Gore Vidal - Empire

Blaise was alert. “Who will ever contest our interpretation of an ambiguous cypher?”

“Your sister will certainly contest our interpretation…”

“But she’s in England, and if the will’s been probated, as you say…”

“There has been a slight delay.” Houghteling’s whisper was more than ever insinuating. “Your cousin has spoken up, on behalf of Caroline…”

“Which cousin?” There were, that Blaise knew of, close to thirty cousins, in or near the city.

“John Apgar Sanford. He is a specialist in patent law, actually…”

Blaise had met Cousin John, a hearty dull man of thirty, with an ailing wife, and many debts.

“Why has he got himself involved?”

“He is representing your sister in this.”

Blaise felt a sudden chill of anger. “ Representing Caroline? Why? We’re not in court. There’s no contest.”

“There will be, he says, over the precise age at which she comes into her share of the estate…”

“The will says that when she’s twenty-seven, she’ll inherit her share of the capital. Until then I have control of the entire estate. After all, Father wrote that will himself, with his own hand.”

“Unfortunately, he-who usually refused to speak French-wrote his will in rather faulty French, and since the French number one looks just like an English seven, though unlike a French seven, your cousin is taking the position that the Colonel intended for this will to conform with the earlier ones; and that your father meant for Caroline to inherit at twenty-one, not twenty-seven, half the estate.”

“Well, it looks like twenty-seven to me. How did it look to the clerk?”

“I translated the text for him. Of course , the English version says twenty-seven…”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Twofold. Your cousin says that we have deliberately misinterpreted your father, and he will now contest our… interpretation of the figure.”

“ He will? How can he? Only Caroline can and she’s three thousand miles away.”

“Your first supposition is correct. He obviously cannot contest a will with which he has nothing to do. Your second supposition-the geographical one-is mistaken. I have just spoken to your sister. She arrived this morning from Liverpool. She is stopping at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

Blaise stared at the old lawyer. In the background, someone proposed three cheers to Mayor Van Wyck, and the rotunda reverberated with cheering; like artillery being fired. Martial images filled Blaise’s head. War. “If they contest what my father wrote, I shall take them through every court in the country. Do you understand, Mr. Houghteling?”

“Of course, of course.” The old man tugged at his rose-pink whiskers. “But, perhaps, it would be more seemly to come to an agreement. You know? A compromise, say. A settlement…”

“She must wait for her share.” Blaise got to his feet. “That’s what my father wanted. That’s what I want. That’s what it is going to be.”

“Yes, sir.” Thus, the crown passed from Colonel Sanford to Blaise, who was now sole steward, for the next six years, of fifteen million dollars.

JOHN HAY STOOD AT THE WINDOW of his office in the state War and Navy Building, a splendid sort of wedding cake designed, baked and frosted by one Mullett, an architectural artificer who had been commissioned a dozen years earlier to provide mock-Roman shelter for the three great departments of state, all in a single building within spitting distance of that gracious if somewhat dilapidated Southern planter’s home, the White House, to the east. From the window of the Secretary of State’s office the unlovely greenhouses and conservatories of the White House-like so many dirt-streaked crystal palaces-were visible through the trees, while in the distance Hay could make out, across the Potomac, the familiar green hills of Virginia, enemy country during the four years that he had been President Lincoln’s secretary.

Now here I am, he thought, trying hard to summon up a sense of drama or, failing that, comedy; he got neither. He was old; frail; solitary. Clara and the children had stayed on at the Lake Sunapee house in New Hampshire. Accompanied only by Mr. Eddy, Hay had marched into the State Department that morning at nine o’clock, and taken control of the intricate and confusing department, where more than sixty persons were employed in order to… what?

“I am curious, Mr. Adee. What does the Secretary of State actually do ?” Hay shouted at his old friend, dear friend, Alvey A. Adee, the second assistant secretary of state. They had first met when both had been posted in Madrid during the time that the self-styled hero of Gettysburg, the one-legged General Dan Sickles, American minister to Spain, was scandalously ministering to Spain’s queen as her democratic lover. Seven years Hay’s junior, Adee had even collaborated with Hay on a short story that had been published in Putnam’s; and, joyously, they had divvied up the cash. Madrid had been a quiet post in the late sixties.

Now Adee carefully groomed his gray Napoleonic beard and moustaches; he used a tortoise-shell comb but, happily, no pocket mirror as in the old days. Adee was the most exquisite of bachelors, with a high voice which, in moments of stress, broke into a mallard’s cackle. Although deaf, he was very good at guessing what it was that people said to him. All in all, he was the ablest man in the American foreign service as well as a superb literary mimic. At a moment’s notice, Adee could write a poem in the manner of Tennyson or of Browning; a speech in the style of Lincoln or of Cleveland; a letter in the style of any and every sort of officeholder. “Each of the secretaries comes here with his own notion of work.” Adee put away the comb. “Your immediate predecessor, Judge Day, spent his five months here fretting about his next judgeship. Of course, he only took the job as a favor to the President when poor Mr. Sherman…” Adee sighed.

Hay nodded. “Poor Uncle John, as we call him, was too old by the time he got here. If this were a just world…”

“What a conceit, Mr. Hay!” Adee produced an amused quack.

“I am prone to the sententious. Anyway, he should have been president years ago.”

“Well, the world’s all wrong, Mr. Hay. Anyway, you tried hard enough to get the old thing elected.” Adee took a small vial of cologne from his pocket and shook a drop or two on his beard.

Hay rather wished that Adee were able to present a somewhat more virile face to the world. As it was, the Second Assistant was not unlike Queen Victoria, with a glued-on beard. “Obviously, I don’t work hard enough. But my question’s quite serious. What do I do?”

“What you should do is let me do most of it…”

“Well, we are old collaborators, of course…”

“I’m serious, Mr. Hay. Why wear yourself out for nothing? There are dispatches from all around the world to be read-and replied to. I do most of that, anyway. I also write a really masterful letter of sympathetic rejection to would-be office-seekers, many of them nephews to senators.”

Hay had a sudden, vivid vision of the tall fragile figure of President Lincoln, looking very much like “the Ancient” that his two young secretaries had nicknamed him, besieged in the upstairs corridor of the White House by men and women, shoving petitions, letters, newspaper-cuttings at him. “Whitelaw Reid now wants the embassy at London,” Hay began.

But Adee was studying his glistening nails, and did not hear him. He must read lips, Hay thought. When Adee’s eyes are not upon your mouth, he does not hear. “You’ll be relieved to know that you now have nothing to offer anyone. The President has given away just about all the posts to keep his senators happy.”