Gore Vidal - Empire

“Perhaps not.” Hay had long since given up trying to imagine how Lincoln would have responded to the modern world. “Anyway, it’s done. We are committed.”

“When does Del move into the White House?”

“In the fall. For now, he’ll be working with Mr. Adee at the State Department while I’m gone… He plans to marry the Sanford girl.”

“The Hays have a dowsing rod for money.”

“Del is also a Stone…”

“A golden Stone. Well, are you pleased?”

Hay said that he was; and he was. “They will marry in the fall. Helen, too, I think, to the Whitney boy…”

“We’ve come a long way from Illinois.”

“I wonder.” With age, Hay was more than ever conscious of what might have been; yet could not conceive of any ladder that might have been better than the one that he had climbed, almost without effort, almost to the top. “I don’t think I ever wanted to be president.” Hay addressed the coal in the grate.

“Of course you did. Have you forgotten you?” Nico addressed Hay.

“I must have.”

“I haven’t. You were ambitious. You tried, twice, to go to Congress. Surely it was not for the company you’d find there.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Hay answered Nico’s not-so-rhetorical question. “Anyway, I have pretty much forgotten me. Even so, it is odd that for one year I was next in succession to the President. So I did get pretty high up that particular ladder, which I may-or may not-have wanted to climb.”

“McKinley’s health is excellent.” Nico laughed; and coughed.

“Unlike mine. After this trip, I go to New Hampshire for the rest of the summer. We’ll all be there. Del and Caroline, too.” Hay indicated the lithograph on the wall. “Do you ever dream of him?”

Nico nodded. “All the time. I dream of you, too. As you were then.”

“What sort of dreams?”

“The usual, for those of us at the end.” Nico’s fragile fingers pulled at his wiry beard. “Things have gone wrong. I can’t find important papers. I go through the pigeon-holes in his desk. I can’t read any of the handwriting, and the President is anxious, and the trouble-”

“ ‘This big trouble.’ ” Hay nodded. “He never said ‘Civil War.’ Fact he never said war at all. Only this big trouble. This rebellion. How does he seem to you in the dreams?”

“Sad. I want to help him, but can’t. It’s very frustrating.”

“I don’t dream of him at all any more.”

“You’re not so close to the end as I.”

“Don’t say that! But what’s the end got to do with dreams? I dream most of the night, and nearly everyone I meet in my dreams is dead. But I never dream of him . I don’t know what that means.”

Nico shrugged. “If he wants to pay you a call he will, I suppose.”

Hay laughed. “Next time you see him tell him I’d like a visit.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Nico with Germanic gallows humor, “face to face. In Heaven, or wherever it is we politicians end up.”

BLAISE AND PAYNE WHITNEY CROSSED the quadrangle, festooned with banners celebrating various class reunions. This was their third reunion, and Blaise had agreed to attend only because Caroline had said that Del Hay would be there, the first member of their class to have made his mark in the world. “You will be envious,” she had said, well pleased. They would all meet in New Haven, and then Del and she and Payne would take a trip on Oliver Payne’s enormous yacht; then Del and she would go on together to Sunapee in New Hampshire, where Mr. Hay was enjoying his ill-health in the bosom of the family. When Blaise had told the Chief about the reunion, the Chief had said, “Cultivate young Mr. Hay.”

Connecticut’s high summer was tropical in its heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of roses and peonies and the whiskey that the graduates were drinking from flasks as they hurried from party to party. Blaise wondered why he had not enjoyed Yale more than he had. “You were in too much of a hurry to get started,” said Payne, breaking into his thoughts. “You should’ve stayed long enough to graduate instead…” Payne broke off not so much out of tact as for lack of sufficient polite vocabulary to describe Hearst, devil incarnate to his class.

“Graduate or not, it’s made no difference at all.” Blaise was accurate. They were now at the edge of the pseudo-Gothic campus. Beyond a row of trees was Chapel Street and their hotel, the New Haven House. A streetcar gasped to a halt. Men in straw hats and women in wide-brimmed hats and flowery dresses got off, and made their way onto the campus. Del and a group of classmates were still at the hotel, where there would be, he had assured Blaise, champagne, “to celebrate my victory over the Boers and the English.”

“Are you Mr. Hearst’s partner?” asked Payne, as they crossed the street, filled with carriages and electrical cars, all converging upon the college.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Blaise was never entirely sure just what his relationship to the Chief was. Principally, he was a money-lender. He would have preferred to be an investor, but Hearst allowed no one to buy any part of a Hearst newspaper. Also, casual as Hearst was about money, he always paid back his debts to Blaise, with interest. Meanwhile, Blaise learned the business; learned it better, in a sense, than Hearst himself, for Blaise saw the business as just that, while Hearst, more and more, regarded his newspapers as mere means to an all-important end: his own presidency in 1904, followed, no doubt, by a Napoleonic dictatorship and self-coronation.

Although Blaise had no political ambition, he quite liked the power that went with the ownership of a newspaper. A publisher could make and break local, if not national, figures. Blaise had also watched, with a degree of fury, Caroline achieving what he ought to have done by now. She was taken very seriously in Washington because her newspaper was read and she no longer lost money. Inadvertently, he had driven her to be what he wanted to be. The irony of the situation was peculiarly unbearable. More than once, he had considered handing over her inheritance in exchange for the Tribune; yet such an exchange would have been an admission that she had, totally, won. Also, he was by no means certain that she would agree to the arrangement. In a few years, she would not only have her inheritance but the newspaper, too-not to mention the President’s secretary for a husband, while Blaise would still be in Hearst’s shadow, holding a purse that was less and less needed, as gold flowed from the Dakotas into Phoebe Hearst’s account. At the corner of the hotel, Blaise vowed that he would buy the Baltimore newspaper, jinx though it was supposed to be. He must start his life.

“I suppose the best time of my life was here at Yale.” Payne at twenty-four was nostalgic. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything to top having rowed for Yale at Henley, even if I was a substitute oar.”

“Oh, I’m sure something else will happen to you, during the next fifty years.”

“I’m sure it will, too. But don’t you see? I’ll be old by then. I was young here.” This threnody was cut short by a sudden eruption of young men and women from the hotel lobby into the street. Blaise and Payne were shoved against a wall. To Blaise’s amazement, one of the young people was Caroline; in her right hand she held high an empty champagne glass, as if she were about to propose a toast.

“Caroline!” Blaise shouted. But if she heard him, she paid no attention, as she hurried to join the others, now gathered in a circle on the sidewalk opposite an ice-cream vendor. To an idle observer, it looked as if a dozen young people had been possessed, like so many medieval zealots, by an overpowering passion if not for God for ice cream. But then, as Blaise and Payne hurried to join the party, the ice-cream vendor abandoned his livelihood and joined the circle, from whose center a loud cry sounded, chilling Blaise’s blood. He had never before heard Caroline so much as weep, much less cry out like a wounded animal.