by Gore Vidal
Just received a message from Mr. Dutton himself, asking if he might call. Also a note from someone at Harper’s New Monthly (signature impossible to read) to tell me that the copy of my article on the Empress Eugénie has arrived and is even now being read with the pleasure that all my works give, etc. Enclosed, a copy of Harper’s December issue, containing a perfunctory discussion of Darwin, an amusing comment from the popular playwright Dion Boucicault, saying that all he wants is money and glory now and posterity be hanged. A regular feature called the Easy Chair makes a curious reference to Winant’s Hotel on Staten Island, and remarks that it was there that Colonel Aaron Burr died.
Colonel Burr has been a good deal on my mind today. Particularly when I looked into Reede Street, where his office was—and is no more. But then: “Never brood upon the past, Charlie!” he used to tell me when I was—so ineptly—pretending to be his law clerk. “Think always of the future, and how much worse it is bound to be!”
I must have dozed in my chair in front of the fire. A discreet servant has come, drawn the curtains, and gone. It is almost five. Time for tea with John Bigelow.
My fingernails are no longer mauve but the flesh is still pale. Must move with care, as if made of glass; and easily broken.
4
SLOWLY I WALKED the several blocks from the hotel to Gramercy Park, which turns out to be a homely little square on the order of London’s Hanover Square but smaller, less impressive, with a tiny bleak garden at the center surrounded by a perfunctory ironwork fence and the usual narrow houses sprayed with chocolate. Apparently, no one of any pretension to respectability will live behind walls of any other shade; so unlike the vivid red-brick houses and tenements of the poor or those occasional wooden shanty houses one sees in the side streets, all smeared with bile-yellow or poison-green paint.
John Bigelow was waiting for me in his pleasant study on the second floor. In front of a cheerful fire, tea was ready for pouring. From other parts of the house I could hear the sounds of family life.
“Charlie, how are you?” Bigelow is one of the few men alive who still call me by the name of my youth.
“And you, John? or your Excellency. Just what does one call the secretary of the state of New York?”
“Unfortunate.”
“A title you share with many.”
“But curiously, peculiarly mine. Have you read the Times today?”
“Only that part about myself.”
“Well, you missed a most disagreeable piece about your old friend.”
Bigelow poured out the tea. I noted that there were two plates of French pastries on the trolley: tribute to my Frenchness?
“Were they as inaccurate about you as they were about me?”
We sat opposite one another before the fire. I must confess that despite their exterior hideousness, these little brownstones are most comfortable in winter. In summer, however, the rooms must be depressingly dark.
Bigelow was plainly furious but trying to contain himself. “I have ‘ratted,’ according to the Times. I have deserted the virtuous Republican party for the wicked Democrats and Tilden.”
“Well, to be precise, you have done exactly that. After all, you were one of the founders of the Republican party…”
“But that Republican party did its work, and died. We abolished slavery. We preserved the Union. Now a corrupt machine continues to use our name, aided and abetted by The New York Times…”
Bitterly my old friend attacked his tormentor. I daresay the fact that Bigelow had once been, for a few months, editor of the Times must have hurt him doubly. “The constant personal attacks I find hard to take. Look at this!” He picked up from a table crowded with periodicals, a newspaper marked with dark exclamation marks. “They say that I was—look at this!—an ‘embarrassment’ to the United States when I was minister to France.”
“Shall I write them an eyewitness account to the contrary?” I can still see the tall, grey-haired Bigelow and his wife gravely making their rounds at the Tuileries whilst the parvenue Empress smiled from behind her fan, not understanding the true dignity of these deliberately plain American republicans.
Bigelow was an excellent minister to France in the sense that he did his work conscientiously and learned to speak French perfectly. On the other hand, his political judgment was unerringly bad. Fortunately, he did his nation no harm, and that was a considerable accomplishment at a most difficult time, for he was in the consular service when the French were trying to establish a puppet empire in Mexico, and he was minister at the time of the War Between the States.
Bigelow railed against the press in general and the Times in particular. “But then the Times can never be objective. Everything is couched in personal terms. They say that I quit the Republican party in order to advance myself! Quite the contrary, I should think…”
“But if our friend becomes president…”
Bigelow did not respond to the obviousness of my approach. “I don’t know why I cannot be like everyone else. Why I couldn’t remain happily in the party of General Grant, and root out my proprium.”
More in this vein. I ate several small cakes…which now rest somewhat heavily on my stomach. I need a purge.
When Bigelow’s tirade ended, I told him that I had breakfasted with our old friend Bryant.
Immediately all was good humour. “He is astonishing, isn’t he? Considering his age…”
“Considering his diet, which is suited only for a horse, if breakfast is typical.”
“Strong as a horse, too. Well, he behaved—personally—like a gentleman when I ran for secretary of state.” This election seems to obsess my old friend; but then it took place only a few weeks ago. “The Post, of course, supported the entire Republican ticket because that scoundrel Henderson is thick as can be with Grant, and controls the paper.”
“Controls Bryant?”
“To a degree. But Bryant wrote much in praise of me, of my chairmanship last spring of the commission that broke the canal ring. You know of that?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” I practically brayed, knowing all that I wanted to know, which is as little as possible about those rings of corruption that Tilden and Bigelow are forever breaking up in order that the two of them may rise to the very top of the tree.
But perhaps I am unduly cynical about Bigelow. Despite his great unchannelled ambition, he has always been scrupulously high-minded. During the time he was at the Evening Post, he made it a financial success. Then he helped found the Republican party; was given diplomatic posts; wrote books.
If Bigelow is remembered, it will be for his resurrection of Benjamin Franklin. Until Bigelow, no one had ever thought to save that wicked old creature from the bowdlerizers. Bigelow’s editing of the original texts of Franklin’s works as well as the biography of Franklin he published last year have made him a fortune. Would that I could find a similar subject.
“Must you live at Albany?” I stayed his reminiscences of a thousand dragons slain in the name of good government.
“The secretary of state is supposed to spend some time there.”
“Doing what?”
“I shall tell you next month.” Bigelow smiled; smoothed his heavy white side whiskers not unlike my own: he eschews the full beard of most Americans, as does Tilden.
“What,” I asked, only because it has been preoccupying me since my arrival yesterday, “has happened to the American voice?”
“Voice?” Bigelow was startled by the question; his own is resonant and clear, like Bryant’s.
“Yes, voice. The way Americans speak.”
“You mean the immigrants? Well, it takes time…”
“No, I mean the Americans. Like us. When I lived here, people spoke like you, like me…”
“But you had a Dutch accent, Charlie, which you’ve gone and lost in Paris!”
I don’t know wh
y that should have made me want to blush, but it did. In my youth, Dutch-ness was a sort of prickly virtue to us and an occasion for dull mockery to others.
“Certainly I never…wenever spoke through our noses. Or made that curious flat whining sound. One hears it everywhere. And the women! Is there anything more dreadful than an American woman’s laughter?”
Bigelow was amused. After some thought, he agreed that there has been a change in the way our countrymen speak. He thinks it might be the influence of those popular fundamentalist church groups that go in for “canting”—the word for praying aloud in a whining nasal voice.
I thought that this might make an interesting article for Harper’s, but Bigelow thought not. “No one may criticize American manners, except at a safe distance like Paris. When do you go back?”
“In a year’s time.” My heart’s beat was now audible to me; blood pounded in my ears. I have never found it easy to ask for anything important. “I shall want to write about the election. I am also—just today—commissioned to write about the last days of General Grant, for the Herald.”
The Herald was sharply analyzed for some minutes. Predictably, Bigelow did not like that paper’s Personal Topics, its salacious gossip, its sharp attacks on anyone—that is to say, everyone—guilty of hypocrisy. But he agreed that in the end Jamie Bennett would doubtless support good government if obliged to choose. “Certainly having someone of your distinction writing about that swamp at Washington will have a powerful effect on him, not to mention on his readers.”
I looked as though power was something that each day I exert like the sun its rays. Then I said, very carefully, “One of the reasons for my straying into such foreign territory is a desire to be of use to Governor Tilden.”
Bigelow set down his cup; sighed; looked for a time at the fire in the grate. “Charlie, I must tell you in all confidence that I am deeply concerned about the Governor.”
“Politically?”
“Never! Politically he is incorruptible. No, I fear for his health. Last February he had—” Bigelow stopped abruptly. I am fairly certain from the set of his mouth that he intended to say “a stroke.” But he quickly shifted to: “He cannot stop working…”
“Isn’t that considered admirable in this country?”
“Not the way he works. Hour after hour until he is hardly able to hold his head up or keep his eyes open. It is maniacal.”
“Is there so much to do at Albany?”
“Not so much that he couldn’t get others to do most of what he now does, which is to study every line of every bill as if it were—” Bigelow stopped again; plainly fearful that he had told me too much about his chief.
I was as reassuring as I could be. “But that is his nature. That is how he became a successful lawyer.”
Bigelow took the plunge; told all. “The point is that he’s sixty-one, and his health has never been good. Even as a young man when we first knew him…”
“You knew him then. I didn’t.”
“Well, he has a tremor of the hands—”
“Who does not—at our age?”
“Cannot digest most food. Constant dyspepsia. Spells of weakness, of costiveness. All made worse by overwork. You know that we’re supposed to be working together on his address to the legislature in January. Well, he is writing it all…”
“But does he do it well?”
“Well enough.”
“Better too much zeal than what we have been accustomed to in high office.”
“But can he live through a presidential campaign?”
“Power is, they say, a supreme tonic. He intends to run?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Bigelow nodded. “But I have said nothing to you, Charlie.”
“Of course not.” I gave him the packet that I had brought with me. “I know that you are his principal adviser in foreign affairs, but he did write me, some months ago, asking my views on our relations with France, Italy, England.” I did not mention Germany, since Bigelow is a devotee of all things Prussian and I am not.
“That’s good of you. Very good of you. I’ll take them with me to Albany tomorrow.”
I asked when the Governor would be back in the city.
“He’ll certainly be here for Christmas. You know, his house is just there. At Number Fifteen.” Bigelow’s gesture seemed to take in all Gramercy Park. “I’ll let you know. He’ll want to see you, to thank you himself.”
“I’d like to do whatever I can to ensure his election. I told him as much when we met at Geneva.”
I think Bigelow and I have reached an understanding, and like most understandings between politicians it was not expressed in words.
If I do my part, provide information, work to explore the corruption of General Grant and whoever is chosen to succeed him as leader of the Republican party, then I will get my heart’s desire—which Bigelow has known, since he himself achieved it ten years ago—the legation at Paris. I can think of no better way of spending my last years than as minister to the country where I have lived so happily for more than a third of a century.
We spoke wistfully of Paris. I recalled the party that Bigelow gave to celebrate the Fourth of July, some three months after the murder of President Lincoln. Although my wife and I seldom saw much of my fellow countrymen at Paris, we pitched in as best we could, hiring the Pré Catalan restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne.
Every American in the city was invited—some five hundred men, women and children. It was a splendid evening with music and dancing, a wizard for the children, “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the patriotic, followed by fireworks as only the French can contrive them. Our fête ended with a sky-filling American eagle (looking suspiciously like the Napoleonic bird) and the legend “The Union Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”
“What a marvellous day!” Bigelow was misty-eyed. “Thanks to you and Emma. Mrs. Bigelow will be calling on her soon. But such a sad time, too, with President Lincoln dead and…” He stopped. Two weeks after the fête in the Bois de Boulogne, his young son Ernest died of fever.
It was time for me to go. At the front door Bigelow helped me into my overcoat.
“What…who are the Apgars?” I asked.
Bigelow was noncommittal. “There are a great many of them in the city. Loyal Republicans. Mostly lawyers.”
“There is one called John Day Apgar.”
Bigelow got the point. “He is interested in your Emma?”
“I have that impression. He was at our legation last year in Paris. We saw a good deal of him. Since then he has written her letters.”
“I believe he is the one who missed the war. He bought himself a replacement.”
“Do you regard that as wise or unwise?”
Bigelow laughed. “It depends on how seriously one feels about the Union.”
I did not tell my old friend that I myself would certainly have stayed out of that incredibly bloody and needless war had I been of conscript age. Most New Yorkers felt the same; witness, the violent riots of those years. “Do you think I should encourage such a match?”
Bigelow’s response was obvious: How does Emma feel about the young man? I do not know. John Day Apgar is known to be a competent lawyer and his family are well connected with the “cliff-dwellers”—the old nonflashy gentry who live in genteel dreariness below Madison Square. Yet, “I can’t imagine the dazzling Princess d’Agrigente living out her days in West Tenth Street.”
“No,” I said, with perfect honesty. “I cannot see it either.”
“Too far from the Tuileries, and all that imperial glitter—sham though it was. Even so, your Emma is a European, she’s not one of us.”
“I know. Yet she’s so much a part of me that I constantly forget that she was not with us in the old days when New York was different and we were young—you, of course, so much younger than I.”
> “You are a diplomat, Charlie!”
I left him in the vestibule and made my way out into the cold darkness of Gramercy Park. The gas lamps had been lit and I found their familiar hissing a comforting note in this cold, strange city where I feel suddenly a perfect alien, entirely out of place and time.
Do the Apgars have money? More specifically, does John Day Apgar have money? Or the prospects of money?
I have found that when one starts to think of money, one cannot, finally, think on any other subject. More worries of this sort and I shall be a proper New Yorker—and so at home again, no longer alien.
Two
1
THE BUSIEST WEEK of my life thus far (can I endure such another?) is almost over. A constant round of calls made and calls received. Of telegrams. Of flowers and candies delivered to Emma, who seems on the verge of vanishing into the vast bosom of John’s family.
Although not old New York themselves, the Apgars have managed to marry into every old New York family. From Stuyvesant to Livingston, they have grafted themselves onto the old patriciate, managing, according to Jamie Bennett, always to attach themselves to the top branch but one of each noble family tree.
I was much distressed to have my memories of the Empress Eugénie returned from Harper’s with an apologetic note; and the hope that I would do the Centennial for them. Well, that is to be done elsewhere, I wrote them, not pleased. The piece has now been given to Robert Bonner through a mutual (pace, Bryant) friend. If the Ledger buys it, then I shall not have to spend as many sleepless nights as I have the last few days, waiting for my plans to mature whilst each day glumly subtracting sizeable sums from our infinitesimal capital. As much as possible, I try to keep my worries from Emma. She is so forthright, so Bonapartish that she would rob a bank (or marry John Day Apgar) to save me from ruin.
