Gore Vidal - Empire

Hay nodded. The pain which had started to radiate from the lumbar region suddenly surrendered to the pillow’s pressure. “He was on McDowell’s staff early in the war. I think he wanted to marry Kate Chase…”

“Surely he was not alone in this madness?” Hay sensed the Porcupine’s smile beneath the beard, pale blue in the ghostly light.

“We were many, it’s true. Kate was the Helen of Troy of E Street. But Sprague got her. And Sanford got Emma d’Agrigente.”

“Money?”

“What else?” Hay thought of his own good luck. He had never thought that he could ever make a living. For a young man from Warsaw, Illinois, who liked to read and write, who had gone east to college, and graduated from Brown, there were only two careers. One was the law, which bored him; the other, the ministry, which intrigued him, despite a near-perfect absence of faith. Even so, he had been wooed by various ministers of a variety of denominations. But he had said no, finally, to the lot, for, as he wrote his lawyer uncle, Milton: “I would not do for a Methodist preacher, for I am a poor horseman. I would not suit the Baptists, for I would dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man.” This last was disingenuous. Hay had always been more than usually susceptible to women and they to him. But as he had looked, at the age of twenty-two, no more than twelve years old, neither in Warsaw nor, later, in Springfield, was he in any great demand as a ladies’ man.

Instead, Hay had grimly gone into his uncle’s law office; got to know his uncle’s friend, a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln; helped Mr. Lincoln in the political campaign that made him president; and then boarded the train with the President-elect to go to Washington for five years, one month and two weeks. Hay had been present in the squalid boardinghouse when the murdered President had stopped breathing, on a mattress soaked with blood.

Hay had then gone to Paris, as secretary to the American legation. Later, he had served, as a diplomat, in Vienna and Madrid. He wrote verse, books of travel; was editor of the New York Tribune . He lectured on Lincoln. He wrote folksy poems, and his ballads of Pike County sold in the millions. But there was still no real money until the twenty-four-year-old Cleveland heiress Clara Stone asked him to marry her; and he had gratefully united himself with a woman nearly a head taller than he with an innate tendency to be as fat as it was his to be lean.

At thirty-six Hay was saved from poverty. He moved to Cleveland; worked for his father-in-law-railroads, mines, oil, Western Union Telegraph; found that he, too, had a gift for making money once he had money. He served, briefly, as assistant secretary of state; and wrote, anonymously, a best-selling novel, The Bread-Winners , in which he expressed his amiable creed that although men of property were the best situated to administer and regulate America’s wealth and that labor agitators were a constant threat to the system, the ruling class of a city in the Western Reserve (Cleveland was never named) was hopelessly narrow, vulgar, opinionated. Henry Adams had called him a snob; he had agreed. Both agreed that it was a good idea that he had published the book anonymously; otherwise, the Major could not have offered him the all-important embassy at London. Had the Senate suspected that Hay did not admire all things American, he would not have been confirmed.

“Money makes the difference.” Hay took a deep puff of his Havana cigar: what on earth, he suddenly wondered, were they to do with Cuba? Then, aware not only of the vapidity of what he had said but also of the thin blue smile beneath the thick blue beard in the chair beside him, he added, “Not that gilded porcupines would know-except by hearsay-what it is like to be poor and struggling.”

“You wrench my heart.” Adams was sardonic. “Also, my quills were not heavily gilded at birth. I have acquired just enough shekels to creep through life, serving the odd breakfast to a friend…”

“Perhaps you might have been less angelic if you’d had to throw yourself into…”

“… wealthy matrimony?”

A spasm of pain forced Hay to cough. He pretended it was cigar smoke inhaled, as he maneuvered his spine against the pillow. “Into the real world. Business, which is actually rather easy. Politics, which, for us, is not.”

“Well, you’ve done well, thanks to a rich wife. So has Whitelaw Reid. So has William Whitney. So would have Clarence King had he had your luck-all right, good sense-to marry wealthily and well.”

Below the terrace, in the dark woods, owls called to one another. Why, Hay wondered, was the Surrenden nightingale silent? “Why has he never married?” asked Hay: their constant question to one another. Of the three friends, King was the most brilliant, the handsomest, the best talker; also, athlete, explorer, geologist. In the eighties all three had been at Washington, and, thanks largely to King’s brilliance, Adams’s old house became the first salon, as the newspapers liked to say, of the republic.

“He has no luck,” said Hay. “And we have had too much.”

“Do you see it that way?” Adams turned his pale blue head toward Hay. The voice was suddenly cold. Inadvertently, Hay had approached the forbidden door. The only one in their long friendship to which Hay had not the key. In the thirteen years since Adams had found his dead wife on the floor, he had not mentioned her to Hay-or to anyone that Hay knew of. Adams had simply locked a door; and that was that.

But Hay was experiencing vivid pain; and so was less than his usual tactful self. “Compared to King, we have lived in Paradise, you and I.”

A tall, tentative figure appeared on the terrace. Hay was relieved at the diversion. “Here I am, White,” he called out to the embassy’s first secretary, just arrived from London.

White pulled up a chair; refused a cigar. “I have a telegram,” he said. “It’s a bit crumpled. The paper is so flimsy.” He gave the telegram to Hay, who said, “Am I expected, as a director of Western Union, to defend the quality of the paper we use?”

“Oh, no. No!” White frowned, and Hay was suddenly put on his guard by his colleague’s nervousness: it was part of White’s charm to laugh at pleasantries that were neither funny nor pleasant. “I can’t read in the dark,” said Hay. “Unlike the owl… and the porcupine.” Adams had taken the telegram from Hay; now he held it very close to his eyes, deciphering it in the long day’s waning light.

“My God,” said Adams softly. He put down the telegram. He stared at Hay.

“The German fleet has opened fire in Cavite Bay.” This had been Hay’s fear ever since the fall of Manila.

“No, no.” Adams gave the telegram to Hay, who put it in his pocket. “Perhaps you should go inside and read it. Alone.”

“Who’s it from?” Hay turned to White.

“The President, sir. He has appointed you… ah… has offered to appoint you…”

“Secretary of state,” Adams finished. “ The great office of state is now upon offer, to you.”

“Everything comes to me either too late or too soon,” said Hay. He was unprepared for his own response, which was closer to somber regret than joy. Certainly, he could not pretend to be surprised. He had known all along that the current secretary, Judge Day, was only a temporary appointment. The Judge wanted a judgeship and he had agreed to fill in, temporarily, at the State Department as a courtesy to his old friend the Major. Hay was also aware that the Major thought highly of his own performance, in which he had handled a number of delicate situations in a fashion that had enhanced the President’s reputation. Now, in John Hay’s sixtieth year, actual power was offered him, on a yellow sheet of Western Union’s notoriously cheap paper.