by Gore Vidal
“I should get a telescope.” Adams squinted in the bright sun. “Then I could see who pays calls on Theodore. I’ve been waiting for a glimpse of J. P. Morgan’s incandescent nose ever since I got back.”
“That particular incandescence is probably already out of joint. I don’t think Theodore will humor him, or any of the others.”
“Betrayal?” Adams’s eyes shone.
“Fidelity to… earlier principles. You know, Bryan’s in town, holding court at the Capitol. He’s been praising Theodore…”
“A bad sign.”
“He also says that if the Democrats were to come out for nationalizing the railroads, they would sweep the country.”
“Why not?” was the response of the co-author of Tales of Erie, easily the most savage indictment ever made of the railroad owners, and their exuberant, never-ending corruption of courts, Congress, White House. Then, triumphantly, “Here they come!”
Hay managed to be perpendicular when Lizzie Cameron entered the room with her daughter, Martha, who was, at eighteen, larger, darker, duller than her mother, who was still, in Hearts’ eyes at least, the world’s most beautiful woman, the Helen of Troy of Lafayette Park, now resident, mysteriously, at the Lorraine, a New York City residential hotel in Forty-fifth Street, convenient to the theaters, and Rector’s, and museums, where Martha was to be finished off at last and then, her mother prayed, grandly married. “La Dona.” Adams welcomed his beloved with a deep bow; bestowed a kiss on Martha’s cheek. “I never thought to see the two of you here again.”
“Oh, yes, you did. John,” Lizzie took Hay’s hand and gave him the cold appraising Sherman look, “go to Georgia. This minute. You are mad to stay on here. I’ll wire Don…”
“I’d be madder to go now we’ve got you back, if only for the Diplomatic Reception.” Lizzie had asked Henry to put her and Martha on the guest list for the January 12 Diplomatic Reception at the White House. This would be, in effect, Martha’s official, and inexpensive, social debut.
“I’m a pauper!” Lizzie let drop her ermine cape on the small chair by the fire, where Adams always sat. Then she sat on the cape.
“You’re not a pauper. Don’t be dramatic, Mother.” Martha had her father’s weighty manner if not actual weight. “Mother wants to reopen Twenty-one. I think she’s mad.”
“Everyone, it would appear, is mad today.” Hay sat on a sofa’s arm, from which he could stand up without effort. “Don’t discourage your mother. We want her back. Next door to us. Forever.”
“See?” Lizzie stared up at Martha, whose body now blocked the fire. In the bright air Hay watched as motes of dust floated and glittered like minuscule fragments of gold, a pretty sight-if of course he was not having another seizure like the one where he had imagined himself in Lincoln’s office. He dared not ask the others if they, too, noted the bright dust.
Then Clara greeted mother and daughter, and their diminished circle was closed at last. “What sort of husband would you like?” asked Clara, as if she herself could provide one, according to Martha’s specifications.
“Rich.” Lizzie was still radiant, Hay decided; and unchanged.
Adams was still besotted with her; and unchanged. “The rich are boring, La Dona.”
“I think I’d like Mr. Adams.” Martha was cool. “He is never boring, except when he sees a dynamo.”
Clara, a master of small talk, disliked idle talk. “Blaise Sanford. He’s the right age. He’s built himself a palace in Connecticut Avenue. He’s half-owner of the Tribune, so he has something to do, always important. And he lives part of the year in France. I think,” she turned to Hay, “we should set things in motion.”
“You set them in motion, I have the Russians to deal with. They’ve just surrendered Port Arthur to the Japanese.” Hay held up the folder containing the Moscow dispatches.
Adams was suddenly alert. “Now the pieces rearrange themselves. Brooks predicted this, you know. Now let’s see if his next prediction comes true. Russia will undergo some sort of internal revolution, he says, and their empire will then fall apart or, if they survive the revolution, expand at our expense. England is at an end, civilization shudders to a halt, and…”
“I cannot get enough of your gloom.” Hay did enjoy the Porcupine’s chiliastic arias. “But we’ve got Japan to deal with in Asia, and a peace to be made in order to keep…”
“Open doors.” Everyone, including Martha, repeated the magic meaningless phrase.
“I would rather be known for that than for ‘Little Breeches.’ ”
“I’m afraid, sonny,” said Adams contentedly, “your future fame will rest on an ever greater vulgarity, ‘Perdicaris alive…’ ”
“ ‘… or Raisuli dead!’ ” the others intoned.
“The fatal gift for phrase,” sighed Adams, as happy as Hay had ever seen him, with Lizzie beside him, and all the remaining Hearts in the room. Then, as if to complete Adams’s felicity, the door to the Bright study now framed the thick rotundity of his houseguest, whose bald head shone in the winter light, like Parian marble, whose great eyes looked merrily but shrewdly on the company. “I have,” intoned Henry James, “already, in the literal sense, merely, broken my fast, but as rumors of a late-ah, collation is being served à la fourchette, so much tidier than au canif, I have hurried home from my morning round of calls, filling the city with a veritable blizzard of pasteboard.” Then, ceremoniously, James greeted Lizzie and Martha, while Adams took a calling-card from his vest pocket, and presented it to James.
“What-or, rather, who is this?” James held the card close to his eyes.
“Delivered by its owner while you were out.”
“ ‘George Dewey,’ ” James read in a voice resonant with awe, “ ‘Admiral of the Navy.’ My cup runneth over, with salt water. Why,” he addressed the room, “would a national hero, whom I’ve not had the pleasure-honor-distinction of meeting, descend, as it were, from the high, glorious-ah, poop-deck of his flagship, which I can imagine moored with chains of gold in the Potomac, all flags unfurled, and submit himself to dull earth in order to pay a call on someone absolutely unknown in heroic circles, and less than a ripple, I should think, in naval ones?”
Hay found James in his old age far more genial and less alarming than in his middle age. For one thing, the appearance was milder since he had shaved off his beard; in fact, the resulting combination of bald head and rosy smooth ovoid face put one in mind of Humpty Dumpty. “You are a fellow celebrity,” said Hay. “That’s all. The press, which defines us all, celebrates both you and him. Now he comes to celebrate you and, in the act, celebrates himself yet again.”
“He is a wondrous fool,” said Adams. “Stay longer and I’ll invite him here.”
“No. No. No. The ladies of America are waiting for me to tell them about Balzac. So much-ah, money can be earned by lecturing, I had no idea.”
James had not been in Washington since 1882; and he had not been in the United States for some years. “Contemptible, effete snob!” Theodore Rex would roar whenever the name was mentioned. But Theodore was himself sufficiently a snob, if not effete, to realize that since the reigning novelist of the English-speaking world had come home to take one last long look at his native land, the President must invite him to the Diplomatic Reception. With each passing year in the White House, Theodore became more royal, and his receptions and dinner parties now had a definite Sun King style to them. Therefore, protocol required that America’s great writer be received by his sovereign. James had been delighted and, wickedly, amused by the invitation; his view of the President was every bit as dark as the President’s of him, but where Theodore thundered, James mocked softly; Theodore Rex was simply a noisy jingo, not to be encouraged.
“We are,” observed James, as Adams led them into the dining room, where silver and crystal sparkled, and William stood at benign attention, “re-creating the house-party at Surrenden Dering. Mrs. Cameron. The delicious Martha-now grown. Ourselves…”
Hay t
hought, with a sudden guilty pang, of Del, whom he almost never thought of any more. James, aware that the party had lost a member to death, shifted swiftly to Caroline. “What of her?” he asked. Adams told him. James was interested, as always, in variations from the usual. A young American woman who chose to publish a newspaper was not quite within his grasp, but Hay had the sense that by the time James’s visit to what he called “the city of conversation” was over, Caroline would be defined in Jamesian terms.
Lizzie asked James, point-blank, what he thought of Washington. The Master’s frown was not without charm, as he affected an air of total concentration, like a man doing a complex sum in his head. “The subject so-vast. The language so-inadequate,” he began, a stick of Maggie’s cornbread breaking off in his hand. “One must be subjective, no other approach will do, so-to live here, for me, not John, a great minister of state or, in short, a statesman in his proper state, the capital, or Henry, the historian, the observer, the creator of theories of history and-ah, energy, what better place to watch the world from? You, too, Mrs. Cameron, are of this world, though divided in allegiance, I suspect, with a bias for our shabby old European world, but I see you here, glittering at the center, with Mrs. Hay and, perhaps, Martha, too, but as for me-ah, my passion for crudely chipped beef is still remembered in this house.” James filled his plate without dropping so much as a single syllable of a speaking style which hardly varied now from his novels, which were, for Hay, unlike the writer himself, too long of wind for the page while delightful when accompanied by James’s beautiful measured voice, far less British in its accent than that of Henry Adams, who sounded exactly like the very Englishmen who had so resolutely snubbed him and his father during the latter’s ministry to St. James’s. “… as for me to live here would be death and madness. The politics are of no account when one is not a politician, while the constellation-not to mention promiscuous congregation-of celebrities would quite smother me…”
2
CAROLINE WAS SURPRISED at how few disagreements there were between herself and Blaise. The new publisher knew his job, if not Washington. Trimble continued to put out the paper. Caroline gladly surrendered to Blaise the task of wringing advertising money from their mutual relatives, and everyone else. He had gone twice to Mrs. Bingham’s; and showed no great disdain. Although Frederika was helping him furnish the palace, he seemed to have no particular interest in her, or in anyone. He had become, in some mysterious way, a creature of Hearst. It was as if their close association had made it impossible for him to find anyone else interesting; yet Blaise did not much like Hearst personally. Obviously, this was a case of inadvertent fascination. Luckily, it was a very useful one for the Tribune. Blaise, was, by any standard, an excellent publisher.
As Marguerite helped Caroline dress for the Diplomatic Reception, she counted the number of days which would bring her to the magic, if not exactly joyous in itself, twenty-seventh birthday: fifty-two days, and she would be able to soar, on eagle-wings of gold. But soar where? What would change? other than the constant dull worry that money was in short supply. John had paid his debts; and remained, at her request, in New York. Jim seldom missed a Sunday; and she was reasonably content. But Marguerite, who was not always-as opposed to usually-wrong, was right when she said that so ridiculous a situation could not go on forever. Mrs. Belmont had made it possible, if not exactly fashionable, to divorce a husband and still remain within the world. That was progress. But divorce implied an alternative, in the form of yet another marriage, and except for Jim, there was no one who interested her; and Jim was beyond her reach, even if she had been so minded to reach out, which she was not. Still, it was now an absolute fact that Caroline had no more use for John Apgar Sanford; and he had none for her. Only Emma was satisfactory.
Blaise arrived in a motor car, with a handsome uniformed driver, who helped Caroline into the back seat, where Blaise was resplendent in white tie. “We are,” Caroline observed, “a couple.”
“For the purposes of Diplomatic Receptions, anyway.” He was more relaxed with her now. The meeting on the river-boat had been their lowest moment. Relations could only improve, or break off entirely. They had improved. “Court will be unusually brilliant tonight.” Caroline turned into the Society Lady. “Mr. Adams is not coming, but he is sending not only Henry James but Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge-literature, sculpture, painting will celebrate our sovereign and decorate his court.”
“He is so full of himself.”
“No more than Mr. Hearst.”
“Hearst’s an original. He’s done something.”
“Isn’t the… the… the Panama Canal something?”
“Nothing compared to reporting…”
“… and inventing…”
“… news.” This was an old debate between them, or, rather, discourse, since they were generally in agreement. To determine what people read and thought about each day was not only action but power of a kind no ruler could, with such regularity, exercise. Caroline often thought of the public as a great mass of shapeless modelling clay which she, in Washington, at least, could mould with what she chose to put in the columns of the Tribune. No wonder that Hearst, with eight newspapers, and a magazine or two, felt that he could-even should-be president. No wonder Theodore Roosevelt genuinely hated and feared him.
The East Room of the White House had been simplified to the point of brilliance, and the result was more royal than republican. Also, the Roosevelts had increased the number of military aides, their gold-braid loopings complementing the quantities of gold-and-silver braid worn by the diplomatic corps. The astonishing McKinley pumpkin seats, each fountaining a sickly palm, had long since vanished; the mustard rug was now only a memory of a time when the East Room was like the lobby of a Cleveland hotel. The floor was now shining parquet, the chandeliers were more elaborate than ever, while the sparse furniture was much gilded and marbled. Red silk ropes were everywhere, in order to control the public, which were allowed, at certain hours, to wander through their sovereign’s palace.
The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt stood at the room’s center, shaking hands, as glittering aides discreetly moved the guests along. Theodore was more than ever stout, and hearty, and delighted with himself, while Edith Roosevelt was her usual calm self, ever ready to curb her volatile mate, whose self-love was curiously contagious.
“Very sound. Very sound on Japan, Mrs. Sanford,” was his greeting to Caroline. “Things are about to happen.” Then he looked very grim, as Cassini, dean of the diplomatic corps, approached, Marguerite in tow. Caroline exchanged amiable whispers with Edith Roosevelt, and moved on. President and Russian Ambassador had nothing to say to each other, and contrary to all diplomatic usage said nothing to each other. Marguerite looked worn. She had had a love affair that had gone wrong, and now the word was that Cassini was to be replaced. End of glory, thought Caroline, as Henry James, the embodiment of all literary glory, shook her hand warmly and said, “At last. At last.”
“It has been almost seven years since Surrenden Dering,“ Caroline observed, with some not entirely banal wonder at the rapidity of time’s passage.
“You never come to our side of the water, so I’ve come to yours.” James lowered his voice in mock fear, as if Theodore might be listening. “Ours. Ours! What have I said? Lèse majesté des États-Unis.”
“I shall be on the other side this summer,” said Caroline, as they crossed the room, for the most part filled with people that she knew. Washington was indeed a village still; and so a newcomer like Henry James was a mild sensation. Once the diplomatic reception was concluded, there would be a supper for the chosen few, among them James and Caroline but not Blaise.
They paused in an empty corner, as the Hays made their entrance. “Our Henry refuses to come,” James observed with quiet satisfaction. “He was here earlier this month, and he has now declared that he has had his absolute fill of the sublime Theodore, whilst conceding how strenuous, vigorous and, yes, let us acknowledg
e it, supple, our sovereign is, the sun at the center of the sky, with us as… as…”
“Clouds,” Caroline volunteered.
James frowned. “I once was obliged to let go an excellent typewriter-operator because whenever I paused for a word, she would offer me one, and always not simply the wrong word, but the very worst word.”
“I’m sorry. But I quite like us as clouds.”
“Why,” asked James, “with the delicious exception of yourself, are there no beautiful women at court?”
“Well, there is Mrs. Cameron-if not Martha.”
“Alas, not Martha. But Mrs. Cameron’s a visitor. What I take to be the local ladies here are plainer than what one would find at a comparable-if anything in poor shabby London could be compared to this incomparability-reception.”
Caroline repeated the Washington adage that the capital was filled with ambitious energetic men and the faded women that they had married in their green youth. James was amused. “The same doubtless applies to diplomats…”
They were joined by Jules Jusserand, the resplendent French ambassador, and the three lapsed into French, a language James spoke quite as melodiously as his own. “What did the President say to you?” asked Jusserand. “We were all watching the two of you, with fascination.”
“He expressed his delight-the very word he used, as, apparently, he always does-at my-and his-election to something called the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which has, parthenogetically, given birth to an American Academy, a rustic version of your august French Academy, some half a hundred members whose souls if not achievements are held to be immortal.”
“What,” said Jusserand, “will you wear?”
“Ah, that vexes us tremendously. As the President and I tend to corpulence, I have proposed togas, on the Roman model, but our leader John Hay favors some sort of uniform like-Admiral Dewey’s.” James bowed low, as the hero passed by them. “He is my new friend. We have exchanged cards. I know,” James swept the air with an extended arm, “everyone at last.”