Gore Vidal - Empire

“With Mr. Hearst?”

“No. I want to be my own Mr. Hearst.”

“He doesn’t know that yet, does he?”

“How can you tell?” Blaise gave her his best boyish smile; and it was still most boyish even though she knew the amount of adult calculation that went into it. Charm was Blaise’s most formidable weapon. Charm was Caroline’s most fragile defense.

“The way he treats you. With everyone else, he is very grand seigneur . He is polite, the way we are to servants. But he treats you as an equal, which means that he expects you to invest money-perhaps all your money-in his papers.” Caroline had not intended to get so directly to the will but she trusted her instinct about Hearst’s attitude to Blaise.

Blaise frowned, not at all boyishly. In fact, he looked like his father at the card table, trying to recall the bidding. “I’m not about,” he said finally, “to make this kind of investment.”

“But you’ve allowed him to think that you will.” Caroline understood Blaise. Did he, she wondered, hardly for the first time, understand her? “That could be dangerous, with a man so-unusual.”

“Father meant twenty-seven.” Blaise struck hard. “Mr. Houghteling ought to know. He was his lawyer. He says there is no doubt of intention.”

Caroline sat very straight in her chair. Back of Blaise’s head a mass of bronze chrysanthemums were arrayed as for a funeral. An omen? If so, his funeral or hers? “It was a lucky accident for you that Father’s pen slipped. We both know what he meant. But what I want to know is what you mean. Why do you want my share of the estate? Surely, there’s enough for both?”

“There isn’t. For what I want to do.” Blaise looked at her bleakly.

“To start a newspaper?”

Blaise nodded. “I’m learning how it’s done now. When I’m ready, I’ll start my own, or buy one. Maybe here…”

For once, Caroline could not stop herself from smiling. “In competition with Mr. Hearst?”

“Why not? He’d understand.”

“There’s no doubt he’d understand! He’d understand that you had betrayed him. He’d also understand that if you tried to compete with him, he’d be obliged to crush you, as he seems to have crushed Mr. Pulitzer.”

“The World’s doing all right. Mr. Pulitzer just isn’t number one any more.”

“So there might yet be Hearst, Pulitzer and Sanford?”

“Yes,” Blaise said; and said no more.

Caroline was impressed; and appalled. “You will lose the entire inheritance.”

“No,” Blaise said; and said no more.

“Lose or gain, for six years you will have the use of my capital. Then-what happens?”

“According to Mr. Houghteling,” Blaise was deliberate, “you’ll inherit the amount which represents half the estate at the time the will was probated.”

Caroline began to see her way through the labyrinth; and not as a victim but as the Minotaur. “Should you double my share of the estate, you will keep half?”

“That seems only fair. I will have doubled it, not you.”

“If you lose…”

“I won’t lose…”

“If you lose, what do I get?”

Blaise’s smile was radiant: “Half of nothing.”

“So I lose everything if you are unfortunate and gain nothing if you are lucky.”

“You’ll be paid thirty thousand dollars a year for the next six years. You can live very nicely on that here. Even better, back at Saint-Cloud.”

Caroline began to see a way through to-the treasure. She was not yet sufficiently New York predator to demand living flesh for her dinner. She had begun by wanting what was hers. Now she was eager to take what was his, as well. Although family history had always bored her, she had been sufficiently intrigued by her father’s cryptic references to the fact that Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, her grandfather, had been an illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. At Mlle. Souvestre’s school she had had the good luck to have a history teacher who did not, like all the others, disdain American history. Together they had read all that they could-which was not much-about her great-grandfather, who seemed more artist than rogue, more Lord Chesterfield than Machiavelli-and, of course, Burr was her maternal ancestor, not Blaise’s, which gave her an advantage if there should be anything to the laws or, rather, whims of heredity. Burr had been narrowly cheated of the presidency; had been rather less narrowly, to say the most, cheated of the crown of Mexico; had lived long enough to see another illegitimate son, if the gossip was true, become president. Burr had been called a traitor but, in actual fact, he had been something far worse and more dangerous to his world, a dreamer. Because of this sublime subversive trait, he had enchanted Caroline. Finally, as Aaron Burr had treated his only legitimate child as if she were a son, so Caroline had vowed when she left Europe for America that she would now become Burr’s great-grand son , and live out, on the grandest scale possible, that subtle creature’s dream of a true civilization with himself as its center, whether in the provincial capital Washington or the even more unlikely Mexico. But where the man Burr had wanted high office-even a crown-his great-grand self-styled son was, after all, unmistakably and completely a woman, and so for Caroline there would be no high office in a nation where only males were allowed to occupy such visible places; yet there was something far better than mere office, and she had got a glimpse of it that evening on the second floor of the Tribune Building in Park Lane; there was, simply, true power. Although money was the source of power in this rude place, now even less of a civilization than it had been in Burr’s day, what she had seen and heard of Hearst that night had convinced her that the ultimate power is not to preside in a white house or open a parliament while seated on a throne but to reinvent the world for everyone by giving them the dreams that you wanted them to dream. She doubted if Blaise-heir to prosaic Delacroix but not to the arch-dreamer Burr-grasped this. He saw simply an exciting game to play, with money and the illusion of power as its reward. While she saw herself creating a world that would be all hers, since she, like Hearst, would have reinvented all the players, giving them their dialogue, moving them in and out of wars: “Remember the Maine,” “Cuba Libre,” “Rough Riders,” “Yellow Kids”… Oh, she could do better than any of that! She too could use a newspaper to change the world. She felt giddy with potentiality. But, first, she must see to her inheritance. She got to her feet. Blaise did the same.

“I suppose,” she said, “we’ll next meet in court.”

Blaise blinked. “You have no case.”

“I shall accuse you of altering the will.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t. But the accusation will always be there, all your life. Mr. Hearst can afford not to be respectable. You can’t.”

“You can’t prove a thing. And I’ll still win.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain. Anyway, remember this.”- Remember the Maine! Had Aaron Burr ever so rapturous a vision?-“I shall do anything to get what’s mine.”

“All right.” Blaise turned to go. “I’ll see you in court.” He opened the door to the suite. “Do you know how much litigation costs here?”

“I took the liberty of removing the four Poussins from Saint-Cloud. They are in London, with a dealer. He says they should fetch a marvellous price.”

“You stole my pictures?” Blaise was white with fury.

“I took my pictures. When we divide the estate, evenly, I’ll give you your half of what I get from the sale. Meanwhile, I shall be able to buy quite a lot of wonderful American law.”