Gore Vidal: Empire

“I read Julius Caesar’s handbook in school. I know all about it. You start at first light and then, by forced marches, you surprise the enemy and kill them. Then you write a book about what you’ve done.”

“Well, the newspapers are now the book you write. Blaise has simply taken a shortcut. He has gone straight to the end-result.”

“But isn’t it better-if that’s what you want-to win a war first?”

“But that’s exactly what Mr. Hearst has done, or thinks he’s done. All those stories of his about how the Spanish blew up our battleship.”

“Didn’t they?”

“Probably not, according to Father. But it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now. Anyway, Blaise is in the midst of it. He wants to be powerful. We all noticed that.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m far too easy-going. I’d rather marry, and be happy, like my father.”

“But the Ambassador has always been at the center of-forced marches at first light.”

Del laughed. “It was the others who got up early to do the marching. Father just wrote the book.”

“Ten volumes, in fact.” Caroline had yet to meet anyone who had been able to read all the way through the ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln by John Hay and his fellow secretary to the President, J. G. Nicolay. Caroline had not even made the attempt. The Civil War had no interest for her, while Lincoln himself seemed as remote as Queen Elizabeth, and rather less interesting. But then she had been brought up on Saint-Simon, in whose bright pages there were no saints with stovepipe hats making sententious appeals to the Almighty, only a king who was compared, quite rightly, to the sun, in bed and out.

Mrs. Cameron appeared on the terrace. “Del!” she called. “Your father wants you. He’s in the library.” She went inside.

“What,” asked Caroline, as they returned to the house, “are the Five of Hearts?”

“Where did you hear about that?”

“I saw some letter-paper. I asked Mrs. Cameron. She was mysterious.”

“Well, don’t mention the subject to Mr. Adams, ever.”

“Then he must be a Heart?”

“It was long ago,” was all that Del said.

Caroline returned to her room; and dressed for lunch. She had come to Kent without a maid; old Marguerite had gone to Vichy to take the waters. In the past, Caroline had always travelled with a mademoiselle, who was half governess and half maid. But now, in her twenty-first year, Caroline was an orphan; and she could do as she pleased. The problem was that she was not certain where pleasure for her might ultimately lie. In any case, until the Sanford estate was settled, she was in limbo. And so she had chosen to spend August with Del and his family at the “summer embassy,” presided over by the Camerons and the Porcupinus Angelicus , their name for Henry Adams, who was indeed prickly as a porcupine if not always much like an angel.

But, happily, Adams was now in a celestial mood, at least with Caroline, who found him alone in the yellow drawing room, so called because, with age, the frayed green damask on the walls had turned a sickly yellow, made even sicklier by the contrast with the heavily gilded-and dusty-furniture. Was dusty to be emblematic of the state of an English August, or merely her own state of mind?

Henry Adams was shorter than Caroline; and she was less than Amazonian. At sixty, Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, as he was inexorably identified, possessed a full white beard, carefully barbered to a point, a full moustache, a high, pink, shining bald head-the Adams birthright, he liked to say-and a full paunch held ever so slightly forward in order to balance properly the small round figure that existed only to support the large round brain-crammed head of America’s great historian, wit, dispenser of gloom-not to mention lover of Lizzie Cameron. But were they, actually, lovers? wondered Caroline, realizing that the country of her father was not that of her own birth and education, and as the chronicler, Adams, was no Saint-Simon, there were no rogue bastards to occupy his pen, though such things did exist in American history, but hidden from view, like the old story that her own grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, was the bastard son of that dark son of the American republic Aaron Burr, who had, so tremendously, like Lucifer, fallen.

“Dear Miss Sanford.” Henry Adams’s old bright eyes were very alert; but the smile was curiously tentative for one so venerable. “You do illuminate at least one sexagenarian’s summer.” The accent was British. But then Adams had matured in England, as his father’s secretary when that dour and gelid statesman had been President Lincoln’s minister at London during the Civil War. Like so many entirely Anglicized Americans, Adams affected to despise the British. “They are impenetrably stupid,” he would say, with quiet delight when confronted with some new demonstration of British dimness.

“Mr. Adams.” Caroline mocked a reverent curtsey. “Is the war concluded to your satisfaction?”

“Well, it is all over, which satisfies me. But then for two years the Cuban business drove me so wild that there was a movement to confine me to the Washington Zoo. At the mention of ‘Cuba Libre,’ I would howl-like a wolf at the full moon.” Adams bared his teeth; looked to Caroline not unlike a wolf at noon. “But then I always lose my head when others are calm. The moment they get off their heads, I am calm. Once the war began, I was serene. I knew we had our man of destiny securely in place.”

“Commodore Dewey?”

“Oh, infant! Commodores are simply playthings in war-time.”

“But he took Manila, and defeated the Spanish fleet, and now everyone wants us to stay, at least the English do.”

Adams tugged the tip of his pointed beard with, she noted, a small rosy hand that was more like a baby’s than that of an old man. He cocked his head to one side. “We students of history-no matter how dull-like to know just who it was who put an admiral, like a chess piece, in Far Eastern waters-soon to be called Far Western, as what’s west to us is what’s true west.”

“My brother Blaise says it was Mr. Roosevelt, when he was at the Navy Department. Blaise says he did it without telling his superiors.”

Adams nodded approvingly. “You are getting closer. Our young bumptious friend Theodore-a student of my young bumptious brother Brooks-deserves more credit, certainly, than the knight-admiral, that is-I think in chess terms-that checkmated Spain. But whose hand directed our castle Theodore?”

A flight of children, led by Martha, filled up the room. All the girls surrounded Uncle Dordie, a name Martha had invented for Mr. Adams, whose pockets turned out to be filled with hard candies, that were promptly and ruthlessly suppressed by Mrs. Cameron. “Not before mealtimes, Dor!” she announced, confiscating whatever she could pry loose from clenched fists.

Other houseguests were now entering the drawing room, without announcement, to the butler’s sorrow. But Mrs. Cameron’s word was final at the summer embassy. Only officialdom was proclaimed. The rest came pell-mell.

To Caroline’s surprise, Adams turned back to her and resumed their conversation where it had broken off. “In those affairs where the balance of power in the world suddenly shifts, there must be a consummate player, who calculates his moves. This player puts Theodore at the Navy Department so that he will put the Admiral at Manila; he then responds to the sinking of the Maine with a series of moves that lead to a near-bloodless war, and the end of Spain as a world-player, and the beginning of the United States as an Asiatic power…”

“I am in suspense, Mr. Adams! Who is the consummate player?”