Gore Vidal - Empire

“You needn’t wait,” said Hay.

Roosevelt looked relieved; and sprang into the presidential carriage, followed by Hay. “Seventeen thirty-three N Street,” said Roosevelt, as if he were in a taxi-cab.

“They know,” said Hay, amused. “It’s their job.”

“Quite right. I must get used to that. I must get used to a lot of things now, like the White House. I want the stationery changed. I can’t stand ‘The Executive Mansion.’ From now on, we’ll just call it ‘The White House.’ Less pompous. How many bedrooms are there?”

“Five in the living quarters; and three of them are pretty small.”

“What’s on the third floor?”

“I haven’t been up there since Tad Lincoln mixed up all the bells in the mansion-house, that is-and I had to unmix them.”

“I suppose we can make extra rooms up there. Alice must have her own room now that she’s about to be eighteen.” Roosevelt stared at the post office, where an illuminated flag was at half-mast.

“All flags should be taken down at sunset. It’s depressing,” he added, uncharacteristically. “To come here as president, and everyone is mourning.”

“Murder is always depressing-and alarming.”

“Do we know who’s behind that anarchist?”

“The Secret Service wants to arrest everyone in sight. They remind me of Stanton after Lincoln was shot.”

“Let’s hope with better result. I wouldn’t mind being shot-like Lincoln, that is, not poor McKinley. Lincoln never knew what happened.”

Hay shuddered, involuntarily. “I’m not so sure. When we were writing his life, I read the autopsy report. Apparently the bullet entered not the back of his head but the left temple, which meant that he had heard Booth at the door to the box, and that he had turned around to see who it was…”

“And saw?”

“And saw, for an instant, the gun.”

“How grisly!” Roosevelt was plainly delighted by this macabre detail.

In front of the N Street house of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, two policemen stood guard. From a second-story window a huge American flag drooped at half-mast. “Why don’t they take down these flags?” Roosevelt was querulous; and, Hay suspected, somehow discomfited by the tribute to his predecessor.

In the downstairs parlor, Roosevelt greeted his wife, Edith; sister, Anna, whom he called Bamie; and son, Ted. The ladies wore mourning; they were in excellent spirits. The ladies made much of Hay, who was pleased to be treated like a piece of rare porcelain from an earlier time. He was helped into an armchair, and encouraged to smoke a cigar, which he refused. Meanwhile, the new president was prancing about the room, asking everyone questions to which he alone had the answers. During this display, the admirable Edith maintained her stately calm. Hay had always preferred her to the noisy-no other word-Theodore.

Edith Kermit Carow was descended from Huguenots who had intermarried with the family of Jonathan Edwards. She had known Theodore all her life. The Carow family had lived in New York’s Union Square next door to the house of Theodore’s grandfather. Edith had been a bookish girl, no great recommendation in their world, but a link to the high-strung asthmatic Theodore, who was not only bookish but, to compensate for physical weakness, doggedly athletic as well.

Hay had always thought that Theodore took too much for granted his perfect wife. Certainly, he had taken her so much for granted that, perhaps to her surprise-who would ever know, as she was all tact and reserve?-Theodore, on his twenty-second birthday, had married a beautiful girl named Alice Lee, and Edith Carow had, serenely it was reported, been a guest at the wedding. In due course, Alice Lee gave birth to a daughter, Alice; not long after, Alice Lee died within a day of Theodore’s mother. The two sudden deaths drove Theodore out of politics-he had been a member of New York’s State Assembly; out of New York City, too. He bought a ranch in the Badlands of the Dakotas; lost money on cattle; and wrote with marvellously contagious self-love of his own bravery. Four Eyes, as the bespectacled Theodore was known to the Western toughs, was very much a hero in his own eyes, while giving much pleasure to his friends the Hearts, if not in the way that he might have liked. After all, he was a mere dude compared to Clarence King.

As Hay listened to this most unlikely of American presidents, he was reminded of the chilling prescience of Henry Adams’s letter from Stockholm, which had arrived on the day that the President was shot. “Teddy’s luck” was the letter’s theme; fate’s too, as it proved. Theodore was, Adams had proclaimed, “pure act,” like God: endless energy without design.

Finally, Roosevelt had returned from the West, poorer than when he had left but better-known to magazine readers. After losing an election for mayor of New York in the autumn of 1886, he and Edith Kermit Carow were married, most fashionably, at St. George’s in Hanover Square, London; the groomsman was Cecil Spring-Rice, the Hearts’ favorite British diplomat. Then the Roosevelts returned to the ugly comfortable house that he had built on Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Here he wrote the six-volume history Winning the West; filled the house with children; and plotted, with Henry Cabot Lodge, a political career that had been interrupted not only by personal tragedies but by a mistrust of the Republican Party’s leader James G. Blaine; fortunately, this dislike had not led to apostasy of the sort that had caused the truly virtuous to bolt the party and raise high the banner of Independence and Mugwumpery. Roosevelt and Lodge were too practical for this sort of idealistic gesture. They stayed with Blaine, who lost to Cleveland in 1884.

While Theodore was turning out biographies of Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris and essays in celebration of Americanism of the sort that had given Henry James such exquisite pain, he was also busy president-making. One president thus made was Benjamin Harrison; and Theodore’s political carpentry was rewarded with a place on the Civil Service Commission.

Both President and Theodore had been eager for him to be under secretary of state, but the secretary, James G. Blaine himself, had the usual politician’s long memory, and Theodore was forced to content himself with Civil Service reform, an Augean stable where not even Hercules would have dreamed of putting hand to shovel. Although Theodore was no Hercules, he was, by nature, busy. In 1889, at the age of thirty, he made himself the commission’s head. He railed against the spoils system, and the press enjoyed him. When Republican President Harrison was replaced by Democratic President Cleveland, Roosevelt was kept on. During the six years he served on the commission, he entered the lives of the Hearts. In 1895, a reform mayor of New York City appointed Roosevelt president of the board of police commissioners. Roosevelt proved to be a fierce unrelenting prosecutor of vice; and the press revelled in his escapades. Since the law that forbade saloons to dispense their poisons on the Sabbath was often flouted, Roosevelt closed down the saloons, which meant that the saloonkeepers need no longer pay protection to Mr. Croker of Tammany Hall. But Mr. Croker was more resourceful than Roosevelt; he got a judge to rule that as it was not against the law to serve alcohol with a meal, a single pretzel ingested while drinking a bottle of whiskey made lawful the unlawful.

Roosevelt was also introduced to a world from which he had always been sheltered, the poor. He took for his guide a Danish-born journalist named Jacob Riis, who had written a polemical book called How the Other Half Lives . Roosevelt was shown not only the extent of poverty in the great city but the complacence of the ruling class, which included his own family.