Gore Vidal - Empire

“Look.” Sanford tapped the document. She read: “… my son, Blaise, who is of age, to inherit his portion; my daughter, Caroline, when she is of age, at 27, to inherit her portion, as described above…” Caroline put down, the will. “This makes no sense. I was twenty when he made the will. Blaise was twenty-one, and Father says he is of age. So why am I not of age when I am twenty-one, as the previous wills stated?”

“You know, I know, Blaise knows, Mr. Houghteling knows, that Colonel Sanford meant twenty-one. But the law does not know this. The law only knows what is written down and witnessed and notarized.”

“But the law must, sometimes, make sense.”

“That is not the law’s function, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re a lawyer. Surely lawyers make the law…”

“We interpret the law. So far the interpretation in this case has all been done by Mr. Houghteling, who says that the Colonel decided that you, as a young inexperienced woman, must wait until you are twenty-seven, before you inherit. Blaise, at twenty-one, he regarded as being competent, and of age.”

Caroline stared at the will, which now seemed to her even more of a jungle than the Palm Garden, where a string trio was playing softly, La Belle Hélène . “What can I do?” she finally asked.

“What do you want?”

“My half of the estate now .”

Sanford crumbled bits of chocolate cake with his fork. “That will mean going to court, an expensive process. It will also mean overthrowing this will, since your father’s peculiar number one is now accepted by everyone hereabouts as a seven.”

“Why,” Caroline was thinking hard, “did he draw up this will? I mean, is it any different from all the others?”

“Yes. Apparently, he changed his will every time there was a new… uh, housekeeper.” Sanford was ill at ease. Caroline was not. “He would make a bequest to the new one. There are seven such bequests in all. But the bulk of the estate has always been evenly divided between his two children.”

“If I should lose,” Caroline had yet to speculate on such a catastrophe but the palms were suddenly filled with menace and the waltz from La Belle Hélène sounded like a funeral march, “what happens?”

“You will be paid, from the estate, thirty thousand dollars a year until you are twenty-seven. Then you will inherit your half.”

“Suppose Blaise loses it all. What then?”

“You will have half of nothing.”

“So I must get my share now.”

“What makes you think Blaise will lose instead of make money?” Sanford eyed her curiously. For Caroline, a banquette’s advantage was that with a slight turn of the head one’s features-half-visible at best-were no longer on display. She looked toward the next table, where an actress whom she had often seen on stage was trying to look obscure in order that everyone might see how young she looked offstage, when, of course, for an actress, the Palm Garden was the ultimate stage.

“Blaise is ambitious, and ambitious people almost always fail, don’t they?”

“That’s a curious notion, Miss Caroline. I mean, there was Caesar and Lincoln and… and…”

“Two excellent examples. Both murdered. But I wasn’t thinking of that sort of huge ambition. I was thinking of people who are in a hurry, very young, to make others take notice of them. Well, Blaise is rushing into the world like… like…”

“Like Mr. Hearst?”

“Exactly. He tells me, proudly, that Mr. Hearst has lost millions of dollars on his two newspapers.”

“But Mr. Hearst-a true rotter-will make other fortunes. He is made for this degraded time.”

“Perhaps he will. Perhaps he won’t. But his mother is richer than our father was, and I don’t want to end up with half of nothing.”

Sanford looked at her curiously. “If what you call ambitious men lose fortunes, what sort of a man do you think makes one?”

“My father.” The answer was prompt. “He was indolent. He paid no attention to business, and he more than doubled his inheritance.” Caroline turned, full face, to Sanford. “We must find a way to force Blaise to give up what’s not his.”

“But Mr. Houghteling has already taken the first steps. I think a court case might be risky.”

Caroline involuntarily shuddered; anger and fear commingled. “Surrender is riskier. Isn’t this the city where everyone can be bought? Well, let us buy a judge, or is it the jury one pays for?”

Sanford smiled to show that he was not shocked; and looked very shocked indeed. Caroline felt a certain compassion for her upright relative. “Our city officials are generally corrupt,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know how to deal with that sort of thing. You see, I am with the reform movement. I helped Colonel Roosevelt when he was police commissioner. Of course, reform is dead for the moment and Tammany’s back in power again with Van Wyck, who’s Boss Croker’s man. Croker’s back, too.” The string trio, as if cued, began to play the song of the year, the sickening, to Caroline’s Parisian ear, “The Rosary.” Sentimental religiosity and public stealing, that was the new world. Well, she decided, she had better master it; or be mastered herself. There was, all in all, a certain advantage to having been brought up by a lazy father who could not speak the language of the country where he lived. As a result, Caroline had been in charge not only of her own life but of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, never really yielding her authority to any one of the resident ladies. In the long run, the managing of the ladies had taught her patience and diplomacy. Unfortunately, the world of men had been closed to her. Blaise, who might have been a link, was always away at school either in England or in the United States; and since the Colonel was like no other man, what she had learned in the managing of him was obviously not going to be of much use to her with the brutes of the Palm Garden. The celebrated actress-who was she?-was listening, head to one side, eyes half-closed, to “The Rosary”; she appeared to be having a religious experience, to the awe of her companions, rude bewhiskered New Yorkers, with red faces, and a reverence for the finer things, of which the actress was, so expensively, one.

“Will you see your brother?” Sanford was tentative; but then he had never known what her relations were with the half-brother who had, so suddenly, turned pirate. Caroline herself was not certain just what she felt, other than fury. She had always appreciated Blaise’s energy, both athletic and moral, if moral was the word for a highly immoral or amoral will to rise. She had even found Blaise’s beauty attractive in the sense that they complemented one another; he was blond and she was dark. He should have been a bit taller with long, less-bowed legs; but then she might have been more usual had she been shorter and fuller-much fuller, since fashion had now decreed magnificent poitrines for the ladies while nature had decreed, in her case, otherwise. Although Worth had made up the difference artfully, the disappointment of her future husband was a source of not exactly pleasant daydreams.

Caroline rose. “Blaise is taking me to the theater. Then we shall go to supper, the two of us, at Rector’s, which I can now enter, as I am a woman of twenty-one though not yet an heiress of twenty-seven.” Caroline saw that she had made her point. Sanford nodded; looked grim; he would do battle for her. As they swept into the Peacock Alley, Sanford said, “You must be very careful of what you say to your brother.”

“I always am. But he does know that we mean to fight, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ve made that clear to Mr. Houghteling. Perhaps you shouldn’t mention the matter to Blaise.”