Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  John asked about various Washington Apgars. Caroline began with a wrong move. “One has even been elected to Congress. James Burden Day. I think his mother was an …”

  “Grandmother, I believe,” John nodded, “was an Apgar. I’ve met her.”

  “The wife is charming.” Then Caroline abandoned this most dangerous of subjects. “You must find …” She could not finish this sentence.

  But John took in stride the sentiment. “Yes, it is quite lonely for me. In spite of a plentitude of Apgars, I have no family life now, none at all.”

  “We Sanfords are also few.”

  “Very few indeed. Blaise …” John did not finish.

  Caroline did not begin. That subject was abandoned, stillborn. “I have been thinking,” she said at last, in lieu of inspiration, “about getting married.”

  “I suppose that is natural, of course.” John seemed unsurprised; also, uninterested.

  “Soon, there will be the inheritance.” She played her great card at once.

  “Yes. You will be very well-off indeed. From what I gather, Blaise did not—do as we feared. There are still certain loans to Mr. Hearst outstanding, but Mr. Hearst is good for them. Otherwise, the inheritance is intact. I hope,” John smiled wanly, “you are not being married for your fortune …”

  “Like one of Mr. James’s poor ladies? No, I don’t think that enters my … calculation, so far. Is patent law so difficult?”

  John looked surprised. “It is not difficult, no. But it is not easy to make a living at it. I’ve changed firms, as you know. But my wife’s long illness …” The voice trailed into embarrassed silence.

  “Things have not been easy for you, John. I know that. I’m sorry. Truly,” she added, pleased by her own display of warmth. She quite liked him; she also liked very much her liking him. “You once did me the,” Caroline stared up at the palm tree, half expecting to see if not a monkey a coconut ready to fall, “honor of proposing to marry me.”

  “Oh, I do apologize,” John stammered; turned pale. “It was after … after …”

  “She had died. I wished that I had known her. She was a …”

  “… a saint,” John filled in.

  “Exactly the word that I was going to use. I have now thought over your proposal—somewhat slowly, I must admit. It’s been—what? Four years at least. And I accept.” It was done.

  Caroline decided that John’s look of astonishment was not the greatest tribute ever paid her. Had she, somehow, imperceptibly, aged? Or was he otherwise engaged? Certainly, she knew nothing of his life. For all she knew, he might have a full-time and exigent mistress, perhaps a Negress, living in Flushing like Clarence King’s secret wife. “But … but, Caroline …”

  “You cannot say that this is so sudden, John.” Caroline was beginning, almost, to enjoy herself.

  “No. No. Only I never dreamed … I mean … why me?”

  “Because you asked me. Remember?”

  “But surely others have …”

  “Only Del Hay, and he is dead. You and I, we are both—survivors.”

  “I can’t think what to say.” John looked as if a coconut had indeed fallen from the trees, and struck him a sharp blow.

  “You can say yes, dear John. Or you can say no. I can accept either. But I can’t accept indecision. You must not think it over in your deliberate legalistic way. I want the answer now, one way or the other.”

  “Well, yes. Yes. Of course. But …”

  “What is the but?”

  “I have lost everything. We were—my family, that is—wiped out two years ago, when the Monongahela Combine failed, and then her illness …”

  “I have,” said Caroline softly, “enough for two. Or I will have soon enough.”

  “But it’s not right that the wife support the husband …”

  “Of course it’s right. It is done all the time, even in Newport, Rhode Island,” she added for dramatic emphasis.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  She was relieved that there was no sexual aura to John. He was more like a brother to her, a conventional American brother, she felt obliged to note in her deposition to the high tribunal of her conscience which was now sitting in judgment on her. Blaise, though only half a brother, was possessed of the same sort of dynamo that she had responded to in Jim. But John Apgar Sanford was like Adelbert Hay; he was comfortably, undisturbingly present; and no more.

  “I shall be able to help you financially,” she said, abandoning any attempt at coquetry, which even if it were her style was irrelevant to the current proceeding.

  “That would be mortifying.” John was acutely uncomfortable.

  “ ‘A fair exchange is no robbery,’ as the French say.” Caroline gazed at the palm fronds overhead. “So I shall explain exactly what is to be exchanged for what. I know that you are, of all the family here, the most worldly, the most experienced.” Caroline saw fit to lay it on rather heavily, as she was by no means certain what his response was going to be. “You handled Blaise superbly, and I am, of course, grateful.” The fact that John had done nothing at all for her was beside the point, as she methodically set him up for man-of-the-worlddom.

  “I did what I could.… He’s difficult, yes.” John was at sea.

  Caroline threw out her net. “In marrying me, you will not only get the support that you need in your … uh, endeavors but you will be able to provide me with a father for my child.” Caroline gazed at him, with what she hoped were luminous, madonna-like eyes.

  John had gone pale. John had misunderstood. “Naturally, in marrying, the thought of a family is all-important to me, to carry on the name …”

  “Our name,” Caroline murmured, wondering how to explain herself.

  “Our name, yes. We are both Sanfords. So your monogram won’t change, will it?” He laughed without mirth. “I always regretted not having children with my wife, my first wife, but her illness …” The voice again trailed off.

  “I think, John, I have not expressed myself with that clarity which you, as a lawyer, so rightly pride yourself in.” Caroline now felt rather like one of Henry James’s older European ladies, ready to launch some terrible bit of information at a dim-witted American ingenu. “I was not speaking of a future hypothetical fatherhood for you, but of an imminent motherhood for me … in October to be precise, which is why I am eager to be married this week, at City Hall, where I have already made inquiries.”

  John gasped, but at least he had understood. “You …” But he exhausted all his breath in startled exhalation.

  As John inhaled, Caroline said, “Yes, I am pregnant. I cannot tell you who the father is, as he is a married man. But I can tell you that he was my first—and only—lover. I feel like that chaste king of Spain who …” But caution stopped her from repeating Mlle. Souvestre’s favorite story about how the ascetic King Philip had finally gone to bed with a woman and promptly contracted syphilis. John might not be ready for this story.

  “He—the father is in Spain?” John was doing his best to grasp the situation.

  “No, he is in America. He is an American. He has visited Spain,” she improvised, hoping to erase King Philip from the court—courtship?—record.

  “I see.” John stared at his shoes.

  “I realize that I am asking for a very great deal, which is why I said at the very beginning that there would be an exchange between us, useful to each.” Caroline wondered what she would do in John’s place. She would, probably, have laughed, and said no. But she was not in John’s place, and she could not measure either his liking for her person or his need for her fortune. These two imponderables would determine the business.

  “Will you continue to see him?” John came swiftly to the necessary, for him, point.

  “No.” Caroline lied so seldom that she found it quite easy to do. Would she now become addicted to lying, and turn into another Mrs. Bingham?

  “What will you do about the newspaper?”

  “I shall go on with it
. Unless you would like to be the publisher.” This was definitely Mrs. Binghamish: Caroline had no intention of ever losing control of the Tribune.

  “No. No. I am a lawyer, after all, not a publisher. I must say, I have never come across a … a case like this.” He looked at her, worriedly; a lawyer mystified by a client.

  “I thought that pregnant ladies were always getting married in the nick of time.”

  “Yes. But to the man who … who …”

  “Made them pregnant. Well, that is not possible for me.”

  “You are in love with him.” John was bleak.

  “Don’t worry, John. I shall be as good a wife as I can, given my disposition, which is not very wifely, in the American way, that is.”

  “I suppose you will want to look at my books …”

  “You are a collector?”

  “My financial books …”

  “I am not an auditor. You have debts. I’ll pay what I can now. When I inherit, I’ll pay the rest. I assume,” Caroline suddenly wondered if she ought not to bring in an auditor; she laughed uneasily, “I assume that your debts are not larger than my income.”

  “Oh, much less. Much less. This is embarrassing for both of us.”

  “In France our relatives would be holding this discussion, but we’re not in France, and I can’t imagine Blaise handling any of this for me.” When Caroline rose from her chair, John sprang to his feet: yes, he was hers, she decided. So far so good. Now ail that needed to be worked out was the marital bed. She had no intention of sleeping with John, and it was plain that he had every intention of claiming his conjugal rights. For the moment she was safe: her family history of difficult, even fatal, pregnancies could be invoked to keep him at a distance. Later, she would, she was certain, think of something.

  Caroline took John’s arm, as a wife takes a husband’s. “Dear John,” she said, as they made their way down the deserted Peacock Alley, the only sound that of the revolving overhead fans.

  “It’s like a dream,” said John.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” said Caroline, who had never felt more awake.

  – 3 –

  JOHAN HAY could still not believe the change in the White House. The entire upstairs was now home to the Roosevelts and their six children, who seemed, to Hay, more like twelve. The entrance hall which had been so long graced by President Arthur’s Tiffany screen was now an impressive eighteenth-century foyer to a sort of Anglo-Irish country house whose drawing rooms, en suite, were now directly accessible to the hall, where the old pols’ wooden staircase had been replaced by a marble affair down which the presidents could descend in glory. The west staircase had been removed in order to enlarge the state dining room, whose new fireplace had been inscribed with the pious Rooseveltian hope that only men as noble as he would ever preside in this republican palace.

  Then, as ushers opened doors, Hay entered the new west wing, where the executive offices were comfortably quartered. The President’s architects had nicely duplicated the oval of the Blue Room for his office, which looked south toward the Potomac. The Cabinet had its own room at last, with the office of the President’s secretary separating it from the sovereign’s oval.

  Theodore was standing in front of his desk throwing a medicine ball at the tiny German ambassador, a particular friend, and the source of remarkable trouble for Hay because Cassini was now convinced that Theodore and the Kaiser were in secret league against the Tsar. Hay was required, at least once a week, to soothe the Russian. The new French ambassador, Jusserand, was more worldly and less excitable than his predecessor, while Sir Michael Herbert, Pauncefote’s successor, was himself like a member of the President’s own family, and rode each day with Theodore through Rock Creek Park, and joined him in loud, clumsy games of tennis where the President’s ferocity and near-blindness made for every sort of exciting danger.

  Hay bowed to President and Ambassador. “If I am interrupting,” he began.

  “No. No, John.” Theodore heaved the medicine ball at von Sternberg, who caught it easily. “That was splendid, Speck!” Hay was always amused at how like his numerous imitators the President could sound, except for the clicking of the teeth, which no one had ever quite duplicated.

  The Ambassador said good-morning to Hay and left the room, carrying the medicine ball with him.

  Roosevelt mopped his face with a handkerchief. “The Kaiser affects indifference.” He was very unlike his imitators when he was at work; and there was now a great deal to be done. “You have the telegram?”

  Hay gave him the draft which he and Adee had just completed. Four days earlier, a junta had declared Panama independent of Colombia. The arrival, the previous day, November 2, 1903, of the USS Nashville, Boston and Dixie had inhibited the Colombians, who might, otherwise, have put down the insurrection. The presence of the American Navy had been necessary, according to the President, because American citizens might have come to harm during the course of a revolution, which had not, as of November 2, taken place. Neither Roosevelt nor Hay had been particularly pleased with their somewhat hollow explanation, but the thing had turned out marvellously well. The revolution, which had started November 3, ended on the fourth, when the Republic of Panama was proclaimed, and now, on the sixth, the United States was preparing to recognize this splendid addition to the concert of nations, freed at least from Colombian bondage.

  “ ‘The people of Panama,’ ” read the President, in a grave voice, “ ‘have, by an apparently unanimous movement,’ I like that, John, ‘dissolved their political connection with the Republic of Colombia …’ Very like Jefferson, that.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “It’s better than these jackrabbits deserve.” Roosevelt read the rest of the telegram quickly; then gave it back to Hay. “Send it.”

  “I’m also drawing up a treaty for the canal, which we should get signed before the end of the month. Then, if Cabot allows the Senate to ratify …”

  “Cabot will call for a voice vote, and his own voice will be the loudest.” Roosevelt was plainly delighted. “There were casualties, after all,” he said. “Root just sent over a message. One dog was killed, and one Chinaman.” With a laugh, the President settled into his chair. Hay also sat, not with a laugh but a groan.

  “The terms for Panama will not be the best, of course …” Hay wondered how much pain the body could take before death provided anesthesia.

  “They are independent, aren’t they? Well, we made that possible. So we deserve something, I’d say.”

  “I’m thinking of next year.”

  Roosevelt nodded; and frowned, as he always did when he contemplated his reelection or, to be precise, his first election to the presidency. “Well, the anti-imperialists can’t really fault us. We must have a canal, and it has to be somewhere along the isthmus.”

  “But it could have been in Nicaragua, with no fuss, no fleet, no dead dog or Chinaman; no hint, shall we say, of collusion, between us and the Panamanian junta.”

  “Of course there was collusion.” Roosevelt pounded left fist into right hand. “We are for free people everywhere, and against foolish and homicidal corruptionists of the sort that govern Colombia …”

  “… and now Panama.”

  “You have never favored the canal, have you?”

  Hay often forgot that under all the noise, the President was both shrewd and watchful. “I’ve always thought,” said Hay, “that the railroads could do the job quite as well as a canal, which will be difficult and expensive not only to build but troublesome—in the future, anyway—politically. Yes,” Hay added before the President could taunt him, “I’m a large investor in the railroads, but that’s not to the point.”

  Idly, Roosevelt spun the globe of the world beside his desk. “The point, John, is that we have done something useful for our country. Our fleets can go back and forth, quickly, between Atlantic and Pacific.”

  “You see a future so filled with war?” Hay wished, suddenly, that he had not allowed the
President to talk him out of the July resignation.

  “Yes, I do.” The high harsh voice was suddenly low and almost, for its owner, mellifluous. “I also see our own mission, which is to lead where once England led, but on a world scale …”

  “All the world?”

  “It could come to that. But so much depends on the sort of people we are, and continue to be.” He grimaced. “There is a weakness running through our people, a love of ease, a lack of courage …”

  “You must continue your demonstrations, and inspire us.”

  “That is exactly what I try to do.” Roosevelt was entirely serious. Hay thought of Henry Adams’s phrase, “the Dutch-American Napoleon.” Well, why not? How else is an empire to begin?

  “And now, Mr. President, I shall provide the legal underpinnings to our latest acquisition.”

  “The Attorney General has assured me that we must not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” Roosevelt’s laughter was like that of a frenzied watchdog.

  As Hay rose, the room appeared to be full of dark green smoke, through which small golden stars shone. For a moment, he thought that he was about to faint. But Theodore was now suddenly at his side, holding him up.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes.” The room was itself again. “I’m often faint when I get up too quickly. But the odd thing was—I thought I was in Mr. Lincoln’s office. You know, with its dark green walls, and the gold stars, one for every state, we used to say, that was trying to get away.”

  Roosevelt walked Hay to the door, his thick arm firmly through the older man’s. “I see him sometimes.”

  “The President?”

  Roosevelt opened the door to his secretary’s office. “Yes. That is, imagine him vividly. It’s usually at night in the corridor, upstairs, at the far end …”

  “The east end.” Hay nodded. “There was a water-cooler in the hall, outside his office. He would drink cup after cup of water.”

  “I’ll look for that next time I see him. He is always sad.”