Gore Vidal - Empire

“I’m freezing. And I’m late,” Frederika announced, as they made their way to the front door, where the watchman let them out. “Mother’s at home Saturday,” Frederika announced, as she dropped Blaise off at Willard’s.

“I’ll be there,” he said. They shook hands, formally, and he went into the hotel. Why not, he wondered, marry Frederika? She appealed to him in an entirely practical way; that is, there was no passion of the sort that might end with a fist-fight in the White House’s Blue Room. She could certainly manage a dozen households. On the other hand, there was Mrs. Bingham, and all those cows. No, a Sanford must marry within that gilded circle where cows could be peripheral but never central, as in the Bingham case.

WHILE BLAISE BROODED ON COWS, Caroline paid court to Henry Adams, as a dutiful niece now matured by matrimony. He seemed smaller, older, and definitely sadder. “The fire that destroyed your brother’s printing press also made molten my little book on the twelfth century.” He sighed, stretched out his hands in a propitiatory way toward the fire, begetter of molten type-face. “I shall have to delay publication, not that I really, ever, publish. The edition is only for me, and you, and a few others…”

“Hearts?”

“We are only three now.” He frowned. “I worry about Hay. He is being slowly worn to death by that maniac across the street, and that madhouse of a Senate. Cabot…” he began; and ended. “I’m in a cheery mood, as you can see.” He gazed at her reflectively. “Why do we never see Mr. Sanford?”

“Because I thought it was the ageing Mrs. Sanford whose company you pretend to enjoy.”

“Oh, no pretense. No pretense. I find it hard to talk to some of the new girls. But then I’m very dull. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes. It’s your most attractive feature. If you were older, I might have married you instead of my cousin, who is merely-not attractively-dull.”

Adams laughed his muted dog’s bark of a laugh. “You’ll do very well.”

“Surely you like Alice.” Washington had taken to saying the name “Alice” with a slight pause between syllables, to denote that the Alice was meant.

“I like her better than her father. But then I like everyone better than I like him. Last week, I went to my first White House dinner since 1878, during the sullen reign of Rutherford B. Hayes, where lemonade flowed like champagne. I was only asked because Brooks could not come. They needed an Adams, any Adams, while the President always needs a pair of humble ears. Mine were never so humble. He did not stop talking for two hours. The contents,” Adams smiled sweetly at Nebuchadnezzar eating grass, “of that mind confound me! All history is neatly on file in that great round Dutch cheese of a head. But-so generous is he that he will share all that he knows with anyone, no matter how humble. I was awed. Speechless. Poor John, what he must go through, day after day…”

Caroline, aware that Adamsian gloom was about to overwhelm the bright room, said, “I just passed Alice and the Cassini girl bob-sledding on Connecticut Avenue. They start at Dupont Circle, and slide through the traffic, out of control.”

“A metaphor, my child, for her father’s Administration.”

“How,” asked Caroline, “does one get money?”

For the first time in their friendship, Adams looked at her with true surprise. “In our world, you select parents who have money, and they, in turn, pass it on. If one has been careless in the selection of parents, one marries someone who was not so careless. I am very good about money, by the way. I can’t think why. But I do well in financial crises. Brooks, who understands the monetary system better than anyone alive, loses money, always. It is highly gratifying. Anyway, next year-is it?-you inherit your fortune-”

“ This year, I am desperate.”

“Your husband has debts.” Adams did not phrase this as a question; but then everyone knew everything in their world.

“More than I had bargained for.”

“Go to your brother.”

“He wants the paper.”

“Go to the Jews.”

“I have tried. But they don’t seem eager to lend, at a bearable rate.”

“I could lend-”

“I shall leave the room, and never return, if you ever hint at such-an impropriety.”

Adams smiled, like a contented cat. “I knew you would reject me. Otherwise, I would not have made so rude a move. Why not sell Blaise your newspaper?”

“Because it is all that I have, of my own. A child is never your own. It is also-the father’s.” Caroline enjoyed the irony. Jim had never once suspected, holding Emma on his knee, that she was his flesh and blood, blue eyes and curly hair.

“Let us be subtle. Sell Blaise half the shares of the Tribune minus one, which will give you control.”

Caroline had thought of this. “It would mean getting to know him rather more than I’d like.”

“One boy is like another.” Adams disliked all males except a half-dozen aged ironists like himself. Caroline had never known a man to whom woman-if not women-was so necessary; and she wondered, as always, why had the brilliant wife killed herself, why had he never remarried, why did he maintain his peculiar, and plainly unrequited, passion for Lizzie Cameron?

“You made do with a cousin as husband. You can certainly make do with a half-brother as-junior partner.”

William was at the door, announcing “Professor Langley.” The accident-prone secretary of the Smithsonian Institution entered the room, without once, symbolically, slipping, Caroline noted. Although Henry Adams regarded Samuel P. Langley as the best scientific mind in the Western world (Adams particularly admired Langley’s invention of something called a bolometer, “which measures the heat,” he would say gleefully, “of nothing !”), the press had, lately, taken a good deal of pleasure out of Langley’s doomed attempts to fly heavier-than-air craft. He was always on the verge of freeing man from the earth; but man continued to be earth-bound, as far as heavier-than-air craft went. Lighter-than-air craft, on the order of gliders or balloons, somehow did not count. Caroline found mystifying Langley’s obsessions; but she had seen to it that he was often, and favorably, interviewed in the Tribune . As a result, he had mistaken her for an admirer like Adams; and she had done nothing to disabuse him. Whatever pleased Adams pleased her. Besides, Langley could be interesting, when not goaded by Adams into discussing the famous dynamo that they had together glimpsed at the Paris Exhibition four years earlier. Adams wanted to find a scientific basis to history, on the order of the second law of thermodynamics. Caroline, who knew little of history and nothing of science, was convinced that there were no laws applicable to the human race, a random affair that moved neither up nor down but, simply, on , in fits and starts, for no reason. She had always found it odd that men required coherent reasons for things that women knew to be non-reasonable.

“There is a rumor that a pair of bicycle mechanics in North Carolina have flown in a heavier-than-air machine of their own devising.” This was Langley’s ponderous greeting to his old friend.

“When?” Adams was alert, as always, to the marvels of science. “And for how long did they fly?”

“Three months ago. The story’s garbled. No one seems to have got it straight. Someone sent me a clipping from a Norfolk newspaper, that made no sense…”

“We were notified,” said Caroline, recalling Mr. Trimble’s amusement at the message from two brothers to the effect that they were the first, ever, to fly in such a machine. In one day they had taken off and landed several times. She recalled that they had claimed to have flown a half-mile. She reported this to Langley, who seemed more depressed than elated. Plainly this disinterested man of science wanted for himself the glory of being the first to fly like-was it Icarus? she wondered, recalling Mlle. Souvestre’s injunction that one ought always to be ready with an apt classical allusion in order not to use it.