Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Newport itself was featured inside two New York City papers; and not much elsewhere. Currently, Newport was in the news because William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., had driven a French motor car from Newport to Boston and back, some one hundred sixty miles, in three hours and fifty-seven minutes. She memorized the item. This would get her nicely through Mrs. Fish’s lunch, where Harry Lehr was now full-time major-domo. Old Mrs. Astor no longer entertained as much as she had; she preferred to remain in her cottage, receiving only the faithful. Power was shifting-everyone said-to Mrs. Fish, though Mrs. Ogden Mills, born Livingston, was the ranking American archduchess at Newport, and when Mrs. Astor let the sceptre fall she should, by the very number of her democratic quarterings, succeed. When asked her views of the Four Hundred, Mrs. Mills had said coldly, “There are really only twenty families in New York.” Mrs. Mills did have one marvellous, even unique, gift: she could make absolutely anyone feel ill at ease in her presence. “A priceless gift,” Mrs. Delacroix had observed, mournfully, unaware of the permanently terrified expression of the spinster Aspinall, always at her side.

  Other, lesser, candidates for the throne included the lively, clever Mrs. Oliver Belmont, “the first lady ever to marry a Vanderbilt,” she would say with some satisfaction, particularly if there was a descendant of the old tugboat commodore in the room, “and the first lady ever to get a divorce, on her own terms. I was also the first American lady to marry her daughter to a duke of Marlborough, for which I shall, doubtless, suffer in the afterlife. But I meant well. And, of course, I am the first lady ever to marry a Jew, my darling Oliver Belmont. Now,” she would say, with a formidable glare in the dark intelligent eyes that fascinated Caroline, “I shall be the first woman-not lady-to see to it that every American woman will one day have the vote. For women are the hope of this country. If you doubt this, then pray to God,” she had said when she first met Caroline, and tried to recruit her for women’s suffrage, “and She will help you.” Caroline revelled in Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, but no one else in the great world did. She was too shocking and too advanced to be popular; she was also too rich and too powerful to be ignored. But she was definitely not in the line of succession to Mrs. Astor; nor wanted to be, any longer. There had been a time when Alva had threatened to replace the Astor-Plantagenets with the Vanderbilt-Tudors. But divorce had intervened; and, more dismally, good works.

  Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, heiress-presumptive, greeted her guests in the great hall at Crossways, a Colonial-style mansion, with a dining room that could seat two hundred, said Harry Lehr, greeting Caroline warmly.

  “That means you must eliminate half the Four Hundred,” said Caroline. “So which will it be? The gentlemen or the ladies?”

  “We shall never experiment, because Morton won’t let us. Sixteen is now his limit for lunch.”

  Morton was the English butler, who had served rather too many dukes, thought Caroline, who also wondered why Mrs. Fish was so impressed by the number of his grand employers while ignoring the briefness of his service with each. Morton was a tall florid man, who treated Mrs. Fish and her guests with a disdain that they may have deserved but ought not to have allowed. Caroline was not charmed.

  The ladies proved to be the season’s best; the men were not. The young and vigorous were sailing off Hazard’s Beach; or driving motor cars. Lispinard Stewart was present, however; he seemed to have stepped from the pages of a “silver fork” novel of the early nineteenth century; he was elegant, effeminate and wondrously boring. He fluttered about Caroline; who fluttered, as best she could, in the general direction of Mrs. Fish, who stood, one eye on the door to the dining room, to make sure that the magnificent Morton would not be kept waiting once he had announced that dinner was served.

  Mrs. Fish received Caroline with an interest that might have passed for warmth had Caroline been less experienced in the social wars. Mamie Fish was a plain but interesting-and interested-looking-woman with deep-set wide eyes beneath arched brows; but the rest of the face had not been worked out with the same care: the jaw was large but characterless and the mouth had been crudely sketched in, rather as if the Divine Artist-plainly, a woman, as Mrs. Belmont maintained-had decided not to undermine with incongruous beauty the easy wit of Mamie Fish, who had, in any case, captured early in life a descendant of not only the Puritan but the Dutch founders of the nation, one Stuyvesant Fish, known fondly to Mamie in Puritan parlance as “the Good Man.” As it was, the good man preferred his old house at Garrison on the Hudson to Newport or New York, an arrangement that perfectly suited Mrs. Fish and the sparkling Harry Lehr, now grown plump and somewhat less sparkling of eye.

  “I feared we should never capture you.” Mrs. Fish stared interestedly at Caroline. “We are used to Blaise in New York. But you are the enigma of Washington, a city no one ever visits. Old Mrs. Astor-not well, you know, not well at all-thinks you a great addition. But to what? I asked.”

  “Washington, perhaps.” Caroline was tentative. “Where, if you’re right, no one will ever visit me.”

  “Washington does not matter, dear child. If you like that sort of a place, try Charleston, during the azalea season, or New Orleans, where Mrs. Delacroix still keeps slaves. Oh, she’ll deny it! But the war has never been accepted in that part of the world. Just as we don’t accept Washington. Are you quite sure you don’t want to marry one of us?” The question was delivered with the famous Mamie Fish drawl.

  Caroline was surprised to find herself blushing. “There is so much to choose from.” Caroline indicated the nearest man, James Van Alen, a moneyed widower, who had modelled himself on the sort of English gentleman seen not so much in London society as on the Broadway stage. When Van Alen had first met Caroline at Mrs. Belmont’s, he had said, loudly, “Zounds!”-a word Caroline had never before heard spoken in real life-then, as he withdrew, still staring at her, he announced, “A most delectable wench, forsooth”; and placed a monocle over one eye.

  “I think,” said Mrs. Fish, “nothing could be simpler than for you to become the bride of Mr. Van Alen.”

  “I am rather near-sighted.” Caroline blinked her eyes. “I didn’t see who it was.”

  “But then you are going to marry Del Hay. You see? We do keep up. But when will he come back from South America?”

  “South Africa.”

  “It’s all the same, sweet pet. Anyway, here’s Helen. And Payne.”

  Caroline and Helen embraced. Payne’s wrist was in a sling, from tennis. “Otherwise, I’d be in the race today.” He looked with youthful displeasure at the room filled with elderly beaux, each armed, as it were, with his hereditary silver spoon as well as fork.

  “Father’s in New Hampshire. New Hampshire!” Helen seemed more than usually exuberant. “He’s been told to spend at least two months there, even if all his open doors slam shut.”

  “Has he heard from Del?”

  “Nothing since you heard last week. Everything’s diplomatic pouch. So he can’t say what he means. But the English are losing. Losing! It’s horrible!”

  At that moment Morton, ominously, announced lunch, and, dutifully, even hurriedly, Mrs. Fish took the ranking gentleman’s arm and hurried to her place at the Sheraton mahogany table, which, although set for Morton’s optimum sixteen, had all its leaves in place, giving each guest a considerable amount of room to accommodate the season’s enormous skirts. Down the center of the table an elaborate solid gold series of pagodas and bridges complemented the somewhat chinoiserie appearance of the hostess.

  Caroline was placed-as she knew that she would be-between Lispinard Stewart and James Van Alen. Longingly, she thought of her small office in Market Square, and of the flies, both living and dead, her familiars.

  “The test of a good cook,” announced James Van Alen, “is codfish cakes.”

  “Is Mrs. Fish’s cook going to give us some?”

  “Egad, Miss! This is not breakfast.”

  Lispinard Stewart explained to her, in elaborate detail, his relationship to the Stuarts,
and why his family had modestly replaced the “u” with “ew” in order not to embarrass the current ruling house of England, who feared, more than anything else, a claimant from his family to their throne, “which, by rights, is ours, as they know.”

  “And of what kingdom,” asked Caroline, remembering at last how to make conversation, “is Lispinard the royal house?”

  There was a dance that night at The Elms, given by the Burke-Roches. When Mrs. Delacroix announced that she was going home early, Caroline went with her. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I must spend the morning on the telephone, talking to Washington.”

  “When I was young, I danced all night. I was always in love.”

  “I am not in love, Mrs. Delacroix. So I sleep… and talk on the telephone.”

  “We enjoyed ourselves more. There were no telephones, of course.” They were seated in the small study off the drawing room. Although it was late July, the night was cool and a fire was burning. Mrs. Delacroix poured herself brandy, while Caroline took Apollinaris water. The old woman laughed. “Mamie’s completely under that butler’s thumb. He’s convinced her that in all great English houses, Apollinaris water must first be boiled.”

  “I would boil him if I were her.”

  Mrs. Delacroix held up a small painting on ivory. “This is your father, and my daughter.”

  “I thought you had no painting of him except in uniform?”

  “I suppose that’s because I never look at him when I look at this. I see only Denise. She was so happy. Can you tell?”

  But Caroline, like the old woman, only saw what she wanted to see-not the pretty rather banal girl but the round-faced, small-lipped young man whom she had never known, and could not associate with the red-faced loud figure of her own youth. “They were both happy,” said Caroline, neutrally; and gave the picture back.

  “Your mother came here once in the summer of ’76. She was beautiful.”

  “She was happy, too. Wasn’t she?”

  “My daughter died, giving birth to Blaise.” The spider’s web across the old woman’s face tautened suddenly: had a fly been trapped? was the spider, ever watchful, close by? “Your mother was her best friend, at that time.”

  “This is all before I was born.” Caroline did not like the direction that the conversation was taking. “My father never spoke-to me, at least-of his first wife. He seldom spoke of my mother, either. So Blaise and I are each motherless.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Delacroix crossed her tiny ankles, just visible beneath the watered pale blue silk of her evening gown. “It is curious how Emma died in much the same way as Denise, as a result of giving birth.”

  “Emma. At last. You have said her name. Now tell me, was she really so dark? And why?” Caroline hurled the question at the old lady, who visibly winced; then rallied. “Your mother,” she said, most evenly, “killed my daughter, and that is the precise nature-and quality-of her darkness.”

  Caroline had often observed women swoon either from too-tight corseting or as an act of desperate policy. She wondered whether or not this was a proper moment for her to experiment, entirely as a matter of policy, with a sudden dead-faint. But she recalled herself. She would give blow for blow. “How was this… murder, as you do not quite call it, achieved?”

  “Denise had been warned that she could never have a child. Your mother encouraged her to have one, by the man your mother wanted to marry, even then, your father-to-be, Colonel Sanford.”

  Caroline bared her teeth in what she hoped might be mistaken by firelight for a young girl’s sweet smile. “I find no darkness here. Only your surmise. How does one woman encourage another to have a child, when each knows the consequences?”

  “There was a lady-I use the word ironically-who specialized in such matters. Emma sent for her. Emma got her to say-paid her to say-that Denise would survive. Since my daughter wanted a child very much, she had one. Then she died, and her husband went on to marry…”

  “Darkness?”

  “Yes. Then you were born, and in due course she died, a proper vengeance I always thought.”

  “I do not believe your story, Mrs. Delacroix, nor can I understand why you choose to tell me so terrible a thing, assuming you believe what you’ve told me, when I am a guest-briefly, may I say-in your house.”

  “I hope not briefly.” The old woman poured herself more brandy. “I have told you because I cannot tell my grandson.”

  “Are you afraid-of Blaise?”

  The head, silver hair aglitter with diamonds, nodded. “I am afraid. I don’t know what Blaise might do, if I were to tell him.”

  “As he seems to have been born entirely without conscience, he will do nothing at all. He will not be interested.”

  “Now you are unkind to him. You see, he is so like her.” Quite unexpectedly, tears began to leak from the bright black eyes. “I look at him, and it’s Denise come back to me. You see, I’d given her up. The way we must always give up the dead until such time… So, having forgot my child, let her go, kept only a picture or two, poor likenesses all, she suddenly comes back to me, alive and young, and I look at her-him-and can’t believe what I see. Think I am dreaming. I see the same eyes, hair, skin, voice…”

  “Blaise is very much a male.”

  “A beloved child is without gender to its creatrix, as you may have the good-or bad-fortune to discover.” Mrs. Delacroix withdrew a lace glove from her left hand; dried her eyes with the wadded glove. “He is my heir, not that I am as wealthy as people suppose.”

  “Good. Perhaps you can then persuade him to give me my share of our father’s estate.”

  But the old woman was now removing, one by one, her huge old-fashioned diamond rings, a slow and complicated process, for the fingers were bent with arthritis. “I shall also remember you in my will.”

  “I trust that when you come to write it you will not mistake a one for a seven like my father.” But Caroline knew that there is no egotism to compare with that of someone old, embarked upon a crucial venture, involving money.

  “Blaise has treated you badly. I don’t know why. But I suspect why. I think, somehow, he knows what happened.”

  Caroline shook her head. “If he knew, he would have told me long ago. Also, if he knew, he would not, I’m afraid, care at all. He lives only for himself.”

  “Your father knew.” Mrs. Delacroix now only heard what she chose to hear. “He never dared to see me, not that I would have spoken to him. He settled in France to avoid me, and what he’d done, what she had done.”

  Caroline rose. “I am tired, Mrs. Delacroix. I am also ill-pleased.” In anger, Caroline’s English began to take on a somewhat archaic sound. She longed to burst into a proper French tirade.

  “Surely not with me, my dear.” The old lady was now her gracious, formidable self again. She swept her rings into her reticule; and rose. “I have taken you into my confidence because, when I am dead, I want you to tell Blaise the true story.”

  “I suggest,” said Caroline, “that you put it all in writing, as part of your will. Let him find out at the same time he gets the money. If you like, I’ll help you put it into French Alexandrines. They are particularly useful for this sort of-theater.”

  “It’s not theater, my child. I only want you to-”

  “Why want me for anything, since I am the daughter, in your eyes, of so much darkness?”

  To Caroline’s astonishment, Mrs. Delacroix crossed herself, and whispered something in Latin. Then: “I believe in atonement.”

  “I am to atone for my mother?” Without thinking, Caroline crossed herself, too.

  “I think you must. Besides, you and Blaise are all that’s left of the Sanfords, the real ones, that is. So you must make up. This is one of the ways.”

  “I can think of less hazardous ways.”

  “I am sure you could.” In the falling firelight the small room had taken on a rosy color, and Mrs. Delacroix looked almost girlish, spider’s web erased. “Blaise is in Newport,” said the suddenly
young-faced old woman, taking Caroline’s arm. “He’s at Jamie Bennett’s Stone Villa. Poor Jamie’s still an exile in Paris. But, of course, you know all that. Anyway, each year he leases his cottage. Blaise has taken it for August.”

  “I’m sorry that I’ve kept him from staying here, with you.”

  “No, no. I want you here. He’s close enough.”

  “Too close, perhaps, for me.” But Mrs. Delacroix had preceded Caroline from the room.

  The next morning Caroline arrived alone at Bailey’s Beach, where she was greeted with a smart salute by the gold-braided field marshal whose task it was to know not only members but their friends by sight. How he was able to discern a member from an intruder was a source of wonder to all Newport. But he was infallible, and the small beach, awash with slimy dark green and dull red seaweed, was the most exclusive patch of sand in the world, as well as, Caroline noted, one of the most malodorous. In the night, an armada of Portuguese men-of-war had attacked Bailey’s, and today their iridescent, bloated, gelatinous shapes were strewn upon the pale sands. Although the field marshal’s helpers-boyish Footstools, as Harry Lehr would say-raked as hard as they could, corpses of the men-of-war still outnumbered Bailey’s members beneath the brilliant sky.

  Caroline made her way to the tented pavilion maintained by Mrs. Delacroix; nearby, the Fish house-party was already on the beach, the ladies in morning frocks. There would be no bathing for them this day, but, like a sea-god, Harry Lehr was costumed for his native element. The upper vest of his emerald-green bathing suit had been cut in daring décolleté to show off an alabaster-white chest and neck, while the ruddy face was barely visible beneath a curious sort of burgundy-red sunbonnet which kept the sun from his face as surely as Caroline’s parasol protected hers. The legs, however, gave great joy to the beach. The suit stopped just above two large dimpled knees which were, in turn, covered by sheer peach-colored silken stockings that set off shapely calves that he liked to compare, complacently, with those of Louis XIV. To Caroline, they were more reminiscent of the legs of certain Paris lady circus-riders. In any case, he was a marvel of androgynous charm; and as indifferent to the sniggers of the boyish Footstools as they raked up the gummy jellyfish as he was proud of the true admiration with which his circle regarded him. Harry Lehr was an original, which he proceeded to demonstrate to Caroline, to the chagrin of the Fish party farther along the beach. “Such beauty!” he exclaimed. “All alone at Bailey’s!”