“I think I can change her mind if she’ll give me a chance.”
“I doubt if she will. Why don’t we go in the south parlor?”
They crossed the hall and Caroline shut the sliding doors. She drew the drapes on the windows and turned to face him. Never had she looked more goddesslike. Her green velvet gown emphasized the curve of her breasts. Her bare arms and neck gleamed in the lamplight.
“What kind of a game do you think you’re playing?”
“The one I just described to John Quincy Adams. The honor game.”
“Honor.” Caroline virtually spat the word. “You call it honor to betray the man and woman who sent you to Mexico? To cut the ground from under Sarah and the president at the very moment when there’s a chance for their vindication? I’ve always feared you were too stupid to become president. You’ve fulfilled my worst fears.”
“As I see it, I’m rescuing him—and the country—from a blunder that would make his name synonymous with disgrace for the next two hundred years.”
“You’re not going to rescue anybody. John Sladen has the votes to chase you and your treaty all the way back to Matamoros—or wherever your Mexican slut is waiting to deliver your reward.”
For a moment Caroline’s face became a blur. The room was clotted with a red mist. George’s vows to remain calm, his hesitations about using Jeremy’s letter, vanished. “My … Mexican … slut?”
“We know all about her. John has talked to numerous reporters as they came through New Orleans. They’ve given us a full and repulsive portrait of your off-the-battlefield activities.”
“Fortunately, I’ve had a correspondent here in Washington who’s given me a good picture of your activities.”
George took Jeremy Biddle’s letter out of his inside coat pocket and handed it to her. At the end of the first page Caroline sank down on the edge of a chair. That sculpted face began to crumple like a papier-mâché mask in soggy weather. “It … isn’t … true,” she said.
Dishes clattered faintly in the kitchen. Dark African voices drifted down the hall. “Is Jeremy in town?” George asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Sladen is. Let’s go ask him to affirm or deny it.”
“No! I won’t let you humiliate him for something that happened twenty years ago.”
“Why not?” George roared. “Are you claiming that entitled him to your favors for the next twenty years? Is this some sort of old Ohio custom? First come, first served in perpetuity?”
Caroline glared up at him. “He never touched me again. From that moment of—of disgrace in New York until today he’s never touched me., I’ve been faithful to you. Believe it or not, I realized while you were in Mexico that I loved you more than I ever thought I loved him. Imagine! What a perfect fool I’ve been. Treasuring up my love to fling it at your feet when you were sitting in Mexico reading this filthy cowardly letter every night and then going to your Mexican slut thinking you were perfectly justified—”
“She wasn’t—isn’t—a slut. She’s a brilliant, compassionate woman who loves Mexico.”
“Oh, excuse me. That justifies your infidelity?”
“I loved her. More than I ever loved you. She didn’t order me around like a servant!”
“Oh, of course not. She just persuaded you to turn your back on our dead, to ignore her worthless countrymen’s repeated betrayals of every standard of honor and good faith between nations, to forgive these scum and reward them with fifteen million dollars and the independence of their excuse for a country. I wouldn’t order you around either if I could persuade you to do that!”
George reeled in this blaze of sarcasm. She was outarguing him again. Turning his trump card against him. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Why should I believe what you’re telling me about Sladen? The next time I see him I’m going to pound his face to jelly!”
“I hope you do. It will enable him to portray you as the oversized idiot that you are. He’ll claim, and I will regretfully confirm him, that the quarrel was about the peace treaty. It will win him a half dozen more votes when the president sends the treaty to the Senate.”
“The president is sending it to the Senate? Doesn’t that prove I’m right?”
“On the contrary. He’s sending it with a message that is as neutral as language can become. He’s saying that it was negotiated by- a fool, Nicholas Trist, against his president’s orders, after he was recalled. But he feels compelled to give the august members of the world’s greatest deliberative body a chance to see it. Senator Sladen and a dozen other senators will tear it to shreds before the end of the first day. They’ll say it’s a meaningless document, in the light of the affronts and betrayals we’ve endured in Mexico. The only honorable alternative has now become the conquest and occupation of all of Mexico.”
“It won’t work. Because I’m going to stand up and tell the whole truth about why and how it was negotiated.”
“John Sladen will make you look like a worse fool than Trist! He’ll leak the story of you and compassionate Maria to every newspaper in Washington. It will be reprinted in New Jersey and New York. Your political career will be over!”
“Worse things could happen.”
“You’re throwing away your chance to be president! You can still rescue it if you say you came home to denounce the treaty! I can fix it with Sarah, and the president. I’ll explain that stupid letter you wrote to him as a product of your head wound. He’ll send you back to Mexico as minister plenipotentiary. In four years you’ll come back and become president!”
George shook his head. “The thing is wrong, Caroline!”
“Wrong, right, how can you be so childish? Can’t you see those words mean nothing in the face of history? Can’t you see that this is the one chance we have of preventing the South from seceding? Give them Mexico, where they can satisfy their dreams of martial glory and take half of their slaves and reduce their fears of a race war. Give them a future that doesn’t fill their nights with horrible dreams.”
George shook his head. “Their worries about a race war have nothing to do with this. Occupying all of Mexico is wrong. The end never justifies the means, Caroline. The South will have to deal with slavery where it is, as it is. We’ll have to help her, of course. We’ll have to be patient.”
“You’re dreaming. The abolitionists are not going to be patient. They’ve opened a newspaper here in Washington. Flinging their filthy rhetoric in the very faces of Southern politicians. They’re the most vicious, self-righteous people God ever created. Does Jeremy’s letter suggest even a hint of a generous spirit?”
“I despise Jeremy Biddle at least as much as I despise Johnny Sladen. But that’s personal. I’m prepared to deal with both of them politically.”
“Nothing else could explain such delusions but a woman who’s made you feel supernatural. Are you going back to her? Is she coming here?”
“No to both questions.”
“If you go through with this, you’ll never touch me again. You know that?”
For a moment Maria’s voice whispered forgive in George’s throbbing skull. “Caroline, can’t we separate these two things, somehow?”
“No. You want to know why? Because you’re not just betraying me. You’re betraying the president and Sarah. He’s dying little by little, day by day, in that house—thanks to this war. She’s dying with him, in a way. Now I have to go tell them I’ve failed to change your excuse for a mind.”
“You don’t have to do anything. I’ll go. I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’ve seen too many men die for this country—to let it be dishonored.”
“They don’t want to see you. Sarah wouldn’t allow you to subject the president to an argument as stupid as the one we’re having.”
Caroline twisted away from him to crush her face into the cushions of the chair. “I loved you! I loved you! We could have been so happy!”
George struggled upstairs to their bedroom. He grabbed a nightshirt and blundered down the
hall to his son Jonathan’s room. He felt dazed, battered—it was not much different from how he felt after the Molino. He stared around the narrow room. The walls were decorated with mementos of Jonathan’s years at Columbia. The decades whirled back to the day George Stapleton saw Caroline Kemble on the steamboat dock. Could it be true, what she said about loving him? For a moment Sor Juana flickered in his brain.
Hombres necios que acusais
a la mujer sin razón
Ah, stupid men, unreasonable
In blaming woman’s nature
Maria Pena de Vega whispered, You must forgive her.
George dismissed them both. Forgiveness would restore Caroline’s power over him. Once there was an honorable peace with Mexico, he would think about forgiveness.
Another, harsher voice asked, But would Caroline?
George knew the answer: Never. But he could not turn back now. Hugh Stapleton and his shadowy friends, those faceless American fathers he had never met, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, would not tolerate it. But the voice, unrelenting, refused to let him dodge what his determination meant. Again it snarled, Never.
TWELVE
AMERICANS WANT TO BE POWERFUL—and good. Only a few of us understand we can’t be both things. Lying in the canopied bed where she had expected to embrace a triumphant George Stapleton, Caroline listened to Aaron Burr’s mordant wisdom. In the morning, without even five minutes of sleep, she arose and faced a haggard husband at the breakfast table. If there was any comfort in their joint insomnia, it was as cold as the weather outside. The rain had turned to sleet overnight, coating trees and buildings with an icy glaze.
In a detached voice, Caroline filled George in on his older sons. “Jonathan is turning into an abolitionist, thanks to his continuing friendship with his roommate, Ben Dall. Charlie is failing all his courses at Princeton. I think we should let him go to New Orleans, where John Sladen assures me he’ll flourish on the Cotton Exchange, if you loan him fifty thousand dollars to give him a flying start.”
“Where is he now?”
“At Bowood, where I fear he’ll ruin some respectable young woman and give us another headache.”
She took almost savage pleasure in that us. It reminded him that they were still husband and wife, no matter what they thought of each other.
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to both of them. I’m going up to New Jersey as soon as possible. I intend to run Jeremy Biddle out of the family—and the state.”
What did that mean? Was he trying to tell her that he regretted what he had learned from Jeremy? Or was he trying to say he regretted what they had said to each other last night? Probably neither.
“There’s no hope of changing your mind about Mexico?”
His face froze into a mask of antagonism. He shook his big head. She shoved aside her coffee cup and told Mercy to order the chaise brought around to the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the White House.”
She dressed in black, as if she were in mourning. In a way, she was. She was mourning the death of her dream of fame, the death of her dream of love for her husband. Would she also have to face the death of another love? What should she tell Sarah about George’s revolt? The thought of confessing everything made her shudder.
Walking to the stairs, she passed Jonathan’s room, where George had slept last night. On the dresser was Jeremy Biddle’s letter. She stuffed it into her purse. What was she doing? Was she going to fling it into the Potomac? Show it to John Sladen? She could not explain the impulse. She only knew the thing belonged to her more than to George or anyone else.
Rolling through the empty ice-glazed streets, Caroline almost hoped the skittish mare that Judson Diggs had chosen for the chaise would stumble or run wild. A fatal accident would be the simplest solution to her dilemma. She composed an obituary in her head: Mrs. Stapleton’s salon at her 3600 Pennsylvania Avenue home has been one of the adornments of Washington. Expressions of sympathy from everyone of importance in the capital, from the President and First Lady to Daniel Webster to Dolley Madison, have deluged her grieving family.
“Mornin’, Miz Stapleton.”
She was at the South Portico of the White House. The smiling Negro porter, Ezekiel, was calming the jumpy horse. The ice glistening on all the White House trees made the place look like a mansion in a fairy tale—or a nightmare. A crack as loud as a cannon shot made the horse—and Caroline—start. “What’s that?” she cried.
“Tree limbs breakin’ off. Not a good day to go out ridin’. One of them limbs could hurt a body real bad.”
She ignored these cautionary words and strode into the White House. Fate apparently had other pains planned for her. Upstairs, a maid said Mrs. Polk was in her study.
Sarah was also in black. She was performing her daily ritual of reading the latest newspapers from New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, crowded with the usual sneers against James Knox Polk. The papers were stacked in a neat pile on her worktable.
“Can I interrupt you?” Caroline said.
“You can always interrupt me. Especially from this chore,” Sarah said with a tired smile.
They exchanged a kiss and Sarah sank into her chair again. “Wait until you hear the latest news from Mexico,” she said. “General Scott has court-martialed General Worth and General Pillow. They in turn are accusing him of all sorts of military misconduct. We were up until three A.M. drafting a letter that reprimands everyone.”
Caroline nodded, gripped by an almost overwhelming nausea. How could she tell this exhausted woman more bad news? But it had to be done. “George arrived last night. Without a word of warning. He walked into my Thursday reception. Afterward, we talked. There’s—there’s no possibility of my changing his mind. He intends to take his seat in the Senate and support the treaty without reservations.”
“Is that all you have to tell me?”
Caroline struggled fiercely to suppress her tears. Today if ever she must not, she could not, be weak. But the tears remorselessly trickled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to burden you with my … my pain. You have more than enough to contend with here.”
“When two people love each other, the word burden loses its meaning.”
“If I told you everything, you … might despise me. You would despise me. You couldn’t help yourself. It would be the end of our love.”
“Try me.”
“It concerns an indiscretion, an immoral act, a sin—”
Caroline stopped in utter confusion, unable to believe that she had said that last word. Sins were only committed by believers in God. She was not, she never would be, one of those weak-kneed creatures. But she had said sin. Was she trying to anticipate what Sarah would call it?
“A sin I committed many years ago.”
“Dearest, we’re all sinners in God’s eyes. He sees through our pretensions, our justifications. Surely you must know that every day I’ve spent in this house, I’ve faced my sin, my domineering pride, which has destroyed a good man’s love and may yet destroy his life. The only thing that’s sustained me is the knowledge that God understands and forgives me—and so do you.”
There were tears on Sarah’s face now. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, a gesture that somehow underscored her fierce determination to persevere in spite of the way her dream of fame had become a nightmare. A wild hope that love would understand, that love would forgive her, seized Caroline’s soul. Wordlessly, she took Jeremy Biddle’s letter from her purse and handed it to Sarah Childress Polk.
Caroline watched disbelief, then dismay, then revulsion, play across Sarah’s face. When she finished, she slumped in her chair as if someone had struck her a savage blow. “It makes me wish … it makes me wish that there was no such thing as a woman.”
“But there is,” Caroline said. “There always will be.”
“There isn’t a word of truth in what he says about you and Sladen … since?”
“None.”
<
br /> “Has Sladen behaved honorably toward you?”
“Not always. But I’ve tried to forgive him. Men are tormented by dreams of mythical desire. Men like him, at any rate. With souls full of rage.”
Sarah nodded. How much they had learned since they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue on that summer morning in 1828, twenty years ago. “Should we abandon All Mexico?”
“By no means. What George said to me last night has severed all and every bond of love, of loyalty, between us. In a curious way, I feel desolated—but free.”
“I know what you mean,” Sarah said in low, musing voice. “Love is a burden as well as a joy. We can live without joy.”
She was confessing what she had hinted more than once—that her marriage with James Polk was as dead as Caroline’s with George Stapleton. Had James snarled atrocious insults at her in the desperate hours between midnight and dawn when he faced the truth about his floundering presidency? Probably. Men have to strike out at something, and who is more convenient than their wives? Especially this wife, who had driven him to this personal Armageddon.
“I think we should proceed with our plan,” Caroline said. “The treaty should go to the Senate with a noncommittal message from the president. Senator Sladen and his friends will understand that they have the president’s permission to attack and destroy it.”
“Have you spoken to Sladen?”
“No. I decided to wait until I saw George. Now I have no alternative—”
“I’m prepared to do it for you.”
“No. I think you—above all—should remain aloof from this process. I don’t trust Senator Sladen’s discretion. He’ll have to take my word for your alliance with him.”
Sarah gestured to the newspapers. “I just read a letter in the Natchez paper from General John Quitman, endorsing All Mexico. Perhaps we should bring him home and offer to make him our minister plenipotentiary.”
“Anyone but General Pillow.”
The Wages of Fame Page 57
