Gore Vidal - Empire

“Colonel Payne is coming, isn’t he?” asked Helen, with more anxiety than her father felt warranted.

“He is doing me the honor, dearest infant. But then I hold open house for all Ohio, always. It is the Adams destiny in the fourth generation.”

Clara laughed. “One Stone and one Payne are hardly all Ohio.”

“But one Mark Hanna and one McKinley are one nation,” said Hay.

“One Republican Party, anyway. It seems,” said Adams, brightening, “that all presidents now come from Ohio. Garfield, Hayes, the Major. And they have quite obliterated the founders with their Western Reserve glory.”

“Dear Henry,” murmured Hay, “you do lay it on.”

The room filled up. Adams had invited twenty guests, the optimum number, he felt, for a dinner party. There was a possibility of general conversation, if someone other than the host proved to be brilliant. If no such paladin emerged, guests could speak across the table if they chose, an impossibility at a vast formal dinner where conversation, in Noah’s Ark twos, shifted to left and right with each course.

Hay noted several senators of the sort that Adams would never have invited were it not for Hay’s treaty: he appreciated the Porcupine’s sacrifice. Dowdily, Lord and Lady Pauncefote arrived, an equally dowdy daughter in tow.

Adams-the worst of guests; in fact, guest no longer of anyone except the Hays-was the best of hosts. Expertly, he moved his menagerie around the study like a sheepdog. But Del got past him to speak to his father. As they talked, Hay studied his own nose at the center of Del’s face; thus, nature would continue him through Del and, after Del, their plainly unlosable nose would be carried on into future generations, a reminder of one Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, master of all trades, as he once vaingloriously proclaimed to Adams, and a jack of none.

“The President says you’re to instruct me, Mr. Secretary.”

“You have no instructions, Consul-General, except the general one that I always give. What you have never said cannot be used against you.”

“I shall be silent to the Boers and silent to the English…”

“But write long reports to me and-to the President?” Hay was curious to know just what the Major expected of Del.

“I am to keep him informed, he said. Nothing more. You know how he is.”

“Not as well as you.” Del blushed at this. “You have his confidence.” Hay was aware of the sententious note in his voice. “Do not abuse it.” Why, Hay wondered, was he so expert at always striking the wrong note with Del when, with everyone else, he had always had-owed his career to, in fact-perfect pitch?

“Why should I?” The gentle Del was now angry; and Hay could not think how to placate him. He looked for a diversion, and one stood in the doorway, the last of the guests, wearing a splendid dark gold gown. Caroline was greeted by Adams, who kissed her hand, something he rarely did with nieces, but then she was more fine Paris lady than humble American niece. Hay had always thought her a splendid catch, unlike Clara, who was less than enthusiastic but could give no reason why Del ought not to marry someone so extraordinarily rare. Yet Clara still went on and on about foreignness as if she had never left Amasa Stone’s house in Cincinnati. It was Hay’s fear that Caroline would take the year of Del’s absence and find someone more grand. Hay did not have the usual American nouveau riche conviction that to be new and rich was a sign of God’s anointment and so to be preferred to quarterings and coronets and money that had been aged in land. He had come from nowhere, like his father-in-law, and he could, he always feared, revisit nowhere at a moment’s notice. Fortunes lost were less of a novelty at century’s end than fortunes won.

Caroline joined them. “You’re late,” said Del.

“I have been,” suddenly Caroline stammered, “at the office. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a woman to say?”

“Say or do?” asked Hay, charmed.

“Both. At first, the fact that I have an office was a novelty here. Now it is a source of- chagrin .” She used the French word.

“The other girls are just jealous,” said Del.

“Oh, the ‘other girls’ rather like the idea. It means that I am completely out of the way, and no competition. It’s the men who grow distressed.”

“We are the superfluous sex.” Del looked at her more than fondly. If he was as much in love as Hay suspected, he was to be envied; at least, by his father, whose fondness for Clara had never once resembled love. Of course, he and Clara had been older when they met; and the world much younger; and marriage a matter, mostly, of sets of silver and linen, and relatives to be shared and propitiated, and money.

“What kept you at this sinister office of yours?” Hay quite liked the idea of a young woman publishing a newspaper in sordid Market Place.

“You,” said Caroline; the hazel eyes looked directly into his own. Wildly, he imagined that he, not his son, was engaged to this splendid creature, who had, on her cheek, like a beauty mark, a small delicate charming smudge of printer’s ink. Hay had spent much of his own youth among printing presses.

“What about Father?” Del seemed anxious. Hay could only delight in the pale rose-pink cheek with its coquettish dot of blue-black ink.

“Wouldn’t you rather wait until after dinner?” Caroline started to back away, and stepped into Root, who was approaching them.

“I won’t be able to eat unless I know what horrors the press plans to rain down upon my head.” Hay could not make up his mind which he despised more, the loud ignorant venal Senate or the equally loud ignorant venal press. On balance, as he had been both a journalist and an editor, he despised the press more. He understood the journalist in a way that he could never understand the egomaniacal senator, who saw himself as the nation incarnate and mindless, and loud, loud, loud.

“Miss Sanford, don’t keep us in suspense. What has come over the wire?” Root looked at Hay. “The War Department has been cut off from the world ever since the last freeze. We could be invaded, and never know it.”

“The New York Sun would probably keep you informed,” said Caroline, producing from her handbag a press cutting. “This is tomorrow’s Sun . Governor Roosevelt has attacked your treaty.”

Hay took the cutting, and pretended to read, though he could see nothing without the pince-nez which rested on his chest. “I suppose,” he observed mildly, “that this is why Cabot did not come tonight.”

“I grow bored with Teddy,” said Root, baring his teeth. He took the cutting from Hay. “He wants the canal to be armed, by us.”

“If the Senate does not accept the treaty,” Hay’s words sounded to himself as if from a great distance, “I shall have no choice but to resign.”

“If you do,” said Root thoughtfully, “you will take Teddy down with you. The President will never forgive him.”

“Then I shall have done two excellent things.” Hay remembered to smile. “Let us not,” he said, “discuss this with the others. Let them read of my shame tomorrow.”

He turned to Caroline. “You are publishing Teddy’s statement?”

“On page three…”

“Where it belongs,” said Root.

“I have an entire family murdered by a single ax, on page one,” said Caroline.

“Good girl!” Hay was amused at last. “First things first, always. Is Del’s nose like mine?”

“Yes. A perfect copy. I’m fascinated at the way physical features continue in families from generation to generation.” She echoed, nicely, his own perception.

“Your mother…”

“I know.”