Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Empire

  Gore Vidal

  Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal's monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.

  Gore Vidal

  Empire

  The fourth book in the Narratives of Empire series, 1987

  ONE

  1

  “THE WAR ENDED last night, Caroline. Help me with these flowers.” Elizabeth Cameron stood in the open French window, holding a large blue-and-white china vase filled with roses, somewhat showily past their prime. Caroline helped her hostess carry the heavy vase into the long cool dim drawing room.

  At forty, Mrs. Cameron was, to Caroline’s youthful eye, very old indeed; nevertheless, she was easily the handsomest of America’s great ladies and certainly the most serenely efficient, able to arrange a platoon of flower vases before breakfast with the same ease and briskness that her uncle, General Sherman, had devastated Georgia.

  “One must always be up at dawn in August.” Mrs. Cameron sounded to Caroline rather like Julius Caesar, reporting home. “Servants-like flowers-tend to wilt. We shall be thirty-seven for lunch. Do you intend to marry Del?”

  “I don’t think I shall ever marry anyone.” Caroline frowned with pleasure at Mrs. Cameron’s directness. Although Caroline thought of herself as American, she had actually lived most of her life in Paris and so had had little contact with women like Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the perfect modern American lady-thus, earth’s latest, highest product, as Henry James had not too ironically proclaimed. When Del asked Caroline to join the house-party at Surrenden Dering, deep in the English countryside, she had not even pretended to give the matter thought. She had come straight on from Paris, with a single night at Brown’s Hotel in London. That was Friday, and the United States and Spain had been at war for three exciting months. Now, apparently, the war was over. She tried to recall the date. Was it August 12 or August 13, 1898?

  “Mr. Hay says that the President agreed to an armistice yesterday afternoon. Which was last night for us.” She frowned. “Those roses look rather awful, don’t they?”

  “They’re a bit… dusty. I suppose from all that heat.”

  “Heat!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a fairly pleasant sound so unlike the stylized staccato screech of a Paris lady. “You should try Pennsylvania this time of year! My husband has two places. Each hotter than the other, with mosquitoes and gnats and something very small and vile that burrows like a mole under your skin and raises a welt. You would make a good wife for Del.”

  “But would he make a good husband for me?” Through the tall windows Caroline could see her co-host, Don Cameron, on the grassy lower terrace. He was driving a buggy, drawn by a pair of American trotting-horses. Senator Cameron was a red-faced, heavily moustached but modestly bearded man, older by a quarter century than his wife. As she could not abide him, she treated him with exquisite courtesy and deference; just as she treated in a rather cool and offhanded way Caroline’s other co-host, the equally ancient Henry Adams, who entirely adored her as she entirely accepted him. According to Del, the trio had struck Henry James, who lived a few miles away at Rye, as “maddeningly romantic.” When Del had repeated this to Caroline, both agreed that although antiquity might indeed be instructive, exotic, even touching, no couple so aged could ever be romantic, maddeningly or otherwise. But then the celebrated expatriate Mr. James was like some highly taut musical string of feline gut, constantly attuned to vibrations unheard by cruder ears.

  Yet old as Mrs. Cameron was, Caroline could not help but admire the slender waist, which seemed unstayed; also, the heat had so flushed her cheeks that she looked-Caroline finally capitulated-beautiful, at least this morning, with naturally waved, old-gold hair, cat-like blue eyes, straight nose and straight mouth, framed by the square jaw of her celebrated uncle. Had Caroline not been so recently and so arduously finished at Mlle. Souvestre’s Allenswood School she might have offered herself as an apprentice to Mrs. Cameron: “Because I want to live forever in America, now that Father’s dead.” Caroline heard herself say rather more than she had intended.

  “Forever is a long time. But if I had forever to spend somewhere it wouldn’t be there, let me tell you. It would be Paris.”

  “Well, since I’ve spent most of my life-so far-in Paris, home looks all the greener, I suppose.”

  “May you find it so,” said Mrs. Cameron vaguely, her attention now distracted by the cook, an elderly woman who was at the door, with the day’s menus to be discussed. “Oh, Cook! What a triumph last night! Senator Cameron admired-and couldn’t stop eating-the sweet potatoes.”

  “Impossible things he gives me to prepare.” In a long white dress, the cook looked like an abbess in a novel by Scott.

  Mrs. Cameron laughed without much joy. “We must do our best to please. All of us. My husband,” she turned to Caroline, just as Don Cameron made a second appearance on the lower terrace, waving a whip, his trotting-horses busily trotting, “hates English food. So he sends home to Pennsylvania for everything we eat. Tonight we shall have corn.”

  “But which is it, ma’am?” The cook looked desperate; the abbey besieged.

  “It is green and cylindrical and should be shucked of its covering and boiled, but not too long. We’ll have the watermelon with the other fruits. I trust you with the rest, dear Cook.”

  “But…” The abbess wailed, and fled.

  Mrs. Cameron sat on a sofa beneath a Millais portrait of a lady of the previous generation; and looked, in her yellowy-white lace, as if she, too, belonged to that earlier time, before the new era of loud clattering railroads, sinister silent telegraphs, garish electric lights. Caroline noticed a delicate line of perspiration on her hostess’s upper lip while a vein at the forehead’s center pulsed. Caroline thought of goddesses as she gazed upon Mrs. Cameron; thought of Demeter’s long search for her daughter Persephone in hell; thought of herself as Persephone and Mrs. Cameron as the mother that might have been. On the other hand, was she herself in any sense in hell? And if she was, would Mrs. Cameron rescue her? But Caroline was quite aware that she had never really known anything except her life just as it was; yet she also knew enough of metaphysics to realize that it is often a condition of hell not to suspect the existence of any alternative to one’s life. Caroline had gone from nuns to a freethinkers’ school. From one concentric ring of hell, she now decided, to another. Yes, she was in hell-or Hades, at least, and though regnant over the dead, she eagerly awaited the earth-mother goddess to free her from Death’s embrace and restore-oh, the glamor of Greek myth!-springtime to all the frozen world above.

  A shaft of bright morning light suddenly made Mrs. Cameron’s face glow like pink Parian marble, made the hair gold fire, prompted the goddess to turn her glittering blue gaze on Caroline and say-now for the oracle! thought Caroline, the next thing she says to me will change my life, liberate me from the underworld: “I allow the servants exactly eight percent for graft. But not a penny more.” Demeter radiated earthly light. “As there is no reforming them-or anyone else-I believe in keeping graft to an agreed-upon but never mentioned figure. That is how my husband governs Pennsylvania.” Well, I have the message, thought Caroline; now I must interpret it.

  Caroline answered in kind. “My father could never bear the commissions servants take. But then he never got used to France.”

  In fact, Colonel Sanford had refused, on what he claimed to be moral grounds, ever to speak French. He thought the French indecent and their language an intricate trap laid for American innocence. During the Colonel’s long widowhood, a series of intensely moral English, Swiss and German ladies had interpreted for him, pale successors to Caroline’s mother, Emma, alleged by all
to have been vivid; she had died not long after Caroline’s birth; she had been dark. For Caroline, Emma was not even a memory, only a portrait in the main salon of their chateau, Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.

  Mrs. Cameron was now ablaze with August light. “Why did he exile himself?” Mrs. Cameron was suddenly almost personal; as opposed to inquisitive.

  “I’ve never known.” But of course Caroline and her half-brother, Blaise, had their suspicions, not to be voiced even to an earth-goddess. “It was after he married my mother. You see, she was really French. I mean, she was born in Italy, but her first husband was French.”

  “She was born a Schermerhorn Schuyler.” Mrs. Cameron was prompt. Everyone knew everyone else’s connections in the grand American world, so unlike Paris, where only a few deranged spinsters in the Faubourg Saint-Germain busied themselves with genealogy. “Your mother was a bit before my time, of course. But people still talked of her when I was young.”

  Actually, Caroline knew that Mrs. Cameron had married the Senator in the obviously astounding year of her own birth and Emma’s death, 1878: a silver box on a console gave the wedding date, a gift from Mrs. Cameron’s other famous uncle, a longtime senator who had been, until that spring, President McKinley’s secretary of state. The great career had been brought to an abrupt and ignominious end when Secretary Sherman had had a lapse of memory while talking to the Austrian minister at Washington, no bad thing in itself but when it developed that he thought that he was the Austrian minister and lapsed into German, which he did not know, President McKinley was obliged, sadly, to let him depart. Mrs. Cameron was still upset. “After all, Uncle John signed my passport,” she would say.

  Now Mrs. Cameron wanted to know what would become of the Colonel’s celebrated place at Saint-Cloud. Caroline said, truthfully, that she did not know. “Everything has been left to Blaise and me. But the will hasn’t been properly-what is the word?”

  “Probated,” said the goddess brightly. “Let us hope the division will be equal.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it probably is.” But Caroline had her doubts. Over the years, Colonel Sanford had progressed from pronounced eccentricity to the edge of madness, obliging the butler to double as taster at mealtimes: the Colonel feared poison. In the warm weather, the Colonel preferred daughter to son; then, just as the leaves started to turn, he preferred son to daughter. During alternating equinoxes, new wills would be drawn. As luck would have it, he had died in cold weather, when the horse he was riding across the railroad track at Saint-Cloud shied, and threw him in the path of the Blue Train itself. Death was swift. That was a year ago; and the lawyers in New York were still unravelling the various wills. In September, Caroline and Blaise would know who had got what. Fortunately, the Sanford estate was supposed to be large enough for two. The “house” at Saint-Cloud was a palace built by one of Louis XV’s less able-and so enormously wealthy-finance ministers. In Caroline’s youth there had never been fewer than forty servants in the chateau while two villages on the estate provided farm labor. But as madness began to claim the Colonel, potential murderers were summarily dismissed until there was hardly anyone left to keep up the splendor paid for by Sanford Encaustic Tiles (made in Lowell, Massachusetts) as well as the Cincinnati-Atlanta Railroad, a profitable postwar invention, built to replace the railroad that Mrs. Cameron’s Uncle Cump (William Tecumseh Sherman-hence, Cump) had smashed to bits on his exuberant march to the sea.

  Six children now filled the room as if they were twelve. There were two nieces of Mrs. Cameron, her stolid twelve-year-old daughter, Martha, one Curzon girl, two small Herbert boys, and Clarence, the plain young brother of Adelbert Hay and son of the house celebrity, John Hay, American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mrs. Cameron now directed their revels with brisk authority. “You are to go outside, girls. To the stables. There’s a cart. And Mr. Adams-Uncle Dordie-has got you two ponies. Boys, there is lawn tennis in Pluckley…”

  “We’ve won the war, Mrs. Cameron,” said Clarence, in a voice that kept cracking. “On Father’s terms, too. Cuba’s forever free,” he suddenly boomed, as the voice dropped an octave, to everyone’s delight. “But we get to keep Puerto Rico. For ourselves.”

  “The question, actually,” said the grave Herbert child, all nose and high color, “is the matter of the Philippines. You Americans must really keep them, you know. In all of this-”

  “We shall decide the Philippines at lunch,” said Mrs. Cameron; and dismissed the lot.

  Caroline had now moved to the great table between the terrace windows. Cameron stationery, Surrenden Dering stationery, United States embassy stationery were scattered over the worn pear-wood surface. Blaise must be written: her hand hovered over the table. Although it was tempting to write on embassy paper, she decided that that might be misrepresenting herself, and so she reached for the pale gray Surrenden Dering writing paper. As she did, she saw a small stock of old-ivory note-paper, each sheet emblazoned with five small Chinese-red hearts, arranged like those of a playing card.

  “What is this, Mrs. Cameron?” Caroline held up one of the sheets.

  “What’s what?” Mrs. Cameron shut the door after the last of the children.

  “Writing-paper. With,” Caroline looked down at the tiny scarlet hearts, “the Five…”

  “… of Hearts.” Mrs. Cameron took the stationery from Caroline. “I can’t think who left them here. I would appreciate it if you said nothing about it.”

  “A secret society?” Caroline was intrigued.

  “Something of a secret, yes. And something of a society, too.”

  “But what… who are the Five of Hearts?”

  Mrs. Cameron smiled with no great evident joy. “You must guess. Besides, there are only four now. Like those ladies-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots.”

  “They were four to begin with.”

  “Well, these were five. But like the old ballad, where once there were five, there were then four, where four three…” Mrs. Cameron suddenly swallowed very hard. “In time, there will be none.”

  “Are you one?”

  “Oh, no! I am not so good as that.” Mrs. Cameron was gone, the mystery clutched in her long capable hand.

  Caroline was halfway through her letter to Blaise when Del Hay came in from the terrace. He was very like his mother, Clara Hay, a heavy, large-boned, handsome woman who had produced an equally heavy, rather broad-hipped son, with more face below the eyes than above, the reverse of Caroline, whose face tended to the triangular and broad-browed. “We’ve won the war,” said Del.

  “As a general greeting, I prefer good-morning.” Caroline was cool. “So far, today, everyone’s told me that we’ve won the war, and no one’s mentioned the weather. Besides, I haven’t won the war. You and your father have.”

  “You, too. You’re an American. Oh, it’s a great day for all of us.”

  “A very hot day. I’m writing your former classmate. Any message?”

  “Tell him he should be happy. At least his employer should be. The New York Journal must be frothing at the mouth, like some rabid…”

  “Eagle. May I write him on your father’s stationery?”

  “Why not? This is the summer embassy.” A young man with hair parted neatly in the middle looked into the room. “Have you seen the Ambassador?”

  “He’s in the library, Mr. Eddy. Did you just come down from London?”

  “I was here last night for dinner.” Mr. Eddy was reproachful. “Of course, there were so many people.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Del. “But there were so many. What’s the latest news?”

  “I don’t know. The telegraph office in the village has either broken down or just shut down. They’ve never had so much work, they say. But Mr. White’s on his way from London. He’ll have the latest news.” Mr. Eddy left the room to Caroline and Del, who left the room altogether. Caroline held on to Del’s arm as they stepped out onto the stone terrace with its long view of the Weald of Kent. Although Caroline did not know just what a w
eald was, she assumed that it must contain green woods and distant hills-the vista before them, in fact. They moved toward the one end of the terrace that was in shade, from a giant gnarled diseased oak. The soft green English countryside was beginning to shimmer as the before-noon sun burned a hole in a sky that ought to have been pale blue but instead was white from heat.

  “You should be more interested in our war.” Del teased her as they sauntered decorously in the shade, gravel crunching beneath their feet. Below them, on a grassy terrace, a somber peacock glared, and unfurled a far too brilliant tail. Everywhere, the bright, if dusty, overblown roses grew in remarkably ill-tended plots. But then Caroline had spent her life seeing to gardens and houses. “She will make some fine lord a splendid hostess,” said her father’s last but one “translator,” a Miss Verlop from The Hague. “Or,” said Blaise maliciously, “some fine capitalist a good factory boss.” But Caroline had no intention of being either a hostess or a wife, though a factory boss sounded interesting. Of course, she had had no desire to be a daughter or a half-sister, either. But she had dutifully served her time as the first-and duly matriculated; as for the second, Blaise was good company; and she quite liked him, so long as he did not steal her share of the estate.

  “Why should he?” Del stopped beneath a vast-again dusty-rhododendron.

  Del looked as surprised as Caroline felt: she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. Was this madness? she wondered. The Sanford family was full of eccentricity, to put the matter politely, which is how they put it to one another, quite aware that a number of them, including her father, enjoyed the homely modifier “mad as a hatter.”

  “What did I say just now?” Caroline was determined to be scientific; if she was to be like the other Sanfords, she wanted to know every phase of her descent. She would be like M. Charcot, clinical.