Gore Vidal - Empire

“I can still pick the first assistant secretary…”

“There is a rumor…” Adee began; but a soft knock at the door interrupted him. “Come,” said Adee, and a smiling Negro messenger entered to present Hay with a silver-framed photograph. “This just arrived, Mr. Secretary. From the British embassy.”

Hay placed the extravagantly signed photograph on his desk, so that Adee could also enjoy the figure depicted, a somewhat larger, stouter, bemedalled version of Adee’s own. “The Prince of Wales!” Adee’s accent now became, unconsciously, British. He mimicked compulsively, as the chameleon shifts its color to suit the landscape. “We’ve all heard what a success you were with the royal family. In fact, Her Majesty was quoted in the Herald , indirectly, of course, as saying that you were the most interesting ambassador that she had ever known.”

“Poor woman,” said Hay, who had read the same story with quiet pleasure. “I told her Lincoln stories. And dialect stories. It was like being out on the Lyceum circuit. No matter how old the joke-or the Queen-the audience laughs.”

Adee’s accent recrossed the Atlantic and hovered somewhere near Hay’s native Warsaw, Illinois. “I reckon your main job will be to help our good President, who knows nothing of foreign affairs and has no time to learn. He is mortally tired now of having been his own secretary of state for two years while running and winning a war and instructing our delegation to the peace conference in Paris, except he’s not sure what he wants them to do.” Adee stared at Hay’s lips. “As far as I can tell, that is,” he added.

Hay had heard the same rumor: indecision in the White House; hence, confusion in Paris. “Do get me all the Paris dispatches. I’d better find out just what’s been said so far.”

Adee frowned. “I’m afraid we don’t get to see them here. Judge Day always reported directly to the President.”

“Oh.” Hay nodded, as if he approved. But the first warning bell had now sounded. Unless he acted quickly, he was to be excluded from the peace treaty by his predecessor’s indifferences.

Mr. Eddy was at the door. “The White House just telephoned, sir. The President can see you anytime now.”

“Have we a telephone ?” asked Hay, who disliked the invention, not only for its dreadful self but for its potential threat to his beloved Western Union.

“Oh, yes,” said Adee. “We are very modern over here. We have one in our telegraph office. Personally, I hear nothing at all when I put it to my ear. But others claim to hear voices, like Joan of Arc. There’s also one in the White House, in what was the President’s war-room.”

“Surely, the President doesn’t, personally, use that… that menacing contraption?”

“He says that it is addictive.” Adee was judicious. “He says that he enjoys the knowledge that he can always hang up when he is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear, and then he can pretend that the connection was broken by accident.”

“The Major has become guileful.”

“He’s a successful war-leader. It is inevitable,” said Mr. Adee. “Shall I walk you over to the mansion?”

Hay shook his head. “No, I’ll go alone. I need to arrange my thoughts, such as they are.”

“What to do with the Philippines?”

“Above all.” Hay sighed. “We must decide, and soon.”

Hay stepped out into the dim high-ceilinged corridor, where a single policeman stood guard. Usually, the State Department was one of the most tranquil, even somnolent, of the government’s ministries, on the order of Interior, where, barring the rare excitement of the odd Indian war, a man could sleep his way through the life of an administration, or get a book written. But since the events of the summer, new translators had been added to the State Department, and the slow stream of paper into and out of Mr. Mullett’s masterpiece was now engorged.

Hay was greeted respectfully by numerous functionaries whose functions were as unknown to him as their persons. But he pretended to recognize everyone, the politician’s trick, with a raise of an eyebrow if the face looked remotely familiar, a bob of the head if not; geniality was the politician’s common tender.

Outside, in Pennsylvania Avenue, Hay was pleased at the absence of journalists. He was not expected until the next day, when he would take the oath of office. For now, no one paid the slightest attention to him except an old black man who was pushing a cart that contained everything needed for the sharpening of knives, the repair of scissors. They had seen each other for years in the street. After a solemn greeting, the old man said, “I didn’t know you was living on this side of the road.”

Hay laughed. “No. I’m still living there.” He pointed to the dark red brick fortress, all turrets and arches, where he and Adams, like two medieval abbots, lived. “But I’m working here now.”

“What sort of work they do in there?” The old man was genuinely curious. “I watched them building the thing. They say it’s, oh, just government, when I asked.”

“Well, that’s what it still is. Remember the old State Department Building there?” Hay pointed roughly to what was now a section of the huge gray-stone Treasury Building which nicely obstructed any view of the Capitol from the White House.

The old man nodded. “I can still see Governor Seward, with that big nose of his and those baggy pants, going back and forth across the road here, with this big cigar all the time.”

“Well, I’ve taken his place, and now we do in here what he used to do in that little shack.”

“Everything keeps getting bigger,” said the old man, without much pleasure. “This was a real small town back then.”

“Well, now it’s a real small city,” said Hay, and continued on his way. He was pleased to note that the brilliant pains in his lower back had migrated to his left shoulder, where they gave him less dazzling discomfort. For an instant, a particle of an instant, John Hay remembered what it was like to be young, as he walked up the familiar semi-circular driveway to the north portico of the White House where, thirty-three years earlier, he had been Lincoln’s “boy” secretary. Somehow or other in the blurred interval between then and now, a generation had come and gone, and quick-stepped boy had changed to slow-moving man.

In front of the portico Hay paused; and looked up at what had been the window to the office that he had shared with the first secretary, John G. Nicolay; and half-hoped to see his own young self, with dashing new moustaches, look out the window at his future self, with… disgust, Hay decided, accurately. He had not, like so many old men, forgotten the boy that he had once been. The boy was still alive but locked up for good-or life, anyway-in an aging carcass.

The head doorkeeper, one Carl Loeffler, was waiting for Hay; plainly, the telephone wire between White House and Mullett’s masterpiece was in good working order. “Mr. Secretary, sir.” The stocky German-in Hay’s day, only Hibernians were entrusted with the door-showed Hay into the entrance hall where the enormous, even astonishing, Tiffany screen, a fantasy of stained glass and intricate leading, rose from tessellated floor to ornately stuccoed ceiling, the gift of that most elegant of all presidents, Chester Alan Arthur, who had dared to do what other presidents had wanted to do but dared not. He had put up a screen in order to hide the state apartments, the Red, Blue and Green Rooms, from the eyes of the multitudes who came to do business with the President, whose office and living quarters were still, as in Lincoln’s day, on the second floor, and reached by a shabby old staircase to the left of the entrance. Hay noted that the heavy dark wood railing was more than ever shiny with sweat, from the nervous hands of office-seekers. At present, a mere dozen political types were ascending, descending.