Gore Vidal - Empire

Thinking of Del’s fineness, Caroline turned to the figure on her right; he was definitely not baroque, she decided. Gothic, in fact-slender, aspiring, lean; she tried to recall Henry Adams’s other adjectives in praise of Gothic; and failed. Besides, the young man’s hair was curly and its color was not gray stone but pale sand; yet the eyes were Chartres blue. Was-what was his name? there were three, of course, to indicate noble birth in the South: James Burden Day-was his character incomparably fine? She was tempted to ask him; but asked instead how a Democrat enjoyed working for a Republican administration. “I like it better than they do.” He smiled; the incisors were oddly canine; would he bite? she hoped. “But it’s just another job to them, and that’s all government is-in this country, anyway. Jobs. Mine should belong to a Republican, and it will in September when I go home.”

“To do what?”

“To come back here,” Del answered for his friend. “He’s running for Congress.”

“Don’t tempt the gods.” Day looked worried; and Caroline found this appealing.

“Then you’ll have an elected job. The best kind,” she said.

“Oh, the worst! The worst!” Helen was adding yet more shad-roe to a Berninian figure that threatened to erupt into extravagant rococo. The arms in their puffed sleeves already looked like huge caterpillars, ready to burst and spread huge iridescent wings. “Every two years Mr. Day will have to go home and persuade the voters that he is still one of them, that he’ll get the government to give them things. It’s a tiring business. Father’s job is best.”

“But the Secretary of State must please the President, mustn’t he? And if he doesn’t, he goes.” Caroline addressed the question not to Helen but to Del.

Predictably, Helen answered. “Oh, it’s more complicated than that. The Major must also please the Secretary of State. If Father should leave-let’s say before an election-that would hurt the Major. Truly hurt the Major. So they must please each other.”

“Both,” said Del, “must please the Senate. Father hates the Senate and everyone in it, including his friend Mr. Lodge.”

“Even so,” Helen had miraculously consumed, in a minute, ten thousand shad’s eggs, “secretary of state is the best of all the jobs in this funny place.”

“I’m sure,” said Caroline. She turned to Del. “I keep forgetting to ask your father. What does a secretary of state do ?”

Del laughed. Helen did not; she said, “He conducts all foreign relations…”

Del said, through her, “Father says he has three jobs. One is to fight off foreign governments when they make claims against us. Two, to help American citizens in their claims against foreign governments, usually fraudulent; and, three, to provide jobs that don’t exist for the friends of senators who do.”

“What senator got you Pretoria?” asked Day.

Del looked contented. “That was the President. Every now and then he gets a job he can give away himself, and so Pretoria is mine.”

“We hate the Boers.” Helen helped herself to a roast, whose weight on the serving-dish was such a strain on the liveried butler that his forearms trembled; but without compassion she hacked and shoved at the lamb. “We are for the British everywhere.”

“Maybe you are, but we’re not back where I come from,” said Day.

“Actually, we’re neutral.” Del frowned at Helen. “That’s my job in South Africa, to be neutral.”

“I won’t give you away.” Day grinned. “But Colonel Bryan’s positive your father and the Major have made all sorts of secret arrangements with the British.”

“Never!” Del seemed truly alarmed. “If we have any policy it’s to get the British out of the Caribbean, out of the Pacific…”

“Out of Canada?” asked Caroline.

“Well, why not? The Major ran as a believer in the eventual, mutual, more perfect, union between Canada and the United States, because we’re all of us English-speaking, you see…”

“Except,” said Caroline, “for the millions who speak French.”

“That’s right,” said Del, not listening. It was a characteristic of Washington, Caroline had noticed-or was it politics?-that no one ever listened to anyone who did not have at least access to power. But Day had heard her; and he murmured in her ear, “Back home we figure these fancy folks here are no better than foreigners.”

“I should love to go back home with you. Where is it?”

Day listed, very briefly, the pleasures of his Southwestern state. Then the latest rumors about Admiral Dewey were discussed. Would he be the Democratic choice for president? Day thought that Dewey could defeat Bryan at the convention. But could Dewey then defeat McKinley? He thought not. The country was, suddenly, marvellously prosperous. The war had given a great impetus to business. Expansion was a tonic; even the farmers-Day’s future constituency-were less desperate than usual. Finally, Helen shifted the subject to Newport, Rhode Island, and Day fell silent; and Caroline held her own, as the uses to which the summer should be put were analyzed. Apparently, Helen and her sister, Alice, planned to divide the Newport season between them. They would not go together: too many Hays, as it were, on the market. Would Caroline join one or the other of them? Caroline said that she might, if she were invited, but no one, she lied, had invited her. Actually Mrs. Jack Astor, after making Caroline promise never to play tennis with her husband, had invited her for July, and Caroline had said that everything would depend on the state of some unfinished business. Mrs. Jack hoped that her bridge was good. Colonel Jack no longer played bridge: “It’s wonderful to be inside when he’s outside. Almost as satisfying as divorce.” Mrs. Jack was definitely racy. She had always played tennis when her husband played bridge. Now that he had taken to the courts she had taken to the card-table. “We cannot be together,” she would say, as if quoting some biblical text.

Halfway across Lafayette Park, Del put his arm through Caroline’s. Helen and Day, not touching, were up ahead, long shadows cast in front of them by dull street lamps which emphasized the sylvan nature of the square’s confusion of ill-tended trees and bushes, crisscrossed by paths, all converging on General Jackson’s monument. “I suppose I must ask sometime.” Del was nervous.

“Ask what?” Caroline felt, again, tears come to her eyes. Just who, she suddenly wondered, was she? Plainly, some part of her had never been introduced to the other.

“Well, would you marry me! I mean- will you marry me?”

The second invitation to a lifelong relationship had arrived, so to speak, in the mail. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed, astonishing both of them. “I mean, oh, no, not now .” She lowered her voice to a more lady-like level. “No, not now,” she improvised, feebly.

“You don’t want to go to Pretoria, I can understand that.” Del sounded glum. To their right, St. John’s Church more than ever looked like a mad Hellenist’s dream of ancient Greece (the columned portico) and Byzantium (the gold-domed tower).

“No, I don’t want not to go to Pretoria.” Caroline paused; the tears had dried on her face. “I think I have put too many negatives in that sentence.”

“Well, just one is too many for me.”

“It’s not Pretoria. It’s not you. It’s me. And Blaise. And business.”

“We have all summer,” said Del, “to do your business in. Then…”

“Well, then-anything. I want,” she said, to her own surprise, “to be married. To, that is,” she added, surprising herself for what she hoped would be the last time, “you.”