Empire

1

ON MARCH 3, 1905, John Hay wrote a letter to the President, whose inauguration was to take place the next day. Adee stood attentively by, combing his whiskers with a curious oriental ivory comb. “Dear Theodore,” Hay wrote. “The hair in this ring is from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of the assassination, and I got it from his son-a brief pedigree. Please wear it tomorrow; you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln. I have had your monogram and Lincoln’s engraved on the ring.” Hay affixed one of his favorite tags from Horace to the letter, and hoped that he had got the Latin right. He sealed the letter and gave it to Adee, with the small velvet box containing the ring. “It is the laying on of hands,” he said, and Adee, who was staring at him, nodded. “You are the last link.” Once Adee had left the room, Hay walked over to the window and looked out at the gleaming White House, where, as usual, visitors were coming and going at a fast rate. The sky was cloudy, he noted; wind from the northeast. There would be rain tomorrow. But there was almost always bad weather at inaugurations. Hadn’t there been snow at Lincoln’s second? Or was that Garfield’s? He found it hard to concentrate on anything except the pain in his chest, which came and went as always, but now, each time it came, stayed longer. One day it would not go; and he would.

Clara and Adams entered, unannounced. “We have seen the ring-bearer, on his joyous errand.” Adams was sardonic. Despite Hay’s best efforts, Adams had discovered the gift of the ring with Washington’s hair to McKinley. “You will be known to posterity, dear John, as the barber of presidents.”

“You are jealous that you have no hair suitable for enclosing in a ring.”

“We are booked,” said Clara, “on the Cretic, sailing March eighteenth.”

Hay coughed an acknowledgment. Each January he was host to a bronchial infection, and this January’s was still in residence.

“We land at Genoa on April third, by which time you should be dancing the tarantella on the deck.” Adams gazed thoughtfully up at his grandfather’s eyes, which stared down at them from the room’s fireplace. Except that each was entirely bald, there was no great likeness.

“I’ve made arrangements at Nervi. With the heart specialist,” Clara declaimed idly.

“Then on to Bad Nauheim and Dr. Groedel, but not with me,” said Adams. “As I am totally valid, I have no desire to join the invalid…”

“Bad No Harm, Mark Twain calls it.” Hay was beginning to feel better. “Then on to Berlin. The Kaiser beckons.”

“You won’t see him.” Clara was firm.

“I must. He hungers to know me. And I him. Anyway, the President says I must.”

“You are,” said Clara, “too ill, and he is far, far too noisy.”

“That is the nature of kaisers,” said Adams, “and of at least one president…”

“Henry, not on this day of days.” Hay held up a hand, as if in benediction.

“All is energy,” said Adams abruptly. “The leader of the world at any given moment is simply the outlet for all the Zeitgeist’s energy, all concentrated in him.”

“Major McKinley was much quieter,” said Clara, thoughtfully.

“Less energy flashing about in those days.” Hay indicated that Clara could help him up. “I have a feeling that it will rain tomorrow.”

But though there was rain in the early morning, by the time of the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and the first inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt at the Capitol, the sky was clear, and a strong wind made it impossible to hear the President’s speech, which was just as well, thought Hay, for the speech was cautious and undistinguished. Theodore had made too many promises to too many magnates for him to sound a bugle note of any kind. For the moment, the square deal was in abeyance, and the progressive President retrogressive. Later, Hay was certain that Theodore would exuberantly betray his rich supporters. He could not not be himself for long.

Hay sat with the Cabinet in the front row of the platform which had been built over the steps of the Capitol’s east front. Hay was grateful to have Taft’s huge bulk next to him, shielding him from the icy wind. Directly in front of him, Theodore Rex addressed his subjects, and, as always, Hay marvelled at the way neck became head without any widening at all.

The President was not going to have an easy time of it. Now that Mark Hanna was dead, he would have difficulty getting so obvious a bill as the one regarding the inspection of meat through a Senate where nearly everyone had been bought or was himself, like Aldrich of Rhode Island, a millionaire buyer of votes, while in the House, Speaker Cannon was wedded to the rich, no bad thing in Hay’s eyes, himself a millionaire not only through marriage but his own efforts. Even more than Adams, he had always had a golden touch, a source of some surprise to one who had begun life as a poet.

Although Hay deeply believed in oligarchy’s “iron law,” as Madison put it, he saw, as Roosevelt saw, the possibility of revolution if reforms were not made in the way that the new rich conducted their business at the expense of a powerless public. The Supreme Court and the police together ensured not only the protection of property but the right of any vigorous man to bankrupt the nation, while the Congress was, for the most part, bought. The occasional honest man, like the loud young Beveridge, was, literally, eccentric: too far from power’s center to do anything but make the public love him-and the all-powerful Steering Committee of the Senate ignore him.

As for Cabot… Hay shuddered; and not from cold. Cabot’s vanity and bad faith were two of the constants of Washington life. Cabot will be the rock, Adams had once observed, on which Theodore wrecks himself. So far, Theodore’s barque had sailed the republic’s high seas without incident; yet Cabot was always there to try to block every one of Hay’s treaties. Cabot’s my rock, Hay murmured to himself, happy he would soon be sailing not on the republic’s viscous sea but on the Mediterranean.

There was loud, long applause, as Theodore finished. In the north a black cloud appeared. Taft helped Hay up. To Hay’s surprise, Taft asked, “Was it here Lincoln gave his last inaugural address?”

Hay nodded. “Yes. Right here. I remember now. There was rain at first. Mr. Johnson, the Vice-President, was drunk. Then the rain stopped, and the President read his speech.”

Taft looked thoughtful. “I know that speech by heart.”

“We never suspected, then, that we were all so-historical. We just saw ourselves caught up in this terrible mess, trying to get through the day. I remember there was applause before he had finished one sentence.” Hay had the odd sense that he was now, if not in two places at once, in the same place at two different times, simultaneously, and he heard, again, the President’s voice rise over the applause, and say with great simplicity the four terrible words “And the war came.”

“We lost a generation.” Taft was oddly flat.

“We lost a world,” said Hay, amazed that he himself had survived so long in what was now, to him, so strange a country.

2

THE DAY AFTER THE INAUGURAL BALL, Caroline celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday with Blaise, and two lawyers, one her husband, John, the other Mr. Houghteling. The celebration began in her office at the Tribune, where various documents of transfer were signed and witnessed and countersigned and notarized. John asked pointed questions. Houghteling’s answers were as to the point as his innumeracy allowed. Blaise stared into space, as if he were not there. Caroline now had what was hers; while Blaise, in possession of half of what was hers, was marginally better off. To be a half-publisher of a successful paper was better than being a non-publisher, or the custodian of the Baltimore Examiner.

“Now,” said Houghteling, as the last set of signatures had been affixed, and Caroline had become a number of times a millionaire, “in the matter of the Saint-Cloud-le-Duc property, the will of your late father neglects to make clear which of you inherits. In law then, a court would doubtless find that you own it jointly as you do the rest of the estate, and should the property be sold, you would divide, evenly, the money from the sale. Is that agreeable?” He looked at John, who looked at Caroline, who said, “Yes,” and looked at Blaise, who shrugged and said, “Okay.”

“I want it for May and June,” said Caroline. “I miss the place.”

“I’ll come in July and August,” said Blaise. “For my honeymoon.”

“Good,” said Houghteling, who never listened to anyone except when specifically paid to.

Caroline looked intently at Blaise, who was now wiping ink off his middle finger. “Frederika?”

“Yes. We’re getting married in May.”

“Then you must have Saint-Cloud. For May, that is.”

“We can all stay there.” Blaise was equable.

“Congratulations,” said John, and formally shook Blaise’s hand. Houghteling had now put away his documents in a leather case and, still unaware of his client’s approaching marriage, bade them all good-by with the sentiment that, after nearly seven years, all must be well that had ended so well.

Blaise suggested that Caroline join him and Frederika for dinner that night at Harvey’s Oyster House. “And you, too, John,” he added; and left the room.

In recent years, Caroline and John seldom looked at each other directly; nor very often aslant, either. “Well, it’s over.” John took out his pipe; filled and lit it. Caroline studied a mock-up of the Sunday Ladies’ Page. Princess Alice was featured yet again; and there were hints that she might marry Nicholas Longworth; and then, again, she might not. “How is Emma?” Caroline had been touched to find that John had taken to the child and she to him.

“She flourishes. She asks for you. I’ve talked to Riggs Bank. They will start making monthly payments into your account, as we agreed.”

John stood up and stretched himself. He looked years older than he was; and the face was now of the same gray as the hair. “I suppose you’ll want a divorce.” He played with the heavy gold watch chain, to which were attached emblems of exclusive clubs and societies. He, too, was Porcellian, a gentleman.

“I suppose so. Would you like one?” Caroline was amazed at the tone that each had managed to strike, a mutual lassitude, like guests at a dinner party that would never get off the ground.

“Well, it’s for you, really, to decide. You see, I have no future.”

“What makes you think I have one?”

John gave a wan smile; and exhaled pale blue pipe-smoke with the words: “Heiresses cannot avoid having a future. It’s your fate. You will remarry.”

“To whom?”

“Emma’s father.”

“Out of reach. For good.”

“Kitty might die…”

For the first and last time in their marriage John astonished her. “How did you know?”

“I have eyes, and Emma has his eyes, and Emma can talk now, and she speaks of his Sunday visits, with pleasure, too.”

“You haven’t spied on me?” Caroline’s face felt unnaturally warm.

“Why should I? It’s no business of mine. What business I ever had with you is concluded, and yours with me.”

“I trust,” said Caroline, rising from behind her rolltop desk, “you will always be a-lawyer to me.”

“And you a client to me.” John smiled, and shook her hand, formally. “You know I did want to marry you, when you first came over. I mean really marry you.”

Caroline felt a sudden strong emotion, which she could not identify. Was it loss? “I’m afraid that wasn’t meant to be, no fault of yours-though, perhaps, of mine. You see, I wanted to be all myself, but had no real self to be all, or even part of. I think I make no sense.” Caroline was suddenly flustered. It was not her way to speak so personally to anyone, even Jim.

“Well, the key to your-brief,” John was dry, “was that it wasn’t meant to be, and that certainly proved to be the case. I helped you, and, God knows, you helped me. Shall I divorce you, or you me?”

“Oh, divorce me!” Caroline had regained her poise. “For desertion, that’s fashionable now. In the Dakotas, which should be lovely in the summer.”

“I shall notify you legally. Here.” To her amazement, he gave her his handkerchief; then he left. To her amazement, she found that she was weeping.

3

BLAISE SAT AT THE EDGE of an artificial lake, and watched the swans sail back and forth, greedy eyes alert for food, predatory beaks ready to strike at any land-creature that moved within range. A perspective had been carefully arranged by an eighteenth-century gardener who believed that nature could only be revealed in its essential naturalness through total artifice. Trees of various sizes gave an odd sense of a huge park that extended to what looked to be a second larger lake, which was, actually, smaller than the first. Roses in full bloom made bonfires of color in the dim greenness. Blaise was content. If he had no inherent talent for marriage, Frederika had more than enough for two. With every show of amiability, she and Caroline had each taken over a wing of the chateau, and each kept to her wing unless invited by the other for a visit.

The state rooms were held in common, under the jurisdiction of the butler, who was also, in effect, the estate manager. M. Brissac had been at the chateau for thirty years; it was he who hired and fired and stole discreetly; it was he who had known both Mrs. Sanfords, and never had a word of the slightest interest to say about either. Now the old man approached Blaise from the central part of the chateau, an astonishing creation of rose-red brick, high mansard windows, gilded ironwork, and chimneys like so many monuments to Saint-Simon’s beloved peers of France.

Brissac bowed low, and presented Blaise with a telegram, which he opened: “Millicent and I and four others will come to lunch May 30. Hearst.”

It was typical of the Chief to give only a day’s notice. As Blaise gave orders to M. Brissac, Caroline and Emma appeared from the woods. They looked like figures on a Watteau fan, thought Blaise, once again thinking not only in French but with French malice, as he noted to himself that this fan could not be shut.

Emma ran forward to her uncle, who picked her up, and listened to her chatter in a combination of French and English. She had her grandmother’s complexion, hair.

“The Chief arrives tomorrow. For lunch. With four lords-in-waiting.”

“He does us honor.” Caroline sat in one of the curious carved sandstone thrones that the builder of the chateau, in a frenzy of premature pharaonism, had sculpted beside the lake. “With the beautiful Millicent?”

Blaise nodded. “He’s very respectable now. He expects to be elected mayor of New York in the fall.”

“Poor man. But I suppose it will give him something to do. Frederika fits in very well.”

Blaise was mildly disappointed that wife and half-sister got on so well. But then Caroline had known Frederika longer than he. “She has discouraged Mrs. Bingham,” he said, giving pleasure.

“She would not fit in.” Caroline put out her hand. “The key.”

“To what?”

“Father’s desk. I want to read Grandfather Schuyler’s memoirs, or whatever they are.”

“The desk’s open. They are in two leather-bound boxes.”

“Have you read them?”

“I don’t like the past.”

“That’s where the key is. If there’s one, of course. Come on, Emma.”

As Caroline collected her child, Blaise said, “Why did you divorce?”

“Why not?”

“It’s very American of you.”

“I am very American. Anyway, I wasn’t married in the church. It doesn’t count, really-for us, anyway. It’s just a legal convenience. Just another key, to just another lock.”

Blaise was still mystified by the whole affair. “Was John with… someone else?”

Caroline’s laugh dispelled any suspicion along that line. “I wish he were.”

“Are you?” Blaise was convinced that Caroline had, for some time, been having an affair, but she was even more guarded than he about her life. He assumed that the man was married; otherwise, now that she was divorced, she would have been free at least to mention if not marry him. Blaise did not rule out a passionate liaison with a lady: Mlle. Souvestre’s powerful example was a fact of their world. But Washington seemed hardly the setting for so Parisian an activity.

“I wish I were.” Caroline echoed herself and was gone.

Blaise found the Chief rather less phlegmatic than usual. He had gained so much weight that had he been shorter he might have presented to the world a comforting McKinley-esque rotundity. But because of his height, the result was more ursine-menacing than McKinley-majestic. The two couples with the Hearsts were part of his publishing life. “I’ve just bought Cosmopolitan magazine,” he said, as Blaise showed him through the suite of state apartments.

The Chief stopped at every painting, sculpture, tapestry, console. Blaise was pleased at the Chief’s awe. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hearst said, as they entered the grand salon, where windows opened onto the vista of lakes and forests, “outside of a royal palace or something. Those tapestries Gobelin?”

“Early Aubusson. It was my father’s hobby, fixing up this place. When he bought it, in the seventies, it was a ruin.” Behind them Frederika was hostess to Millicent, whose moon face shone with pleasure, as she said in her tough New York Irish accent, “Don’t sell a stick of furniture to Willy, or he’ll buy it all and put us in the poorhouse.”

“Warehouse is more like it.” Hearst enjoyed talk of his mania for acquiring everything on earth-including Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. “You’re not thinking about selling, are you?”

“Never,” said Caroline, making a grand entrance on Plon’s arm. “We’re home at last.”

After lunch, Blaise and Hearst walked together by the lake. “I want to know about Willie Winfield.” Blaise was direct.

Hearst stopped in mid-stride. For an instant, Blaise was struck by the incongruity of the splendid seventeenth-century façade behind them, the swans and topiary and pale statues before them, and the American political squalor that was their all-consuming subject. Of course, the great duke who had built the chateau had been a notorious thief; on the other hand, he had spent his stolen money with a splendor yet to be rivalled on Fifth Avenue or even Newport’s Ochre Point. “How do you know him?”

Blaise was cool. “He came to me, at the Tribune. He said he had been stealing letters from Mr. Archbold and that he’d taken them round to one of your editors at the American, and the editor would photograph them. Then you paid, he said.”

Hearst scowled down at Blaise. “You paid, too.” A statement, not a question.

Blaise smiled. “Not for the same letters, unfortunately. I bought a part of the first half of the 1904 letterbook.”

“I didn’t buy that one.” Hearst sat in one of the sandstone thrones. In the distance Caroline and Frederika were playing croquet with the guests, the ladies’ clothes almost as bright as the tall roses, all around them. Emma had been borne off to her nap.

“I thought we had enough. We got Foraker for good. You know, I’ve been pushing him for the Republican nomination. Then, just before the election, if he’s nominated, of course, I’ll spring the stuff. Now,” the Chief looked at Blaise sadly, “you can do the same thing, tomorrow morning, and someone else will get the nomination…”

“Someone who won’t have written Archbold any letters?”

Hearst nodded. “Like Root or Taft. Neither one’s in the file, so far’s I can tell. But all the small fry and a lot of the big-time politicals are being paid off. So what are you going to do?” Although Hearst’s physiognomy did not allow for displays of indecision or apprehension, the weak voice was suddenly, oddly tremulous. Apparently, Hearst was basing a considerable political strategy on the release-or withholding at a price-of the letters in 1908.

“We could work something out.” Blaise was by no means certain what, if anything, he himself could do with them. Hearst was capable of anything: he was Hearst. But a Sanford, though not so well-defined, could hardly publish stolen letters unless they were used as background, say, to an investigation of one of Rockefeller’s judges. Standard Oil had the same proprietary feeling about judges that Blaise’s mother-in-law had about members of Congress, only Standard Oil paid large sums of money to make sure that the judges would always rule in their favor. In fact, most of the letters from politicians dealt not so much with pro-Standard Oil legislation as with judicial appointments. From the look of one letter-book, Archbold’s web of bought officials ranged from city halls to governors’ mansions to Congress and the appropriate courts and, finally, to the White House. But Blaise had been disappointed in the one letter to Archbold from Theodore Roosevelt. The letter could have meant anything, or everything, or nothing.

“I don’t think I have any use for the letters.”

Hearst’s physiognomy could not betray relief either; he stared blankly at Blaise, who said, “I don’t think that the Tribune, as a Washington paper, should get too mixed up in these things. If there’s a crusade for good government again, we might join in. Or Caroline might. I’m happy with bad government.”

“You’re in, like it or not. There’s no alternative.” Hearst was flat. “You’ll sit on the letters?”

“I think so.” But Blaise intended to keep Hearst in suspense as long as possible. “I’m only interested in one letter, one politician…”

“Roosevelt?”

Blaise nodded. “The letter I bought can only be interpreted in its proper context. Well, I don’t know the context. Do you?”

Hearst hummed, in his usual high off-key voice, a few bars of “Everybody Works but Father,” the year’s popular song. Blaise was grateful there was no banjo to accompany that chilling voice. “I’ll tell you what I guess the context is. Hanna was in deep with Rockefeller. So was Quay. My letters are full of them. But then everyone knows about them, anyway. They got money from Rockefeller, from everybody, for the Republican Party, for Roosevelt, for themselves.”

“For him, personally?”

Hearst shrugged. “I don’t think he’s that big a fool. But he’s got to have money so he can go round the country at election time, attacking the trusts that are paying for his train. When was your letter dated?”

“Last summer. After he was nominated.”

“Well, that makes no sense. But then, Hanna and Quay are dead. So he’s got nobody with the nerve to go to old Rockefeller, or even Archbold, and say, ‘Give me half a million for the campaign, and I’ll go easy on you.’ I expect that when he wrote Archbold, he was fishing.”

“Did he catch anything?”

Hearst’s thin smile was slow and genuine. “It doesn’t make any difference if he did or didn’t, does it? I mean, it’s the way the thing looks that matters. You could make the case as to how Roosevelt’s managers have always been on the take from Standard Oil, then, by the time you get around to his being in touch with Archbold, when he was desperate, trying to raise money from Morgan and Frick and Harriman, everyone will believe Teddy’s on the take, too, which, I suspect, he is.”

Ignobly, Blaise wondered how he could put together this story before Hearst did. Obviously, he could not unless he knew the contents of Hearst’s letters, all written before 1904. “I suppose you’ll use this when Roosevelt does something that favors Standard Oil, if he does.”

Hearst shook his head. “I’ll use what I’ve got-or not use it-in connection with my own campaign in 1908.”

Blaise did not use to himself the word “blackmail,” but that was indeed the Chief’s intention. As the owner of eight popular newspapers and the Archbold letters, he could make the leaders of the republic leap through any hoop of his choice. “There’s one more detail you should know,” said Hearst. “John D. Archbold is an old personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt.”

“That is something.”

“That is something.”

“If,” said Blaise, doing his best not to sound eager, “you were to publish these letters, what excuse would you give, for having stolen them…?”

Hearst attempted another chorus of “Everyone Works,” with invented words. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t say I’d stolen them. They came to my attention, that’s all. Then I’d also say that I do not consider that letters written to public men on matters affecting the public interest and threatening the public welfare are ever private letters.” At that moment, Blaise realized that Hearst might yet become president and, if he did, he might surprise everyone; in what way, of course, it was hard to tell.

4

CAROLINE SAT AT the large marquetry table, said to have been the very one that the Duke had used when he was the controller of the royal revenues, and opened the two letter-boxes. The first contained fragments of Aaron Burr’s autobiography, with a commentary by his law-clerk Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. She glanced through the pages, and decided that Henry Adams, if no one else, would be fascinated. She skipped to the end of the book, written years after Burr’s death, and read what she already knew, of her grandfather’s accidental discovery that he was one of Burr’s numerous illegitimate children.

The second leather box was a final journal by her grandfather, covering the year 1876. He had returned to New York for the first time since 1836, with his daughter, Emma, the Princesse d’Agrigente. This was the volume that she intended to read carefully.

Once the Hearst party had left, Caroline spent every moment that she could reading her grandfather’s journal. She was charmed by his amusement at the strange American world, fascinated by his description of her mother’s campaign to find a wealthy husband, the object of the visit, appalled at her grandfather’s cynical complaisance. But then father and daughter were broke, and he was just able to support the two of them by writing for the magazines. Fortunately, Mrs. Astor took them up; and they were in demand socially, thanks to Emma’s beauty, and her father’s charm. At one point, Emma had almost married an Apgar cousin, for convenience, something her daughter had actually done.

As Caroline read on, she began to see something alter in Emma’s character-alter or be revealed to the reader, Caroline, but not to the narrator, who seemed unable to understand the thrust of his own narrative. Sanford made his entrance, with wife Denise, who could not give birth without danger. As Denise and Emma became closer and closer friends, Caroline found that her fingers were suddenly so cold that she could hardly, clumsily, turn the pages. Caroline knew the end before the end. Emma persuaded Denise to give birth to Blaise. In effect, Emma murdered Denise in order to marry Sanford.

Emma’s expiation was the long painful time she took to die after Caroline’s birth. But did Emma feel guilt? Did she atone? Confess?

Caroline sent for Plon. It was late afternoon. She wanted to talk to Emma’s oldest son while the-crime was still vivid in her mind. Plon sprawled handsomely on a sofa. Caroline told him what their mother had done. At the end, somewhat dramatically, she held up the journal and waved it in the air; told him of the murder. “Brûlez,” Plon read from the cover. “That’s what you should have done, you idiot! Burn it. What difference does any of this make now?”

“You knew all along, didn’t you?”

Plon shrugged. “I thought something had happened.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Of course not.”

“Did she seem tragic or sad or-dark?”

“She was adorable, as always, even at the end, when there was pain.”

“Did she make confession, to a priest?”

“She was given the last rites. She was conscious. I suppose she did.”

Plon lit a cigarette from a new gold case. “You know, when someone becomes emperor of the French, and conquers all Europe, he doesn’t brood much about the people he killed.”

“But she was a woman, and a mother, not emperor of the French…”

“You don’t know how-I don’t know how-she saw herself. She had to survive, and if the sad lady, her friend, Blaise’s mother, must die, naturally, in childbirth, then die she must.”

The next morning, Caroline invited Blaise to breakfast in her wing of the chateau. He knew why. Plon had told him. They sat in an oval breakfast room, with du Barry dove-gray walls. “Now you know,” he said, casually, “that your mother killed my mother for our father’s money. I’m sure it happens all the time.”

“Don’t be-don’t make a joke of it. Now I know why your grandmother was so insistent with me. I am to expiate…”

“You? Don’t exaggerate your importance. You weren’t even there. I, at least, was the direct cause of my mother’s death.”

“I think these things go on, into the next generation, and further, maybe.”

“You! The atheist from Mlle. Souvestre’s stable.” Blaise laughed into his omelette.

“Atheists believe in character, and I certainly believe in cause and effect, and consequence.”

“The consequence is that you and I are still fairly young by the standards of our world and very rich by any standard. This isn’t the house of Artois.”

“Atreus.” She corrected him from force of habit. “Plon sounded as if he would have done the same.”

“I doubt it. Men are never as cruel as women when it comes to this sort of thing. Look at your dismissal of John. That was very Emma-esque. I couldn’t have done that.”

Caroline felt a chill in the room, which turned out to be not a ghost but a sudden cold wind from the lake; a summer storm was on its way. Blaise closed the window. “You prove my point then,” she said. “The old crime.”

“Don’t be carried away. Think of all the new crimes we can commit. Let poor Emma rest in peace. I have never, once, thought of Denise. Why should you think of Emma, who, according to Plon, except for one nicely executed murder, was delightful, as a woman, and admirable as a mother?”

“You are immoral, Blaise.” Caroline wanted to be shocked; but felt nothing at all.

“I never said I wasn’t. I’m indifferent. You remember our last night in New York, at Rector’s? when you were so shocked by the way the whole room sang that song?-well, I was thrilled because I was just like the singers of that song.”

Caroline shuddered at the memory. The latest Victor Herbert musical contained a highly minatory song called “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” On the night that she and Blaise came, as it were, full circle, in their knowledge of each other, they had dined at Rector’s, and when the singer from the musical comedy entered the restaurant, he boomed out, “I want…” and the entire restaurant took up the chorus, and on the word “want” everyone banged a fist on the table. It was like a war being conducted by very fat people against-the waiters? or everyone on earth who was not as fat or as rich as they? “So Emma was right, to want what she wanted?”

“You have only one chance sometimes. Anyway, what she wanted,” Blaise brought down his fist on the table, and Caroline jumped in her chair, “she got, and that’s what counts, and because she did, you’re here.”

So, in the end, Caroline, the successful American publisher, was not the acclimatized American that her brother, her appendage, was. She wished Mr. Adams was on hand, to delight in the irony.

But the next day, when Mr. Adams was indeed on hand, with John and Clara Hay, there was no opportunity to discuss anything in private except the fading away of John Hay, whose hair was now as white as his beard, the result, he said, still capable of his old humor, “of the waters of Bad Nauheim, which etiolate-my favorite word that I never get a chance to use-all things dark, not to mention false. Clara’s henna is all gone.”

While Hay sat with Caroline in the sandstone thrones, Blaise and Frederika showed off the chateau, and even Henry Adams affected to be overwhelmed.

Caroline had not had much experience with the dying. But one of her aunts had been something of a devotee of death-beds, and if she so much as heard of someone moribund within a hundred miles, she was on her way, in somber black with Bibles and prayer-books, with medicines to speed the terminal to terminus, and with cordials to assuage the survivors’ grief. “You can always tell when they’re about to pass on by a certain strong light in their eyes, just toward the end. Well, that’s the glory coming.” Late for a highly significant death-bed, the Sanford aunt had hurried down a flight of stairs, fallen, broken her neck; and so was robbed of her shining glory, so long awaited by her friends.

But John Hay’s eyes were not in the least glorious. Rather, they were dull and glassy; he was also thinner and paler than he had been before the cure; but he had not lost interest in life, rather the reverse. He looked about him curiously. “I couldn’t imagine living in a poky house in Georgetown when you have all this. It even beats Cleveland.”

“Well, the house is splendid but the company’s poky. So I stay on in Washington. Besides, we didn’t sort out the estate till this spring.”

“Satisfactorily?” Hay gave her a shrewd look.

Caroline nodded. “As satisfactory as anything ever is. Anyway, I like my new sister-in-law.”

“I suppose you’ll get married again.”

“You sound disapproving.” Caroline laughed. “But then I’m a divorcée. I’m told if I go to Cleveland, I shall be stoned to death…”

“Only when taken, publicly, in adultery, by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. Oh, I shall miss this,” he said, with all sorts of resonance that tact required her not to explore.

“You go on to London?”

“Then Washington, then New Hampshire.”

“Why Washington in the heat?”

Hay sighed. “Theodore is there. Theodore is busy. When Theodore is busy, I feel constitutionally obliged to be on hand.”

“The Russians?” Caroline could no longer forget, even in the company of the dying, that she was a journalist.

“The Japanese, I should say. I’m so far removed from things. I have to read the foreign press with a sort of mental cypher-code to figure out what’s happening. Apparently, Theodore has been asked by the Japanese to arbitrate a peace treaty between them and Russia. But what is actually happening-if anything-I don’t know. Spencer Eddy-”

“Surrenden Dering?”

“The same. He’s posted in Petersburg. He came all the way to Bad Nauheim to tell me that Russia’s falling apart. It seems that the Tsar is a religious maniac, and so the thirty-five grand dukes are running the country, which is to say they create endless confusion. The workers are on strike. The students are on strike. Maybe Brooks is right, after all. They’ll have their French Revolution at last. Meanwhile, what government they have has instructed Eddy to tell me that they’d like a convention with us, and I had to tell him that, thanks to the Senate and dear Cabot, there is no way of getting such a treaty as long as any senator has one constituent who might object.”

Adams joined them. He seemed immeasurably old to Caroline; yet, paradoxically, he never aged. He simply became more himself: the last embodiment of the original American republic. “I like your sister-in-law. She knows what not to show you on a tour of the house.”

“There’s so much not to be seen. There is dry-rot…”

“I think that’s what I’ve got.” Hay sighed. “I was finally examined by an austere Bavarian doctor who assured me, with touching Teutonic modesty, that he was the greatest expert on the heart in the world. As I believe everything I’m told, I said, ‘So what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You have a hole-or a bump,’ he was not consistent, ‘in your heart.’ When I asked why all the other great heart specialists had not noticed this hole or bump, he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t see it, or maybe they didn’t want to worry you.’ ‘Is it fatal?’ I asked. ‘Everything’s fatal,’ he said, with a confident smile. I must say he sort of grew on me. Anyway, he said he could delay the final rites, which, apparently, is a cinch for him.”

“I hate doctors. I never go to one.” Adams was firm. “They make you sick. Anyway, you look no worse-and no better-for all the waters that have flowed through you…”

“… and over me.” Hay stretched his arms. “I can’t wait to see Theodore, and tell him that I’ve been right all along about the Kaiser. Theodore thinks that because the Kaiser is, as Henry James says of Theodore, ‘the embodiment of noise,’ that he is mindless…”

“Like Theodore himself?”

“Now, Henry. Theodore has a mind that is chock-a-block with notions…”

“Thoughts, too?”

“Splendid thoughts. Anyway, the latest information is that the Kaiser, after pushing his stupid cousin, the Tsar, into declaring war on Japan, now realizes that Russia is too weak, even for his purposes, so he now is making frantic love to Japan, and to Theodore, too.”

“They are made for each other.”

“Not yet. But the Kaiser has a plan. Would to God I could go to Berlin to see him. He may be a reckless orator but he is a cold calculator.”

Two menservants appeared, pushing a tea-table; and the croquet players joined them. Frederika did the honors, while Caroline and Clara walked beside the lake, keeping a careful distance from the swans. “He seems better.” Caroline could think of nothing else to say on that subject.

Clara was now huge, even monumental; her manner, as always, secure, declamatory. “He could live another year. Maybe more, if only he would leave Washington.”

“He won’t?”

“Not yet. We go to London, incognito, June second. Then we sail on the Baltic. Then he insists on going back to the State Department before we go on to New Hampshire. He does not trust Theodore.” Clara exhorted a willow tree’s reflection in the lake.

“Perhaps it’s best, to keep on, till…” Caroline did not finish.

“I wonder about you and Del.” Clara spoke for the first time to Caroline about her son. “I’m not sure-now-it would’ve been for the best.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“No. We never will. It’s when I see all this, I realize you are foreign. He was not.”

“I’m both. Or, maybe, neither.” Caroline was amused that Clara was still making censorious divisions between what was foreign, and probably bad, and what was American and entirely good. “At least I don’t publish the Tribune in French.”

Clara smiled, as she always did when she suspected that someone had made a joke. “Do you and Blaise get on?”

“We do now. We probably won’t in the future.” Caroline was surprised, as always, when she said what she actually thought.

“That’s my impression, too. The girl’s nice. But he does want to be like Mr. Hearst…”

“No more than I do…”

“Caroline! You are a lady.”

“But foreign.”

“Even so, you could never want to be like that dreadful man. Henry James returned our latch-key.” Clara’s mind was so constituted that she could make the leap from yellow journalism to the fact that Henry James, who had gone off with the key to the front door of the Hay house, had returned it; and make the non sequitur seem part of some significant whole, which perhaps it was, un-grasped by Caroline, who suddenly recalled her discussion of keys with Blaise, both real and metaphysical.

“Will you see Mr. James in London?”

“If we have the chance. I don’t want John to see anyone except old friends. But the King insists. So we go to Buckingham Palace.”

“The King is political.”

“He likes John. I said, No food! The King eats for hours. We shall stay exactly one half hour, I said, no longer.” The two women sat on a bench, and watched the others at tea. Adams was walking up and down excitedly, a good sign. Hay sat huddled in his throne, a study in gray and white. Blaise sat on the edge of his chair like an attentive schoolboy. “Divorce still shocks me.” Clara hurled the commandment down the length of her figure, which even seated suggested Mount Sinai.

“We were never really married.” Caroline started to tell the truth, but then, not wanting to spend the rest of her life in France, she told not the truth but something true. “I was alone, after Del died. So I married a cousin for-protection.” Caroline hoped that she could successfully portray herself as helpless.

She could not, to Clara, at least. “I know.” She was peremptory. “Rebound. From grief. Even so, one might have waited until there was not a cousin but a true husband.”

“That’s all past. I’m alone now, and quite content. There’s Emma. What,” asked Caroline, imitating the manner of Clara, the non sequitur without ellipsis, “ever became of Clarence King’s children by the Negress?”

Clara blushed. Caroline knew victory. “They are still in Canada, I think. John and Henry help out. They tell me nothing, and I never ask.” Clara rose, ending the subject. Attended by Caroline, the mountain returned to the tea-table.

Hay was describing his meeting with the French foreign minister. “I was expressly forbidden by the President to speak to him, since I hadn’t first seen the Kaiser. But I, too, must be allowed my diplomacy. All the troubles in Morocco-no, not Perdicaris, not Raisuli…”

“Spare us your high drama.” Adams ceased pacing and sat in a chair too large for him. The two tiny glittering black patent-leather shoes were an inch from the ground.

“… are coming to a head, and the Kaiser is imposing himself on the French, and threatens to go to Morocco himself to take it away from them. Poor Delcassé is filled with gloom. With Russia on the verge of a revolution, the Kaiser has the only important army in Europe. The French don’t breed enough, he complained, and the English army is too small, so the Kaiser can do as he pleases, unless Theodore puts down his great boot…”

“Stick, isn’t it?” Adams interjected. “The one he says he carries when he speaks with a soft voice. The reverse, of course, is the case. He bellows, and there is no stick at all.”

“A large navy, Henry, is a big stick…”

“When war comes in Europe, it will be on land, and it will be won by land armies, and that will be Germany’s last chance to be king of the mountain.”

“We,” Clara said the last word, “will stay out.”

As the perfect day ended with a golden light breaking through the leaves of the west park, Caroline and Blaise and Frederika saw the last of the Hearts into their motor cars. Adams was off to join the Lodges, “part of my secret diplomacy to keep Cabot from John’s throat.” Caroline remembered too late that she had not mentioned to Adams the fragments of Aaron Burr’s memoirs. Fortunately, from the healthy look of him, there would be time during the winter in Washington.

“You must come see us at Sunapee.” Hay took Caroline’s hand; she almost recoiled from the coldness of his touch.

“I’ll come in July.”

“Come for the Fourth. We will all be there.” Clara kissed Caroline’s cheek. Then they were gone.

The young trio regarded the departure of the old trio with, on Caroline’s side, considerable regret. “They are the last,” she said.

“Last of what?” Frederika gazed bemusedly at her, hair suddenly dark gold in the slanting light.

“Last-believers.”

“In what?” Blaise turned to go inside.

“In… Hearts.”

“I believe in hearts.” Frederika had misunderstood. “Don’t you, Caroline?”

“I meant something else by Hearts, and what they were, and tried to be, made them different from us.”

“They aren’t different from us.” Blaise was final. “Except that they are old, and we aren’t. Yet.”

5

JOHN HAY SAT in a rocking chair on the verandah of The Fells and stared across the green New Hampshire lawn to the gray New Hampshire mountains with Lake Winnepesaukee between, so much flat shining water that reflected the deep clear blue summer sky. Exhaustion did not describe his condition. He had returned on June 15, and after a day at Manhasset with Helen, he had gone on to Washington, despite firm instructions from the President to go home. For a week in the damp heat of the tropical capital, he had done the business of his department, and plotted with Theodore on how-and where-to get the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He had found Theodore more than ever regnant, and the mammoth Taft apparently indispensable. The last bit of business that they had set in motion was to put an end to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which earlier administrations had used to keep the Chinese from immigrating to the United States. With the rise of Japan, paradoxically, the Yellow Peril must be put to rest as a means for politicians to frighten the people.

The house in Washington was depressing, with white sheets over everything, closed shutters and windows, and a musty smell. Clarence, now grown and amiable if not brilliant, kept him company, and together they had left the city on June 24 for Newbury, on the overnight sleeper, where Hay had caught his inevitable sleeper-cold. Today he was better; but mortally tired. He had also developed a habit of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, and dreaming vividly; then he’d wake up, disoriented, with the sensation, yet again, of being, simultaneously, in two places, even two epochs of time. But now Clarence sat beside him in a noisy rocker, made noisier by the instinct of the young to rock vigorously, while that of the old is to be rocked gently.

“Of course, I’ve been lucky.” Hay stared at the sky. “There must be a kind of law. For every bit of bad luck Clarence King-for whom we named you-had, I got a prize. He wanted to make a fortune, and lost everything ten times over. I didn’t care one way or another, and everything I did, just about, made me rich, even if I hadn’t married an heiress.” Hay wondered if this was entirely true. When he had worked for Amasa Stone, he had been drilled thoroughly in business. Of course, he had been an apt student, but without Stone’s coaching he might have ended up as just another newspaper editor, earning extra money on the lecture-circuit.

“I’ve never really been sick till now, or, as old Shylock says, ‘never felt it till now.’ The family’s turned out better than I ever had any right to hope.” He turned and gazed at the attentive Clarence. “I’d go to law school, if I were you. Also, don’t marry young. It’s a mistake for a boy to tie himself up-or down-too young.”

“I’ve no intention,” said Clarence.

“Good boy. Poor Del.” Hay’s chest seemed to constrict a moment; and his breath stopped. But, for once, there was no sense of panic. Either he would breathe again, or he would not, and that was that. He breathed; he sighed. “But Del’s life was splendid for someone so young. We got used to that, my generation, to dying young. Just about everybody I knew my age was killed in that terrible trouble. Name me a battle, and I can tell you which of my friends fell there, some never to rise again. Say Fredericksburg and I see Johnny Curtis of Springfield, his face blown away. Say…” But already Hay was beginning to forget both battles and youths. Things had begun to fade; past, present mingled.

“I thought I’d die young, and here I am. I thought I wouldn’t amount to much and… I really believe that in all history, I never read of a man who has had so much-and such varied-success as I have had, with so little ability and so little power of sustained industry. Nothing to be proud of. Something to be grateful for.” Hay looked at Clarence, thoughtfully, and was somewhat surprised-and mildly irritated-to find him reading a stack of letters.

“You’re busy, I see.” Hay struck the sardonic note.

“You should be, too.” Clarence did not look up. As he finished reading a letter, he would let it fall to the floor of the verandah, in two piles. Obviously one pile was to be answered; the other not. Who used to do that? Hay wondered. Then he thought of himself again, soon to be no self at all, and he wondered why he had been he and not another, why he had been at all and not simply nothing. “I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood,” he proclaimed. But that was not true. The poet John Hay, heir to Milton and Poe, had come to nothing but a pair of very “Little Breeches.” “My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualifications.” Who had said that that was the only proof of fame, as opposed to notoriety? It sounded like Root, but Hay had forgotten.

Hay turned to Clarence, who was now on his feet. For the first time Hay noticed that the boy had grown a long pointed beard, not the style of the young these days. He must tell him, tactfully, that when the summer was over he must face the world clean-shaven.

“The President wants to see you,” said Clarence.

Hay leapt-to his own amazement-to his feet, and crossed the crowded corridor to the President’s office. Obviously he had been dreaming of New Hampshire while napping in the White House, awaiting Theodore’s summons. The Japanese…

In the office, Hay found the President staring out the window at the Potomac, and blue Virginia beyond. The President was hunched over, and was unlike his usual exuberant noisy self. Over the fireplace, the portrait of Jackson glowered at the world.

“Sit down, John.” The familiar high voice sounded deathly tired. “I’m sorry you’ve been sick.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” and Hay realized that he had made a mistake in hurrying so quickly across the corridor. Exhausted, he sat in the special visitor’s chair with all the maps of battle in full view, and a yellow curtain ready to cover them up, if the visitor was not to be trusted.

Abraham Lincoln turned from the window, and smiled. “You look pretty seedy, Johnny.”

“You don’t look too good yourself, if I may say so, sir.”

“When did I ever?” Lincoln went to his pigeon-holed desk, and took out two letters. “I’ve got a couple of letters for you to answer. Nothing important.” Lincoln gave Hay the letters; then he sat very low in the chair opposite, so that the small of his back would press against hard wood, while one long leg was slung over the chair’s arm. Hay realized with some excitement that he had, at last, after so many years, been able to remember Lincoln’s face from life as opposed to ubiquitous effigy. But what was he thinking? This was the President, he realized, on a Sunday afternoon, in summer. “I can’t sleep,” the Ancient was saying. “I think I’m sleeping but then I find I’m only day-dreaming and I wake up, and by the time it’s morning, I am plumb worn out, or as the preacher said to his wife…”

Hay felt, suddenly, as one with the President, as the melancholy dark green walls, picked out with tiny golden stars, swirled all about the two of them like the first attack of sleep which always starts, no matter how restless one has been, with a nothingness out of which emerges, first, one image, then another, and, finally, mad narratives unfold which take the place of the real world stolen now by sleep, unless sleep be the real world stolen by the day, for life.