Gore Vidal - Empire

“You have only one chance sometimes. Anyway, what she wanted,” Blaise brought down his fist on the table, and Caroline jumped in her chair, “she got, and that’s what counts, and because she did, you’re here.”

So, in the end, Caroline, the successful American publisher, was not the acclimatized American that her brother, her appendage, was. She wished Mr. Adams was on hand, to delight in the irony.

But the next day, when Mr. Adams was indeed on hand, with John and Clara Hay, there was no opportunity to discuss anything in private except the fading away of John Hay, whose hair was now as white as his beard, the result, he said, still capable of his old humor, “of the waters of Bad Nauheim, which etiolate-my favorite word that I never get a chance to use-all things dark, not to mention false. Clara’s henna is all gone.”

While Hay sat with Caroline in the sandstone thrones, Blaise and Frederika showed off the chateau, and even Henry Adams affected to be overwhelmed.

Caroline had not had much experience with the dying. But one of her aunts had been something of a devotee of death-beds, and if she so much as heard of someone moribund within a hundred miles, she was on her way, in somber black with Bibles and prayer-books, with medicines to speed the terminal to terminus, and with cordials to assuage the survivors’ grief. “You can always tell when they’re about to pass on by a certain strong light in their eyes, just toward the end. Well, that’s the glory coming.” Late for a highly significant death-bed, the Sanford aunt had hurried down a flight of stairs, fallen, broken her neck; and so was robbed of her shining glory, so long awaited by her friends.

But John Hay’s eyes were not in the least glorious. Rather, they were dull and glassy; he was also thinner and paler than he had been before the cure; but he had not lost interest in life, rather the reverse. He looked about him curiously. “I couldn’t imagine living in a poky house in Georgetown when you have all this. It even beats Cleveland.”

“Well, the house is splendid but the company’s poky. So I stay on in Washington. Besides, we didn’t sort out the estate till this spring.”

“Satisfactorily?” Hay gave her a shrewd look.

Caroline nodded. “As satisfactory as anything ever is. Anyway, I like my new sister-in-law.”

“I suppose you’ll get married again.”

“You sound disapproving.” Caroline laughed. “But then I’m a divorcée. I’m told if I go to Cleveland, I shall be stoned to death…”

“Only when taken, publicly, in adultery, by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. Oh, I shall miss this,” he said, with all sorts of resonance that tact required her not to explore.

“You go on to London?”

“Then Washington, then New Hampshire.”

“Why Washington in the heat?”

Hay sighed. “Theodore is there. Theodore is busy. When Theodore is busy, I feel constitutionally obliged to be on hand.”

“The Russians?” Caroline could no longer forget, even in the company of the dying, that she was a journalist.

“The Japanese, I should say. I’m so far removed from things. I have to read the foreign press with a sort of mental cypher-code to figure out what’s happening. Apparently, Theodore has been asked by the Japanese to arbitrate a peace treaty between them and Russia. But what is actually happening-if anything-I don’t know. Spencer Eddy-”

“Surrenden Dering?”

“The same. He’s posted in Petersburg. He came all the way to Bad Nauheim to tell me that Russia’s falling apart. It seems that the Tsar is a religious maniac, and so the thirty-five grand dukes are running the country, which is to say they create endless confusion. The workers are on strike. The students are on strike. Maybe Brooks is right, after all. They’ll have their French Revolution at last. Meanwhile, what government they have has instructed Eddy to tell me that they’d like a convention with us, and I had to tell him that, thanks to the Senate and dear Cabot, there is no way of getting such a treaty as long as any senator has one constituent who might object.”

Adams joined them. He seemed immeasurably old to Caroline; yet, paradoxically, he never aged. He simply became more himself: the last embodiment of the original American republic. “I like your sister-in-law. She knows what not to show you on a tour of the house.”

“There’s so much not to be seen. There is dry-rot…”

“I think that’s what I’ve got.” Hay sighed. “I was finally examined by an austere Bavarian doctor who assured me, with touching Teutonic modesty, that he was the greatest expert on the heart in the world. As I believe everything I’m told, I said, ‘So what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You have a hole-or a bump,’ he was not consistent, ‘in your heart.’ When I asked why all the other great heart specialists had not noticed this hole or bump, he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t see it, or maybe they didn’t want to worry you.’ ‘Is it fatal?’ I asked. ‘Everything’s fatal,’ he said, with a confident smile. I must say he sort of grew on me. Anyway, he said he could delay the final rites, which, apparently, is a cinch for him.”

“I hate doctors. I never go to one.” Adams was firm. “They make you sick. Anyway, you look no worse-and no better-for all the waters that have flowed through you…”

“… and over me.” Hay stretched his arms. “I can’t wait to see Theodore, and tell him that I’ve been right all along about the Kaiser. Theodore thinks that because the Kaiser is, as Henry James says of Theodore, ‘the embodiment of noise,’ that he is mindless…”

“Like Theodore himself?”

“Now, Henry. Theodore has a mind that is chock-a-block with notions…”

“Thoughts, too?”

“Splendid thoughts. Anyway, the latest information is that the Kaiser, after pushing his stupid cousin, the Tsar, into declaring war on Japan, now realizes that Russia is too weak, even for his purposes, so he now is making frantic love to Japan, and to Theodore, too.”

“They are made for each other.”

“Not yet. But the Kaiser has a plan. Would to God I could go to Berlin to see him. He may be a reckless orator but he is a cold calculator.”

Two menservants appeared, pushing a tea-table; and the croquet players joined them. Frederika did the honors, while Caroline and Clara walked beside the lake, keeping a careful distance from the swans. “He seems better.” Caroline could think of nothing else to say on that subject.

Clara was now huge, even monumental; her manner, as always, secure, declamatory. “He could live another year. Maybe more, if only he would leave Washington.”

“He won’t?”

“Not yet. We go to London, incognito, June second. Then we sail on the Baltic . Then he insists on going back to the State Department before we go on to New Hampshire. He does not trust Theodore.” Clara exhorted a willow tree’s reflection in the lake.

“Perhaps it’s best, to keep on, till…” Caroline did not finish.

“I wonder about you and Del.” Clara spoke for the first time to Caroline about her son. “I’m not sure-now-it would’ve been for the best.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“No. We never will. It’s when I see all this, I realize you are foreign. He was not.”

“I’m both. Or, maybe, neither.” Caroline was amused that Clara was still making censorious divisions between what was foreign, and probably bad, and what was American and entirely good. “At least I don’t publish the Tribune in French.”

Clara smiled, as she always did when she suspected that someone had made a joke. “Do you and Blaise get on?”

“We do now. We probably won’t in the future.” Caroline was surprised, as always, when she said what she actually thought.