Gore Vidal - Empire

As Caroline collected her child, Blaise said, “Why did you divorce?”

“Why not?”

“It’s very American of you.”

“I am very American. Anyway, I wasn’t married in the church. It doesn’t count, really-for us, anyway. It’s just a legal convenience. Just another key, to just another lock.”

Blaise was still mystified by the whole affair. “Was John with… someone else?”

Caroline’s laugh dispelled any suspicion along that line. “I wish he were.”

“Are you?” Blaise was convinced that Caroline had, for some time, been having an affair, but she was even more guarded than he about her life. He assumed that the man was married; otherwise, now that she was divorced, she would have been free at least to mention if not marry him. Blaise did not rule out a passionate liaison with a lady: Mlle. Souvestre’s powerful example was a fact of their world. But Washington seemed hardly the setting for so Parisian an activity.

“I wish I were.” Caroline echoed herself and was gone.

Blaise found the Chief rather less phlegmatic than usual. He had gained so much weight that had he been shorter he might have presented to the world a comforting McKinley-esque rotundity. But because of his height, the result was more ursine-menacing than McKinley-majestic. The two couples with the Hearsts were part of his publishing life. “I’ve just bought Cosmopolitan magazine,” he said, as Blaise showed him through the suite of state apartments.

The Chief stopped at every painting, sculpture, tapestry, console. Blaise was pleased at the Chief’s awe. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hearst said, as they entered the grand salon, where windows opened onto the vista of lakes and forests, “outside of a royal palace or something. Those tapestries Gobelin?”

“Early Aubusson. It was my father’s hobby, fixing up this place. When he bought it, in the seventies, it was a ruin.” Behind them Frederika was hostess to Millicent, whose moon face shone with pleasure, as she said in her tough New York Irish accent, “Don’t sell a stick of furniture to Willy, or he’ll buy it all and put us in the poorhouse.”

“Warehouse is more like it.” Hearst enjoyed talk of his mania for acquiring everything on earth-including Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. “You’re not thinking about selling, are you?”

“Never,” said Caroline, making a grand entrance on Plon’s arm. “We’re home at last.”

After lunch, Blaise and Hearst walked together by the lake. “I want to know about Willie Winfield.” Blaise was direct.

Hearst stopped in mid-stride. For an instant, Blaise was struck by the incongruity of the splendid seventeenth-century façade behind them, the swans and topiary and pale statues before them, and the American political squalor that was their all-consuming subject. Of course, the great duke who had built the chateau had been a notorious thief; on the other hand, he had spent his stolen money with a splendor yet to be rivalled on Fifth Avenue or even Newport’s Ochre Point. “How do you know him?”

Blaise was cool. “He came to me, at the Tribune . He said he had been stealing letters from Mr. Archbold and that he’d taken them round to one of your editors at the American , and the editor would photograph them. Then you paid, he said.”

Hearst scowled down at Blaise. “You paid, too.” A statement, not a question.

Blaise smiled. “Not for the same letters, unfortunately. I bought a part of the first half of the 1904 letterbook.”

“I didn’t buy that one.” Hearst sat in one of the sandstone thrones. In the distance Caroline and Frederika were playing croquet with the guests, the ladies’ clothes almost as bright as the tall roses, all around them. Emma had been borne off to her nap.

“I thought we had enough. We got Foraker for good. You know, I’ve been pushing him for the Republican nomination. Then, just before the election, if he’s nominated, of course, I’ll spring the stuff. Now,” the Chief looked at Blaise sadly, “you can do the same thing, tomorrow morning, and someone else will get the nomination…”

“Someone who won’t have written Archbold any letters?”

Hearst nodded. “Like Root or Taft. Neither one’s in the file, so far’s I can tell. But all the small fry and a lot of the big-time politicals are being paid off. So what are you going to do?” Although Hearst’s physiognomy did not allow for displays of indecision or apprehension, the weak voice was suddenly, oddly tremulous. Apparently, Hearst was basing a considerable political strategy on the release-or withholding at a price-of the letters in 1908.

“We could work something out.” Blaise was by no means certain what, if anything, he himself could do with them. Hearst was capable of anything: he was Hearst. But a Sanford, though not so well-defined, could hardly publish stolen letters unless they were used as background, say, to an investigation of one of Rockefeller’s judges. Standard Oil had the same proprietary feeling about judges that Blaise’s mother-in-law had about members of Congress, only Standard Oil paid large sums of money to make sure that the judges would always rule in their favor. In fact, most of the letters from politicians dealt not so much with pro-Standard Oil legislation as with judicial appointments. From the look of one letter-book, Archbold’s web of bought officials ranged from city halls to governors’ mansions to Congress and the appropriate courts and, finally, to the White House. But Blaise had been disappointed in the one letter to Archbold from Theodore Roosevelt. The letter could have meant anything, or everything, or nothing.

“I don’t think I have any use for the letters.”

Hearst’s physiognomy could not betray relief either; he stared blankly at Blaise, who said, “I don’t think that the Tribune , as a Washington paper, should get too mixed up in these things. If there’s a crusade for good government again, we might join in. Or Caroline might. I’m happy with bad government.”

“You’re in, like it or not. There’s no alternative.” Hearst was flat. “You’ll sit on the letters?”

“I think so.” But Blaise intended to keep Hearst in suspense as long as possible. “I’m only interested in one letter, one politician…”

“Roosevelt?”

Blaise nodded. “The letter I bought can only be interpreted in its proper context. Well, I don’t know the context. Do you?”

Hearst hummed, in his usual high off-key voice, a few bars of “Everybody Works but Father,” the year’s popular song. Blaise was grateful there was no banjo to accompany that chilling voice. “I’ll tell you what I guess the context is. Hanna was in deep with Rockefeller. So was Quay. My letters are full of them. But then everyone knows about them, anyway. They got money from Rockefeller, from everybody, for the Republican Party, for Roosevelt, for themselves.”

“For him, personally?”

Hearst shrugged. “I don’t think he’s that big a fool. But he’s got to have money so he can go round the country at election time, attacking the trusts that are paying for his train. When was your letter dated?”

“Last summer. After he was nominated.”

“Well, that makes no sense. But then, Hanna and Quay are dead. So he’s got nobody with the nerve to go to old Rockefeller, or even Archbold, and say, ‘Give me half a million for the campaign, and I’ll go easy on you.’ I expect that when he wrote Archbold, he was fishing.”

“Did he catch anything?”

Hearst’s thin smile was slow and genuine. “It doesn’t make any difference if he did or didn’t, does it? I mean, it’s the way the thing looks that matters. You could make the case as to how Roosevelt’s managers have always been on the take from Standard Oil, then, by the time you get around to his being in touch with Archbold, when he was desperate, trying to raise money from Morgan and Frick and Harriman, everyone will believe Teddy’s on the take, too, which, I suspect, he is.”