The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “What did your wife think of her?”

  “She was put off by Mary’s atheism. Otherwise she agreed with every word.”

  The Congressman’s smile was almost gleeful. He could see George was scarcely able to conceal his amazement that his grandmother, often described in saintly terms for her numerous charities and her passionate detestation of slavery, had been an admirer of the great female radical.

  “Mary is one of Caroline’s patron saints,” George said.

  “Why not? She should be the heroine of every thinking woman—up to a point.”

  “Where would you designate that point?” Caroline said.

  “Her private life. She ruined herself politically by going too far, scorning marriage, having children out of wedlock. The mass of people see such disorder as ruinous to their individual happiness. They don’t have the luxury of private fortunes. The woman who wants to make progress for her sex in America should observe the conventions, the customs, the morality, of the majority.”

  “Won’t she simply fade into the mass and become invisible?” Caroline asked. “How can she have any impact?”

  “By accepting the hard truth that all great changes come gradually, and watching for the opportunity to push a little harder here, and there, with her husband’s help. Women will never manage this change alone. They must have loving men at their sides, men who share their convictions—and have the power to change things.”

  The Congressman saw that Caroline was unconvinced. He struggled to his feet. “Pontificating is an old politician’s worst fault. Come into the library. There’s something I want to show you.”

  They followed him as he stumped on his cane through the high-ceilinged rooms, full of elegant furniture by the best cabinetmakers in New York and Philadelphia. In the east wing, they entered a lofty library, rising two stories to a skylight. On the walls were numerous portraits of Stapletons. The Congressman identified the most important ones for Caroline: Malcolm, his hulking frontiersman father, his hard-eyed, sharp-featured Dutch mother, Catalyntie Van Vorst, and the Congressman’s wife, Hannah Cosway Stapleton. He paused to gaze fondly at her. She was sitting in the sunlit alcove of a farmhouse kitchen. The light spilling on her lovely face created an aura of saintliness. But the painter, whoever he was, had added a realistic touch to her eyes—they were a mixture of sadness and pain.

  “A day seldom passes without my wishing she were still here,” the Congressman said. “Her moral sense was deeper than mine. I was my mother’s son. Nothing was more important to me than a whacking profit at the end of every year. But I eventually managed to rise to Hannah’s standards. I learned it the hard way, as one learns many of life’s major lessons.”

  He caught himself, embarrassed by the way both George and Caroline were looking at him with more than ordinary interest. “Ye gods, how we codgers ramble on. I didn’t bring you here to recite my ancient and well-forgotten travails. Here’s what I wanted you to see.”

  The Congressman led them to a painting against the rear wall. On one side was the battle of Lundy’s Lane, showing gray-clad Americans holding their ground against redcoated British, with Niagara Falls in the background. On the other side was the battle of the Thames, with mounted riflemen and frontiersmen in fringed leather hunting shirts fighting Tecumseh and his Indians. In the right-hand corner of the frame was a portrait of George’s father in his lieutenant’s kepi. On the left was a portrait of Caroline’s father, Jonathan Gifford Kemble, in his hunting shirt.

  For a moment Caroline found it difficult to breathe. “Did you know my father? Did he ever come here before he went to Ohio?”

  “No. He didn’t approve of me, I’m afraid. We were in opposing political parties. He was with Jefferson, I was with Hamilton.”

  “I suppose he’d be a violent Democrat if he were alive today,” Caroline said.

  “Undoubtedly,” the Congressman said. “I gather he never forgave Jefferson for compromising with us Hamiltonians and permitting us to go on making ourselves and the country rich.”

  Caroline had only a vague idea of her father’s politics from comments by her older brothers. How harmless the Congressman made it all seem—in contrast to John Sladen’s dark denunciations of Jefferson’s compromise.

  Hugh Stapleton was one of the aristocrats who had multiplied his wealth and power against the democratic tide. But he was not the disdainer of democracy that Fenimore Gardiner declared himself. On the contrary, he seemed ready to accept the tide as a fact of life and cope with it.

  Politics suddenly became irrelevant as she gazed at her lost father’s portrait in the shadow of the battle that had cost him his life. This old man was telling her she was already part of his family. If she wanted to become a more important part—even his partner in persuading this big uncertain grandson to plunge into the turbulent politics of contemporary America—he was ready to accept her. He had brought her into this library to tell her she had the bloodline and the brains to win a place among the portraits on these walls.

  The portrait, the entire painting, vanished in a blur of tears. Suddenly Caroline wanted nothing more than the privilege of resting her head on Hugh Stapleton’s shoulder. “I can’t believe how dear you’ve become to me,” she said.

  “If this goes any further, Grandfather, I’m going to sue you for alienation of affections,” George said.

  The Congressman’s smile was rakish. “If I were twenty years younger, George, you might have to.”

  “I’ll write to my mother tonight and tell her about this painting,” Caroline said.

  “I’ve already sent her a copy,” Hugh Stapleton said.

  The smile had grown sly, suggesting that he had known exactly what he was doing when he ordered the painting. Had he been in touch with George’s mother, or her own mother? Caroline wondered. Was there a clever conspiracy among the older generation to lure her into wedlock with George Stapleton?

  She brushed away her tears and studied George for a long moment. What did her heart say? In a flash, John Sladen was standing beside George, his lean swarthy face and hungry eyes challenging her judgment. Who lured her into his arms? Was it big muscular George? His physique made two of John Sladen. But there was some sort of strange compulsion, a wild mixture of want and need, that made her turn to John instead. In another flash, she was opening her arms to him, his angry lips were on her yielding mouth.

  Caroline Kemble never forgot those flashes in Bowood’s library. They were visitations from a subterranean world of darkness and blind desire. As if she had plunged into the underground river Samuel Taylor Coleridge had described in his mysterious poem “Kubla Khan” and discovered:

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

  Poetry. She heard the Congressman saying, Poetry doesn’t get you anywhere. American women want the offer stated in prose. Caroline struggled for the self-control that prose implied. For a fierce moment she resented the restraint that was expected of her. She bridled at the Congressman’s casual confidence that George could capture her. She wanted the wild freedom of John Sladen’s lips.

  Resentment dwindled as the dinner guests arrived. First came George’s lean, gray-haired uncle, Malcolm, the Congressman’s younger son. His canny eyes, his hard mouth, made him an unmistakable descendant of Catalyntie Van Vorst. George had remarked that Uncle Malcolm was “born to do business.” He was Sally Stapleton’s father. His wife had died giving birth to Sally, and Malcolm had never remarried. With a dedication that approached asceticism, he had sent Sally to New York to live with Angelica Stapleton and devoted himself to expanding the Stapleton commercial empire.

  With Malcolm was Andrew Freylingheusen, the senior U.S. senator from New Jersey, a red-cheeked Dutchman who looked almost as old as Hugh Stapleton, and Philip Tilghman, a congressman who was equally ancient. They sat down to a dinner of roast pork and vegetables in Bowood’s wainscoted dining room,
served by black maids, presided over by a stern, gray-haired black butler named Peter in tasteful maroon livery. All Bowood’s servants were black, descendants of Stapleton slaves freed after the Revolution, reportedly at Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s insistence.

  George and Caroline remained silent as the older men analyzed the political situation in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey. Everyone seemed to agree that in the upcoming election the supporters of President John Quincy Adams and his secretary of state, Kentuckian Henry Clay, who called themselves National Republicans, were in trouble. In Pennsylvania and New York, the Democrats were growing stronger by the day with their raging attacks against the aristocratic Adams and Henry Clay’s so-called American System, which envisioned business and government as partners in building the country. New Jersey, thanks largely to the influence of the Stapletons and a few other prominent families, remained loyal to the president, but the Democrats were contesting every office.

  “This is your opportunity, George,” the Congressman said. “Come out here and stand as a National Republican. A young American ready and eager to speak for the American System as well as your native state. Tilghman here is ready to step aside in your favor.”

  “What can one congressman do if the Democrats sweep the country?” George said.

  “They won’t sweep New England. Henry Clay will hold Kentucky in line. Delaware and Maryland are still with us,” Hugh Stapleton said. “Upstate New York and Ohio are fairly firm. There’ll be a decent block of votes against these fellows.”

  “Young vigorous voices will be especially needed in the House of Representatives,” Congressman Tilghman said. “There’s a tendency to mob rule in that chamber.”

  “It’s vital to have people from the Middle States who can talk sense about tariffs and banking,” Malcolm Stapleton said. “Some of these dimwit Democrats are for free trade. That would be tantamount to shutting down Principia Mills and every other textile mill in the country and handing the whole game to the British. A hundred thousand people would be thrown out of work.”

  “Why are the Middle States so important?” Caroline asked.

  “The Yankees are obnoxious and disliked by everyone in the West as well as the South,” Hugh Stapleton said. “Their ideas are sound but their personalities are a disaster.”

  The elders unanimously predicted Jackson would make a terrible president: He was an ignoramus, a hothead and a bully. Glumly, they weighed and found wanting the National Republicans’ attempt to paint the General as an adulterer and a blackguard because he had married his wife before her divorce from her first husband was legal. Some accounts tried to make it sound as if Jackson had kidnapped her from her first husband’s house.

  George remarked that these gutter tactics were proof that decency had vanished from politics. Why was the supposed party of the best people stooping so low?

  “Desperation,” Hugh Stapleton said.

  After dinner, Freylingheusen and Tilghman departed and the talk shifted from politics to business. The Stapletons had invested thousands of dollars in toll roads and bridges all over New Jersey. They had put even more money into a canal that would connect the Delaware River to the Raritan River. They also had money in John Stevens’s steamboat company. Should they finance Stevens’s railroad or block it in the state legislature? Caroline realized the family more or less controlled this body, and the state’s governor.

  “George was telling me only a few weeks ago that he’s strongly in favor of investing in railroads,” Caroline said. “Isn’t that right, George?”

  “Yes, I think I did say that.” George seemed to barely remember their conversation in Hoboken.

  Delight gleamed in the Congressman’s old eyes. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard from George in an age,” he said.

  Malcolm Stapleton grumbled that a successful railroad would wipe out their money in toll roads and bridges and endanger their canal. “Better to cut losses early for bigger profits later,” Hugh Stapleton said.

  He gave Caroline an owlish smile. “We decided a long time ago that whoever controls transportation across New Jersey stands to make a fortune. We’re sitting between the two most prosperous states in the Union, New York and Pennsylvania.”

  “All right. I’ll talk to Stevens about the railroad,” Malcolm said. “How much of a share do you think we should give him?”

  The Congressman shook his head. “He’ll drive too hard a bargain if we deal only in railroad stock. Suggest a merger between the canal and the railroad. The Joint Companies. Form a new corporation by that name and issue stock in it. That way we’re the logical majority shareholders.”

  For a moment Caroline felt transported into a trance state. Could this be happening? She was sitting at this splendid mahogany table, surrounded by gleaming sideboards and bombé chests, listening to these calm canny men making fortunes, plotting how to influence the future of the country. She had already cast George’s vote in a crucial family decision. The thrill—there was no other word for the emotion Caroline felt—vibrated in her flesh. She was discovering that power had its unique pleasure. And this was merely business. What would she feel if she persuaded George Stapleton to join her in the pursuit of fame?

  Could it compare to that flash of subterranean desire she had felt in Bowood’s library? As a woman, she was supposed to be less vulnerable to such dark impulses. Invulnerable, in the opinion of some philosophers. Men were dragged down by their animal hungers. A woman’s soul was composed of finer materials. Did she believe that?

  Yes.

  That answer sealed the bargain Caroline made with herself and with fate, with the ambiguous memory of her lost father, with the loneliness and anger of her girlhood. Sitting at Bowood’s opulent dining table, she chose George Stapleton over John Sladen and assured herself she was content. No, more than content—she was happy. She was catapulting herself into a world she had scarcely imagined a year ago. A world charged with energy and hope as well as power—infinitely more exciting than the defeated sadness of Aaron Burr.

  George had trumped—and won.

  On the steam ferry returning from Hoboken the next day, George led Caroline out on the deck. It was an afternoon of magnificent spring sunshine. The Hudson flowed swiftly past the ferry’s cleaving prow in its final rush to the sea. New York’s great harbor spread below them, dotted with ships of all nations. Ahead, the city with its church spires and slate roofs sparkled in the brilliant white glow.

  “If I’m not mistaken, I think you love Grandfather as much as I do,” George said.

  “It was adoration at first sight,” Caroline said.

  “You know you’re already the mistress of my heart. Can I make you mistress of Bowood as well?”

  “I want more than Bowood, George. I want you to run for Congress. I want a husband who’ll play a part in the history of this country. I want to be his partner in business, in politics, as well as in love.”

  “But I don’t care about those things—compared to what I feel for you. For me happiness is you and me—and our children—in Bowood.”

  George’s broad handsome face was contorted with confusion and dismay. He saw himself ensconced in Bowood, writing poetry and history, comforted by his beautiful wife and children. Caroline was unmoved.

  “George, I want more than happiness from my life. I want adventure, accomplishment, fame!”

  “Won’t having our children be an accomplishment?”

  “That doesn’t take any brains, George. I want to use my head, as well as my heart.”

  “All right,” George said with a sigh. “I’ll run for Congress.”

  “You’ll like it, George. You’ll learn to like what makes me happy. Because that will help me make you happy.”

  Hoooonk! The ferry’s smokestack emitted a derisive hoot as they approached the dock. Was the god of the nineteenth century, the genius who had inspired the machinery that was transforming the world, commenting on this overconfident prediction? If so, neither George nor Ca
roline noticed it. The young are seldom prey to doubts.

  George Stapleton took a small jewelry box from his pocket and revealed a ring with a huge diamond set in the center. “This was my grandmother’s wedding ring,” George said.

  “The Congressman gave it to me last night after you went to bed. He wants you to have it.”

  Caroline felt instantly wary, reluctant, almost angry. Should she accept a marriage ring from that woman with the sunny aureole around her saintly face? Were there powers here that she did not understand? She was infinitely different from that woman. Although she knew almost nothing about Hannah Cosway Stapleton, for some reason she feared her. Never would Hannah have had those flashes of dark desire. Never would she have exulted in power for its own sake. This woman represented a spiritual side of the Stapletons’ heritage that Caroline Kemble in her bitter loneliness, her defiant admiration of Mary Wollstonecraft’s atheism, disdained. Had George Stapleton, with his devotion to poetic beauty and the idealism of the gentleman, inherited this tradition?

  If he had, she would drive it out of him, Caroline told herself with a grim intensity that was out of all proportion to the romantic moment they were acting out. Gently, George slid the ring on her finger and kissed her on the lips for the first time.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you, love you, love you.”

  “I love you too, George.” Caroline let him crush her to his broad chest.

  Caroline was not lying. More precisely, she loved the George Rensselaer Stapleton she planned to manufacture out of the present undefined gentleman poet. That future George, the man who strode the corridors of power, who won the cheers of the American people, she would love extravagantly.

  And John Sladen? She would love him too, in memory. He would inhabit those measureless caverns through which Alph, the sacred river, ran down to a sunless sea. The ghost of another Caroline Kemble would linger with him in that “miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.”