by Gore Vidal
“Teddy was not in town very long,” said Adams. “He presided over the Senate on March fourth. Then Congress adjourned until next December, and he went home to that ugly house of his on Long Island.”
“I wonder,” said the practical Clara, “where they will live. And how. Edith says there’s no money, and all those children. Bamie-his sister-has found a house here, but only for herself.”
“Our Madame Maintenon?” asked King, moving from fireplace to an armchair too low and narrow for the second-largest of the Hearts. Clara, the largest, had her own special non-Adams-proportioned chair. “Otherwise, I shall simply stand when I’m in your study.”
“We could do worse.” Adams extended alabaster hands toward jonquil-yellow flames. “She’s sounder than Teddy. But he’ll vanish from public life. He was astonished to find that between March fourth and next December, the vice-president has no duties at all. He will probably write another half-dozen books.”
“No,” said Hay, delighted that he could delight his fellow Hearts with the higher gossip. “Teddy has suddenly succumbed to ambition. He means to… what word shall I use? He means to do something that only Clarence among us has ever done.”
“Lechery in the South Seas?” Adams’s eyes were bright.
“No. Something more unusual, more… alarming.”
“What?” cried Clara.
“Work!” shouted Hay.
“Oh, Lord save us! Save him!” Clarence sank from chair to floor, on his knees-no great distance-hands clasped in prayer. “Theodore Roosevelt will actually work for a living?”
“Something Henry and I would never dream of doing…”
“No, no. You are not pure, John.” Adams was stern. “You have worked as an editor and a journalist and a businessman. I have never worked…”
“Professor at Harvard? Editor of the North American Review?”
“Neither was proper work. Certainly, I did not make my living from all that showing off…”
“What, please tell me,” King was still on his knees, “is the vice-president going to work at?”
“The law! He is going to go to law school.” Hay was pleased by the general excitement.
“An American vice-president, in office, at law school?” Adams’s horror was not affected.
“I can’t imagine your great-grandfather taking courses at Columbia while waiting for General Washington to die, but Teddy…”
“… is out of sight,” said King, an addict of Bowery slang. Then he pulled himself, with some difficulty, Hay noticed, back into the tiny armchair. “How do you know this?”
“At the White House, he cornered the Chief Justice, and told him that as he was still quite young with a lot of time on his hands, he wanted to qualify for the bar. The Chief Justice was alarmed, of course. But when he saw how serious Teddy was, he said that he’d give him a reading list for the summer, and once Congress convenes, he’ll tutor Teddy, ‘quiz him’ was the phrase he used to me, every Saturday night.”
“Theodore is not like other people,” said Clara, as neutrally as she could say anything!
“If Clarence is our Renaissance man…” Adams began.
“… Teddy is our Baroque boy,” completed King. “We live in wondrous times. What does the Major think of all this?”
“If I didn’t know, I’d tell you,” Hay repeated Seward’s favorite line. “Actually, the President is more than ever the Buddha these days. He’s leaving at the end of the month for a six-week trip around the country, accompanied by, among others, me. At last,” said Hay, turning to King, “I shall see your California. The President launches a battleship at San Francisco, and I’ll be there, chatting of open doors and peace, while General MacArthur continues his slaughter of Filipinos.” Hay wondered what errant electrical circuit in his brain had made him advert to the one subject that he-and the Administration-never acknowledged. Particularly now, when the war-no other word for it, privately-was over. Aguinaldo had been captured in March, shortly after the inauguration. Presently, before they started across the country, the President would issue a decree declaring the “insurrection” at an end.
Hay did not allow the others to pick up on his unexpected use of the word “slaughter.” “By the end of the month, of course, the business is over.” He spoke rapidly, and was aware of a shortening of breath. Heart? To die, suddenly, at the heart of the Hearts would be poetic. “I shall get them, by the way.”
“Get what?” asked King, through a series of dry coughs. Perhaps all the Hearts might stop at once, like four clocks someone had forgotten to wind.
“The Philippines. The Major thinks that the State Department, not the War Department, should administer them. Root agrees, I am happy to say. In October I shall be lord of all the isles.”
“What about the canal?” King coughed. “Will you be lord of the isthmus, too?”
“We must get the treaty through the Senate first.” Hay was again short of breath: must not panic. “They’ve rejected two versions so far, despite England’s surprising complaisance. Pauncefote and I are now ready with a third version, which we will submit to our masters in the Senate come December.” Hay took a deep breath; felt better; noticed that Clara was watching him with some alarm, which, in turn, alarmed him. Did he look-did he sound?-so ill? He glanced at Adams to see if the Porcupine had noticed anything wrong, but the Porcupine was looking at Clarence King, whose lower face was covered with a handkerchief, even though the fit of coughing had stopped. How fragile we have become, thought Hay; then he rallied. “Of all our friends I hate Cabot Lodge the most.”
“John.” Clara was reproving.
“Oh, Cabot’s hateful.” Adams turned his gaze from the dying King to the blazing fire. “I’ve always detested him, while delighting in his friendship. I think that Cabot’s problem is shyness.”
“No senator was ever shy.” King chiselled out the sentence as if on marble.
“Shyness?” Hay had not thought the ever-grinding Cabot shy. But perhaps he was, and disguised the fact with endless commentaries broken by sudden acts of treachery toward friends.
“Yes, shyness,” Adams repeated. “He is one of nature’s Iagos, always in the shadows, preferring to do evil to nothing…”
“And nothing to good.” Hay made his addition to the indictment. “So if Cabot’s Iago, McKinley must be his Othello.”
“No, no.” Adams was firm. “After all, Othello trusted Iago. I think it most unlikely that our Ohioan Augustus trusts-or even notices-Cabot. No. I see Theodore in the part of Othello. They complement each other. Theodore all action and bluster, Cabot all devious calculation. Cabot is the rock on which Theodore will sink.”
“I like Cabot.” Clara put a stop to the conversation. “He is also Brooks’s brother-in-law. He is practically your relative, Henry.”
“That is no recommendation, Clara, to a member of the house of Atreus…”
“From Quincy, Mass.” King liked to deflate the Adamses. Their peculiar self-esteem was matched only by their sense of general unworthiness. All in all, Hay was happy not to be the member of a great family’s fourth generation. Better to be one’s own ancestor; one’s own founding father. What would Del become, he wondered, in the twentieth century that had begun, as Root had maintained, January 1, 1901? Hay had already spent four months in the new century (Queen Victoria had wisely died after three weeks of the new epoch) and was more than ever convinced that it was just as well that he would miss nearly all of it. Del, on the other hand, might experience more than half the century. Father wished son luck.
2
CAROLINE GREETED DEL at the door to her office, abuzz with the first-and always precious to her-flies of spring. Del was larger than when he had left; there was more chest, more stomach; he also seemed taller. They shook hands awkwardly. Mr. Trimble watched them, all benignity. He had given his unsought blessing to the match. “A woman must not be alone too long,” he had said, “particularly in a Southern town like Washington.”
Carolin
e had just returned from New York, where she had said good-by to Plon, who had sailed for home, enriched by two cigarette cases.
Now Del had come to take her to lunch. They faced each other across the rolltop desk. “Were you really pro-Boer?” asked Del.
“Were you, really, secretly pro-British?” Much of Bryan’s attack on McKinley had been the President’s pro-British policy, the result of that conniving Anglophile the Secretary of State, John Hay, and his equally sinister son, who was American consul general-nepotism, too!-at Pretoria.
“Yes,” said Del, to Caroline’s surprise. “But only secretly. No word ever passed my diplomatically sealed lips. I was the soul of caution, like Father.”
“Well, we were pro-Boer because our readers-and advertisers-are, or were. Anyway, now it’s over. Your team has won. Ours has lost.”
“And the Irish and the German riff-raff have all joined the Democratic Party where they belong. What next?”
John Hay had told her that he doubted Del would want to stay on in the diplomatic service; but then Hay usually said what others wanted to hear. He knew that Caroline could not bear the thought of being a diplomat’s wife, moving from post to post around the world.
But Del chose not to answer her directly. “You’ll see what’s next.”
“When?”
“Today. At lunch.”
Mystified, Caroline took her place in the Hays’ family carriage, which proceeded from Market Square into Pennsylvania Avenue, then headed north. “There are more electrical cars,” Del observed. “And telephone wires.” Like spaghetti, wires were strung every which way on posts in the bright noon-light, which made their shadows on the avenue resemble an elaborate spider’s web. The trees along the sidewalk were in new bloom. Washington’s April was so like Paris’s June that Caroline was, suddenly, homesick: by no means the proper mood for a young lady who had not seen her fiancé for a year. She noted her opal ring on his finger; tried to imagine a wedding ring on her own; thought instead of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. She and Blaise had agreed that neither would go there until the will had been finally settled. Marguerite was suicidal. Caroline was stoic.
“I am stoic,” she said to Del, apropos nothing at all. But he was speaking to the driver. “We’ll go in from the south side.” They were now opposite the immaculately restored and redecorated façade of Willard’s. Black children stood on the sidewalk, holding out clusters of daffodils and blossoming dogwood switches, pale pink, white. White.
“The White House?” asked Caroline.
“Yes. We’re having lunch with the President.” Del’s small eyes gleamed; he would be, one day, as large as his mother, she thought, and she wondered if she could be happy with so huge a masculine entity.
Although the south door of the White House had been originally designed as the mansion’s great entrance, nothing in Washington ever turned out as planned. For instance, the Capitol on its hill faced, magnificently, a shanty town, while its marble backside loomed over Pennsylvania Avenue and the unanticipated city’s center. The city had been expected to grow west and south; instead it had grown east and north. The Executive Mansion had been designed to be approached from the river through the park, with a fine view of Virginia’s hills across the river; but the unexpected primacy of Pennsylvania Avenue had obliged the tenants to make the northern portico the main entrance, and only secret or private visitors were encouraged to drive through the now muddy park to the somewhat forlorn grand entrance, where curved stairs looked as if they had been designed for an al fresco republican coronation of the sort that the Venetian doge endured atop stairs of equal pomp.
The downstairs corridor was empty. As always, Caroline was fascinated by the casualness of the White House. Except for a single policeman, who sat reading a newspaper inside the door, they had the shadowy corridor to themselves. “How easy it would be,” whispered Caroline, though if ever walls had no ears, it was these, “to stage a coup d’état.”
“Who would bother?” Del seemed genuinely surprised by the idea. “The place is too big.”
“This house is very small.”
“The house is nothing,” said Del, as they started up the creaky steps to the main floor. “It’s the country that’s too big for that sort of thing.”
In the main entrance hall, crowded as usual with visitors, Mr. Cortelyou greeted them in front of the Tiffany screen. “The President will join you in the family dining room. She’s joining you.”
“She’s better?” asked Del.
But Cortelyou was now stowing them in the small presidential elevator; then he shut the door, and remained behind. Rattling alarmingly, the elevator rose. Caroline clutched Del’s arm: would the machine be stuck? Would they die of suffocation before help came? But after what seemed like a purgatorial if not presidential term, they came to a halt, and Del led the way into the living quarters. One of the Germans opened the door to the dining room, where the table was set for four. To Caroline’s surprise, Mrs. McKinley was already in her place. Had she been carried in, and set upright, like a doll? The face was unreal in its prettiness. Like so many women whose career is illness, she looked younger than her years. “Miss Sanford,” the voice was nasal, like a crow’s cawing, “I’m glad to see you again. Sit down here, next to me. The Major sits on my other side. I don’t know why Mr. Hay’s department fusses so when a husband and wife want to sit together at supper. After all, that’s why you get married, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure, Mrs. McKinley. But, then I’m not married…”
“Yes,” said the First Lady, and smiled. The smile was indeed lovely; and like a young girl’s. “Well, you’ll make a fine couple, and with money, too. Did you know that the Major’s the only honest man we’ve ever had as president? Mr. Cleveland came here poor as can be, but when he left he was able to buy that mansion of his in Princeton. Well, the Major and I have finally, after all these years of scrimping, been able to buy our old house in Canton, Ohio, and guess how much we paid?”
“I don’t know,” said Caroline, who did know. The Tribune had already carried the story.
“Fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars, and the Major’s going to spend three thousand more-which is all we have left-on fixing it up so that when I’m feeling poorly, like last summer, we can just hole up there, and he can still be president, with the telephone and all. Do you play cribbage, dear?”
“No. But I can always learn.”
“You ought to. Euchre is a good card game, too. I always win, you know. It’s important when you’re a wife, to have something to do.”
“Miss Sanford has her newspaper.” Del meant to be helpful; and failed.
Mrs. McKinley buried her sudden frown in the bouquet of hot-house roses beside her plate. “I never read those… things.”
“Neither do I,” said Caroline quickly. “I only publish, which is very much like… like cribbage, I think,” she added nonsensically. Why, she wondered, was she here? Obviously to be approved of by the Major and his lady as Del’s wife; but why was that so important?
The Major stood in the doorway, large and serene, eyes glowing with-was it opium he was supposed to take? In his left silk lapel he wore a pink carnation, to set off Ida’s pink roses. Caroline got up from her chair and curtseyed. The President crossed to her; he took her hand and, gently, seated her again. The low and beautiful voice was as rustic as Ida’s but without the canting nasality. “I’m glad you could come, Miss Sanford. Sit down, Mr. Hay. Ida…” Fondly, he touched his wife’s face; fondly, she kissed his hand. Caroline noted how pale each was. But then he had nearly died of pneumonia after the New Year’s reception, and she had had a nervous collapse the previous summer. Caroline tried to imagine what it was like to be at the head of such a vigorous, loud nation; and failed.
Lunch was as simple and as enormous as the President’s dove-gray waistcoated paunch, which began very high indeed on his frame and curved outward, keeping him from ever sitting close to table, which accounted, no doubt, for the single s
hamrock-shaped gravy stain on the black frock-coat that hung in perpendicular folds to left and right of the huge autonomous belly, like theater curtains drawn to reveal the spectacle. Quail was followed by porterhouse steak which preceded broiled chicken, each course accompanied by a variety of hot bread-wheat muffins, corn sticks, toast, and butter. Butter flowed over everything, and the Major ate everything while Ida picked at this and that. Del, Caroline noted with alarm, kept pace with the President: two of a kind, obviously. Would Del be as fat? Across Caroline’s future fell a shadow, every bit as large and fateful as President McKinley’s stomach.
The President spoke of the coming trip across the country. “Mrs. McKinley will make the effort.” He gazed at her fondly. She munched a quail’s leg. “Her doctor comes, too. And your father, of course. In fact, I want the whole Cabinet with me. Not everyone can get to see us here in Washington…”