Empire

by Gore Vidal

  The faun-lips were surprisingly soft, while the surrounding skin was scratchy, a nice contrast. He smelled of cedar, and the horse that he had been riding. “You and Kitty must come here to dinner,” said Caroline, leading him to her bedroom door.

  Jim looked amazed. “Both of us?”

  “Well, it is usual to invite married couples together, or so my Society Lady instructs us.”

  “You’d like Kitty here?”

  “Very much. We have,” Caroline smiled, “so much in common.”

  “I guess you do at that.” He could be as cool as she, and that would make their relationship all the easier, she decided; and smiled, when she heard the front door slam. As it did, Marguerite, arthritis forgotten, hurtled into the room like a witch on the devil’s breath; and embraced Caroline, weeping loudly, shouting her congratulations, mixed with cautionary do’s and don’t’s and did she remember? and how was it, it, it?

  “I have come through, Marguerite.” Caroline spoke to her in French; and felt a bit like Joan of Arc at the crowning of the Dauphin. “I am a saint-I mean a woman, at last.”

  “Praise God!” Marguerite positively howled.

  ELEVEN

  1

  JOHN HAY LOOKED OUT over the Atlantic, and thought of Theodore Roosevelt; but then practically everything reminded Hay of the President, who had summoned him to the strenuous confusions of Oyster Bay to concert a policy toward Russia, which had refused to accept a protest, forwarded by the President, deploring the Easter massacre of the Jews of Kishineff. American Jewry, headed by one Jakob Schiff, was up in arms; and, on the opposite side, so was Cassini in Washington. The President, like the Atlantic, obeyed his own tides, mindless tides, Hay had decided, entirely directed by the moon of his destiny. In the confusion of children, ponies, neighbors, it was decided to make no official remonstrance to the Tsar, but to play up, in the American press, the refusal of the Tsar’s government to accept a message on the subject.

  “I believe the country would follow me if I were to go to the extreme.” Roosevelt was standing before his house, jaw held high; but since jaw and neck were all of a piece, Hay thought, queasily, of a chunk of roast beef.

  “You mean war with Russia?” Hay leaned his back against the bole of a sycamore tree; and the pressure relieved, somewhat, the pain.

  “I could lead the people in such a war…”

  “Well, if you couldn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a war, would there?” In a year the Republicans would hold their convention, and Roosevelt dearly wanted to be the nominee. As a war leader, at the head of his legions in Manchuria, he would be, he thought, another Lincoln and so, overwhelmingly, elected. Hay lived now in dread of Theodore’s activism, like the Atlantic when the moon was at the full and the wind north-northwest.

  “I favor only splendid little wars, as you know…” Hay began.

  But Theodore Rex was now in full repetitive flow. “Who holds Shansi province dominates the world.” Hay wished that Brooks Adams had been born mute or, better, not at all. As Theodore trumpeted the Brooks Adams line, Hay made the usual demurs; then, inspired, he said, “Now if you want a useful small war, there’s Colombia.”

  “I’d hoped you would say Canada.” Roosevelt suddenly laughed; and stopped playing emperor. “Yes. We’ve got good cause to send the troops to Bogotá. They are endless cheats. I know you’d just as soon place the canal in Nicaragua, but Panama’s the more likely spot, and if the Colombians don’t come to terms…” More Atlantic menace flowed up and down the lawns of Sagamore Hill; then the President went off to play tennis, and Hay fled to Edith for comfort.

  Now Hay was again at Newport, Rhode Island, in the house that Helen and Payne had rented for the season. “The sea-air will do you good,” even Henry Adams had said that, as he fled to France; and the sea-air had indeed done him so much good that he had, that very morning, written out his resignation as secretary of state. The strain of keeping Theodore in line was too much for a sick man. Root was far better suited than he; also, Root rather frightened Theodore, which Hay certainly did not. Finally, Root was planning to give up his post as secretary of war; therefore, the graceful thing for Hay to do would be to stand aside, allowing Root to take his place, as Theodore’s keeper.

  “I shall be free.” Hay addressed the Atlantic, which indifferently glittered in the bright July light. “I shall be able to enjoy life.” Then he laughed aloud when he recalled what Henry Adams had said when he had heard Hay fretting that by the time he left office he might have lost all zest for life.

  “Don’t worry, sonny,” said his old friend, with exuberant malice, “you’ve already lost it.”

  Slowly, Hay descended the curved marble staircase to the round marble entrance hall-inspired by Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Colonel Payne rented only the best for his stolen Whitney son. Hay did not like Colonel Payne; but, to the Colonel’s credit, he did not thrust himself upon the family of Helen Hay Whitney. Thus far, he had not been seen in Newport; nor had William C. Whitney. Each maintained the symmetry of their feud through absence.

  In a panelled study that resembled the interior of a cigar box, Clara was writing letters beneath the portrait of the house’s owner, a railroad magnate, gone abroad. “You have resigned,” she said, without looking up.

  “How did you know?” Hay was no longer astonished by Clara’s astonishing knowledge of him.

  “The way you walk on your heels when you think you’ve-put your foot down. I’m writing Edith. Shall I say anything about your resignation?”

  “No. No. Theodore must hear it only from me.” Hay produced the letter. “My freedom.”

  “Yes, dear.” Clara continued to write; and Hay felt robbed of all drama.

  “It’s not every day the secretary of state resigns,” he began.

  “Well, it seems like every day in your case. I wish,” Clara signed her letter with a flourish, and turned the entire huge bulk of her body toward him, “that you really would go through with it. I want to get you back to Bad Nauheim, to the treatments, to…”

  “Clara, I’ve done it! We can leave for Europe next month. Adee keeps the department running smoothly whether I’m living or dead, and the President…”

  “… will stop you, as always. He wants you for next year, for the election. You’ll have to stay on, worse luck. Of course, the sea-air…”

  “… agrees with me. But, how can I take another year of the Senate and Cabot…?” Hay shuddered at the thought of that narrow pompous man whom he had once thought of as a friend.

  “We must put up with him because of Sister Ann. She’s worth a dozen of him…”

  “And he is a dozen truly dreadful senators rolled into one…”

  Helen swept, very like her mother, into the room. Marriage had enlarged everything about her. “Mrs. Fish gives a reception for the Secretary of State Saturday. So Mr. Lehr has decreed, decreed…”

  “What dogs are to be asked?” Hay had been rather more pleased than shocked by the Lehr-Fish dinner party for the dogs of the Four Hundred. Roman decadence had always appealed to his frontiersman soul. The fact that decadence so enraged Theodore was also a point in its favor, particularly now that Theodore was himself showing late-imperial signs.

  “Alice is arriving.” It was no longer necessary to ask which Alice. The Alice always arriving was Roosevelt. The press revelled in her; and called her Princess Alice. She delighted; she shocked; she powdered her nose in public, something no lady was supposed to do even in private, and it was even whispered that she, secretly, smoked cigarettes. Plainly, late, very late, Roman decadence now luridly lit up the White House, and the President had even joked to Hay that he himself had been taken to task by a lady in Canada who had read that he had actually drunk a glass of champagne at Helen Hay’s wedding, thereby placing in jeopardy his immortal soul.

  “Your father has resigned.”

  “I suppose she’ll stay at the Stone House. But we could always have her here…”

  “Is that all that you
have to say at the close of my long career?” Hay realized that his affectation of melancholy was too close to the real thing to be convincing.

  “Oh, you won’t resign. You won’t really. Don’t be silly, Father. You’d have nothing at all to do. Anyway, the President won’t let you. So that’s that, isn’t it?” Helen appealed to Clara, who nodded, with sibylline dignity.

  Hay was ill pleased, for he had, indeed, meant to resign once and for all, and now every omen was wrong. Only death could free him of office; and that would come soon enough. “You two are merciless,” he observed.

  “You must also see to it that we get that canal from Colombia,” said Helen, adjusting her hair in a mirror. She was now nearly as large as her mother; and dressed in the same dramatic style. “Why are they being so difficult?”

  “They are dawdling because next year the old French Concession for a canal, which we took on, runs out, and then they’ll want us to pay all over again.”

  “Thieves,” said Helen, curling a lock of hair with a finger.

  “To put it mildly. We may have to-intervene. The people who actually live in the isthmus, the Panamanians, hate the Colombian government.”

  “We must give them their freedom.” Helen was emphatic. “That is the least we can do, the very least.”

  “You and the President think alike,” said Hay. “Four times in the last two years the Panamanians have revolted against Colombia…”

  “The next time we’ll help them, and then they can enter the union like… like Texas.”

  “Oh, surely, not like Texas,” said Clara, obscurely.

  “One Texas may be too much.” Helen was reasonable. “But if Panama wants to belong to us, we should let them.”

  “Or,” said Hay, “we should say that we’ll build the canal in Nicaragua. Just the threat will bring Colombia round.” This had been Hay’s policy; and Roosevelt had concurred, for the time being. “I shall resign,” he repeated, as he left the room. Neither lady responded. Helen’s hair had fallen, disastrously, down her back, while Clara’s letter-writing totally absorbed her.

  In the marble hall, Hay gave the butler his letter to be mailed to the President at Oyster Bay; and the butler presented Hay with a newly arrived dispatch-case, full of business from Cinderella at Washington.

  As Payne came down the stairs, Hay gave the dispatch-case to the butler. “I’m playing hooky today,” he said. “Put this in my room.”

  “I’ll take you driving, sir.” Payne gazed down at his tiny father-in-law. “The Pope Toledo’s just arrived.”

  “The what?”

  “The Pope Toledo, my new motor car…”

  “It sounds like a picture you might see hanging in the Prado.”

  “Shall we ask the ladies?” Payne looked toward the study.

  “No,” said Hay. “I’m no longer speaking to them. I’ve resigned as secretary of state, and they simply won’t accept it-my resignation, that is.”

  “Let’s drive by old Mrs. Delacroix’s. Caroline and Blaise are there.”

  Had Payne heard him? Hay wondered, as he followed the young man through the front door to the porte-cochere, where stood a marvellously intricate, shining piece of machinery.

  The butler helped Hay into the front seat beside Payne, who showed as little interest in Hay’s resignation as the ladies of the family. Perhaps I am already dead, thought Hay, and everyone’s too polite to tell me. Perhaps I am dreaming all this. Lately, Hay’s dreams had been getting more and more life-like-and unpleasant-while his waking life was more than ever dream-like, and almost as unpleasant. Surely, it was all a dream that young Teddy was president and that he had just been to see him at Sagamore Hill and Teddy had discussed the possibility, even desirability, of a war with Russia. This sort of thing happened in dreams. In real life, there were real presidents, like Lincoln and McKinley; and real secretaries of state like Seward, not himself in masquerade, little Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, barely grown, with a new moustache, in a horse and buggy, driving down the rutted mud main street of Springfield, not being sped along inside an elegant contraption on rubber wheels that gave the sense they were floating on air, as Bellevue Avenue slipped past them, its palaces more suitable for Paradise-or Venice-than mere earth.

  The Secretary of State was recognized as he was borne by Pope Toledo to the Delacroix cottage, and hats were raised, and he nodded graciously at the strangers who held him-or rather, his office-in such awe. When one was dead did one actually know it? as in the sort of dreams when the dreamer knows he dreams? That seemed an urgent question to put to Henry Adams, who knew everything.

  In the Delacroix drawing room they were greeted by Caroline, who held in one hand a dozen newspapers. “You catch me with my knitting,” she said.

  “Mine, too,” said Hay, “only I’ve sworn off reading the stuff until September.”

  “If only I could.” Caroline greeted Payne rather as if she were the sister-in-law that he might have had, and Hay wondered what sort of marriage she and Del would have had. He was fairly certain that Del would not have wanted her to go on publishing a newspaper, and he was equally certain that she would not have given it up. She had a good deal of will, Hay had long ago decided; and if there was one quality that he himself would not have wanted in a wife it was will, of Caroline’s sort, which was like a man’s, unlike Clara’s, which was formidable, in its way, but entirely womanly, wifely, motherly.

  “Mrs. Delacroix is surrounded by Louisiana ladies, and Blaise is playing tennis with Mr. Day.”

  “Which rhymes with Hay,” said Hay, “and who is Mr. Day?”

  “James Burden Day. He’s an Apgar, too. He’s in Congress.”

  “Why isn’t he home, looking after the folks, like all the other tribunes of the people?” Hay looked with longing at an armchair, but the sound of ladies’ voices kept him on his feet; he could no longer bear too many standing ups and sitting downs.

  “He wanted to see Mr. Hearst in New York. Mr. Hearst wants to be elected president next year. He is very ambitious.”

  “He married the chorus girl,” said Payne, who had moved, before his marriage, in glamorous Broadway circles.

  “She will make a stunning first lady.” Caroline was solemn.

  “What a lucky country!” Hay was amused; until the room filled up with ladies from Louisiana.

  Mrs. Delacroix had aged, she told everyone, but she looked no different to Hay from the way that she had always looked during the thirty years that he had casually known her. “I am now aged beyond recognition,” she said, giving Hay her hand, while she removed a large hat with the other.

  “You are unchanged,” said Hay. “But the hat shows its age.”

  “How rude! It’s only ten years old.” A chorus of approval from the ladies, who were now taking cups of tea from the Irish housemaid, circulating among them. “Sit down, Mr. Hay. Please. You look peaked.”

  “It was the Pope Toledo,” said Hay, sinking into an armchair.

  “Pope who?” Mrs. Delacroix looked anxiously at the Irish maid. Catholicism, Hay knew, was always a delicate subject in the presence of servants.

  “My new car,” said Payne.

  “Blaise is here, too. Isn’t it wonderful?” Mrs. Delacroix addressed this sentiment to Payne, as Blaise’s one-time classmate.

  “But doesn’t he always come to see you?” Payne’s own strong familial life was so rich in furious drama that he had little appetite for the family dramas of others.

  “Not when Caroline’s with me. Now they have made up.” Mrs. Delacroix turned to Caroline, and smiled.

  “No, we haven’t. We simply ignore any differences when we’re under your roof. It is our affection for you, not one another. It is also my-atonement.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Mrs. Delacroix smiled at Caroline; then sat opposite Hay, while the Louisiana ladies hovered around the grand piano, as if they expected to break into song.

  “Is it still the inheritance?” asked Hay, who had once known, from Del, all the
intricacies of the Sanford testament, which had proved to be every bit as stupid as Sanford himself, Hay’s exact contemporary.

  “Yes. But in less than two years I shall inherit under the mysterious terms of the will…”

  “The one that looks like a seven?” Hay recalled the portentous detail.

  “Exactly. Well, when I am twenty-seven, the one will at last be a seven; and what is mine will be mine…”

  “You must marry.” Mrs. Delacroix frowned. “You’re much too old to be a single girl.”

  “I am a spinster, I am afraid.”

  “Don’t!” Mrs. Delacroix made the sign to ward off the evil eye. “Payne, why don’t you marry her?”

  “But I am married, Mrs. Delacroix. To Mr. Hay’s daughter.”

  “I quite forgot.”

  “We haven’t,” said Hay, agreeably. “It’s still very much on our minds.”

  “Such a splendid wedding,” Caroline contributed.

  “You must come to New Orleans, Caroline. We have a great many young men there, all ready to marry and settle down.”

  “Not too young,” said Caroline. “Not at my age.” Hay wondered why so handsome a young woman should so much enjoy depicting herself as old and, essentially, unattractive. Perhaps she was, as she had said, one of nature’s most curious creatures, a spinster. He had always somehow doubted that Del would ever succeed in marrying her. She was too self-contained; too-cold? But that seemed the wrong word to describe a character of such charm and amiability. She was, simply, independent in a way that their world was unused to.