Gore Vidal - Empire

For an instant they stared, frozen, at each other. Then Jim finished his tie, as coolly as he could; the face was attractively flushed, the way it had been on the river-boat in St. Louis. “Caroline’s upstairs,” he said. “I have to go.” They met on the stairs; but did not shake hands. As Jim passed him, Blaise smelled the familiar warm scent.

Caroline was in her bed, wearing a dressing gown trimmed with white feathers. “Now,” she greeted Blaise, in a high tragic Olga Nethersole voice, “you know.”

“Yes.” Blaise sat opposite her, in a love-seat, and tried to look for signs of love-making. Except for a large crumpled towel on the floor, there were no clues to what had taken place-how many times? and why had he never suspected?

“It is all quite respectable. Since Jim is Emma’s father, we must keep this in the family. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.” Blaise saw the whole thing clearly at last, including the otherwise meaningless marriage to John. He did his best not to imagine Jim’s body on the bed, all brown skin and smooth muscles. “It would be the end of him, if Kitty knew,” he added, gratuitously.

“Or the beginning.” Caroline was airy. “The world doesn’t end any more with an affair.”

“It does in politics, in his state.”

“If she were to divorce him, I’d fill the breach, as best I could. That’s not the worst fate, is it?”

“For him, probably.” Blaise was, obscurely, furious.

But what might have been obscure to him was blazingly plain to Caroline. “You’re jealous,” she teased. “You want him, too. Again.”

Blaise thought that he might, like some human volcano, erupt with-blood? “What are you talking about?” He could do no better, aware that he had given himself away.

“I said-I repeat we should keep all this in the family as,” she smiled mischievously, “we seem to have done, anyway. We have the same tastes, in men, anyway…”

“You bitch!”

“Comme tu est drôle, enfin. Cette orage…” Then Caroline shifted to English, the language of business. “If you try to make trouble between Jim and Kitty, or Jim and me, your night of passion aboard the river-boat, with poor Jim, doing his innocent best to give you pleasure, will be as ruinous for you as anything you can do to him or to me or to poor blind Kitty.” Caroline swung her legs over the side of the bed, and put on her slippers. “Control yourself. You’ll have a stroke one of these days, and Frederika will be a widow, as well as my best friend.”

In the back of Blaise’s mind, there had always been the thought-hope-that he and Jim might one day reenact what had happened aboard the river-boat. But, ever since, the embarrassed Jim had kept his distance; and once again, Caroline was triumphant. From Tribune to Jim, Caroline had got everything that he had wanted. In the presence of so much good fortune, Blaise was conscious of a certain amount of sulphur in the air. But for now at least, he must be cool, serene, alert.

“The White House thinks that Hearst will win.” Caroline was at her dressing table, rebuilding her hair.

“So do I. So does he. So does the animated feather-duster.”

“Mr. Root is going to Utica.” Caroline pulled her hair straight back and stared into the mirror, without apparent pleasure.

“What does that mean?”

“The President is sending him. To Hearst.”

“Too late.”

“Mr. Root carries great weight in New York. As the President’s emissary… I would be nervous if I were Mr. Hearst.”

But all Blaise wanted to speak of was Jim, and that, of course, was the only subject that he and Caroline could never again mention to each other.

Blaise was with the Chief in New York City when the Secretary of State spoke in Utica. It was the first of November. The weather was peculiarly dismal, even for New York, and a drizzle that was neither snow nor rain made muddy the streets.

Hearst had his own news-wire in his study, set up between busts of Alexander the Great and-why?-Tiberius. Blaise was at his side as the message from Utica came through, even as Root was speaking. Elsewhere in the room, Brisbane kept a number of politicians in a good mood, an easy task since none doubted that soon they would all be going to Albany in the train of the conquering Hearst.

As read, line by line, the speech was lapidary. Root’s style was Roman, school of Caesar rather than Cicero. The short sentences were hurled like so many knives at a target; and none missed. Absentee congressman. Hypocrite-capitalist. False friend of labor. Creature of the bosses. Demagogue in the press and in politics, pitting class against class.

“Well,” said the Chief, with a small smile, “I’ve heard worse.”

But Blaise suspected that he was indeed about to hear worse; and he did, toward the end. Root read Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain, calling for McKinley’s murder. Hearst stiffened as the familiar words stuttered past them on the wire. Root quoted other Hearstian indictments of McKinley, inciting the mad anarchist to murder. Then Root quoted Roosevelt’s original attack on the “exploiter of sensationalism” who must share, equally, in the murder of the beloved-by-all President McKinley.

Hearst was now very pale, as the thin ribbon of text passed through his fingers to Blaise’s. “I say, by the President’s authority, that in penning these words, with the horror of President McKinley’s murder fresh before him, he had Mr. Hearst specifically in mind.”

“The son of a bitch,” whispered Hearst. “When I finish with him…”

The message went on: “And I say, by his authority, that what he thought of Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now.”

So it would be on the charge of regicide that Hearst was to be brought down at last. Blaise marvelled at the exactness with which Roosevelt, using Root for knife, struck the lethal blow.

“Champagne?” Brisbane approached with a bottle in hand.

“Why not?” The Chief, who never swore, having just sworn, who never drank, now drank. Then he turned to Blaise. “I want you to go over the Archbold letters with me.”

“With pleasure, if I can publish first.”

“Simultaneously, anyway, with me.”

CAROLINE WAS SHOWN INTO the Red Room, forever referred to by Roosevelt loyalists as the Room of the Great Error. She had received a last-minute invitation to a “family” dinner, which could well mean, considering the Roosevelt family, fifty people. But it was indeed, for the most part, family. Alice and her husband, Nick Longworth, were already there, with, to Caroline’s surprise, the sovereign himself, who sprang to his feet, rather like a Jack-in-the-box, and said, just like his music-hall imitators, “Dee-light-ed, Mrs. Sanford. Come sit here. By me.”

“Why not by us?” asked Alice.

“Because I want to talk to her and not to you.”

“There is no reason,” said Alice, “to be rude, simply because I’m the wife of a mere member of the House…”

But the President had turned his back on daughter and son-in-law, and led Caroline to a settee near the door, so situated that if the door was open, as now, the settee was invisible. Roosevelt practiced several unpleasant grimaces on Caroline, before he began. “You know about the Archbold letters?”

Caroline nodded. Trimble had received copies of a number but not the entire set. “I gather your brother Blaise has seen the lot.”

“We’re not speaking at the moment.”

“But if he decides to publish, they will appear in the Tribune .”

“If I decide to publish, they will appear in the Tribune .”

Roosevelt clicked his teeth three times, as if sending out a coded message to a ship in distress at sea. Then he removed his pince-nez and polished it thoroughly with a scrap of chamois. Caroline noticed how dull the eyes were without the enhancement of shining magnifying glass. “You are the majority shareholder?”