“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 their 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 Service. 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.
But at Beverly Farms, news was slow in coming. Don Cameron relied on visitors to bring him day-old newspapers. As there was neither telephone nor telegraph office nearby, Caroline wondered if she should go back to Washington, to her command post at the Tribune. But Lizzie said, “There’s no one in the government left in town. What news there is is at Buffalo, and who wants to go there?”
Kiki began to bark; visitors had appeared on the piazza of the house. Brooks Adams and his wife, Daisy, waved to the group on the lawn. Then Brooks shouted, “Teddy!”
“Teddy what?” responded Cameron, getting first to his knees; then, laboriously, onto his feet.
“Teddy Roosevelt,” roared Brooks, as his wife, frowning, put her hands over her ears, “is president of the United States.”
“Oh, God,” murmured Cameron.
Caroline crossed herself. The poor good McKinley was now as vanished from the story as Del. Then to Kiki’s delight, everyone ran toward the house.
“When-how?” asked Lizzie.
“Yesterday evening. Friday the thirteenth. Gangrene set in. At two-fifteen this morning, he died. Teddy was off in the woods, somewhere. But he should be in Buffalo by now, being sworn in. The Cabinet’s all there except for Hay, who’s in Washington, holding together the government. No one knows the extent of the conspiracy. The Spanish-Cubans are thought to be behind it, out of revenge, for what McKinley did-and did not do-in Cuba.” Brooks spoke rapidly, without a pause for breath. Then, like a child, he began to jump up and down on the porch; and Kiki jumped alongside him. “Teddy’s got it all now! Do you realize that he occupies a place greater than Trajan’s at the high noon of the Roman empire?” Brooks, like his brother, never spoke when he could lecture. “There has never been so much power given a man at so propitious a time in history! He will have the opportunity-and the means-to subjugate all Asia, and so give America the hegemony of the earth, which is our destiny, written in stars! Also,” Brooks came to earth with a crash, “today is a day of great importance to Daisy and me. It is our wedding anniversary.”
“History does seem to have us by the throat,” said Lizzie mildly. “Come inside.”
“Champagne,” said Cameron, brightening. “For your anniversary…”
“And for Theodore the Great, whose reign has, at last, begun.”
“No period of mourning for Mr. McKinley?“ asked Caroline, who felt, suddenly, an intense grief for Del, the Major and, not least, herself, bereft.
“The King is dead.” Brooks was cold. “Long live the King.”
IN THE BRIGHTLY ILLUMINATED reception room of the Pennsylvania Station, John Hay sat in a gilded armchair. Adee stood beside him, while a half-dozen Secret Service men prowled about the small, ornate, musty room reserved for dignitaries. The train from Buffalo was due to arrive at eight-thirty; aboard was the new president, and the body of his predecessor. Hay had arranged for the White House ushers to escort Mrs. McKinley and Cortelyou to the mansion, where McKinley would lie in state, while his family helped Mrs. McKinley to pack her belongings, a melancholy task that Hay had twice before witnessed when the widows of Lincoln and Garfield had each been obliged to deal with a life’s end in the most humiliating and public way.
Once again, to Hay’s amazement, as there would be no vice-president for another four years, he was constitutional heir to the President. If only for this reason, he was confident that Roosevelt would replace him as secretary of state. The President-the youngest in history at forty-two-must not have as his potential successor a sixty-two-year-old wreck, which is how Hay thought of himself, literally a wreck in body-mind, too. The death of Del had shaken him; the death of McKinley had sunk him into a melancholy of a sort that he had never before experienced. “I am a harbinger of death,” he would say aloud, dramatically, when alone: he had yet to find the person with whom he could share his desolate vision of himself. In the nation’s history, only three presidents had been murdered in office, and each had been a close friend of John Hay. It was curious, too, how essentially benign the three murdered men had been; it was not as if they had been tyrants, tempting the gods. Although, and Hay began to redefine “tyrant,” many Filipinos and Spanish-Cubans did view McKinley as a tyrant. But, thus far, the Secret Service had been unable to link Czolgosz’s anarchists to those Spanish-Cubans who were supposedly eager to avenge wrongs done them by McKinley.
Although Roosevelt had announced in Buffalo that, as he was simply a continuation of McKinley, he would keep the Cabinet intact, Hay expected, after a decent interval, to be let go. On Sunday morning Hay had written Roosevelt a letter of commiseration and congratulation, all couched in a valetudinarian style: “My official life is at an end-my natural life will not be long extended, and so in the dawn of what I am sure will be a great and splendid future, I venture to give you the heartfelt benediction of the past.” Hay had wept when he wrote that line; now, recalling it, his eyes again filled with tears, for all the selves that he had been; and would be no more.
Suddenly, Hay heard the noise of a crowd outside the reception room. As he got to his feet, and started across the room, the station master flung open the door and said, “The President”; and disappeared.
Theodore Roosevelt, thick, sturdy, small, bounded across the room, and shook Hay’s hand. Teeth bared but not smiling, he spoke rapidly. “I’ve seen your letter. Of course you will stay on with me, to the end, or as long as you like. As for your talk of age, that’s affectation. You’re not old. It’s not your true nature to be old, any more than it’s mine.”
“Mr. President-” Hay began.
“Theodore, please. As I have always, disrespectfully, called you John, you must call me Theodore, as you’ve always done, except, of course, when people are about and we must both acknowledge the majesty of our estate…”
“You are too kind… Theodore.” Hay was amused at the Rooseveltian vehemence. Obviously, on the long train ride, he had been busy working out how protocol would affect his various personal relationships.
“I don’t want to cut myself off from old friends socially, the way the other presidents have tended to do. I want to be able to dine like any guest at your house, or Cabot’s, but, of course,” he became very grave, somber even with majesty, “I must preserve the prerogative of the initiative.” Before Hay could think of a response, Roosevelt was off on another tangent. “Root swore me in. It was very moving, all of us in that parlor. Root couldn’t say the oath of office for some ten minutes. Odd. I never think of him as being an emotional man. For the time, I want to keep the Philippines in his department. You don’t mind?”
“No, no. I have quite enough to do. Your wife and young Ted are here. They arrived this afternoon.”
“Good! Let’s join them.”
Theodore grabbed Hay’s arm, and marched him, rather too fast for Hay’s perfect comfort, into the main waiting room of the station, where a small crowd cheered the new president, who solemnly raised his hat, but did not, Hay was relieved to note, mar the occasion with the huge, toothy Roosevelt smile. A dozen policemen then made a ring about them, and escorted them outside.
In the distance, the dome of the Capitol was illuminated like a confectionery skull, thought Hay. Since Hay had ordered the White House to make no announcement, there was no crowd outside the station; the public did not expect the new president to arrive until the next day. Neither Roosevelt nor Hay chose to notice the huge ebony hearse, with its six black horses, ready to bear McKinley’s body to the White House. For a moment, Roosevelt paused on the sidewalk; started to speak; said nothing.
“You needn’t wait,” said Hay.
Roosevelt looked relieved; and sprang into the presidential carriage, followed by Hay. “Seventeen thirty-three N Street,” said Roosevelt, as if he were in a taxi-cab.
“They know,” said Hay, amused. “It’s their job.”
“Quite right. I must get used to that. I must get used to a lot of things now, like the White House. I want the stationery changed. I can’t stand ‘The Executive Mansion.’ From now on, we’ll just call it ‘The White House.’ Less pompous. How many bedrooms are there?”
“Five in the living quarters; and three of them are pretty small.”
“What’s on the third floor?”
“I haven’t been up there since Tad Lincoln mixed up all the bells in the mansion-house, that is-and I had to unmix them.”
“I suppose we can make extra rooms up there. Alice must have her own room now that she’s about to be eighteen.” Roosevelt stared at the post office, where an illuminated flag was at half-mast.
“All flags should be taken down at sunset. It’s depressing,” he added, uncharacteristically. “To come here as president, and everyone is mourning.”
“Murder is always depressing-and alarming.”
“Do we know who’s behind that anarchist?”
“The Secret Service wants to arrest everyone in sight. They remind me of Stanton after Lincoln was shot.”
“Let’s hope with better result. I wouldn’t mind being shot-like Lincoln, that is, not poor McKinley. Lincoln never knew what happened.”
Hay shuddered, involuntarily. “I’m not so sure. When we were writing his life, I read the autopsy report. Apparently the bullet entered not the back of his head but the left temple, which meant that he had heard Booth at the door to the box, and that he had turned around to see who it was…”
“And saw?”
“And saw, for an instant, the gun.”
“How grisly!” Roosevelt was plainly delighted by this macabre detail.
In front of the N Street house of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, two policemen stood guard. From a second-story window a huge American flag drooped at half-mast. “Why don’t they take down these flags?” Roosevelt was querulous; and, Hay suspected, somehow discomfited by the tribute to his predecessor.
In the downstairs parlor, Roosevelt greeted his wife, Edith; sister, Anna, whom he called Bamie; and son, Ted. The ladies wore mourning; they were in excellent spirits. The ladies made much of Hay, who was pleased to be treated like a piece of rare porcelain from an earlier time. He was helped into an armchair, and encouraged to smoke a cigar, which he refused. Meanwhile, the new president was prancing about the room, asking everyone questions to which he alone had the answers. During this display, the admirable Edith maintained her stately calm. Hay had always preferred her to the noisy-no other word-Theodore.
Edith Kermit Carow was descended from Huguenots who had intermarried with the family of Jonathan Edwards. She had known Theodore all her life. The Carow family had lived in New York’s Union Square next door to the house of Theodore’s grandfather. Edith had been a bookish girl, no great recommendation in their world, but a link to the high-strung asthmatic Theodore, who was not only bookish but, to compensate for physical weakness, doggedly athletic as well.
Hay had always thought that Theodore took too much for granted his perfect wife. Certainly, he had taken her so much for granted that, perhaps to her surprise-who would ever know, as she was all tact and reserve?-Theodore, on his twenty-second birthday, had married a beautiful girl named Alice Lee, and Edith Carow had, serenely it was reported, been a guest at the wedding. In due course, Alice Lee gave birth to a daughter, Alice; not long after, Alice Lee died within a day of Theodore’s mother. The two sudden deaths drove Theodore out of politics-he had been a member of New York’s State Assembly; out of New York City, too. He bought a ranch in the Badlands of the Dakotas; lost money on cattle; and wrote with marvellously contagious self-love of his own bravery. Four Eyes, as the bespectacled Theodore was known to the Western toughs, was very much a hero in his own eyes, while giving much pleasure to his friends the Hearts, if not in the way that he might have liked. After all, he was a mere dude compared to Clarence King.
As Hay listened to this most unlikely of American presidents, he was reminded of the chilling prescience of Henry Adams’s letter from Stockholm, which had arrived on the day that the President was shot. “Teddy’s luck” was the letter’s theme; fate’s too, as it proved. Theodore was, Adams had proclaimed, “pure act,” like God: endless energy without design.
Finally, Roosevelt had returned from the West, poorer than when he had left but better-known to magazine readers. After losing an election for mayor of New York in the autumn of 1886, he and Edith Kermit Carow were married, most fashionably, at St. George’s in Hanover Square, London; the groomsman was Cecil Spring-Rice, the Hearts’ favorite British diplomat. Then the Roosevelts returned to the ugly comfortable house that he had built on Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Here he wrote the six-volume history Winning the West; filled the house with children; and plotted, with Henry Cabot Lodge, a political career that had been interrupted not only by personal tragedies but by a mistrust of the Republican Party’s leader James G. Blaine; fortunately, this dislike had not led to apostasy of the sort that had caused the truly virtuous to bolt the party and raise high the banner of Independence and Mugwumpery. Roosevelt and Lodge were too practical for this sort of idealistic gesture. They stayed with Blaine, who lost to Cleveland in 1884.
While Theodore was turning out biographies of Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris and essays in celebration of Americanism of the sort that had given Henry James such exquisite pain, he was also busy president-making. One president thus made was Benjamin Harrison; and Theodore’s political carpentry was rewarded with a place on the Civil Service Commission.
Both President and Theodore had been eager for him to be under secretary of state, but the secretary, James G. Blaine himself, had the usual politician’s long memory, and Theodore was forced to content himself with Civil Service reform, an Augean stable where not even Hercules would have dreamed of putting hand to shovel. Although Theodore was no Hercules, he was, by nature, busy. In 1889, at the age of thirty, he made himself the commission’s head. He railed against the spoils system, and the press enjoyed him. When Republican President Harrison was replaced by Democratic President Cleveland, Roosevelt was kept on. During the six years he served on the commission, he entered the lives of the Hearts. In 1895, a reform mayor of New York City appointed Roosevelt president of the board of police commissioners. Roosevelt proved to be a fierce unrelenting prosecutor of vice; and the press revelled in his escapades. Since the law that forbade saloons to dispense their poisons on the Sabbath was often flouted, Roosevelt closed down the saloons, which meant that the saloonkeepers need no longer pay protection to Mr. Croker of Tammany Hall. But Mr. Croker was more resourceful than Roosevelt; he got a judge to rule that as it was not against the law to serve alcohol with a meal, a single pretzel ingested while drinking a bottle of whiskey made lawful the unlawful.
Roosevelt was also introduced to a world from which he had always been sheltered, the poor. He took for his guide a Danish-born journalist named Jacob Riis, who had written a polemical book called How the Other Half Lives. Roosevelt was shown not only the extent of poverty in the great city but the complacence of the ruling class, which included his own family.
Hay had never been much impressed by Theodore’s occasional impassioned denunciations of the “malefactors of great wealth”; after all, as Henry Adams liked to say, they were all of them consenting parties to the status quo. Though the Police Commissioner got himself a reputation for the disciplining of dishonest policemen, when the journalist Stephen Crane-previously admired by Roosevelt-testified in court against two policemen who had falsely arrested a woman for soliciting, Roosevelt had sprung to the defense of the policemen, and denounced Crane, an eyewitness to the arrest. Since Crane was much admired by the Hearts, Roosevelt had been taken to task. But he stood by his men, like a good commander in a war.
In March, 1897, the thirty-eight-year-old Roosevelt met, as it were, his luck. The new president, McKinley, appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, ordinarily a humble post, but with a weak and amiable secretary, Roosevelt, in thrall to the imperial visions of Captain Mahan and Brooks Adams, was now in a position to build up the fleet without which there could be no future wars, no glory, no empire. The next four years were to wreathe with laurel the stout little man who now stood, if not like a colossus athwart the world, like some tightly wound-up child’s toy, dominating all the other toys in power’s playroom, shrill voice constantly raised. “Germany, John. There’s the coming problem. Coming? No, it’s here. The Kaiser’s on the move everywhere. He’s built a fleet to counter us-or the British, one or the other, but not-not both together-yet. Also, if he makes the bid, he will have to look to his rear, for there is savage Russia, huge and glacial, waiting for the world to fall like a ripe fruit into its paws.” Theodore smote together his own paws. Hay tried to imagine the world smashed in those pudgy hands. “Russia is the giant of the future,” Theodore proclaimed.
Hay felt obliged to intervene. “I don’t know about the future-but at the moment the only kind of giant that Russia is is a giant dwarf.”
Theodore laughed; and clicked his teeth. Bamie was now pouring coffee, with Edith’s assistance. Neither paid much attention to Theodore; but their absent-mindedness was benign. “I’ll use that, John, with your permission.”
“Don’t you dare. I can say such things in private. But you can’t, ever. We have enough trouble here with Cassini, with Russia. You may think such things,” Hay conceded, “but the president must always avoid wit…”
“And truth?”
“Truth above all, the statesman must avoid. Elevated sentiment and cloudy tautologies must now be your style…”
“Oh, you depress me! I had hoped to make a brilliant State of the Union address. Full of epigrams, and giant dwarfs. Well, all right. No dwarfs.”
“We must extend the hand of friendship,” Hay intoned, “through every open door that we can find.”
Roosevelt laughed; or, rather, barked; and started to march about the room. “The thing to remember about the Germans is this. They simply haven’t got the territory to support their population. They’ve got France and England to the west-and us back of them. They’ve got your giant dwarf to the east, and back of it China. There’s really no place, anywhere, for a German empire…”
“Africa,” Hay broke in.
“Africa, yes. But Africa what? A lot of territory, and no Germans willing to go there. In the last ten years, one million Germans-the best and the pluckiest of them all-moved out of Germany. And who got them? We did-or most of them. No wonder the Kaiser’s eager to set up his own empire in China. But he’ll have to deal with us if he moves into Asia…”
“Suppose he moves into Europe?” Hay’s back pains had returned; and Bamie Cowles’s coffee had created turbulence in a digestive system more than usually fragile.
“Spring-Rice thinks he might, one day. I like Germans. I like the Kaiser, in a way. I mean, if I were in his situation, I’d try for something, too.”
“Well, we did not like them in ’98, when they tried to get England to join them to help Spain against us.”
“No. No. No. But you can see how tempting it must have been for the Kaiser. He wanted the Philippines. Who didn’t? Anyway, the British were with us.” Roosevelt suddenly frowned.
“Canada claims,” Hay began.
“Not now! Not now, dear John. The subject bores me.”
“Bores you? Think of me, hour after hour, day after day, in close communion with Our Lady of the Snows…”
“Boring Lady, in my experience.”
“Now, Thee.” Edith’s warning voice was a bit lower than her normal voice; but no less effective.
“But, Edie. I was just commiserating with John…”
“I suppose,” said young Ted, “that I will be able to endure Groton another term.”
“Is this a cry for attention?” asked the father, balefully clicking his teeth.
“No, no. It was just an observation…”
“Where is Alice?” asked the President, turning to his wife.
“Farmington, isn’t she?” Edith turned to her sister-in-law.
“In my house, yes. Or she was. She’s very social, you know.”
“I don’t know where she gets that from.” Theodore appealed to Hay. “We are not-never have been-fashionable.”
“Perhaps this is an advance, a new hazard for an old fortune-”
“No fortune either!” sighed Edith. “I don’t know how we’ll live now. This black dress,” she slowly turned so that her husband could appreciate her sacrifice, “cost me one hundred and thirty-five dollars at Hollander’s this morning. That’s ready-made, of course, and then I had to buy a truly hideous hat with black crepe veil.”
“One can only hope that there will be numerous similar funerals for you to attend,” said Hay, “of elderly diplomats, of course, and senators of any age.”
Theodore was staring at himself in a round mirror; he seemed as fascinated by himself as others were. Then he confided, “I have to go to Canton after the services here.” Then he spun around, and sat in a chair, and was suddenly still. It was as if the toy had finally run down. He even sat like a doll, thought Hay; legs outstretched, arms loose at his side.
“Shall I go?” asked Hay.
“No. No. We can never travel together again, you and I. If something should happen to me, you’re the only president we’ve got.”
“Poor country,” said Hay, getting to his feet. “Poor me.”
“Stop sounding old.” The doll, rewound, was on its feet. “I’ll meet with the Cabinet Friday, after Canton; the usual time.”
“We shall be ready for you. As for Alice, if she does decide to visit Washington, Helen says that she can stay with us.”
“Alice worships your girls,” said Edith, without noticeable pleasure. “They dress so beautifully, she keeps reminding me.”
“Alice doesn’t like having poor parents,” said the President, as he led Hay to the door.
“Give her to us. There’s plenty of room.”
“We might. Pray for me, John.”
“I have done that, Theodore. And will, again.”
BLAISE FOUND THE CHIEF IN, of all places, his office at the Journal. As a rule, he preferred to work at home when he was in New York, which was seldom these days. In Hearst’s capacity as presiding genius of the Democratic clubs, he travelled the nation, rallying the faithful, preparing for his own election four years hence. He had been in Chicago when McKinley was shot.
Brisbane was seated on a sofa while the Chief sat feet on his desk, and eyes on the window, through which nothing could be seen except falling, melting snow. Neither man greeted Blaise; he was a member of the family. But when Blaise asked, “How bad is it?” Hearst answered, “Bad and getting worse.” Hearst gave him a copy of the World. Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain was printed in bold type. Hearst’s deliberate incitement to murder was the theme of the accompanying story. As Blaise read, he could hear the steady drumming of Hearst’s fingers on his desk, always a sign of nervousness in that generally phlegmatic man. “They’re trying to make out that the murderer had a copy of the Journal in his pocket at Buffalo. He didn’t, of course.”
“They will invent anything,” said Brisbane sadly. The two founding fathers of invented news were not pleased to find themselves being reinvented by others no less scrupulous. The irony was not lost on Blaise.
“The Chicago American’s got close to three hundred thousand circulation.” Hearst’s mind worked rather like a newspaper’s front page, a number of disparate items crowded together, some in larger type than others. “I’m going to add the word ‘American’ to the Journal here. Particularly now. Croker’s leaving Tammany Hall. Murphy’s taking his place. The saloon-keeper, who was also dock commissioner. The one we caught owning stock in that ice company.”
“Even so,” Brisbane sounded confident, “I’m willing to bet he’ll nominate you for governor next fall.”
“I’m not so sure.” The right foot now began to waggle, and the drumming fingers were still as the energy moved to the body’s opposite end. “Maybe you should try him out. See if he’ll nominate you for Congress in the Eleventh Ward. All you have to pay is your first year’s congressional salary. After that, they leave you alone in Washington, except on votes that concern the city, which nobody else cares about.” The Chief stared at Blaise.
“But I don’t want to go to Congress,” began Blaise.
“I was talking to Brisbane.” The Chief was equable.
“We’ve discussed it before.” Brisbane’s urbane whiskerless face looked, suddenly, statesmanlike. He had, it was rumored, socialist tendencies. “A sort of trial balloon. The Chief needs to win one high office before 1904, and governor of New York is the one that will put him in the White House.”
“What about Colonel Roosevelt? He’s bound to run again.” Blaise could not imagine the Chief, for all his journalistic skills, as a match for the dynamic, evangelical Roosevelt. More to the point, the Chief hated public speaking; hated crowds; hated shaking hands-his limp damp grip was much imitated along Newspaper Row.
A sub-editor entered with a newspaper proof. “The President’s message to Congress. We just got it on the wire.” Hearst took the long sheets of paper, and read rapidly; found what he was looking for; read aloud, imitating Roosevelt’s falsetto, not so different from his own: “Leon, however his name’s pronounced, was, according to our new president, ‘inflamed by the teachings of professed anarchists…’ ”
“Poor Emma Goldman,” said Brisbane.
“ ‘… and probably also by the reckless utterances of those who, on the stump and in the public press,’ that’s me, I hope Mother doesn’t read this, ‘appeal to the dark and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and sullen hatred. The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped.’ ”
Hearst made a ball of the sheets of paper, and aimed it, successfully, at the waste basket beside Brisbane. Then he swung his feet off the desk, opened a drawer and withdrew a revolver, which he slipped into his coat pocket. “I’ve been getting death threats,” he said to Blaise. “And Mr. Roosevelt’s speech won’t help. Well, we’ll get him, too, one of these days.”
“With another bullet, to put him on his bier?” Blaise found dark comedy in the Chief’s melodramatic view of the world.
“Heaven forbid.” Hearst turned pale. “I hate violence. I was sick to my stomach when I heard about McKinley. Frightful. Frightful.” Blaise realized that, in some curious way, Hearst lived in a kind of dream where real people were turned, by his yellow art, into fictional characters that he could manipulate as he pleased. On those rare occasions when his fictions and the real world coincided, he was genuinely shocked. It was all very well for him to report that one Jack had taken a ride into Heaven aboard a bean stalk and quite another thing for an actual bean stalk to lift him up above the world.
Brisbane left them. The President’s message must be printed and commented on. Then Hearst asked for news of the Baltimore newspaper, and Blaise told him the truth. “It’s just a stepping-stone.”
“To where?”
“I want Washington. After all, you have everything else worth having.”
“You could run one of my papers.” Hearst stared at the snow, which was now sticking to the glass of the window. The room was filled with an odd refracted blue light.
“You run them. I want my own.”
“In Baltimore?”
“The Examiner’s a beginning until…” But Blaise did not know where or what the “until” would be.
“She’d probably have sold, if the Hay boy hadn’t been killed.” Hearst liked to analyze Caroline. By and large, women did not interest him as people. But Caroline was now beyond mere womanhood, she was a publisher.
“I’m not so sure. She likes owning a newspaper.”
“I know the feeling.” Hearst made one of his rare mild jokes about himself. “Well, I’ll miss you around here.” With that, Blaise was dismissed. He was no longer of financial use to the Chief, whose mother’s fortune was even larger than when her son first set out to spend it all. Now that Blaise was himself a publisher, there was no need to continue the master-apprentice relationship. “Are you going to live in Baltimore?” The Chief seemed genuinely curious.
“No. The management’s good enough as it is, without me.” This was untrue, but Blaise was not going to tell Hearst that he was already planning a raid on the Chicago American’s editorial staff. He had an excellent managing editor in view, who would have to be paid more than Hearst paid him, which was far too much, but if anyone could salvage the Baltimore Examiner it would be one Charles Hapgood, a native of Maryland’s eastern shore and eager to abandon Chicago’s arctic winters and tropical summers for equable Baltimore.
“You should do well.” Hearst did not sound passionately convinced. “I mean, you’ve got the money, that’s what counts. Buy the best people and-that’s the ticket.” The pale gray eyes glanced for a brief instant in Blaise’s direction; and Blaise decided that the Chief knew about Hapgood. “You been giving any thought to the magazines?” This was the Chief’s new interest. He had been impressed by the amount of advertising that certain ladies’ magazines could command. But when he had tried to buy one of them, he had been put off by the cost. He would now have to start one-or two, or a thousand.
“I don’t know enough about how they work.” Blaise was direct. “Neither do you. Why bother?”
“Well, we could learn the business, I reckon. I’ve been thinking about, maybe, a magazine called Electrical Machine or something…”
“For ladies?”
“Well, they drive, too. But I’d aim that at men. Just a thought. I’m marrying Miss Willson one of these days.”
Blaise was surprised. “Before the election?”
“Well, that part’s up in the air. Maybe I’ll…” The thin voice trailed off. Obviously, Hearst was afraid that scandal might be made of his long liaison with a showgirl; although marriage would silence the sterner moralists, might it not draw attention to the earlier liaison?
Blaise rose to go. The Chief gave him several limp soft fingers to squeeze.
“Which one?” asked Blaise, as he walked toward the door.
“Which one what?”
“Which Miss Willson are you marrying?”
“Which…?” For an instant, Hearst seemed entirely to have lost his train of thought. Marriage often had that effect on men, Blaise had noticed. “Anita,” said Hearst. Then corrected himself. “I mean Millicent, of course. You know that,” he added, with a hint of accusation. Hearst was that rare thing, the humorless man who could recognize humor in others, and even at his own expense. “Your French lady,” Hearst began a counter-attack.
“She has retired to the country. I am to see her no more.”
“So that’s how they do it in France.”
Blaise left Pennsylvania Station aboard the parlor-car with every intention of stopping in Baltimore, but the sight, from the train window, of those interminable brick row-houses, all alike, with scoured white stone steps, depressed him, and he continued on to Washington.
During the train journey, Blaise thought, rather more insistently than usual, about himself. He was twenty-six; he was rich; he was attractive to women, even though he was not seriously attracted to them. Anne de Bieville had called him gâté-spoiled. But there was more to it than that, he knew, as the town of Havre de Grace, bleak under snow, moved slowly past his window. He had become too used to being the one wooed; and seduced. Except for occasional visits to the Tenderloin’s more exclusive bordellos, Blaise had made no effort to find himself a mistress, much less a wife. Plon had been amazed, and wondered, solicitously, if Blaise might not be in ill-health, suffering perhaps from some debilitating malady of the sort that begins, as all things French must, with the liver and then moves, inexorably, devastatingly southward. But as Blaise was as sturdy as a young pony, Plon had, finally, come to the sad conclusion that the illness was not of the flesh but the spirit: Anglo-Saxonism, a state of mind notoriously debilitating to the whole man. Plon had suggested more exercise, like tennis.
Blaise was duly impressed by the renovated lobby of Willard’s, which still extended from street to street. Just behind the monumental cigar stand, the city’s political center, there was a new telephone room. Here he gave the telephone operator the number of the Washington Tribune. She plugged various wires into sockets.
“Your number is ready.” She indicated a booth.
When Blaise lifted the receiver and asked for Caroline, a deep Negro voice said, “There is no Miss Sanford here. This is the Bell residence.”
“But isn’t this number-”
“No, sir, it isn’t. We have been getting wrong numbers here all week.” The man hung up. After two more attempts, Blaise got through to the Tribune.
Caroline was delighted with Blaise’s misadventure. “Now we can write the story. Everyone in Washington knows that the only telephone that never works properly is Alexander Graham Bell’s. ‘Inventor without honor.’ How’s that for a head? But, of course, he’s got plenty of honor for inventing the telephone. Perhaps ‘Inventor without a repairman.’ ” Caroline agreed to meet Blaise at Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham’s “ ‘palatial home.’ The occasion is humble. She is pouring tea for the new members of Congress. I have to be there. You don’t, of course. Oh, but you do. You’re a publisher, too-at last!” she added, with bright, impersonal malice.
Mrs. Bingham stood before a palatial fireplace, taken from a Welsh castle, she said, belonging to Beowulf, an ancestor of Mr. Bingham on the maternal side. As usual the milk lord of the District of Columbia was nowhere to be seen. “We are surrounded by Apgars,” said Caroline, who had met Blaise at the door. But Blaise could not tell an Apgar from anyone else in the crowded room, where the new congressmen and their ladies looked supremely ill at ease despite Mrs. Bingham’s deep-throated welcomes. Although she was not learned in matters of history, much less myth, she had the politician’s ability to remember not only names but congressional districts. After many consultations with Caroline, it had been decided that Mrs. Bingham’s destiny was to fill the void at the center of Washington’s social life and become a political hostess. There had been no proper salon in years. The Hay-Adams drawing room was far too rarefied for mere mortals, much less itinerant politicians; embassies were out of bounds, while the White House was essentially a family-even tribal-affair now that the Roosevelts were all arrived. So Caroline had encouraged Mrs. Bingham to move to the high-relatively high-ground; and there set her standard.
“Blaise Sanford!” she exclaimed, as Caroline approached, half-brother on her arm. Blaise found himself transfixed by dull onyx eyes, and a powerful handclasp. “Baltimore is closer than New York, and blood,” she added, significantly, “thicker than water.”
“Yes.” Blaise had never found talking to American ladies, as opposed to girls, easy. But then ladies like Mrs. Bingham had conversation enough for two. An occasional “yes” or “no” could see a young man safely through this sort of encounter. “You’ll live here, naturally. Baltimore is out of the question. Washington’s more convenient, in every way. Caroline, have you heard? Alice Roosevelt has lost all her teeth, and only eighteen years old. I think that’s so romantic, don’t you? Such a great calamity, at so tender an age.”
“How,” asked Caroline, “did she lose the teeth?”
“A horse kicked her.” Mrs. Bingham looked almost youthful as she bore, yet again, ill tidings. “Now she’s developed an abscess in her lower jaw, and all the teeth fell crashing out…”
“Poor girl,” said Blaise. He had never met Miss Roosevelt, but she was known to be clever and eager to have a social life of great intensity anywhere on earth except in dowdy Washington. He could not blame her. Idly, he wondered if he should marry her. She was said to be good-looking. But then the thought of the dentures that she soon must wear erased any fantasy of a White House wedding.
Caroline helped Mrs. Bingham greet the arriving guests, and Blaise was taken off by an Apgar lady, “your fifth cousin,” she said. They kept track, the Apgars, of their vast cousinage. As Blaise tried to make conversation, he looked about the room, all gilt and crystal and old-fashioned shiny black horsehair, and tried to recognize who was who among the politicians, and failed. But he was able to tell which man present was a politician-the uniform black Prince Albert frock-coat was the give-away, not to mention the inevitably large mouth and huge chest, suitable for speech-making to enormous crowds. So many opera tenors, he decided, disguised as preachers. Caroline, he noted, seemed in her element; she was supremely poised, as Mrs. Bingham introduced her to the new men of state; and once each had realized that this young lady was proprietor of the Tribune, her hand would be taken not in one hand but two glad-hands, and her arm pumped, as if from the depths of her being printer’s ink might be summoned up, to spell out, again and again, the politician’s name in stories that would give pleasure to his constituents and profits to his sponsors.
Bleakly, Blaise realized that the Baltimore Examiner could never have the same effect on these overexcited men, excepting, always, the Maryland delegation, to a man to be avoided. Fortunately, Hapgood had promised to act as buffer; and Hapgood knew them all.
A wiry young man with a full head of coppery hair-for some reason, a full head of hair was a rarity in the republic’s political life-turned to Blaise, and said, “You’re Mr. Sanford. Caroline’s brother.” The young man’s handshake was highly professional. By gripping hard the other man’s fingers, the politician got the first grip, thus saving himself from the malicious working-man, whose superior strength could, with a grinding squeeze, reduce even the sturdiest man of state to his knees. McKinley’s famous trick of simultaneously shaking the honest yeoman’s hand while appearing gently to caress its owner’s elbow was simply a precaution. Should the other begin to crush the presidential fingers, the affectionate grip on the elbow would be transformed to a sudden sharp blow, calculated to cause such unexpected pain that the grip would be loosened. Blaise had learned all the tricks, in the Chief’s service.
“You’re one of the new-congressmen?” Despite the political handclasp, the young man seemed far too athletic and handsome to be a tribune of the people; but that, indeed, was what he was. “James Burden Day,” he said; and named his state and district; also cousinage. “We’re all of us Apgars,” he said.
“Yes.” Blaise was vague. He had no memory of James Burden Day, but he was not displeased to have a distant cousin in the Congress, particularly one who looked like a gentleman even if he did represent a barbarous state, whose barbarous accent he also affected, if it was not, grim thought, his own.
“I was here before, in the comptroller’s office. That’s when I got to know Del Hay and, of course, Miss Sanford.” They exchanged condolences on Del’s death. “After he went off to Pretoria, I never saw him again. He was going to marry Miss Sanford…?” Day inserted a question in his voice.
“Yes. This month, I think. He was also going to join the President’s staff.”
“Poor… Mr. Hay,” said the young man, unexpectedly; and his pale blue eyes looked suddenly, directly, embarrassingly, into Blaise’s. With one hand, Blaise touched his own forehead, as if to deflect by this meaningless gesture that sharp disquieting gaze; and wondered why he should find Mr. Day disturbing. After all, the inference that Caroline did not care for Del was none of Blaise’s business. But Day had made him uneasy, which he did not like. He was also reminded, yet again, that although he was the Sanford, Washington was very much Caroline’s city. She had made herself a high place; and he had none yet.
Day said the expected things. Del dead so young; President dead so tragically; Mr. Hay devastated. “Even more so now,” said Blaise, wishing that he was as tall as Day, who was able to speak to him with such intimacy and warmth, and yet could look, whenever he chose, over Blaise’s head to see what new magnate had entered the room. But Blaise continued: “Mr. Hay’s oldest friend just died, Clarence King. You know, the geologist.”
“I didn’t know…”
“My sister tells me he died in Arizona a few weeks ago. So in six months poor Mr. Hay has lost his son, friend and president.”
“Well,” said Day, with sudden cold-bloodedness, “he hasn’t lost his job, has he? Funny that Roosevelt hasn’t replaced him. But then,” and the smile was boyish and engaging, “I’m a Democrat, and I carry a spear for Bryan, in the people’s name.”
“We’re crucifying them,” said Blaise, matching the other’s boyish coldness, “upon a cross of silver this time around.” Both men laughed.
“I’m Frederika Bingham.” A pale blond girl, with a languid manner, introduced herself. “I know who you are, of course, but Mamma thinks that you should know who I am.” She smiled at Blaise, a somewhat crooked smile that revealed curiously sharp incisors. She smelled of lilac-water. Day smelled of not quite clean broadcloth. Of all Blaise’s faculties, the sense of smell was the strongest and, in sexual matters, the most decisive. “I saw you at the Casino, at Newport,” he said.
“You will go far in politics,” said the young woman, her voice on a dying fall, her eyes not on Blaise but on James Burden Day.
“Except Mr. Sanford doesn’t go into politics at all,” said Day. “He doesn’t have to, lucky man.”
“I get everyone mixed up,” said Frederika contentedly. Blaise could see that Day attracted her; and that he didn’t. Masculine competitiveness began, like a tide, to rise, for no reason other than the moon’s disposition, or was it lilac, or the other? The other…
Caroline joined them. She, too, was attracted, Blaise could see. A storm of male resolve broke-behind his eyes or wherever such storms break. One male-admittedly taller than he-had attracted two women. He must, somehow, establish his own primacy. “You have come back, as you said you would,” Caroline greeted Day warmly. “In Congress, at last.”
“Father wants you to do something about milk,” said Frederika, gazing thoughtfully at Blaise. At least, he had willed her attention from the other.
“But I don’t come from a dairy state,” said Day, answering for Blaise.
“You are naive!” Caroline seemed to be bestowing a high compliment; but Day blushed, as she meant him to do. “The fact that there is not a single cow in your state means that when you finally do something for all the cows in the nation-I don’t know just what you’ll have to do, but Mr. Bingham will tell you-you will be thought disinterested and altruistic and a true friend of…”
“… of the dairy interests,” finished Day, habitual healthy bronze heightened.
“No. No. Of the cows.” Caroline was emphatic.
“Father really likes them.” Thoughtfully, Frederika smiled her crooked smile at Blaise. “Cows, that is. He can moon around that dairy of his-the one in Chevy Chase-all day.”
“I know how he feels.” Blaise could tell that Caroline was about to improvise an aria. She could, with no effort, say what others would like to hear, with astonishing spontaneity. “I was like that at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. Remember, Blaise? The cows, the milking rooms, the churns where they still make butter the way they did when Louis XV stayed there? It was Paradise, and at its center not God but the Cow…” Before Caroline could complete her panegyric, Day pulled a small, plump, pretty woman to his side, and said, “This is my wife, Kitty.”
“The cow…” Caroline repeated absently; then her voice trailed off as, politely, she gave the woman her hand. “But this is thrilling,” she began.
Blaise understood her disappointment. Since James Burden Day was uncommonly fetching, Blaise suspected that Caroline’s phantom list of possibilities might once have included him. The speed with which Caroline now set out to charm Kitty convinced Blaise that he was right. “Mr. Day never hinted that he might… And to you!” she exclaimed, eyes radiant, as if with admiration for Kitty. “Oh, he is lucky! We are lucky to have you in Washington. Aren’t we, Blaise? Except you live in Baltimore…”
“Oh, no, I don’t,” Blaise growled.
But Caroline was not to be stopped. “Was it so sudden? We heard nothing here, and between Frederika’s mother and the Tribune’s ‘Society Lady,’ we’re supposed to know everything.”
“Well, it was sudden,” said Kitty. She had a low nasal voice of the sort that Blaise liked least in a country where nearly everyone’s voice got on his nerves.
“We got married,” said Day, “on election day. We’d always planned that,” he added.
“Only if you were elected.” Kitty was flat in her humor. “I wasn’t about to marry somebody who was going to stay on in American City, and practice law like everybody else. No, sir,” she said to Caroline, who took the “sir” in easy stride. “I wanted to get out of the state almost as bad as Jim, Representative Day, I guess I have to call him now.”
“Surely not at breakfast.” Caroline was gracious.
Mrs. Bingham, sensing discord or at the least drama, approached and Frederika fled. “Isn’t this a surprise?” The voice was accusing. “Mr. Day never let on that he was going home to get both elected and married, to Judge Halliday’s daughter. Judge Halliday,” Mrs. Bingham explained, “is to that state what Mark Hanna is to Ohio, and then some.”
Blaise noticed that Day was smiling, with embarrassment. On the other hand, Kitty looked as if she had indeed, like the fabulous feline, swallowed the canary. As Caroline now prepared to rise to new heights of insincerity, Blaise was suddenly conscious of the degree and intensity of his sister’s sexuality, no less powerful for her innocence or, rather, ignorance. He wondered, perversely, what it would be like to switch roles with her; then, looking at Day and Kitty, thought better of it. The sort of wall that a man might breach no woman could, at least not in their world. Here the cards were entirely stacked against women; only men could play a relatively free hand.
Kitty spoke of houses and servants, and Caroline offered to help with both. Day turned to Blaise. “I hope we’ll see you, now that you’re nearby.”
“I hope so, too.” Then Blaise added recklessly, “But I won’t be nearby. I’ll be right here.”
“In Washington?” The sandy eyebrows arched.
“Yes, in Washington. New York’s too far away and Baltimore is nowhere at all. I’m looking for a house,” he improvised, inspired by Caroline. She was not the only one who could spin a bright web in company.
“Then we’ll see more of you.” Day was easy; charming. “It won’t be the same, though, without Del.”
“I think I shall build a house,” said Blaise, allowing for no sentiment. “In Connecticut Avenue. The best of country life, the best of village life. She would never,” Blaise lowered his voice, not that Caroline and Kitty could have heard either of them in the noisy room, “never have married Del.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I know her,” Blaise lied. “Better than myself,” Blaise told the truth.
JOHN HAY WAS AT THE WINDOW to Henry Adams’s study, looking down on the passersby. The Porcupine was always amazed at how many people Hay could recognize, particularly now that everyone they knew had been so dramatically transformed by age. “General Dan Sickles, with crutches,” Hay announced, as the aged, blear-eyed warrior, murderer, and queen’s lover hobbled beneath the window in icy H Street.
“Surely, he’s dead.” This season, Adams affected to believe that everyone of their acquaintance was dead unless proven otherwise.
“He may well be dead.” Hay was judicious. “But he has taken to moving about, like Lazarus. Where is his leg, by the way?”
“Shot off at the battle of Gettysburg, which he nearly lost for us, the four-flusher.”
“No. No.” Hay turned round in the window seat, and settled his back as comfortably as he could against cushions. “When the leg was detached, by cannonball, Sickles sent someone to find it. Then he had a charming box made for it so that he could carry it around with him. I think he said he was going to give it to one of his clubs in New York.”
“Another point against New York. I would not allow Sickles in any club, much less his leg.” Adams sat beside the fire; he wore a mulberry velvet smoking jacket. As always on Sunday, the breakfast table was set more elaborately than usual. At noon, the guests would arrive. Hay was never entirely sure how many were directly invited and how many simply showed up. When queried, Adams looked mysterious. “All is random,” he would murmur. “Like the universe.”
But this morning, all was not random in their lives. Adams had come back from Europe at the end of December, in time to attend, on New Year’s Day, Clarence King’s funeral in New York City. He had stayed on in the city longer than usual. He had been, he wrote Hay, astonished by King’s will; but said no more.
The previous night, at dinner with the Hays, Adams had whispered in Hay’s ear that he would like to see him, alone, before breakfast the next day. When Hay arrived, Adams had been maddeningly mysterious, as he went slowly through the drawers of his escritoire, collecting bits of paper, while Hay, finally, retreated to the window and the view of the passersby, many of them slipping and falling most agreeably upon the frozen pavement. Only the one-legged Sickles was entirely sure-footed.
“The will,” Adams said, at last.
“The estate…?” Hay was more to the point.
“Well, there will be money. Our friend’s collection of pictures and bric-a-brac is stored in Tenth Street, in New York City, and once sold off at auction should provide enough money for any reasonable contingency.”
“What, dear Henry, is ‘reasonable’ and what is the ‘contingency’?”
But Adams was staring at the fire as if it were the sun and he a worshipper. “You know, John, that for King, in his robust way, and for me, in my crabbed way, woman is all things in Heaven and earth…”
“Your twelfth-century virgin…”
“Our Virgin; as revered in that last cohesive century, and memorialized at Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres.”
Although Hay never wearied of Adams’s enthusiasms, currently focussed on the idea of woman as virgin, and mother of God, he failed to make any connection between the Porcupine’s ongoing literary work of celebration and Clarence King, who had died a bachelor. But Adams was not to be hurried, and Hay settled back in the window seat, and stared at Blake’s mad Babylonian monarch, on all fours, munching grass. “King always saw the male as being rather like the crab’s shell, to be discarded when no longer needed, by the crab-by woman, that is. She is the essential energy that uses the shell, and then lets it go. Obviously, King was a more primitive, basic man than I. Although each of us celebrated the idea of woman, I see her as the virgin queen of an ordered, perfect world while he celebrated an earthier, more primitive great-mother goddess, rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals.”
Even for Adams, this was highfalutin, thought Hay. Admittedly the two men had obviously run amok in the islands of the South Pacific, paying court to old-gold women, but to make a universal system out of two inhibited nineteenth-century American gentlemen’s good luck was, perhaps, too much.
“In any case, our friend was to find his ideal, his inspiration, and in 1883, he married her.”
Hay nearly fell from the window seat. “Clarence King was married?”
Adams gave a maddeningly diffident bob of his pink-bald head. “In Twenty-fourth Street, in New York, he married one Ada Todd, by whom he was to have five children.”
“In secret!” Hay had the sense of going mad.
“In such secrecy that he never actually told Ada his true name until the very end. He called himself James Todd, and he settled her, and their children, in a lovely rural New York retreat called Flushing.”
“Henry, if you have turned to novel-writing again…”
“No, no. Truth is bizarre enough for the mere historian. King was still able to produce sufficient money to keep his family in comfort in their Horatian rusticity, where the ginkgo trees run riot, and loyal servitors were able to maintain them in Arcadian if anonymous comfort.”
As Hay grew more and more impatient, Adams grew more lyric. “As you might suspect-I saw your face subtly change when I used the word ‘anonymous.’ There were excellent reasons why King did not want the world-or even the Hearts, sad to tell-to know of his secret life. Ada was his ideal, of course, an earth goddess, essential, a custodian of cosmic energy…”
“Henry, in God’s name-”
“John.” Adams raised a hand in gentle remonstrance. “I’ve not finished with the secret life. Just before King went west again, he decided that it would be best for his family-still called Todd-to move to that part of the world which currently gives you so much trouble, over the infamous Alaskan boundary…”
“Canada?”
“Our Lady of the Snows, yes. He moved the lot of them to Toronto, where the sons have been enrolled in,” Adams glanced at the paper on his lap, “something called the Logan School…”
“Why Canada?”
“Because there is a tolerance there quite unlike our own-oh, fierceness on the subject of identity, one might say. Our national disapproval of any and every misalliance.”
Hay nodded. “I can understand that, particularly now that he has given her his name. He has, hasn’t he?”
Adams nodded. “If she wants to use it, of course. He also made it clear in his will, which you’ll get a copy of, in due course. You are a trustee…”
“Why do you have a copy, and I don’t?”
“A friend-our friend, Gardiner-gave me this early draft. Once the will is probated, and King’s bric-a-brac is sold, the widow will be able to live in moderate comfort as Mrs. Todd or Mrs. King, in Toronto or Flushing or…”
“This sounds like one of poor Stephen Crane’s stories. The gentleman and the fallen lady, the illegitimate family, the false names…”
“Oh, it’s a much bolder story than anything Mr. Crane put his hand to. You see, dear John, King’s perfect woman, mother of his five children, emblem of the original universal goddess for whom the male has no use once his biological function is complete, this glorious creature from pre-history, this Ada Todd, is a Negress.”
Hay exhaled suddenly; and all the blood went from his head. For an instant, he thought he might faint. Then he rallied. “Clarence King married a Negress! But-that’s impossible.”
“You did not go to Tahiti.” Smugly, Adams gazed into the fire, framed by luminous Mexican jade.
“But you did, and I fail to see a dusky Mrs. Henry Adams on these premises…”
“Only because I moved on-and up. To the Virgin of Chartres, to another more perfect avatar of the primal goddess, who…”
“I’ll be damned,” said John Hay, as William slowly opened the door to the study and said, “The young ladies would like to pay their respects…”
Adams rose; and assumed his avuncular mask, though a certain unfamiliar gleam in his eye suggested that there was still something demonic latent in his nature.
The room was filled by three girls. Hay had never been able to figure just how it was that his two daughters and their friend Alice Roosevelt could take up so much space, breathe so much air, create so much atmosphere-for want of a better word-but they did.
The three swarmed over Uncle Henry; receiving chaste touches of his hands, now raised in papal blessing. Helen was more and more like Clara, while Alice was like himself. The President’s Alice was, happily, not like her father, except for a thin mouth full of large snaggled teeth. Alice Roosevelt was more handsome than pretty, with a slender figure, and gray marbly eyes; she stood very straight, and comported herself like the regal princess she saw herself as. She was also given to demonstrations of manic energy, and there were already signs of a dexterous, most undemocratic-yet hardly royal-wit. Henry Adams affected to find her intimidating. Eager to please, she proceeded to intimidate Uncle Henry. “You must come to the party. It’s not every day I have a debut in the White House…”
“I am too old, dear child…”
“Of course you are. So we’ll prop you up like who was it at the feast?”
“Themistocles…”
“Mr. Hay, make him come!” Alice Roosevelt turned to Hay, one arm raised high like the goddess of victory.
“I’ll do what I can.”
Helen threw herself, with rather too much of a crash, into the chair opposite Adams, the large chair consecrated to her mother, who was still larger, Hay was relieved to note, than their daughter. He was also relieved that Helen would marry Payne Whitney the following month. Were she to become even larger… He dared not think of what it would be like to live in a house between that massive Scylla, his wife, and a prospective spinster of equal grandeur, Helen, as Charybdis.
“Everyone else is coming.” Alice Roosevelt perched on a stool. “Of course, it will be boring. Father and Mother refuse to spend money. Other girls get a cotillion. Do I? Of course not! Simple Republican Alice gets only a dance, and punch. Not even champagne. Punch!” she exclaimed, as her father might have shouted “Bully!”
“Surely punch is suitable for young people.” Hay, making kindly grandfatherly sounds, could think only of voluptuous black women, heavy-breasted and sinuous, crabs to his relevant shell, to appropriate Henry’s ugly image. How lucky King had been. Even as he was dying, he had had “a woman,” and, apparently, such a woman as the unadventurous Hay had not known since he was a very young man, living a bachelor life in Europe. Was it now too late? Of course, he was dying, but then King had been dying, too. Where there was a will, there was Eros. There was, also, Thanatos, he grimly completed his reverie. He would never again touch warm silken skin.
“We’re to have a hardwood floor in the East Room instead of that awful mustard carpet, and those round seats with the palms sprouting out of them. It’s a horrible house, isn’t it, Uncle Henry?”
“Well, it has never been a fashionable house,” Adams began.
“Father is going to redo everything, as soon as he makes Congress cough up the money. It’s intolerable, all of us upstairs, and Father’s office, too, in such a small place. We’re going to do over the entire floor, from west to east…”
“And where will the President have his office?” In Hay’s memory, every administration had tried to change the White House; and except for the odd Tiffany screen, nothing much had been altered since Lincoln’s time.
“Father’s going to tear down the conservatories, and put his office where they were. So he’ll be practically next door to you at the State Department.”
“Is this wise?” Even the iconoclast Adams-and what mustier icon than the White House was better suited for his smashing?-was dismayed.
“Either our family grows smaller or the house grows larger.” Thus the Republican princess decreed.
“Alice knows her mind, her mind!” Helen applauded.
William was again at the door; this time he stood very straight, as he announced, “The President.”
All rose, including the Republican princess, as Roosevelt, dressed in morning suit, skipped into the room, as if he were still racing upstairs, two at a time, his usual practice, which would, sooner or later, Hay thought, with true pleasure, cause that thick little body to break down. “I’ve been to church!” The President shared the great news with all of them. Lately, he had taken to dropping in on Hay after church, which gave sovereign and minister a few often crucial moments alone together, away from secretaries and callers. The President, Hay had duly noted, could not be alone. Even when he was reading, a family passion, he liked to have fellow-readers all about him. “I heard you were over here, for breakfast…”
“Join us, Mr. President.” Adams was silky.
“Oh, no! Your food’s much too good for the likes of me.”
“Chipped beef will do for the President.” Alice grimaced. “And a nice hash with an egg on it. And ketchup.”
“Perfect breakfast! If Alice ever exercised, she’d eat hash, too. Prince Henry of Prussia.” Roosevelt flung the name at Hay; then took up an imperial position before the fire; and clicked his teeth three times.
“Father!” Alice shuddered. “Don’t do that. You know, the slightest breeze makes my bottom teeth sway…”
“I’m not making a breeze.”
“But you’re clicking your teeth, which reminds me… Look,” Alice opened wide her mouth, “the horror!”
But all Hay could see was a lower tier of teeth somewhat smaller than the tombstones above. “They are all loose,” she said triumphantly, mouth still open, diction suffering.
“Do shut, please!” Roosevelt, in turn, as if by paternal example, pursed his own lips tight-shut.
“I should have had them all pulled out. Every debutante in America would have imitated me, of course. A nation of toothless girls-like the Chinese women, with their bound feet…”
“Alice, your teeth have exhausted us as a subject…”
“I,” said Adams, “was just beginning to enjoy this dental-permutation on Henry James’s American girl…”
“Effete snob!” Roosevelt glared.
“Prince Henry of Prussia.” Hay retrieved the lost subject.
“Oh, yes. He’s to come in February, to pick up the yacht we’re building for the Kaiser, or so I was informed at church by old Holleben, who had converted to Presbyterianism, at least for the day. What do we do?”
“Give him a state dinner. But try to keep him from getting around the country…”
“Since I am a debutante,” said Alice, “I shall be asked to charm him. Is he married?” Alice was now moving about the room in imitation of her father, only as she walked, she swept her long dress this way and that, as if it were a royal train. “If I married him, I’d be Princess Alice of Prussia, wouldn’t I? So much nicer than Oyster Bay…”
“Princess Henry, I should think.” Adams was in his avuncular glory. “You will civilize the Teuton. If that’s possible.”
“Barbarize them even more.” Roosevelt was brisk. “Anyway, he’s married, and no Roosevelt’s going to marry a Prussian.”
“Unless the next election looks very close,” added Hay.
“Extraordinary!” Roosevelt added at least one too many syllables to the word. “The loyalty common Americans have to Germany. Imagine if we felt the same way about Holland.”
“We’ve been away longer,” said Alice. “Come on, girls.” She swept from the room with Hay’s daughters in tow.
“You are good to take Alice in.” Roosevelt sat in the chair vacated by Helen. “She is so-strenuous.”
“Like her father.” Hay thought of black women; and spoke of Prince Henry. “He’s here for one purpose. To stir up the German-Americans.”
“We won’t allow that. He’s supposed to be a gentleman. Not like his brother. The Kaiser’s a cad, all in all. Well, one day he’ll go too far. He’ll put out his neck and place it on the block.” Roosevelt clapped right hand with left; the sound was like a pistol shot. “No head. No Kaiser.”
“Then we shall be king of the castle?” Adams’s voice was mild, always, Hay knew, a dangerous sign. Adams was growing more and more restive not only with the bellicose President but with his own brother, Brooks, who never ceased to make the American eagle scream.
“That may be.” Roosevelt was equally mild; and guarded.
“Brooks believes that we are now at the fateful moment.” Adams smiled at Nebuchadnezzar. “The domination of the world is between us and Europe. So-which will it be?”
“Oh, you must come on Thursdays, and enlighten us.” Roosevelt was not to be drawn out. He was wily, Hay had discovered, rather to his surprise. Under all the noise, there was a calculating machine that never ceased to function. “We meet at nine o’clock and listen-”
“To my brother. I could not bear that, Mr. President. I’m obliged to hear him whenever I-he likes.”
“We’ll pick a Thursday when he’s not there.” Roosevelt was on his feet. “Your breakfast guests will be coming soon. Gentlemen.” Adams and Hay rose; their sovereign beamed upon them; and departed.
“He will have us at war.” Adams was bleak.
“I’m not so sure.” Hay approached the fire, suddenly cold. “But he wants the dominion of this earth, for us…”
“For himself. Curious little man,” said Adams, himself as small as Theodore, as small as Hay; three curious little men, thought Hay. “Now there are three of us.” Adams looked at Hay, forlornly.
“Three curious little men?”
“No. Three Hearts where once there were five.”
Hay felt a sudden excitement of a sort that had not troubled him for years; certainly, not since he had begun to die. “Is there a photograph?” he asked, voice trembling in his own ears. “Of her?”
“Of who?” Adams was bemused by firelight.
“The black woman.” The phrase itself reverberated in Hay’s head, and his mind was, suddenly, like a boy’s, filled with images of feminine flesh.
“As the trustee of his will, I suppose you could ask her for one. Droit de l’avocat, one might say. King outdid us all. We died long ago, and went on living. He kept on living long after he should’ve been dead.”
Two Hearts gone, thought Hay; three left. Who would be next to go? he asked himself, as if he did not know the answer.