Empire

1

CAROLINE HAD NOT REALIZED the extent of her own courage as she walked, all alone, in Peacock Alley, a corridor as long as that block of Thirty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues which was encased-exquisitely entombed, she had begun to feel-by the magnificence of New York’s newest and most celebrated hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria. Even in Paris, the new hotel had been written about with, for the French, wry respect: one thousand modern bedrooms, untold restaurants, palm courts, a men’s café and, most intriguing, the Peacock Alley, which ran straight through the double building, a splendid promenade with walls of honey-colored marble that reflected rows of relentlessly glittering electrified chandeliers. Between potted palms and the mirrored entrances to alluring courts and restaurants, sofas and armchairs lined the alley; here sat what looked to be all New York, watching all New York go by. Like the city itself, the Waldorf-Astoria never slept. There were late-night supper rooms as well as early-morning cafés where men in white tie and tails could be seen drinking coffee with men in business suits, drones and worker-bees all in the same buzzing honey-filled hive.

Caroline had been warned that no proper young lady could ever be seen alone in Peacock Alley. But as she was there to meet a gentleman, she would not be alone for very long; and so she took pleasure in the interest that she-and her Paris Worth gown-aroused, as she proceeded from lobby to Palm Court, all eyes upon her progress. So, she decided, animals in the zoo watch their human visitors. Certainly, the notion that it might be she who was on display in the monkey house, and the fleshy ladies on their divans and the stout gentlemen in their armchairs were the human audience, she found perversely amusing; also, she noted, in their general grossness, the New York burghers were more like bears than monkeys: upright and curious, dangerous when disturbed.

Just ahead of Caroline, two by no means fleshy girls were walking, arm in arm, like sisters. Were they, she wondered, prostitutes? Worldly ladies had told her that even in the most splendid-or particularly in the most splendid-of New York’s extraordinary hotel lobbies, businesswomen patrolled. But now with the invention of the Waldorf-Astoria, it had become fashionable not only for respectable women but for grand ladies to be seen, properly escorted, in hotel lobbies and even, though this was very new, to dine in a hotel restaurant, something unknown to the previous generation. In a fit of charity, Caroline decided that her dark suspicions about the “sisters” in front of her were simply that, and that they were indeed, like herself, young ladies curious to see and be seen.

Two-thirds of the way down the Alley, John Apgar Sanford sprang to his feet; promptly, his head vanished in the fronds of the palm tree that shaded his chair. “Are you hiding from me?” asked Caroline, delighted.

“No, no.” Sanford emerged from the fronds, his thin curly hair in disarray. He shook her hand gravely; he had her father’s small mouth-were they second or third cousins?-but the rest of him was all his own, or an inheritance from ancestors not shared with Caroline. At thirty-three he lived with a chronically ill wife in Murray Hill. “I’ve made a reservation in the Palm Garden. How was your trip?”

“When not terrifying, very dull. There is no middle way on a ship. How wonderful!” The Palm Garden was a wonderful jungle of palm trees set in green Chinese cachepots. From the high ceiling crystal chandeliers were all ablaze though it was daytime. Noon on a tropical island, thought Caroline, half expecting to hear a parrot shriek; then heard what sounded like a parrot shrieking but was merely the laughter of Harry Lehr, young, fair, fat and damp; he was leaving the Palm Garden in the company of a thin elderly lady. “You’re expected,” he said, clasping Caroline’s hand. “At five sharp.” He looked at Sanford appraisingly. “Alone,” he added; and was gone.

“That… cad!” Sanford had turned the color of Murray Hill brick. Caroline took his arm protectively; and together they followed the headwaiter to a table set in front of a gold-velvet banquette for two, on which they could sit side by side, close enough to be able to speak in low voices, far enough apart to emphasize the innocent decency of their relationship in the eyes of that considerable portion of the great world, having tea in the Palm Garden. Much more opulent than Paris, Caroline noted; but also more coarse. “Why is Mr. Lehr a cad?”

“Well… I mean, look at him.”

“I have looked at him. I have also listened to him. He is a bit on the fantastic side. But very amusing. He’s always been kind to me. I can’t think why. I’m not yet fifty. Or rich.”

“What-where are you expected at five? Of course, it’s none of my business.” Sanford suddenly stammered. “I’m sorry. But I thought you were just off the boat. I mean, he seemed to be expecting you.”

“I am just off the boat; and I haven’t seen Mr. Lehr since spring; and, yes, he always seems to be expecting you, and so I shall have tea with him. That’s all.”

“At Mrs. Fish’s?”

“No. At Mrs. Astor’s. When he mentions no name like that it is always Mrs. Astor. The Mystic Rose, as they call her. But why a rose? Why mystic?”

“Ward McAllister called her that. I don’t know why. He was court chamberlain before this-this little brother of the rich, as they call his sort.” Tea was brought them, followed by liveried waiters, bearing cakes.

“Well, he makes me laugh, which is probably his function in life. I suppose he makes Mrs. Astor laugh, too. Hard to imagine.”

“I shouldn’t think she’d feel like laughing in here.” Sanford placed a thick envelope on the table between them. “This used to be Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, the one that McAllister said could only hold four hundred people, the only people who mattered socially, he said. Another little brother.”

“I thought the hotel was all new?”

“The hotel’s new. But half of it’s built on the site of Mrs. Astor’s old house, and half on the site of her nephew’s house.”

“Ah, of course! I remember. They hate each other. Oh, the raging passions of the Astors! I can’t get enough of them. They are like the Plantagenets. Everything on such a monstrous scale, like this hotel.”

Caroline knew all about the rivalry between nephew and aunt. The nephew, William Waldorf Astor, was oldest son of oldest son; this meant that he was the Astor and that his wife was the Mrs. Astor. But upon his father’s death, his aunt had declared herself the Mrs. Astor, causing her niece much pain, not to mention confusion, as invitations were constantly being sent to wrong addresses. William Waldorf then declared war on the Mystic Rose. He tore down his house, which was next to hers, and put up a hotel. Unable to bear the presence of a hotel’s shadow on her garden, the Mystic Rose persuaded her husband to tear down their house and put up a second hotel. Though uncle and nephew were also at war, they were sufficiently practical to see the advantage of joining the two hotels into a single unique monument to the fierce passions of their turbulent family, and so they styled the result, somewhat uneasily, the Waldorf-Astoria.

“Now everyone can sit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.”

“Everyone certainly does.” Sanford was sour; but then his mother was an Apgar, a self-regarding old family whose brown-stone rectitude and gentility were forever grimly opposed to the white marble vulgarity of the buccaneer rich whose palaces now extended not only up Fifth Avenue to Central Park but also to the west, where, not long ago, one enterprising millionaire had discovered, to everyone’s astonishment, the Hudson River; and so the Riverside Drive was now a place where the new rich could build their palaces, and live in a rural, riparian splendor, like so many upstate Livingstons with the marvelous amenity of the nearby Columbus Avenue elevated train, which could get them to any part of Manhattan in a matter of minutes. “The world is very much changed,” said Sanford, now all Apgar.

“I wouldn’t know.” Caroline was enjoying everything about the Waldorf-Astoria. “The only world I know is now.”

“You are young.”

“That is the problem, isn’t it?” Caroline indicated the envelope, flanked by a chocolate torte and a blond, pale, damp cake, reminiscent of Harry Lehr’s face.

Sanford nodded; opened the envelope; withdrew some documents. “I have gone on appeal. There are the documents in question. They are… well, I’ll leave them with you. Read them carefully. I’ve also obliged Mr. Houghteling to produce the Colonel’s earlier wills, for comparison. In every will that I know of, each of you was to inherit his half of the estate at the age of twenty-one. But in the last will…”

“Father appears to have written a seven instead of a one.” At first Caroline had thought it some sort of joke; then she realized that the Colonel must have, by mistake, written a French one. Now, for the first time, she was able to examine a copy of the will. “Surely if I’m not to inherit until I am twenty-seven, then the same condition-that is, the same confused cypher-must apply to Blaise, who is only twenty-two.”

“Look.” Sanford tapped the document. She read: “… my son, Blaise, who is of age, to inherit his portion; my daughter, Caroline, when she is of age, at 27, to inherit her portion, as described above…” Caroline put down, the will. “This makes no sense. I was twenty when he made the will. Blaise was twenty-one, and Father says he is of age. So why am I not of age when I am twenty-one, as the previous wills stated?”

“You know, I know, Blaise knows, Mr. Houghteling knows, that Colonel Sanford meant twenty-one. But the law does not know this. The law only knows what is written down and witnessed and notarized.”

“But the law must, sometimes, make sense.”

“That is not the law’s function, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re a lawyer. Surely lawyers make the law…”

“We interpret the law. So far the interpretation in this case has all been done by Mr. Houghteling, who says that the Colonel decided that you, as a young inexperienced woman, must wait until you are twenty-seven, before you inherit. Blaise, at twenty-one, he regarded as being competent, and of age.”

Caroline stared at the will, which now seemed to her even more of a jungle than the Palm Garden, where a string trio was playing softly, La Belle Hélène. “What can I do?” she finally asked.

“What do you want?”

“My half of the estate now.”

Sanford crumbled bits of chocolate cake with his fork. “That will mean going to court, an expensive process. It will also mean overthrowing this will, since your father’s peculiar number one is now accepted by everyone hereabouts as a seven.”

“Why,” Caroline was thinking hard, “did he draw up this will? I mean, is it any different from all the others?”

“Yes. Apparently, he changed his will every time there was a new… uh, housekeeper.” Sanford was ill at ease. Caroline was not. “He would make a bequest to the new one. There are seven such bequests in all. But the bulk of the estate has always been evenly divided between his two children.”

“If I should lose,” Caroline had yet to speculate on such a catastrophe but the palms were suddenly filled with menace and the waltz from La Belle Hélène sounded like a funeral march, “what happens?”

“You will be paid, from the estate, thirty thousand dollars a year until you are twenty-seven. Then you will inherit your half.”

“Suppose Blaise loses it all. What then?”

“You will have half of nothing.”

“So I must get my share now.”

“What makes you think Blaise will lose instead of make money?” Sanford eyed her curiously. For Caroline, a banquette’s advantage was that with a slight turn of the head one’s features-half-visible at best-were no longer on display. She looked toward the next table, where an actress whom she had often seen on stage was trying to look obscure in order that everyone might see how young she looked offstage, when, of course, for an actress, the Palm Garden was the ultimate stage.

“Blaise is ambitious, and ambitious people almost always fail, don’t they?”

“That’s a curious notion, Miss Caroline. I mean, there was Caesar and Lincoln and… and…”

“Two excellent examples. Both murdered. But I wasn’t thinking of that sort of huge ambition. I was thinking of people who are in a hurry, very young, to make others take notice of them. Well, Blaise is rushing into the world like… like…”

“Like Mr. Hearst?”

“Exactly. He tells me, proudly, that Mr. Hearst has lost millions of dollars on his two newspapers.”

“But Mr. Hearst-a true rotter-will make other fortunes. He is made for this degraded time.”

“Perhaps he will. Perhaps he won’t. But his mother is richer than our father was, and I don’t want to end up with half of nothing.”

Sanford looked at her curiously. “If what you call ambitious men lose fortunes, what sort of a man do you think makes one?”

“My father.” The answer was prompt. “He was indolent. He paid no attention to business, and he more than doubled his inheritance.” Caroline turned, full face, to Sanford. “We must find a way to force Blaise to give up what’s not his.”

“But Mr. Houghteling has already taken the first steps. I think a court case might be risky.”

Caroline involuntarily shuddered; anger and fear commingled. “Surrender is riskier. Isn’t this the city where everyone can be bought? Well, let us buy a judge, or is it the jury one pays for?”

Sanford smiled to show that he was not shocked; and looked very shocked indeed. Caroline felt a certain compassion for her upright relative. “Our city officials are generally corrupt,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know how to deal with that sort of thing. You see, I am with the reform movement. I helped Colonel Roosevelt when he was police commissioner. Of course, reform is dead for the moment and Tammany’s back in power again with Van Wyck, who’s Boss Croker’s man. Croker’s back, too.” The string trio, as if cued, began to play the song of the year, the sickening, to Caroline’s Parisian ear, “The Rosary.” Sentimental religiosity and public stealing, that was the new world. Well, she decided, she had better master it; or be mastered herself. There was, all in all, a certain advantage to having been brought up by a lazy father who could not speak the language of the country where he lived. As a result, Caroline had been in charge not only of her own life but of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, never really yielding her authority to any one of the resident ladies. In the long run, the managing of the ladies had taught her patience and diplomacy. Unfortunately, the world of men had been closed to her. Blaise, who might have been a link, was always away at school either in England or in the United States; and since the Colonel was like no other man, what she had learned in the managing of him was obviously not going to be of much use to her with the brutes of the Palm Garden. The celebrated actress-who was she?-was listening, head to one side, eyes half-closed, to “The Rosary”; she appeared to be having a religious experience, to the awe of her companions, rude bewhiskered New Yorkers, with red faces, and a reverence for the finer things, of which the actress was, so expensively, one.

“Will you see your brother?” Sanford was tentative; but then he had never known what her relations were with the half-brother who had, so suddenly, turned pirate. Caroline herself was not certain just what she felt, other than fury. She had always appreciated Blaise’s energy, both athletic and moral, if moral was the word for a highly immoral or amoral will to rise. She had even found Blaise’s beauty attractive in the sense that they complemented one another; he was blond and she was dark. He should have been a bit taller with long, less-bowed legs; but then she might have been more usual had she been shorter and fuller-much fuller, since fashion had now decreed magnificent poitrines for the ladies while nature had decreed, in her case, otherwise. Although Worth had made up the difference artfully, the disappointment of her future husband was a source of not exactly pleasant daydreams.

Caroline rose. “Blaise is taking me to the theater. Then we shall go to supper, the two of us, at Rector’s, which I can now enter, as I am a woman of twenty-one though not yet an heiress of twenty-seven.” Caroline saw that she had made her point. Sanford nodded; looked grim; he would do battle for her. As they swept into the Peacock Alley, Sanford said, “You must be very careful of what you say to your brother.”

“I always am. But he does know that we mean to fight, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ve made that clear to Mr. Houghteling. Perhaps you shouldn’t mention the matter to Blaise.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

They entered the high-ceilinged, resonant lobby, suggestive of a Bernini nightmare, thought Caroline, darkly approving the excess of gold and crystal and red damask, through which moved the hotel staff, evenly divided between those dressed to look like officers of the Habsburg court and those got up as members of some very superior parliament where Prince Albert frock-coats were cut to perfection and trousers were subtly, grayly striped. Caroline walked Sanford to the door. He seemed disturbed; then blurted out: “You must have someone with you, you know.”

“A governess?” Caroline smiled. “But surely I’ve been governed all my life.”

“I meant a suitable lady, a relative…”

“Those who are suitable are not available, those who are available… Don’t worry. I have Marguerite. She’s been with us all my life. She sleeps in a small room next to my bedroom. The hotel was relieved to see her honest, ugly face.”

“Well, then, I suppose… But when you go out, she goes with you?”

“When we take the air, yes. But I’m not going to take her to Mrs. Astor’s. She’s far too intelligent for those people. She has read Pascal.”

Sanford looked puzzled; then said, “Good-by. I’ll see you tomorrow, if I may. After I’ve talked to Mr. Houghteling and you…”

“… have not talked to Blaise.” Caroline smiled, as he left; and kept on smiling all the way to the elevator; then caught a glimpse in the mirrored door of her own face, made perfectly stupid by the insipid smile. She frowned; beauty regained.

Caroline’s beauty-such as it was-was again lost at Mrs. Astor’s. Although she had made up her mind not to smile, habit undid her; and she looked, she knew, exactly the way she was expected to look: stupid, innocent, young. But then, she thought dourly, she was all three and the absolute proof of her stupidity was the fact that she knew it and could do nothing about it. She had had a superior education with Mlle. Souvestre. She had read the classics; she knew art. But no one had ever explained to her how not to be cheated out of a fortune.

Harry Lehr pranced toward her as she crossed the first drawing room, empty except for the two of them. “Oh, Miss Sanford! You are a sight for sore eyes!”

“In that case, I shall go live in Lourdes and make my fortune.”

“You won’t need to go anywhere for that.” Lehr had not heard of Lourdes; and Caroline was not in an instructive mood. “She’s pouring tea herself, in the library. Just a few people, the chosen ones, you might say.”

“And then again might not.” Caroline enjoyed Lehr’s deep silliness. Paris was filled with similar lapdogs. There seemed to be a universal law that the greater the lady the more urgent it was for her to have a Lehr to make her laugh, to collect gossip and new people, to be always at her side and yet never give her cause to fear compromise. Lehr was in his late twenties; from Baltimore. He lived by his wits. He sold champagne to friends. On occasion, he liked to dress up as a smart lady; and make people laugh.

Caroline followed, happily, the conventionally dressed Lehr through a second drawing room to a library, newly panelled with ancient wood. Here a dozen “old” New Yorkers sat in a semi-circle around the tea service, where Mrs. Astor presided; she was very much herself, as always, beneath a jet-black wig. The old woman gave Caroline a finger to touch; a thin smile to respond to; a cup of tea to drink. “Dear Miss Sanford,” said the Mystic Rose, “sit beside me.”

Caroline sat next to the old lady, a mark of honor that did not go unnoticed by the other guests, most of whom she recognized but none of whom she could identify. New York had always been like that for her, a series of strange drawing rooms filled with familiar-looking strangers, and familiar-sounding names. She assumed that once she could put the right name to the right face she would be, at last, home, for she had decided that she was going to be what her father pretended, uselessly, not to be, an American. Nevertheless, New York was still a foreign city to her, unlike Paris, where she was at home, or even London, where she had often stayed with family friends or with girls she had known at Allenswood; over the years, she had graduated from children’s parties to the grown-up world, marked, officially, four years earlier, when she had put three feathers in her hair and in the company of the Dowager Countess Glenellen, mother-in-law of a schoolfriend, she curtseyed low to Queen Victoria. Now she sat next to the Queen’s American equivalent, who put her uneasily at ease as is royalty’s way. “You will not have cake?”

Caroline had refused the cake offered her by a maid. “This is my second tea, Mrs. Astor. I had my first in your old ballroom.”

“The Palm Garden.” Mrs. Astor pronounced each syllable with the same emphasis. “I have seen the Palm Garden. But only from the corridor. You are stopping at the hotel?”

“Yes. It is most comfortable.” Caroline was finding this sort of exchange oddly more tiring in English than in French, where the ritual exchange of polite phrases could be, occasionally, charged with meaning. “I think the hotel is unique.” And now, why not, she wondered, get the reputation for being much too clever for a girl? She launched herself, “The Waldorf-Astoria has brought exclusivity to the masses.”

Mrs. Astor’s range of expressions did not include astonishment, as, like her British counterpart, she could not, by definition, ever be observed in so fallen a state; but polite disapproval was very much in her repertoire. The eyes, which slightly drooped at the corners, opened wide. The short-lipped mouth was now pursed, as if she might be inclined to whistle. “Surely,” she said in her usual clear uninflected voice, “that is not possible. I also wonder how one so young, though brought up in France,” Caroline did not wince at the low thrust, “could know of these things.”

“Oh, Mrs. Astor, we are nothing if not exclusive…”

“I meant,” said Mrs. Astor, “the… masses.” She blinked her eyes, as if a tumbril had come into view. But it was only the maid with bread and butter. Mrs. Astor helped herself, as if falling back on a basic necessity in order to fortify herself against the mob. “Your grandfather,” Caroline was pleased that Mrs. Astor had made a connection, “wrote a book which I have still in this library,” her dark eyes stared vaguely at a row of magnificent tooled morocco volumes, emblazoned with the name Voltaire, “that told of what happened in Paris when the Communists overthrew the regime. It is a work which gave me many a sleepless night. Those fierce common people, after killing poor Marie Antoinette, then proceeded to eat the entire contents of the Paris Zoo, too dreadful, from antelope to… to emu.”

Caroline smiled politely in order not to laugh out loud. Mrs. Astor had managed to confuse 1870 with 1789. “Let us hope that the mob will be kept happy here by the Waldorf-Astoria with its one thousand bedrooms.”

Mrs. Astor frowned slightly at the raffish word “bedroom”; but then, as if recalling her young guest’s unfortunate upbringing, she said, “Your grandfather always said he was the wrong Schermerhorn and the wrong Schuyler. I was born Schermerhorn,” she added quietly, as if she had pronounced the ultimate royal name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

“I know, Mrs. Astor, and I hope you don’t mind but I have taken to pretending that my grandfather was the right Schermerhorn.”

Mrs. Aster’s genuine smile had considerable charm. “I suspect, my child, that the distance between the right and the wrong Schermerhorn has never been much wider than a ledger.” Thus, Mrs. Astor unfurled the Jolly Roger of trade, under whose cross-and-bones all America sailed, more or less prosperously. Before Caroline could think of something memorable-stupid or otherwise-to say, Lehr neatly replaced her on the sofa with an elderly man and Caroline, on her feet, was now face to face with a woman not much older than she. “I’m Mrs. Jack,” said the woman in a husky voice. “You’re the French Sanford girl, aren’t you?”

“French, no. Sanford yes; living in France…”

“That’s what I meant. Jack and I visited your father at Saint-Cloud. That’s the way to live, I said, not like the way we do in the Hudson Valley, in wooden crates.” Then Caroline realized that Mrs. Jack was Mrs. John Jacob Astor, the daughter-in-law of the Mystic Rose. The war between the two ladies was a source of delight to New York. Although friendly when together in public, each tended to disparage the other when apart. Mrs. Jack found her mother-in-law’s social life boring, while Mrs. Astor thought Mrs. Jack’s circle fast. Worse, in the eyes of the Mystic Rose, her son had political interests if not ambitions. Like so many of New York’s young grandees, Jack Astor had been inspired to clean up the Augean stables if not of the republic, an impossible undertaking, of the city. He had been a colonel in the recent war; he was said to be an inventor; he had published a novel about the future. None of this gave pleasure to his mother. On the other hand, she herself had recently won the only family war that mattered: not only had William Waldorf Astor exchanged New York for London, he had also renounced his American citizenship. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor reigned alone. “I can’t think where my mother-in-law finds these people.” Mrs. Jack looked about the room. She was very handsome, Caroline decided; and very fashionable in the English rather than the American way. “I think they must be kept in cedar chests when they’re not here. Harry amuses, of course. Did you know Ward McAllister?”

“I think,” said Caroline, “he was under a cloud when I first stepped onto the stage.”

Mrs. Jack looked at her with some interest. “Yes,” she said, “it is very much a stage, our world. But the clouds are real, if one’s not careful.”

“The problem must be,” Caroline wished to sound tentative, and succeeded, she thought, “at least my problem is, what is the play that we are supposed to be acting in.”

“The play, Miss Sanford, is always the same. It is called ‘Marriage.’ ”

“How boring!”

“How would you know?” Mrs. Jack gave a sudden great hearty deep laugh. “One has to be married to know just how deeply boring the play is.”

“But if that’s the play, I’m well into the first act. Getting married is at least a third of the drama, isn’t it?”

“To Del Hay, I hear. Well, you could probably do worse.”

“Who knows? Perhaps I shall, Mrs. Astor.”

“Call me Ava. I shall call you Caroline. Do you play bridge?”

“Not yet.”

“I shall teach you. I used to play tennis until Jack took it up. Now I play bridge. It is exactly like being alive. You’ll love it. The danger. The excitement. We shall see each other from time to time. We shall lunch at restaurants together, something that drives my mother-in-law mad. We shall compare notes on the play, between terrible yawns. I do hate my life, you know.” On that intimate if somewhat somber-not to mention theatrical-note, Mrs. Jack bade her new close friend farewell; kissed ritually the cheek of the Mystic Rose; and departed.

“Ava is always bored,” said Mrs. Astor to Caroline, as if she had overheard their conversation. “I am never bored. I recommend that you never be bored either. There is nothing so boring as people who are always bored.”

“I shall remember that,” said Caroline, fearing that she would.

“I am told that your brother, Blaise Sanford, is in the city. He has not come to see me, though your d’Agrigente brothers have. They are French,” she mysteriously emphasized; then regained her subject, Blaise. “He works with that Mr. Hearst.”

“Yes. Blaise also plans never to be bored. He finds Mr. Hearst very exciting.”

“It is possible to be too exciting.”

“I’ve not been so lucky.”

“I see Mrs. Delacroix each summer in Newport, Rhode Island. She does not think Mr. Hearst a good influence on her grandson. She tells me that journalism is bound to draw Blaise into the company of politicians and Jews. She is deeply distressed.”

“I’ve not met her, you know.”

Mrs. Astor’s dark stare was curiously disconcerting. She looked at Caroline as if, indeed, Caroline were an actress on stage and she the critical audience when, Caroline was certain-or was she?-that it ought to be the other way around. “That is right. You had different mothers. I knew both. Your mother I knew very slightly. She was dark-like you. She was the Princesse d’Agrigente. Then Denise Delacroix Sanford died, and your mother married your father.”

“Yes, I know the sequence intimately.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Astor. “I suppose you must.”

Harry Lehr then amused everyone; and the tea was over.

At midnight Broadway resembled itself at noon, except that the millions of white electrical lights used to spell out the names of theaters and plays, lacking all color, drained Broadway of color, too. There was something arctic about the scene, thought Caroline, as the carriage entered Longacre Square, a lozenge-shaped area whose south end was dominated by an odd triangle of a building. At midnight the square was almost as crowded as at noon. Streetcars rattled by; carriages stopped and started, as the night people got in, got out.

Blaise was entirely at home, thought Caroline, with a twinge of envy. She was still a foreigner; he was already a New Yorker. At the theater, he pointed out all sorts of New York figures in the audience, including a man who invariably bet a million dollars on almost anything, and another man, very fat and covered with diamonds, who ate a dozen dinners a day but drank only orange juice, a gallon at each meal.

“Here’s Rector’s.” Blaise was at his most attractive when he was excited, and New York excited him-electrified him, she thought, feeling a dozen years his senior. But despite her own new gravitas, she had enjoyed the play almost as much as the intermissions. Neither had mentioned the will; presumably, over supper, they would begin their business, and she would ignore her cousin’s warning.

Rector’s occupied a low yellow-brick building between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets on the east side of Longacre Square. Over the doorway hung an electrical griffin. “There’s no other sign,” Blaise explained happily. “Everyone knows this is Rector’s.”

As Caroline entered Rector’s the orchestra was playing what she had come to think of as the city’s anthem: “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” She was not certain whether the war had made the song popular, or the other way around. In either case, she preferred this jaunty tune to the lachrymose “The Rosary.” A thick, heavy man-but then all New York men were thick, heavy-Mr. Rector himself greeted Blaise; and was pleased, if somewhat surprised, to learn that Caroline was his sister. “We’ll put you in the back, Mr. Sanford. A quiet table.”

“Has Mr. Hearst been in?”

“No, sir. But the evening’s young.”

They sat facing one another across a corner table. The room was overheated, and smelled of roast beef and cigar smoke.

“You’ll like the Chief. At least I think you will.”

“Mrs. Astor-”

“Oh, those people hate him. You see, he does everything his own way. They really hate that, you know. They also can’t believe it. Like Brooklyn Bridge…” The maître d’hôtel took their order for supper. Although Caroline could not get enough of Long Island’s oysters, she disliked France’s allegedly more delicate and distinctive oysters. The Atlantic was colder here than there; or so someone had said, trying to explain to her the crucial difference. Meanwhile, she ate as many oysters as she dared.

“What about Brooklyn Bridge?” Meekly Caroline accepted every delay that Blaise saw fit to contrive; and he was in a delaying mood. She had also begun, almost idly, to wonder what he was really like. She had, of course, analyzed him to their Sanford cousin, but even as she had held so sententiously forth on Blaise’s form of ambition, she now realized that she hardly knew this sharp-faced, high-colored blond youth sitting opposite her. They had been apart too often. Was he, for instance, in love with anyone? Or was he what Mrs. Astor’s circle called a libertine? Or was he simply interested in himself, in thrall to his own energy as she was to hers?

Blaise told her about the Brooklyn Bridge. “The Chief decided that after all the fuss about the bridge-you know, the biggest and the best and so on-that the bridge was about to fall down. So we ran a series on how it’s about to collapse. Lovely stuff. Except there was nothing wrong with the bridge. Then when people found out that the bridge was safe, everyone was so mad at the Chief that he goes and publishes a big front-page story, saying that Brooklyn Bridge is safe at last, thanks to the Journal. It was a wonderful series!”

“Doesn’t it bother…” Caroline shifted tactfully from “you” to, “him that these things aren’t true?”

Blaise shrugged; and looked, momentarily, French. “It’s just for circulation. No one cares. There’s always another story tomorrow. Anyway, he makes things happen.”

“You mean, they seem to happen.”

“It’s all the same here. It’s not like other places. Where’s Del?”

“In New Hampshire, I think.”

“You like him?” Again the bright blue eager stare.

“Do you like him?” Caroline was curious.

“Yes. He’s very-old-fashioned, I guess. Is he going to work, or is he just going to be a clubman?”

“Oh, he’ll work, I suppose. He talks about the law. He talks about the diplomatic service.”

“Well, he’s set up there. Old Hay’s back on top.”

“Old Hay is not so well, I think. I liked them, the old people, this summer.”

“I can’t stand old people.” Blaise scowled. “They always act like they are judging us.”

“I don’t think they notice us at all.”

“Oh, they do! They notice the Chief anyway. The only old person he knows is his mother, and she’s jolly enough, for an old lady.”

“I hadn’t realized that you had developed this phobia for-old folks.”

“It’s New York!” Blaise grinned. “It’s the only place to be young in.”

“Well, I intend to do my best,” said Caroline, ready now to broach the delicate subject. But the one person in all New York who ought never to know their business approached the table. It was the infamous Colonel William D’Alton Mann. Florid, white-bearded, definitely elderly and thus entirely unacceptable to Blaise, the gentle-seeming Colonel, whose style of address was antebellum courtly-he had actually been a colonel in the war-was known to all New York as the city’s preeminent blackmailer. He published the irresistible weekly Town Topics, where, as “the Saunterer,” he confided to his readers a man-about-town’s inside knowledge of society’s dark side. The Saunterer gave the impression that he was more than eager to print not only devastating truths but ingenious libels about the rich and powerful. But this vivid impression was, largely, for effect. In actual fact, a truth too devastating or a libel too ingenious would first be submitted to the victim, who then had the opportunity to buy off the Colonel, usually with a loan of money, at a nominal interest rate, that became, in due course, a thoroughly bad debt. Smaller truths and minor libels were kept out of print by the payment of fifteen hundred dollars a year for a subscription to the Colonel’s luxurious annual volume, called, rather pointedly, Fads and Fancies of Representative Americans. Caroline was delighted to meet a villain of such stature. Blaise was less than pleased.

“Dear boy,” said the Colonel, seating himself uninvited in an empty chair beside Caroline. “How I revel in what the Chief is doing to the Secretary of War. Mr. Alger is indeed a murderer, just as the Chief says, killing American soldiers with poisoned beef, the same old trick that was played on us who fought in the War Between the States. You must give him my compliments. He is the best thing to happen to journalism since-”

“Since Town Topics was revived by you,” said Caroline, eager to show that she was up-to-date. To her pleasure the Colonel’s dull red face began to take on a purple coloring at the edge of the snow-white whiskers.

Colonel Mann was all honey. “How rare it is to find a young lady who appreciates-well, courage, I suppose is the word.”

“That’s one word,” said Blaise.

“The word,” said Caroline. “I can’t get enough of your newspaper, and I don’t know why so many people I know are made uneasy by your… saunterings.” Caroline flattered.

“I am, at times,” the Colonel’s confession gave every appearance of shyness, “unkind, even-yes, a fault admitted is a fault mitigated-unfair. For instance, there is something about Mrs. Astor that annoys me, possibly because we’re all good Democrats, aren’t we? Well, the jewels that she wears in just one evening could rebuild the thousand and one Astor tenements that paid for them.”

“The Colonel’s turned socialist.” Blaise had not yet learned how to turn social disgust to fascinated rapture. Caroline had been well taught by Mlle. Souvestre.

“No, my boy. I simply voted the way the Journal told me to vote, for Bryan.” He took a pinch of snuff from a silver box. “Have I your permission, Miss Sanford?”

“Of course! How nice to know one another without being introduced. Versailles must have been just like… Rector’s.”

“God,” said Blaise to the oysters that had just arrived.

“You will live here, I hope?”

Caroline nodded. “It is the city of the future, and so perfect for someone like me who has no past, as you know best of all.”

“Oh, the Saunterer is not that much of an ogre. Believe me. You must get on with supper.” He rose, as champagne arrived, a present from Mr. Rector. “Mr. Houghteling tells me that everything is going nicely now, which is plain,” he spread his hands as if to embrace the young couple, “to even my Saunterer’s eyes!” Colonel Mann moved on to the next room, and the men’s bar.

“He’s a monster. How can you talk to him like that?”

“I’m fascinated by monsters. How does he find out things? You know, dark secrets?”

Blaise toasted the air; and drank. Caroline satisfied herself with a single sip: this was not a time to be unalert. “He bribes servants mostly, and he pays people like Harry Lehr to give him gossip. They say he has a safe which is full-up with the dirt on everyone famous in the town.”

“Break into it!”

“What?” Blaise stared at her, as dumbly as his sharp features could allow.

“Well, wouldn’t that be a coup for the Chief? To publish the contents of Colonel Mann’s safe.”

“They might really run him out of town, if he did that.” Thus announced, the Chief himself appeared, with two young girls; all three in evening dress. Blaise introduced Caroline to Mr. Hearst, and the two Misses Willson. Hearst’s presence at Rector’s caused considerable excitement. Admirers shook his hand; detractors turned away. The Chief stared intently at Caroline and then, as the orchestra, this time in Hearst’s honor, began to play “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” he said, in an odd thin voice, “Would you like to see me put the Journal to bed?”

“I thought the Journal never slept…”

“It goes to bed when they make it up, the front page, for the last time before they print.” Blaise was helpful.

Hearst was forceful. “Come on,” said the Chief. The Misses Willson continued to smile in unison. Hearst took Caroline’s arm, most politely. “Miss Sanford,” he said. She looked up at him; he was well over six feet tall. Caroline smiled; and understood why her brother found Hearst so exciting: he was one of those rare creatures who make, as Mlle. Souvestre would say, the weather.

A perilous old elevator, operated by an ancient Negro, took them to the second floor of the Tribune Building, where several men were still at work in a long ink-smelling room, rather like a livery stable except that instead of bridles and saddles attached to walls or mounted on sawhorses, there were long sheets of galley paper, drawings, photographs. The overhead electric light bulbs on their cords swayed whenever a heavy wagon made its way along Park Lane. The editor, Willis Abbott, both dapper and deeply weary, presided over a mock-up of the front page, whose principal headline advised the reader that President McKinley was to make a major address on the Philippines, in St. Louis.

“Oh, no,” said Hearst mildly. “Unless we can tell them something they don’t know-like he’s going to annex the whole place, or burn down Manila…”

“A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” sounded, unbidden, in Caroline’s head. With both amusement and awe, she watched as Hearst put a number of strips of text and squares of illustration on the floor and then got down on his knees and, like a child happy with a puzzle, began to create-no other word-the next day’s news. But news was not the right word. This was not news but entertainment for the masses. A murder at the bottom of the page began, inexorably, to move higher and higher up the page. A drawing of the murdered woman, idealized to a Madonna-esque purity, found its way to the page’s center while the President sank to the page’s bottom, and a statement by Secretary of State Hay moved to the third page. During this, the Willson girls practiced a new dance step at the far end of the room beneath a large drawing of the Yellow Kid, a cartoonist’s invention for the World which Hearst had appropriated for the Journal (along with the cartoonist), causing the aggrieved Mr. Pulitzer to engage a new creator of Yellow Kids and, in the process, giving the generic word “yellow” to popular journalism.

“The Chief’s amazing,” Blaise murmured in Caroline’s ear. “He’s like a painter.”

“But is it always murder first?” Caroline’s voice was low, but Hearst, now on all fours, heard her. “Rape’s better,” he said, “if you’ll forgive the word.”

The Willson girls shrieked with delight. Hearst received an enlarged headline from a copy-boy: “Murdered Woman Found!” He placed it above the Madonna face. “We also like a good fire.”

“And a good war,” said Mr. Abbott dutifully.

“Look,” said Blaise. On the wall opposite, beneath an American flag, the huge headline “Journal’s War Won!”

“Your war, Mr. Hearst?”

“Pretty much, Miss Sanford. McKinley and Hanna weren’t ever going to fight. So we got the war going so they’d have to…” Hearst sat on his heels, a strand of blond dull hair in one eye. “Mr. Abbott, wasn’t the murdered woman found nude?”

“Actually, no, Chief. She was wearing a sort of gingham dress…”

“Well, make that a slip… a torn slip.” Hearst smiled up at Caroline. “I hope this doesn’t shock you.”

“No. Blaise has prepared me.”

“Blaise has got a real knack for this.” The great man then started in on page two, with running commentary to Abbott, mostly asking for more pictures and large headlines; also, “We’re giving too much space to that dude Roosevelt. Remember. We’re for Van Wyck. And sound government, and all that.”

“You mean Tammany, Chief?” Abbott smiled.

“Platt’s better than Tammany any day. But Van Wyck’s our crook. Roosevelt’s theirs. But we’ll clean up this city one of these days.”

“Reform?” asked Caroline, who knew in theory what the word meant; knew, in practice, what it meant when applied to New York City’s politics; knew nothing of what the word meant to Hearst.

“Yes, Miss Sanford. The whole country, too. Bryan’s hopeless. McKinley’s just a front for old moneybags Hanna.” Hearst stood up. On the floor, his masterpiece: the front page for the next morning’s edition of the New York Journal. “So we need somebody new, clean.”

“That’s what they say Roosevelt is.” Blaise was cautious.

“He’s Platt’s candidate. How can Platt be reformed? Anyway, he’s going to lose. Mr. Abbott.” Hearst turned to the editor just as that more than ever weary figure was presenting the intricate mosaic of the front page to the printer.

“Yes, Chief.”

“I’ve decided on our next president.” Even the Willson girls stopped dancing when they heard this. Everyone looked very solemn; even Caroline was impressed.

“Yes, Chief?” The editor was imperturbable. “Who?”

“Admiral Dewey. Hero of Manila. ‘You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.’ That’s as good as ‘Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.’ ”

“But did Admiral Dewey really say those-those inspiring words?” Caroline was now caught up in the excitement of inventing history, not to mention of creating presidents.

“Well, we said he said it, and I suppose he probably did say something like it. Anyway, he hasn’t denied it, and that’s what matters. Besides, he beat the Spaniards and got us Manila. Do you know him?” Although Hearst was looking at Caroline, the question was to Abbott.

“No, Chief. But I suppose we could write or cable him and inquire…”

“Nothing in writing!” Hearst was firm. “Send someone to Manila, to sound him out. If he’s willing, we’ll nominate him to run against McKinley.”

“Is the Admiral a Democrat?” asked Blaise.

“Who cares? I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“But,” asked Caroline, “does he want to be president?”

“Oh, everyone does over here. That’s why we call ourselves a democracy. Fact, just about anyone can be president, particularly if the Journal promotes him right.”

“You, too?” Caroline was bold; despite Blaise’s evident dismay.

But Hearst was bland. “Do you like Weber and Fields?”

“The shoemakers?” Caroline had heard the names before. “In Bond Street.”

The Willson girls giggled in harmonic unison. “No. Comedians. In vaudeville. I can’t get enough of them. We must take her with us sometime,” Hearst said to Blaise; then to Caroline, “Now get this. Weber and Fields are in this fancy French restaurant, and the waiter comes up after dinner and the waiter asks Weber if he wants a demitasse, and Weber says yes. Then the waiter asks Fields if he’d like a demitasse, too, and Fields says, ‘Yes,’ ” at this point Hearst began to laugh, “ ‘Yes, I’d like a demitasse, too, and,’ ” Hearst was now shaking with laughter while the Willson sisters clung to one another, giggling, “ ‘and I’d also like a cup of coffee.’ ” The office echoed with laughter; and Caroline assumed that her question had been dramatically answered.

Blaise drove her back to the Waldorf-Astoria; escorted her to the suite where old Marguerite, in her night-dress, greeted him with a cascade of pent-up French. “She will not learn English,” said Caroline, presenting Blaise with a new bottle of brandy, which he opened. As he filled a glass for each, Marguerite delivered herself of a tirade celebrating the beauties and comforts of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc as contrasted with the horrors of New York; then she went to bed.

Every vase in the Louis XVI sitting room was filled with chrysanthemums despite Marguerite’s piteous pleas that they be taken away, for, as the civilized world knows, chrysanthemums are flowers suited only to memorialize the dead. Although Caroline told her not to be superstitious, she herself was somewhat troubled by those memento mori. But she kept them where they were, all bronze and yellow, as a proof of her new unsuperstitious Americanism.

“Do you like the Chief?” Blaise sipped at his cognac. Caroline poured herself Vichy water.

“I don’t think I’d ever find him very easy to like. But he’s certainly fascinating to watch-to listen to. Is he so powerful?”

Blaise nodded. “He can really make someone president…”

“But he didn’t say someone. He said anyone.”

“Well, he exaggerates at times.”

Caroline laughed. “At times? I should think that that’s his power. He exaggerates all the time.”

“It sells newspapers.”

“That’s all that he cares about?”

Blaise refused to be led into deeper waters. “As a publisher, yes. That’s what I want to be.”

“With Mr. Hearst?”

“No. I want to be my own Mr. Hearst.”

“He doesn’t know that yet, does he?”

“How can you tell?” Blaise gave her his best boyish smile; and it was still most boyish even though she knew the amount of adult calculation that went into it. Charm was Blaise’s most formidable weapon. Charm was Caroline’s most fragile defense.

“The way he treats you. With everyone else, he is very grand seigneur. He is polite, the way we are to servants. But he treats you as an equal, which means that he expects you to invest money-perhaps all your money-in his papers.” Caroline had not intended to get so directly to the will but she trusted her instinct about Hearst’s attitude to Blaise.

Blaise frowned, not at all boyishly. In fact, he looked like his father at the card table, trying to recall the bidding. “I’m not about,” he said finally, “to make this kind of investment.”

“But you’ve allowed him to think that you will.” Caroline understood Blaise. Did he, she wondered, hardly for the first time, understand her? “That could be dangerous, with a man so-unusual.”

“Father meant twenty-seven.” Blaise struck hard. “Mr. Houghteling ought to know. He was his lawyer. He says there is no doubt of intention.”

Caroline sat very straight in her chair. Back of Blaise’s head a mass of bronze chrysanthemums were arrayed as for a funeral. An omen? If so, his funeral or hers? “It was a lucky accident for you that Father’s pen slipped. We both know what he meant. But what I want to know is what you mean. Why do you want my share of the estate? Surely, there’s enough for both?”

“There isn’t. For what I want to do.” Blaise looked at her bleakly.

“To start a newspaper?”

Blaise nodded. “I’m learning how it’s done now. When I’m ready, I’ll start my own, or buy one. Maybe here…”

For once, Caroline could not stop herself from smiling. “In competition with Mr. Hearst?”

“Why not? He’d understand.”

“There’s no doubt he’d understand! He’d understand that you had betrayed him. He’d also understand that if you tried to compete with him, he’d be obliged to crush you, as he seems to have crushed Mr. Pulitzer.”

“The World’s doing all right. Mr. Pulitzer just isn’t number one any more.”

“So there might yet be Hearst, Pulitzer and Sanford?”

“Yes,” Blaise said; and said no more.

Caroline was impressed; and appalled. “You will lose the entire inheritance.”

“No,” Blaise said; and said no more.

“Lose or gain, for six years you will have the use of my capital. Then-what happens?”

“According to Mr. Houghteling,” Blaise was deliberate, “you’ll inherit the amount which represents half the estate at the time the will was probated.”

Caroline began to see her way through the labyrinth; and not as a victim but as the Minotaur. “Should you double my share of the estate, you will keep half?”

“That seems only fair. I will have doubled it, not you.”

“If you lose…”

“I won’t lose…”

“If you lose, what do I get?”

Blaise’s smile was radiant: “Half of nothing.”

“So I lose everything if you are unfortunate and gain nothing if you are lucky.”

“You’ll be paid thirty thousand dollars a year for the next six years. You can live very nicely on that here. Even better, back at Saint-Cloud.”

Caroline began to see a way through to-the treasure. She was not yet sufficiently New York predator to demand living flesh for her dinner. She had begun by wanting what was hers. Now she was eager to take what was his, as well. Although family history had always bored her, she had been sufficiently intrigued by her father’s cryptic references to the fact that Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, her grandfather, had been an illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. At Mlle. Souvestre’s school she had had the good luck to have a history teacher who did not, like all the others, disdain American history. Together they had read all that they could-which was not much-about her great-grandfather, who seemed more artist than rogue, more Lord Chesterfield than Machiavelli-and, of course, Burr was her maternal ancestor, not Blaise’s, which gave her an advantage if there should be anything to the laws or, rather, whims of heredity. Burr had been narrowly cheated of the presidency; had been rather less narrowly, to say the most, cheated of the crown of Mexico; had lived long enough to see another illegitimate son, if the gossip was true, become president. Burr had been called a traitor but, in actual fact, he had been something far worse and more dangerous to his world, a dreamer. Because of this sublime subversive trait, he had enchanted Caroline. Finally, as Aaron Burr had treated his only legitimate child as if she were a son, so Caroline had vowed when she left Europe for America that she would now become Burr’s great-grandson, and live out, on the grandest scale possible, that subtle creature’s dream of a true civilization with himself as its center, whether in the provincial capital Washington or the even more unlikely Mexico. But where the man Burr had wanted high office-even a crown-his great-grand self-styled son was, after all, unmistakably and completely a woman, and so for Caroline there would be no high office in a nation where only males were allowed to occupy such visible places; yet there was something far better than mere office, and she had got a glimpse of it that evening on the second floor of the Tribune Building in Park Lane; there was, simply, true power. Although money was the source of power in this rude place, now even less of a civilization than it had been in Burr’s day, what she had seen and heard of Hearst that night had convinced her that the ultimate power is not to preside in a white house or open a parliament while seated on a throne but to reinvent the world for everyone by giving them the dreams that you wanted them to dream. She doubted if Blaise-heir to prosaic Delacroix but not to the arch-dreamer Burr-grasped this. He saw simply an exciting game to play, with money and the illusion of power as its reward. While she saw herself creating a world that would be all hers, since she, like Hearst, would have reinvented all the players, giving them their dialogue, moving them in and out of wars: “Remember the Maine,” “Cuba Libre,” “Rough Riders,” “Yellow Kids”… Oh, she could do better than any of that! She too could use a newspaper to change the world. She felt giddy with potentiality. But, first, she must see to her inheritance. She got to her feet. Blaise did the same.

“I suppose,” she said, “we’ll next meet in court.”

Blaise blinked. “You have no case.”

“I shall accuse you of altering the will.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t. But the accusation will always be there, all your life. Mr. Hearst can afford not to be respectable. You can’t.”

“You can’t prove a thing. And I’ll still win.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain. Anyway, remember this.”-Remember the Maine! Had Aaron Burr ever so rapturous a vision?-“I shall do anything to get what’s mine.”

“All right.” Blaise turned to go. “I’ll see you in court.” He opened the door to the suite. “Do you know how much litigation costs here?”

“I took the liberty of removing the four Poussins from Saint-Cloud. They are in London, with a dealer. He says they should fetch a marvellous price.”

“You stole my pictures?” Blaise was white with fury.

“I took my pictures. When we divide the estate, evenly, I’ll give you your half of what I get from the sale. Meanwhile, I shall be able to buy quite a lot of wonderful American law.”

“Comme tu est affreuse!”

“Comme toi-même!”

Blaise slammed the door hard behind him. Caroline remained standing in the center of the room, politely smiling, and singing, rather loudly, and to her own surprise, verse after verse of “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

2

THE BRONZE BUSTS of Henry James and William Dean Howells stared off into space, as did the earthly head of Henry Adams beside the fire. It was John Hay’s turn to be host to his friend and neighbor, and from his armchair he surveyed the three heads with a pleasure he was quick to identify to himself as elderly. Each belonged to a friend. If nothing else, he had done very well when it came to friends. Although he was not the man-of-letters that James or Howells was, or the historian that Adams was, he felt extended through them beyond his natural talents. Had he wanted to turn round in his chair, he could have stared into Lincoln’s bronze face, surprisingly life-like for a life-mask. But Hay seldom looked at the face that he had once known far better than his own. During the years that he and Nicolay were writing their enormous history of the President, Hay was amazed to find that he had lost all firsthand memory of Lincoln. The million words that they had written had had the effect of erasing Hay’s own memory. Nowadays, when asked about the President, he could only remember what they had written, so dully he knew, of that odd astounding man. Hay and Adams often discussed whether or not a memoir might not have the same effect-a gradual erasing of oneself, bit by bit, with words. Adams thought that this would be ideal; Hay did not. He liked his own past, as symbolized by the two busts, one life-mask. He had always suspected, even in moods melancholy and hypochondriacal, that he would end his days in comfort, with abundant memories, seated at his fireside on a February night in the last year of the nineteenth century, in the company of a friend not yet bust-ed. Of course, he had not counted on being secretary of state at the end of the road, but he did not any longer object to the dull grind, which he had turned over to Adee, or to the battles with the Senate, which he allowed Senator Lodge to conduct for him, with considerable help from Lodge’s old Harvard professor Henry Adams.

Now the old friends waited for Mrs. Hay, and the dinner guests and “the shrimps,” as Hay addressed his children: two out of four were in the house. Alice and Helen were deeply involved in the capital’s social life. Clarence was away at school. Del was in New York, perhaps studying law. Hay had always found it easy to talk to his own father; yet found it impossible to talk to his oldest son. Some bond of sympathy had, simply, not developed between them. But then Hay had been a country boy like Lincoln, with nothing but his wits-and a connection or two; while Del, like Lincoln’s son Robert, was born to wealth. Lincoln father and Lincoln son had not got on well, either.

“Will Del marry the Sanford girl?” Adams often strayed into Hay’s mind.

“I was just thinking of Del, as you must have known, with those other-worldly Adams psychic powers. I don’t know. He doesn’t confide in me. I know he sees her in New York, where she’s set up for the winter.”

“She’s uncommonly clever,” said Adams. “Of all the young girls I know…”

“The brigade of girls…”

“You make me sound like Tiberius. But of the lot, she is the only one I can’t work out.”

“Well, she’s not like an American girl. That’s one reason.” Hay had found Caroline disturbingly direct in small matters and unfathomable when it came to those things that must be taken seriously, like marriage. There was also the problem, even mystery, of her father’s will. “I think she’s made a mistake, contesting the will. After all, when she’s twenty-five, or whatever, she’ll inherit. So why fuss?”

“Because at her age five years seems forever. I hope Del brings her into the family. I should like her for a niece.”

“He threatens to bring her here, for a visit. But he hasn’t.”

The butler announced, “Senator Lodge, sir.” Both Hay and Adams rose as the handsome, were it not for a pair of cavernous nostrils that always made Hay think, idly, of a bumblebee, patrician-politician glided into the room. “Mrs. Hay has got off with Nannie. Neither one can bear to hear me say another word about the treaty.”

“Well, we want to hear nothing else.” Hay did his best to be genial; and, as always, succeeded. The problem with Henry Cabot Lodge-aside from the disagreeable fact that he looked young enough to be Hay’s son-was his serene conviction that he alone knew what the United States ought to do in foreign affairs, and from his high Republican Senate seat he drove the Administration like some reluctant ox, toward the annexation of, if possible, the entire world.

Worse, at a bureaucratic level, Lodge meddled so much with the State Department that even the patient Adee now found unbearable the Senator’s constant demands for consulates, to reward right-thinking imperialist friends and allies. But the President wanted peace at any price with the Senate, and the price in Lodge’s case was patronage. In exchange, however, Lodge had taken charge of getting the Administration’s treaty with Spain through the Senate, a surprisingly difficult task because of the Constitution’s unwise stipulation that no treaty could be enacted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate, an august body filled with men of the most boundless conceit, as Adams had so neatly portrayed in an anonymous, highly satiric novel which even now no one, except the remaining Hearts, knew for certain that he had written.

Apparently, the Senators were, once again, running true to form, according to Lodge, whose British accent offended Hay’s ears. But then Hay still spoke near-Indiana, and deeply loved England, while Lodge spoke like an Englishman, and hated England. La-di-da Lodge was one of the less unkind epithets for Massachusetts’s junior senator, who was now denouncing his state’s senior senator, the noble if misguided anti-imperialist George F. Hoar, who had told the nation that “no nation was ever created good enough to own another,” a sly paraphrase of Lincoln. “Theodore writes me almost every day.” Lodge stood, back to the fire, rocking from side to side on short legs. “He says that Hoar and the rest are little better than traitors.”

Adams sighed. “I would think that Theodore would have quite enough to do up in Albany without worrying about the Senate.”

“Well, he does think of the war as his war.” Lodge smiled at Hay. “His splendid little war, as you put it. Now he wants to make sure we keep the Philippines.”

“So do we all,” said Hay. But this was not strictly true. Hay and Adams had thought, from the beginning, that a coaling station for the American fleet would be sufficient recompense for the splendors and miseries of the small war. This was also the view of several of the American commissioners at the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, one commissioner-a Delaware senator-had written Hay a curiously eloquent telegram to say that as the United States had fought Spain in order to free Spain’s colonies from tyranny, the United States had no right to take Spain’s place as tyrant, no matter how benign. We must, he said, stick to our word.

Hay had put the case to the President, but St. Louis, as it were, had inspired McKinley with a sense of mission. After ten days in the West, McKinley returned to Washington, convinced that it was the will of the American people, and probably God, too, that the United States annex the entire Philippine archipelago. He instructed the commissioners to that effect; he also offered Spain twenty million dollars; and the Spanish agreed. Meanwhile, something called the Anti-Imperialist League was breathing fire, and an odd mixture they were, ranging from the last Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, to the millionaire Republican Andrew Carnegie, from Henry Adams’s own brother, Charles Francis, a one-time president of the Union Pacific Railroad, to Mark Twain.

“I wish, Cabot, I could be as certain as you are…” said Adams.

“About everything?” Lodge was amused and slightly, thought Hay, patronizing. Hay had observed the phenomenon before: when the pupil has surpassed-or thinks he has-his teacher.

“No. I have never wished for senatorial certitude.” Adams was dry. “That is beyond me. I’m always uncertain.”

“You were certainly certain that the Spanish must be driven out of Cuba,” began Lodge; to be stopped by Adams, who suddenly raised a pale small poodle-like paw.

“That was different. The only important contribution that my family ever made to the United States was the invention of the doctrine that is known by President Monroe’s name. The Western Hemisphere must be free of European influence, and the Cuba Libre movement was the last act-the completion-of my grandfather’s doctrine. Now, in the large sense, Spain is gone from our hemisphere, along with the French and for all intents and purposes, the British. The Caribbean is ours forever. But for us to end up with vast holdings in the Pacific, that strikes me as potentially dangerous, as more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve sailed the South Seas…”

“Old gold,” murmured Hay, the phrase Adams had used to describe the entrancing native women of Polynesia.

Adams affected not to hear. “Now you want us to take over a hostile population, made up of worthless Malay types, and Roman Catholics, as well. I thought you had enough of those in Boston without taking on another ten million or so.”

Lodge was airy. “Well, unlike the ones in Boston, we won’t let your worthless Malays vote, at least not in Massachusetts elections. And they’re not hostile, at least not the ones who matter, the people of property, who want us to stay.”

“Those are the tame cats, the ones who liked the Spanish. But all the rest follow this young man Aguinaldo, and they want independence.” Adams tugged at his beard, which was a white version of Lodge’s beard as Hay’s beard was a grizzled compromise. Hay was touched that a relatively young politician should want to emulate his elders when modern politics now required clean-shaven men like McKinley and Hanna, or the moustachioed Roosevelt. What did beards imply? he wondered. The early Roman emperors, like the early presidents, were clean-shaven; then decadence-and beards; then Christianity and the clean-shaven Constantine. Was McKinley to be a religious leader, as well as imperial consolidator?

Hay gave the latest news of Emilio Aguinaldo, whose troops had fought with Admiral Dewey on condition that once the Spaniards were gone there would be an independent Philippine-or Visayan-republic. But McKinley’s change of heart had put an end to that dream. Now Aguinaldo’s troops-mostly from the Tagal tribe-had occupied the Spanish forts. Aguinaldo had also occupied Iloilo, the capital of Panay province. Thus far, neither side had been eager to begin hostilities. “But this can’t last much longer,” said Hay, completing his tour of the archipelago’s horizon as viewed from the State Department. Elsewhere in Mullett’s wedding cake of a building, Hay knew that the War Department was contemplating games that he knew nothing of; and did not want to know about.

“Obviously some sort of incident now would get us our two-thirds vote.” Lodge sat in the armchair opposite Adams and adopted the same meditative pose as his old professor-and editor. After Lodge had graduated from Harvard, Adams had hired his former student to be an assistant editor of the North American Review, with one standing instruction: when editing historians, strike out all superfluous words, particularly adjectives. Hay had always envied Adams’s continence in the matter of English prose. Adams wrote like a Roman, with an urgent war to report; Hay’s prose simply idled, waiting for a joke to turn up.

“We had-you had-the two-thirds vote two weeks ago.” Adams scowled. “Then the whole thing was frittered away. How I wish Don Cameron was still in the Senate…”

“And La Dona across the square,” Hay added. Without Lizzie Cameron, Adams was incomplete. But the Camerons were wintering in Paris; and Adams was more than usually irritable and restless in Washington.

For once, Lodge did not make an excuse or, rather, more characteristically, blame someone else for the erosion of support in a Senate where the Republicans not only had a majority but he himself was the guiding spirit of the Foreign Affairs Committee. “I’ve never seen so much pressure brought to bear, never heard senators give so many positively crazed reasons for not doing the obvious. Anyway, we now have help from Mr. Bryan. Or Colonel Bryan, as he calls himself…”

“And who does not, who can?” said Hay, himself a major in the Civil War, who had never fought because he was Lincoln’s secretary. Then, the war won without his participation, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel; hence, always and forever, he was Colonel Hay just as the President was always Major McKinley. But the President had actually seen action under his mentor, Ohio’s politician-general Rutherford B. Hayes, whose own mentor had been yet another politician-general, James Garfield, and Hay’s dear friend, as well. When General Garfield, the golden, had been elected president, he had offered Colonel Hay the position of private secretary; but Hay had gently declined. He could not be in middle age what he had been in youth. Now, of course, all the political generals from Grant to Garfield were dead; the colonels were on the shelf; and the majors had come into their own. After them, no more military-titled politicians. Yet every American war had bred at least one president. Who, Hay wondered, would the splendid little war-oh, fatuous phrase!-bring forth? Adams favored General Miles, the brother-in-law of his beloved Lizzie Cameron. Lodge had already declared that Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila was equal to Nelson’s at Aboukir. But of course Lodge would support McKinley, who would be reelected; and so there would be no splendid little war-hero president in the foreseeable future.

Hay caught himself daydreaming; and not listening. In his youth, he could do both. What was Lodge talking about? “He holds court in the Marble Room back of the Senate. They come in, one by one, to get their instructions. He’s like the pope.” Bryan. Colonel Bryan was in town to persuade the Democratic senators to support the treaty on patriotic grounds; then, the treaty passed, they would support a separate resolution to the effect that, in due course, the Philippines would be given their independence. Hay decided that Bryan was probably clever. If imperialism proved to be as popular as McKinley sensed it was in St. Louis, Bryan could enter the next presidential race as one who had joined the army and then favored the treaty and temporary annexation; but if imperialism, for some reason, should not be popular, he was on record as favoring the independence of the Philippines while the Major was now firmly for annexation. “He’s also like the pope in that he is not a gentleman.” Lodge could not resist the double thrust. Hay, who had not begun life as a gentleman by Lodge’s standards, had become one; so much so, in fact, that he, unlike Lodge, never saw any need to use the dangerous word in any context. Politicians, no matter how patrician their birth, were a vulgar infantile lot. “We should be grateful to him, of course, wild man that he is. Because if the treaty passes…”

“No ‘if,’ please.” Hay refused to envisage the treaty’s failure.

“It’s going to be close, Mr. Hay, very close. But Bryan’s changing votes. I’m changing votes, I think, and…”

“And Mark Hanna’s buying one or two,” said Adams. “Such is the way of our world.”

“A very good thing, too. Corruption in a good cause is a good thing. So who cares that a senator’s been bought in the process?” Hay got to his feet, with some difficulty. Although the mortal ailment was, temporarily, in recession, he had lately developed an exciting new set of pains, both arthritic and sciatic; as a result, what felt like jolts of electric energy kept assaulting his nerve ends while odd tendons twitched quite on their own and joints, for no reason, would suddenly lock. “I’ve come around, Cabot. At first I thought it not only wrong but inconvenient to try to govern so many Catholic Malays. But time’s running out on us. The Europeans are partitioning China. The Russians are in Port Arthur. The Germans are in Shantung…”

“I want us in Shanghai.” Lodge’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of yet more Asiatic victories.

“Well, I want us in Siberia,” said Adams. “We have no future in the Pacific, but when Russia breaks up, as it must, there’s our opportunity. Who controls the Siberian land-mass is the master of Europe and Asia.”

Happily, Hay was spared an Adams meditation on the world’s ever-shifting balance of power by the arrival of ladies. Hay greeted Mrs. Lodge, known as Sister Anne or Nannie, at the door, aware that her suspicious eye was on her husband. She did not entirely approve of Lodge when he was too much the senator; husband gave wife an innocent look. “Henry and I talk and talk about the treaty, while Cabot, who knows everything, just sits and listens, quiet as pussy,” said Hay, maintaining peace in the Lodge family. “In fact, cat’s got his tongue tonight.”

“There is no cat,” said Nannie Lodge, “large enough to get Cabot’s silver tongue.”

Meanwhile, Clara Hay and their two daughters quite filled the study, and Adams began to shine, as he always did when young women were present, while Lodge grew ever more courtly, and Sister Anne witty. Three of five Hearts in the same room: Hay was content. But contentment ceased in the midst of the bombe-glacée, Clara Hay’s ongoing masterpiece. Although cooks came and went over the years, Clara, who could not, as they say, boil water, nevertheless was able to pass on the secret receipts to a number of all-important dishes of which the bombe-glacée was the quivering, delicate, mocha-flavored, creamy, filigree-sugared piece, as Hay called it, of least resistance.

Hay’s fork was posed for a stab at this perfection when the butler appeared in the doorway to announce, “The President, sir. He would like you to go over to the mansion.”

The dining room was silent. Lodge’s dark eyes shone; and the bumblebee nose looked as if it scented pollen. Adams gave his old friend a mournful look. Clara was firm. “He can wait until we’ve finished dinner.”

Hay had discovered a new and almost painless way of getting out of a chair; he used his relatively strong right arm rather than his relatively bad knees to get to his feet. Now he pushed hard against the arm of his chair; and was, almost painlessly, upright. “Henry, you be host. I’ll be back-when I’m back.”

“I can’t think,” said Clara, “what the Major is doing up at this hour. Over there, they go to bed with the chickens.”

“A fox,” said Lodge, “is loose in the chicken house.”

At the foot of Hay’s majestic staircase stood Mr. Eddy and a White House messenger. Hay’s descent was cautious; the scarlet runner a magnificent peril. “What is it, Mr. Eddy?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Secretary.”

“I don’t know either, sir,” said the messenger.

“All I know, sir, is he wants you straightaway, sir.”

“In mid-bomb,” Hay murmured sadly, as the butler got him into his fur-lined coat.

Although February had been lethally cold, no snow had yet fallen, and the three men were able to walk across the avenue to the White House, where the offices in the east end were ominously lit up while the downstairs was dark.

The German doorkeeper greeted Hay in the near-darkness of the entrance hall; he said, somewhat surprisingly, “The President’s waiting in the conservatories.” An usher stepped out of the shadow, to lead the way. In the dim light of a single lamp, the Tiffany screen looked incongruously Byzantine.

During Lincoln’s time the conservatories had been modest; now they covered acres. One greenhouse was devoted exclusively to orchids, another to roses, another to exotic tropical fruits. At evening receptions, the Marine band would play in the rose house, and the young couples would wander from glass-house to glass-house, invariably getting lost. But there had been no such evenings since the sinking of the Maine.

The President was in the carnation greenhouse, seated in an armchair, smoking a cigar, a stack of papers in his lap. Hay was quite overwhelmed by the scent of flowers, not to mention the moist warmth in such marked contrast to the icy night beyond the panes of glass, which were now so many black mirrors reflecting the artificial-looking colors of the carnations on their green straw-like stalks. Electric lights made summer noon of winter night.

“I come here when I want to get away.” The Major started to get up but Hay’s hand on his shoulder kept him in place. Hay got into a chair opposite him; they were at the center of a perspective of carnations, arrayed in tables according to color. Those at hand were pale pink, a color Hay disliked and the Major doted on. “Tonight I’ve been working on my speech to the Home Market Club in Boston. It’s for the sixteenth. I want to make the case, once and for all, for annexation. Please go over the text. Add anything, subtract anything. Just make it right. You’re the best I know for this sort of speech.”

Hay wondered if the President might not be a little mad: to summon him away from a dinner party, admittedly a late one, to sit in a stifling greenhouse in order to discuss a speech two weeks away. “Is that the text?”

“This?” McKinley held up the top paper on his lap; the huge waistcoated belly had crumpled an edge of the paper where belly rested upon vast presidential thighs. “No, Mr. Hay. This is what we have to talk about. It is from the Manila correspondent of the New York Sun. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.”

As Hay read the cabled story, the agitated President spun his eyeglasses on their silken cord; first clockwise, then counterclockwise. On the island of Luzon, Aguinaldo’s gun-men had opened fire on American troops. Hay returned the cable to the President. “I am not surprised,” he said. “It was only a matter of time-and timing.”

“We have a second war on our hands, so close to the other.” The Major sighed. “It is always the unexpected that happens, at least in my case. I thought my Administration would be a quiet affair, dedicated to sound business, sound money. Instead I am thrust by events into war after war…”

“Mr. Lincoln said I do not act. I am acted upon. My policy is to have no policy.”

“In this, we are as one.” McKinley suddenly shook the cabled report as if it were a child in need of discipline. “How foolish these people are! Don’t they realize that this will get us our treaty? The people will insist on it now.”

Hay nodded; he was also growing suspicious. “Do we know who fired the first shot?”

“All we know is what you’ve just read. It sounds as if they fired first or provoked us to fire first. I’ve cabled General Otis for a report. Just the other day he said he thought he’d need as many as thirty thousand troops, to run things properly. I disagreed. As it is, our army of occupation is twenty thousand men, all-”

“… wanting to go home.”

The massive ivory head-a perfect egg save for the cleft chin-nodded and the round luminous eyes were suddenly hooded. “Now that Spain’s surrendered, we are committed to getting the troops home as soon as possible. They did not sign up to fight Filipinos, Colonel Bryan has reminded me.”

“So they-Aguinaldo, that is-have really done us a great favor. We can’t bring the troops home if there is an insurrection.” But as Hay began to make the Administration’s case, he was by no means certain to what specific end they were about to commit themselves and the country. After all, the word “insurrection” assumed that the United States government was the legitimate government of the Philippines; but they were not a legitimate government; they were, allegedly, liberators, and the so-called insurrection was actually a war for independence from foreign liberators turned conquerors, with Aguinaldo in the role of Washington and McKinley in that of George III. Hay now began to weave new language: the word “trustee” emerged; “temporary,” also. Suddenly, he stopped, aware that the President was not listening. McKinley’s eyes were shut; and he was breathing deeply. Was he asleep? or in a trance? Could the President, like his wife, be epileptic? Hay wondered, somewhat wildly. But then McKinley cleared his throat; and opened his eyes. “I was praying,” he said, simply. “Do you pray often, Mr. Hay?”

“Not, perhaps, often enough.” Hay recalled the Jesuit injunction that the wise man never lies, as he has already seen to it that he need not tell the whole truth. Hay was truth-full and god-less.

“I think God answered me the other night.” McKinley picked a carnation and held it up to his nose. “I actually got down on my knees-not an easy thing,” he smiled, indicating the broad stomach that had overwhelmed his chest, “and asked for guidance. I was in the oval library. Ida had gone to bed. I was alone. I told God that I had never wanted any of this war, and that I certainly had never wanted those islands. But the war had come, and the Philippines are ours. What am I to do? Well, number one, I said to God, I could give the islands back to Spain. But that would be cruel to the natives, who hate Spain. Number two, I could let France or Germany take them over. But that would be a very bad business for us commercially…”

“I’m sure God saw the wisdom of that.” Hay could not resist the interjection. Fortunately, McKinley was too preoccupied with his divine audience to note Hay’s impiety.

“… and discreditable, too. Number three, we could simply go home and let them govern themselves, which they could never do, as everyone knows. But at least we’d be out of it. That’s the easy way, of course. It was then that I felt-something.” McKinley’s eyes seemed to glow in the light which had transformed the glass panes of the greenhouse into so many onyx mirrors. “There was a presence in that room, and I found myself summing up in a way that I had not planned to. I had simply wanted to put the case to God and hope. But God answered me. I heard myself saying, aloud: Number four, in the light of numbers one through three, as I have just demonstrated, Your Honor-God, that is-we have no choice but to take all of the islands and govern the people to the best of our ability, to educate and civilize them and to Christianize them-and in my sudden certitude, I knew that God was speaking to and through me, and that we would all of us do our best by them, by our fellow men for whom Christ also died. Well, Mr. Hay, I have never been so relieved. I had the first good night’s sleep in a year. Then, the next morning, without telling you or any of the Cabinet I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department, and I gave him an order.” McKinley opened up on his legs a world map. “Here is what I told him to do.”

Hay took the map and held it up. At first he noticed nothing unusual; then his eye strayed to the Pacific Ocean and there, in the same yellow color as the United States, an ocean away, were the Philippines with the legend “U.S. Protectorate.”

“You annexed them?”

McKinley nodded. “With God’s assurance that I must. And, of course,” he smiled, and took the map from Hay, “some assistance from Admiral Dewey and Colonel Roosevelt. I know I have done the right thing.”

“But if the treaty fails to pass the Senate, there is no protectorate…”

“The treaty will pass. That’s why I took you into my confidence, to show you why I am so certain and so-fatalistic. Because,” McKinley stood up, “I never wanted any of this. But it is God’s plan now, and we are His humble instruments.”

“I hope God will give us some hints on how best to handle Aguinaldo.”

But McKinley was now moving, in his stately way, down the long aisle of carnations to the door. At the President’s request, Hay joined him in the shaky coffin-like elevator to the living quarters, where, upon arrival, McKinley led him into the oval library to show him the exact spot where the interview with God had taken place. But Mrs. McKinley, not God, was now in possession of the hallowed spot. She sat in her invalid’s chair, knitting bedroom slippers. She was slender, pale, surprisingly pretty; she spoke, however, with a nasal sing-song whine that Hay found as disagreeable as Lodge’s British accent. Was there to be no happy American mean? “When they told me the Major was with you, I felt better. You never keep him up to all hours like some of them do.”

Hay bowed, as if to Victoria. “I returned him from the carnation room as quickly as I could and as good as new, I hope.”

Cortelyou appeared in the doorway. “There’s no more news, Mr. President. Secretary Alger says that General Otis’s report will be ready first thing tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cortelyou. You go to bed now.”

Cortelyou withdrew. Hay was about to do the same when Mrs. McKinley delivered herself of an ex cathedra judgment on Washington’s worldly ladies. “Why, they even brag about how they tuck their poor tired husbands into bed and then they go out gallivanting to parties on their own. Imagine! Well, I tell them that when I tuck Mr. McKinley into bed, I get right in with him, which is what we’re going to do now.”

“I, too,” said Hay, adding indecorously, “in my own bed, of course.”

But Mrs. McKinley was staring narrowly at his shoes. “Draw me an outline of your shoe-sole, and I’ll make you slippers next.”

“With pleasure, Mrs. McKinley.“

Then, to Hay’s astonishment, Mrs. McKinley stuck her tongue out at him; gave him a lascivious wink; and became rigid, only the whites of her eyes visible. The President, with an unhurried, practiced gesture, took a huge silk handkerchief from his pocket; and covered her head. “I am troubled by the Teller Amendment in the Senate.” McKinley stared absently at the veiled Ida. “How to interpret it? The amendment is clear that we cannot retain Cuba. But will the Senate try to extend the amendment to cover the Philippines?”

“No, sir. Your Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation has been accepted by all except a few die-hards-and blow-hards like Bryan. If the treaty passes, the archipelago is ours. Paid for in cash to Spain. Twenty million dollars for ten million Filipinos.” Hay found this talk of empire curiously exciting; and even humorous. “That’s two dollars a head,” he added.

“Colonel Hay.” The President was gently reproving. Then he bade Hay good-night. “We’ll discuss the insurrection tomorrow. Before the Senate vote.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” But as Hay walked down the east wing stairs, having just vowed never to use the west wing elevator-too like a coffin-ever again, he was beginning to have his doubts about the Major’s new “protectorate.”

3

BUT ALL DOUBTS WERE DISPELLED on Monday when at Lodge’s insistence and against Hay’s better judgment, he entered the Marble Room of the Capitol, as a somewhat casual guest of the Senate, which was now, in its chamber next door, busy biting the proverbial bullet. The voting would begin on the treaty in one hour, at three o’clock. From the windows of the gilded, mirrored, marbled chamber, White House and Washington monument were visible against a sky as dark as steel. Only Mr. Eddy accompanied Hay; on principle, Adams refused to set foot in the Capitol-or, for that matter, his family’s one-time home, the White House.

Fresh from the Senate cloakroom and its intrigues, Lodge joined Hay: more than ever a bumblebee today. “I think we’ve got all the Republicans, except Hoar. We’re getting several Democrats. I may bring them in here to you.”

“I’ll do what I can, dear Cabot. But what can I do?”

Lodge was not listening. But then Hay knew that senators, particularly when they were at home on their side of the Capitol, lost their never overwhelming auditory powers. Lodge produced a press-cutting from his frock-coat. “Did you see this? In yesterday’s Sun?”

Hay had indeed read their friend Rudyard Kipling’s contribution to the American political process. Although English, the prodigious Mr. Kipling had lived for some time in the United States; during 1895, he was a good deal in Washington, where Hay and his circle had come to know and admire him. Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, had taken him up, and their muscular minds, Hay’s happy phrase, lifted, as it were, dumb-bells together. Now Kipling had launched a thunderbolt, in the form of a poem, carefully timed to affect, if possible, the treaty vote. “Theodore sent me an advance copy last month. He thought it poor poetry but good for the expansionist cause. I happen to think it’s quite good as a kind of hymn, pretending to be a poem.”

“A hymn to the god of war,” said Hay, who had indeed been struck by the poem, not least by its alarming title, “The White Man’s Burden.”

“I’m using some of it in a speech.” Lodge quoted,

“ ‘Take up the White Man’s burden-

Send forth the best ye breed-

God bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need.’

I also like the warning to us, that we must take over from England, the torch is passing and we must-where is it? Oh, yes.” Again Lodge read,

“ ‘To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild-

Your new-caught sullen peoples

Half devil and half child.’

That describes those Malays to a T, don’t you think?”

“Well, they are certainly sullen at the moment. And even the excellent Rudyard admits that we’re in for trouble.” Hay took the cutting and read the quatrain that had most struck him:

“ ‘Take up the White Man’s burden-

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard…’ ”

“What’s that?” asked a deep voice from behind them.

Hay turned toward the door, where stood a tall, noble-looking young man in a frock-coat that had been made famous-like the wide mouth, square jaw-by a thousand cartoonists. Lodge greeted William Jennings Bryan with a cry of joy. Hay never ceased to delight in the spontaneous hypocrisy of the true politician, always at his most appealing when faced in the flesh by a bitter enemy. But the enemies were, this day, allies. As titular head of the Democratic Party, Bryan had been rallying his troops in the Senate to the treaty. But senators are seldom anyone’s troops, particularly those of a defeated presidential candidate. Bryan’s task was made more difficult by the ambition of one Senator Gorman, who saw anti-imperialism as the means to get for himself the Democratic nomination in 1900. Although the weekend had been hectic, Bryan looked calm and at ease. No, he had not seen Kipling’s poem. As he read it, lips moving, sounding the phrases, Hay wondered if Bryan had indeed ever heard of Kipling before. Then Bryan returned the cutting to Lodge. “Well, it can be read two ways,” he said. The smile was wide, perhaps a trifle cretinous; but the eyes were shrewd and watchful. “And, all in all, I’d rather not have either way read today. We’re having a hard enough time as it is. There is no one more anti-imperialist than I…”

“Colonel Bryan, we’re all agreed that there will be no long-term annexation. We’re all anti-imperialists.” Lodge lied with perfect sincerity.

“We’d better be,” said Bryan; and left the room in order to avoid his nemesis, fat, white Mark Hanna.

“I can’t stand seeing that anarchist in this place,” growled Hanna. “Where’s Hobart?“

No one had seen the Vice-President, an obscure New Jersey corporation lawyer who had been chosen to be vice-president by Hanna for no reason that Hay could see other than his wealth. Would wealthy men one day buy the great offices of state as they had during Rome’s decadence? Adams thought that the practice was already common. After all, state legislatures elected United States senators. Many legislators were for sale. Hadn’t New York’s sardonic Roscoe Conkling boasted that he had paid only two hundred thousand dollars for his seat? a bargain price back in the seventies? Hay argued that the presidency was still different. A party leader, like McKinley, slowly and openly evolved; or, thanks to a sudden shift in popular opinion, he emerged like Bryan. In neither case could the leadership have been bought, assuming that the would-be leader had had the money, or access to it. But it was on the word “access” that Adams looked dour. Hanna had financed McKinley on a scale unknown until now. What would prevent a Carnegie or a Jay Gould from selecting some nonentity and then, through adroit expenditure, securing for himself the presidency’s power, all in the nonentity’s name? Hay felt that Adams, once again, took too dark a view.

They were joined by another of McKinley’s intimates, Charles G. Dawes, a personable, red-haired young politician from Nebraska, who had played a significant role in the election of McKinley. When Bryan began to take the country by storm and the multitude thought him the greatest orator in American history, Hanna panicked. Although the money interest was solidly behind McKinley, the South and the West were for Bryan. Since the farmers were penniless, Bryan promised to increase the money supply. Silver coins would be minted, sixteen to one in relation to gold. America, intoned Bryan, in speech after speech to the largest crowds anyone could remember, would not be crucified upon a cross of gold. Meanwhile, McKinley seldom strayed from his hometown of Canton, Ohio, where he conducted his own low-key campaign from his own comfortable front porch, a gift of admirers. After twelve years in the House of Representatives and four as Ohio’s governor, he was a poor man; hence, honest. Hanna thought McKinley should take to the stump. McKinley was tempted; but, as Hay had heard it, young Mr. Dawes persuaded the Major to stay right where he was. When it came to demagoguery, he could not compete with Bryan; so why try? As McKinley recounted it later to Hay, “If I hired a train to campaign in, he’d hire a single car. If I bought a Pullman car berth, he’d buy a cheap seat. If I bought a cheap seat, he’d ride the freight. So I decided to stay put.” In response to Bryan’s cross of gold, McKinley was vigorous and vague. He was, he declared, in favor of both gold and silver money, an admirable sentiment as acceptable as it was unintelligible, to get the largest popular vote. Finally, crucially, a majority preferred the Major’s placid solidity to Bryan’s fieriness. For a moment, class war was in the air. Then the border states, which had made Lincoln president, shifted from Bryan to McKinley; and he was elected with the largest popular vote of any president since Grant.

Young Mr. Dawes had been astonished not to be included in the Cabinet; but the Major had soothed him with the office of comptroller of the currency, where he could amuse himself with the chimera of bimetallism while his wife, Caro, amused Ida McKinley.

Dawes greeted Hay warmly; introduced him to a tall young man named Day, the assistant comptroller and a Democrat. “On his way home to run for Congress, something I should be doing. You, too, Mr. Hay.”

“Oh, not me. Not now. I’m not even an Ohioan any longer.” Neither Adams nor Hay, as full-time residents of the District of Columbia, ever voted in those presidential elections which so entirely absorbed them. If the irony had been, by some accident, lost on them, Lodge and a host of others were quite willing to torment the self-disenfranchised statesmen. Hay had been offered a seat in Congress in 1880; but the price quoted by the local Republican boss was too high, or so his father-in-law decreed. Then came the move to Washington; and a limbo that was now quite filled with power’s unexpected rainbow.

“I think we’ll win, with three votes to spare.” Dawes had taken a notebook out of his pocket. Hay could see that it contained a list of senators with pluses and minuses and question marks next to each name.

“I think we’ll win it,” said Mr. Day. “Colonel Bryan’s changed a half-dozen votes for you folks.”

“You anarchists ain’t winning nothing today,” said Hanna; and, Hay noted, there was no twinkle in those dull red eyes. A buzzer sounded: a Senate roll-call. “I got to go join the animals. If anybody sees Hobart, tell him I’m looking for him.” Hanna waddled toward the Senate chamber.

Day looked after Hanna, with some distaste. “Personally, I wish Colonel Bryan had let the thing go hang.”

“And let Senator Gorman take over the party? No,” said Dawes, “that’s not in the cards. Bryan’s riding two horses just fine.”

Hay turned to Eddy. “I don’t seem to be needed, after all.”

Dawes took Hay’s arm, companionably. “Let’s go up in the gallery and watch the vote.” He turned to Day. “Come on, anarchist,” he said. “Now’s your chance to throw a bomb.”

Hay took his seat in the front row of the distinguished visitors’ gallery. Nearby, the press had filled up their section; while Washington’s ladies were out in force. As always, on such senatorial occasions, Hay was reminded of the bull-fights in Madrid. Admittedly, Washington’s ladies, all in winter furs, were not so vivid as Spanish women in summer, but there was the same excited focus on the arena-in this case, the Senate chamber beneath them.

A senior senator presided in the Vice-President’s chair, high on its dais. The roll-call was about to begin. Senators were now taking their seats opposite the dais. Hay’s presence had been noted. Graciously, he bowed to this one and to that, as this one and that waved or bowed to him; happily, he had no idea who anyone was. He was getting like the nearly blind Chief Justice Chase, who, toward the end of his life, had taken to greeting everyone with the same, solemn, studied joy on the ground that he did not want to offend anyone who might still see in him a potential president.

As the roll-call was being taken, Dawes chattered: “There’s a story going to break that we provoked those natives to attack us, but it won’t hit the papers till tomorrow, and by then it won’t make any difference.”

“No difference?” Mr. Day was not shy, Hay decided, mildly curious as to how a Bryan Democrat could be holding office in an administration which took very seriously the notion that to the victors belong the spoils. Naturally, Civil Service reform was dear to every progressive Republican heart; but office for the worthy was dearer. “Do you realize what a difference it will make if people find out that it was us who started trouble over there?”

“It meant no difference to the vote today, which is what matters. I’m also not saying we started it. I don’t know. It’s just a rumor.” Dawes turned to Day. “You folks have been getting nowhere with silver since they found all that gold in the Klondike, so now you’ve got to hit us with something new, like going into the empire business.”

“Are you related to my predecessor, Judge Day?” Hay found the young man personable, for an anarchist. From his accent he could have been from Indiana, too; in fact, he was not unlike, Hay thought, his own young self, only taller, stronger.

“No, sir. But I do know your son, Del.”

Hay was not surprised. As he himself saw Del so little nowadays, he had no idea whom his son saw. “Then tell me, what has become of him?”

“I think he’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since last month when he took me over to the White House, to play billiards, down in the cellar.”

Hay was truly startled. “In the cellar of the White House?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a terrible place, too. Slimy-like a dungeon. But there’s a billiard room where some of the staff meet…”

“And the President?”

“He looked in, while we were playing.”

Before Hay could unravel the secret life of his son and the President, Vice-President Hobart, now in his chair, entertained a motion from the floor that the peace treaty be, herewith, voted upon. As the senators answered with an aye or a nay when their names were called, Dawes would scribble in his notebook and mutter “Hell” or “Maria,” presumably “bad” and “good.” When the name Elkins was called, Dawes said, “Now we’ll see if your man Bryan’s done his work.” The whole chamber was still. Elkins was a Democrat; and an anti-imperialist. Elkins allowed the silence after his name to last as long as possible; then he shouted, “Aye!” Applause exploded in the gallery. Hobart, resembling an aged gray walrus, struck his gavel hard on his desk. While a familiar la-di-da voice intoned, “Bravo!”

Day turned to Dawes. “Well, Colonel Bryan’s gone and got you your empire.”

“You don’t follow your leader?” asked Hay.

“I think he’s made a mistake. We have enough to do here at home without…”

But cheering had again filled the chamber: the necessary two-thirds vote had been achieved, with one vote to spare. The Senate had voted fifty-seven to twenty-seven to uphold the Administration’s peace treaty, and annex the Philippine Islands, now in rebellion against their newly legitimate, by act of Congress, masters.

“Hell and Maria!” shouted the delighted Dawes. “I must go tell the Major.”

Eddy helped Hay to his feet. Various dignitaries shook his hand, as if this had been his treaty rather than the President’s. At the foot of the gallery stairs, Lodge met Hay with the words: “We have done it.” Hay noted that Lodge looked distinctly unwell. “I have never in my life gone through such an ordeal.”

Hay gave him the praise that he wanted; and deserved. In the end, only two Republicans had voted against the treaty: Lodge’s colleague Hoar, who had somewhat startlingly offered to be beheaded in the Senate if that would stop the annexation, and Hale, the hereditary senator from Maine, who had kept his hard head, and said no. Otherwise, Hanna’s money and patronage, Bryan’s eloquence and smile, and Lodge’s perseverance had carried, just barely, the day. “The ship of state is in the open sea at last,” said Hay, bowing to left and right, as he and Lodge crossed the rotunda where Washington’s ladies now mingled with the weary proud legislators.

“Ship is the right image,” said Lodge, somewhat grimly. “And I’ve just spent a month in the engine room…”

“The cloakrooms of the Senate.”

“Exactly. I’m caked with grime.”

At that moment, as if to emphasize the nature of the grime, a tall burly youthful man, surrounded by admirers, all simple Western folk, passed them without a glance, or a pause in his tirade: “I never thought I’d live to see the day when any man dare try to give, openly and in broad daylight, a bribe to a United States senator so as to get him to change his vote.”

“Who,” asked Hay, “was that?”

“The honorable senator from Idaho, Mr. Heitfeld, who in a well-run world would be, at this moment, planting wheat back home.”

“Not, dear Cabot, in Idaho, in February. Was he offered a bribe?”

Lodge shrugged. “Not by me. But Hanna’s been from one end of the cloakroom to the other, whispering. Bryan, too. So who knows? Anyway, all that matters is that the ship is now full speed ahead. We are on the high seas at last, Mr. Hay. What England was, we are now, as of today. Asia is ours.”

“Well, not yet.” They were outside the Capitol. The sky was black; a cold wind blew. Fortunately, the Secretary of State took precedence over everyone but Vice-President and Speaker; and in no time at all, the State Department carriage creaked and rattled to a halt, at the head of a long line of carriages, their waiting horses blanketed against the cold. Hay completed the nautical image. “Let’s hope the barometer’s not falling, now that we’re on the high seas.”

“Oh,” said the driver, thinking that he had been addressed, “there’s a blizzard on its way, sir. Worst of the season, they say.”

“That,” said Hay to Lodge, “is not a good omen.”

“So I’ll keep killing Capitoline geese until I find one whose liver predicts good sailing weather.” Lodge and Eddy helped Hay into the carriage. “Seriously,” said Lodge, seriously, “this was the closest, hardest fight I have ever known. I doubt if we’ll see another in our time, when so much was at stake.”

“I make no predictions when it comes to earthly matters.” An elaborate burst of pain at the bottom of Hay’s spine brought earth into its true material perspective; the inexorable refuge for the lot of them and, for him, more soon than late. “As opposed to heavenly ones. Let us say the ships are afloat, and the legions are fighting on the Asian marches.”

“Ave Caesar!” Lodge laughed.

“Hail McKinley.“ Hay smiled in the icy darkness. “Pacific lord of the Pacific Ocean.”