Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Seventeen-year-old Adelbert—“Del”—Hay had always struck Henry James (and probably his father John Hay, as well) as a rather slow, dull, uninteresting boy. But James hadn’t seen any of the four children since the Hay family’s last en masse descent upon London at least five years ago.

“Amazing growth spurt,” laughed Hay. “Del’s over six feet tall now and weighs more than two hundred pounds. And he’s become quite the athlete at St. Paul’s. He’s going to Yale in the autumn and plans to go out for football. Football , Harry. American football, where one rarely uses one’s feet.”

“Football?” James said blankly. The name, in an American context, rang only the faintest of bells. “But not what we call soccer?”

“No, an entirely new game,” said Hay. “Evidently it was invented—or, rather, adapted from European football and rugby, mostly rugby, I think, and its rules laid down—a dozen or so years ago by a Yale undergraduate at the time, a certain Walter Camp, who became general athletic director and . . . head football coach . . . whatever that means. Football is all the rage at Ivy League colleges now, Harry. It seems that Harvard and Yale have been in a deadly annual football competition for some years. Last year, a Harvard chess master named Lorin Deland introduced a devastating new play or maneuver or move or . . . something . . . called ‘the Flying Wedge’—no clue as to what that means—but Yale still managed to win, six to zero. Del can’t wait to play under Walter Camp’s tutelage.”

“And Helen will also be here tomorrow night?” said James. He would have stabbed himself in both eyes with a dull knife if that is what it would have taken to get off the subject of sports. “She must be . . . eighteen?”

“Yes,” said Hay. “And she’s very dedicated these days to writing poetry and even some short fiction. Don’t let her corner you, Harry.”

“In London last, she was a lovely and invigorating interlocutor at age thirteen,” said James. “I can only imagine how pleasant it would be now to be ‘cornered’ by her to pursue the discussion of all things literary.”

“Adams needs to meet Sherlock Holmes,” said Hay, his voice suddenly serious. “That’s the primary reason for this gathering . . . not that Adams wouldn’t have arranged to see you at the earliest possible opportunity, Harry. He was distraught at having missed your first week here. But I wasn’t sure what to tell him about . . . the whole Holmes thing. Do you think it will be Sherlock Holmes or Jan Sigerson who will appear tomorrow night?”

“To whom did you address the invitation?” asked James.

“To Mr. Holmes.”

“Then I wager that it will be Mr. Holmes who appears.”

“Oh . . . I almost forgot,” said Hay as he walked James through the foyer to the door. “We’ve also invited . . . as Adams and Wendell always call him . . . the Boy.”

“The Boy,” mused James. “Oh, you mean . . . oh! Oh, my. Oh, dear. I keep forgetting that he’s in Washington these days.”

“I made him promise to be on his best behavior,” said Hay.

James’s smile was three parts irony to two parts anticipation. “We shall see. We shall see.”

Sherlock Holmes had been invited as “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” to the 8 p.m. Hays’ Sunday dinner gathering so he arrived as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. His second and third steamer trunks had caught up to him via the British Embassy in Washington, so he wore the latest London fashion in white tie and black tails, soft pumps so highly polished that they could be used as a signaling mirror in an emergency (but not the overly flexible Capezio black jazz oxfords so popular with the younger set for a long night of dancing), a crimson-lined black cape, the silkiest of silk, six-and-a-half-inch-tall top hat, a formal vest with lapels and scooped front, a brilliantly white formal shirt with a stand-up rather than wing collar, and—since it was a dinner, not a ball—no white gloves.

The other men were dressed similarly—no sign of the less formal (and, to Holmes, definitely déclassé) new “tuxedo jacket”—and, upon their introduction by Hay, Holmes had to award Henry Adams the laurels for oldest, most worn, and by far most beautiful jacket of the evening, although Henry Cabot Lodge’s shining new threads must have cost five times the price of Adams’s time-worn perfection. The only man there that night who did not look to have been born into his clothes was Hay’s heavily muscled and bull-necked teenaged son, Del, who seemed to be bursting out of his formalwear even as they all watched.

The ladies, with only a few missed cues, were also upholding the highest standards of modern French-American design.

The group had only a few minutes for introductions and polite conversation before they were called into the dining room.

Holmes had to admit to a feeling of admiration. He’d dined with the Prince of Wales, the King of Scandinavia, and more elite and sophisticated hosts in England, France, and around the world, but he couldn’t remember a more beautiful room, chandelier, or table. Realizing that this dining room might comfortably seat fifty at a State Department banquet, Holmes marveled at how Clara Hay had arranged it to perfection for the twelve of them—four women and eight men.

The dinner was lopsided in terms of gender, but Clara and John Hay had made up for that in careful placement of their guests and beautiful but low centerpieces that hid no one’s face from anyone else. After they found their seats—there seemed to be a white-tie-and-tails servant behind every chair to help them with the extreme effort of scooting in or scooting out—Holmes took a minute to appreciate the seating arrangements.

At the head of the table was not John Hay, as one would expect in the man’s own home, but Henry Adams. The placement emphasized the “Welcome home, Henry” aspect of the dinner, but Holmes also suspected that the chair provided to Adams had a little higher seat, a little extra cushion, and thus put the short, bald man at eye height with everyone else.

Down the right side of the table—Holmes’s side—was first the newly sworn-in Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (perfectly groomed down to his perfectly cropped beard and mustache, but cold of eye— very cold of eye), then the stolid but animated Clara Hay (whose gown of royal-blue silk blended with satin and a design of garnet-colored peacock feathers with sleeves and trim of garnet-colored silk-satin and velvet would have been absolutely breathtakingly original if it hadn’t been featured in that March’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar ), and then Pennsylvania Senator James Donald Cameron (whose dark eyes seemed as sadly drooping as his thick mustache), then Sherlock—who found himself sitting directly across the table from Henry James and who knew at once that this was no accident, since at mid-table both of them could then field questions from both ends of the table—and to Sherlock’s left, young “Del” Hay smiling and ham-fisted but obviously comfortable with formal dining in such elite company as Henry Adams, Senator J. Donald Cameron, author Henry James, and the ice-eyed congressman-billionaire only this month turned U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

At the end of the table to Holmes’s left was seated the other “special guest” of the evening, Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Other than hearing from Henry James that Adams and Hay and Clarence King and the late Clover Adams had sometimes referred to young Roosevelt whom they’d known for many years as “the Boy”, Holmes knew little about the man.

But Holmes was interested in what he saw. Merely in the act of helping young Helen Julia Hay, to his left, into her seat and then taking his own chair and beaming down both sides of the table, Theodore Roosevelt radiated aggression. With small eyes squinting out from behind pince-nez, a military-trimmed mustache, and rows of teeth that seemed strangely aligned top and bottom, a horse’s teeth, a fierce stallion’s pre-breeding grimace, and a powerful, coiled, compact body that made athlete Del Hay’s tall form seem to shrink by comparison, the grinning Theodore Roosevelt seemed prepared to attack everyone at the table.