Gore Vidal - Empire

“Comme tu est affreuse!”

“Comme toi-même!”

Blaise slammed the door hard behind him. Caroline remained standing in the center of the room, politely smiling, and singing, rather loudly, and to her own surprise, verse after verse of “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

THE BRONZE BUSTS of Henry James and William Dean Howells stared off into space, as did the earthly head of Henry Adams beside the fire. It was John Hay’s turn to be host to his friend and neighbor, and from his armchair he surveyed the three heads with a pleasure he was quick to identify to himself as elderly. Each belonged to a friend. If nothing else, he had done very well when it came to friends. Although he was not the man-of-letters that James or Howells was, or the historian that Adams was, he felt extended through them beyond his natural talents. Had he wanted to turn round in his chair, he could have stared into Lincoln’s bronze face, surprisingly life-like for a life-mask. But Hay seldom looked at the face that he had once known far better than his own. During the years that he and Nicolay were writing their enormous history of the President, Hay was amazed to find that he had lost all firsthand memory of Lincoln. The million words that they had written had had the effect of erasing Hay’s own memory. Nowadays, when asked about the President, he could only remember what they had written, so dully he knew, of that odd astounding man. Hay and Adams often discussed whether or not a memoir might not have the same effect-a gradual erasing of oneself, bit by bit, with words. Adams thought that this would be ideal; Hay did not. He liked his own past, as symbolized by the two busts, one life-mask. He had always suspected, even in moods melancholy and hypochondriacal, that he would end his days in comfort, with abundant memories, seated at his fireside on a February night in the last year of the nineteenth century, in the company of a friend not yet bust-ed. Of course, he had not counted on being secretary of state at the end of the road, but he did not any longer object to the dull grind, which he had turned over to Adee, or to the battles with the Senate, which he allowed Senator Lodge to conduct for him, with considerable help from Lodge’s old Harvard professor Henry Adams.

Now the old friends waited for Mrs. Hay, and the dinner guests and “the shrimps,” as Hay addressed his children: two out of four were in the house. Alice and Helen were deeply involved in the capital’s social life. Clarence was away at school. Del was in New York, perhaps studying law. Hay had always found it easy to talk to his own father; yet found it impossible to talk to his oldest son. Some bond of sympathy had, simply, not developed between them. But then Hay had been a country boy like Lincoln, with nothing but his wits-and a connection or two; while Del, like Lincoln’s son Robert, was born to wealth. Lincoln father and Lincoln son had not got on well, either.

“Will Del marry the Sanford girl?” Adams often strayed into Hay’s mind.

“I was just thinking of Del, as you must have known, with those other-worldly Adams psychic powers. I don’t know. He doesn’t confide in me. I know he sees her in New York, where she’s set up for the winter.”

“She’s uncommonly clever,” said Adams. “Of all the young girls I know…”

“The brigade of girls…”

“You make me sound like Tiberius. But of the lot, she is the only one I can’t work out.”

“Well, she’s not like an American girl. That’s one reason.” Hay had found Caroline disturbingly direct in small matters and unfathomable when it came to those things that must be taken seriously, like marriage. There was also the problem, even mystery, of her father’s will. “I think she’s made a mistake, contesting the will. After all, when she’s twenty-five, or whatever, she’ll inherit. So why fuss?”

“Because at her age five years seems forever. I hope Del brings her into the family. I should like her for a niece.”

“He threatens to bring her here, for a visit. But he hasn’t.”

The butler announced, “Senator Lodge, sir.” Both Hay and Adams rose as the handsome, were it not for a pair of cavernous nostrils that always made Hay think, idly, of a bumblebee, patrician-politician glided into the room. “Mrs. Hay has got off with Nannie. Neither one can bear to hear me say another word about the treaty.”

“Well, we want to hear nothing else.” Hay did his best to be genial; and, as always, succeeded. The problem with Henry Cabot Lodge-aside from the disagreeable fact that he looked young enough to be Hay’s son-was his serene conviction that he alone knew what the United States ought to do in foreign affairs, and from his high Republican Senate seat he drove the Administration like some reluctant ox, toward the annexation of, if possible, the entire world.

Worse, at a bureaucratic level, Lodge meddled so much with the State Department that even the patient Adee now found unbearable the Senator’s constant demands for consulates, to reward right-thinking imperialist friends and allies. But the President wanted peace at any price with the Senate, and the price in Lodge’s case was patronage. In exchange, however, Lodge had taken charge of getting the Administration’s treaty with Spain through the Senate, a surprisingly difficult task because of the Constitution’s unwise stipulation that no treaty could be enacted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate, an august body filled with men of the most boundless conceit, as Adams had so neatly portrayed in an anonymous, highly satiric novel which even now no one, except the remaining Hearts, knew for certain that he had written.

Apparently, the Senators were, once again, running true to form, according to Lodge, whose British accent offended Hay’s ears. But then Hay still spoke near-Indiana, and deeply loved England, while Lodge spoke like an Englishman, and hated England. La-di-da Lodge was one of the less unkind epithets for Massachusetts’s junior senator, who was now denouncing his state’s senior senator, the noble if misguided anti-imperialist George F. Hoar, who had told the nation that “no nation was ever created good enough to own another,” a sly paraphrase of Lincoln. “Theodore writes me almost every day.” Lodge stood, back to the fire, rocking from side to side on short legs. “He says that Hoar and the rest are little better than traitors.”

Adams sighed. “I would think that Theodore would have quite enough to do up in Albany without worrying about the Senate.”

“Well, he does think of the war as his war.” Lodge smiled at Hay. “His splendid little war, as you put it. Now he wants to make sure we keep the Philippines.”

“So do we all,” said Hay. But this was not strictly true. Hay and Adams had thought, from the beginning, that a coaling station for the American fleet would be sufficient recompense for the splendors and miseries of the small war. This was also the view of several of the American commissioners at the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, one commissioner-a Delaware senator-had written Hay a curiously eloquent telegram to say that as the United States had fought Spain in order to free Spain’s colonies from tyranny, the United States had no right to take Spain’s place as tyrant, no matter how benign. We must, he said, stick to our word.

Hay had put the case to the President, but St. Louis, as it were, had inspired McKinley with a sense of mission. After ten days in the West, McKinley returned to Washington, convinced that it was the will of the American people, and probably God, too, that the United States annex the entire Philippine archipelago. He instructed the commissioners to that effect; he also offered Spain twenty million dollars; and the Spanish agreed. Meanwhile, something called the Anti-Imperialist League was breathing fire, and an odd mixture they were, ranging from the last Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, to the millionaire Republican Andrew Carnegie, from Henry Adams’s own brother, Charles Francis, a one-time president of the Union Pacific Railroad, to Mark Twain.