Gore Vidal - Empire

BLAISE, IN A BATHROBE, entered Jim’s room, which adjoined his own. The bathroom door was open and his tennis partner stood, eyes shut, beneath the shower. When it came to plumbing, Mrs. Delacroix did not share the prejudice of so many old Newporters, who believed that hot water was not really luxurious unless humanly transported in metal cans up many steps from cellar kitchen. Every bedroom of her Grand Trianon had its own bath with huge copper fixtures kept perfectly polished. Blaise stared, thoughtfully, at his tennis partner; and wished that he himself were as tall and well-proportioned. Where his own legs were short and muscular, Jim’s were long and slender, like the rest of him; he had a classical body in every sense, heroic even, suitable for showing off in a museum, once a suitably large leaf had been found.

Jim opened his eyes, and saw Blaise, and smiled, without self-consciousness. “We can’t buy a shower anything like this in Washington,” he said. “Kitty’s looked and looked.”

“I think you have to have them specially made.” Blaise turned away, as Jim shut off the shower, and picked up a towel. “How did you like Brisbane?”

While Hearst was abroad with his new wife, Arthur Brisbane was in charge not only of the newspapers but of Hearst’s political career. Hearst had wanted to know James Burden Day, who had wanted to know Hearst. As Democratic members of Congress, each could be useful to the other. Unfortunately, Day could only be in New York when Hearst was abroad. But Blaise had arranged a meeting with Brisbane, followed by an invitation to join Blaise at Newport, which Day had accepted without his wife. Caroline seemed glad to have the young congressman as a guest, and Blaise was now able to observe his half-sister in a new light as she and Day talked politics like two professionals. Certainly, she made more sense than Hearst, her model, she liked to claim, knowing how much it annoyed Blaise.

Jim dressed himself quickly, from long habit, he said. “I rush from boardinghouse to picnic ground to depot, no time to dress, think, do anything except politics.”

“I couldn’t imagine that sort of a life.”

“I couldn’t- can’t imagine being rich, like this.” Jim looked around the bedroom, all, more or less, in the style of the original Grand Trianon.

“It’s sort of like being born with six fingers instead of five. You don’t pay attention to it, but others do. So, what was your impression of Brisbane?”

Jim was now combing out his wet curls, and wincing with pain as the comb’s teeth struck snarl after snarl. “He doesn’t know as much about politics as he thinks he does. At least not our kind, in the West and the South. He thinks Bryan’s some sort of fool…”

“ Isn’t he?”

Jim laughed. “I reckon you think all of us Westerners are yokels, which we are when you coop us up in a place like this, but we know a thing or two about the country that people with six fingers to the hand don’t know.”

Then Blaise laughed; and could not resist saying, “If you know so much, why do we keep beating you in these elections?”

“Money. Give me what Mark Hanna gave McKinley and gives Roosevelt, and I’ll be president, too.”

“You’d like that?”

The boyish head was turned toward a gilded mirror but the mirror reflected both their heads. Jim looked at Blaise through the glass. “Oh, yes, why not? It’s there, after all.”

“But you need six fingers.”

“I need friends with six fingers.” Jim sat on the foot of the bed and tied his shoelaces. “Except when there’s trouble, the money power isn’t really everything. There’s a lot of labor out there, and the farmers, and all the new people coming in from Europe. We’ll get most of them. That’s why Hearst interests me. He’s set up all these Democratic clubs, which is the best way of enrolling them, but I’m afraid he’s so busy trying to use the clubs to get the nomination for himself that they aren’t much use to us, to the party, that is… so far.”

“Do you think he has a chance?”

Jim shook his head. “He’s too rich for us Democrats. He’d be better off with you people. But those papers of his have done him in with all the respectables. You know, I’d like to let Bryan try again, but…”

“He’d lose.”

Jim nodded, somewhat forlornly. “They’ve turned him into a sort of national fool, the papers. They always do that when somebody comes along who wants to help the working-man.”

Blaise could never tell with any politician where truth ends and expedient cant begins. Did this handsome, god-like youth, admittedly a rustic god, more Pan than Apollo, really give a damn about the working-man or the price of cotton or the tariff? Or were these the noises that he was obliged to make, like a bird’s mating call, to gain himself what he wanted in the world? Blaise did not pursue the question. Instead, he reminded Jim that Hearst had helped to invent the populist if not popular Bryan. “So they, the six-fingered owners of the country, haven’t totally distorted him. He has his rich admirers, too.”

“Yes, that’s been lucky for us. Hearst has done us some good, no doubt of that-and no matter why.” Jim stood up; and Blaise realized that he himself was not dressed. Blaise walked toward the open door to his own bedroom. “We’re having lunch on Payne’s ocean-liner,” he said. He paused at the door. “Did Brisbane say that you would go far in politics?”

Jim laughed. “Yes, he did. And he told me why.”

“Because you have blue eyes.”

“Exactly. Is Hearst just as crazy?”

“Crazier in a way.”

“We must,” said Jim, as he left the room to rejoin the house-party, “keep an eye on him.”

“A cold blue eye.”

“On those six fingers, particularly.”

DESPITE MARGUERITE’S PLEAS, Caroline joined the yachting party. “I must seem absolutely all right,” she said, “until…”

“Until… what?”

“I do what I have to do.” This sentence released a torrent of mercifully silent tears. Actually, Caroline had no plan for the coming catastrophe. She must be cool, she told herself; do nothing rash; tell no one, certainly.

The father of her child-to-be looked very handsome, as he lounged on the after-deck of the yacht, the unlovely bulk of Block Island just back of him. The other guests were in the main salon, waiting for lunch to be announced. Although Caroline had been careful to avoid Jim, she had not been able to resist fresh air. She who had never in her life fainted now feared just that. The sensations inside her body were ominous, to say the least; and anything could happen.

“I probably shouldn’t have come.” Jim smiled. “But Blaise insisted, and I’m in his debt-for Mr. Hearst, or Mr. Brisbane, I suppose.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Caroline managed to animate her voice. “Of course,” she added.

“I’d no idea people really lived like this.”

“Does it tempt you?”

“No. What I do is more interesting. I’m never bored, while these folks…”

“Give dinner-parties for their dogs.”

“I just met Mr. Lehr.“ Jim grimaced.

“I will not protect you…”

“That poor girl he’s married to…”

“You saw that?”

“We’re not all that simple back home.”

“I never thought you were.” Caroline was pleased that, thanks to the shock of her situation, she felt no desire at all for Jim. He, on the other hand, was radiating sexual energy like one of Henry Adams’s dynamos. She would have to discourage him, she decided, not quite certain what the etiquette of a pregnancy at this point required, or allowed. The doctor that she had visited, anonymously, in Baltimore, had been so interested in his fee for the planned abortion that she had not gone back to him. Instead, she had waited; she did not know for what.