Gore Vidal: Empire

“You should be more interested in our war.” Del teased her as they sauntered decorously in the shade, gravel crunching beneath their feet. Below them, on a grassy terrace, a somber peacock glared, and unfurled a far too brilliant tail. Everywhere, the bright, if dusty, overblown roses grew in remarkably ill-tended plots. But then Caroline had spent her life seeing to gardens and houses. “She will make some fine lord a splendid hostess,” said her father’s last but one “translator,” a Miss Verlop from The Hague. “Or,” said Blaise maliciously, “some fine capitalist a good factory boss.” But Caroline had no intention of being either a hostess or a wife, though a factory boss sounded interesting. Of course, she had had no desire to be a daughter or a half-sister, either. But she had dutifully served her time as the first-and duly matriculated; as for the second, Blaise was good company; and she quite liked him, so long as he did not steal her share of the estate.

“Why should he?” Del stopped beneath a vast-again dusty-rhododendron.

Del looked as surprised as Caroline felt: she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. Was this madness? she wondered. The Sanford family was full of eccentricity, to put the matter politely, which is how they put it to one another, quite aware that a number of them, including her father, enjoyed the homely modifier “mad as a hatter.”

“What did I say just now?” Caroline was determined to be scientific; if she was to be like the other Sanfords, she wanted to know every phase of her descent. She would be like M. Charcot, clinical.

“You said you didn’t care if anyone were ever to remember the Maine again…”

“True. Then?”

“You said you thought Mr. Hearst and Blaise probably sank it together.”

“Oh, dear. But at least I tell the truth in my delirium.”

“Are you ill?”

“No. No. Not yet, anyway. Not that I know of. How did I get from the Maine to my father’s will?”

“You said… Are you making fun of me?” The small gray eyes in the large face were kind, with a tendency to absorb rather than reflect the now intense August light.

“Oh, Del!” Caroline seldom used a young man’s first name. After all, her first language was French, with its elaborately gauged and deployed second person. On the subtle shift from intimate “you” to formal “you” an entire civilization had been built. Although Caroline had never been in love (if one did not count a fourteen-year-old’s crush on one of her teachers at Allenswood), she knew from the theater and books and the conversation of old ladies what love must be like and she fancied herself best as Phaedra, consumed with lust for an indifferent stepson; worst, as a loving wife to a good man like Adelbert Hay, whose father, the celebrated John Hay, was once private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and now ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. John Hay was himself not only civilized to the extent that any native American could be (Caroline was never quite sure just how deep the veneer could ever be of any of her countrymen) but wealthy as a result of his marriage to one Clara Stone, an heiress of Cleveland, who had borne him two sons and two daughters. As luck insisted on having it, the eldest son had been at Yale with Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise Delacroix Sanford; and Caroline had met young Mr. Hay twice in New Haven and once in Paris; and now they were houseguests in Kent, contemplating the question she had allowed herself to ask, quite unaware that she was literally speaking her mind, something not encouraged outside the bluestocking academy of the grand Mlle. Souvestre: “Will Blaise try to take all my money now that he’s sunk the Maine ?”

Caroline did her best to pretend that she had been joking-about the money if not the Maine; and so she managed to convince Del that she was not joking. He shut his eyes a moment. Two tiny lines formed a sort of steeple between his brows, filial imitation of the Ambassador’s deep lines. “Blaise is very-fierce,” said Del. The peacock shouted harsh agreement beneath them. “But he is also a gentleman.” Del opened his eyes: the matter was, for him, satisfactorily resolved.

“You mean he went to Yale?” Caroline had a truly French distaste for the Anglo-American word-not to mention romantic concept-“gentleman.”

“Of course, he didn’t graduate. But even so…”

“He is half a gentleman. And, of course, he’s only half my brother. I wish I were a man. A man,” Caroline repeated, “ not a gentleman.”

“But you would be both. Anyway, why be either?” Del sat on a bench carved from dull local stone. Caroline arranged herself, at an angle, beside him. How pleased, she thought, Sanfords and Hays would be to see so inevitable a young couple merging like fragments of mercury into the silvery whole of marriage. Del would one day be as huge-no other word-as his mother, Clara. But then Caroline knew that she could very well become as huge as the Colonel, who, at the end, gave up going to the theater because he could no longer fit in any seat, and refused to arrange for a special chair to be placed in a box as his one-time friend the even more enormous Prince of Wales did.

“We could be fat together,” murmured Caroline, wondering if she had revealed herself in a murmured aside about Blaise, or had the voice been normal? Normal, she decided, when the puzzled Del asked her to repeat herself. She asked, “What is your impression of his character?”

“I don’t know any more. I haven’t seen him since he quit Yale and went to work for the Morning Journal .”

“Even so, you were his classmate. You know him better than I do. I’m just the half-sister, back home in France. You’re the-contemporary in America.”

“I think Blaise wanted to get his life started earlier than most of us do. That’s all. He was-he is-in a hurry.”

“To do what?” Caroline was genuinely curious about her brother.

“To live it all, I suppose.”

“And you’re not?”

Del smiled; the teeth were like a child’s first set, small irregular pearls; he also had dimples and a turned-up nose. “I’m lazy. Like my father says he is, but isn’t. I don’t know what I shall do with myself. But Blaise knows just what he wants.”

Caroline was surprised. “Last year he wanted to study law. Then he quit Yale and went to work for a newspaper, of all things. And what a newspaper!” Caroline had yet to hear anything good of the Journal or its proprietor, the wealthy young Californian William Randolph Hearst, whose mother had recently inherited a fortune from his near-illiterate father, Senator George Hearst, a crude discoverer of gold and silver mines in the West. It was the Senator who had set up his cherished only son as a newspaper proprietor, first with the Daily Examiner in San Francisco and then with the Morning Journal in New York, where young Hearst had spectacularly succeeded, through a form of sensational journalism known as “yellow” (fires, alarums, scandals), in surpassing Mr. Pulitzer’s original “yellow” New York World . The Journal was now, in its own words, “the most popular newspaper on earth.” “And Blaise delights in Mr. Hearst,” said Caroline. “And I delight in hearing about Mr. Hearst.”

“But you’ve never met him?”

“No. No. He is not to be met, I gather. He goes to Rector’s with actresses. Two very young actresses, I am told. Sisters.”

“He is a cad.” Del said the final word; there would be no appeal.

“So why does Blaise want to work for him?”

This time Del’s smile was more grown-up and knowing: the baby teeth unrevealed by smooth lips. “Oh, Miss Sanford, has no one told you yet about power?”