Gore Vidal - Empire

Blaise put down the page. “I think,” he said, “we can do business.”

ON MARCH 3, 1905, John Hay wrote a letter to the President, whose inauguration was to take place the next day. Adee stood attentively by, combing his whiskers with a curious oriental ivory comb. “Dear Theodore,” Hay wrote. “The hair in this ring is from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of the assassination, and I got it from his son-a brief pedigree. Please wear it tomorrow; you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln. I have had your monogram and Lincoln’s engraved on the ring.” Hay affixed one of his favorite tags from Horace to the letter, and hoped that he had got the Latin right. He sealed the letter and gave it to Adee, with the small velvet box containing the ring. “It is the laying on of hands,” he said, and Adee, who was staring at him, nodded. “You are the last link.” Once Adee had left the room, Hay walked over to the window and looked out at the gleaming White House, where, as usual, visitors were coming and going at a fast rate. The sky was cloudy, he noted; wind from the northeast. There would be rain tomorrow. But there was almost always bad weather at inaugurations. Hadn’t there been snow at Lincoln’s second? Or was that Garfield’s? He found it hard to concentrate on anything except the pain in his chest, which came and went as always, but now, each time it came, stayed longer. One day it would not go; and he would.

Clara and Adams entered, unannounced. “We have seen the ring-bearer, on his joyous errand.” Adams was sardonic. Despite Hay’s best efforts, Adams had discovered the gift of the ring with Washington’s hair to McKinley. “You will be known to posterity, dear John, as the barber of presidents.”

“You are jealous that you have no hair suitable for enclosing in a ring.”

“We are booked,” said Clara, “on the Cretic , sailing March eighteenth.”

Hay coughed an acknowledgment. Each January he was host to a bronchial infection, and this January’s was still in residence.

“We land at Genoa on April third, by which time you should be dancing the tarantella on the deck.” Adams gazed thoughtfully up at his grandfather’s eyes, which stared down at them from the room’s fireplace. Except that each was entirely bald, there was no great likeness.

“I’ve made arrangements at Nervi. With the heart specialist,” Clara declaimed idly.

“Then on to Bad Nauheim and Dr. Groedel, but not with me,” said Adams. “As I am totally valid, I have no desire to join the invalid…”

“Bad No Harm, Mark Twain calls it.” Hay was beginning to feel better. “Then on to Berlin. The Kaiser beckons.”

“You won’t see him.” Clara was firm.

“I must. He hungers to know me. And I him. Anyway, the President says I must.”

“You are,” said Clara, “too ill, and he is far, far too noisy.”

“That is the nature of kaisers,” said Adams, “and of at least one president…”

“Henry, not on this day of days.” Hay held up a hand, as if in benediction.

“All is energy,” said Adams abruptly. “The leader of the world at any given moment is simply the outlet for all the Zeitgeist’s energy, all concentrated in him.”

“Major McKinley was much quieter,” said Clara, thoughtfully.

“Less energy flashing about in those days.” Hay indicated that Clara could help him up. “I have a feeling that it will rain tomorrow.”

But though there was rain in the early morning, by the time of the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and the first inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt at the Capitol, the sky was clear, and a strong wind made it impossible to hear the President’s speech, which was just as well, thought Hay, for the speech was cautious and undistinguished. Theodore had made too many promises to too many magnates for him to sound a bugle note of any kind. For the moment, the square deal was in abeyance, and the progressive President retrogressive. Later, Hay was certain that Theodore would exuberantly betray his rich supporters. He could not not be himself for long.

Hay sat with the Cabinet in the front row of the platform which had been built over the steps of the Capitol’s east front. Hay was grateful to have Taft’s huge bulk next to him, shielding him from the icy wind. Directly in front of him, Theodore Rex addressed his subjects, and, as always, Hay marvelled at the way neck became head without any widening at all.

The President was not going to have an easy time of it. Now that Mark Hanna was dead, he would have difficulty getting so obvious a bill as the one regarding the inspection of meat through a Senate where nearly everyone had been bought or was himself, like Aldrich of Rhode Island, a millionaire buyer of votes, while in the House, Speaker Cannon was wedded to the rich, no bad thing in Hay’s eyes, himself a millionaire not only through marriage but his own efforts. Even more than Adams, he had always had a golden touch, a source of some surprise to one who had begun life as a poet.

Although Hay deeply believed in oligarchy’s “iron law,” as Madison put it, he saw, as Roosevelt saw, the possibility of revolution if reforms were not made in the way that the new rich conducted their business at the expense of a powerless public. The Supreme Court and the police together ensured not only the protection of property but the right of any vigorous man to bankrupt the nation, while the Congress was, for the most part, bought. The occasional honest man, like the loud young Beveridge, was, literally, eccentric: too far from power’s center to do anything but make the public love him-and the all-powerful Steering Committee of the Senate ignore him.

As for Cabot… Hay shuddered; and not from cold. Cabot’s vanity and bad faith were two of the constants of Washington life. Cabot will be the rock, Adams had once observed, on which Theodore wrecks himself. So far, Theodore’s barque had sailed the republic’s high seas without incident; yet Cabot was always there to try to block every one of Hay’s treaties. Cabot’s my rock, Hay murmured to himself, happy he would soon be sailing not on the republic’s viscous sea but on the Mediterranean.

There was loud, long applause, as Theodore finished. In the north a black cloud appeared. Taft helped Hay up. To Hay’s surprise, Taft asked, “Was it here Lincoln gave his last inaugural address?”

Hay nodded. “Yes. Right here. I remember now . There was rain at first. Mr. Johnson, the Vice-President, was drunk. Then the rain stopped, and the President read his speech.”

Taft looked thoughtful. “I know that speech by heart.”

“We never suspected, then, that we were all so-historical. We just saw ourselves caught up in this terrible mess, trying to get through the day. I remember there was applause before he had finished one sentence.” Hay had the odd sense that he was now, if not in two places at once, in the same place at two different times, simultaneously, and he heard, again, the President’s voice rise over the applause, and say with great simplicity the four terrible words “And the war came.”

“We lost a generation.” Taft was oddly flat.

“We lost a world,” said Hay, amazed that he himself had survived so long in what was now, to him, so strange a country.

THE DAY AFTER THE INAUGURAL BALL, Caroline celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday with Blaise, and two lawyers, one her husband, John, the other Mr. Houghteling. The celebration began in her office at the Tribune , where various documents of transfer were signed and witnessed and countersigned and notarized. John asked pointed questions. Houghteling’s answers were as to the point as his innumeracy allowed. Blaise stared into space, as if he were not there. Caroline now had what was hers; while Blaise, in possession of half of what was hers, was marginally better off. To be a half-publisher of a successful paper was better than being a non-publisher, or the custodian of the Baltimore Examiner .