Gore Vidal - Empire

“A very good thing, too. Corruption in a good cause is a good thing. So who cares that a senator’s been bought in the process?” Hay got to his feet, with some difficulty. Although the mortal ailment was, temporarily, in recession, he had lately developed an exciting new set of pains, both arthritic and sciatic; as a result, what felt like jolts of electric energy kept assaulting his nerve ends while odd tendons twitched quite on their own and joints, for no reason, would suddenly lock. “I’ve come around, Cabot. At first I thought it not only wrong but inconvenient to try to govern so many Catholic Malays. But time’s running out on us. The Europeans are partitioning China. The Russians are in Port Arthur. The Germans are in Shantung…”

“I want us in Shanghai.” Lodge’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of yet more Asiatic victories.

“Well, I want us in Siberia,” said Adams. “We have no future in the Pacific, but when Russia breaks up, as it must, there’s our opportunity. Who controls the Siberian land-mass is the master of Europe and Asia.”

Happily, Hay was spared an Adams meditation on the world’s ever-shifting balance of power by the arrival of ladies. Hay greeted Mrs. Lodge, known as Sister Anne or Nannie, at the door, aware that her suspicious eye was on her husband. She did not entirely approve of Lodge when he was too much the senator; husband gave wife an innocent look. “Henry and I talk and talk about the treaty, while Cabot, who knows everything, just sits and listens, quiet as pussy,” said Hay, maintaining peace in the Lodge family. “In fact, cat’s got his tongue tonight.”

“There is no cat,” said Nannie Lodge, “large enough to get Cabot’s silver tongue.”

Meanwhile, Clara Hay and their two daughters quite filled the study, and Adams began to shine, as he always did when young women were present, while Lodge grew ever more courtly, and Sister Anne witty. Three of five Hearts in the same room: Hay was content. But contentment ceased in the midst of the bombe-glacée, Clara Hay’s ongoing masterpiece. Although cooks came and went over the years, Clara, who could not, as they say, boil water, nevertheless was able to pass on the secret receipts to a number of all-important dishes of which the bombe-glacée was the quivering, delicate, mocha-flavored, creamy, filigree-sugared piece, as Hay called it, of least resistance.

Hay’s fork was posed for a stab at this perfection when the butler appeared in the doorway to announce, “The President, sir. He would like you to go over to the mansion.”

The dining room was silent. Lodge’s dark eyes shone; and the bumblebee nose looked as if it scented pollen. Adams gave his old friend a mournful look. Clara was firm. “He can wait until we’ve finished dinner.”

Hay had discovered a new and almost painless way of getting out of a chair; he used his relatively strong right arm rather than his relatively bad knees to get to his feet. Now he pushed hard against the arm of his chair; and was, almost painlessly, upright. “Henry, you be host. I’ll be back-when I’m back.”

“I can’t think,” said Clara, “what the Major is doing up at this hour. Over there, they go to bed with the chickens.”

“A fox,” said Lodge, “is loose in the chicken house.”

At the foot of Hay’s majestic staircase stood Mr. Eddy and a White House messenger. Hay’s descent was cautious; the scarlet runner a magnificent peril. “What is it, Mr. Eddy?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Secretary.”

“I don’t know either, sir,” said the messenger.

“All I know, sir, is he wants you straightaway, sir.”

“In mid-bomb,” Hay murmured sadly, as the butler got him into his fur-lined coat.

Although February had been lethally cold, no snow had yet fallen, and the three men were able to walk across the avenue to the White House, where the offices in the east end were ominously lit up while the downstairs was dark.

The German doorkeeper greeted Hay in the near-darkness of the entrance hall; he said, somewhat surprisingly, “The President’s waiting in the conservatories.” An usher stepped out of the shadow, to lead the way. In the dim light of a single lamp, the Tiffany screen looked incongruously Byzantine.

During Lincoln’s time the conservatories had been modest; now they covered acres. One greenhouse was devoted exclusively to orchids, another to roses, another to exotic tropical fruits. At evening receptions, the Marine band would play in the rose house, and the young couples would wander from glass-house to glass-house, invariably getting lost. But there had been no such evenings since the sinking of the Maine .

The President was in the carnation greenhouse, seated in an armchair, smoking a cigar, a stack of papers in his lap. Hay was quite overwhelmed by the scent of flowers, not to mention the moist warmth in such marked contrast to the icy night beyond the panes of glass, which were now so many black mirrors reflecting the artificial-looking colors of the carnations on their green straw-like stalks. Electric lights made summer noon of winter night.

“I come here when I want to get away.” The Major started to get up but Hay’s hand on his shoulder kept him in place. Hay got into a chair opposite him; they were at the center of a perspective of carnations, arrayed in tables according to color. Those at hand were pale pink, a color Hay disliked and the Major doted on. “Tonight I’ve been working on my speech to the Home Market Club in Boston. It’s for the sixteenth. I want to make the case, once and for all, for annexation. Please go over the text. Add anything, subtract anything. Just make it right. You’re the best I know for this sort of speech.”

Hay wondered if the President might not be a little mad: to summon him away from a dinner party, admittedly a late one, to sit in a stifling greenhouse in order to discuss a speech two weeks away. “Is that the text?”

“This?” McKinley held up the top paper on his lap; the huge waistcoated belly had crumpled an edge of the paper where belly rested upon vast presidential thighs. “No, Mr. Hay. This is what we have to talk about. It is from the Manila correspondent of the New York Sun . It will be in all the papers tomorrow.”

As Hay read the cabled story, the agitated President spun his eyeglasses on their silken cord; first clockwise, then counterclockwise. On the island of Luzon, Aguinaldo’s gun-men had opened fire on American troops. Hay returned the cable to the President. “I am not surprised,” he said. “It was only a matter of time-and timing.”

“We have a second war on our hands, so close to the other.” The Major sighed. “It is always the unexpected that happens, at least in my case. I thought my Administration would be a quiet affair, dedicated to sound business, sound money. Instead I am thrust by events into war after war…”

“Mr. Lincoln said I do not act. I am acted upon. My policy is to have no policy.”

“In this, we are as one.” McKinley suddenly shook the cabled report as if it were a child in need of discipline. “How foolish these people are! Don’t they realize that this will get us our treaty? The people will insist on it now.”

Hay nodded; he was also growing suspicious. “Do we know who fired the first shot?”

“All we know is what you’ve just read. It sounds as if they fired first or provoked us to fire first. I’ve cabled General Otis for a report. Just the other day he said he thought he’d need as many as thirty thousand troops, to run things properly. I disagreed. As it is, our army of occupation is twenty thousand men, all-”

“… wanting to go home.”

The massive ivory head-a perfect egg save for the cleft chin-nodded and the round luminous eyes were suddenly hooded. “Now that Spain’s surrendered, we are committed to getting the troops home as soon as possible. They did not sign up to fight Filipinos, Colonel Bryan has reminded me.”