Gore Vidal - Empire

“Is he greater than Lincoln?”

“He is as… crucial, which puts them on a par, in a way.” Hay picked up the Washington Tribune . A headline celebrated the burning of a livery stable in Arlington. “Our putative daughter-in-law has a fixation about fire.”

“If she would only confine herself to that sort of flame.” Clara was severe.

“I quite like what she does,” said Hay, who quite liked Caroline. “Del is lucky.”

“I think I like her, too. But she is not like us. She is French, really.”

“The French are not, all of them, so very wicked. Look at M. Cambon.”

Throughout their marriage Clara had been torn between a desire, on the one hand, to know everything about Hay’s many years in Europe and a conviction, on the other, that she must keep all knowledge of sin from her. She vacillated between frivolous desire and stern conviction. She vacillated now. “I suppose it’s her independence that I can’t get used to. She is like a young man…”

“Rather better to look at than any young man I’ve ever met.”

“Del seems so young beside her.” Clara shifted ground. She had never been able to accommodate the unusual, which Hay not only accommodated easily, but often courted.

“There is always,” Hay noted that the snow was now starting to fall again, as it always did once the White House carriage ways had been laboriously cleared, “the Cassini girl.”

“Do you think he likes her?”

“I told him to woo her, for his country’s sake.”

“Patriotism!” Clara sighed. Hay was never certain that his wife understood his jokes. She registered them politely; but seldom laughed, once the registration had been made.

“She’s uncommonly pretty…”

“But not legitimate, they say.” Clara was remorseless in such matters. In July, she had refused to attend Kate Chase’s funeral in Glenwood Cemetery. Husband and wife had quarrelled; and Hay had gone alone to say good-by-to himself. Kate herself had been said good-by to when he last saw her, with bloated face, dyed hair, trying to sell him eggs from her Maryland farm.

“No. She is legitimate. I had our ambassador in Petersburg find out. But after Cassini’s other wives, and all his losses at gambling, he never dared asked the Tsar for permission to marry her mother, an actress, someone so far beneath him, hard as that is to visualize.” Across the square the sky was like a gray iron plate, and the shovellers at the White House were now striking attitudes of despair, as the snow began, once more, to pile up. The reception was going to be chaos. Snow and trains. He shuddered.

“What matters,” said Clara, “is Del. The young people seem to think that he is in love with Mlle. Cassini. Ever since he took her to the Bachelors’ German at the Armory.”

“Where you presided.”

“Of course I have no objections to…” Clara’s unfinished sentences were often her judgments.

“To foreign girls like Marguerite Cassini or Caroline Sanford, who is as good as foreign. But you prefer the native stock for Del.”

“Am I wrong?”

“You are never wrong, Clara.”

“There are so many girls right here, like the Warder girls, and Bessie Davis and Julia Foraker…”

“Don’t! You make me think of votes in the Senate. As for Del and the Cassini girl, I’ve learned a lot. The Russians and the French plot against us and the British in China.” Hay relayed to Clara what Del had learned about Holy Russia’s intentions in Asia; and Clara smiled approvingly, and listened not at all. Marriage mattered. China did not. Meanwhile, the White House had disappeared behind a screen of falling snow. Fortunately, the Hays would not be obliged to join the long procession of carriages. Since Vice-President Hobart’s death, John Hay was now the President’s constitutional heir, a matter of midnight panic, when he saw himself suddenly elevated by death to the presidency, an office which he had always pined-rather than fought-for, and now no longer had the strength to fill. Fortunately, McKinley’s health was excellent.

On the other hand, Hay suddenly found that he did have the unexpected strength to join Clarence and some of his friends in a pillow fight in the rough-room; and only Clara’s warning, “We’ll be late if you don’t get dressed,” stopped the delightful game. Clarence was both thoughtful and playful; unlike the ever-mysterious Del, who had said that, yes, he would be at the White House reception but, no, he would get there on his own.

The snow had stopped falling as Hay and Clara got into their carriage. Driveways that had been cleaned of snow that morning now resembled the steppes of Siberia. An endless line of carriages moved slowly beneath the portico of what Count Cassini had referred to as “a pleasant country home.” Groundmen scattered sawdust beside the driveway as, in pairs, pedestrians moved slowly along Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House grounds.

By earlier agreement with Mr. Cortelyou, Hay’s carriage went round the White House to the south entrance, which was used only for special visitors. As the city vanished beneath feathery fronds of snow, he tried to recall what winters had been like in Lincoln’s day; but as he had been young then, all that he could recall of that far-off time was a constant, languorous high summer, broken by fits of malarial fever.

One of the German door-keepers helped the Hays from their carriage. “Mr. Cortelyou would be pleased, sir, if you were to go directly to the Blue Room.”

In the relative gloom of the lower White House corridor, Hay and Clara, arm in arm (she supporting him more than he her), made their way up the stairs just back of the Tiffany screen which hid the state apartments from the sort of curious crowd that was now gathering in the entrance hall. Green, Red, and Blue Rooms were already filled with distinguished guests. As Clara had predicted, the trains were a nightmare, not improved by the slush and mud from shoes. The carpets were like wet burlap sacking, reminding Hay of Congress in his youth when tobacco-chewing was universally popular and, at session’s end, the deep red carpet of the Senate would be river-mud brown.

The Blue Room contained the members of the Cabinet and the chiefs of diplomatic missions. As always, Hay was charmed and amused by the costumes of the-he always thought of them as his -diplomats. Pauncefote wore what looked to be an admiral’s uniform laced with enough gold to please a Byzantine emperor. Lady Pauncefote, plain and mild in everyday life, had suddenly grown from her mouse-gray hair, like antlers, a tiara so splendid that it seemed to aspire to be a crown. In her silver dress, she reminded Hay of an icon; even her constitutionally sallow face looked as if it might have been darkened by the smoke of votive candles. She was in marked contrast to her usual untidy self, invariably wearing a highly unbecoming shawl, “the gift,” she would murmur, “of our dear Queen.” Cambon was red and gold; Cassini more gold than anything else, while his daughter, Marguerite, glowed at his side, the only youthful, beautiful object in the room. If Hay had been Del, he would have carried her off and married her.

The ambassadors greeted Hay with the punctiliousness that his rank required. Clara flattered the wives. In the entrance hall, the Marine band played.

Mr. Cortelyou drew Hay to one side. “We have a problem, sir.”

“Never say ‘we’ to me. You have a problem, and I won’t take it on.”

“Well, sir. It’s protocol…”

“Ask Mr. Adee. He loves protocol.”

“It’s the Navy, sir.”

Hay was now interested. “They want to take precedence over the Army?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been a terrible week. It’s due to the war, and what the Navy did…”