Gore Vidal - Empire

Kitty spoke of houses and servants, and Caroline offered to help with both. Day turned to Blaise. “I hope we’ll see you, now that you’re nearby.”

“I hope so, too.” Then Blaise added recklessly, “But I won’t be nearby. I’ll be right here.”

“In Washington?” The sandy eyebrows arched.

“Yes, in Washington. New York’s too far away and Baltimore is nowhere at all. I’m looking for a house,” he improvised, inspired by Caroline. She was not the only one who could spin a bright web in company.

“Then we’ll see more of you.” Day was easy; charming. “It won’t be the same, though, without Del.”

“I think I shall build a house,” said Blaise, allowing for no sentiment. “In Connecticut Avenue. The best of country life, the best of village life. She would never,” Blaise lowered his voice, not that Caroline and Kitty could have heard either of them in the noisy room, “never have married Del.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I know her,” Blaise lied. “Better than myself,” Blaise told the truth.

JOHN HAY WAS AT THE WINDOW to Henry Adams’s study, looking down on the passersby. The Porcupine was always amazed at how many people Hay could recognize, particularly now that everyone they knew had been so dramatically transformed by age. “General Dan Sickles, with crutches,” Hay announced, as the aged, blear-eyed warrior, murderer, and queen’s lover hobbled beneath the window in icy H Street.

“Surely, he’s dead.” This season, Adams affected to believe that everyone of their acquaintance was dead unless proven otherwise.

“He may well be dead.” Hay was judicious. “But he has taken to moving about, like Lazarus. Where is his leg, by the way?”

“Shot off at the battle of Gettysburg, which he nearly lost for us, the four-flusher.”

“No. No.” Hay turned round in the window seat, and settled his back as comfortably as he could against cushions. “When the leg was detached, by cannonball, Sickles sent someone to find it. Then he had a charming box made for it so that he could carry it around with him. I think he said he was going to give it to one of his clubs in New York.”

“Another point against New York. I would not allow Sickles in any club, much less his leg.” Adams sat beside the fire; he wore a mulberry velvet smoking jacket. As always on Sunday, the breakfast table was set more elaborately than usual. At noon, the guests would arrive. Hay was never entirely sure how many were directly invited and how many simply showed up. When queried, Adams looked mysterious. “All is random,” he would murmur. “Like the universe.”

But this morning, all was not random in their lives. Adams had come back from Europe at the end of December, in time to attend, on New Year’s Day, Clarence King’s funeral in New York City. He had stayed on in the city longer than usual. He had been, he wrote Hay, astonished by King’s will; but said no more.

The previous night, at dinner with the Hays, Adams had whispered in Hay’s ear that he would like to see him, alone, before breakfast the next day. When Hay arrived, Adams had been maddeningly mysterious, as he went slowly through the drawers of his escritoire, collecting bits of paper, while Hay, finally, retreated to the window and the view of the passersby, many of them slipping and falling most agreeably upon the frozen pavement. Only the one-legged Sickles was entirely sure-footed.

“The will,” Adams said, at last.

“The estate…?” Hay was more to the point.

“Well, there will be money. Our friend’s collection of pictures and bric-a-brac is stored in Tenth Street, in New York City, and once sold off at auction should provide enough money for any reasonable contingency.”

“What, dear Henry, is ‘reasonable’ and what is the ‘contingency’?”

But Adams was staring at the fire as if it were the sun and he a worshipper. “You know, John, that for King, in his robust way, and for me, in my crabbed way, woman is all things in Heaven and earth…”

“Your twelfth-century virgin…”

“ Our Virgin; as revered in that last cohesive century, and memorialized at Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres.”

Although Hay never wearied of Adams’s enthusiasms, currently focussed on the idea of woman as virgin, and mother of God, he failed to make any connection between the Porcupine’s ongoing literary work of celebration and Clarence King, who had died a bachelor. But Adams was not to be hurried, and Hay settled back in the window seat, and stared at Blake’s mad Babylonian monarch, on all fours, munching grass. “King always saw the male as being rather like the crab’s shell, to be discarded when no longer needed, by the crab-by woman, that is. She is the essential energy that uses the shell, and then lets it go. Obviously, King was a more primitive, basic man than I. Although each of us celebrated the idea of woman, I see her as the virgin queen of an ordered, perfect world while he celebrated an earthier, more primitive great-mother goddess, rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals.”

Even for Adams, this was highfalutin, thought Hay. Admittedly the two men had obviously run amok in the islands of the South Pacific, paying court to old-gold women, but to make a universal system out of two inhibited nineteenth-century American gentlemen’s good luck was, perhaps, too much.

“In any case, our friend was to find his ideal, his inspiration, and in 1883, he married her.”

Hay nearly fell from the window seat. “Clarence King was married?”

Adams gave a maddeningly diffident bob of his pink-bald head. “In Twenty-fourth Street, in New York, he married one Ada Todd, by whom he was to have five children.”

“In secret!” Hay had the sense of going mad.

“In such secrecy that he never actually told Ada his true name until the very end. He called himself James Todd, and he settled her, and their children, in a lovely rural New York retreat called Flushing.”

“Henry, if you have turned to novel-writing again…”

“No, no. Truth is bizarre enough for the mere historian. King was still able to produce sufficient money to keep his family in comfort in their Horatian rusticity, where the ginkgo trees run riot, and loyal servitors were able to maintain them in Arcadian if anonymous comfort.”

As Hay grew more and more impatient, Adams grew more lyric. “As you might suspect-I saw your face subtly change when I used the word ‘anonymous.’ There were excellent reasons why King did not want the world-or even the Hearts, sad to tell-to know of his secret life. Ada was his ideal, of course, an earth goddess, essential, a custodian of cosmic energy…”

“Henry, in God’s name-”

“John.” Adams raised a hand in gentle remonstrance. “I’ve not finished with the secret life. Just before King went west again, he decided that it would be best for his family-still called Todd-to move to that part of the world which currently gives you so much trouble, over the infamous Alaskan boundary…”

“Canada?”

“Our Lady of the Snows, yes. He moved the lot of them to Toronto, where the sons have been enrolled in,” Adams glanced at the paper on his lap, “something called the Logan School…”

“Why Canada?”

“Because there is a tolerance there quite unlike our own-oh, fierceness on the subject of identity, one might say. Our national disapproval of any and every misalliance.”

Hay nodded. “I can understand that, particularly now that he has given her his name. He has, hasn’t he?”

Adams nodded. “If she wants to use it, of course. He also made it clear in his will, which you’ll get a copy of, in due course. You are a trustee…”