Gore Vidal - Empire

“Then everyone will be less rich.” The President was now retreating from the room. Alice remained. If nothing else, Caroline found her refreshing. But then the entire Roosevelt family was a surprise to a world that had come to look upon the White House as a seedy boardinghouse for dim politicians emeriti . Caroline’s “Society Lady,” as the woman in question signed herself in the pages of the Tribune , was thrilled with the change in Washington’s ton , as she liked to call it, rhyming the French word, to Caroline’s immeasurable joy, with the English word that denotes a measurement of weight.

“This place has possibilities.” Mrs. Jack was looking about the room. The diplomatic corps was its usual colorful self; and the few men of state were, if not actually gentlemen, got up as if they were. Only the wives-the poor wives, as Caroline thought of them-gave away the game. They were redolent of the back yards of small towns; and always frowning with anxiety, fearful of letting down the ton .

Caroline had been disagreeably surprised to meet the wife of James Burden Day. For one thing, she had not expected him to marry so unexpectedly, and, for another, to marry someone from “back home” when he had already entered the relatively great world of Washington, where he was, relatively, related to those ubiquitous gentlefolk the Apgars. Caroline assumed that Day’s wife was the price of his congressional seat. None of this was her business.

“If the wives were subtracted,” Mrs. Jack said aloud what Caroline was thinking, “the result would be a lot more amusing than anything we’ve got in New York.”

“Only,” said Caroline sadly, “they refuse to be subtracted.”

“Try division.” Mrs. Jack gave her a sudden sharp, knowing look; and Caroline, for no reason that she could ascertain, gasped.

Clara Hay gathered them up. “Come on, you two. Amuse Colonel Payne.”

“Surely, he dislikes ladies,” began Mrs. Jack.

“Who doesn’t,” whispered Caroline, taking advantage of Clara Hay’s deafness.

“All the more reason for him to make a fuss over you , Mrs. Astor.” Clara was firm, always firm; she was also generally right. Colonel Oliver Payne was thrilled to be surrounded by Mrs. Astor and Miss Sanford.

“We must,” said Mrs. Jack, voice more throaty and menacing than ever, “find you a husband-I mean, a wife, Colonel.”

BLAISE HAD ACCOMPANIED HIS EDITOR Hapgood to New York City to observe the election of the Chief to Congress, a foregone election, as Hearst had left nothing to chance. The original Democratic nominee, Brisbane, had stepped aside, to make way for his employer; and Hearst was duly confirmed as Tammany’s Democratic nominee in the Eleventh District. For this safe Democratic seat, the new head of Tammany, the cheerful Charles Francis Murphy, asked only that the Journal whole-heartedly support Tammany’s candidate for governor. Hearst had agreed.

Now Blaise and Hapgood stood in windy Madison Square, where some forty thousand people were gathered to hear the election results, and view the fireworks laid on by the Journal . “He sure knows how to spend the money,” observed Hapgood, with awe.

“Sometimes I think that that’s all he knows.” Blaise was sour. He, too, had spent money in Baltimore; in fact, the money spent was now at his side, a stout Teutonic man with a huge moustache, the paradigm of Hearst journalists in the copious flesh. But even Hapgood had so far failed to increase circulation figures. Currently, their hopes were based on a series about miscegenation, the one subject certain to thrill their readers, or so Hapgood, the Marylander, maintained. Blaise envied Caroline her city. When the capital was dull, there was Embassy Row; when the embassies were short of news, there was the White House, a never-ending source of “warm human interest,” to use the current phrase. Stories about the Roosevelt children and their ponies in the elevator, their appearances at state sessions on stilts, their snakes and frogs at table, and, above all, the Jovian sovereign Theodore, conducting himself like a king, destined by birth to his high estate. Caroline need do nothing to fill the columns of her paper; they filled themselves. All he had was miscegenation; and then what?

Blaise had wanted to join Hearst at the Lexington Avenue house, but Hapgood suggested that they get a sense of the crowd first. “After all, if the Chief”-although he worked for Blaise now, the Chief was still the Chief-“is going to be the candidate in ’04, we’ll get some sense of it now, from the crowd.”

“A lot of Bowery.” Blaise knew his Manhattan crowds. “Also Tammany.” Everyone was in a gala mood. Huge transparencies celebrated Hearst’s victory of fifteen thousand eight hundred votes over his dim Republican adversary; and his lead over the entire ticket by thirty-five hundred votes, which made him the largest Democratic vote-getter in the state. Tammany’s governor-to-be was not-to-be: in a close race, he had lost to the Republicans. This then was the night that Hearst had dreamed of. He had won his first election in the biggest possible way.

Blaise and Hapgood found themselves not far from a band which kept playing, rather tactlessly, “California, Here I Come,” a tribute to Hearst’s origin rather than to his adopted domicile, which was now dispatching him to Washington. Overhead a manned balloon was lit up with colored lanterns. The crowd was festive, as well they should be; free schooners of beer were being served at one end of the square beneath the legend “William Randolph Hearst, Labor’s Friend,” while nearby an electrical sign proclaimed, “Congress Must Control the Trusts,” a not-so-subtle reminder that the current president was less than arduous in his efforts to master the country’s owners.

Hearst’s socialism-if that was what it was-always bemused Blaise, who never ceased, for a moment, to be loyal to his own class and could not conceive any other loyalty. Although Hearst would have to pose as a friend of the working-man and the enemy of the rich if he wanted to replace William Jennings Bryan as the plain people’s tribune, he was not entirely the demagogue others thought him. The rich Mr. Hearst, who had inherited his money, disliked those other rich men, who had inherited theirs. He was genuinely attuned not so much to the hard-working worthy poor as he was to those excluded from society itself. Himself a sort of outlaw, he not only lived outside the law but used law to flout law. Hearst might yet strike that nerve in a still-savage land which would make him its natural leader. Blaise was, suddenly, aware that he was present at an historic moment, the genesis of what might be an astonishing, even Napoleonic career.

As if to emphasize and punctuate the Napoleonic image, Madison Square exploded-literally exploded. Blaise fell to his knees on the pavement, while Hapgood sat down beside him with a crash. Sound-waves buffeted them like Montauk surf. The band stopped playing. Then the screaming began; and the sound of ambulances. Overhead the balloon hovered; then began its descent. The electrical sign still threatened the trusts, but the various transparencies had been abandoned, as people ran, in panic, from the square, where something, Blaise could not tell what, had blown up.

“Anarchists!” Hapgood was now on his feet, ever the reporter, the Hearst reporter.

In the cool autumn air there was the acrid scent of-what?-gunpowder, Blaise decided, as he and Hapgood, like brave soldiers in a battle, hurried against the fleeing crowd. Let others run from battle; they would go to war.

The fire department arrived just as Blaise and Hapgood found the source of the explosion, a small cast-iron mortar inside of which a fireworks bomb had gone off, igniting dozens of other bombs. The principal damage had been to the windows of a building nearby. The glass had been pulverized, and like so many icy lethal bullets had laid low dozens of men, women and children. Some stood, screaming, faces bleeding; others lay ominously still on the pavement. Blaise stared down at a man, spread-eagled face down; in the back of his neck there was a diamond-shaped piece of glass which must have severed the spine. To Blaise’s amazement there was no blood, only the glass, shining in the lamplight, and the dark slit, rather like a letterbox into which someone had tried to insert a glass message.