1876

by Gore Vidal

  I sat opposite Tilden and found him, for the first time, impressive. Toward the end of lunch, I had asked him why he had not joined the Republican party, since, politically, he is little different from the Bryants and the Adamses. Someone had interrupted us, and he had not been able to answer—had not wanted to answer, I thought. But now, without prompting, Tilden returned to the subject, his voice less and less audible as the noise of the band at the capitol grew.

  “I was never a Republican, Mr. Schuyler, because those gentlemen you mentioned, distinguished as they are, have only one real interest, and that is the making of special laws in order to protect their fortunes. I know. In my day I was employed by them as a working lawyer. I also know that they have no compassion for the masses of the people in this country who are without money and who are, many of them, thanks to General Grant and his friends, without food or houses. I have always thought that only as a Democrat, reflecting Jefferson and Jackson—and our common friend Van Buren—could justice ever be done the people because, at this moment in history, ours is the only party which is even faintly responsive to the force of ideas. That is why I mean to do my very best to fire a majority of the people with a desire for true reform. I also have every intention of succeeding. To fail now would be cruel and unthinkable!”

  I was deeply impressed not only by this statement but by Tilden’s power of concentration, and recollection. With a band playing, a crowd cheering, fireworks exploding, the nomination for the presidency in his hand, he took the time to answer me eloquently, even passionately, considering his habitual coolness.

  Is it possible, I wonder, that in this gaudy centennial year these states have produced a great man? I am half convinced that such is the case, and unless the people of the country are even more stupid than one suspects, there is not a chance of Samuel Tilden, in the name of reform, failing to be elected nineteenth president of the United States.

  Ten

  1

  I HAVE, MOST HAPPILY, mislaid July, lost every single day of it in a sea-brightness that fair dazzles me. The world of little men pursuing power seems far away. I dream quite other dreams in this lotus sleep, induced by the high summer scent of peonies and of roses, of sea-salt spray.

  Idle days succeed one another like blue Atlantic waves on Newport’s seaweed-strewn lion’s-skin-coloured beach. Oh, let me stay here forever upon (or even under) these marvellous moist green lawns, in the shade of serious old trees whilst the dulcet voice of Ward McAllister sounds in my ear throughout all eternity, giving me his darkey’s receipts for terrapin, for black stew Baltimore or Trenton (add cream, butter), cooked in a chafing dish.

  Jamie sends me urgent telegrams. Colonel Pelton wants me to join the Tilden “Speakers Bureau” and exhort the public in the small towns of the republic. But I plead ill health, having never been in better form—form in the mental, not in the corporeal sense, for my legs are weakening, I am too fat, and my lungs give every indication that the effort demanded of them will soon be too much, not to mention the monotony of in-out, in-out. But accepting the fact that I am in my penultimate phase, I have been entirely content—until perhaps this afternoon, when something very like a cloud crossed our gilded Newport sun.

  We were invited by McAllister for a picnic. This is an occasion much looked forward to by the Newporters, because McAllister does take pains, and to echo the style of Mrs. Fayette Snead known as Fay, there are many pains here to be taken.

  A special train left at noon from the town to McAllister’s place, Bayside Farm; another train at 4:45 P.M. returned us from farm to town. The journey to Bayside takes exactly six minutes and is an occasion for much good cheer as Watteau ladies pretend to be Breughel women, each carrying a single dish as her chef’s contribution to the picnic.

  Emma, Denise, John Apgar and I joined the other revellers. The Mystic Rose was indisposed, but there were enough minor Astors to give “tong” to the day. McAllister’s cottage is not much more than a farmhouse which makes it unique, for at Newport “cottage” means mansion, like the Sanford palace (built by Denise’s father), a white and grey marble replica of the Grand Trianon, half again as large. Here twenty servants look after us, and Saint-Gratien seems cottagey by comparison. I have, incidentally, just received a charming but sad note from Princess Mathilde. She complains that too many of our friends have had the bad taste to die. She is quite right to be indignant.

  Sanford is mostly on his yacht. When he does visit us, he speaks warmly of his old friend General Hayes, and I suppose that they must, by now, have met. Lately he has been threatening to take us on a cruise but Denise has said, firmly, no.

  John Apgar has been with us for ten days, and goes back to New York Monday: “To work. All the family is now in Maine, except me.” If John is resentful of the way Emma has elected to spend her summer, he has said nothing to her, or if he has she has not repeated it to me. Although, on occasion, I see him looking down or, rather, up the Apgar nose at some element of grandeur that would not be in good taste south of Madison Square, he takes well to Sanford luxury.

  Today the girls were very much en fleur, at least, at the beginning of the picnic. McAllister greeted us effusively. “Fish off the rocks, do! Catch us a lobster.” And some of the guests actually did take fishing rods and sat on the rocks, impersonating fishermen. Others strolled about McAllister’s farm—a real farm with real tenant farmers got up for the day to look like honest yeomen, but, thank Heaven, their sly, disgruntled Yankee faces quite nullified McAllister’s feudal intention.

  Denise and I sat beneath a tall shady tree, and drank a well-chilled ’74 champagne brut. Emma and John walked arm in arm to where a small orchestra played waltzes and couples danced on a raised platform. The women of the farmers’ families arranged the various dishes on a long trestle table beneath a grape arbour.

  “I like John.” It was the first time Denise had mentioned to me her—rival? No, that confuses rather than defines an odd and delicate relationship between two women, neither of whom has ever before had a woman friend. Although Denise did tell me of a first cousin back in New Orleans “who was like my sister, the way Emma is now. Only she died when she was seventeen. Of the bloody flux, as they call dysentery in the South. Too terrible! I thought I’d never get over it, her dying. But I did.”

  “John is devoted,” I said. That’s really the best thing that one can say of him. “And I like him, too…”

  “I think they’ll be happy. I hope so, anyway.”

  “What does Emma say to you?” I was deeply curious. On the subject of John, Emma tends to obliqueness.

  “Very little.” Denise opened her eighteenth-century fan and stirred warm air redolent of new-cut grass and cow. “It’s a pity we can’t go on like this forever.”

  “More pity for me, my girl.” I took her hand. I treat her like a daughter but could easily be her lover—well, not easily. Nothing on that order is easy for me now, but in my day…

  No! I must confine myself to the events and non-events of this day, which is so evidently not to be mine. “I’m the one who wants to make time stop. I don’t want any part of the future. Just let me have this present frozen forever in”—since my eye was on the buffet table I fear that instead of saying “amber” I said—“aspic.”

  Denise laughed until her face was quite scarlet. Then we drank to our future en gelée. “Bill has found an interest, thanks to you.”

  “Not me.”

  Denise shook her head. “No. You’ve done it. I don’t know how. He wants to prove to you that he’s…”

  “What?”

  “Worthwhile. Powerful. All the things he pretends to be. Not that he couldn’t be any of them, mind you. And I think that he will be. Now.”

  “And I have been his inspiration?”

  Denise nodded. “He respects you. He’s a little afraid of you. And he wants very much to impress you. As do I.”

 
“You are good—to say that.” Looking at her in that—oh, for a superior word! lambent?—light framed in that fragment of time already lost as I write this late at night, I had the terrible sad sense that I would never be so happy again with anyone whom I so much—not loved, for that word is too suggestive of pain, not to mention banality—delighted in. She is twin to my Emma, but not, like Emma, a part of me and therein lies a world of difference, tempering beautifully response.

  But, as always, interruption. Denise was led away by McAllister. Emma danced with a minor Astor connection while I walked slowly amongst the rocks at the sea’s edge, my arm through John Apgar’s arm—a gesture that looked to be more affectionate than it was, because with my curiously weakened legs I do fear falling.

  “Are you enjoying Newport, sir?” The question suggested that a negative softly sounded might strike an Apgar note. But I chose to sound enthusiastic; praised the sea, weather, cottages—and Sanfords.

  “Oh, she is very nice. In fact, her father…”

  “Is a connection of your family. Yes!” I was perhaps too swift in cutting short Apgar genealogy. “It is nice for Emma to have a friend like Denise.” I stopped to catch my breath, to watch the gulls and sailboats. For an instant I could not tell which was which. A trick of perspective combined with bright summer’s vivid sea and sky had so eliminated the horizon that distant sails and gulls’ wings seemed all the same: free-moving bits of white in a blue creation.

  “Mrs. Sanford has been more than kind.” John cleared his throat. I sat down carefully on a rock; breathed deeply, deliberately, filling lungs with sea air, the best of tonics. John unfolded the largest white handkerchief that I have ever seen and spread it on the mosses and the lichens beside my rock; then he sat cross-legged and looked up at me, his Adam’s apple mysteriously bobbing up and down, as regularly as Mr. Corliss’s steam engine and to as little evident purpose.

  “But you would rather Emma had gone to Maine.”

  “The family had expected it, of course. But I can see how this must—amuse her more.” Wanting, I think, gently to condemn, John merely sounded wistful. Although an Apgar, he responds as any young man might to the rich pleasures of this place as opposed to what must be the rather austere arrangements at Maine.

  “Emma is a foreigner in a strange land, and though she has her father, and her husband-to-be”—I managed a sweet smile for my son-in-law-to-be—“she is still without friends, without any sense of belonging. Denise—Mrs. Sanford”—I must stop making this slip—“has given her that sense, has given her true friendship, and women, dear boy, need each other in a way that we can never understand.” I let fall this nonsense with impressive gravity, like a newly engraved brick found at the base of Sinai.

  “I hope,” said John, astonishing me, “that I don’t lose her.”

  “What makes you think there’s any danger of that?”

  “This is not the life…” He gestured at the handsome picknickers strolling amongst the rocks, dancing beneath the trees. “I mean we are very different in our family.”

  “Has Emma said that she does not—enjoy your family?”

  “No. No. She is an angel, as you know. She is most tactful. And most self-contained.”

  I cannot think why I have got into the habit of thinking John stupid when he is not. I suppose his social limitations and want of imagination have misled me. He is an acute observer in matters that concern him (as who is not?). “I don’t, I hope, betray a secret, John, when I say that both Emma and I rather hope that you will, perhaps, consider seriously the possibility of one day living at Paris.” There. It was said.

  John’s response was swift and, to a point, heartening. “I would like nothing better. And I’ve told Emma that repeatedly.” I find it curious that Emma has never said a word of this to me. She has remarked, from time to time, that it might be possible one day to persuade John to come to Europe, but she has never told me that he is actually eager to make the move.

  “But your family…” No need to finish that sentence.

  “My family would survive.” This was very dry; and rather disloyal to the Gens Apgar. “But it would take some arranging. I would have to separate my share of the estate from that of the Brothers. I would also have to find employment.”

  “But surely the estate is sufficient?” I shall soon be like one of those Americans who goes about asking everyone how much money he has.

  John ever so slightly winced at my crudeness. “I mean, sir, I cannot be idle. I must practise law or do something useful.”

  “Of course. Of course.” I was encouraging, spoke of various American and English law firms with offices at Paris.

  John interrupted me. “I know, sir. I have even made inquiries. But when I talk about all this in any detail, Emma seems not to be interested.”

  “But I assure you, she is!”

  “That’s not my impression. She is—I don’t know. Drifting out to sea, as they say.” And confirming the metaphor physically, he hurled a piece of juniper wood toward the rocks. It vanished in the foam of a breaking wave.

  Somewhat alarmed, I did and said all that I could to reassure him. I think I succeeded. At least he was more cheerful as we made our way back to the picnic, to the music, to the champagne, to Ward McAllister’s excited anecdotes of the various great personages he has peeped at. Apparently, he once was allowed to watch, from a pantry at Windsor, Queen Victoria’s private dinner table being set.

  I had it out with Emma after dinner. Denise did not join us; sent word that she had had too much sun and picnic. So we dined à trois in the cavernous dining room.

  After dinner we went into the drawing room and Emma played Offenbach while John and I smoked cigars (we had been given dispensation by Denise). Then John went to bed early. Tomorrow he goes to Providence to do business, even though it is a Sunday. Emma and Denise will, as usual, go to early mass while I will, as usual, lie in bed until noon.

  When John had gone, I told Emma of our conversation at the rocks. She listened intently, still seated at the piano. Finally, she sighed and said, “Well, is he right? Am I drifting away?”

  “You must tell me.”

  Emma did scales. Not my favourite sound. “No.” She spoke very precisely. “I feel the same way about this marriage as I did when it was first proposed.”

  “Perhaps that is what John fears.”

  Emma glanced at me, with half a smile and half a frown. “I keep my bargain, Papa.” She shifted to her native language, where she is entirely at ease with every nuance and where I am at ease but doomed to a slow decorous correctness, unlike my conversation—and behaviour—in English.

  “What have you done, to make him uneasy?”

  Emma struck chords. “It is probably what I’ve not done. In affairs like this, there is supposed to be some sort of progress. Well, he has moved and I have not. I’ve stayed the same, from the beginning.”

  “All things considered, that is not abnormal. But he is more intelligent than we think.”

  “Oh, Papa! Of course he is. And I’m not intelligent at all, as you must’ve noticed in our thirty-five years together.”

  “Thirty-two, chérie!” That is the age we have agreed is most plausible, given the accursedly premature moustache of my oldest grandson. “And you are as intelligent as a doting father who was himself—” I was going to say “son to a doting father,” meaning Colonel Burr, but stopped, for she still thinks me the son of James Schuyler, the cuckolded tavern keeper of Greenwich Village.

  Emma had just begun a new set of scales when Denise’s maid entered—a thick-boned, good-hearted woman from the Auvergne. She was very red in the face and out of breath. “It’s Madame. She wants you. She’s not well.”

  Emma hurried after the maid, and I sat alone in that dim summery drawing room and wondered how and by what route I have come to be who I am, old, derelict, unreal to myself, a victim of
the sheer incomprehensible randomness of living, and of the atrocious running out of time. Why am I I, and not another? Young, not old? Or unborn, rather than (result of a most random conjoining) made flesh and deposited in a hard world, to flourish, mate, and now presently to die.

  This sombre train of thought was made even worse by Emma’s visit to me here in my room half an hour ago. She told me that Denise’s doctor had come and gone.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Emma looked weary. She has been with Denise since dinner and it is now midnight. “She’s pregnant, Papa.”

  I felt my own stomach contract, as if in sympathy. “But I thought she could not have a child, ever.”

  “So did she. So did everyone. But Madame Restell…You know who I mean?”

  “Yes, my dear. I have even met the infamous lady.”

  “Well, Madame Restell says that with proper rest, and a new concoction—to be taken every day, to relax the muscles, or whatever—Denise can have a normal childbirth.”

  “Then what was the trouble just now?”

  Emma shrugged. “It’s the third month. Her responses are normal. She felt ill. Some nausea…You don’t really want to know all the secrets of our maternal art, do you?”

  “No. Spare me the details. But if everything is so normal, why the doctor tonight?”

  “Because she’s easily frightened. And more than anything, that could make the birth difficult. Anyway, I trust Madame Restell, and so does Denise.”

  “How curious that Denise would want a child. She told me in New York how pleased she was not to be like the other ladies.”

  “When she said that, she was making the best of it. She has always wanted a child. After all, she’s a good Catholic, not like us. Be fruitful, multiply. She is being obedient and very happy.”