by Gore Vidal
“Are you Mr. Hearst’s partner?” asked Payne, as they crossed the street, filled with carriages and electrical cars, all converging upon the college.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Blaise was never entirely sure just what his relationship to the Chief was. Principally, he was a money-lender. He would have preferred to be an investor, but Hearst allowed no one to buy any part of a Hearst newspaper. Also, casual as Hearst was about money, he always paid back his debts to Blaise, with interest. Meanwhile, Blaise learned the business; learned it better, in a sense, than Hearst himself, for Blaise saw the business as just that, while Hearst, more and more, regarded his newspapers as mere means to an all-important end: his own presidency in 1904, followed, no doubt, by a Napoleonic dictatorship and self-coronation.
Although Blaise had no political ambition, he quite liked the power that went with the ownership of a newspaper. A publisher could make and break local, if not national, figures. Blaise had also watched, with a degree of fury, Caroline achieving what he ought to have done by now. She was taken very seriously in Washington because her newspaper was read and she no longer lost money. Inadvertently, he had driven her to be what he wanted to be. The irony of the situation was peculiarly unbearable. More than once, he had considered handing over her inheritance in exchange for the Tribune; yet such an exchange would have been an admission that she had, totally, won. Also, he was by no means certain that she would agree to the arrangement. In a few years, she would not only have her inheritance but the newspaper, too-not to mention the President’s secretary for a husband, while Blaise would still be in Hearst’s shadow, holding a purse that was less and less needed, as gold flowed from the Dakotas into Phoebe Hearst’s account. At the corner of the hotel, Blaise vowed that he would buy the Baltimore newspaper, jinx though it was supposed to be. He must start his life.
“I suppose the best time of my life was here at Yale.” Payne at twenty-four was nostalgic. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything to top having rowed for Yale at Henley, even if I was a substitute oar.”
“Oh, I’m sure something else will happen to you, during the next fifty years.”
“I’m sure it will, too. But don’t you see? I’ll be old by then. I was young here.” This threnody was cut short by a sudden eruption of young men and women from the hotel lobby into the street. Blaise and Payne were shoved against a wall. To Blaise’s amazement, one of the young people was Caroline; in her right hand she held high an empty champagne glass, as if she were about to propose a toast.
“Caroline!” Blaise shouted. But if she heard him, she paid no attention, as she hurried to join the others, now gathered in a circle on the sidewalk opposite an ice-cream vendor. To an idle observer, it looked as if a dozen young people had been possessed, like so many medieval zealots, by an overpowering passion if not for God for ice cream. But then, as Blaise and Payne hurried to join the party, the ice-cream vendor abandoned his livelihood and joined the circle, from whose center a loud cry sounded, chilling Blaise’s blood. He had never before heard Caroline so much as weep, much less cry out like a wounded animal.
Blaise pushed to the crowd’s center, where he found Caroline on her knees, still holding the empty champagne glass carefully balanced, as if she were fearful of spilling its long-since-spilled contents. In front of her, on his back, was Del Hay, arms and legs flung wide, akimbo, like a comic doll.
Caroline touched Del’s face with her unencumbered hand; Del’s mouth was ajar, and blood streamed down his chin, while the gray eyes stared, intelligently, upward at his recent friends.
“Stand back! Stand back!” A voice of authority was heard. But no one heeded it. “Caroline,” Blaise murmured in her ear; she did not look at him but she did give him her glass to hold. “He fell, from the third floor,” she said. “He was sitting in the open window, talking to us, and leaned back, and fell. Like that.” Blaise helped her up. The others had now made a passage for two policemen, who stared, dumbly, at the figure on the sidewalk. Then one of them squatted down and felt for the pulse in the right wrist; as he did, the hand flopped over, revealing a gold ring, without its jewel.
“My ring,” said Caroline. Blaise had never seen her so marvellously collected; or so entirely mad, from shock. “The opal’s gone.” While the policeman examined Del for signs of life, Caroline got down on her hands and knees on the red-brick sidewalk and searched for the missing jewel. Amazed-and embarrassed-bystanders stood back, as she, politely, said, over and over again, “I’m sorry. Do you mind moving? His ring is broken, you see. The stone fell out.”
“He’s dead,” said the policeman, who was now checking the neck for a pulse; then he shut the staring eyes.
“Oh, good,” Caroline exclaimed, “I’ve found it!” She got to her feet, triumphantly. “Look,” she said to Blaise, as the policemen carried away Del’s body, and the crowd dispersed. “Here’s the fire opal-for luck, for some, they say. But,” she frowned at the stone in the palm of her hand, “it’s cracked in two.” Sunlight struck the stone in such a way that for a moment Blaise’s eyes were dazzled by what seemed to be firelight. “I wonder if it can be fixed.” Caroline’s hand shut over the stone. Blaise took one arm. Payne took the other.
“I’m sure it can,” said Blaise. “Let’s go inside.”
The lobby was dim and cool after the bright heat of the street. Just inside the door, Caroline became herself again. She turned to Payne. “How do we tell Mr. Hay?”
“I don’t know.” Payne was now in shock. “Thank God Helen isn’t here.”
“Let Mr. Hay find out on his own.” Blaise was practical. “There’s nothing we can do…”
“That we’ve not done.” Caroline put the broken stone in her handbag. “I should have taken the warning seriously, that opals are bad luck.” Happily, they were joined by Marguerite, loudly wailing; and as Caroline comforted her maid, Blaise knew that she would be all right. On the other hand, he wondered, briefly, about the universe. Was it all right? or was the whole thing meaningless and random, and insensately cruel?
NINE
1
“WHY,” ASKED LIZZIE, “are autumn flowers darker than summer flowers, which are darker than spring flowers?”
“Is that a question?” Caroline sat on the lawn, a shawl between her and the damp grass. “If it is, you’ve asked the wrong person. I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there, and not be encouraged in any way.”
“The French love flowers.” Lizzie was assembling bouquets of zinnias and early chrysanthemums; she, too, sat on the lawn, a blanket beneath her, a wide-brimmed straw hat pushed to the back of her head: she looked like a handsome country boy.
“But we like to discover them indoors, in vases. You’re not afraid of chrysanthemums?”
“No. But then I’m not afraid of anything,” said the niece of General Sherman; and Caroline believed her.
“I’m glad Marguerite’s not here. She would make a scene. Chrysanthemums are only for the dead, we believe. She believes, that is.”
“She will come back?”
Caroline nodded. “The end of this month, when I go back to Washington. Thank you for my holiday.”
“Thank you. Without you, I would have gone mad in this house, with only my loved ones to keep me company.”
“The Senator’s less restless than he was.” Caroline was neutral. Don Cameron was ageing visibly; and drinking invisibly. Although never exactly drunk in their presence, he was never entirely sober. Daughter Martha was at what promised to be the sort of awkward age that might well last a lifetime. She was large, ungainly, unhappy; an exact opposite to her beautiful and gallant mother. Lizzie, wanting to do her best for the girl, did her worst. They had nothing in common but blood, that least of bonds. It was Henry Adams who had arranged that they take this house at Beverly, on Massachusetts’s north shore, not far from Nahant, where the Cabot Lodges summered. Only this summer, the Lodges and Adamses had gone to Europe, leaving the Camerons to thei
r own devices, with only the Brooks Adamses for company, at not-so-nearby Quincy.
Earlier in the year, Don had cut back Lizzie’s allowance. She had barely been able to live in Paris on eight hundred dollars a month. When she had asked for a thousand, Don reduced the eight hundred; and then decided, capriciously, that they should all economize together, in the United States, where Martha must soon take her place in society, not to mention at school. Father, mother and daughter were now situated on the aptly named Pride’s Hill, surrounded by rented rural beauty, with only Caroline for company.
After Del’s death, Caroline had, with some misgivings, joined the Hay family in New Hampshire. She would have preferred to spend the summer in Washington’s heat, working at the Tribune, or even return to Newport, Rhode Island, and Mrs. Delacroix, but Clara Hay had been insistent; and so Caroline had gone, to Sunapee, to act the part of the widow that she might have been.
Hay had taken the death hard. “I see his face all the time now, always before me and always smiling.” Then he had read aloud to Caroline a curiously intimate and uncharacteristic letter from Henry Adams to Clara. For the first time, according to Clara, Adams alluded to the suicide of his wife: “I never did get up again, and never to this moment recovered the energy or interest to return into active life.” He had cautioned Clara not to allow Hay to break down as he had done, with the result, he had duly noted with devastating self-knowledge, that “I have got the habit of thinking that nothing is worthwhile! That sort of habit is catching, and I should not like to risk too close contact at a critical moment with a mind to be affected by it.” Hay had been both touched and amused by the Porcupine’s sharp clarity, charity.
When the Camerons had invited Caroline to Beverly, Clara had insisted that she go. “They are so deeply interested in themselves that you won’t have any time to think of yourself.” Caroline accepted the invitation; then sent Marguerite back to France to see the inevitable ailing mother that every lady’s maid possessed, even to her hundredth year, as a constant memento non mori.
The Camerons were indeed full of themselves, but as Caroline could never get enough of Lizzie, she was content to drift with them to summer’s end. Now the sea-wind was sharp with an autumnal chill. Soon the house, always sea-damp, would be shut up, and the Camerons would go-where? They were like so many flying Dutchmen, each on a separate track, and only briefly, as now, did their courses coincide.
They were joined by Kiki, Lizzie’s small overweight poodle, who leapt onto Lizzie’s lap and began, methodically, to lick Lizzie’s firm chin.
“Martha’s problem is that she is both lazy and vain. Which is worse?” Lizzie appeared to be addressing Kiki.
“I find both qualities endearing, at least in friends. Lazy people never bother you, and vain ones don’t involve themselves in your life. I wish I had such a daughter,” Caroline added, surprising herself; Lizzie, too.
“You really want children?”
“I just said that I did, so I suppose I must.” But, curiously, Caroline could never imagine having given birth to a child by Del. Worse, she had never been able even to fantasize what it might be like to make love to him.
“She wears my last year’s clothes.” Lizzie was neutral. “Don delights in her. She is more Cameron than Sherman. We are not so large. I think that she would like to marry that Jew. But I got her away in time.”
Earlier in the year, at Palermo, Lionel Rothschild, a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, had affixed himself to Martha. “The odd thing,” said Lizzie, “is that he is absolutely enchanting but…”
“A Jew.” Caroline had lived through the Dreyfus case in a way that no one who was not French could understand; and Caroline was, for all practical purposes, a Frenchwoman, impersonating an American lady. Caroline had favored Dreyfus in the civil war that had broken out in the drawing rooms of Paris. She had skirmished on many an Aubusson, heard the ominous hiss of enemy epigrams, the thudding sound of falling tirades; yet she herself knew no Jews. “At least the Rothschilds are very rich.”
“Worse!” Lizzie pushed her straw hat even farther back on her head. “The boy’s charming. But the race is accursed…”
“You sound like Uncle Henry.”
“Well, that is the way of our world, isn’t it? Anyway, she’s too young to marry…”
“And I’m too old.” Caroline got the subject back to herself. Since Del’s death, she had become more than ever interested in herself; and more than ever puzzled what to do about this peculiar person. She was apt to live a long time. But she had no idea how she was to occupy her time. The thought of half a century to be lived through was more chilling to her than the thought of an eternity to be dead in.
“No, you’re not too old.” Lizzie was direct. “But you’d better make your move soon. You don’t want to be the first-and last-woman publisher in the world or Washington or whatever, do you?”
“I don’t… I really don’t know. I miss Del.”
“That’s natural. You’ve had a shock. But some shocks are good-after the pain, of course. Have you ever noticed a tree after lightning’s struck it? The part that’s still alive is twice as alive as before and puts out more branches, leaves…”
“Unlike a woman struck by lightning, who is decently buried.”
“You are morbid. You’re also lucky. You are-will be-rich. You’re not like me, dependent on a man who is-happiest alone.”
The man, happiest when alone, seemed delighted to be walking arm in arm with Martha, dark-browed, tall, heavy. They came from the house, whose old-fashioned frame porch-piazza they called it locally-was ablaze with potted hydrangeas, neatly regimented by Lizzie. Kiki abandoned Lizzie; and leapt into Martha’s arms, while the red-faced patriarch smiled upon this homely scene.
Don Cameron was now nearly seventy; nearly fat; nearly very rich, though a sudden fall in the stock market the previous month had obliged him, for some days, to drink for two. Now news from the outside world had shaken them all. History was at work, “overtime,” in Lizzie’s phrase.
“There are still no newspapers,” said Don, slowly, carefully, arranging his bulk on Lizzie’s blanket. Martha stood, holding Kiki in her arms-Virgin with canine god, thought Caroline.
“Anyway, we think we can pronounce the name,” said Martha, and she pronounced, “Leon Czolgosz,” with two shushing sounds. “He is Polish, it seems.”
“An anarchist!” Don growled. “They’re everywhere. They’re out to kill every ruler in the world, like the king of Italy last summer, and before him, what’s her name?”
“Elizabeth,” said Caroline, “empress of Austria. They also-whoever they are-killed the prime minister of Spain and the president of France… She was so beautiful.” Caroline had always been told that her mother had been very like the Kaiserin, whose death from a knife through the heart, as she was getting aboard a ship, had appalled the world. It was, somehow, unnatural that a woman as beautiful as the Empress should be so gratuitously murdered.
“Funny thing,” said Cameron. “Hanna’s been worrying for more than a year now. ‘I want more guards,’ he kept telling the Secret Service. Then they find that list of those wops over in New Jersey, with the names of all the rulers they meant to kill, and Hanna was fit to be tied, because there was the Major’s name but the Major wasn’t interested; very fatalistic, the Major.”
“Very lucky, the Major,” added Lizzie, reclaiming the faithless Kiki from Martha’s arms. Martha now sat, cross-legged, on Caroline’s shawl. The four of them then proceeded to contemplate history.
A few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon of September 6, 1901, in the Temple of Music of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, President McKinley stood before a large American flag, with potted plants to his left and right. An organ played Bach. The day was hot. The presidential collar had twice been changed. Mrs. McKinley was, as usual, ill; and bedded down in the International Hotel. The President was attended only by Cortelyou, and three agents of the Secret Serv
ice. Exposition police were also on hand, but when the President gave the order to throw open the doors, so that the people could come shake his hand, there was more than the usual confusion. For one thing, the line was not orderly and rapid, the way the President preferred: one citizen’s hand succeeded rapidly by another, one pair of eyes deeply, if briefly, transfixed by the President’s luminous stare. Instead, the citizens of the republic advanced slowly, hesitantly, singly, in couples, even in groups. There was no sorting them out. A young, slight man approached the President with a bandaged right hand. Face to face, there was a moment of confusion. As McKinley’s right arm outstretched automatically, he was presented with a problem. Did one shake a bandaged hand? or would its owner offer him his left hand? The young man solved the problem. He darted forward, pushing to one side the President’s arm while, simultaneously, firing twice a pistol that he had been holding in the bandaged hand. The stunned President remained standing while guards threw the man to the floor; then, as they dragged him from the hall, a chair was brought for the President, who sat down and, dazedly, felt his waistcoat, where blood was oozing. But he seemed more interested in the assailant than in his wound, and he said to Cortelyou, most calmly, “Don’t let them hurt him.” Then, when he saw the blood on his fingers, he said, “Be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell my wife.”
Eleven minutes later, the President was on the operating table of the Exposition’s emergency hospital. One bullet had grazed his chest; the other had entered the vast paunch, and gone through the stomach. The surgeons were able to repair the points of entry and of exit; the bullet, however, was not found. Then the President was sewed up. No vital organs had been harmed; on the other hand, the wound was not drained, and there remained the possibility of infection, not to mention shock to a system that might not prove to be as strong as it appeared.
During the next few days, Vice-President, Cabinet, and Mark Hanna, as well as McKinley’s sisters and brother, came to Buffalo. But after a feverish weekend, the President’s temperature returned to normal; and he was pronounced out of danger. The Vice-President vanished into the Adirondacks, while the Cabinet dispersed. Meanwhile, Leon Czolgosz was closely questioned. When he confessed to an admiration for a leading anarchist named Emma Goldman, she was immediately arrested in Chicago; and declared the originator of the plot to kill the President.
