s going all out for Bryan.”
“All out?” Caroline smiled. “He doesn’t take seriously Bryan’s nonsense about silver, and he loves the empire that Bryan keeps attacking.”
Blaise laughed in spite of himself. “Well, they don’t like the trusts, and they don’t like Mark Hanna.”
“Very statesmanlike. The Chicago American is losing money, I hear.”
“Quantities.”
“My money?” asked Caroline.
“Some of it is my money, yes. But most of it is old Mrs. Hearst’s. They keep finding gold in South Dakota.” Harry Lehr swept by, a plain young woman on his arm.
“Elizabeth Drexel.” He said the name as if half-brother and half-sister were wholly interested. “I,” he added, with a lizard’s swift blink at Blaise, “am the Funmaker.”
“You must make some fun for my numerous half-brothers.” As Caroline sensed Blaise’s furious disapproval, she found herself quite liking Lehr.
“First, you must let Wetzel make your suits, and Kaskel your pajamas and underwear…”
Lehr’s public association of Blaise with pajamas, much less the pruriency of any reference to underwear, brought a coughing fit as Blaise’s phlegm, mistakenly inhaled, choked him-with wrath, of course, thought Caroline with satisfaction. Lehr was delighted to have caused so much distress, while the Drexel girl-the future Mrs. Lehr?-looked as embarrassed as Blaise. They were saved by the majestic approach of Mrs. Astor, with her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack. Caroline felt as if she ought to curtsey, while even Blaise-no longer choking-bowed low at the great ladies’ approach. Lehr pranced about the old sovereign like some huge blond dog. The two Mrs. Astors regarded him with stares worthy of the two bronze owls that decorated the gateposts to the Casino. Plainly, Lehr was going to pay for his defection to Mamie Fish.
“You must come see me, Miss Sanford.” The huge dark wig was aglitter with rubies. “You, too, Mr. Sanford, though I have heard that you have no time for old ladies.”
Blaise blushed becomingly. “We’ve only arrived, Mrs. Astor, my step-brother and me…”
“The Prince has a great deal of time for ladies,” said Mrs. Jack in her low drawl, “of any and every age.”
“How you comfort me.” Mother-in-law smiled with dislike at daughter-in-law, who was now examining Blaise speculatively.
“Don’t,” said Mrs. Jack, “get married.”
“I have no intention of marrying.” Blaise recovered his poise. He was a match for Mrs. Jack if not her mother-in-law.
“Like dear Harry?” asked Mrs. Astor, finally acknowledging the fawning creature at her side.
“I don’t know about that.” Blaise was staring boldly at Mrs. Jack, who suddenly looked away. Was she cold? Caroline wondered; and what, after all, was coldness but a strategy in the dangerous American world where a lady’s fall from grace could cause her extrusion-no matter how resonant her name or heavy her wealth-from the only world that mattered? Paris was filled with extruded American ladies, paying dearly for adulteries of the sort for which a French lady would have been applauded.
“I won’t be a bachelor forever,” Lehr trilled. The Drexel girl pursed her lips, as if to kiss the air. She was the one, poor creature, thought Caroline. But, then, perhaps, they were well-matched. She might be another Mlle. Souvestre.
“We are told,” said Mrs. Astor, “that you and Mamie-so original, isn’t she?-” Mrs. Astor’s malice was royal in its self-assurance-“plan to give a dinner for dogs.”
“Dogs?” Mrs. Jack’s deep voice dropped to an even lower, almost canine register.
“Dogs, yes.” Lehr yelped. “Each with its owner, of course.”
“How amusing.” Mrs. Astor made of “amusing” three full evenly emphasized syllables.
“At the same table?” asked Caroline.
“There will be different tables, of course.”
“So that you can tell the dogs from their masters?” As Caroline spoke, she knew that she had, once again, gone too far. Wit had always been disliked and feared at Newport, while wit in a woman was sufficient cause to be burned as a witch anywhere in the republic.
The Astor ladies chose to ignore Caroline’s slip. But she knew that each would give damning evidence should she, indeed, be tried for witchcraft.
Lehr took charge of the Astor ladies and swept them into the party. “He’s awful,” said Blaise.
“But think how much duller this place would be without him.”
“Plon needs a rich widow.” Blaise changed the subject.
“Don’t look at me. I’m no help. I’m outside this world. In Washington…”
“Why don’t you take him there, in the fall?”
“I’ll take Plon anywhere, of course. I adore him, as you know…”
“As I know.” They stared at each other. The orchestra was now playing Tales of Hoffmann. “I hear that Cousin John’s wife is dead.”
Caroline merely nodded; and said, “How is Mr. Houghteling?”
“Lawyers!” Blaise let the subject go. Neither had much emotion left to bear on the subject of the money that divided them. “I’ve told Plon that Mrs. Astor-the young one-only flirts.”
“I think he’s worked that out. But he thinks that he understands American women better than he does because he has seduced so many of them in Paris,”
“Does he tell you such things?”
“Doesn’t he tell you?”
“Yes, but I’m a man.”
“Well, I’m not an American woman. Anyway, what those creatures do in Paris is one thing.” Caroline thought of the beautiful Mrs. Cameron with her beautiful boy poet, of the majestic antlers once again sprouting from Don Cameron’s head, not to mention a delicate unicorn’s horn from the pink marble baldness of Henry Adams’s brow.
Lord Pauncefote joined them, having no doubt exhausted Helen Hay with his notorious and habitual long answers to questions not put to him. “Your friend Mr. Hearst is in splendid form.” He acknowledged Blaise’s identity. “He accuses poor Mr. Hay of being England’s creature.”
“Oh, that’s just to fill space,” said Blaise.
“Between murders,” Caroline added:
“Actually, he’s going to have some more fun with Roosevelt!”
Pauncefote shut his eyes for a long instant, always a sign that he was interested; that a message to the Foreign Office would soon be encoded. “Yes?” Pauncefote’s eyes were again open…
“The Chief’s been in touch with some of the leading goo-goos…”
“The leading what?”
“Goo-goo,” said Caroline, “is what reformers of the American system are called by those who delight in the system. Goo-goo is an-abbreviation?-of the phrase ‘good government,’ something Governor Roosevelt, like all good Americans, holds in contempt. Isn’t that right, Blaise?”
“Not bad.” Her brother’s praise was grudging.
“Goo-goo,” murmured Pauncefote without relish.
“The goo-goos are attacking Roosevelt because he’s a creature of the bosses but likes to talk about reform, which he’s really as much against as Senator Platt. The Chief’s going to have some fun with all this when the campaign starts.”
“Soldier!” Blaise laughed delightedly. “He’s just a politician who got lucky in Cuba.”
“But that was a famous victory over Spain, and he was part of it.”
“As architect, yes,” said Blaise, and Caroline was surprised that her brother seemed to know of the plotting that had gone on amongst Roosevelt and Lodge and the Adamses and Captain Mahan. “But not as a soldier. The real story in Cuba-which the Chief will never print-is not how we bravely defeated the Spanish but how seven hundred brave Spaniards nearly beat six thousand incompetent Yanks.”
Pauncefote stared, wide-eyed, at Blaise. “I have never read this in any newspaper.”
“You never will, either,” said Blaise. “In this country, anyway.”
“Until I publish it.” Caroline was indeed tempted to puncture the vast endlessly expanding balloon of American pomposity and jingoism.
“You won’t.” Blaise was flat. “Because you’d lose the few readers you’ve got. We create news, Lord Pauncefote.”
“Empires, too?” The Ambassador had recovered his professional ministerial poise.
“One follows on the other, if the timing’s right.” Blaise was indifferent; and most Hearstian, thought Caroline.
“I shall reexamine the careers of Clive and Rhodes, with close attention to the Times of their day.”
“Lord North’s career would be more to the point.” Blaise was hard. Caroline wondered who had been educating him; certainly not Hearst. Plon joined them; and Pauncefote withdrew.
“Have you found a rich lady?” asked Caroline.
“Oh, they are-what do the English say?-thick upon the ground. But they cannot talk.”
“Bring him to Washington.” Caroline turned to Plon. “We are rich in ladies whose husbands are under the ground. And they talk-the ladies, that is.”
“Perhaps we’ll both come, after the election.” Blaise stared, idly, at a pale blond girl who was approaching them, on the arm of a swarthy youth. What color, wondered Caroline, would the children of so contrasted a couple be? “But New York is more Plon’s sort of oyster.”
“Oyster?” Plon’s grasp of idiom was weak. “Huître?” He translated, tentatively.
To Caroline’s amazement the blond girl greeted her warmly. “Frederika, Miss Sanford.” The voice was Southern; the manner shy; the profile, turned to Caroline, noble. “I’m Mrs. Bingham’s daughter. From Washington. Remember?”
“You’ve grown up.” Caroline had hardly noticed the child in Washington; a child, literally, until this summer.
“It’s the dress, really. Mother won’t let me dress up at home.”
“Mrs. Bingham is Washington,” Caroline declared.
“Is she a widow?” asked Plon, in French.
“Not yet,” murmured Caroline. The swarthy young man proved to be from the Argentine embassy, a representative of what John Hay wearily termed “the dago contingent” until Caroline had allied herself sternly with the entire Latin race and “dago” was no longer a word used in her volatile presence:;
Frederika was thrilled by the half-brothers; they were characteristically indifferent to her. She was too young and pure for Plon; and Blaise’s mind-Caroline never thought to associate the word “heart” with so blond and fierce a beast-was elsewhere.
“Is your mother here?” Caroline knew that there was no earthly way, as yet, for Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, wife to Washington’s milk king, to break into Newport’s Casino on such a night.
“Oh, no. I visit friends. You see, Mother likes Washington in the summer.” There was a sudden mischievous, even collusive, look in Frederika’s eyes. As Caroline was deciding that the girl had possibilities, the Argentine swept her away.
“Her father,” said Caroline, to Plon, “makes all of Washington’s milk.”
“How funny!” Plon laughed delightedly.
“Why funny?”
“It’s my English, I suppose, but for a moment I thought you said he made ‘milk.’ ” Caroline let the subject go. Plon was better in Paris. Blaise-and she-were better suited to this new world of energetic and mindless splendor, of waste-of absolute waste of everything and, she wondered, suddenly feeling disagreeably faint, of everyone?
EIGHT
1
FOUR OF THE ORIGINAL Five Hearts were gathered in Henry Adams’s study, to John Hay’s delight. Although the pale April sun filled the study, Adams as always had a fire blazing and the smell of wood-smoke mingled agreeably with that of the masses of daffodils and lilies-of-the-valley the incomparable servant, Maggie, had placed everywhere. The fourth Heart-Clarence King-stood with his back to the fire, Adams to his right, all admiration like a schoolgirl, and Clara to his left, all fondness like a sister, while King talked rapidly and brilliantly and coughed and laughed at his own coughing, and coughed again. “I have a spot on my lung now, the size of a dollar-why always a dollar, I wonder? But better the coin than the greenback. I thought the sun would cure me, as it always has before, but Florida has failed me, as Florida has failed so many before me, including you, John. Didn’t you want to be a congressman from there in 1864?”
“From there, oh, yes,” said Hay. “I like to pretend it was President Lincoln’s idea, to get friends into Congress. But the carpetbag I took to Florida was all my own…” And then, Hay completed to himself, just as I was about to quit as the President’s secretary, he was shot. Hay wondered, yet again, how strange it was that he, who dreamed now so much at night, no longer encountered the Ancient in his dreams.
Although Clarence King was dying, he was determined to go in a great display of mind and wit and energy. He was bearded like Hay and Adams: the three had more or less synchronized their beards, each allowing the rakish moustaches of youth to act as foundation for the stately beards of middle age.
Hay had been shocked at the change in King, who had arrived some days before, haggard and ill-kempt. But William and Maggie had taken him in hand; put him to bed; fed him magnificently. “Tuberculosis does wonders for the appetite,” King had announced at the first meal-High Communion, Adams had called it-of the Hearts, and Hay noticed that a fifth place had been left at table for the fifth never-to-be-mentioned Heart, Clover Adams. Except that King, quite naturally, would repeat something that Clover had said, and Adams seemed not at all perturbed; but then King could do no wrong for Henry Adams, who had declared his friend the greatest man of their generation, causing Hay a pang of ignoble envy; but then Henry Adams had always been in love-there was no other word-with the geologist, naturalist, philosopher, world-traveller, creator of mining enterprises, Renaissance man who, now that his life was near its end, had managed to fail on the grandest scale. He had been wiped out in the depression of ’93, and though he still went exploring in the Yukon and other parts of the world, he was now merely a brilliant geologist, employed by others. There would be no King Mine, no King fortune, no King widow and children; only the memory that the Hearts all had of a glorious companion who could sit up till dawn speaking on the origins of life, and, presumably, they could go look at a mountain called Clarence King, a superb peak in the Sierra Nevada.
A mountain and a memory were not much, thought Hay; but then what a life King had had. While Adams and Hay had sat at desks, reading and writing, or hovering on the periphery of power, King had explored and mapped the West, and written marvellously of the new world he had discovered, not to mention the geological wealth that other men would exploit. So taken with the idea of King was Adams that he had fled from Harvard to the Far West to travel with King, to rough it. In later years they had often travelled together, most recently to Cuba. Each had developed a passion for Polynesian women, “old-gold girls,” as they would cryptically refer to these palpable visions, unknown to Hay. Then, in 1879, King became director of the United States Geological Survey, a bureau created largely for him, with considerable assistance from Senator James G. Blaine,
who was less than amused when the novel Democracy, suspected to be a work by one of the Hearts, lampooned him as the venal Senator Ratcliff. Hay had often wondered if Henry Adams had, somehow, instinctively, harmed the man he loved and envied above all others. By 1880, King had departed the only office that he had ever wanted; he had also entered the lives of John and Clara Hay; and, thus, due to highly elective affinities, Five Hearts beat as one until Clover Adams swallowed potassium cyanide; and then there were Four. Soon, Hay thought bleakly, as April light made glitter King’s feverish eyes, there would be Three; then Two, One, None. Why?
King answered, as if he had looked into Hay’s mind. “When I went mad that day in the lions’ house in Central Park, I was positive that I had seen God, and He was, simply, a huge mouth, maw, with teeth, sharp, sharp-and hungry, oh, so hungry to dine on us. That’s why we exist, I thought, to feed Him. Then a Negro-someone’s butler from a house in Madison Avenue-enraged me, and I struck him. One tends to violence in the lion house, particularly in the presence of one’s Maker who is also one’s devourer, and I was taken away by the police in a state of purest ecstasy, and committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum…”
“On Halloween,” said Adams, happy to contemplate, yet again, the sacred story. “Then we went off to Cuba in February. There were no lions there.”
“Ah, but there was that maw, always in attendance. Always hungry. Is Theodore as dreadful as ever, now he’s vice-president?”
“I had hoped that name would not be spoken on this day of days,” said Adams. “Theodore’s luck is relentless and inexorable, like the Chicago Express.”
“He was,” said Clara, justly, “less noisy than usual. You must give him credit for that, Henry.”
“But there weren’t many occasions for noise.” Hay had been surprised by the dignity of Teddy’s inaugural speech to the Senate, given during a lull in a particularly squalid filibuster. In that cigar-smelling chamber where weary senators dozed, Teddy had taken the oath of office as vice-president; and then, cryptically, he had spoken of the great things in store for this particular generation of Americans. “As we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.” At that moment, a storm broke over the Capitol and the sound of rain on the skylights of the Senate chamber put Hay, suitably, in mind of war. Given the chance, Teddy would try to expand the American empire; but vice-presidents are not given such opportunities, as Teddy knew. “This office is the ultimate grave of my political career,” he had said to Lodge accusingly; but then he liked to blame Lodge for driving him to accept a nomination never offered him by President or party leaders. Teddy had simply seized the prize-or, as Hay always thought of the vice-presidency, “persimmon.” During the autumn, he had spoken in twenty-four states to audiences that so thrilled him that he was inspired to refer to William Jennings Bryan as “my opponent.” The Major said that he had been amused by these slips; but Hay suspected that the Major’s tolerance for the Colonel was not great. Certainly, the overwhelming Republican victory in November was spoiled for McKinley by’ those who suggested that it was not he but his glamorous running-mate who had ensured the million votes by which the Republicans had won.