Empire

1

JOHN HAY LOOKED OUT over the Atlantic, and thought of Theodore Roosevelt; but then practically everything reminded Hay of the President, who had summoned him to the strenuous confusions of Oyster Bay to concert a policy toward Russia, which had refused to accept a protest, forwarded by the President, deploring the Easter massacre of the Jews of Kishineff. American Jewry, headed by one Jakob Schiff, was up in arms; and, on the opposite side, so was Cassini in Washington. The President, like the Atlantic, obeyed his own tides, mindless tides, Hay had decided, entirely directed by the moon of his destiny. In the confusion of children, ponies, neighbors, it was decided to make no official remonstrance to the Tsar, but to play up, in the American press, the refusal of the Tsar’s government to accept a message on the subject.

“I believe the country would follow me if I were to go to the extreme.” Roosevelt was standing before his house, jaw held high; but since jaw and neck were all of a piece, Hay thought, queasily, of a chunk of roast beef.

“You mean war with Russia?” Hay leaned his back against the bole of a sycamore tree; and the pressure relieved, somewhat, the pain.

“I could lead the people in such a war…”

“Well, if you couldn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a war, would there?” In a year the Republicans would hold their convention, and Roosevelt dearly wanted to be the nominee. As a war leader, at the head of his legions in Manchuria, he would be, he thought, another Lincoln and so, overwhelmingly, elected. Hay lived now in dread of Theodore’s activism, like the Atlantic when the moon was at the full and the wind north-northwest.

“I favor only splendid little wars, as you know…” Hay began.

But Theodore Rex was now in full repetitive flow. “Who holds Shansi province dominates the world.” Hay wished that Brooks Adams had been born mute or, better, not at all. As Theodore trumpeted the Brooks Adams line, Hay made the usual demurs; then, inspired, he said, “Now if you want a useful small war, there’s Colombia.”

“I’d hoped you would say Canada.” Roosevelt suddenly laughed; and stopped playing emperor. “Yes. We’ve got good cause to send the troops to Bogotá. They are endless cheats. I know you’d just as soon place the canal in Nicaragua, but Panama’s the more likely spot, and if the Colombians don’t come to terms…” More Atlantic menace flowed up and down the lawns of Sagamore Hill; then the President went off to play tennis, and Hay fled to Edith for comfort.

Now Hay was again at Newport, Rhode Island, in the house that Helen and Payne had rented for the season. “The sea-air will do you good,” even Henry Adams had said that, as he fled to France; and the sea-air had indeed done him so much good that he had, that very morning, written out his resignation as secretary of state. The strain of keeping Theodore in line was too much for a sick man. Root was far better suited than he; also, Root rather frightened Theodore, which Hay certainly did not. Finally, Root was planning to give up his post as secretary of war; therefore, the graceful thing for Hay to do would be to stand aside, allowing Root to take his place, as Theodore’s keeper.

“I shall be free.” Hay addressed the Atlantic, which indifferently glittered in the bright July light. “I shall be able to enjoy life.” Then he laughed aloud when he recalled what Henry Adams had said when he had heard Hay fretting that by the time he left office he might have lost all zest for life.

“Don’t worry, sonny,” said his old friend, with exuberant malice, “you’ve already lost it.”

Slowly, Hay descended the curved marble staircase to the round marble entrance hall-inspired by Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Colonel Payne rented only the best for his stolen Whitney son. Hay did not like Colonel Payne; but, to the Colonel’s credit, he did not thrust himself upon the family of Helen Hay Whitney. Thus far, he had not been seen in Newport; nor had William C. Whitney. Each maintained the symmetry of their feud through absence.

In a panelled study that resembled the interior of a cigar box, Clara was writing letters beneath the portrait of the house’s owner, a railroad magnate, gone abroad. “You have resigned,” she said, without looking up.

“How did you know?” Hay was no longer astonished by Clara’s astonishing knowledge of him.

“The way you walk on your heels when you think you’ve-put your foot down. I’m writing Edith. Shall I say anything about your resignation?”

“No. No. Theodore must hear it only from me.” Hay produced the letter. “My freedom.”

“Yes, dear.” Clara continued to write; and Hay felt robbed of all drama.

“It’s not every day the secretary of state resigns,” he began.

“Well, it seems like every day in your case. I wish,” Clara signed her letter with a flourish, and turned the entire huge bulk of her body toward him, “that you really would go through with it. I want to get you back to Bad Nauheim, to the treatments, to…”

“Clara, I’ve done it! We can leave for Europe next month. Adee keeps the department running smoothly whether I’m living or dead, and the President…”

“… will stop you, as always. He wants you for next year, for the election. You’ll have to stay on, worse luck. Of course, the sea-air…”

“… agrees with me. But, how can I take another year of the Senate and Cabot…?” Hay shuddered at the thought of that narrow pompous man whom he had once thought of as a friend.

“We must put up with him because of Sister Ann. She’s worth a dozen of him…”

“And he is a dozen truly dreadful senators rolled into one…”

Helen swept, very like her mother, into the room. Marriage had enlarged everything about her. “Mrs. Fish gives a reception for the Secretary of State Saturday. So Mr. Lehr has decreed, decreed…”

“What dogs are to be asked?” Hay had been rather more pleased than shocked by the Lehr-Fish dinner party for the dogs of the Four Hundred. Roman decadence had always appealed to his frontiersman soul. The fact that decadence so enraged Theodore was also a point in its favor, particularly now that Theodore was himself showing late-imperial signs.

“Alice is arriving.” It was no longer necessary to ask which Alice. The Alice always arriving was Roosevelt. The press revelled in her; and called her Princess Alice. She delighted; she shocked; she powdered her nose in public, something no lady was supposed to do even in private, and it was even whispered that she, secretly, smoked cigarettes. Plainly, late, very late, Roman decadence now luridly lit up the White House, and the President had even joked to Hay that he himself had been taken to task by a lady in Canada who had read that he had actually drunk a glass of champagne at Helen Hay’s wedding, thereby placing in jeopardy his immortal soul.

“Your father has resigned.”

“I suppose she’ll stay at the Stone House. But we could always have her here…”

“Is that all that you have to say at the close of my long career?” Hay realized that his affectation of melancholy was too close to the real thing to be convincing.

“Oh, you won’t resign. You won’t really. Don’t be silly, Father. You’d have nothing at all to do. Anyway, the President won’t let you. So that’s that, isn’t it?” Helen appealed to Clara, who nodded, with sibylline dignity.

Hay was ill pleased, for he had, indeed, meant to resign once and for all, and now every omen was wrong. Only death could free him of office; and that would come soon enough. “You two are merciless,” he observed.

“You must also see to it that we get that canal from Colombia,” said Helen, adjusting her hair in a mirror. She was now nearly as large as her mother; and dressed in the same dramatic style. “Why are they being so difficult?”

“They are dawdling because next year the old French Concession for a canal, which we took on, runs out, and then they’ll want us to pay all over again.”

“Thieves,” said Helen, curling a lock of hair with a finger.

“To put it mildly. We may have to-intervene. The people who actually live in the isthmus, the Panamanians, hate the Colombian government.”

“We must give them their freedom.” Helen was emphatic. “That is the least we can do, the very least.”

“You and the President think alike,” said Hay. “Four times in the last two years the Panamanians have revolted against Colombia…”

“The next time we’ll help them, and then they can enter the union like… like Texas.”

“Oh, surely, not like Texas,” said Clara, obscurely.

“One Texas may be too much.” Helen was reasonable. “But if Panama wants to belong to us, we should let them.”

“Or,” said Hay, “we should say that we’ll build the canal in Nicaragua. Just the threat will bring Colombia round.” This had been Hay’s policy; and Roosevelt had concurred, for the time being. “I shall resign,” he repeated, as he left the room. Neither lady responded. Helen’s hair had fallen, disastrously, down her back, while Clara’s letter-writing totally absorbed her.

In the marble hall, Hay gave the butler his letter to be mailed to the President at Oyster Bay; and the butler presented Hay with a newly arrived dispatch-case, full of business from Cinderella at Washington.

As Payne came down the stairs, Hay gave the dispatch-case to the butler. “I’m playing hooky today,” he said. “Put this in my room.”

“I’ll take you driving, sir.” Payne gazed down at his tiny father-in-law. “The Pope Toledo’s just arrived.”

“The what?”

“The Pope Toledo, my new motor car…”

“It sounds like a picture you might see hanging in the Prado.”

“Shall we ask the ladies?” Payne looked toward the study.

“No,” said Hay. “I’m no longer speaking to them. I’ve resigned as secretary of state, and they simply won’t accept it-my resignation, that is.”

“Let’s drive by old Mrs. Delacroix’s. Caroline and Blaise are there.”

Had Payne heard him? Hay wondered, as he followed the young man through the front door to the porte-cochere, where stood a marvellously intricate, shining piece of machinery.

The butler helped Hay into the front seat beside Payne, who showed as little interest in Hay’s resignation as the ladies of the family. Perhaps I am already dead, thought Hay, and everyone’s too polite to tell me. Perhaps I am dreaming all this. Lately, Hay’s dreams had been getting more and more life-like-and unpleasant-while his waking life was more than ever dream-like, and almost as unpleasant. Surely, it was all a dream that young Teddy was president and that he had just been to see him at Sagamore Hill and Teddy had discussed the possibility, even desirability, of a war with Russia. This sort of thing happened in dreams. In real life, there were real presidents, like Lincoln and McKinley; and real secretaries of state like Seward, not himself in masquerade, little Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, barely grown, with a new moustache, in a horse and buggy, driving down the rutted mud main street of Springfield, not being sped along inside an elegant contraption on rubber wheels that gave the sense they were floating on air, as Bellevue Avenue slipped past them, its palaces more suitable for Paradise-or Venice-than mere earth.

The Secretary of State was recognized as he was borne by Pope Toledo to the Delacroix cottage, and hats were raised, and he nodded graciously at the strangers who held him-or rather, his office-in such awe. When one was dead did one actually know it? as in the sort of dreams when the dreamer knows he dreams? That seemed an urgent question to put to Henry Adams, who knew everything.

In the Delacroix drawing room they were greeted by Caroline, who held in one hand a dozen newspapers. “You catch me with my knitting,” she said.

“Mine, too,” said Hay, “only I’ve sworn off reading the stuff until September.”

“If only I could.” Caroline greeted Payne rather as if she were the sister-in-law that he might have had, and Hay wondered what sort of marriage she and Del would have had. He was fairly certain that Del would not have wanted her to go on publishing a newspaper, and he was equally certain that she would not have given it up. She had a good deal of will, Hay had long ago decided; and if there was one quality that he himself would not have wanted in a wife it was will, of Caroline’s sort, which was like a man’s, unlike Clara’s, which was formidable, in its way, but entirely womanly, wifely, motherly.

“Mrs. Delacroix is surrounded by Louisiana ladies, and Blaise is playing tennis with Mr. Day.”

“Which rhymes with Hay,” said Hay, “and who is Mr. Day?”

“James Burden Day. He’s an Apgar, too. He’s in Congress.”

“Why isn’t he home, looking after the folks, like all the other tribunes of the people?” Hay looked with longing at an armchair, but the sound of ladies’ voices kept him on his feet; he could no longer bear too many standing ups and sitting downs.

“He wanted to see Mr. Hearst in New York. Mr. Hearst wants to be elected president next year. He is very ambitious.”

“He married the chorus girl,” said Payne, who had moved, before his marriage, in glamorous Broadway circles.

“She will make a stunning first lady.” Caroline was solemn.

“What a lucky country!” Hay was amused; until the room filled up with ladies from Louisiana.

Mrs. Delacroix had aged, she told everyone, but she looked no different to Hay from the way that she had always looked during the thirty years that he had casually known her. “I am now aged beyond recognition,” she said, giving Hay her hand, while she removed a large hat with the other.

“You are unchanged,” said Hay. “But the hat shows its age.”

“How rude! It’s only ten years old.” A chorus of approval from the ladies, who were now taking cups of tea from the Irish housemaid, circulating among them. “Sit down, Mr. Hay. Please. You look peaked.”

“It was the Pope Toledo,” said Hay, sinking into an armchair.

“Pope who?” Mrs. Delacroix looked anxiously at the Irish maid. Catholicism, Hay knew, was always a delicate subject in the presence of servants.

“My new car,” said Payne.

“Blaise is here, too. Isn’t it wonderful?” Mrs. Delacroix addressed this sentiment to Payne, as Blaise’s one-time classmate.

“But doesn’t he always come to see you?” Payne’s own strong familial life was so rich in furious drama that he had little appetite for the family dramas of others.

“Not when Caroline’s with me. Now they have made up.” Mrs. Delacroix turned to Caroline, and smiled.

“No, we haven’t. We simply ignore any differences when we’re under your roof. It is our affection for you, not one another. It is also my-atonement.”

“Yes. Yes.” Mrs. Delacroix smiled at Caroline; then sat opposite Hay, while the Louisiana ladies hovered around the grand piano, as if they expected to break into song.

“Is it still the inheritance?” asked Hay, who had once known, from Del, all the intricacies of the Sanford testament, which had proved to be every bit as stupid as Sanford himself, Hay’s exact contemporary.

“Yes. But in less than two years I shall inherit under the mysterious terms of the will…”

“The one that looks like a seven?” Hay recalled the portentous detail.

“Exactly. Well, when I am twenty-seven, the one will at last be a seven; and what is mine will be mine…”

“You must marry.” Mrs. Delacroix frowned. “You’re much too old to be a single girl.”

“I am a spinster, I am afraid.”

“Don’t!” Mrs. Delacroix made the sign to ward off the evil eye. “Payne, why don’t you marry her?”

“But I am married, Mrs. Delacroix. To Mr. Hay’s daughter.”

“I quite forgot.”

“We haven’t,” said Hay, agreeably. “It’s still very much on our minds.”

“Such a splendid wedding,” Caroline contributed.

“You must come to New Orleans, Caroline. We have a great many young men there, all ready to marry and settle down.”

“Not too young,” said Caroline. “Not at my age.” Hay wondered why so handsome a young woman should so much enjoy depicting herself as old and, essentially, unattractive. Perhaps she was, as she had said, one of nature’s most curious creatures, a spinster. He had always somehow doubted that Del would ever succeed in marrying her. She was too self-contained; too-cold? But that seemed the wrong word to describe a character of such charm and amiability. She was, simply, independent in a way that their world was unused to.

“Don’t wait too long,” was Mrs. Delacroix’s conventional wisdom.

Blaise and the young congressman stood in the doorway. They wore white cotton shirts, flannel trousers; they were sweating. It was a sign of great old age, thought Hay, when congressmen looked like schoolboys.

“Don’t come in!” ordered Mrs. Delacroix. “Go change, both of you.”

The young men vanished, to the apparent sorrow of the Louisiana ladies. “I want,” said Payne, to Mrs. Delacroix, “to ask all of you to come out on Uncle Oliver’s yacht, for lunch.”

“I hate boats.” Mrs. Delacroix was firm. “But I’m sure the young people will want to go. Caroline?”

“Oh, yes. I love boats.” Suddenly she stood up. Hay noted that she had ripped in two the lace handkerchief that she had been playing with. Was she ill, too? Or was so much talk of spinsterhood disturbing to her?

“I’ll be right back,” she said; and slipped out of the room.

“Their reconciliation has been the joy of my life,” said Mrs. Delacroix, with somber joy.

“Funny, isn’t it? how family quarrels are always about money,” said Hay, who had had his problems with his own wealthy father-in-law.

“What else is there to quarrel about?” asked Payne, unexpectedly, himself the victim of a family quarrel, whose origin, whatever it was, was not money.

“Unrequited love,” said Hay, and observed with pleasure that his son-in-law had blushed. Hay had always suspected that Colonel Payne had been in love with brother-in-law Whitney, and as a love so sulphurous in its possibilities could never manifest itself, Oliver Payne had allowed it to turn so violently to hate that at least the same quantity of violent emotion might be used up in the process.

CAROLINE STOOD OVER THE COMMODE in her bathroom; and vomited. She felt as if she might turn herself inside out, so powerful were the spasms and of such long duration. She would not, she decided, ever commit suicide by poisoning. Then the spasms ceased, and she washed her face in cologne, noting how red and swollen her eyes had become.

Suddenly, Marguerite was at her side. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

“Dear Marguerite, you, of all people, how can you ask me that?” Caroline put down the linen towel. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “In my fifth month.” Then, before Marguerite could cry out, Caroline placed her hand firmly over the old woman’s mouth. “Maintenant le silence,” Caroline whispered.

BLAISE, IN A BATHROBE, entered Jim’s room, which adjoined his own. The bathroom door was open and his tennis partner stood, eyes shut, beneath the shower. When it came to plumbing, Mrs. Delacroix did not share the prejudice of so many old Newporters, who believed that hot water was not really luxurious unless humanly transported in metal cans up many steps from cellar kitchen. Every bedroom of her Grand Trianon had its own bath with huge copper fixtures kept perfectly polished. Blaise stared, thoughtfully, at his tennis partner; and wished that he himself were as tall and well-proportioned. Where his own legs were short and muscular, Jim’s were long and slender, like the rest of him; he had a classical body in every sense, heroic even, suitable for showing off in a museum, once a suitably large leaf had been found.

Jim opened his eyes, and saw Blaise, and smiled, without self-consciousness. “We can’t buy a shower anything like this in Washington,” he said. “Kitty’s looked and looked.”

“I think you have to have them specially made.” Blaise turned away, as Jim shut off the shower, and picked up a towel. “How did you like Brisbane?”

While Hearst was abroad with his new wife, Arthur Brisbane was in charge not only of the newspapers but of Hearst’s political career. Hearst had wanted to know James Burden Day, who had wanted to know Hearst. As Democratic members of Congress, each could be useful to the other. Unfortunately, Day could only be in New York when Hearst was abroad. But Blaise had arranged a meeting with Brisbane, followed by an invitation to join Blaise at Newport, which Day had accepted without his wife. Caroline seemed glad to have the young congressman as a guest, and Blaise was now able to observe his half-sister in a new light as she and Day talked politics like two professionals. Certainly, she made more sense than Hearst, her model, she liked to claim, knowing how much it annoyed Blaise.

Jim dressed himself quickly, from long habit, he said. “I rush from boardinghouse to picnic ground to depot, no time to dress, think, do anything except politics.”

“I couldn’t imagine that sort of a life.”

“I couldn’t-can’t imagine being rich, like this.” Jim looked around the bedroom, all, more or less, in the style of the original Grand Trianon.

“It’s sort of like being born with six fingers instead of five. You don’t pay attention to it, but others do. So, what was your impression of Brisbane?”

Jim was now combing out his wet curls, and wincing with pain as the comb’s teeth struck snarl after snarl. “He doesn’t know as much about politics as he thinks he does. At least not our kind, in the West and the South. He thinks Bryan’s some sort of fool…”

“Isn’t he?”

Jim laughed. “I reckon you think all of us Westerners are yokels, which we are when you coop us up in a place like this, but we know a thing or two about the country that people with six fingers to the hand don’t know.”

Then Blaise laughed; and could not resist saying, “If you know so much, why do we keep beating you in these elections?”

“Money. Give me what Mark Hanna gave McKinley and gives Roosevelt, and I’ll be president, too.”

“You’d like that?”

The boyish head was turned toward a gilded mirror but the mirror reflected both their heads. Jim looked at Blaise through the glass. “Oh, yes, why not? It’s there, after all.”

“But you need six fingers.”

“I need friends with six fingers.” Jim sat on the foot of the bed and tied his shoelaces. “Except when there’s trouble, the money power isn’t really everything. There’s a lot of labor out there, and the farmers, and all the new people coming in from Europe. We’ll get most of them. That’s why Hearst interests me. He’s set up all these Democratic clubs, which is the best way of enrolling them, but I’m afraid he’s so busy trying to use the clubs to get the nomination for himself that they aren’t much use to us, to the party, that is… so far.”

“Do you think he has a chance?”

Jim shook his head. “He’s too rich for us Democrats. He’d be better off with you people. But those papers of his have done him in with all the respectables. You know, I’d like to let Bryan try again, but…”

“He’d lose.”

Jim nodded, somewhat forlornly. “They’ve turned him into a sort of national fool, the papers. They always do that when somebody comes along who wants to help the working-man.”

Blaise could never tell with any politician where truth ends and expedient cant begins. Did this handsome, god-like youth, admittedly a rustic god, more Pan than Apollo, really give a damn about the working-man or the price of cotton or the tariff? Or were these the noises that he was obliged to make, like a bird’s mating call, to gain himself what he wanted in the world? Blaise did not pursue the question. Instead, he reminded Jim that Hearst had helped to invent the populist if not popular Bryan. “So they, the six-fingered owners of the country, haven’t totally distorted him. He has his rich admirers, too.”

“Yes, that’s been lucky for us. Hearst has done us some good, no doubt of that-and no matter why.” Jim stood up; and Blaise realized that he himself was not dressed. Blaise walked toward the open door to his own bedroom. “We’re having lunch on Payne’s ocean-liner,” he said. He paused at the door. “Did Brisbane say that you would go far in politics?”

Jim laughed. “Yes, he did. And he told me why.”

“Because you have blue eyes.”

“Exactly. Is Hearst just as crazy?”

“Crazier in a way.”

“We must,” said Jim, as he left the room to rejoin the house-party, “keep an eye on him.”

“A cold blue eye.”

“On those six fingers, particularly.”

DESPITE MARGUERITE’S PLEAS, Caroline joined the yachting party. “I must seem absolutely all right,” she said, “until…”

“Until… what?”

“I do what I have to do.” This sentence released a torrent of mercifully silent tears. Actually, Caroline had no plan for the coming catastrophe. She must be cool, she told herself; do nothing rash; tell no one, certainly.

The father of her child-to-be looked very handsome, as he lounged on the after-deck of the yacht, the unlovely bulk of Block Island just back of him. The other guests were in the main salon, waiting for lunch to be announced. Although Caroline had been careful to avoid Jim, she had not been able to resist fresh air. She who had never in her life fainted now feared just that. The sensations inside her body were ominous, to say the least; and anything could happen.

“I probably shouldn’t have come.” Jim smiled. “But Blaise insisted, and I’m in his debt-for Mr. Hearst, or Mr. Brisbane, I suppose.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Caroline managed to animate her voice. “Of course,” she added.

“I’d no idea people really lived like this.”

“Does it tempt you?”

“No. What I do is more interesting. I’m never bored, while these folks…”

“Give dinner-parties for their dogs.”

“I just met Mr. Lehr.“ Jim grimaced.

“I will not protect you…”

“That poor girl he’s married to…”

“You saw that?”

“We’re not all that simple back home.”

“I never thought you were.” Caroline was pleased that, thanks to the shock of her situation, she felt no desire at all for Jim. He, on the other hand, was radiating sexual energy like one of Henry Adams’s dynamos. She would have to discourage him, she decided, not quite certain what the etiquette of a pregnancy at this point required, or allowed. The doctor that she had visited, anonymously, in Baltimore, had been so interested in his fee for the planned abortion that she had not gone back to him. Instead, she had waited; she did not know for what.

“You’ll be going back to American City now…?”

Jim nodded. As the mouth still had its appeal for her, she gazed upon Block Island instead. “On Monday. Kitty’s pregnant.”

“Oh, no!” Caroline’s astonishment was so genuine that she feared that she had given herself away.

But Jim simply grinned. “Well, that’s what you get married for, you know.”

“I don’t-know.” Caroline saw a good deal of gallows humor in the situation. “I can imagine, naturally.” She was her usual self now. “Is she ill? I mean does she have-spells of sickness?”

Jim nodded, without much interest. “There’s always a bit of feeling bad, I guess.”

“When will it… the child, that is, be born?”

“October, the doctor thinks.”

The same month that Caroline’s would be due. He had gone from one bed to the other, perhaps even on the same day, like a rooster. For the first time, she realized just how dangerous the male was. The superior physical strength was bad enough, but the ability to start new life, with a single inadvertent thrust, was truly terrifying. Mlle. Souvestre had been right. Better the Sapphic life, the “white marriages” between ladies, than this sweaty black magic.

Blaise appeared in the doorway. “Lunch is ready.” For once, Caroline was grateful for his interruption.

“I have no appetite,” she said, accurately, and entered the ship’s salon just as a gong sounded from the dining room. Harry Lehr took her arm, as if for a cotillion.

“I had no idea our congressmen were so attractive.” For a guilty instant, Caroline wondered if Harry Lehr knew. But, of course, he could not know, and her heart beat less rapidly. She wondered if she was going to become entirely furtive in character, thus giving away her game to everyone.

“You mean Mr. Day?” Caroline smiled at Mamie Fish, who nodded in a queenly way. “He’s Blaise’s friend.”

“They’re an attractive couple, aren’t they?” Lehr laughed, musically. Caroline joined in; she had, suddenly, a plan.

2

AT EXACTLY NOON, Caroline entered the Waldorf-Astoria’s Peacock Alley, now largely deserted. Fashionable New York could not be found within a hundred miles of the city, while working New York was largely shut down. The emptiness and stillness of the great rooms was somewhat alarming. Paris must have been like this, she thought, when Bismarck was at the gates.

Beneath a potted palm sat John Apgar Sanford, somewhat balder, somewhat grayer than the year before when they had last met in Washington, and he had reported his usual failure to budge Mr. Houghteling. Since she would inherit soon, no matter what, they had given up the case. “You didn’t say in your telegram what you wanted to see me about, but I assumed it would be the case, so I’ve brought the key documents.” He held up a leather case.

“That’s all right,” she said, and seated herself opposite him. “It’s not about the case, actually.” She had rehearsed a number of openings but none was right. She would, she had decided, depend on inspiration; but now that she was with him, there was none, only a mild panic.

John asked about various Washington Apgars. Caroline began with a wrong move. “One has even been elected to Congress. James Burden Day. I think his mother was an…”

“Grandmother, I believe,” John nodded, “was an Apgar. I’ve met her.”

“The wife is charming.” Then Caroline abandoned this most dangerous of subjects. “You must find…” She could not finish this sentence.

But John took in stride the sentiment. “Yes, it is quite lonely for me. In spite of a plentitude of Apgars, I have no family life now, none at all.”

“We Sanfords are also few.”

“Very few indeed. Blaise…” John did not finish.

Caroline did not begin. That subject was abandoned, stillborn. “I have been thinking,” she said at last, in lieu of inspiration, “about getting married.”

“I suppose that is natural, of course.” John seemed unsurprised; also, uninterested.

“Soon, there will be the inheritance.” She played her great card at once.

“Yes. You will be very well-off indeed. From what I gather, Blaise did not-do as we feared. There are still certain loans to Mr. Hearst outstanding, but Mr. Hearst is good for them. Otherwise, the inheritance is intact. I hope,” John smiled wanly, “you are not being married for your fortune…”

“Like one of Mr. James’s poor ladies? No, I don’t think that enters my… calculation, so far. Is patent law so difficult?”

John looked surprised. “It is not difficult, no. But it is not easy to make a living at it. I’ve changed firms, as you know. But my wife’s long illness…” The voice trailed into embarrassed silence.

“Things have not been easy for you, John. I know that. I’m sorry. Truly,” she added, pleased by her own display of warmth. She quite liked him; she also liked very much her liking him. “You once did me the,” Caroline stared up at the palm tree, half expecting to see if not a monkey a coconut ready to fall, “honor of proposing to marry me.”

“Oh, I do apologize,” John stammered; turned pale. “It was after… after…”

“She had died. I wished that I had known her. She was a…”

“… a saint,” John filled in.

“Exactly the word that I was going to use. I have now thought over your proposal-somewhat slowly, I must admit. It’s been-what? Four years at least. And I accept.” It was done.

Caroline decided that John’s look of astonishment was not the greatest tribute ever paid her. Had she, somehow, imperceptibly, aged? Or was he otherwise engaged? Certainly, she knew nothing of his life. For all she knew, he might have a full-time and exigent mistress, perhaps a Negress, living in Flushing like Clarence King’s secret wife. “But… but, Caroline…”

“You cannot say that this is so sudden, John.” Caroline was beginning, almost, to enjoy herself.

“No. No. Only I never dreamed… I mean… why me?”

“Because you asked me. Remember?”

“But surely others have…”

“Only Del Hay, and he is dead. You and I, we are both-survivors.”

“I can’t think what to say.” John looked as if a coconut had indeed fallen from the trees, and struck him a sharp blow.

“You can say yes, dear John. Or you can say no. I can accept either. But I can’t accept indecision. You must not think it over in your deliberate legalistic way. I want the answer now, one way or the other.”

“Well, yes. Yes. Of course. But…”

“What is the but?”

“I have lost everything. We were-my family, that is-wiped out two years ago, when the Monongahela Combine failed, and then her illness…”

“I have,” said Caroline softly, “enough for two. Or I will have soon enough.”

“But it’s not right that the wife support the husband…”

“Of course it’s right. It is done all the time, even in Newport, Rhode Island,” she added for dramatic emphasis.

“I don’t know what to think.”

She was relieved that there was no sexual aura to John. He was more like a brother to her, a conventional American brother, she felt obliged to note in her deposition to the high tribunal of her conscience which was now sitting in judgment on her. Blaise, though only half a brother, was possessed of the same sort of dynamo that she had responded to in Jim. But John Apgar Sanford was like Adelbert Hay; he was comfortably, undisturbingly present; and no more.

“I shall be able to help you financially,” she said, abandoning any attempt at coquetry, which even if it were her style was irrelevant to the current proceeding.

“That would be mortifying.” John was acutely uncomfortable.

“ ‘A fair exchange is no robbery,’ as the French say.” Caroline gazed at the palm fronds overhead. “So I shall explain exactly what is to be exchanged for what. I know that you are, of all the family here, the most worldly, the most experienced.” Caroline saw fit to lay it on rather heavily, as she was by no means certain what his response was going to be. “You handled Blaise superbly, and I am, of course, grateful.” The fact that John had done nothing at all for her was beside the point, as she methodically set him up for man-of-the-worlddom.

“I did what I could… He’s difficult, yes.” John was at sea.

Caroline threw out her net. “In marrying me, you will not only get the support that you need in your… uh, endeavors but you will be able to provide me with a father for my child.” Caroline gazed at him, with what she hoped were luminous, madonna-like eyes.

John had gone pale. John had misunderstood. “Naturally, in marrying, the thought of a family is all-important to me, to carry on the name…”

“Our name,” Caroline murmured, wondering how to explain herself.

“Our name, yes. We are both Sanfords. So your monogram won’t change, will it?” He laughed without mirth. “I always regretted not having children with my wife, my first wife, but her illness…” The voice again trailed off.

“I think, John, I have not expressed myself with that clarity which you, as a lawyer, so rightly pride yourself in.” Caroline now felt rather like one of Henry James’s older European ladies, ready to launch some terrible bit of information at a dim-witted American ingénue. “I was not speaking of a future hypothetical fatherhood for you, but of an imminent motherhood for me… in October to be precise, which is why I am eager to be married this week, at City Hall, where I have already made inquiries.”

John gasped, but at least he had understood. “You…” But he exhausted all his breath in startled exhalation.

As John inhaled, Caroline said, “Yes, I am pregnant. I cannot tell you who the father is, as he is a married man. But I can tell you that he was my first-and only-lover. I feel like that chaste king of Spain who…” But caution stopped her from repeating Mlle. Souvestre’s favorite story about how the ascetic King Philip had finally gone to bed with a woman and promptly contracted syphilis. John might not be ready for this story.

“He-the father is in Spain?” John was doing his best to grasp the situation.

“No, he is in America. He is an American. He has visited Spain,” she improvised, hoping to erase King Philip from the court-courtship?-record.

“I see.” John stared at his shoes.

“I realize that I am asking for a very great deal, which is why I said at the very beginning that there would be an exchange between us, useful to each.” Caroline wondered what she would do in John’s place. She would, probably, have laughed, and said no. But she was not in John’s place, and she could not measure either his liking for her person or his need for her fortune. These two imponderables would determine the business.

“Will you continue to see him?” John came swiftly to the necessary, for him, point.

“No.” Caroline lied so seldom that she found it quite easy to do. Would she now become addicted to lying, and turn into another Mrs. Bingham?

“What will you do about the newspaper?”

“I shall go on with it. Unless you would like to be the publisher.” This was definitely Mrs. Binghamish: Caroline had no intention of ever losing control of the Tribune.

“No. No. I am a lawyer, after all, not a publisher. I must say, I have never come across a… a case like this.” He looked at her, worriedly; a lawyer mystified by a client.

“I thought that pregnant ladies were always getting married in the nick of time.”

“Yes. But to the man who… who…”

“Made them pregnant. Well, that is not possible for me.”

“You are in love with him.” John was bleak.

“Don’t worry, John. I shall be as good a wife as I can, given my disposition, which is not very wifely, in the American way, that is.”

“I suppose you will want to look at my books…”

“You are a collector?”

“My financial books…”

“I am not an auditor. You have debts. I’ll pay what I can now. When I inherit, I’ll pay the rest. I assume,” Caroline suddenly wondered if she ought not to bring in an auditor; she laughed uneasily, “I assume that your debts are not larger than my income.”

“Oh, much less. Much less. This is embarrassing for both of us.”

“In France our relatives would be holding this discussion, but we’re not in France, and I can’t imagine Blaise handling any of this for me.” When Caroline rose from her chair, John sprang to his feet: yes, he was hers, she decided. So far so good. Now all that needed to be worked out was the marital bed. She had no intention of sleeping with John, and it was plain that he had every intention of claiming his conjugal rights. For the moment she was safe: her family history of difficult, even fatal, pregnancies could be invoked to keep him at a distance. Later, she would, she was certain, think of something.

Caroline took John’s arm, as a wife takes a husband’s. “Dear John,” she said, as they made their way down the deserted Peacock Alley, the only sound that of the revolving overhead fans.

“It’s like a dream,” said John.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” said Caroline, who had never felt more awake.

3

JOHN HAY COULD STILL NOT BELIEVE the change in the White House. The entire upstairs was now home to the Roosevelts and their six children, who seemed, to Hay, more like twelve. The entrance hall which had been so long graced by President Arthur’s Tiffany screen was now an impressive eighteenth-century foyer to a sort of Anglo-Irish country house whose drawing rooms, en suite, were now directly accessible to the hall, where the old pols’ wooden staircase had been replaced by a marble affair down which the presidents could descend in glory. The west staircase had been removed in order to enlarge the state dining room, whose new fireplace had been inscribed with the pious Rooseveltian hope that only men as noble as he would ever preside in this republican palace.

Then, as ushers opened doors, Hay entered the new west wing, where the executive offices were comfortably quartered. The President’s architects had nicely duplicated the oval of the Blue Room for his office, which looked south toward the Potomac. The Cabinet had its own room at last, with the office of the President’s secretary separating it from the sovereign’s oval.

Theodore was standing in front of his desk throwing a medicine ball at the tiny German ambassador, a particular friend, and the source of remarkable trouble for Hay because Cassini was now convinced that Theodore and the Kaiser were in secret league against the Tsar. Hay was required, at least once a week, to soothe the Russian. The new French ambassador, Jusserand, was more worldly and less excitable than his predecessor, while Sir Michael Herbert, Pauncefote’s successor, was himself like a member of the President’s own family, and rode each day with Theodore through Rock Creek Park, and joined him in loud, clumsy games of tennis where the President’s ferocity and near-blindness made for every sort of exciting danger.

Hay bowed to President and Ambassador. “If I am interrupting,” he began.

“No. No, John.” Theodore heaved the medicine ball at von Sternberg, who caught it easily. “That was splendid, Speck!” Hay was always amused at how like his numerous imitators the President could sound, except for the clicking of the teeth, which no one had ever quite duplicated.

The Ambassador said good-morning to Hay and left the room, carrying the medicine ball with him.

Roosevelt mopped his face with a handkerchief. “The Kaiser affects indifference.” He was very unlike his imitators when he was at work; and there was now a great deal to be done. “You have the telegram?”

Hay gave him the draft which he and Adee had just completed. Four days earlier, a junta had declared Panama independent of Colombia. The arrival, the previous day, November 2, 1903, of the USS Nashville, Boston and Dixie had inhibited the Colombians, who might, otherwise, have put down the insurrection. The presence of the American Navy had been necessary, according to the President, because American citizens might have come to harm during the course of a revolution, which had not, as of November 2, taken place. Neither Roosevelt nor Hay had been particularly pleased with their somewhat hollow explanation, but the thing had turned out marvellously well. The revolution, which had started November 3, ended on the fourth, when the Republic of Panama was proclaimed, and now, on the sixth, the United States was preparing to recognize this splendid addition to the concert of nations, freed at least from Colombian bondage.

“ ‘The people of Panama,’ ” read the President, in a grave voice, “ ‘have, by an apparently unanimous movement,’ I like that, John, ‘dissolved their political connection with the Republic of Colombia…’ Very like Jefferson, that.”

“You flatter me.”

“It’s better than these jackrabbits deserve.” Roosevelt read the rest of the telegram quickly; then gave it back to Hay. “Send it.”

“I’m also drawing up a treaty for the canal, which we should get signed before the end of the month. Then, if Cabot allows the Senate to ratify…”

“Cabot will call for a voice vote, and his own voice will be the loudest.” Roosevelt was plainly delighted. “There were casualties, after all,” he said. “Root just sent over a message. One dog was killed, and one Chinaman.” With a laugh, the President settled into his chair. Hay also sat, not with a laugh but a groan.

“The terms for Panama will not be the best, of course…” Hay wondered how much pain the body could take before death provided anesthesia.

“They are independent, aren’t they? Well, we made that possible. So we deserve something, I’d say.”

“I’m thinking of next year.”

Roosevelt nodded; and frowned, as he always did when he contemplated his reelection or, to be precise, his first election to the presidency. “Well, the anti-imperialists can’t really fault us. We must have a canal, and it has to be somewhere along the isthmus.”

“But it could have been in Nicaragua, with no fuss, no fleet, no dead dog or Chinaman; no hint, shall we say, of collusion, between us and the Panamanian junta.”

“Of course there was collusion.” Roosevelt pounded left fist into right hand. “We are for free people everywhere, and against foolish and homicidal corruptionists of the sort that govern Colombia…”

“… and now Panama.”

“You have never favored the canal, have you?”

Hay often forgot that under all the noise, the President was both shrewd and watchful. “I’ve always thought,” said Hay, “that the railroads could do the job quite as well as a canal, which will be difficult and expensive not only to build but troublesome-in the future, anyway-politically. Yes,” Hay added before the President could taunt him, “I’m a large investor in the railroads, but that’s not to the point.”

Idly, Roosevelt spun the globe of the world beside his desk. “The point, John, is that we have done something useful for our country. Our fleets can go back and forth, quickly, between Atlantic and Pacific.”

“You see a future so filled with war?” Hay wished, suddenly, that he had not allowed the President to talk him out of the July resignation.

“Yes, I do.” The high harsh voice was suddenly low and almost, for its owner, mellifluous. “I also see our own mission, which is to lead where once England led, but on a world scale…”

“All the world?”

“It could come to that. But so much depends on the sort of people we are, and continue to be.” He grimaced. “There is a weakness running through our people, a love of ease, a lack of courage…”

“You must continue your demonstrations, and inspire us.”

“That is exactly what I try to do.” Roosevelt was entirely serious. Hay thought of Henry Adams’s phrase, “the Dutch-American Napoleon.” Well, why not? How else is an empire to begin?

“And now, Mr. President, I shall provide the legal underpinnings to our latest acquisition.”

“The Attorney General has assured me that we must not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” Roosevelt’s laughter was like that of a frenzied watchdog.

As Hay rose, the room appeared to be full of dark green smoke, through which small golden stars shone. For a moment, he thought that he was about to faint. But Theodore was now suddenly at his side, holding him up.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes.” The room was itself again. “I’m often faint when I get up too quickly. But the odd thing was-I thought I was in Mr. Lincoln’s office. You know, with its dark green walls, and the gold stars, one for every state, we used to say, that was trying to get away.”

Roosevelt walked Hay to the door, his thick arm firmly through the older man’s. “I see him sometimes.”

“The President?”

Roosevelt opened the door to his secretary’s office. “Yes. That is, imagine him vividly. It’s usually at night in the corridor, upstairs, at the far end…”

“The east end.” Hay nodded. “There was a water-cooler in the hall, outside his office. He would drink cup after cup of water.”

“I’ll look for that next time I see him. He is always sad.”

“There was a good deal to be sad about.”

“My problems are so slight compared to his. Curious, to measure oneself with him. I don’t think I’m immodest when I say I’m very much superior to most of the politicians of our time. But when I think of what greatness he had…” Roosevelt sighed, a most un-Rooseveltian sound. “You must get some rest, John.”

Hay nodded. “Once the treaty’s done, I’m going south.”

“Bully!” Roosevelt was again his own best imitation.

4

THE GREAT HOLLOW SOUND of metal striking the thick bole of a magnolia tree brought Caroline and Marguerite to the window of the Georgetown house. A motor car had, somehow, got from N Street onto the sidewalk and into the largest of Caroline’s two magnolias. At the wheel was Alice Roosevelt, a feathered hat now jammed over her implacable blue eyes, while at her side Marguerite Cassini, looking both beautiful and terrified, waved her hands in front of her, in a gesture which Caroline took to be, literally, the wringing of hands, something that only her own histrionic Marguerite ever did.

Caroline hurried into the street, where an elderly Negro man was working hard to open the door on Alice’s side of the car; it had jammed.

“The brakes!” Alice was accusing. “They don’t work. It’s your chauffeur’s fault.”

“It’s my fault, when Father finds out.” Marguerite got out of the car. Caroline helped the Negro to free the Republican Princess, who then shoved her hat back in place; leapt to the ground; thanked the Negro; and said, “Tell the police to take this bit of junk back to the Russian embassy, in Scott Circle. It is the ugliest house there. They can’t miss it.”

“My father-” Marguerite began.

“Your father? My father. That’s the problem. He wouldn’t let me buy a car, you know.” Alice led Caroline into her own house, while Marguerite Cassini gave the Negro elaborate instructions. “I can’t fathom him. There are times when he seems to be living in another century. I had picked out this splendid roadster. Too killing. And he said, no. Never. Women are not to drive, or smoke, or vote. I agree on the vote, of course. It will just double the same old vote. Even so… What’s it like, being married?”

They were now in the back parlor, overlooking the small garden where, because of the season, only late ominous chrysanthemums grew. The trees had lost their leaves; and in the small goldfish pond, a large goldfish had bellied up, a victim to overeating.

“Serene. The same, actually. John’s mostly in New York with his law firm. I’m mostly here with the paper; and the child.”

The two-month-old Emma Apgar Sanford was less noisy than Caroline had anticipated, and though not yet the best of company, she was a benign presence in the house, and Caroline, against Marguerite’s advice-no longer heeded, ever-breast-fed her daughter, and noted with awed wonder how large her gravid breasts had become. She was, for the first time in her life, à la mode in the grand fleshy world.

Marguerite Cassini now made her hardly climactic entrance. Caroline admired her beauty; but nothing more. The shadow of Del seemed, mysteriously, attached to her. Caroline had heard it said that the opal ring that had broken in half on the New Haven pavement had been a gift from Countess Cassini. Plainly, fiction’s war with truth was never-ending. Marguerite went straight toward the open box of chocolates from Huyler’s, the city’s principal confectioner. Each Washington house ordered its own mixture, and Caroline had introduced white chocolate to Washington, a novelty still controversial in those circles where the Tribune’s Society Lady so hungrily moved. “You shouldn’t eat chocolate. You’ll get fat,” Alice announced. “I never eat dessert. Just meat and potatoes, like Father.”

“Perhaps you’ll be as stout as he is,” said Marguerite, looking suddenly Mongol-or was it Tartar?-or were they the same? The friendship between La Cassini and Alice was the talk of the town, and by no means confined to the Society Lady’s circles. In the current troubles between Russia and Japan, President Roosevelt tended to take the Japanese side, to the fury of Cassini, who had roared in Caroline’s presence, “The man’s a pagan! We are a Christian nation like the United States, and he sides with yellow savage pagans.” At the White House, Russian greed was sadly deplored. The Administration was ready to acquiesce in Japan’s proposal that Russia might annex Manchuria if Japan could be allowed to take over Korea as well. The Tribune tried to be even-handed but tended, thanks to Mr. Trimble, to favor Russia, to the President’s fury. At the center of the new Cabinet room, he had made Caroline a long speech on the tides of history while a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looked wearily away from the seated woman, the marching President. Lately, Cassini tended to kiss rather too warmly Caroline’s hand at receptions, and Marguerite had thanked her for her editorial support. “It’s so difficult for me,” she had sighed, “now that I am doyenne of the diplomatic corps.” With Pauncefote’s death, Cassini had become the senior chief of mission at the capital. As his hostess, Marguerite sailed first into every official gathering; meanwhile, the President’s daughter defied her father and made Marguerite her friend, all because, as only Caroline knew, the President had refused to allow Alice to own a red automobile, and so Alice had commandeered the Russian Ambassador’s machine. The previous summer Alice and Marguerite, like Arctic explorers, had driven together to Newport, to the fearful applause of the public, to the horror of pedestrians run down, of motorists forced off the road. After today’s collision, Caroline was fairly certain that the relationship between Alice and Marguerite was about to undergo a sea-change. Cassini would deny them the use of his car; and Japan would triumph over Russia. The causal links, as Brooks Adams liked to say.

“What am I wearing tomorrow at the British embassy?” asked Alice, opening her handbag, removing a cigarette case and, as expertly as any clubman, lighting up. Caroline still experienced mild shock whenever she saw this; and had said so. “But,” Alice had assured her, “everyone will be doing it now that I do.”

“But you don’t do it beneath your father’s roof.”

“I do it out the window, a technicality he has come to respect. So what am I wearing?”

“The dark blue velvet, with lace at the throat…” Caroline began.

“I won’t lend you my sable again.” Marguerite was squashing the chocolates with her fingers; she liked only soft centers.

Both Mrs. Roosevelt and Alice liked to invent elaborate costumes, which they did not possess, and then give the White House press secretary descriptions of these fabulous creations, which would be written of, ecstatically, in every “Society Lady” page. As it was, neither lady could afford much of anything to wear, though, of the two, Alice was somewhat richer. When Caroline had caught on to the White House game, Alice had asked her to help invent costumes, which Caroline would describe in the Tribune, to the amazement of those who had actually seen what the Roosevelt ladies had been wearing.

The maid-of-all-work appeared with tea. Caroline had planned to move to larger quarters and hire what the Apgars would call a proper staff, but John’s liabilities had used up her own income for the year; fortunately, the newspaper had begun, shyly, to flourish, and she could live, comfortably, as a Mrs. Sanford in Georgetown instead of the Mrs. Sanford, which she would not be until March 5, 1905, some fifteen months in the future. Worse, she suspected that John had even greater debts than he had admitted to. Even worse, she suspected that Blaise knew just how insolvent her unexpected bridegroom was, because he had only recently suggested that she sell him the Tribune, if she were so minded. She was not so minded, she said, and continued to watch, as did all Washington, his palace take shape on Connecticut Avenue, rivalling in its ornate marble splendor those Dupont Circle palaces where reigned the Leiters and now the Pattersons, whose daughter, Eleanor, known as Cissy, a restless nineteen-year-old, entered on the arm of the most elegant member of the House of Representatives, one Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, a dapper figure in his early thirties, most glitteringly bald. One day it was rumored that he was supposed to marry Marguerite Cassini; the next, Alice Roosevelt; the day after, no one at all, for “he is,” his mother had confided to the press, “a born bachelor.”

Caroline poured tea; made conversation, not that much of that ever had to be made in a room containing Alice, who never stopped talking, particularly when inspired to shock, and Long-worth seemed her particular butt of the moment. While Marguerite Cassini glowed, in her Tartar way, and Alice spoke rudely of the House of Representatives, Cissy Patterson told Caroline her problems. Cissy’s face was that of a dull red-haired Pekinese, with a small pink nose; eyes, too, for she had been weeping. “Yes, I’ve been crying on Nick’s shoulder,” she murmured to Caroline.

“The Pole?”

“The Pole. I can’t believe Mother is doing this to me.”

“But he is handsome…”

“I don’t think I care for men,” said Cissy, staring at Caroline in a way that made that new mother-new woman, too-somewhat uneasy; the gaze was too like Mlle. Souvestre’s.

“Oh, you’ll get used to them. They are too large, of course, for most uses.” Caroline thought fondly of Jim, who visited her every Sunday, after his ride along the canal. He smelled, always, of horse. In fact, she now so connected sex with horses that she had suggested that perhaps he send her the horse on a Sunday, and himself go home to Kitty. He had been shocked.

“It’s not that. At least, I don’t think it is. Of course, I’m a virgin.”

“Of course,” said Caroline. “We all were once. Such happy carefree days.”

“I don’t know about happy. But Joseph is deeply impressed by my virginity. Apparently, there are no virgins in Europe.”

“Very few, certainly.” Caroline was eager to be agreeable. Cissy’s uncle was Robert McCormick, whose wife’s family published the Chicago Tribune, and he was eager to buy Caroline’s Tribune. Cissy’s brother, Joe Patterson, was a reporter for her uncle’s paper; and so, like a law of nature, Pattersons had begun to gravitate toward Sanfords, printer’s ink, in its way, as binding as blood. Cissy had literary dreams; she would write novels, she said; and promptly picked up Mr. James’s latest effort, The Ambassadors, inscribed to Henry Adams, who had recommended it to Caroline, who had given up reading fiction now that she herself, a newspaper publisher, was a principal purveyor of that evanescent product.

“He’s too long-winded now.” Cissy had learned to say what everyone else said, a moment or two before perfect staleness made dust of the conventional wisdom. As a result, she was thought clever. “He’s getting a million,” she whispered into Caroline’s ear, while biting off, one by one, the points of one of Huyler’s very special thin chocolate leaves.

“Count Gizycki?”

Cissy nodded, tragically; mouth full of chocolate.

“That’s fair, I suppose.” Caroline was judicious. “In Europe, the bride brings the money while the husband provides the title, the name and the castle. There is a castle?”

“In Poland.” Cissy sighed. “He doesn’t love me, you know.”

“Then why marry him?”

“Mother wants me to be a countess. Father will pay, of course. But it’s very un-American, buying a husband.”

“It may be un-American but Americans do it all the time. Look at Harry Lehr and the poor Drexel girl. Or read your uncle’s paper, or mine, or-if you’re really innocent-any of Mr. Hearst’s. It’s common.”

“Common!” Cissy looked as if she might burst into tears. “I wish,” she said unexpectedly, “I had your mouth.”

“I’ll give it to you, on your wedding day-in the form of a kiss,” added Caroline, uneasily aware that she was now the recipient of a “crush.”

Marguerite Cassini joined them, leaving, unwisely, thought Caroline, Nick Longworth to the predatory Alice, who had her father’s need to be always the center of attention. She was capable of marrying anyone, if she thought that that was the only way of gaining everyone’s complete attention. Of the Republican dollar princesses, Alice was the most interesting, and the most doomed, Caroline decided, to unhappiness. It was all very well to be the most famous girl in the United States, but then, more soon than late, all-powerful presidents turned into obscure ex-presidents, while glamorous girls became women, wives, mothers, forgotten. She could not imagine Alice old; it would be against nature. Meanwhile, the beautiful Cassini was consoling Cissy, with countessly wisdom. “The family is a great one-for Poland, of course. And his best friend is very close to us, Ivan von Rubido Zichy, who says Joseph is over the heels head in love with you!”

“These names sound,” said Caroline, “like characters in The Prisoner of Zenda.”

“You are so literary,” said Marguerite, disapprovingly. “You must get it from having to read all those newspapers.”

“My White House marriage will be the first since poor Julia Grant married Prince Cantacuzene.” Alice hurled herself at center stage.

“Nellie Grant, Julia’s mother, was married in the White House.” Longworth was languidly pedantic. “That was the last White House marriage. Julia was married in Newport…”

“And my father, representing the Tsar, had to give permission, which he wouldn’t, of course, because Julia’s aunt, Mrs. Potter Palmer, wouldn’t come up with a dowry on the ground that Julia was pretty enough to be married for herself alone.”

“Hardly true,” all three girls echoed as one.

“So Father said to Mrs. Potter, ‘How much do you pay your cook?’ Then he explained that a newlywed prince and princess must also have enough money to pay their cook. He was overwhelming. Of course, the Prince was rich in his own right…”

Caroline cut short Marguerite’s tsarist vainglory. “Alice, you must tell us when your White House wedding will take place; and with whom…”

Alice was brisk. “In 1905, probably. After Father’s reelected. I haven’t picked anyone yet. Blaise is very rich, isn’t he?”

“Very.” Caroline had often thought what a good match it would be for him, not to mention the publisher of the Tribune. In or out of the White House, the Roosevelts would be colorful, if nothing else. “You’d also have that new palace of his to live in.”

“Oh, I’d never live here! Too dull. Scenes of former glory sort of thing. I don’t want to be a fixture. No, I could never live here. I want New York, Paris, London…”

“Oyster Bay is probably what you’ll get,” said Longworth. “And deserve.”

“Better that than Cincinnati.” Alice’s eyelashes were, Caroline noticed, remarkably thick; she fell just short of actual beauty. Did she care?

Then Longworth proceeded to amuse them with an impression of Theodore Roosevelt, which made even his daughter laugh: and Alice was always alert to condemn lèse-majesté. But Nick, like the President, was a member of Harvard’s Porcellian Club and so nearly an equal.

“I was in his office Monday, talking about some business in the House, and he was in a bad mood-for him, that is. So I was getting a bit uneasy because I’d promised this young Cincinnati reporter that I’d get him into the President’s office for a minute or two, and he was waiting in the next room. Anyway, after we finished our business, I said, ‘You know, Colonel, there’s a young journalist who’d like to say hello…’ ” With that, Longworth began a rendition of Theodore Roosevelt-snarling, grimacing, charging about the room, fists punching wildly at the air. “ ‘Never! Never, Nick! You presume too much! You are a fellow Pork, true. We are bound together by the ties that bind all gentlemen, but, no! Of course, I am the First Magistrate, and I am accessible, in theory, to every citizen. But if I saw them all, there would be no time left for me to magistrate…’ ‘First magistrate,’ I ventured. ‘Execute’ ” the voice was now an inhuman shriek, “ ‘my office. What’s his name?’ I told him. ‘Never heard of him. What’s the newspaper?’ I told him. ‘Never heard of it!’ I was desperate. ‘His father, so-and-so, led the movement that denied General Grant a third term.’ ‘I don’t believe it. Send him in.’ Well, the young man entered, filled with awe, and the President practically embraced him. ‘I am thrilled, young man, to make your acquaintance. Do you know why? Because your grandfather was one of the greatest men I have ever had the privilege to meet. How well I remember him arguing to the party’s leaders-such eloquence!-which you’ve inherited, I can see, in the pages of your inspiring journal. Well, sir, on that occasion your grandfather was another Demosthenes, but unlike the original, he stopped the tyrant, and saved the republic from corruption of a sort that it makes me shudder, even now, to contemplate. Go thou, my boy, and do likewise!’ With that the President shook the ecstatic boy’s hand and got him out of the room, a convert to TR for life. Then he turned to me and hissed, ‘Never do that to me again!’ Then he winked.”

As they all laughed, Alice said, thoughtfully, “Father has depths of insincerity not even he has plumbed.”

“It is the nature,” said Longworth, “of our politicians’ art.”

The ladies asked to see the baby, who was brought down to the drawing room, a solemn wide-eyed child. Cissy promptly burst into tears at the thought of marriage and babies and money and a title, and Caroline gave her a tumbler of brandy, which she drank in a single gulp, to everyone’s amazement.

As the impromptu “at-home” broke up, Marguerite Cassini took Caroline aside to announce, “Nick has asked me to marry him. Tell nobody.”

Except the public, thought Caroline, who asked, “Will you?”

Marguerite nodded.

“Come on, Maggie,” Alice commanded. “Nick’s taking us in his carriage. I hope that father of yours fixes those brakes. We,” she said dramatically, “could have been killed.”

“Maybe,” said Cissy, darkly, to no one, “it would be for the best.”

“Do be still,” said Princess Alice; and they were gone.

Glumly, Caroline sat at her desk and began, yet again, to study her husband’s debts. Slowly, she was coming to the realization that if his creditors refused to wait, she might have to sell the Tribune. She did her best not to blame John. After all, she had married him, and not the other way round. Even so, men were supposed to know about business, and she felt, obscurely, cheated. The wages of sin, she thought; and laughed aloud: she was beginning to think like a newspaper. Nevertheless, where, she wondered, could money be found?