Gore Vidal - Empire

“No. But I admired your mother a century ago. You must come see us one day, at the edge of the Arctic Circle.”

“I prefer the equator, for now.”

Mrs. Dewey, in perfect if heavily accented French, said, “I understand every word. After all, my late husband and I were at the Austrian court for ages…”

Del saved Caroline from further displays of international glamour. “They are Beales, and can never forget it.”

“What’s a Beale? And why can such a thing never be forgotten?”

“Their father. He was a general in the war, and then he struck it rich in California…”

“To strike…” Caroline paused. “What a funny expression, ‘to strike it rich,’ like a blow of some kind against someone else.”

“Well, many people never recover from those strikes.”

“I think,” said Caroline, “my father might have been one.”

“But he was very rich to start with.”

“He made more, like Mr. McLean.”

Lord Pauncefote stopped Del at the door to the ballroom. “We have had good news from South Africa,” he said. Caroline turned her back on them, so that the old man could tell whatever it was that he wanted Del, in turn, to repeat to his father. As Caroline surveyed the room, she saw the exquisite figure of the Cassini child, as elegantly dressed as a Paris lady of fashion, with a round chubby face, small features, and the bright eyes of a young fox. “They say,” said Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, “that she is neither daughter nor niece but,” the low excited voice dropped even lower and became more excited, “mistress.”

“Oh, surely not!” Caroline was mildly shocked. She might have been even more shocked had she not known Mrs. Bingham altogether too well. Mrs. Bingham was Galatea to Caroline’s Pygmalion, monster to Caroline’s Baron Frankenstein. Ever since she had so off-handedly thrust Mrs. Bingham and her fabulous jewels, aristocratic lineage, magisterial presence onto the front page of the Tribune , she had received not only a number of advertisements for the Silversmith Dairies but a large number of invitations to Mrs. Bingham’s “sumptuous mansion,” where, at last, Caroline met all of her Apgar connections as well as much of pre-hard-pan Washington. The cave-dwellers, or cliff-dwellers as they were alternately known, seldom mingled in the new palaces of the West End and never in the world of official Washington. But Mrs. Bingham, and one of the Apgar ladies, were twin poles of Washington’s high if dowdy social world, to which Cousin John had assigned Caroline her place, a place she filled as little as possible and then only on condition that in return for the pleasures of her company she be given advertising for the Tribune . As a result of her relentlessness, she had increased the paper’s revenues by twelve percent, much to Trimble’s amazement. “It is a charge,” Caroline had explained, “for my appearance at their functions. They think I am rich, so they are willing to give me money. If they knew how poor I really am, I’d be cut dead.”

As it was, every mother of a marriageable son wanted to entertain Caroline, with due pomp and gravity; the present mootness of Caroline’s heiressdom was either not known or not understood. The fact that her brother Blaise was never to be seen had been noted by all, and the Apgars, rehearsed by Cousin John, spoke sadly of an estrangement. Meanwhile, Caroline’s proprietorship of what was, after all, the cave-dweller’s favorite unread newspaper was considered a charming folly due to her European upbringing.

Certainly, Mrs. Bingham revelled in the fact. Until Caroline’s highly creative account of the Connecticut Avenue robbery, Mrs. Bingham had led a decorous life, a monarch of much of what she surveyed, including the ancient dairyman, her husband. But once identified as a sort of Mrs. Astor disguised as a Washington milkmaid, there was now no stopping her. She courted the press. Every visiting celebrity was summoned to her mansion; and those few who obeyed her summons were then written up at length in the Star , Post and Tribune . All in all, Caroline quite enjoyed her monster. For one thing, Mrs. Bingham was a treasury of scandal. There was no one that she did not know something discreditable about; best of all, there was no one whom she would not slander, joyously, to her inventrix, Caroline, who now stared at the lean, yellow-faced woman of sixty, whose moustache was like fluff of the sort that Marguerite constantly found under Caroline’s bed, and could not persuade the African either to acknowledge or identify, much less remove.

“How can you tell? I mean that she’s his mistress?”

The deep voice sounded like a cello when a bass chord is, mournfully, struck. “My butler’s sister is upstairs maid at the Russian embassy. She says, late at night, there are footsteps from his room to hers .”

“A heavy Cossack tread?”

“Booted and spurred!” roared Mrs. Bingham, delighted at her own wit. Caroline suspected her of constant improvisation. Mention Queen Victoria, and she would promptly give lurid details of the Queen’s secret marriage to a Scots servant, in a cottage at Balmoral; and mourn the fact that the Queen, once a symbol of fertility for all the world, was now so many decades past the ability to conceive: “Otherwise, there would be Morganatic Claimants to the Throne!” This said in a hushed voice, awed by the grandeur of her subject.

“You must ‘do’ society for me, Mrs. Bingham. You know everything.”

“But I say nothing,” said Mrs. Bingham, who said everything but not to everyone. “Another proof that she is his mistress,” she began, true artist, to ornament her invention, “is the fact that he insists she act as his official hostess, and attend state dinners. One doesn’t do that with a daughter…”

“In Russia, always,” Caroline smoothly invented. “The wives are left home in their, ah, dachas, and the oldest daughter always escorts her father to court.”

“Curious, I have never heard that before.” Mrs. Bingham gave Caroline a suspicious look. Unlike most liars she was seldom taken in by the lies of others. “I’ll ask Mamie Bakhmetoff,” she said, ominously.

“Oh, she will lie. To save face. They all do.” With that, Del took Caroline’s arm, but before they could escape, Mrs. Bingham struck hard.

“Mr. Hay can tell you all about Mlle. Cassini. He sends her flowers.”

Del coughed nervously. In Washington, when a man sent flowers to an unmarried girl, it meant that he was courting her. “I didn’t know,” said Caroline.

“I’m sorry for her, that’s all. Poor girl.” As they crossed the room, he bowed to the Cassini girl, and whispered to Caroline, “Father wants me to keep an eye on the Russians.”

In the carriage, en route to Caroline’s house, Del told her that, contrary to what Pauncefote had told him, things were not going well for the British in Africa. “The Boers are on the warpath, which is good for us.”

“Aren’t we-your father, anyway-pro-British?”

“Of course. But we’ve got the treaties to think about. When England’s riding high, they oppose us everywhere from habit. When things go badly for the English, they are very agreeable. This means they’ll accept Father’s treaty, without fuss.”

“But will the Senate?”

“Why not? Lodge is there, and the President’s popular.”

“But next year’s election…”

Del was staring out the window at the Treasury, like a granite mountain in the rain. “There’s talk in New York, of Blaise and an older woman, a Frenchwoman.”

“Madame de Bieville? Yes. I know her. She has great charm. They are old friends.”

“But isn’t she married?”