by Gore Vidal
“A hot-house blossom. What a wretched life those two must have.” Hay was surprised at his own observation. He made it a point never to speculate on the private lives of others, particularly with Clara, who sat in constant judgment, studying every shred of evidence, and weighing all hearsay in the scales of her own perfect justice.
“I don’t think they know they are wretched.” Clara held up a napkin as if to blindfold herself, like Justice, and pronounce verdict. “They do go on and on about the child they lost. But I think that gives them something to talk about. She worships him, you know. While he…” Clara stopped to give Hay his moment in the stand to speak as witness for the male.
“He seems devoted. There is no one else, either.”
Clara began to frown: irregularity in marriage disturbed her almost as much as an ill-run house. Hay quietly added, “I speak, my dear, of friends, men or women. The Major is quite alone, it seems to me, which makes him very like the President.”
“He is the President.”
Hay smiled; pushed a crumb out of his beard. “When I say the President like that, seriously, I mean only one.”
“Mr. Lincoln. I wish I’d known him.”
“I wish I had, too.” Hay tried to visualize the Ancient, but could only summon up the dead life-mask in his study. Lincoln had been erased from his mind by too much-or too little?-thought upon the subject. “But no one knew him, except Mrs. Lincoln, who was often mad, while no one at all really knows the Major…”
“Not even the dreadful Mr. Hanna?”
“Particularly not the dreadful Marcus Aurelius Hanna. No, Mr. McKinley has done it all alone.” Hay laughed.
Clara looked at him sharply. She hated to be excluded from anything. Whenever she caught him smiling at remembered dialogue or rehearsing phrases to be used, she would say, “Tell me! Tell me what you’re smiling about. It must be very funny.” Now she added, “What are you thinking of?”
“I was thinking of something the Major said the other evening. We were in the upstairs oval room, the two of us, and he said, ‘From the Mexican war in 1848 until 1898, we were sound asleep as a nation. Internationally, that is. Happy in our isolation. Now all that has changed. We are everywhere. We are treated now with a respect which we were not when I was inaugurated.’ ”
Clara blinked. “True enough, I suppose. But why did you laugh?”
“I laughed because when I reminded him that, originally, he had been inclined to give the Filipinos their freedom, he said that that had never been his intention. From the beginning, he said, he had meant to hold on to everything. When I reminded him of his conversation with God, he gave me his secret kindly Borgia smile.”
“Is he greater than Lincoln?”
“He is as… crucial, which puts them on a par, in a way.” Hay picked up the Washington Tribune. A headline celebrated the burning of a livery stable in Arlington. “Our putative daughter-in-law has a fixation about fire.”
“If she would only confine herself to that sort of flame.” Clara was severe.
“I quite like what she does,” said Hay, who quite liked Caroline. “Del is lucky.”
“I think I like her, too. But she is not like us. She is French, really.”
“The French are not, all of them, so very wicked. Look at M. Cambon.”
Throughout their marriage Clara had been torn between a desire, on the one hand, to know everything about Hay’s many years in Europe and a conviction, on the other, that she must keep all knowledge of sin from her. She vacillated between frivolous desire and stern conviction. She vacillated now. “I suppose it’s her independence that I can’t get used to. She is like a young man…”
“Rather better to look at than any young man I’ve ever met.”
“Del seems so young beside her.” Clara shifted ground. She had never been able to accommodate the unusual, which Hay not only accommodated easily, but often courted.
“There is always,” Hay noted that the snow was now starting to fall again, as it always did once the White House carriage ways had been laboriously cleared, “the Cassini girl.”
“Do you think he likes her?”
“I told him to woo her, for his country’s sake.”
“Patriotism!” Clara sighed. Hay was never certain that his wife understood his jokes. She registered them politely; but seldom laughed, once the registration had been made.
“She’s uncommonly pretty…”
“But not legitimate, they say.” Clara was remorseless in such matters. In July, she had refused to attend Kate Chase’s funeral in Glenwood Cemetery. Husband and wife had quarrelled; and Hay had gone alone to say good-by-to himself. Kate herself had been said good-by to when he last saw her, with bloated face, dyed hair, trying to sell him eggs from her Maryland farm.
“No. She is legitimate. I had our ambassador in Petersburg find out. But after Cassini’s other wives, and all his losses at gambling, he never dared asked the Tsar for permission to marry her mother, an actress, someone so far beneath him, hard as that is to visualize.” Across the square the sky was like a gray iron plate, and the shovellers at the White House were now striking attitudes of despair, as the snow began, once more, to pile up. The reception was going to be chaos. Snow and trains. He shuddered.
“What matters,” said Clara, “is Del. The young people seem to think that he is in love with Mlle. Cassini. Ever since he took her to the Bachelors’ German at the Armory.”
“Where you presided.”
“Of course I have no objections to…” Clara’s unfinished sentences were often her judgments.
“To foreign girls like Marguerite Cassini or Caroline Sanford, who is as good as foreign. But you prefer the native stock for Del.”
“Am I wrong?”
“You are never wrong, Clara.”
“There are so many girls right here, like the Warder girls, and Bessie Davis and Julia Foraker…”
“Don’t! You make me think of votes in the Senate. As for Del and the Cassini girl, I’ve learned a lot. The Russians and the French plot against us and the British in China.” Hay relayed to Clara what Del had learned about Holy Russia’s intentions in Asia; and Clara smiled approvingly, and listened not at all. Marriage mattered. China did not. Meanwhile, the White House had disappeared behind a screen of falling snow. Fortunately, the Hays would not be obliged to join the long procession of carriages. Since Vice-President Hobart’s death, John Hay was now the President’s constitutional heir, a matter of midnight panic, when he saw himself suddenly elevated by death to the presidency, an office which he had always pined-rather than fought-for, and now no longer had the strength to fill. Fortunately, McKinley’s health was excellent.
On the other hand, Hay suddenly found that he did have the unexpected strength to join Clarence and some of his friends in a pillow fight in the rough-room; and only Clara’s warning, “We’ll be late if you don’t get dressed,” stopped the delightful game. Clarence was both thoughtful and playful; unlike the ever-mysterious Del, who had said that, yes, he would be at the White House reception but, no, he would get there on his own.
The snow had stopped falling as Hay and Clara got into their carriage. Driveways that had been cleaned of snow that morning now resembled the steppes of Siberia. An endless line of carriages moved slowly beneath the portico of what Count Cassini had referred to as “a pleasant country home.” Groundmen scattered sawdust beside the driveway as, in pairs, pedestrians moved slowly along Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House grounds.
By earlier agreement with Mr. Cortelyou, Hay’s carriage went round the White House to the south entrance, which was used only for special visitors. As the city vanished beneath feathery fronds of snow, he tried to recall what winters had been like in Lincoln’s day; but as he had been young then, all that he could recall of that far-off time was a constant, languorous high summer, broken by fits of malarial fever.
One of the German door-keepers helped the Hays from their carriage. “Mr. Cortelyou would be pl
eased, sir, if you were to go directly to the Blue Room.”
In the relative gloom of the lower White House corridor, Hay and Clara, arm in arm (she supporting him more than he her), made their way up the stairs just back of the Tiffany screen which hid the state apartments from the sort of curious crowd that was now gathering in the entrance hall. Green, Red, and Blue Rooms were already filled with distinguished guests. As Clara had predicted, the trains were a nightmare, not improved by the slush and mud from shoes. The carpets were like wet burlap sacking, reminding Hay of Congress in his youth when tobacco-chewing was universally popular and, at session’s end, the deep red carpet of the Senate would be river-mud brown.
The Blue Room contained the members of the Cabinet and the chiefs of diplomatic missions. As always, Hay was charmed and amused by the costumes of the-he always thought of them as his-diplomats. Pauncefote wore what looked to be an admiral’s uniform laced with enough gold to please a Byzantine emperor. Lady Pauncefote, plain and mild in everyday life, had suddenly grown from her mouse-gray hair, like antlers, a tiara so splendid that it seemed to aspire to be a crown. In her silver dress, she reminded Hay of an icon; even her constitutionally sallow face looked as if it might have been darkened by the smoke of votive candles. She was in marked contrast to her usual untidy self, invariably wearing a highly unbecoming shawl, “the gift,” she would murmur, “of our dear Queen.” Cambon was red and gold; Cassini more gold than anything else, while his daughter, Marguerite, glowed at his side, the only youthful, beautiful object in the room. If Hay had been Del, he would have carried her off and married her.
The ambassadors greeted Hay with the punctiliousness that his rank required. Clara flattered the wives. In the entrance hall, the Marine band played.
Mr. Cortelyou drew Hay to one side. “We have a problem, sir.”
“Never say ‘we’ to me. You have a problem, and I won’t take it on.”
“Well, sir. It’s protocol…”
“Ask Mr. Adee. He loves protocol.”
“It’s the Navy, sir.”
Hay was now interested. “They want to take precedence over the Army?”
“Yes, sir. It’s been a terrible week. It’s due to the war, and what the Navy did…”
Hay knew the problem; all Washington did. “Admiral Dewey outranks General Miles,” said Hay promptly, “so he wants the Navy to go in to see the President ahead of the Army.”
“Then you do know, sir?”
“No, I didn’t know. But I’m pretty good at figuring out this sort of thing. Stupidity has always been kind of a specialty of mine. Now I suggest the person you deal with…”
“… is me.” Elihu Root now stood between them. “I gave a very hard ruling. Since the beginning of the country, the Army has taken precedence over the Navy. And that’s that, I told Dewey.”
“What did he say to you, sir?”
“He said I should talk to Mrs. Dewey.” The Root smile glittered like a knife. “I told him I was much too busy. I also have no small talk.”
“I never realized that before,” said Hay comfortably. “Is all your talk big?”
“Gargantuan.”
“Well, mine’s all small. So I guess I don’t ever really understand a word you say.”
Cortelyou hurried away; unamused by senior-statesman facetiousness. Root then came to the point. “Ten dollars, Hay. Fork it over. I win.”
“About the start of the century?”
Root nodded; he withdrew a press cutting from his frock-coat. “This is authority,” said Root. “The Review of Reviews.”
“Hardly…” Hay began.
But Root was inexorable; he read: “ ‘With December 31 “… Dr. Shaw is referring to yesterday…’we completed the year 1899-that is to say, we round out ninety-nine of the hundred years that are necessary to complete a full century.’ Now, dear Hay, attend closely to his reasoning…”
“You know I’m hopeless when it comes to figures, dear Root.”
“As your vast real estate holdings testify. Anyway, you are sufficiently numerate to get this point. ‘We must give the nineteenth century the three hundred sixty-five days that belong to its hundredth and final year, before we begin the year one of the twentieth century.’ You will like this part.” Root beamed contentedly. Just back of him, Hay noted that Mrs. Dewey, all sapphire blue, had somehow got herself to the Blue Room’s center, where Cortelyou stared at her, deeply alarmed.
Root continued, unaware of the drama in the making. “ ‘The mathematical faculty works more keenly in monetary affairs than elsewhere…’ One would think that Dr. Shaw knew you personally, Hay.”
“I am Everyman, Root. You know that. An on-going exemplar of the ordinary and the modest. Something to be found on any grandmother’s sampler.”
“Be that as it may, none of the people who have prepared to allow ninety-nine years to go for a century would suppose that a nineteen-hundred-dollar debt had been fully met by a tender of eighteen hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Well?”
“You are brutal.” Hay gave Root ten dollars. “You win. And now it is possible-probable even-that I shall have my wish and die in the nineteenth century.”
“What a curious ambition. My God, there’s Mrs. Dewey.”
“She has captured Mr. Long. He is her Cavite Bay.”
The great china-doll eyes of Mrs. Dewey were turned on the Secretary of the Navy, while a tiny doll’s hand rested gently, imploringly, on his forearm.
“Mischief is afoot,” Hay began; but then the Marine band broke into “Hail to the Chief,” and the guests who had been waiting in Green, Red, and Blue Rooms now stationed themselves at the foot of the stairs as the President and-to general amazement-Mrs. McKinley made their slow, stately descent. She clung to him; he held her upright. There was something poignant, Hay felt, in their perfect ordinariness. The other guests were already crowded into the East Room.
McKinley nodded, first, to Hay, who bowed; and then fell in behind the last of the diplomatic corps, the Cabinet behind him.
Suddenly, Hay was aware that Mrs. Dewey had moved into position at his left elbow, while clinging to the right arm of the Secretary of the Navy. “Happy New Year, Mr. Hay!” She was brightly innocent; even the eyelashes were like those of a doll, in odd clusters, giving a starry artificial look to the china-blue eyes.
“What a joy,” murmured Hay, never so happy as when he was able to indulge in a minor insincerity, “to find you here with us, in the Cabinet.”
“It was dear Mr. Long who took me in. I told him that the Admiral and I must leave early, and if we were to wait until Cabinet, Court, diplomats, Congress and Army went through the line, why, we’d be here longer than my Admiral’s whole war, and Mr. Long said he’d take me through. So kind…”
Hay felt Clara’s disapproval on his right; and saw Root’s amused anger or angered amusement at Mrs. Dewey’s bold victory over the Army, and himself.
At the door to the East Room, the President paused; and looked anxiously down at Mrs. McKinley, who looked up, wanly, at him. Then the President made his entrance, going straight to the throne-like blue chair at the room’s opposite end; here he deposited Mrs. McKinley, who sank into the chair, clutching a bouquet of orchids to her bosom.
As Hay and Clara entered the crowded room, he was careful to avoid, as always, his single superstition, the cleared space at the center, where Lincoln had lain in his coffin. Otherwise, the East Room had no particular significance for Hay. It had always been a sort of theater, whose star was the president of the moment, whose audience were the dignitaries who came and went, usually without trace; yet, simultaneously, Washington was a city that although it never missed anyone never forgot anyone, either. Again, Hay thought of the house-the city, too, and the republic beyond-as a theater, with a somewhat limited repertory of plays; and types. The only time the East Room had ever come alive was during the weeks that a Kentucky regiment of volunteers, eager to protect President Lincoln, had bivouacked in the room, where they had used
the fireplaces for cooking. Later, Mrs. Lincoln would make the East Room splendid, at a stunning cost to the government and to her husband, who insisted on paying for some of her madder luxuries. Now the East Room was, again, shabby, and depressing; rather like a resort hotel out of season. Where Mrs. Lincoln’s glorious sea-green carpet had unfurled its expansive expensive length there was now a bright yellow mustard-colored carpet, presently a bright perfect foil for muddy footprints. Between windows and fireplaces rows of shabby, pumpkin-shaped seats were placed, each with a stricken palm tree rising from its center. The effect was peculiarly dismal in the glare of the huge electrified chandeliers.
Mrs. McKinley endured her high estate for an hour; then the President himself took her upstairs; and the guests were now free to roam outside their hierarchical orders. Mrs. Dewey’s preemptory strike had been noticed by all; and General Miles looked very grim indeed. The Admiral seemed not to have noticed anything as he and triumphant wife departed, while Hay was taken to one side by Lord Pauncefote. Across the room the Russian Ambassador glared at the two conspirators. Hay knew that Cassini regarded him as not only an Anglophile but a dupe of England. Actually, in most matters of any consequence to the United States, England followed America’s lead; in exchange, the Administration reciprocated by tacit encouragement in South Africa. Hay was prepared to discuss the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, soon to go to the Senate, but to his surprise, Pauncefote had not canals but China on his mind. “You know, Mr. Hay,” the old man’s seductive barrister’s voice buzzed agreeably in Hay’s ear, “that the dismemberment of China continues, with the Russians busiest of us all…”
“ ‘Us’? We are not busy.”
“I speak of wicked Europe, of course, not innocent America.”
“Thank you.”
“They are consolidating Manchuria. They will soon be Russifying Peking and North China, an essential market for your textile industries, which the Russians mean to close.”
Cassini, a few yards away, clamped his monocle into his left eye-socket; and glared at them over the head of Cambon. Cassini seemed to be listening to every word.
