Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  Although Clarence King was dying, he was determined to go in a great display of mind and wit and energy. He was bearded like Hay and Adams: the three had more or less synchronized their beards, each allowing the rakish moustaches of youth to act as foundation for the stately beards of middle age.

  Hay had been shocked at the change in King, who had arrived some days before, haggard and ill-kempt. But William and Maggie had taken him in hand; put him to bed; fed him magnificently. “Tuberculosis does wonders for the appetite,” King had announced at the first meal—High Communion, Adams had called it—of the Hearts, and Hay noticed that a fifth place had been left at table for the fifth never-to-be-mentioned Heart, Clover Adams. Except that King, quite naturally, would repeat something that Clover had said, and Adams seemed not at all perturbed; but then King could do no wrong for Henry Adams, who had declared his friend the greatest man of their generation, causing Hay a pang of ignoble envy; but then Henry Adams had always been in love—there was no other word—with the geologist, naturalist, philosopher, world-traveler, creator of mining enterprises, Renaissance man who, now that his life was near its end, had managed to fail on the grandest scale. He had been wiped out in the depression of ’93, and though he still went exploring in the Yukon and other parts of the world, he was now merely a brilliant geologist, employed by others. There would be no King Mine, no King fortune, no King widow and children; only the memory that the Hearts all had of a glorious companion who could sit up till dawn speaking on the origins of life, and, presumably, they could go look at a mountain called Clarence King, a superb peak in the Sierra Nevada.

  A mountain and a memory were not much, thought Hay; but then what a life King had had. While Adams and Hay had sat at desks, reading and writing, or hovering on the periphery of power, King had explored and mapped the West, and written marvellously of the new world he had discovered, not to mention the geological wealth that other men would exploit. So taken with the idea of King was Adams that he had fled from Harvard to the Far West to travel with King, to rough it. In later years they had often travelled together, most recently to Cuba. Each had developed a passion for Polynesian women, “old-gold girls,” as they would cryptically refer to these palpable visions, unknown to Hay. Then, in 1879, King become director of the United States Geological Survey, a bureau created largely for him, with considerable assistance from Senator James G. Blaine, who was less than amused when the novel Democracy, suspected to be a work by one of the Hearts, lampooned him as the venal Senator Ratcliff. Hay had often wondered if Henry Adams had, somehow, instinctively, harmed the man he loved and envied above all others. By 1880, King had departed the only office that he had ever wanted; he had also entered the lives of John and Clara Hay; and, thus, due to highly elective affinities, Five Hearts beat as one until Clover Adams swallowed potassium cyanide; and then there were Four. Soon, Hay thought bleakly, as April light made glitter King’s feverish eyes, there would be Three; then Two, One, None. Why?

  King answered, as if he had looked into Hay’s mind. “When I went mad that day in the lions’ house in Central Park, I was positive that I had seen God, and He was, simply, a huge mouth, maw, with teeth, sharp, sharp—and hungry, oh, so hungry to dine on us. That’s why we exist, I thought, to feed Him. Then a Negro—someone’s butler from a house in Madison Avenue—enraged me, and I struck him. One tends to violence in the lion house, particularly in the presence of one’s Maker who is also one’s devourer, and I was taken away by the police in a state of purest ecstasy, and committed to the Bioomingdale Asylum …”

  “On Halloween,” said Adams, happy to contemplate, yet again, the sacred story. “Then we went off to Cuba in February. There were no lions there.”

  “Ah, but there was that maw, always in attendance. Always hungry. Is Theodore as dreadful as ever, now he’s vice-president?”

  “I had hoped that name would not be spoken on this day of days,” said Adams. “Theodore’s luck is relentless and inexorable, like the Chicago Express.”

  “He was,” said Clara, justly, “less noisy than usual. You must give him credit for that, Henry.”

  “But there weren’t many occasions for noise.” Hay had been surprised by the dignity of Teddy’s inaugural speech to the Senate, given during a lull in a particularly squalid filibuster. In that cigar-smelling chamber where weary senators dozed, Teddy had taken the oath of office as vice-president; and then, cryptically, he had spoken of the great things in store for this particular generation of Americans. “As we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.” At that moment, a storm broke over the Capitol and the sound of rain on the skylights of the Senate chamber put Hay, suitably, in mind of war. Given the chance, Teddy would try to expand the American empire; but vice-presidents are not given such opportunities, as Teddy knew. “This office is the ultimate grave of my political career,” he had said to Lodge accusingly; but then he liked to blame Lodge for driving him to accept a nomination never offered him by President or party leaders. Teddy had simply seized the prize—or, as Hay always thought of the vice-presidency, “persimmon.” During the autumn, he had spoken in twenty-four states to audiences that so thrilled him that he was inspired to refer to William Jennings Bryan as “my opponent.” The Major said that he had been amused by these slips; but Hay suspected that the Major’s tolerance for the Colonel was not great. Certainly, the overwhelming Republican victory in November was spoiled for McKinley by those who suggested that it was not he but his glamorous running-mate who had ensured the million votes by which the Republicans had won.

  “Teddy was not in town very long,” said Adams. “He presided over the Senate on March fourth. Then Congress adjourned until next December, and he went home to that ugly house of his on Long Island.”

  “I wonder,” said the practical Clara, “where they will live. And how. Edith says there’s no money, and all those children. Bamie—his sister—has found a house here, but only for herself.”

  “Our Madame Maintenon?” asked King, moving from fireplace to an armchair too low and narrow for the second-largest of the Hearts. Clara, the largest, had her own special non-Adams-proportioned chair. “Otherwise, I shall simply stand when I’m in your study.”

  “We could do worse.” Adams extended alabaster hands toward jonquil-yellow flames. “She’s sounder than Teddy. But he’ll vanish from public life. He was astonished to find that between March fourth and next December, the vice-president has no duties at all. He will probably write another half-dozen books.”

  “No,” said Hay, delighted that he could delight his fellow Hearts with the higher gossip. “Teddy has suddenly succumbed to ambition. He means to … what word shall I use? He means to do something that only Clarence among us has ever done.”

  “Lechery in the South Seas?” Adams’s eyes were bright.

  “No. Something more unusual, more … alarming.”

  “What?” cried Clara.

  “Work!” shouted Hay.

  “Oh, Lord save us! Save him!” Clarence sank from chair to floor, on his knees—no great distance—hands clasped in prayer. “Theodore Roosevelt will actually work for a living?”

  “Something Henry and I would never dream of doing …”

  “No, no. You are not pure, John.” Adams was stern. “You have worked as an editor and a journalist and a businessman. I have never worked …”

  “Professor at Harvard? Editor of the North American Review?”

  “Neither was proper work. Certainly, I did not make my living from all that showing off …”

  “What, please tell me,” King was still on his knees, “is the vice-president going to work at?”

  “The law! He is going to go to law school.” Hay was pleased by the general excitement.

  “An American vice-president, in office, at law school?” Adams’s horror was not affected.

  “I can’t imagine your great-grandfather taking courses at Columbia while waiting for General Washington to die, but Teddy …”r />
  “… is out of sight,” said King, an addict of Bowery slang. Then he pulled himself, with some difficulty, Hay noticed, back into the tiny armchair. “How do you know this?”

  “At the White House, he cornered the Chief Justice, and told him that as he was still quite young with a lot of time on his hands, he wanted to qualify for the bar. The Chief Justice was alarmed, of course. But when he saw how serious Teddy was, he said that he’d give him a reading list for the summer, and once Congress convenes, he’ll tutor Teddy, ‘quiz him’ was the phrase he used to me, every Saturday night.”

  “Theodore is not like other people,” said Clara, as neutrally as she could say anything.

  “If Clarence is our Renaissance man …” Adams began.

  “… Teddy is our Baroque boy,” completed King. “We live in wondrous times. What does the Major think of all this?”

  “If I didn’t know, I’d tell you,” Hay repeated Seward’s favorite line. “Actually, the President is more than ever the Buddha these days. He’s leaving at the end of the month for a six-week trip around the country, accompanied by, among others, me. At last,” said Hay, turning to King, “I shall see your California. The President launches a battleship at San Francisco, and I’ll be there, chatting of open doors and peace, while General MacArthur continues his slaughter of Filipinos.” Hay wondered what errant electrical circuit in his brain had made him advert to the one subject that he—and the Administration—never acknowledged. Particularly now, when the war—no other word for it, privately—was over. Aguinaldo had been captured in March, shortly after the inauguration. Presently, before they started across the country, the President would issue a decree declaring the “insurrection” at an end.

  Hay did not allow the others to pick up on his unexpected use of the word “slaughter.” “By the end of the month, of course, the business is over.” He spoke rapidly, and was aware of a shortening of breath. Heart? To die, suddenly, at the heart of the Hearts would be poetic. “I shall get them, by the way.”

  “Get what?” asked King, through a series of dry coughs. Perhaps all the Hearts might stop at once, like four clocks someone had forgotten to wind.

  “The Philippines. The Major thinks that the State Department, not the War Department, should administer them. Root agrees, I am happy to say. In October I shall be lord of all the isles.”

  “What about the canal?” King coughed. “Will you be lord of the isthmus, too?”

  “We must get the treaty through the Senate first.” Hay was again short of breath: must not panic. “They’ve rejected two versions so far, despite England’s surprising complaisance. Pauncefote and I are now ready with a third version, which we will submit to our masters in the Senate come December.” Hay took a deep breath; felt better; noticed that Clara was watching him with some alarm, which, in turn, alarmed him. Did he look—did he sound?—so ill? He glanced at Adams to see if the Porcupine had noticed anything wrong, but the Porcupine was looking at Clarence King, whose lower face was covered with a handkerchief, even though the fit of coughing had stopped. How fragile we have become, thought Hay; then he rallied. “Of all our friends I hate Cabot Lodge the most.”

  “John.” Clara was reproving.

  “Oh, Cabot’s hateful.” Adams turned his gaze from the dying King to the blazing fire. “I’ve always detested him, while delighting in his friendship. I think that Cabot’s problem is shyness.”

  “No senator was ever shy.” King chiselled out the sentence as if on marble.

  “Shyness?” Hay had not thought the ever-grinding Cabot shy. But perhaps he was, and disguised the fact with endless commentaries broken by sudden acts of treachery toward friends.

  “Yes, shyness,” Adams repeated. “He is one of nature’s Iagos, always in the shadows, preferring to do evil to nothing …”

  “And nothing to good.” Hay made his addition to the indictment. “So if Cabot’s Iago, McKinley must be his Othello.”

  “No, no.” Adams was firm. “After all, Othello trusted Iago. I think it most unlikely that our Ohioan Augustus trusts—or even notices—Cabot. No. I see Theodore in the part of Othello. They complement each other. Theodore all action and bluster, Cabot all devious calculation. Cabot is the rock on which Theodore will sink.”

  “I like Cabot.” Clara put a stop to the conversation. “He is also Brooks’s brother-in-law. He is practically your relative, Henry.”

  “That is no recommendation, Clara, to a member of the house of Atreus …”

  “From Quincy, Mass.” King liked to deflate the Adamses. Their peculiar self-esteem was matched only by their sense of general unworthiness. All in all, Hay was happy not to be the member of a great family’s fourth generation. Better to be one’s own ancestor; one’s own founding father. What would Del become, he wondered, in the twentieth century that had begun, as Root had maintained, January 1, 1901? Hay had already spent four months in the new century (Queen Victoria had wisely died after three weeks of the new epoch) and was more than ever convinced that it was just as well that he would miss nearly all of it. Del, on the other hand, might experience more than half the century. Father wished son luck.

  – 2 –

  CAROLINE greeted Del at the door to her office, abuzz with the first—and always precious to her—flies of spring. Del was larger than when he had left; there was more chest, more stomach; he also seemed taller. They shook hands awkwardly. Mr. Trimble watched them, all benignity. He had given his unsought blessing to the match. “A woman must not be alone too long,” he had said, “particularly in a Southern town like Washington.”

  Caroline had just returned from New York, where she had said good-by to Plon, who had sailed for home, enriched by two cigarette cases.

  Now Del had come to take her to lunch. They faced each other across the rolltop desk. “Were you really pro-Boer?” asked Del.

  “Were you, really, secretly pro-British?” Much of Bryan’s attack on McKinley had been the President’s pro-British policy, the result of that conniving Anglophile the Secretary of State, John Hay, and his equally sinister son, who was American consul general—nepotism, too!—at Pretoria.

  “Yes,” said Del, to Caroline’s surprise. “But only secretly. No word ever passed my diplomatically sealed lips. I was the soul of caution, like Father.”

  “Well, we were pro-Boer because our readers—and advertisers—are, or were. Anyway, now it’s over. Your team has won. Ours has lost.”

  “And the Irish and the German riff-raff have all joined the Democratic Party where they belong. What next?”

  John Hay had told her that he doubted Del would want to stay on in the diplomatic service; but then Hay usually said what others wanted to hear. He knew that Caroline could not bear the thought of being a diplomat’s wife, moving from post to post around the world.

  But Del chose not to answer her directly. “You’ll see what’s next.”

  “When?”

  “Today. At lunch.”

  Mystified, Caroline took her place in the Hays’ family carriage, which proceeded from Market Square into Pennsylvania Avenue, then headed north. “There are more electrical cars,” Del observed. “And telephone wires.” Like spaghetti, wires were strung every which way on posts in the bright noon-light, which made their shadows on the avenue resemble an elaborate spider’s web. The trees along the sidewalk were in new bloom. Washington’s April was so like Paris’s June that Caroline was, suddenly, homesick: by no means the proper mood for a young lady who had not seen her fiancé for a year. She noted her opal ring on his finger; tried to imagine a wedding ring on her own; thought instead of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. She and Blaise had agreed that neither would go there until the will had been finally settled. Marguerite was suicidal. Caroline was stoic.

  “I am stoic,” she said to Del, apropos nothing at all. But he was speaking to the driver. “We’ll go in from the south side.” They were now opposite the immaculately restored and redecorated façade of Willard’s. Black children stood on the si
dewalk, holding out clusters of daffodils and blossoming dogwood switches, pale pink, white. White.

  “The White House?” asked Caroline.

  “Yes. We’re having lunch with the President.” Del’s small eyes gleamed; he would be, one day, as large as his mother, she thought, and she wondered if she could be happy with so huge a masculine entity.

  Although the south door of the White House had been originally designed as the mansion’s great entrance, nothing in Washington ever turned out as planned. For instance, the Capitol on its hill faced, magnificently, a shanty town, while its marble backside loomed over Pennsylvania Avenue and the unanticipated city’s center. The city had been expected to grow west and south; instead it had grown east and north. The Executive Mansion had been designed to be approached from the river through the park, with a fine view of Virginia’s hills across the river; but the unexpected primacy of Pennsylvania Avenue had obliged the tenants to make the northern portico the main entrance, and only secret or private visitors were encouraged to drive through the now muddy park to the somewhat forlorn grand entrance, where curved stairs looked as if they had been designed for an al fresco republican coronation of the sort that the Venetian doge endured atop stairs of equal pomp.

  The downstairs corridor was empty. As always, Caroline was fascinated by the casualness of the White House. Except for a single policeman, who sat reading a newspaper inside the door, they had the shadowy corridor to themselves. “How easy it would be,” whispered Caroline, though if ever walls had no ears, it was these, “to stage a coup d’état.”

  “Who would bother?” Del seemed genuinely surprised by the idea. “The place is too big.”

  “This house is very small.”

  “The house is nothing,” said Del, as they started up the creaky steps to the main floor. “It’s the country that’s too big for that sort of thing.”