Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  Abraham Lincoln turned from the window, and smiled. “You look pretty seedy, Johnny.”

  “You don’t look too good yourself, if I may say so, sir.”

  “When did I ever?” Lincoln went to his pigeon-holed desk, and took out two letters. “I’ve got a couple of letters for you to answer. Nothing important.” Lincoln gave Hay the letters; then he sat very low in the chair opposite, so that the small of his back would press against hard wood, while one long leg was slung over the chair’s arm. Hay realized with some excitement that he had, at last, after so many years, been able to remember Lincoln’s face from life as opposed to ubiquitous effigy. But what was he thinking? This was the President, he realized, on a Sunday afternoon, in summer. “I can’t sleep,” the Ancient was saying. “I think I’m sleeping but then I find I’m only day-dreaming and I wake up, and by the time it’s morning, I am plumb worn out, or as the preacher said to his wife …”

  Hay felt, suddenly, as one with the President, as the melancholy dark green walls, picked out with tiny golden stars, swirled all about the two of them like the first attack of sleep which always starts, no matter how restless one has been, with a nothingness out of which emerges, first, one image, then another, and, finally, mad narratives unfold which take the place of the real world stolen now by sleep, unless sleep be the real world stolen by the day, for life.

  SIXTEEN

  – 1 –

  CAROLINE had promised to look in on Adams before the White House dinner in celebration, for once, of nothing; and true to her word, she arrived, wearing in her hair the diamonds that she had inherited that autumn from Mrs. Delacroix, who had proved, after all, not to be immortal; who had proved, above all, to be grateful for whatever “expiation” that Caroline might have made in her coming to terms with Blaise, and their common past.

  Adams sat beside his Mexican onyx fireplace, looking more small and isolated than usual. “I see no one. Except nieces. I am no one. Except an uncle. You are beautiful as nieces go …”

  “You should be happy.” Caroline settled before the fire; and refused William’s offer of sherry. “You have Mrs. Cameron in the Square. What more can you want?”

  “Yes, La Dona makes a difference.” The previous year, Mrs. Cameron had reinstalled herself and Martha at 21 Lafayette Square. She was, again, queen of Washington, for what that might be worth: to Adams, apparently, nothing. Although a year had passed, he was still not reconciled to John Hay’s death on July 1, 1905. Adams had been in France when the news came; and so had not been able to go to Cleveland, where Hay was buried, beside Del, in the presence, of all the great of the land. Ironically, Adams had been with Cabot and Sister Anne Lodge when the news came; and it was said that the Benevolent Porcupine had, one by one, shot each of his poisoned quills into the fragile senatorial hide, blaming, not entirely unfairly, Lodge for Hay’s death.

  “Anyway, I’m bored. I’m mouldy. I’m breaking fast. I’ve nothing, nothing to live for …”

  “Us. The nieces. Your twelfth-century book, which you must have finished for the twelfth time now. And, best of all, as you said yourself, you will never again have to see, in this life, Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Adams’s eyes were suddenly bright. “You do know how to cheer me up! You’re absolutely right. I shall never set foot in that house again. The relief is enormous. I have also quarantined Cabot, and if it weren’t for Sister Anne, I’d relieve myself of all Lodges. Why are you going tonight?”

  “I am still a publisher. I’m also the only publisher of the Tribune who’s welcome. The President is furious with Blaise, for helping out in the Hearst campaign.”

  “Hearst.” Adams managed to hiss the “s”; thus the serpent in Eden celebrated evil. “If he is elected governor of New York, he’ll be living over there in two years’ time.”

  Caroline tended to agree. Although Hearst had lost the election for mayor of New York, in a three-way race, he had come within a handful of votes of winning it. Only a last-minute burning of ballots by Murphy of Tammany Hall had secured the election for McClellan. Hearst was now behaving like a Shakespearean tragic hero, in search of a fifth act.

  With remarkable skill, Hearst had created his own political machine within New York State, and now he was prepared to seize the governorship, with Blaise’s help. Caroline was not certain quite why her apolitical brother had decided to come to the aid of a publishing rival, unless that was the reason. If Hearst were to become governor, president—Cawdor, Scotland—he might be obliged to sell off his newspapers, and Blaise would want them. So, for that matter, would Caroline.

  “I’ve always hoped that in my senility I wouldn’t, like the first three Adamses, turn against democracy. But I detect the signs. Racing pulse, elevated temperature; horror of immigrants—oh, the revelation in Heidegg! Even John was horrified to what an extent we’ve lost our country. Roman Catholics are bad enough. Yes, my child, I know you’re one, and even I tend, at times, to the untrue True Church, but the refuse of the Mediterranean, the detritus of Mitteleuropa, and the Jews, the Jews …”

  “You will have a stroke, Uncle Henry.” Caroline was firm. “One day your hobby-horse will throw you.”

  “I can’t wait to be thrown. But I’m always astride. That’s because I’m nobody. Power is poison, you know.”

  “I don’t know. But I’d like to taste it.”

  “The problem is what I call Bostonitis. The habit of the double standard, which can be an inspiration for a man of letters, but fatal to a politician.” Adams picked up a folder beside his chair. “Letters to John Hay. Letters by John Hay. Clara’s been collecting them. She wants to publish.”

  Caroline had, from time to time, received a note from Hay. He was a marvelous letter-writer, which meant that he was always indiscreet. “Is that a good idea?”

  “Probably not. I’m sure Theodore will think not. Hay liked him, but saw all his faults. Worse, his absurdities. Great men cannot bear to be thought, ever, absurd.”

  “Publish! And be praised.”

  “I think I will edit them.”

  “Why not write his life?”

  Adams shook his head. “It would be my life, too.”

  “Write that, then.”

  “After St. Augustine, I’d look more than usually inept. He did best what cannot be done at all—mix narrative and didactic purpose and style. Rousseau couldn’t do it at all. At least Augustine had an idea of a literary form—a notion of writing a story with an end and object, not for the sake of the object, but for the form, like a romance. I come at the wrong time.”

  “But you occupy the right space,” said Caroline. “Anyway, I don’t believe in time …”

  “Are you content?” Adams looked at her closely.

  “I think so. I wanted to be—myself, not just a wife or mother or …”

  “Niece?”

  “That I wanted most of all.” Caroline was entirely serious. “But then I have never confessed to you just how ambitious I am. You see,” she took the great plunge, “I wanted to be a Heart.”

  “Oh, my child!” Adams struck a note that she had never heard before. There was no irony, no edge to that beautiful voice. “You are one. Didn’t you know?”

  “I wanted to—know.” She was tentative.

  “That is it. That is all there is, to want to know …”

  Elizabeth Cameron and Martha entered; each was dressed appropriately for the White House dinner.

  “We’ve heard from Whitelaw Reid,” said Lizzie, after her usual warm but not too warm greeting of Caroline. “Martha’s to be presented at court, June the first, and you know what Martha said?”

  “ ‘I’d rather stay in Paris’ is what Martha said,” said Martha.

  “You must give pleasure to Whitelaw. He has so many presentations to make and so few presentables.” Adams had greeted Whitelaw Reid’s appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s with exuberant derision. Reid’s pursuit of office and its attendant pomp had, finally, been rewarded by the Pre
sident, who had required that all ambassadors and ministers resign after the election. Everyone had now been moved round—or out.

  “I do it for Mother.” Martha would never be beautiful, Caroline decided, but she might yet cease to be plain.

  The clocks were carefully checked, and it was agreed that the three ladies share the same carriage to get them across the perilous wintry waste of Pennsylvania Avenue, a matter of so many icy yards.

  Adams rose and showed them to the door of his study; he kissed each on the cheek.

  “I hope Cabot won’t be there,” said Lizzie. “I have a permanent grudge against him, since John died.”

  “Be forgiving, Dona.” Adams smiled his secret smile. “Life is far too long to hold a grudge.”

  The Lodges were not present; the dinner was relatively small; and there was no theme, which Caroline enjoyed. Of the Cabinet, only Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, was present. He and Caroline gravitated toward each other in the Red Room, where the company was gathered before dinner. The Roosevelts never made their regal entrance until everyone was present.

  “What is your brother doing?” was Root’s less than ceremonious greeting.

  “He is travelling through New York State, enjoying the scenery.”

  “I am alarmed. We’re all alarmed. You know, Hearst was really elected mayor of New York. Then Tammany destroyed the ballots.”

  “Then why are you alarmed? When he’s elected governor, Tammany will just burn the ballots all over again. Fraud is the principal check—or is it balance?—of your—sorry, our—Constitution.”

  Root’s mock alarm was replaced by, if not real alarm, unease. “We can’t rely on our most ancient check this time. Hearst has made a deal. He’s going to be Tammany’s candidate.”

  “Is this possible?” Caroline was startled.

  “Everything’s possible with those terrible people. Warn your brother away.”

  As Caroline was explaining why Blaise accepted no warnings from her, Alice Roosevelt and her new husband, Nicholas Longworth, made their entrance. Root looked at his watch. “Amazing! She’s arriving before her father. Nick’s influence, obviously.”

  Alice looked, if not blooming, as in a rose, bronze, as in a chrysanthemum, while her husband’s bald head was scarlet from sunburn. They had been married in mid-February, with great pomp, in the East Room; then they had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon. This was their first White House function, as man and wife. Alice joined Root and Caroline. “Well, I’ve been to the top of San Juan Hill, and it’s absolutely nothing. I looked for the jungle—remember the famous jungle? where Father stood among the flying bullets, ricocheting off trees, and parrots and flamingos—I always added them to every description—sailed about? Well, the place couldn’t be duller. The hill’s a bump, and there is no jungle. All that fuss about so little. But they gave us something called a daiquiri, made with rum. After that, I remember nothing.”

  The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt were announced, rather as if they were the Second Coming, and Theodore conducted himself rather as if he were God, surveying, with quiet satisfaction, His Creation. Edith Roosevelt looked tired, as befitted God’s conscientious consort.

  The President greeted Caroline with his usual amiability, usual because the Tribune usually supported him. As a reward, he would occasionally ask her to the White House, where he would give her a story—usually minor—that no one else had yet printed. He was even stouter and redder this season, she noted; apparently, the vigorous, strenuous life he advocated for others and practiced himself was not, of itself, thinning. “You must come to lunch, and tell me about France. I envy you last summer. If I ever get away from here …”

  “Come to us, Mr. President.”

  “Delighted!”

  “What, if I may cease to be a lady at court for an instant, is going to happen to the Hepburn Bill?” This was a commanding work of legislation which the House of Representatives had passed the previous year. The regulation of railroad rates was, somehow, at the center of the national psyche. The progressive saw it as a necessary means of controlling the buccaneer railroad operators, while the conservative courts and Senate saw it as the first fine cutting edge of socialism, the one thing that all Americans were taught from birth to abhor. Characteristically, Roosevelt was vacillating. When he had needed money for his presidential campaign he had asked the railway magnate E. H. Harriman to dinner at the White House; no one knew what promises were exchanged. Yet Caroline had taken heed of one of Adams’s truisms which was so true as to be ungraspable by minds shaped from birth by an American education: “He who can make prices for necessaries commands the whole wealth of all the nation, precisely as he who can tax.” That said it all. But the ownership of the country controlled both Supreme Court and Senate, and so they need not give up anything, ever. “I shall stand fast, of course. I always do. To Principle. I’m sure I can bring Senator Aldrich around. One thing I won’t accept will be an amended bill.”

  “How curious to see you allied with the populists, like Tillman …”

  “Terrible man! But when the end is just, grievances are forgotten. We must make do. If we don’t, Brooks fears a revolution on the left or a coup d’état on the right. I tell him we are stronger-fibered than that. Even so …”

  An aide, roped in gold, moved the President through the room to greet the other guests. “It was in this very room, on election night,” observed Root, “that Theodore told the press that he would not run for a second term of his own.”

  “He must have been—temporarily—deranged,” observed Caroline, admiring Edith Roosevelt’s inevitable look of interest in the presence of even the most ruthless bore.

  “I think he got the mad notion from mad Brooks, whom he was just quoting. In order to be profoundly helpful, Brooks went through several million unpublished Adams papers and found that both of the Adams presidents had thought that one term was quite enough, and despised what they called ‘the second-term business.’ ”

  “On the sensible ground that since each had been defeated for a second term, the principle was despicable.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, Theodore, in a vainglorious mood, said that there would be no second election for him.”

  The fat little President was now showing off a new ju-jitsu hold to the German Ambassador, while Edith’s lips moved to form the three dread syllables “Thee-oh-dore.” “He’ll be bored. But then he will keep on governing through his successor—you, Mr. Root.”

  “Never, Mrs. Sanford. First, I’d not allow it. Second, I won’t be his successor.” Root’s dark eyes glittered. “I’m not presidential. But if I was, I’d tell my predecessor to go home to Oyster Bay, and write a book. You do this job alone, or not at all. Anyway, he can bask in glory. He loved war, and gave us the canal. He loved peace, and got the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He will be, forever—which in politics is four years—known as Theodore the Great.”

  “Great,” murmured Caroline, “what?”

  “Politician,” said Root. “It’s a craft, if not an art.”

  “Like acting.”

  “Or newspaper publishing.”

  “No, Mr. Root. We create, like the true artist. News is what we invent …”

  “But you must describe the principal actors …”

  “We do, but only as we see you …”

  “You make me feel,” said Root, “like Little Nell.”

  “I feel,” said Caroline, “like the author of Freckles.”

  On the way in to dinner, Alice told her of the great advantage of matronhood. “You can have your own motor car, and Father has nothing more to say.”

  “This means that you’re a socialist.”

  For once Alice was stopped in her own flow. “A socialist, why?”

  “You missed the story. You were in Cuba. The new president of Princeton said that nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of the automobile.”

  “He sounds mad. What’s his name
?”

  “I don’t remember. But Colonel Harvey at Harper’s Weekly says that he will be president.”

  “… of Princeton?”

  “The United States.”

  “Fat,” said Alice, “chance. We’ve got it.”

  – 2 –

  BLAISE was filled with admiration for Hearst, who had managed to make himself the candidate of the independent lovers of good government forever hostile to the political bosses, while simultaneously picking up the support of Murphy of Tammany Hall, and a half-dozen equally unsavory princes of darkness around the country who, should he be elected governor of New York in November, would make him the party’s candidate against Roosevelt’s replacement. Hearst had adopted the Roosevelt formula: with the support of the bosses, you run against them. Hearst had even announced, with his best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger compassion, “Murphy may be for me, but I’m not for Murphy.” Thus, the alliance was made and the tomahawks in the Tammany wigwam currently buried.

  In due course, Hearst became the Democratic candidate for governor as well as the nominee of his own now potent machine, the Municipal Ownership League. The Republican candidate was a distinguished if dim lawyer, Charles Evans Hughes, known as the scourge of the corrupt insurance companies. He was considered no match for Hearst, whose fame was now total.

  When, in April, San Francisco had been levelled by earthquake and fire, Hearst had taken over the rescue work; had fed people; sent out relief trains; raised money through Congress and his newspapers. Had anyone but Hearst been so awesomely the good managing angel, he would have been a national hero and the next president. As it was, he was forever associated not only with yellow journalism, to which most people were indifferent, but with socialism (he favored an eight-hour work day), the nemesis of all good Americans, eager to maintain their masters in luxury and themselves in the hope of someday winning a lottery. Yet despite so many handicaps, Blaise could not see how Hearst was to be stopped.