Gore Vidal - Empire

“It was,” said Ida, staring intently at Caroline, “my idea.”

“What is- it , Mr. President?”

“I’m appointing Del assistant private secretary to the president, with the understanding that when Mr. Cortelyou moves out and-and up, Del will be secretary.”

Del turned pink with pleasure.

Caroline saw immediately the eerie symmetry. “It is the same position that John Hay had, when he came to Washington with President Lincoln.”

“I think it fitting.” The President smiled; dried his lips with a napkin, just missing a shiny buttery spot on the Napoleonic chin.

“Oh, that was so long ago.” Ida was entirely in the present when she was not out of time altogether.

“But to look a long way ahead,” said Caroline, “thirty-eight years from now, if you are like your father, you will be secretary of state.”

“In the year,” McKinley paused; not so much to count as to marvel, “1939. What on earth will we be like then?”

“Gone, dearest. In Heaven, with little Katie. And good riddance to everybody else.” Mrs. McKinley put down her napkin. “We’ll have coffee in the oval parlor.” The President helped her up, while Caroline and Del flanked the sovereign couple. “I’m glad Del’s marrying you.” Thus Ida gave her blessing to the appointment and the marriage. Caroline was relieved, for Del’s sake. Whether or not she married him, she wished him well; realized that this was the greatest day of his life so far. As Lincoln had lifted the young John Hay out of the irrelevant mass and placed him squarely in history, so McKinley now lifted the son.

They proceeded into the oval sitting room, where the coffee service had been set up.

“When do you start work?” Caroline helped the President arrange the drooping First Lady in a green velvet chair.

“In the fall,” said Del.

“After the tour.” In his antimacassared rocking chair, McKinley rocked slowly back and forth, gently settling the contents of that huge stomach. “Shall I tell your father? or do you want to?”

“You should, sir.”

“No.” Caroline was firm. “Del must confide in his father, this one time, anyway.”

“Your young lady is a born politician.” The Major bestowed the highest accolade within his gift. Then smiled at Caroline, and she was struck, yet again, by the beauty of his plain face. Over the years, goodness of character had transformed what might otherwise have been a dull, somewhat bovine appearance into an almost god-like radiance-almost because, unlike most gods, there was no fury, no malice, no envy of mortal happiness in William McKinley, only a steady radiant kindness, like a comforting nimbus about that great head, whose rounded chin reflected the afternoon sunlight, thanks to the butter with which it was, like some sacred balm, anointed.

NICOLAY WAS PROPPED UP in an armchair beside a coal fire. A faded tartan-patterned blanket covered the lower part of a body preparing soon to be in fact what it looked even now to be, a skeleton. The beard was wild, long, white. The eyes-nearly blind and oversensitive to light-were covered by a green shade. Hay recognized nothing in this old man of the young secretary who had persuaded President Lincoln to bring Johnny Hay to Washington as assistant secretary. “We can’t bring all Illinois,” Lincoln had complained. But Hay had joined the White House staff; shared a bed and an office with Nicolay, five years his senior. Later, in the aftermath of that heroic era-the American Iliad , Hay always thought-the two men had together spent a decade writing the story of Lincoln. Then Nicolay had been given a sinecure as a marshal at the Supreme Court; then he became ill and retired. Now he lived in a small house on Capitol Hill with his daughter, on the margin of the American present but at the center of its past.

Although Nicolay no longer resembled the man that he had been, Hay was conscious that despite his own numerous debilities he himself was still very much Johnny Hay, who had simply glued on a beard and lined his face with a pencil in order to impersonate an old man-an old man of state; and so had managed to fool everyone but himself. He knew that he was doomed to be forever what he had been, young and appealing and-the word that he had come to hate, charming, even as he charmed, and charmed. Those whom the gods wish to disappoint they first make charming.

“You’re making headway, I hope.” Hay indicated the desk where papers and open books were piled. Nicolay was at work on yet another Lincoln book, recently interrupted by a trip up the Nile.

“Oh, I try to work. But my head is not what it was.” Hay marvelled that the Bavarian-born Nicolay still spoke with a German accent.

“Whose is?”

“Yours, Johnny.” Back of the wild white King Learish beard; the young Nicolay was smiling. “You grow more fox-like with time…”

“The fox is weakening, Nico. The dogs have got the scent. I hear the huntsman’s bugle.” Hay was a master of the elegiac note.

“You’ll go to ground.” Nicolay’s hand shook as he pulled the tartan tighter about himself. The hand was white, bloodless, dead. “It is good news about your boy,”

Hay nodded, wondering why he himself had not been pleased. In recent years, since Pretoria, in fact, he had come to admire and like his son; yet he did not want him to be so vividly and precisely his own replacement. Now that the son had started up glory’s ladder, the father must prepare to surrender his own place higher up; ladder, too. “Del will go far,” he said. “I never thought he’d have what it would take, but the President did-does. Del’s like a son to the President.”

“And not to you?” Nico stared at Hay, who looked at a copy of the now faded lithograph of Lincoln with his two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. Had he ever been so young?

“Well, yes, to me, too. But he’s more like his mother:… Anyway, he’s at the start and we’re at the end.”

“You’re not.” Nico was flat. “I am. I’ll die this year.”

“Nico…” Hay began.

Nico finished, “I think there’s nothing next. What do you think?”

“I don’t-think. There’s not much now. I’ll say that.”

“Religion,” Nicolay began, but stopped. Both stared at the neutral fire.

“I go, at last, to California.” Hay’s mood lightened at the thought. “We start tomorrow. The President and the Postmaster General and I and forty others. We shall, yet again, bind up the wounds of the South, and then on to Los Angeles, and a fiesta, and San Francisco, where the rest of the Cabinet joins us, except clever Root, who says he must stay close to the War Department, where he directs our far-flung empire. Do you think it wise?”

“What wise?” Nico was drifting off.

“The empire we’re assembling. Do you think,” Hay was curious to know what Nico would answer, “that the Ancient would approve?”

Nico’s response was quick. “The Ancient, no. The Tycoon, yes. He was of two minds, always.”

“But he acted with a single view.”

“Yes, but he thought for such a long time before he acted. The cautious Ancient and the fierce Tycoon held long debates, and Mr. Lincoln, in the end, arbitrated, and handed down his decision.”

“The Major took a long time making up his mind.”

“The Major is not Mr. Lincoln.”

“No. But he is as essential to us in his way. I think we have done the right thing. I was persuaded of it when I was in England, and saw what prosperity-and civilization-empire had given them. Now they begin to falter. So we must take up the burden.”

Nico looked at Hay directly. “Mr. Lincoln would never have wanted us to be anyone’s master.”