Gore Vidal - Empire

“Don’t worry, sonny,” said his old friend, with exuberant malice, “you’ve already lost it.”

Slowly, Hay descended the curved marble staircase to the round marble entrance hall-inspired by Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Colonel Payne rented only the best for his stolen Whitney son. Hay did not like Colonel Payne; but, to the Colonel’s credit, he did not thrust himself upon the family of Helen Hay Whitney. Thus far, he had not been seen in Newport; nor had William C. Whitney. Each maintained the symmetry of their feud through absence.

In a panelled study that resembled the interior of a cigar box, Clara was writing letters beneath the portrait of the house’s owner, a railroad magnate, gone abroad. “You have resigned,” she said, without looking up.

“How did you know?” Hay was no longer astonished by Clara’s astonishing knowledge of him.

“The way you walk on your heels when you think you’ve-put your foot down. I’m writing Edith. Shall I say anything about your resignation?”

“No. No. Theodore must hear it only from me.” Hay produced the letter. “My freedom.”

“Yes, dear.” Clara continued to write; and Hay felt robbed of all drama.

“It’s not every day the secretary of state resigns,” he began.

“Well, it seems like every day in your case. I wish,” Clara signed her letter with a flourish, and turned the entire huge bulk of her body toward him, “that you really would go through with it. I want to get you back to Bad Nauheim, to the treatments, to…”

“Clara, I’ve done it! We can leave for Europe next month. Adee keeps the department running smoothly whether I’m living or dead, and the President…”

“… will stop you, as always. He wants you for next year, for the election. You’ll have to stay on, worse luck. Of course, the sea-air…”

“… agrees with me. But, how can I take another year of the Senate and Cabot…?” Hay shuddered at the thought of that narrow pompous man whom he had once thought of as a friend.

“We must put up with him because of Sister Ann. She’s worth a dozen of him…”

“And he is a dozen truly dreadful senators rolled into one…”

Helen swept, very like her mother, into the room. Marriage had enlarged everything about her. “Mrs. Fish gives a reception for the Secretary of State Saturday. So Mr. Lehr has decreed, decreed…”

“What dogs are to be asked?” Hay had been rather more pleased than shocked by the Lehr-Fish dinner party for the dogs of the Four Hundred. Roman decadence had always appealed to his frontiersman soul. The fact that decadence so enraged Theodore was also a point in its favor, particularly now that Theodore was himself showing late-imperial signs.

“Alice is arriving.” It was no longer necessary to ask which Alice. The Alice always arriving was Roosevelt. The press revelled in her; and called her Princess Alice. She delighted; she shocked; she powdered her nose in public, something no lady was supposed to do even in private, and it was even whispered that she, secretly, smoked cigarettes. Plainly, late, very late, Roman decadence now luridly lit up the White House, and the President had even joked to Hay that he himself had been taken to task by a lady in Canada who had read that he had actually drunk a glass of champagne at Helen Hay’s wedding, thereby placing in jeopardy his immortal soul.

“Your father has resigned.”

“I suppose she’ll stay at the Stone House. But we could always have her here…”

“Is that all that you have to say at the close of my long career?” Hay realized that his affectation of melancholy was too close to the real thing to be convincing.

“Oh, you won’t resign. You won’t really . Don’t be silly, Father. You’d have nothing at all to do. Anyway, the President won’t let you. So that’s that, isn’t it?” Helen appealed to Clara, who nodded, with sibylline dignity.

Hay was ill pleased, for he had, indeed, meant to resign once and for all, and now every omen was wrong. Only death could free him of office; and that would come soon enough. “You two are merciless,” he observed.

“You must also see to it that we get that canal from Colombia,” said Helen, adjusting her hair in a mirror. She was now nearly as large as her mother; and dressed in the same dramatic style. “Why are they being so difficult?”

“They are dawdling because next year the old French Concession for a canal, which we took on, runs out, and then they’ll want us to pay all over again.”

“Thieves,” said Helen, curling a lock of hair with a finger.

“To put it mildly. We may have to-intervene. The people who actually live in the isthmus, the Panamanians, hate the Colombian government.”

“We must give them their freedom.” Helen was emphatic. “That is the least we can do, the very least.”

“You and the President think alike,” said Hay. “Four times in the last two years the Panamanians have revolted against Colombia…”

“The next time we’ll help them, and then they can enter the union like… like Texas.”

“Oh, surely, not like Texas,” said Clara, obscurely.

“One Texas may be too much.” Helen was reasonable. “But if Panama wants to belong to us, we should let them.”

“Or,” said Hay, “we should say that we’ll build the canal in Nicaragua. Just the threat will bring Colombia round.” This had been Hay’s policy; and Roosevelt had concurred, for the time being. “I shall resign,” he repeated, as he left the room. Neither lady responded. Helen’s hair had fallen, disastrously, down her back, while Clara’s letter-writing totally absorbed her.

In the marble hall, Hay gave the butler his letter to be mailed to the President at Oyster Bay; and the butler presented Hay with a newly arrived dispatch-case, full of business from Cinderella at Washington.

As Payne came down the stairs, Hay gave the dispatch-case to the butler. “I’m playing hooky today,” he said. “Put this in my room.”

“I’ll take you driving, sir.” Payne gazed down at his tiny father-in-law. “The Pope Toledo’s just arrived.”

“The what?”

“The Pope Toledo, my new motor car…”

“It sounds like a picture you might see hanging in the Prado.”

“Shall we ask the ladies?” Payne looked toward the study.

“No,” said Hay. “I’m no longer speaking to them. I’ve resigned as secretary of state, and they simply won’t accept it-my resignation, that is.”

“Let’s drive by old Mrs. Delacroix’s. Caroline and Blaise are there.”

Had Payne heard him? Hay wondered, as he followed the young man through the front door to the porte-cochere, where stood a marvellously intricate, shining piece of machinery.

The butler helped Hay into the front seat beside Payne, who showed as little interest in Hay’s resignation as the ladies of the family. Perhaps I am already dead, thought Hay, and everyone’s too polite to tell me. Perhaps I am dreaming all this. Lately, Hay’s dreams had been getting more and more life-like-and unpleasant-while his waking life was more than ever dream-like, and almost as unpleasant. Surely, it was all a dream that young Teddy was president and that he had just been to see him at Sagamore Hill and Teddy had discussed the possibility, even desirability, of a war with Russia. This sort of thing happened in dreams. In real life, there were real presidents, like Lincoln and McKinley; and real secretaries of state like Seward, not himself in masquerade, little Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, barely grown, with a new moustache, in a horse and buggy, driving down the rutted mud main street of Springfield, not being sped along inside an elegant contraption on rubber wheels that gave the sense they were floating on air, as Bellevue Avenue slipped past them, its palaces more suitable for Paradise-or Venice-than mere earth.