Gore Vidal - Empire

There was no need to fear awkward silences. Theodore, very much aware of the two men’s enmity, delivered himself of a lecture on the trusts; an occasional glance at the two money princes acted as a reminder that today, at least, and in more ways than one, they were in the same boat. The handsome Whitney was, as always, calm, but Payne, a choleric man, could barely speak for rage.

The situation was too curious for words, thought Hay, happy that Theodore’s flow of talk could not be deterred by mere curiosity of situation. For once, Edith did not give her husband a warning look, followed by a small cough, followed-if that did not staunch the flow-by “Oh, Thee!” in a stern voice. She, too, was awed by the hatred of the two men, who spoke, politely but briefly, to each other whenever the President paused for breath. The Whitelaw Reids, for once at rest in the still circle of perfect social preeminence, glowed benignly, as course after course was served, and the round table in the bay window became luminous with bright winter sunlight, an Arthurian table at the Arctic, thought Hay.

“Helen loved your gifts, Mr. Whitney.” Clara made motherly sounds. “They are so very grand, the rings, the brooch.”

“I’m glad.” Whitney was Chesterfieldian in his politeness. He had had a great deal to contend with lately. He had given up his political career. He was under fire for his various business connections. He had not been invited to his son’s bachelor dinner, held at the Arlington Hotel by Colonel Payne, the usurper. Yet he acted as if nothing in his world was amiss. On the other hand, Payne was incoherent with mysterious rage. Hay wondered why. The fact that after the death of Oliver Payne’s sister Whitney had remarried could not have been sufficient reason for so long-lasting a vendetta-long-lasting and infinitely resourceful. There was something positively Luciferian in the relentless way that Payne had gone about buying two of Whitney’s children, one of whom was now Hay’s son-in-law. Perhaps childlessness was at the root of it all. Envying Whitney’s charm and fecundity, Payne robbed him of two children; and tried to ruin him financially as well. But though Oliver Payne was the richer of the two, Whitney was the cleverer; and not made for failure.

Edith Roosevelt made the error of asking Oliver Payne what he had given the young couple. “Not much,” he said, eyes on his plate, where a quail in aspic seemed, somehow, obscene. “Diamonds, the usual,” he mumbled. Whitney drank champagne, and smiled at Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. “The house in Thomasville, Georgia,” said Payne. “They’ll honeymoon there. Good hunting, Georgia.”

The President, mouth full, could not let the subject of hunting pass unannotated. “ Wild turkey!” he choked.

“Thee!”

But guns and wild turkeys were now the subject of that powerful energetic boy’s mind. “I’m also lending them my yacht,” said Oliver Payne to those of the table who were not entirely attentive to the presidential hymn to the slaughter of wildlife. “The Amphitrite . They’ll go to Europe on it, this summer…”

“An ocean -going yacht?” Mrs. Whitelaw Reid’s happiness was complete.

“Yes,” said Oliver Payne, looking not at Whitney’s face but his far shoulder. Thus he emphasized his own greater wealth.

“It’s the size of an ocean-liner,” said Hay, allowing Reid his moment with the President, who, sensing that he had lost the table in general, was now concentrating all the more on Reid, whose sycophantish smiles and bobs of the head caused the President to give a detailed history, from prehistoric times to the present, of the beagle.

“I’m also building them a place in New York.” Oliver Payne turned to Clara, as an interested party. “Your daughter said she preferred New York to Washington…”

“And you to us!” Clara’s sudden laugh cut the beagles just short of François Premier, and a hunting party at Poitier.

“She never said that,” murmured the very rich man. “But New York’s right for Payne, and her. I’ve found them a lot on Fifth Avenue near Seventy-ninth Street, where I’ll build a house…”

“And we can be,” said William Whitney, “all together, on Fifth Avenue.”

That stopped both Oliver Payne and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay wished that Henry Adams could have shared this comic interlude.

“How is young Ted?” asked Clara in the pause.

“Weak but recovered. Groton’s looking after him well enough.”

Young Ted had nearly died of pneumonia, and both Roosevelts had gone to Groton to be with him, leaving Hay as the acting president. Occasionally, he still day-dreamed of what it would be like should Theodore himself fall victim to pneumonia or an assassin’s bullet, or simply a trolley car, like the one that had smashed into the President’s carriage the previous autumn, killing a Secret Service man. Had Theodore and not the Secret Service man died, John Hay would have been the president. Old and ill as he was, the thought was not entirely without its appeal. Of course, he was too fragile to do much. On the other hand, he would have a free hand to guide the United States onto the world stage, as an equal party with England. Between the two fleets-nations, he corrected his reverie-the entire world would be theirs for the foreseeable future. Although Theodore was on the same course, he was fitful and easily diverted; he was also concerned with being elected president in his own right in 1904. Disturbingly, despite the closeness of his friendship with Cecil Spring-Rice, he resented, as only a Dutch-American could, England’s long ascendancy in the United States, achieved at the expense of his ancestors. He had even said to Hay, apropos Pauncefote, that the Englishman is “not a being I find congenial or with whom I care to associate. I wish him well but I wish him well at a distance.” This was most unlike McKinley, whose benign neutrality in the Boer War had been of such importance to England.

Whitelaw Reid spoke of Russia, and the President gave Hay a quick glance. They were not to discuss the current problems with that, to Hay, mindless grasping barbarous nation. “We can say nothing, dear Whitelaw.” Hay made of his old colleague’s first name a sort of formal title, White Law, White Rod, Black Law, Black Rod, like those ancient ceremonial servitors of the British crown. “Because Cassini is lurking on the premises, and he will tell the Tsar everything.”

“Did you see him avoid Takahira?” The President was about to be tactless.

Hay intervened. “Cassini doesn’t see too clearly. It’s the monocle, I think…”

“What will Japan do about Russia, and Manchuria?” Whitelaw had refused to take Hay’s hint. Thus a man lost a foreign mission.

“We must ask the Japanese.” Hay was bland. “Certainly, none of us wants the Russians to occupy the industrial parts of Manchuria…”

“Shansi province!” Roosevelt erupted; and Hay shuddered, as he heard Brooks Adams’s suave low voice turned into Rooseveltian falsetto. “The principal goal of every empire on earth today. Who holds Shansi province holds the key to the balance of power…”

“Theodore, they are going to cut the cake.” Edith rose in tandem with Clara, and Hay was relieved. Although Hay did not in the least disapprove of the coming American hegemony, as outlined by Brooks in his soon-to-be-published polemic The New Empire , he felt that the Administration ought never to associate itself with such un-American concepts as empire. Let the empire come in the name of-the pursuit of happiness, of liberty, of freedom. If the United States was not always high-minded, the world might take less seriously the great new-world charter that set off this extension of the British empire not only from the motherland but from all other restless, expanding nations.