Gore Vidal - Empire

“Perhaps,” she said.

They entered the high-ceilinged, resonant lobby, suggestive of a Bernini nightmare, thought Caroline, darkly approving the excess of gold and crystal and red damask, through which moved the hotel staff, evenly divided between those dressed to look like officers of the Habsburg court and those got up as members of some very superior parliament where Prince Albert frock-coats were cut to perfection and trousers were subtly, grayly striped. Caroline walked Sanford to the door. He seemed disturbed; then blurted out: “You must have someone with you, you know.”

“A governess?” Caroline smiled. “But surely I’ve been governed all my life.”

“I meant a suitable lady, a relative…”

“Those who are suitable are not available, those who are available… Don’t worry. I have Marguerite. She’s been with us all my life. She sleeps in a small room next to my bedroom. The hotel was relieved to see her honest, ugly face.”

“Well, then, I suppose… But when you go out, she goes with you?”

“When we take the air, yes. But I’m not going to take her to Mrs. Astor’s. She’s far too intelligent for those people. She has read Pascal.”

Sanford looked puzzled; then said, “Good-by. I’ll see you tomorrow, if I may. After I’ve talked to Mr. Houghteling and you…”

“… have not talked to Blaise.” Caroline smiled, as he left; and kept on smiling all the way to the elevator; then caught a glimpse in the mirrored door of her own face, made perfectly stupid by the insipid smile. She frowned; beauty regained.

Caroline’s beauty-such as it was-was again lost at Mrs. Astor’s. Although she had made up her mind not to smile, habit undid her; and she looked, she knew, exactly the way she was expected to look: stupid, innocent, young. But then, she thought dourly, she was all three and the absolute proof of her stupidity was the fact that she knew it and could do nothing about it. She had had a superior education with Mlle. Souvestre. She had read the classics; she knew art. But no one had ever explained to her how not to be cheated out of a fortune.

Harry Lehr pranced toward her as she crossed the first drawing room, empty except for the two of them. “Oh, Miss Sanford! You are a sight for sore eyes!”

“In that case, I shall go live in Lourdes and make my fortune.”

“You won’t need to go anywhere for that.” Lehr had not heard of Lourdes; and Caroline was not in an instructive mood. “ She’s pouring tea herself, in the library. Just a few people, the chosen ones, you might say.”

“And then again might not.” Caroline enjoyed Lehr’s deep silliness. Paris was filled with similar lapdogs. There seemed to be a universal law that the greater the lady the more urgent it was for her to have a Lehr to make her laugh, to collect gossip and new people, to be always at her side and yet never give her cause to fear compromise. Lehr was in his late twenties; from Baltimore. He lived by his wits. He sold champagne to friends. On occasion, he liked to dress up as a smart lady; and make people laugh.

Caroline followed, happily, the conventionally dressed Lehr through a second drawing room to a library, newly panelled with ancient wood. Here a dozen “old” New Yorkers sat in a semi-circle around the tea service, where Mrs. Astor presided; she was very much herself, as always, beneath a jet-black wig. The old woman gave Caroline a finger to touch; a thin smile to respond to; a cup of tea to drink. “Dear Miss Sanford,” said the Mystic Rose, “sit beside me.”

Caroline sat next to the old lady, a mark of honor that did not go unnoticed by the other guests, most of whom she recognized but none of whom she could identify. New York had always been like that for her, a series of strange drawing rooms filled with familiar-looking strangers, and familiar-sounding names. She assumed that once she could put the right name to the right face she would be, at last, home, for she had decided that she was going to be what her father pretended, uselessly, not to be, an American. Nevertheless, New York was still a foreign city to her, unlike Paris, where she was at home, or even London, where she had often stayed with family friends or with girls she had known at Allenswood; over the years, she had graduated from children’s parties to the grown-up world, marked, officially, four years earlier, when she had put three feathers in her hair and in the company of the Dowager Countess Glenellen, mother-in-law of a schoolfriend, she curtseyed low to Queen Victoria. Now she sat next to the Queen’s American equivalent, who put her uneasily at ease as is royalty’s way. “You will not have cake?”

Caroline had refused the cake offered her by a maid. “This is my second tea, Mrs. Astor. I had my first in your old ballroom.”

“The Palm Garden.” Mrs. Astor pronounced each syllable with the same emphasis. “I have seen the Palm Garden. But only from the corridor. You are stopping at the hotel?”

“Yes. It is most comfortable.” Caroline was finding this sort of exchange oddly more tiring in English than in French, where the ritual exchange of polite phrases could be, occasionally, charged with meaning. “I think the hotel is unique.” And now, why not, she wondered, get the reputation for being much too clever for a girl? She launched herself, “The Waldorf-Astoria has brought exclusivity to the masses.”

Mrs. Astor’s range of expressions did not include astonishment, as, like her British counterpart, she could not, by definition, ever be observed in so fallen a state; but polite disapproval was very much in her repertoire. The eyes, which slightly drooped at the corners, opened wide. The short-lipped mouth was now pursed, as if she might be inclined to whistle. “Surely,” she said in her usual clear uninflected voice, “that is not possible. I also wonder how one so young, though brought up in France,” Caroline did not wince at the low thrust, “could know of these things.”

“Oh, Mrs. Astor, we are nothing if not exclusive…”

“I meant,” said Mrs. Astor, “the… masses.” She blinked her eyes, as if a tumbril had come into view. But it was only the maid with bread and butter. Mrs. Astor helped herself, as if falling back on a basic necessity in order to fortify herself against the mob. “Your grandfather,” Caroline was pleased that Mrs. Astor had made a connection, “wrote a book which I have still in this library,” her dark eyes stared vaguely at a row of magnificent tooled morocco volumes, emblazoned with the name Voltaire, “that told of what happened in Paris when the Communists overthrew the regime. It is a work which gave me many a sleepless night. Those fierce common people, after killing poor Marie Antoinette, then proceeded to eat the entire contents of the Paris Zoo, too dreadful, from antelope to… to emu.”

Caroline smiled politely in order not to laugh out loud. Mrs. Astor had managed to confuse 1870 with 1789. “Let us hope that the mob will be kept happy here by the Waldorf-Astoria with its one thousand bedrooms.”

Mrs. Astor frowned slightly at the raffish word “bedroom”; but then, as if recalling her young guest’s unfortunate upbringing, she said, “Your grandfather always said he was the wrong Schermerhorn and the wrong Schuyler. I was born Schermerhorn,” she added quietly, as if she had pronounced the ultimate royal name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

“I know, Mrs. Astor, and I hope you don’t mind but I have taken to pretending that my grandfather was the right Schermerhorn.”

Mrs. Aster’s genuine smile had considerable charm. “I suspect, my child, that the distance between the right and the wrong Schermerhorn has never been much wider than a ledger.” Thus, Mrs. Astor unfurled the Jolly Roger of trade, under whose cross-and-bones all America sailed, more or less prosperously. Before Caroline could think of something memorable-stupid or otherwise-to say, Lehr neatly replaced her on the sofa with an elderly man and Caroline, on her feet, was now face to face with a woman not much older than she. “I’m Mrs. Jack,” said the woman in a husky voice. “You’re the French Sanford girl, aren’t you?”