Gore Vidal - Empire

“Well, he couldn’t help it,” said Mr. Trimble. “What do you intend to do with the old Trib ?”

“Why-be successful!” Caroline’s ears were now ringing again; she wondered if she was about to faint. Where once there had been four Poussins there was now a newspaper and a printer’s shop in an African city half a world away from home. Was she mad? she wondered. More important, could she win? She was certain that in the war with Blaise she had just won a significant battle if not the war itself, but Blaise was now, oddly, secondary to the newspaper, which was hers-became hers, as she sat at a rolltop desk to write out the second and final payment on her account at the Morgan Bank; and gave it to Vardeman, who then signed the various documents that Cousin John had brought with him. The transfer was complete.

“You will see a lot of me, Mr. Trimble.” Caroline was now at the door. “I’m here for at least a year. Maybe forever.”

“Are we to continue as before?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing is to be changed, except the circulation.”

“How will you change that?” asked Vardeman, with something less than his habitual ceremony: the check in hand gave him gravity.

“Have you no murders to report?” asked Caroline.

“Well, sure. I mean, we put the police news on the last page, like always. But it’s just the usual. A body found floating in the river…”

“Surely, from time to time, a beautiful woman is pulled out of the muddy cold dark Potomac River. A beautiful young woman perhaps divided into sections, and wearing only a negligée.”

“Caroline,” murmured Cousin John, so shocked that he used, in public, her first name.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right. No negligee could survive being quartered.”

“The Tribune is a serious paper,” said Vardeman, thick lips suddenly compressed like punctured bicycle tires. “Devoted to the Republican Party, to the tariff…”

“Well, Mr. Trimble, let us never forget our seriousness. But let us also remember that a beautiful young woman, murdered in a crime of passion, is also a serious figure if only to herself, while the crime-murder-is the most serious of all, in peacetime, that is.”

“You want… uh, yellow journalism, Miss Sanford?” Trimble was staring at her, a look of amusement in his pale blue eyes.

“Yellow, ochre, café au lait,” tactlessly, she looked at yellow-brown Vardeman, “I don’t care what color. No, that’s not true. I am partial to gold.”

“What about the gold standard?” asked Cousin John, eager to make light of everything that she had said.

“As a friend of Mr. Hay, I favor that, too. Whatever,” Caroline added as graciously as she could, “it is. You see, Mr. Trimble, I am a serious woman.”

“Yes, Miss, I see that all right, and I’ll send someone over to police headquarters right now to see what they got in the morgue.”

Caroline recalled Hearst on the floor, making up the front page of the Journal , the murdered woman slowly coming, as it were, alive under the embellishments. “Do that,” she said. “But remember that the illustration on the front page…”

“Front page,” groaned Vardeman, looking out at Market Square.

“… need not resemble too closely what is actually in the morgue.”

“But we… you… the Tribune is a news paper,” said Vardeman.

“No,” said Caroline. “It is not a newspaper. Because there is no such thing as a newspaper. News is what we decide it is. Oh, how I love saying ‘we.’ It is a sign of perfect ignorance, isn’t it?” The ringing in her ears had stopped; she had never felt so entirely in command of herself. “Obviously earthquakes and election results and the scores of… baseball teams,” she was proud to have remembered the name of the national sport, “are news, and must be duly noted. But the rest of what we print is literature, of a kind that is meant to entertain and divert and excite our readers so that they will buy the things our advertisers will want to sell them. So we must be-imaginative, Mr. Trimble.”

“I shall do my best, Miss Sanford.”

In the street Cousin John turned on her, with unfeigned anger. “You can’t be serious…”

“I have never been more serious. No.” She stopped herself. “That’s not true. What I mean to say is that I have never been serious about anything until now.”

“Caroline, this is… this is…” He launched like an anathema the word. “Corruption.”

“Corruption? Of what? The newspaper readers of Washington? Hardly. They know it all. Of the Tribune , a dull, dying paper? The word doesn’t apply. I see no corruption in what I mean to do. Perhaps,” she was judicious, “we shall offer a true reflection of the world about us. But you cannot blame a mirror for what it shows.”

“But your mirror willfully distorts…”

“A newspaper has no choice. It must be partisan in one way or another. But where is the corruption in this case?”

“An appeal to base appetites…”

“Will increase circulation. I did not make those appetites base.”

“But that is corrupt, to pander to them.”

“To gain readers? Surely, a small price to pay for…” Caroline stopped; a herdic cab had seen them, and now drew up to the front step.

“To pay for what?”

“To pay, Cousin John, for power. The only thing worth having in this democracy of yours.” More than a generation separated Caroline from Henry Adams’s Mrs. Lightfoot Lee; now, Caroline decided, it was possible for a woman to achieve what she wanted on her own and not through marriage, or some similar surrogate. She had not realized to what an extent Mlle. Souvestre had given her confidence. She not only did not fear failure, she did not expect it. “Which is probably proof that I am mad,” she said to Cousin John, as he helped her down from the cab, in the dense lemon-scented shade of the twin magnolia trees.

“I don’t need any proof of that,” he said, quite ignoring the non-sequitur nature of her remark: they had been talking of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling and the ever more intricate games that were now being played at law.

Caroline led her cousin into the house, to be greeted by Marguerite with complaints about the cook, who appeared, rumbling what sounded like powerful voodoo curses against Marguerite. As usual, the crisis was based upon misunderstanding. Parisian French and Afro-American seemed always at cross-purposes. Caroline was placating the confusion of two languages, as she led Cousin John into the narrow, dim, cool drawing room that ran the length of the small house, where they sat in front of a fireplace of white marble, filled now with ceramic pots containing early roses, an innovation that had caused deep laughter in the kitchen: “Flowers is for the yard. Wood’s for the fire.”

“I wish you were more enthusiastic.” Caroline wished there was a stronger word that she could use. But their relationship was insufficiently comfortable. He seemed to think that they might yet be engaged; and she allowed him to think this on the sensible ground that as anything is possible most things are improbable. Their cousinage was also a complication. He was, above all, a Sanford; and took himself seriously, in loco parentis .

“You must,” said Cousin John, surprisingly, “meet my cousins, the Apgars. They live in Logan Circle. It’s not the West End, of course; but old Washington still prefers that neighborhood. You should have some solid friends here.”

“Unlike the Hays?” She was mischievous.

“The Hays are too grand to be of use, if you should need them, while the Apgars are always here and ready to…”