Gore Vidal - Empire

Once the bay-window table had been abandoned, Whitney and Payne separated, as if by prior arrangement. The Hays escorted the Roosevelts into the dining room, where all the guests were standing, champagne glasses at the ready. Back of the huge white cake Helen and Payne stood, ready for the toasts; and the cutting of the cake.

As a bridesmaid, Caroline wore a light gray silk crepe gown, a not entirely satisfactory color or non-color, but Helen had insisted that she be a bridesmaid, “since you were supposed to be my matron-of-honor.” To this appeal, Caroline had surrendered.

Now Caroline stood between Henry Adams and Cabot Lodge, and the three responded to the various toasts, particularly an exhilarating one from the President, who had moved in between bride and groom as if, somehow, their wedding if not their marriage might have been incomplete without his nearness, even centrality.

“Theodore,” murmured Adams, “is quite drunk with himself.”

Lodge’s laugh was not the prettiest of sounds; but, under the circumstances, Caroline found it irresistible. “He can’t bear for anyone else to be the center of attention. He wants to be groom…”

“And bride,” Caroline contributed.

“ Everything ,” said Adams. “What, I wonder,” he added with a macabre smile, “will he be like at a funeral?”

“In the coffin,” said Lodge.

“If it’s a state funeral,” Adams agreed. “So much energy for everything, including death.”

“We’re lucky.” Lodge was now grave. “To have him where he is, at such a time.”

“Handing round cake?” Caroline was deflationary but Lodge was a true believer, and Theodore’s star was his star.

To Caroline’s surprise, Frederika Bingham was in the room, uncommonly pretty in pale green. Although Mrs. Bingham had yet to enter the gilded gates of the highest society, the crooked smile of her daughter seemed, somehow, to open every door. Caroline was admiring. After all, the pursuit of a high social career was, perhaps, the only challenge that a wealthy American girl might ever meet and, with luck, overcome. “Alice invited me,” Frederika read Caroline’s mind.

“Roosevelt?”

“Hay. I never knew there were so many people in Washington I did not know and so few,” the smile was implicit rather than visible, “so wonderfully few, congressmen.”

“Your mother has them .”

“She can keep them. I suppose these are New York people.” Frederika looked about the room as if she were in New York’s legendary lion house, where Clarence King had seen fit to go mad.

“I’m a foreigner.” Caroline still fell back on this identity; but, of course, she was now, like it or not, old Washington. “There are many people here from Ohio. Like Colonel Payne. And the Stones. And Senator Hanna.” They were bowed to by the fat, pale Mark Hanna, who resembled, for an instant, all Ohio. “Is your brother here?” asked Frederika, as the two young women followed the newlyweds and the adhesive President into the drawing room.

“No. He’s vanished. But he’s supposed to be building a house here.”

“He’s not in Baltimore?”

“Not if he can help it.” Caroline had just received, unofficially, an accountant’s report of the Examiner losses for the year just ended. The paper was going to be expensive to maintain. The Tribune , thanks to Mr. Trimble and her own inspired negligence, was profitable. Mr. McLean had even made a New Year’s offer to buy; and Caroline had declined, joyfully, to sell and, sorrowfully, he had said that he might now be obliged to buy the Post .

“I think Mr. Hearst must be fascinating.” Frederika was unexpected. As a rule, nice young ladies deplored the national villain.

“Well, if you think that, you and Blaise think alike. He’s drawn to him like… like…”

“A moth to a flame?”

“I’d hoped to avoid that phrase but then, as a publisher, I ought not, ever, to avoid the too familiar. Exactly. A moth to a flame. I hope he isn’t burned.” Caroline said exactly what she meant; but then she no longer regarded Blaise as an enemy. After all, had he not behaved as he had, she might have been simply another transatlantic young heiress of the sort that Mr. James wrote more and more elaborately about. Instead, she had made a place for herself like no other; and though Marguerite might mourn the irregularity of their situation, Caroline was delighted to be free, and-why deny it?-powerful in the world of Washington, which was becoming very much the world that mattered. She glanced at the ring that she wore on her left little finger. As Del’s fire opal had split in equal halves, she had had them set on either side of an irregular yellow sapphire. The effect was more evocative than beautiful; emblematic of a life that had broken in half, had not been lived…

At the door to the drawing room, Caroline was astonished to see Mrs. Jack Astor, like some celestial peacock-or was it hen?-in the Washington back yard. “It is like one of those Brueghel paintings,” the deep voice sounded in the crowded room. “The wedding of village swain to milkmaid.”

“Attended by a fairy godmother, all in gossamer and jewels…” Caroline began.

“… witch , dear Caroline. What am I doing in so bucolic a place?”

“It reminds you of Newport, Rhode Island, I suppose.”

“No. Rhinebeck-on-Hudson when we give our annual harvest feast to the yokels, and I see to it that their trestle tables are wreathed in poison ivy.” Mrs. Jack’s laughter was enjoyable if not precisely contagious. All round them, awed Washington ladies were staring at the fashionable Mrs. Astor, never before seen in the capital city. Caroline was agreeably aware that her own stock was rising rapidly.

“Are you a friend of the Hays?” asked Caroline.

“No, not really. But I am enamored of this creature, so young, so potentially appalling…”

Mrs. Jack had put out an arm and swept the imperious Alice Roosevelt toward her. “You see? I came. Your rustic revels are now complete.”

“So proud the Astors!” exclaimed Alice, in no way, ever, to be outdone, even by the superb Mrs. Jack. “When they were nothing but German Jews, kosher butchers, when we Roosevelts…”

“… were running away from the Indians, in your clumsy wooden shoes, which I see you’re wearing today,” she added, glancing down at Alice’s rather large squared-off slippers. “How suitable…”

“Isn’t she foul!” Alice turned, delighted, to Caroline.

“No, no. She is fair. But her bite is lethal.”

“Rabid!” Alice gazed with delight on Mrs. Jack. It was no secret that the President’s oldest child was also, in his own words, “the only one of us with any money,” inherited from her dead mother. She was also bent on being a Fashionable, something unknown in Roosevelt circles, a family not unlike the Apgars when it came to dowdy self-satisfaction.

There was a sudden murmur all about them, as the President and Mrs. Roosevelt approached, led by John Hay, like an ancient chamberlain. “Alice, we’re leaving,” the President announced.

“You’re leaving. I’m staying.”

“Alice,” murmured her stepmother.

“Mrs. Jack Astor.” Alice presented the swan to the barnyard geese.

Mrs. Jack made an elaborate curtsey.

“Do stop that!” The President was unamused.

“She does it very well.” Edith smiled a queenly smile.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Jack rose now to her full height. “Why do you call us ‘the idle rich’?” She gave the President a mocking smile. “We are never idle.”

“Some are less idle than others,” began the President, plainly not comfortable.

“While some are less rich than others,” acknowledged Mrs. Jack. “Even so, you must not generalize about your loyal subjects, or we shall all vote for Bryan next year.”