Gore Vidal - Empire

“Not seriously,” said Caroline. “Anyway, she is now a widow.” Caroline was obliged, always, to conduct herself with rather more caution than was natural to her whenever this sort of subject came up. Did Americans really believe what they said or were they simply fearful of that ominous majority whose ignorance and energy set the national tone? They certainly never ceased to pretend in public that marriage was not only sacred but the stately terminus to romance. Although she constantly heard, and not just from Mrs. Bingham, of this or that bad marriage, adultery was seldom alluded to within the pale of respectability.

Del confirmed her not so native caution. “Blaise ought to remember that New York’s not Paris. We have different standards here.”

“What about Mr. Hearst?”

Del flushed. “First, he is outside society. Second, he is never without a chaperon, as far as one knows. He is afraid of his mother, after all, and she has the money.”

Caroline nodded, as gloomy now as the November day. “She’s struck it rich again, with a silver mine somewhere.”

“Copper. In Colorado.”

“She’s giving him money again.”

“To buy the Tribune ?” Del looked at Caroline, most curiously. She knew that he was mystified by her life as a publisher; scandalized, too, she feared. Ladies did not do such things. Ladies did not, in fact, do anything at all but keep house and wear the jewels that the gentlemen they were married to gave them, as outward symbols not of love or of fidelity but of the man’s triumphant solvency in the land of gold.

“Oh, I won’t sell, ever. Besides, he now has his eye on Chicago. He needs the Midwest. He wants everything, of course.”

“Like you?” Del smiled.

But Caroline took the question seriously. “I want,” she said, “to be interested. That is not easy for a woman. In this place.”

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGAN, according to Hay, but did not begin, according to Root, on January 1, 1900. Although in idle moments John Hay had been practicing writing “19” he could not get used to the change from the familiar, even consoling “18” into which he had been born and during which he had now lived more than sixty years to the somewhat ominous “19” which, if nothing else, would mark his end. At best, he might have ten years more; at worst, when the pains began, he prayed for prompt extinction.

Hay and Clara breakfasted alone in a window recess of the great dining room, with a view of Lafayette Park and the White House beyond. The park was full of snow that had fallen during the night. In the White House driveway black men were covering white snow with sawdust. Comforted by the labor of others, Clara ate heartily. Hay ate sparingly. With time’s passage, she had grown larger and larger; he smaller. Another century and she would quite fill the room at her present rate, while he would have shrunk to nothing. Between them, on the breakfast table, was a telegram from Henry Adams in Paris. “Sail from Cherbourg January 5.”

“I can’t wait to see the Porcupine in action again, keeping Cabot in line, and all the senators.” Actually, Hay dreaded the presentation to the Senate of what was now known as the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, a document carefully designed to place in a new perspective relations between England, busily at war in South Africa, and the United States, busily at war in the Philippines. For once, the United States was, if not in the lead, in the higher ascendant. White reported to Hay regularly on the purest honey that dropped from the British ministry whenever relations with the now imperial republic were mentioned. Boundary problems with Canada were no longer of any urgency. Let the Canadians work out their own dimensions, the Prime Minister had been heard to say, the partnership of London and Washington was the hope of the world, not to mention of the busy, efficient, right-minded Anglo-Saxon race.

“It will be a nightmare.” Clara put down the Washington Post . The pale gentle moon face shone upon Hay. “The trains ,” she added; and moaned.

“You seem to have travel on your mind. But we are going nowhere. There are no trains in our immediate future, nightmarish or not.”

“The reception today. There.” She indicated the White House. “The ladies. They have. All of them. Trains . This year.” The pauses were accompanied by a thoughtful chewing of cornbread, from a special coarse meal water-ground at Pierce’s Mill beside the Rock Creek.

“Trains to their dresses.” Hay understood. “But what’s so bad about that?”

“In the crush? A thousand ladies, each with a three-foot train?”

Hay understood. “We shall be there for the entire twentieth century.”

“Mrs. McKinley has said that she will come down.” Clara sighed. “I’ve noticed that she is at her best when others are uncomfortable. The Green Room was seriously overheated last week. Two ladies fainted. But Mrs. McKinley looked in her element, and stayed on and on.”

“A hot-house blossom. What a wretched life those two must have.” Hay was surprised at his own observation. He made it a point never to speculate on the private lives of others, particularly with Clara, who sat in constant judgment, studying every shred of evidence, and weighing all hearsay in the scales of her own perfect justice.

“I don’t think they know they are wretched.” Clara held up a napkin as if to blindfold herself, like Justice, and pronounce verdict. “They do go on and on about the child they lost. But I think that gives them something to talk about. She worships him, you know. While he…” Clara stopped to give Hay his moment in the stand to speak as witness for the male.

“He seems devoted. There is no one else, either.”

Clara began to frown: irregularity in marriage disturbed her almost as much as an ill-run house. Hay quietly added, “I speak, my dear, of friends, men or women. The Major is quite alone, it seems to me, which makes him very like the President.”

“He is the President.”

Hay smiled; pushed a crumb out of his beard. “When I say the President like that, seriously, I mean only one.”

“Mr. Lincoln. I wish I’d known him.”

“I wish I had, too.” Hay tried to visualize the Ancient, but could only summon up the dead life-mask in his study. Lincoln had been erased from his mind by too much-or too little?-thought upon the subject. “But no one knew him, except Mrs. Lincoln, who was often mad, while no one at all really knows the Major…”

“Not even the dreadful Mr. Hanna?”

“Particularly not the dreadful Marcus Aurelius Hanna. No, Mr. McKinley has done it all alone.” Hay laughed.

Clara looked at him sharply. She hated to be excluded from anything. Whenever she caught him smiling at remembered dialogue or rehearsing phrases to be used, she would say, “Tell me! Tell me what you’re smiling about. It must be very funny.” Now she added, “What are you thinking of?”

“I was thinking of something the Major said the other evening. We were in the upstairs oval room, the two of us, and he said, ‘From the Mexican war in 1848 until 1898, we were sound asleep as a nation. Internationally, that is. Happy in our isolation. Now all that has changed. We are everywhere. We are treated now with a respect which we were not when I was inaugurated.’ ”

Clara blinked. “True enough, I suppose. But why did you laugh?”

“I laughed because when I reminded him that, originally, he had been inclined to give the Filipinos their freedom, he said that that had never been his intention. From the beginning, he said, he had meant to hold on to everything. When I reminded him of his conversation with God, he gave me his secret kindly Borgia smile.”