Gore Vidal: Empire

Del told her of all the dangers that might befall the world if the German kaiser-whose fleet was even now in Philippine waters-were to acquire that rich archipelago in order to carry out the current dream of every European power, not to mention Japan, the carving up of the collapsed Chinese empire. “We had no choice, really. As for allowing Spain to stay on in our hemisphere, that was an anachronism. We must be the masters in our own house.”

“Is all the western hemisphere, even Tierra del Fuego, a part of our house?”

“You’re making fun of me. Let’s talk about the theater in Paris…”

“Let’s talk about men and women.” Caroline felt suddenly as if she had had a revelation about these two hostile races. The differences between the two sexes were known to her in a way that they could never be known to an American young lady. Although American girls were given a social freedom unknown in France, they were astonishingly sheltered in other crucial ways, their ignorance nurtured by anxious mothers, themselves more innocent than not of the on-going plan of Eden’s serpent. Del looked at her, startled. “But what shall we say about-about men and women?” Del’s flush was not entirely from the August heat and the heavy meal.

“I’ve thought of one difference. At least between American men and women. Mr. James called the United States ‘the newspapered democracy.’ ”

“Mr. Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a government without a press and a press without a government, he would choose a press without a-”

“How stupid he must have been!” But when Caroline saw Del’s hurt expression-plainly, he had identified himself with the sage of Monticello-she modified: “I mean, he was not stupid. He just thought that the people he was talking to were stupid. After all, they were journalists, weren’t they? I mean if they weren’t journalists of some sort, how would we know what he said-or might have said, or didn’t say? Anyway, back to men and women. We women are criticized, quite rightly, for thinking and, worse, talking about marriage and children and the ordinary people we have to deal with every day and the lives we have to make for our husbands or families or whatever, and this means that as we get older, we get duller and duller because we have, at the end, nothing left but ourselves to think about and talk about and so we become perfect-if we’re not already to begin with-bores,” Caroline concluded in triumph.

Del looked at her, quite bewildered. “So if you are-like that, then men are… what?”

“Different. Boring in a different way. Because of the newspapers. Don’t you see?”

“You mean men read them and women don’t?”

“Exactly. Most of the men we know, that is, read them, and most of the women we know don’t. At least, not the news-what a funny word!-of politics or wars. So when men talk to one another for hours about what they have all read that morning about China and Cuba and… Tierra del Fuego, about politics and money, we are left out because we haven’t read those particular bits of news.”

“But you could, so easily, read them…”

“But we don’t want to. We have our boredom and you have yours. But yours is truly sinister. Blaise says that practically nothing Mr. Hearst prints is ever true, including the story about how the Spaniards blew up the Maine . But you men who read the Journal , or something like it, will act as if what you read is true or, worse, as if, true or not, it was all that really mattered. So we are excluded, entirely. Because we know that none of it matters-to us.”

“Well, I agree newspapers are not always true, but if… foolish men think they are true-or perhaps true-then it does matter to everyone because that is how governments are run, in response to the news.”

“Then worse luck for foolish men-and women, too.”

Del laughed at last. “So what would you do if you could alter things?”

“Read the Morning Journal .” Caroline was prompt. “Every word.”

“And believe it?”

“Of course not. But at least I could talk to men about Tierra del Fuego and the Balance of Power.”

“I prefer to talk about the theater in Paris… and marriage.” Del’s lower larger face reddened; the small forehead remained pale ivory.

“You’ll be the woman? I’ll be the man?” Caroline smiled. “No. That’s not allowed. Because we are divided at birth by those terrible newspapers that tell you what to think and us what to wear and when to wear it. We cannot, ever, truly meet.”

“But you can. There is, after all, the high middle ground,” said Henry James, who had been listening, the ruins of an elaborate pudding before him.

“Where- what is that?” Caroline turned her full gaze on that great head with the gleaming all-intelligent eyes.

“Why that is art, dear Miss Sanford. It is a kind of Heaven open to us all, and not just Jim Bludso and his creator.”

“But art is not for everyone, Mr. James.” Del was respectful.

“Then there is something not unlike it, if more rare, yet a higher stage, a meeting ground for all true-hearts.”

On the word “hearts,” Caroline felt a sudden premonitory chill. Did he mean the specific mysterious five or did he mean just what he said? Apparently, he meant just that, because when she asked what this higher stage was, Henry James said, simply, for him: “Dare one say that human intercourse which transcends politics and war and, yes, even love itself? I mean, of course, friendship. There-you have it.”

IN WICKER CHAIRS, placed side by side on the stone terrace, John Hay and Henry Adams presided over the Kentish Weald, as the summer light yielded, slowly, very slowly, to darkness.

“In Sweden, in summer, the sun shines all night long.” Henry Adams lit a cigar. “One never thinks of England being almost as far to the north as Sweden. But look! It’s after dinner, and it’s light yet.”

“I suppose we like to think of England as being closer to us than it really is.” Carefully, John Hay pressed his lower back against the hard cushion that Clara had placed behind him. For some months the pain had been fairly constant, a dull aching that seemed to extend from the small of the back down into the pelvis, but, of course, ominously, the doctors said that it was the other way around. In some mysterious fashion the cushion stopped the pain from exploding into one of its sudden borealises, as Hay tended to think of those excruciating flare-ups when his whole body would be electrified by jolts of pain-originating in the atrophied-if not worse-prostate gland, whose dictatorship ordered his life, obliging him to pass water or, painfully, not to pass water, a dozen times during the night, accompanied by a burning sensation reminiscent of his youth when he had briefly contracted in war-time Washington a minor but highly popular venereal infection.

“Are you all right?” Although Adams was not looking at him, Hay knew that his old friend was highly attuned to his physical state.

“No, I’m not.”

“Good. You’re better. When you’re really in pain, you boast of rude health. How pretty Del’s girl is.”

Hay looked across the terrace to the stone bench where his son and Caroline had combined to make a romantic picture, suitable for Gibson’s pen, while the remaining houseguests-it was Monday-floated like sub-aquatic creatures in the watery half-light. The children had been removed, to Hay’s delight, Adams’s sorrow. “Do you recall her mother, Enrique?” Hay had a number of variations of Henry’s name, playful tribute to his friend’s absolute unprotean nature.

“The darkly beautiful Princesse d’Agrigente was not easy, once seen, ever to forget. I knew her back in the seventies, the beautiful decade, after our unbeautiful war was won. Did you know Sanford?”