Gore Vidal - Empire

“You leave too much.”

“Well, I don’t leave you Teddy.” Hay looked at the now sealed letter to the Governor of New York. “He will speak in every state, he says.”

“It will be interesting to see if he mentions the President.” Root’s contempt for Roosevelt was entirely impersonal and spontaneous. At the same time, they got on well politically: two practical men who needed each other. Teddy had already written Root his version of the convention, which Root had shown Hay: “It was a hard four days in Philadelphia.” Teddy made his own nomination sound like a war won. “What will the Major do?”

“He is going home to Canton,” said Hay. “He will sit on his front porch until election day, chatting to the folks…”

“… and waiting for the telephone to ring.”

“We’re weak on the Philippines.” Root was abrupt. “Taft’s too easy-going. MacArthur’s too much of the military proconsul.”

“You can handle the General,”

Root chuckled. “Oh, I’ll break him to sergeant if he disobeys me. But I can’t give Taft a backbone. If there’s trouble between now and November…”

“Bryan won’t know what to do about it. We shall be reelected, and I shall no longer be the heir-presumptive to the republic. Are you certain you wouldn’t like my place?”

Hay, genuinely, for the moment at least, wished to relinquish office. But Root would have none of it. “We make a good team, the way we are.” He picked up a copy of the Washington Tribune from a side-table where the national press was each day arranged, much as Hay himself used to prepare it for President Lincoln. But unlike Lincoln, who had never been a journalist, Hay should have known better than to take seriously the press. But fabulists, Hay knew, tend to believe tall tales.

“Del’s fiancée seems to be making a go of this.”

“She says that she does not lose money,” said Hay, “and she is amused.”

BUT CAROLINE HAD LOST MONEY since spring; and she was not amused. She had spent far too much money covering the national conventions. Since Hearst had given every journalist in the country an exaggerated idea of his worth, she had been obliged to pay a former New York Herald journalist more than she could afford to write what proved to be, surprisingly, an excellent account of the Philadelphia convention. Could it be that Hearst was right? that one did get what one paid for? Now she sat on the lawn of the Delacroix “cottage” and read the Tribune’s account of the nomination of William Jennings Bryan at Kansas City on July 5. As a running mate, Bryan had selected Grover Cleveland’s ancient vice-president, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Caroline carefully compared the account in her paper to that of the rival press. Although Hearst was hearty in his endorsement of Bryan, nothing much was said about silver, while Bryan’s anti-imperialist views were barely acknowledged by imperialist Hearst. Happily, Hearst and Bryan were at one on the “Criminal Trusts,” whatever they were, thought Caroline, turning to Hearst’s new paper, the Chicago American , officially launched on July 4, with all of the Chief’s characteristic energy and rich inaccuracy.

“It is curious indeed,” said a deep feminine voice, “to see a young lady reading the vulgar press, and getting ink on her gloves in the process.”

“Then I shall take off the gloves.” Caroline dropped the stack of newspapers onto the grass, and removed her white gloves. “But I must keep on reading my competition; and perfect my own vulgar art.”

Curiosity had, finally, brought them together. When Caroline, vanquished at last by Washington’s heat, had agreed to spend July with Mrs. Jack Astor, Mrs. Delacroix had written her that she must stay with what was, after all, the nearest thing that she had to a grandmother. And so Caroline had transferred herself from Mrs. Jack’s to the splendors of the Grand Trianon, set high on Ochre Avenue above the bright cool Atlantic; and from this sea-fragrant height the steaming heat of Washington was soon forgotten.

Mrs. Delacroix was small and thin, with a face whose lines resembled an intricate spider’s web, framed by silver-gray hair so elaborately curled and arranged-not to mention thick-that half Newport was convinced she wore a wig like her contemporary Mrs. Astor. But hair-and spider’s web-were all her own. When the old lady spoke, her speech was swift with oddly clipped syllables, a reminder of her New Orleans origin. As Mrs. Delacroix approached Caroline, she held a parasol between pale skin and bright sun; she seemed, to Caroline, like some highly purposeful ghost; with truly bad news from the other side.

“Mr. Lispinard Stewart, our neighbor, has come to call. I said that I thought that you were indisposed. But of course if you are disposed…”

“I am entirely at your disposition.”

“They do teach you girls how to talk over there in Europe.” A footman in livery appeared from behind a hedge of lilac, and placed a chair behind Mrs. Delacroix, who sat in it without once looking to see if the chair was in place. “Mr. Lispinard Stewart owns the White Lodge down the road. He is very snobbish.”

“Like everyone else here. Or so I’ve been told,” Caroline added; she had vowed not to be critical, in conversation.

“Some of us have more occasion to be snobbish than others. Mr. Stewart is a bachelor whom everyone would like to marry. But I suspect he will remain in his current state of immaculate chastity, as the nuns used to say in my youth, until he is one day called to a higher station, as a bridegroom of Christ.”

Caroline could never tell when the old lady was being deliberately droll. In either case, she laughed. “It was my impression that Jesus contents himself only with brides.”

“We must not,” said Mrs. Delacroix serenely, “question the mysterious ways of the Almighty.” With the point of her parasol she was turning over the pile of newspapers on the lawn. “You’re the first young lady that I have ever known who reads the front part of the newspapers.”

“I am the first young lady you have ever known to publish a newspaper.”

“I would not,” said Mrs. Delacroix, “boast.”

“Boast? I had hoped to arouse your sympathy.”

“I have none.” Mrs. Delacroix looked quite pleased with herself.

“None at all-for anyone?”

“Not even for myself. We get what we deserve, Caroline.” From the first day, the old woman had addressed the young woman as both child and relative. “But what I most particularly deserve, you don’t have.” She abandoned turning over the newspapers; and frowned with disappointment. “It’s not here.”

“What were you looking for?”

“ Town Topics . I read nothing else. It’s always wise to know what the servants think of us. The things that that paper prints!”

“It’s what they don’t print-the omissions-that I study it for.”

Mrs. Delacroix carefully readjusted her huge pastel yellow hat with its swept-back veil of lace. Gold ornaments clung haphazardly to her bust. “Surely those not mentioned are virtuous, and so of no concern to our servants.”

“Or they pay Colonel Mann large sums of money to keep their names out of his ‘Saunterings.’ ”

“Cynical!” Mrs. Delacroix’s voice tolled like the sea-bell on the sharp rocks beneath the house. “That’s what comes of reading newspapers! They soil one’s soul as surely as they soil white gloves.”

Caroline held up her gloves. They were indeed smudged with ink. “I must change again,” she said.

“Wait until we dress for lunch.” Caroline had been relieved to discover that Newport required no more than five changes of dress a day, assuming that one did not play tennis or go yachting or riding. In Paris, seven changes of costume was thought the fashionable minimum. As a result of this new dispensation, the asthmatic Marguerite was in Paradise: enraptured by the sea-air’s coolness, as well as by the thousand or so French maids employed along the ridge where Newport’s “cottages” were set apart from the old town whose year-round inhabitants had been dubbed by Harry Lehr, in a literal translation of Louis XIV, “our Footstools.” Although the Footstools loathed the fashionable Feet, they served them grimly during the eight-week season of July and August; after the last fête, Mrs. Fish’s Harvest Festival Ball, the huge palaces were then shut for the remaining ten months of the year and Newport was again the property of the Stools.