Gore Vidal: Empire

Caroline sat at table between Del and Henry James. The dining room was easily the most agreeable of the old house’s state apartments, and here Mrs. Cameron presided efficiently over children, young adults, statesmen and-now-a dim poet, wreathed in courtly laurel. “Mr. Austin is under the impression that our friend Hay is the American poet laureate,” said James, doing justice to a quantity of turbot in fresh cream. Across the table a very small Curzon girl sniffled next to a nanny who had apparently invoked an unfair prohibition.

“Father keeps telling Mr. Austin that he hasn’t written a line since…”

Like the low rumbling note of an organ the voice of Henry James began, through a last mouthful of turbot, to intone:

“And I think that saving a little child,

And fetching him to his own,

Is a derned sight better business

Than loafing around The Throne.”

At the quatrain’s end, half the table applauded: Mr. James’s voice was unusually sonorous and compelling.

“I always find that part the most moving,” said the Laureate, “if not theologically tactful.”

“I hate it,” said Hay, who looked most embarrassed.

“I am sure that Dante must have felt the same whenever the Inferno was quoted.” Adams was most amused.

“What on earth is it?” Caroline whispered to Del, but Henry James’s ear was sharp.

“ ‘Little Breeches,’ ” he boomed, “the poignant narrative-nay, epic-of a four-year-old boy saved from the wreckage of some sort of rustic conveyance that was drawn, most perilously, as it proved, by horses, the sort of conveyance, ill-defined, I fear, and of vague utility, what one might term…”

“A wagon?” Caroline contributed.

“Precisely.” James was enjoying himself. The first of several roast fowls had now appeared, further brightening his mood. “The small boy-hardly more than what Adams would call an infant, except to Adams an infant is any unmarried maiden who might be his niece, and this child-Little Breeches,” again the name vibrated in the air and Caroline could see Hay cringe, and even Del cleared his throat, preparatory to drowning out James’s inexorable voice, “-apparently, this small untended rustic person fell from the moving conveyance and was saved by a rustic hero, who deliberately sacrificed his own life for this pair of, as it were, small trousers, or, rather, its contents, and for this noble act, despite a terrestrial life of some untidiness-even sin-he was translated to Paradise.”

“The churches still complain about Father’s poem.” Del was more than ready to change the subject.

“But it sold, as a pamphlet, in the untold millions,” said James, dislodging with a forefinger a morsel of chicken from between his two front teeth. “Like the later and, perhaps, more profound ‘Jim Bludso,’ your father’s most celebrated ballad, the hero of which gave his life to save those of his passengers aboard a-this time nautical-conveyance, the Prairie Belle . Mr. Hay’s fascination with the hazards of American travel was very much the spirit of the seventies. In any event, this steam-propelled barque explodes, if memory serves, in some wild American river, enabling the paragon to give his life for innumerable little breeches, not to mention other garments, including maidenly costumes, all the passengers in short, thus ensuring himself a direct passage to Paradise on the democratic ground-highest of all grounds-that ‘Christ ain’t going to be too hard on a man who died for men.’ ” But this time James dropped his voice dramatically and no one but Caroline heard. To her left, Del was talking to Abigail Adams, one of Henry’s actual nieces, a large plain girl, recently broken out of a Paris convent.

As boiled beef relentlessly followed fowl, and the conversation in the dining room grew both louder and slower, Henry James said that, yes, indeed he had met Caroline’s grandfather. “It was in ’76.” He was suddenly precise. “I had decided to make my… deliberate removal to Europe, like Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, who had made his thirty years earlier. He had always intrigued me, and I had noticed, most favorably, for The Nation , his Paris Under the Communards . I can still see him in bright summer Hudson riparian light, on a lawn at river-side, somewhere north of Rhinecliff, a Livingston house behind us, all white columns and cinnamon stucco, and we spoke of the necessity, for some, of living on this side of the Atlantic, some distance from our newspapered democracy.”

“Was my mother with him?”

James cast her a sidelong glance; and helped himself to horseradish sauce. “Oh, she was there, so very much there! Madame la Princesse d’Agrigente. Who can forget her? You are very like her, as I told you at Saint-Cloud…”

“But not so dark?”

“No. Not so dark.” James was then drawn by his other table partner, Alice Hay, who resembled her father-small, shrewd, quick-witted; also, pretty. Although Caroline had not found either of Del’s sisters particularly sympathetic, she did not in the least mind their company, particularly that of Helen, who sat across the table, next to Spencer Eddy, who seemed infatuated with Helen’s precociously middle-aged radiance. She was like her mother, large-bodied, with glowing eyes and quantities of glossy hair, all her own.

Suddenly, Senator Cameron shouted, “What’s this?” He sat at the head of the table, as befitted the married co-host. In one hand he held a silver serving-spoon from which hung a gelatinous mass, rather like a jellyfish, thought Caroline.

“A surprise,” said Mrs. Cameron, from her end of the table. The Curzon child promptly burst into tears: the word “surprise” had not a happy association.

“What is this?” Senator Cameron turned his small fierce eyes upon the butler.

“It is the… corn, sir. From America, sir.”

“This is not corn. What is this mess?”

From behind the coromandel screen that hid pantry from dining room, the cook appeared, like an actress who had been waiting in the wings for her cue. “It is the corn, sir. As you said to make it. Boiled, sir. Should I have left the seeds in it?”

“Oh, Don!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a most genuine sound in that often dramatically charged household. “It’s the watermelon. She mistook it for the corn.” In the general laughter, not shared by Cameron, the cook vanished.

“Father thinks now that we shall keep all the Philippines,” said Del. “The Major has come round, he says. But it hasn’t been easy. All those people who didn’t want us to take on Hawaii last summer are at it again. I can’t think why. If we don’t take up where England’s left off-or just given up-who will?”

“Does it make so much difference?” Although Caroline had been delighted by the war’s excitement, she could not see that there had been any earthly point to it. Why drive poor weak old Spain out of the Caribbean and the Pacific? Why take on far-off colonies? Why boast so much? It was not like Napoleon, who did appeal to her because he had, himself, wanted the world, which Mr. McKinley did not seem to want to be bothered with, unlike that friend of her hosts, a man to whom they all referred, with an inadvertent baring of teeth, as Thee-oh-dore, who had managed, under fire, to lead some of his friends to the top of a small hill in Cuba, without once breaking his pince-nez. The fuss in the newspapers over Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his so-called Rough Riders was as great as the fuss over Admiral Dewey, who had actually defeated Spain’s Pacific fleet and occupied Manila. For reasons obscure to Caroline, the newspapers thought “Teddy” the greater of the two heroes. Therefore: “Does it make so much difference?” was not idly posed.