Empire

1

AT THE END OF the long broad corridor that divided the ground floor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Blaise waited in what was known from one end of the political city to the other as the Amen Corner. He had yet to discover why the corner was so named. Presumably it was here that “amen” was put to fervent prayers by the current master of the Corner, Senator Thomas Platt. Seated at the center of a gilded horsehair sofa, the so-called Easy Boss presided over the fortunes and misfortunes of all members of the so-called organization, the machinery that controlled the Republican Party in the state of New York and, presumably, the new Republican governor, Theodore Roosevelt, who had promised to give Blaise an interview after his weekly breakfast meeting with Platt. When Congress was in session, the Senator came up from Washington on Friday evening and returned to the capital on Monday morning. The fact that each Saturday the Governor came down the river from Albany to breakfast with the Easy Boss indicated the nature of their relationship, or so the Chief darkly maintained.

Blaise was nervous. He had never met the Governor; he was, of course, used to him (“habituated,” he said to himself, reverting to French). By now he had watched the energetic figure on a dozen stages, the incarnation of, if nothing else, energy. Now the Chief wanted the Governor interviewed; thought the time was right for Blaise to try his hand at the deceitful art; wanted certain things asked, which Blaise had written down on a pad of paper, already smudged from sweaty fingers. He was nervous; and wondered why. Was he not habituated to the great? He was a Sanford; a Delacroix, too. He reminded himself of his father’s deep contempt for all politicians, which had been deeply and permanently satisfied at Newport, Rhode Island, when President Chester A. Arthur had made the mistake of visiting the Casino, where everyone had blithely ignored him. Worse, when it came time for Mr. Arthur to leave, he was obliged to stand, quite alone, while the carriages of Astors, Belmonts, Delacroixs, Vanderbilts swept past him, as he himself shouted, “The President’s carriage!” Colonel Sanford had revelled in the situation. But Blaise lacked his father’s patrician disinterestedness.

At eight-thirty of a Saturday morning, the Fifth Avenue Hotel was uncommonly tranquil. A few guests were to be seen in the distant lobby, while several potential justices of the peace from upstate tentatively occupied the Amen Corner. They reminded Blaise of the sort of furtive men one saw in the Mulberry Street police station, standing in the criminal line-up.

Two members of New York’s police force guarded the door to the private dining room where their one-time commissioner was breakfasting, heartily-the usual adverb-on chicken pan-fried steak, with a pair of fried eggs, like magnified eyes on the steak, and a quantity of fried potatoes. Blaise had questioned the maître d’hôtel earlier. Apparently, the Governor was a big eater, in the Western frontiersman style; he liked his “grub” plain and plentiful and always fried.

Suddenly, a large, round, dark-waistcoated belly, packed with fried meat, appeared in the dining room’s doorway; the belly’s attachment, Governor-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, said something to the two policemen which made them frown, and which made their old commissioner hoot with laughter, like a screech-owl, thought Blaise, swooping down upon a nocturnal rodent. The Governor was accompanied by the pale and more than ever weary-looking Platt. To Blaise’s surprise they had breakfasted without aides or-witnesses, he immediately thought. The Chief’s dark conspiratorial view of the world was contagious; and probably correct.

The policemen then saluted the Governor, who crossed to Blaise, ignoring the would-be supplicants. “Mr. Sanford? From the Journal. Our favorite paper, isn’t it, Mr. Platt?“

“There are worse, I suppose,” moaned Platt softly, moving toward his familiar settee; he was like the now proverbial man with a hoe come home to rest. “Mr. Sanford,” he murmured, touching Blaise’s hand with his own delicate one. Then Senator Platt sank onto his throne in the Amen Corner, ready to rule as well as reign, while the nominal ruler of the state was left free to charm and delight a young journalist. As supplicants surrounded Platt, the boss waved Governor and Blaise a mournful farewell.

“Well, now, Mr. Sanford, why don’t you drive uptown with me to my sister’s house. We can talk on the way.” During this Roosevelt had taken Blaise’s left elbow into his right hand, a curious gesture which might seem a demonstration of intimacy or at least good feeling to an observer, but to the victim, so Blaise felt himself, it was more like a gesture of physical control, as the Governor forced him to walk rapidly alongside him, and in perfect step; again he was reminded of the Mulberry Street police station. But although the Governor was like a policeman, he was hardly the robust physical specimen that legend proclaimed. Roosevelt was as short as Blaise, who had spent a half-dozen years praying for half as many inches more; but he had stopped growing at sixteen. Yet where Blaise was muscular, Roosevelt was simply rubbery, with an enormous head and neck, the first emerging from the second like a tree’s section. The belly was definitely fat; the limbs were definitely thick but not muscular. Nevertheless, Roosevelt walked swiftly, purposefully, like an athlete with an appointment on some as yet undetermined playing field. Meanwhile, Blaise was bemused to discover that the Governor’s conversation was exactly as recorded by the press. In the lobby, when strangers asked to shake his hand and wish him well, he would flash those huge rock-like teeth and exclaim, in three distinct syllables, “Dee-light-ed!” When told something that he approved of, he would actually say “Bully!” like a stage Englishman. He even responded, in the street, to cries of “Teddy,” a name that Blaise knew no one ever dared call him in or out of the family.

A light April rain was dampening Fifth Avenue, if not Governor Roosevelt, who leapt inside his carriage, using Blaise’s elbow, still held in his right hand, as fulcrum. Blaise was happy to note that the brougham was closed. Otherwise, he had an image of the exponent of “the strenuous life,” the title of a lecture recently given in the Midwest, riding up Fifth Avenue in a rainstorm, shouting “Bully!” at the elements.

“You should go west,” said the Governor, predictably. “A boy like you should develop his body, and morals.”

Blaise found himself blushing, not at the word “morals,” a subject that he, the French-reared young man, could have lectured the Governor on, but the word “body”; he prided himself on a musculature unequalled by any Yale classmate, the work of nature, admittedly, but still all his own, unlike the thick suet-pudding beside him. Close to, Roosevelt did not look young; but then, for Blaise, forty was not exactly a man’s optimum age. Deep lines radiated from behind the gold-framed pince-nez. The short-cropped hair was grizzled. Like a parenthesis of hair, the Chinese-style moustache framed-and disguised?-red, full, curiously voluptuous lips. The eyes were bright and quick and of no distinctive color, other than bright. The body was unhealthily fat. “I can beat you,” said Blaise, to his own amazement, “at Indian arm-wrestling.”

The Governor, who had been staring out the window, hoping to be recognized by a passing umbrella, turned an astonished gaze on Blaise. The spectacles were allowed to drop from his nose onto his chest-where they swung on their chain like a pendulum. The eyes, Blaise could see at last, were blue. “You! A city dude?” There was a burst of high laughter; then: “You’re on,” said the Governor.

The two men then arranged themselves on the back seat so that each could rest an elbow on the middle cushion as they interlocked forearms. Blaise was perfectly confident; he was stronger, he knew, as he began to force down the older man’s arm. But Roosevelt was heavier; finally, faced with defeat, he simply cheated. Aware that he was about to be beaten, he surreptitiously slid his feet under the folding seat opposite and, with this leverage, abruptly forced Blaise’s arm down. “There!” shouted the Governor, delighted.

“You had your feet under the seat.”

“I did not…”

“Look!” Blaise pointed; the feet were quickly withdrawn.

“An accident. They slipped.” For an instant Roosevelt looked furious, like a small child caught out. Then he roared. “Bully for you, my boy! Come on in. You’re no city dude. Whatever you are. A Sanford. Which Sanford?”

The family game was swiftly played through. The Colonel, a perfect snob like so many tribunes of the people, was quite at home with a Sanford; but somewhat intimidated by a Delacroix. As they got out of the carriage in front of 422 Madison Avenue, the brownstone house of the Governor’s youngest sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson (Blaise took meticulous notes), Roosevelt said, “Do you box?”

“Yes,” said Blaise, who did.

“We’ll go put on the gloves in the basement, once breakfast’s settled.”

Mrs. Robinson, addressed as Conie by her brother, was a dark, bright-eyed woman, who led them into a small parlor, dominated by the head of a buffalo shot by the Governor when he was a cowboy in the West. The resemblance, Blaise noted, was eerie between victim-beast and victor-man. “I used to be a taxidermist myself,” said Roosevelt. “Birds, mostly. But I really wanted to be an ornithologist, a naturalist. Why Hearst?”

“Well, why not, sir?” Blaise sat in a William Morris rocking chair while Roosevelt worked off his breakfast by walking vigorously, if pointlessly, about the room. From the back parlor, a telephone rang from time to time and a low masculine voice would answer it. Apparently, the state of New York was being strenuously governed even as they spoke.

“He is against reform, of course. He is a Democrat, not that I am strict in such matters. But I think Boss Croker is, perhaps, unsavory, even by Tammany standards.”

“That’s true, sir. But he did stand by when you were running for governor, and you won by eighteen thousand votes because he wouldn’t really go all out for Judge Van Wyck.”

Roosevelt chose not to hear this. “Last week, Mr. Hearst was at the Tammany Hall dinner, in Grand Central Palace, presided over by our friend Croker, home from Ireland, or away from home, in Ireland. I would not want to be so closely allied with such a man.”

“I think, sir, the Chief was there to listen to Mr. Bryan.”

“I can’t think why a newspaper publisher, who went to Harvard, should want to involve himself in politics when he has, as far as I can tell, no politics at all.”

Although Blaise had been more amused than bemused by the Chief’s sudden obsession with politics and the holding of high office, he could not tell Roosevelt that much of the Chief’s interest had been created not, as many thought, by the career of his father, Senator George Hearst, but by that of the thick small restless shrill-voiced man who was marching about the room like a toy soldier that someone had wound up but forgot to point in any particular direction. Blaise had now given up on conducting an interview with the Governor. Those whom Roosevelt regarded as social equals, and Blaise was one, were not treated as a part of the solemn consistory of reforming angels at work with bucket and shovel in the stables of the republic; rather, they were treated as a fellow boy by a boy who despite-or because of-small stature and bad eyesight, was a born bully and, perhaps, leader, too, if anyone could be persuaded to follow him. Certainly, whatever crossed his plainly quick mind, he felt obliged to express.

Hearst now ceased to interest the Colonel. Instead, he was distracted by a model of a battleship, not, Blaise was reasonably certain, a treasured possession of Mrs. Robinson’s. “I was given this when I was assistant secretary of the Navy. Build more, I said. Have you read Admiral Mahan on sea-power? Published nine years ago. An eye-opener. I reviewed it in the Atlantic Monthly. We are fast friends. Without sea-power, no British empire. Without sea-power, no American empire, though we don’t use the word ‘empire’ because the tender-minded can’t bear it. Like Andrew Carnegie, that old scoundrel, who says that if we don’t give freedom to our little brown brothers in the Philippines, we will be cursed. By what? His money? He told Mr. Hay that if an American soldier fires-as they’ve had to do-on the Filipinos, we will lose our republic at home. Incredible! Thanks to Mr. Carnegie and his friends our government was obliged to fire on a great many American workers at the time of the Haymarket riots, and the old fraud was dee-light-ed. Hypocrite. But Mahan’s not. He’s a patriot. The torpedo boats. I have him to thank for the theory. The Navy has me to thank for arming us, in time…”

“… and you to thank for Admiral Dewey.” Blaise took advantage of a pause during which Roosevelt clicked his teeth together three times, like a dog; the sound was as disconcerting as the expression of the face was alarming. “Well, I did get him the job in the Pacific. Took a bit of doing. Had to get a senator to sponsor him first. Imagine! What a country! If we hadn’t found us a senator to sponsor him, another officer would have got the job, and we’d not be in Manila. Good man, Dewey. Good officer. They’ll try to run him for president, of course. I hope he’s wise. And stays out.”

“Mr. Hearst thinks the Admiral would be better than Bryan…”

“Dear boy, you’d be better than Bryan. Didn’t my sister Anna visit your father a few years ago?”

“Did she go to Allenswood?” Suddenly Blaise remembered a charming, excessively plain, large-toothed woman, very much at home in France.

“No. But she studied with Mlle. Souvestre when she still had her school in France. Before she moved to England…”

“My sister Caroline was there, too. In England…”

Roosevelt talked through him. “… did wonders for Bamie’s French and general knowledge but I’m not so sure of morals. She’s now a freethinker, like Mlle. Souvestre…”

“Who’s an atheist, actually.”

Roosevelt ground his teeth in a lively imitation of rage. “So much the worse for my sister. And yours…” Like so many politicians who never ceased to talk, he heard what others said even through the comforting cascade of his own words. “At least mine learned perfect French. What about yours?”

“She already spoke perfect French. She was obliged to learn perfect English, which she did.”

“We’re sending my niece to her this year. We have hopes…” But the Governor looked grim.

“That would be the daughter of Mr. Elliott Roosevelt, sir?”

“Yes. My brother is well known to your readers.” The Governor threw himself into an armchair; and glowered at Blaise, as if he were Hearst, the devil. Four years earlier, Elliott Roosevelt had died, under an assumed name, in 102nd Street, where he had been living with his mistress and a valet. Although he had been a heavy drinker for years, Blaise’s father had always said that if any Roosevelt could be said to have true charm, it was Elliott, who had spent quite a lot of time in Paris, much of it at the Chateau Suresnes, a place of refuge-or containment-for wealthy alcoholics. Some years earlier, the Governor had publicly declared his brother insane, to the delight of the press. The Chief, in particular, found it almost impossible to let the Roosevelt family skeleton rest peacefully in its closet; he also never let pass an opportunity to remind New Yorkers that in order to avoid taxes, Theodore Roosevelt used to give as his place of residence not New York State but the District of Columbia. Because of this confusion over residence he had come close to losing the nomination for governor; but then the brilliant Elihu Root, a lawyer without peer, as the Journal would say, had talked the nominating convention around. All in all, Blaise was pleased that he himself had no political ambitions. Between private life and public, there was, for him, no contest. What, he sometimes wondered, would they do with the Chief’s private life when he decided to enter the arena?

Roosevelt wondered the same. “He’ll find all the newspaper fellows will be treating him the way he’s treated everybody else.” Roosevelt removed his spectacles; and stared near-sightedly at the buffalo, which stared into eternity, a place just above the door to the hall. “I suppose he’ll support Bryan again. That would make things easy for us. McKinley’s a shoo-in.”

“What about you, sir?”

“I am a good party man. McKinley’s the head of the party. I’ve been offered the editorship of Harper’s Weekly. You can write that. You can also say I’m tempted to take it next year, when my term’s up.” An aide entered from the hall; and gave the Governor what Blaise could see was a newspaper slip. He wondered from which paper; probably the Sun. As the aide left, Roosevelt was on his feet again, marching up and down, with no precise end in view other than the pleasure that vigorous motion of any kind appeared to give him. “The President has unleashed General MacArthur on the rebels. I’ve proposed unconditional surrender on our terms, not that the humble governor of New York has anything to say in such great matters.”

“But they listen to you, sir.” Blaise was beginning to work out a theme if not a story. “You are for expansion-everywhere?”

“Everywhere that we are needed. It is to take the manly part, after all. Besides, every expansion of civilization-and we are that, preeminently in the world, our religion, our law, our customs, our modernity, our democracy. Wherever our civilization is allowed to take hold means a victory for law and order and righteousness. Look at those poor benighted islands without us. Bloodshed, confusion, rapine… Aguinaldo is nothing but a Tagal bandit.”

“Some people regard him as a liberator,” Blaise began, aware that the Governor could thunder platitudes by the hour.

But there was no braking him now. Roosevelt was now marching rapidly in a circle at the center of the room. He had been seized by a speech. As he spoke, he used all the tricks that he would have used had Blaise been ten thousand people at Madison Square Garden. Arms rose and fell; the head was thrown back as if it were an exclamation mark; right fist struck left hand to mark the end of one perfected argument, and the beginning of the next. “The degeneracy of the Malay race is a fact. We start with that. We can do them only good. They can do themselves only harm. When the likes of Carnegie tell us that they are fighting for independence, I say any argument you make for the Filipino you could make for the Apache. Every word that can be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. The Indians could not be civilized any more than the Filipinos can. They stand in the path of civilization. Now you may invoke the name of Jefferson…” Roosevelt glowered down at Blaise, who had no intention of invoking anyone’s name. Blaise stared straight ahead at the round stomach whose gold watch-chain quivered sympathetically with its owner’s mood, now militant, imperial. “Well, let me tell you that when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he did not include the Indians among those possessing our rights…”

“… or Negroes either,” said Blaise brightly.

Roosevelt frowned. “Slavery was something else, and solved in due course in the fiery crucible of civil war.”

Blaise wondered what the inside of a politician’s mind looked like. Were their drawers marked “Slavery,” “Free Trade,” “Indians”? Or did the familiar arguments hang on hooks, like newspaper galleys? Although Roosevelt was a respectable historian, who wrote and even read books, he could never say anything that one had not already heard said a thousand times. Perhaps that was the politician’s art: to bring to the obvious the appearance of novelty and passion. In any case, the Governor was enchanted by his own rhetoric. “Jefferson bought Louisiana, and never once consulted the Indian tribes that he had acquired in the process.”

“Or the Delacroix family, and some ten thousand other French and Spanish inhabitants of New Orleans. We still hate Jefferson, you know.”

“But, in due course, you were incorporated as free citizens of the republic. I speak now only of savages. When Mr. Seward acquired Alaska, did we ask for the consent of the Eskimos? We did not. When the Indian tribes went into rebellion in Florida, did Andrew Johnson offer them a citizenship for which they were not prepared? No, he offered them simple justice. Which is what we shall mete out to our little brown brothers in the Philippines. Justice and civilization will be theirs if they but seize the opportunity. We shall keep the islands!” Roosevelt suddenly began to click his teeth rapidly, alarmingly; he was like a machine, thought Blaise, wondering how on earth he could describe, in mere words, so odd a creature. Again the image of a wound-up toy soldier. “And we shall establish therein a stable and orderly government so that one more fair spot,” fist struck hand a powerful blow, “of the world’s surface shall have been snatched,” two stubby hands seized the innocent warm air of the parlor, saving it from winter cold, “from the forces of darkness!” There was a bit of froth at the edge of the governor’s full lower lip. He brushed it away with the back of the hand which still held the one fair spot snatched from darkness.

“Are you absolutely sure that Mlle. Souvestre is an atheist?” The Governor suddenly settled into a chair. He had put away the Philippines in their drawer; and locked it.

“So I’ve been told. I don’t really know her.” Blaise was neutral. “She’s been very active for Captain Dreyfus.” This was not such a non sequitur, since freethinkers tended to be Dreyfusards. In any case, the Governor was not listening.

“Bamie-my sister, that is-says that one can just ignore her on religious matters. It’s worth the chance, I think, for my niece, Eleanor.” The Governor then lectured Blaise for an hour. He wanted stronger proconsuls in Cuba and the Philippines. He would discuss the matter with the President. He thought that the sooner Secretary of War Alger-the man responsible for feeding the troops tinned, tainted meat-left the Cabinet the better. Blaise managed to ask a question or two about the Governor’s relations with Senator Platt. They were, apparently, “bully,” even though everyone knew that the two men could not bear each other, and that Platt had only taken Roosevelt because, after the scandals of the previous Republican governor, the party would have lost the state. At the same time, Roosevelt, the zealous reformer, needed the Republican machine in order to be elected governor. It was also no secret that he would like to join his friend Lodge in the Senate; it was also no secret that Platt was not about to surrender his own seat to accommodate a governor who was currently insisting that any corporation with a public franchise must pay tax. Specifically, this struck at William Whitney, a Democrat millionaire, who owned numerous streetcar lines as well as, some said, the golden key to Tammany Hall. Whitney had served in Cleveland’s cabinet; had fathered Blaise’s classmate Payne.

As the Governor declaimed, he would shift his voice from effete questioner to stern Jehovah-like answerer; he played a dozen different parts, all badly but engagingly. Blaise wondered, idly, as he so often did in this still strange city, whether or not such a man would have a mistress, or go to brothels (there were more in the Tenderloin District than in all of Paris), or would he confine himself, with iron resolve, to the indulgences of his second wife?

The thought of Payne Whitney had made Blaise think of sex. Once, innocently, at Yale, Blaise had asked the high-spirited Payne if there was a decent brothel in New Haven. The boy had gone red in the face; and Blaise had realized that his twenty-year-old classmate was a virgin. Further highly covert investigations convinced Blaise not only that most of the young men of his class were virgins but that this unnatural state explained their, to him, inexplicable long and dull talk of the girls that they knew socially, combined with heavy drinking of a sort that he associated, in Paris, with workmen of the lowest class. As a result, he never let on that since his sixteenth year he had been involved in an affair with a friend of his father’s, Anne de Bieville, twenty years his senior and happily married to a bank manager; her oldest son, two years Blaise’s senior, had taught him how to shoot at Saint-Cloud; for a time, he was Blaise’s best friend. As it was tacitly assumed that Blaise was the mother’s lover, the subject was never mentioned between the boys. Consequently, prim New Haven had come as something of a shock.

“Perhaps Anglo-Saxons develop later than we do,” said Anne, amused at the sight of so much virginity on the playing fields of Yale; actually, not the playing fields but at a dance for the senior class. Blaise had introduced violet-eyed Anne as his aunt; and she had caused a sensation. “Well, physically, they are all there,” said Blaise; many seniors wore thick moustaches, heavy sideburns. “But something happens-or doesn’t happen-to their brains over here.”

“Their livers, too, I should suspect. They drink too much.”

Theodore Roosevelt was again on the march around the room. Blaise tried to imagine him in a love nest in 102nd Street; and failed. Yet the brother, Elliott, had had a mistress with him when he died-a Mrs. Evans, whom the Roosevelt family had paid off because there was a Mr. Evans, who had threatened to shoot the Roosevelt lawyer if her income was not increased. Elliott had also loved a Mrs. Sherman, who lived in Paris but was not received in the Sanford world.

Blaise decided that Governor Roosevelt was not the sort to enjoy women as he did, say, food. On the other hand, to Blaise’s youthful cynic’s eye, Roosevelt seemed very much the sort of person who would, after much heart-searching and hand-wringing, seduce the wife of his best friend, and then hold his best friend entirely responsible for the tragedy. That seemed to be the Anglo-Saxon style. A secretary brought news of a telephone call from Albany. Thus, the interview was concluded.

“Good luck, my boy. I hope you can make something of my tendency to ramble. So much to talk about. So much to do. Next time I’ll give you a boxing lesson. As for your Mr. Hearst…” The bright eyes narrowed behind the gold-edged lenses. “We disagree on many things. Bryan, free silver. Those plaid suits. He wore,” Roosevelt’s voice moved up half an octave, with scorn, “a chartreuse plaid suit with a purple tie at the Mayor’s reception last month. And he wonders why no club will take him in.” The handclasp was heavy; and Blaise’s departure swift.

The Chief was amused by the Governor’s sartorial disdain. “Well, at least we stopped him from wearing those pink shirts and fancy sashes.” The Chief lay full-length on a sofa in his living room. A bust of Alexander the Great at his head; one of Julius Caesar at his feet. On the floor lay a banjo. The drama critic of the Journal, Ashton Stevens, had vowed that he could teach Hearst to play the banjo in six lessons. But, after fourteen lessons, the longed-for virtuosity was still longed-for. Apparently, the Chief, despite his passion for popular music, was tone-deaf. For two weeks, he had been trying to learn “Maple Leaf Rag,” that essential exemplar of rag-time, with results that could only be regarded as sinister. The Chief was again in plaid; but this time of a subdued gray travertine hue, like a fashionable foyer’s floor, thought Blaise, as he finished his report on Governor Roosevelt.

“Pity about what’s his name, the frog,” was all that Hearst had to say. He had moved on.

“It would have been a great coup.” Blaise was also sorry that their hare-brained but exciting plot to rescue the prisoner of Devil’s Island had been preempted by the French government. Dreyfus was home: a free man. The Journal must look elsewhere for dragons to slay.

“The ‘Man with the Hoe’ thing…” the Chief began; he did not need to finish. Recently, he had published, in the San Francisco Examiner, some verse by an obscure California teacher. Overnight, the poem had become the most popular ever published in the United States, “… and now they say that I’m a socialist! Well, maybe I am. Even so, a poem!” Hearst shook his head; and picked up the banjo. “Whoever thought a poem would increase sales?” Hearst had one more go at “Maple Leaf Rag.” Blaise felt his skin crawl. “I think I’ve got the hang of it,” said the Chief, striking a chord never before heard on earth; and holding it.

George was at the door. “There’s another house-agent, sir.”

“Tomorrow. Tell him nothing above Forty-second Street. I don’t want to be a farmer.”

“Are you moving?”

Hearst nodded. “They’re tearing down the Worth House. This year. Just as I finished fixing it up.” Hearst gestured to show off what looked to be an auction warehouse. Statuary in crates, dozens of paintings turned face to wall, while others that ought to have been face to wall were displayed as in a provincial French museum; chairs piled one on top of the other, reminiscent of the Louis XV Room of the Hoffman House after a dinner. “There’s a possibility in Chicago,” he said, swinging his long legs to the floor.

“For a house, sir?”

“No, a newspaper. To buy.”

“The News!”

“No. They won’t sell. But I could take over another one. Cheap.” Hearst glanced innocently at Blaise. “That is, cheap for you. Expensive for me right now. Next year my mother’s moving back to California.”

“She won’t… help?”

“She’d rather not, she says. She’s already in for, maybe, ten million. Then there’s Washington. The Tribune’s close to shutting down. Of course, there aren’t any votes in the District. But you can always have fun scaring the politicians.”

Blaise was puzzled. “Votes? I thought you wanted readers.”

“Well, I want both. I’ve got New York, San Francisco, and now Chicago-with a bit of luck. The Democratic Party’s up for grabs.”

“You want to grab it?”

“Somebody has to. You see, the press has a power that no one understands, including me. But I know how to make it work…”

“To get readers. Votes are something else.”

“I wonder.” The Chief stretched his arms. “My mother’s met your sister.”

“Oh.” Blaise was guarded. He wanted no one, least of all Hearst, to know about the war between brother and sister. At the moment, they communicated only through lawyers. Caroline had appealed a lower court’s ruling; now they awaited a higher court’s decision on the arcana of the cyphers one and seven. Meanwhile, to Blaise’s surprise Caroline had settled not in New York, where the courts were, but in Washington, where, presumably, Del Hay was. Before Blaise had been able to stop her, she had sold the Poussins for two hundred thousand dollars; she now could afford to buy a vast amount of American law. But Houghteling had chuckled when he heard the news and said that, even so, she might well be twenty-seven by the time the case was settled in her favor. Irritably, Blaise had then pointed out that he was the one in a hurry, not she. At the moment relations with the Chief were good; but the Chief’s moods were volatile, to say the least. Now was the time to help him buy the Chicago newspaper. Later, old Mrs. Hearst might again come to her son’s aid; or he might even start to make more than he spent, a not likely prospect for a man who was in the habit of offering a good journalist double his usual salary, simply to get him away from the competition.

“Your sister came to look at my mother’s house. But it was too big, she said. Your sister said, that is. She’s intelligent, Mother says. Why does she like Washington?”

“I think it’s the Hay family that she likes.”

“He’s practically an Englishman by now.” Hearst’s short attention span had snapped. Mother, sister, John Hay were as one with Captain Dreyfus and “Maple Leaf Rag.” “You go to Washington. Take a look at the Tribune. Don’t let on you have anything to do with me. I’ll scout out Chicago.”

Blaise was delighted with the assignment; less delighted with the thought that he might see Caroline; alarmed when the Chief said, “Pay a call on Mother. Tell her how hard I work. How I don’t smoke or drink or use bad language. And tell her how much you like schools.”

“But I don’t.”

“But she does. She’s just started one for girls, up at the Cathedral. Maybe the two of us could go there and teach the girls-you know, journalism.” The Chief had come as close as Blaise had ever heard him to a smutty remark. “Give my regards to your sister.”

“If I see her,” said Blaise. “She moves in refined circles.”

2

IN MARCH CAROLINE had arrived at the outermost ring of the republic’s circles, when she rented a small rose-red brick house in N Street, which ran through a part of dilapidated Georgetown, reminiscent of Aswan in Egypt, where she had once wintered with her father and his arthritis. There was hardly a white face to be seen; and the owner of the house, a commodore’s widow of pronounced whiteness, hoped that she would not mind “the darkies.” Caroline pronounced herself entranced; and hoped, she said, to hear tom-toms in the night. The widow said that as there were, happily, no Indians nearby, tom-toms would not sound; on the other hand, a good deal of voodoo was practiced between the Potomac River and the canal. She did not recommend it, in practice. The commodore’s widow left behind her a large black woman, who would “help out.” It was agreed that Caroline would take the house for at least one year. On the brick sidewalk in front of the house two vast shiny-leaved magnolia trees put the front rooms in deepest shadow, always desirable, Caroline had remarked, when living in the tropics. Predictably, Marguerite was stunned to find herself marooned in Africa, with an African in the kitchen.

From the outermost circle, Caroline moved to the innermost: the dining room of Henry Adams, where breakfast was served for six each mid-day and no one was ever invited; yet the table was never empty except for this particular morning, when Caroline ate Virginia smoked ham and biscuits made with buttermilk, and the host, more round than ever, discussed his departure the next day for New York; and then a tour of Sicily with Senator and Mrs. Lodge. “After that, I shall spend the summer in Paris, in the Boulevard Bois de Boulogne. The Camerons are there. She is there, at least. No more coffee, William,” he said to the manservant, William Gray, who poured him more coffee, which he drank. “Do you know a young poet, an American, named Trumbull Stickney?”

Caroline said, accurately, that she knew very few Americans in Paris. “While we don’t seem to know any French,” said Adams, judiciously. “We go abroad to see one another. I gather that Mrs. Cameron is Mr. Stickney’s muse this spring. If I were young, I would not be jealous. As it is, I writhe.” But Adams seemed not to be writhing at all. “You must come over-or back in your case-and show us France.”

“I don’t know France at all.” Caroline was again accurate. “But I know the French.”

“Well, I can show you France. I tour the cathedrals yet again. I brood on the relics of the twelfth century.”

“They are… energetic?”

Adams smiled, almost shyly. “You remembered? I’m flattered.”

“I’d hoped for more instruction. But just as I move to Washington, you go away. I feel as if you had created me, a second Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, and then left me in mid-chapter.” Caroline was now on forbidden territory. No one was ever supposed to suggest that Adams might be the author of the novel Democracy, whose heroine, a Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, settles in Washington in order to understand power in a democracy; and is duly appalled. Caroline had delighted in the book, almost as much as she did in its author. Of course, there were those who thought that John Hay had written the novel (he had been photographed holding a copy of the French edition and wearing a secret smile); others thought that the late Clover Adams, a born wit, was the author. But Caroline was certain that Adams himself had written his quintessential book of Hearts. He never, with her, denied-or affirmed-it. “The lesson of that amorality tale is-stay away from senators.”

“That’s not difficult.”

“In Washington? They are like cardinals in Renaissance Rome. You can’t avoid them. That’s why I flee to the twelfth century, where there were only three classes: the priest, the warrior and the artist. Then the commercial sort took over, the money-lenders, the parasites. They create nothing; and they enslave everyone. They expropriated the priest-don’t you like to hear all this at breakfast?”

“Only when there is honey in the comb,” said Caroline, spreading the wax and honey over a piece of hot cornbread. “I can take quite a lot of priests expropriated. And the warriors…?”

“Turned into wage-earning policemen, to defend the money-men, while the artists make dresses or paint bad portraits, like Sargent…”

“Oh, I like him. He never tries to disguise how much his sitters bore him.”

“That is our last revenge against money. See? I count myself an artist; but I am only a rentier, a parasite. Why Washington?”

Caroline was not certain how much she should confide in this brilliant old professional uncle. “My brother and I have disagreed…”

“Yes, we’ve heard all about that. There is nothing to do with money that we don’t seem to hear about. We have lost our spirituality.”

“Well, I may lose something far worse, my inheritance.” Where was it that she had read that there was a certain honey that made one mad? She had just eaten it, plainly; she confided: “Blaise could control everything for five years. He worships Mr. Hearst, who loses money on a scale that makes me very nervous.”

“The terrible Mr. Hearst could end up losing the Sanford money, too?”

As Caroline took more honey, she noted, in the comb, a tiny grub. Perversely, she ate it. “That’s my fear. Anyway, while our lawyers duel, Blaise lives in New York and I have come here to Aswan, to observe democracy in action, like Mrs. Lee.”

“Then,” said Adams, pushing back from the table, and lighting a cigar, with a by-your-leave gesture, “there is Del.”

“There is Del.”

“He is next door, even as we speak. Are you tempted?”

“My teacher-”

“The formidable Mlle. Souvestre, now established at Wimbledon. She has advised you?”

“No. She gives no advice. That is her style. I mean no practical advice. But she is brilliant, and she has never married, and she is happy, teaching.”

“You want to teach?”

“I have nothing to teach.”

“Neither have I. Yet I run a school for statesmen, from Lodge to Hay. I am also Professor Adams, late of Harvard.”

“I am not so ambitious. But I am curious what it would be like to remain single.”

“With your-appearance?” Adams laughed; an appreciative bark. “You will not be allowed to stay single. The forces will be too great for you. Unlike you, your Grande Mademoiselle had neither beauty nor a fortune.”

“In time, I shall lose the first, and in an even shorter time could lose the second. Besides, she is very handsome. She has had suitors.”

“Perhaps,” said Adams, “she prefers the company of serious ladies, like an abbess of the twelfth century.”

Caroline flushed, not certain why. Mademoiselle had had a partner when the school first began at Les Ruches. There had been quarrels; they parted. Mademoiselle had reigned alone ever since. No, this was not what she herself would prefer in the way of a life alone. But then she had had no experience, of any kind. “I have not the vocation,” she said, “of an abbess, even a worldly one.”

The honey’s power released her. Adams led her into the library, her favorite American room. The overall effect was meant to be medieval, Romanesque even, with windows so sited that one could ignore the White House across the square by looking slightly upward, to Heaven. The room’s focal point was the fireplace, carved from a pale jade-green Mexican onyx shot through with scarlet threads; she had never seen anything like it before, but unlike so many things never seen before, the extraordinary silk-like stone fascinated her. On either side of the fireplace Italian cinquecento paintings were arranged, as well as a Turner view of the English countryside lit by hell-fire; best of all, there was a crude drawing by William Blake of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, on all fours, munching grass in his madness. “It is the portrait of my soul,” Adams had said when he showed it to her for the first time. The room smelled of wood-smoke, narcissi and hyacinth. The leather chairs were low, built to suit Adams and no one else. They quite suited Caroline, who settled in one, and said, “You must tell me when I’m to go.”

“I’m already packed.” Adams groaned. “I hate travel. But I can never remain in one place.” William announced Mr. Hay, who limped into the room. He was in pain, Caroline decided; and looked a decade older than he had in Kent.

“What are you doing here?” Adams pulled out his clock. “It’s Thursday. Your day to receive the diplomatic corps.”

“Not till three. Cinderella holds the fort.”

“Cinderella?” asked Caroline.

Adams answered, “Mr. Hay’s name for his assistant, Mr. Adee, who does all the work in the kitchen, and is never asked to the ball.”

“You’ve settled in, Miss Sanford?” Hay took coffee from William, who knew his ways. Caroline said that she had. Hay nodded vaguely; then turned to Adams. “I think of you, Enricus Porcupinus, as a deserter. When I need you most, you and Lodge leave town.”

“You have the Maj-ah.” Adams was not in the least sentimental. “We’ve worked hard enough for you all winter. We got you your treaty. I long, now, to see La Dona-and the Don, too, of course.”

“Tell her she may have her house back sooner than she thinks.”

“What’s wrong with the Vice-President?”

“Heart trouble. Doctor’s ordered him out of town, indefinitely.”

“Well, it is not as if his absence will be noted.”

“Oh, Henry, you are so hard on us poor hacks! Mr. Hobart may not be much as vice-presidents go, but he is one of the best financial investors in the country. He invests money for the Maj-ah and me, and we all do well. Though I prefer real estate. I’ve been negotiating for a lot on Connecticut Avenue. It is my dream to build a many-spired apartment house. They are the coming thing in this town of transients…”

Caroline had hoped for, perhaps, more elevated conversation at Hearts’ heart. But today the old men obviously did not inspire one another to breakfast brilliance, while her presence was now sufficiently familiar not to require any special exertion. In a way, she was relieved to be taken for granted. But that was by the old; she was, to the young Del, very much a wish ungranted. “I heard you were here,” he said, as he entered the room.

Adams turned to Caroline: “Our kitchens correspond closely. From cook to cook. Our Maggie to their Flora.”

“And I knew you’d be here, Mr. Adams, and Mr. Adee said Father was here, too. So I…”

“You were at the office?” Hay looked surprised.

“Why, yes. Then I went to the White House, where I had a meeting with the President. He’s asked me to surprise you.”

“Is such a thing possible? Is such a thing wise?”

“We’ll soon see.” Del took a deep breath. “I have just been appointed American consul general in Pretoria.”

To Caroline’s astonishment, Hay looked as if someone had struck him. He took a deep breath, apparently uncertain whether or not tremulous lungs could absorb so much scented Adams library air. “The…?” He could not utter the literally magisterial noun.

Del nodded. “The President made the appointment himself. He wanted to surprise you. He certainly surprised me. He also didn’t want people to think that I got the job because I am your son.”

“Surely a republic ends,” said Adams, “when the rule of nepotism-like the second law of thermodynamics-ceases to apply.”

“I could not,” said Hay, breath regained, “be more thrilled, as Helen used to say when we’d go inside the monkey house at the zoo.” Caroline watched father and son with considerable interest. What she had always taken to be Anglo-Saxon lack of intimacy between males she now decided was antipathy on the part of the famously charming and affable father toward the equally affable and, in time, no doubt, equally charming son who had not, after all, been trained in the art of storytelling by the admitted master himself, Abraham Lincoln, who could make, it was said, a mule with a broken leg laugh.

“I thought you’d be.” Del was impassive; he looked not unlike photographs of President McKinley. If this were Paris, Caroline would put the odd and the even numbers together and understand precisely the nature of the appointment. But Del had his father’s eyes, mouth; and there was little chance, she decided, of Ohio, known as the mother of presidents, having produced, through unlikely presidential lust, a consul to Pretoria, which was-where? Australia? She had not liked the geography teacher at Allenswood.

“South Africa could be a turbulent post,” said Adams; he, too, was gauging Hay’s response to his son’s abrupt elevation. “What is our policy, between the English and those Dutch lunatics?”

“Extreme benign neutrality,” said Del, looking at his father. “In public, that is.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” Hay shook his head and smiled broadly. “Neutral on England’s side. The great fun will be if there’s a war down there…”

“Splendid, perhaps?” Adams smiled. “Little?”

“Little-ish. Hardly splendid. The fun will be how our own Irish Catholic voters will respond. They are for anyone who’s against England, including these Dutchmen, these Boers, who are not only Protestant but refuse to allow the Catholics to practice their exciting rites. I predict Hibernian confusion hereabouts. I also predict that though it’s only noon, and I must greet, soberly and responsibly, the Diplomatic Corps, there is champagne no farther than the flight of a porcupine’s quill. We drink to Del!”

Adams and Caroline cheered; Del’s forehead remained, as always, oddly pale, while his face turned to rose.

After champagne had been ceremoniously drunk to the new consul general, Caroline announced, “I can’t think why I am celebrating. Now that I’m settled into N Street, Mr. Adams deserts me for Sicily, and Del for South Africa.”

“You still have my wife and me,” said Hay. “We’re more than enough, I should say.”

“And I don’t go till fall,” said Del. “The President still has some work for me to do, at the White House.” Again Caroline noted the father’s perplexed look.

“Then I have a few months of cousinhood if not unclehood.” Caroline was pleased that Del should still be at hand. She must learn Washington at every level, and as quickly as possible. “One must be like Napoleon, Mlle. Souvestre always said, never without a plan.”

“Even a woman must always have a plan?” Caroline had asked.

“Especially a woman. We don’t often have much else. After all, they don’t teach us artillery.”

Caroline had indeed worked out a plan of action. John Apgar Sanford could not believe it when she told him. He begged her to think twice; to do nothing; to let the law take its course. But she was convinced that she could bring Blaise around in a more startling and satisfying fashion; assuming, of course, that she had Napoleonic luck as well as cunning. But the key to her future was here in a strange tropical city, among strangers. She needed Del. She needed all the help that she could get. John-as a cousin, she now called him by his first name-was more than willing to help her; but he was, by nature, timid. He was also, at last, a widower. One night at Delmonico’s showy new restaurant, and with the witty Mrs. Fish at the next table, straining to hear every word (for once Caroline blessed Harry Lehr’s never-failing laughter), John had lost his timidity and proposed that once his term of mourning was at an end, she take his hand in marriage. Caroline’s eyes had filled with genuine tears. She had done her share of flirting in Paris and London, but aside from Del no one, as far as she could determine, had ever wanted to marry her; nor had she met anyone that she wanted to marry; hence, the comfortable image of herself alone, and in command-of her own life. Yet Caroline had been touched by John’s declaration; she would, she had said, have to think it over very carefully, for was not marriage the most important step in a young woman’s life? As she began to unfurl all the sentences that she had learned from Marguerite, the theater, novels, she started to laugh, while the tears continued to stream down her face.

“What are you laughing at?” John had looked hurt.

“Not you, dear John!” Mrs. Fish’s not unpiscine face was now costive with attention. “At myself, in the world, like this.”

Adams insisted that Caroline remain behind, as father and son departed together for the State Department across the street and what would doubtless be a very serious conversation indeed. “That,” said Adams, when the Hays had gone, “was a bit of a shocker.”

“Mr. Hay seemed unenthusiastic.”

“You felt that?” Adams was curious. “What else did you feel?”

“That the father expects the son to fail in life, and that the son…” She stopped.

“The son… what?”

“The son has tricked him.”

Adams nodded. “I think you’re right. Of course, I know nothing of sons. Only daughters-or nieces, I should say. I can’t think what it is that goes on or does not go on between fathers and sons. Cabot Lodge’s son George is a poet. I would be proud, I suppose. Cabot is not.”

“It is sad that you have no heir.”

Adams glared at her, with wrath. Whether real or simulated, the effect was disconcerting. Then he gave his abrupt laugh. “It has been four generations since John Adams, my great-grandfather, wrote the constitution of the state of Massachusetts, and we entered the republic’s history by launching, in effect, the republic. It’s quite enough that Brooks and I now bring the Adamses to a close. We were born to sum up our ancestors and predict-if not design-the future for our, I suspect, humble descendants. I refer,” he smiled mischievously, “not to any illicit issue that we have but to the sons of our brother Charles Francis.”

“I cannot imagine humility ever devouring the Adamses, even in the fifth generation.” Caroline enjoyed the old man. It was as if Paul Bourget had been wise as well as witty.

Adams now came to his point. “I am aware of your connection with Aaron Burr, and I seem to remember you mentioning, last summer, that you had some of his papers.”

“I do. Or I think I do. Anyway, I don’t have to share them with Blaise. They came to me from my mother. They are in leather cases. I’ve glanced at them, but that’s all. It seems that Grandfather Schuyler persuaded Burr to write some fragments of memoir. Grandfather worked in Burr’s law office, when Burr was very old. There is also a journal grandfather kept during the years that he knew Burr. There is also,” she frowned, “a journal, which I’ve never looked at, because my mother, I think it was she, wrote on the cover, ‘Burn.’ But it is still in its case, and no one has ever burned it-or probably read it! At least I haven’t and I don’t think my father ever did.”

“Clearly, your bump of curiosity is less than ordinary. It is not like my family, where everyone has been writing down everything for a hundred years, and if anyone were to write ‘Burn,’ we would obey, with relief.” Adams placed two small, highly polished shoes on the fender to the fireplace. “Some time ago I wrote a book about your ancestor Burr…”

“Perhaps my ancestor. Though I am absolutely certain that he was. He is romantic.”

“I thought him, forgive me, a windbag.”

Caroline was startled. “Compared to Jefferson!”

Adams’s laugh was loud and genuine, no longer the stylized bark of approval. “Oh, you have me there! Do you read American history?”

“Only to find out about Burr.”

“American history is deeply enervating. I can tell you that firsthand. I’ve spent my life reading and writing it. Enervating because there are no women in it.”

“Perhaps we can change that.” Caroline thought of Mlle. Souvestre’s battles for women’s suffrage.

“I hope you can. Anyway, I’ve done with our history. There’s no pattern to it, that I can see, and that’s all I ever cared about. I don’t care what happened. I want to know why it happened.”

“I think, in my ignorance, I am the opposite. I’ve always thought that the only power was to know everything that has ever happened.”

Adams gave her a sidelong glance. “Power? Is that what intrigues you?”

“Well, yes. One doesn’t want to be a victim-because of not knowing.” Caroline thought of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling; thought of her father, whom she had known too little about; thought of the dark woman painted in the style of Winterhalter, who was completely unknown to her, and always referred to, with a kind of awe, as “dark.”

“I think you must come join your uncle in Paris. I give graduate courses to girls, too; girls, mind you, not women.”

Caroline smiled. “I shall enroll.” She rose to go. He stood; he was smaller than she. “I shall also let you read the Burr papers.”

“I was going to ask you that. I destroy a good deal of what I write. Probably nowhere near enough. I have been considering adding my Burr manuscript to the ongoing bonfire.”

“Why a windbag?” Caroline was curious. “After all, he never theorized, like the others.”

“He was the founder of the Tammany Hall-style politics, and that is windbagging. But I am unfair. He made one prescient remark, which I like, when he said farewell to the Senate. ‘If the Constitution is to perish, its dying agonies will be seen on this floor.’ ”

“Will it perish?”

“All things do.” At the door Adams kissed her chastely on each cheek. She felt the prickling of his beard; smelled his cologne-water. “You must marry Del.”

“And leave all this for Pretoria?”

Adams laughed. “Except for my unique, avuncular presence, I suspect that Washington and Pretoria are much the same.”

Del thought not. Caroline and Helen Hay dined with Del at Wormley’s, a small hotel with numerous dining rooms, both small and large, and, traditionally, the best food in Washington. Whenever the young Hays wanted to escape the medieval splendor of the joint house with Adams, they would cross Lafayette Square to the hotel at Fifteenth and H Streets, where the mulatto Mr. Wormley presided. As the senior Hays were committed that evening to the British embassy, Del and Helen invited Caroline to dinner, to celebrate Pretoria. They were joined in a small upstairs dining room by a lean young Westerner named James Burden Day. “He’s the assistant comptroller of the United States, for the next few hours,” said Del, as they took their seats in the low-ceilinged room with its view of the vast granite Treasury Building down the street.

“What do you assist at controlling?” asked Caroline.

“The currency, ma’am.” The voice was softly Western. “Such as it is.”

“He’s a Democrat,” said Del, “and so he’s devoted to silver, sixteen to one.”

“I,” said Helen Hay, large and comfortable-looking, like her mother, with dimples like Del, “am devoted to shad-roe, which is coming in now, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Helen had a habit of repeating phrases. The courtly black waiter, more family butler than mere restaurant worker, said that it was, it was, and proposed diamond terrapin, a house specialty, and, of course, canvasback duck, which would be served, Caroline knew, bloody and terrible. But she agreed to the menu. Del continued with the champagne, begun at Mr. Adams’s breakfast.

“I should be giving the dinner,” said Caroline. “In the consul general’s honor.”

“You must start to do things jointly.” Helen Hay even sounded like her mother, the amiable voice, which always spoke a command. In a well-run world, what splendid generals Clara and Helen Hay would have made. During the shad course, Caroline decided that she could do a lot worse than marry Del; on the other hand, she could imagine nothing worse than a season (unless it be a year) in Pretoria. Plainly, her interest in him was less than romantic. She had often wondered what it was that other girls meant when they said that they were “in love,” or deeply attracted or whatever adhesive verb a lady might politely use. Caroline found certain masculine types attractive, as types, quite apart from personality-the young man on her right, addressed by Del as Jim, was such a one. Del himself was too much, physically, created in his mother’s baroque mould. But had she not always been taught that fineness of character is the best that any woman could hope for in a mate? And Del’s was incomparably fine.

Thinking of Del’s fineness, Caroline turned to the figure on her right; he was definitely not baroque, she decided. Gothic, in fact-slender, aspiring, lean; she tried to recall Henry Adams’s other adjectives in praise of Gothic; and failed. Besides, the young man’s hair was curly and its color was not gray stone but pale sand; yet the eyes were Chartres blue. Was-what was his name? there were three, of course, to indicate noble birth in the South: James Burden Day-was his character incomparably fine? She was tempted to ask him; but asked instead how a Democrat enjoyed working for a Republican administration. “I like it better than they do.” He smiled; the incisors were oddly canine; would he bite? she hoped. “But it’s just another job to them, and that’s all government is-in this country, anyway. Jobs. Mine should belong to a Republican, and it will in September when I go home.”

“To do what?”

“To come back here,” Del answered for his friend. “He’s running for Congress.”

“Don’t tempt the gods.” Day looked worried; and Caroline found this appealing.

“Then you’ll have an elected job. The best kind,” she said.

“Oh, the worst! The worst!” Helen was adding yet more shad-roe to a Berninian figure that threatened to erupt into extravagant rococo. The arms in their puffed sleeves already looked like huge caterpillars, ready to burst and spread huge iridescent wings. “Every two years Mr. Day will have to go home and persuade the voters that he is still one of them, that he’ll get the government to give them things. It’s a tiring business. Father’s job is best.”

“But the Secretary of State must please the President, mustn’t he? And if he doesn’t, he goes.” Caroline addressed the question not to Helen but to Del.

Predictably, Helen answered. “Oh, it’s more complicated than that. The Major must also please the Secretary of State. If Father should leave-let’s say before an election-that would hurt the Major. Truly hurt the Major. So they must please each other.”

“Both,” said Del, “must please the Senate. Father hates the Senate and everyone in it, including his friend Mr. Lodge.”

“Even so,” Helen had miraculously consumed, in a minute, ten thousand shad’s eggs, “secretary of state is the best of all the jobs in this funny place.”

“I’m sure,” said Caroline. She turned to Del. “I keep forgetting to ask your father. What does a secretary of state do?”

Del laughed. Helen did not; she said, “He conducts all foreign relations…”

Del said, through her, “Father says he has three jobs. One is to fight off foreign governments when they make claims against us. Two, to help American citizens in their claims against foreign governments, usually fraudulent; and, three, to provide jobs that don’t exist for the friends of senators who do.”

“What senator got you Pretoria?” asked Day.

Del looked contented. “That was the President. Every now and then he gets a job he can give away himself, and so Pretoria is mine.”

“We hate the Boers.” Helen helped herself to a roast, whose weight on the serving-dish was such a strain on the liveried butler that his forearms trembled; but without compassion she hacked and shoved at the lamb. “We are for the British everywhere.”

“Maybe you are, but we’re not back where I come from,” said Day.

“Actually, we’re neutral.” Del frowned at Helen. “That’s my job in South Africa, to be neutral.”

“I won’t give you away.” Day grinned. “But Colonel Bryan’s positive your father and the Major have made all sorts of secret arrangements with the British.”

“Never!” Del seemed truly alarmed. “If we have any policy it’s to get the British out of the Caribbean, out of the Pacific…”

“Out of Canada?” asked Caroline.

“Well, why not? The Major ran as a believer in the eventual, mutual, more perfect, union between Canada and the United States, because we’re all of us English-speaking, you see…”

“Except,” said Caroline, “for the millions who speak French.”

“That’s right,” said Del, not listening. It was a characteristic of Washington, Caroline had noticed-or was it politics?-that no one ever listened to anyone who did not have at least access to power. But Day had heard her; and he murmured in her ear, “Back home we figure these fancy folks here are no better than foreigners.”

“I should love to go back home with you. Where is it?”

Day listed, very briefly, the pleasures of his Southwestern state. Then the latest rumors about Admiral Dewey were discussed. Would he be the Democratic choice for president? Day thought that Dewey could defeat Bryan at the convention. But could Dewey then defeat McKinley? He thought not. The country was, suddenly, marvellously prosperous. The war had given a great impetus to business. Expansion was a tonic; even the farmers-Day’s future constituency-were less desperate than usual. Finally, Helen shifted the subject to Newport, Rhode Island, and Day fell silent; and Caroline held her own, as the uses to which the summer should be put were analyzed. Apparently, Helen and her sister, Alice, planned to divide the Newport season between them. They would not go together: too many Hays, as it were, on the market. Would Caroline join one or the other of them? Caroline said that she might, if she were invited, but no one, she lied, had invited her. Actually Mrs. Jack Astor, after making Caroline promise never to play tennis with her husband, had invited her for July, and Caroline had said that everything would depend on the state of some unfinished business. Mrs. Jack hoped that her bridge was good. Colonel Jack no longer played bridge: “It’s wonderful to be inside when he’s outside. Almost as satisfying as divorce.” Mrs. Jack was definitely racy. She had always played tennis when her husband played bridge. Now that he had taken to the courts she had taken to the card-table. “We cannot be together,” she would say, as if quoting some biblical text.

Halfway across Lafayette Park, Del put his arm through Caroline’s. Helen and Day, not touching, were up ahead, long shadows cast in front of them by dull street lamps which emphasized the sylvan nature of the square’s confusion of ill-tended trees and bushes, crisscrossed by paths, all converging on General Jackson’s monument. “I suppose I must ask sometime.” Del was nervous.

“Ask what?” Caroline felt, again, tears come to her eyes. Just who, she suddenly wondered, was she? Plainly, some part of her had never been introduced to the other.

“Well, would you marry me! I mean-will you marry me?”

The second invitation to a lifelong relationship had arrived, so to speak, in the mail. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed, astonishing both of them. “I mean, oh, no, not now.” She lowered her voice to a more lady-like level. “No, not now,” she improvised, feebly.

“You don’t want to go to Pretoria, I can understand that.” Del sounded glum. To their right, St. John’s Church more than ever looked like a mad Hellenist’s dream of ancient Greece (the columned portico) and Byzantium (the gold-domed tower).

“No, I don’t want not to go to Pretoria.” Caroline paused; the tears had dried on her face. “I think I have put too many negatives in that sentence.”

“Well, just one is too many for me.”

“It’s not Pretoria. It’s not you. It’s me. And Blaise. And business.”

“We have all summer,” said Del, “to do your business in. Then…”

“Well, then-anything. I want,” she said, to her own surprise, “to be married. To, that is,” she added, surprising herself for what she hoped would be the last time, “you.”

So the unofficial engagement was unofficially arrived at in the dark shadow of the Romanesque monument of the Hay-Adams house, glaring like some medieval monk across the square at the rather sporty, slightly louche, White House.

Unfinished business began the next day when Cousin John arrived at her house in a “herdic cab,” a local invention, consisting mostly of glass, like a royal coach. “You can see everything,” he said, as they drove along Fourteenth Street, between Pennsylvania Avenue and F Street. “This was what they used to call Newspaper Row.”

Caroline saw a line of irregular red brick houses, very much in the style of the rest of the old part of the city. At the end of the line was Willard Hotel, covered with scaffolding: it was to be enlarged, redone. Willard’s also faced on Pennsylvania Avenue and the recently completed-after a third of a century, everyone said with some awe-Treasury Building. At the other end of Newspaper Row was the Ebbitt House, a large hotel that stayed open even in the summer months, a true novelty. On the front of one of the red brick buildings was a faded sign, The New York Herald.

“All the newspapers have offices here?”

Sanford nodded. “During the war Washington was the news, for the first time, ever. So the journalists set up shop along here.” Then he pointed across F Street. “Your friend Mr. Hay’s Western Union is right across the street, and, of course, there’s Willard’s, where all the politicians used to gather-and still gather-in the bars and barber shops and dining rooms. Then when they felt particularly inspired, they’d wander across the street here, and talk to the newspaper boys.”

“But the row has moved…”

“Regrouped.” The carriage paused in front of the Evening Star’s building, which occupied the block between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, a four-story brick building painted yellow. “The color,” Caroline noted, “must be a recent tribute to Mr. Hearst.”

“No doubt.” Sanford frowned. “Your plan…” he began.

“Nothing ventured,” she concluded. Caroline quite liked the look of what she now took to be her future city.

The carriage turned into Pennsylvania Avenue. Down the avenue’s center, there were two streetcar tracks, parallel to one another. Electrical cars glided, more or less smoothly, from northwest, the Treasury, to southeast, the Capitol, and back again. Unlike New York City, Washington had few automobiles: “devil wagons,” according to the large black woman who presided over the N Street kitchen. As always, Caroline was struck by the number of black people; they seemed to be the city while everyone else was, like herself, a transient member of an alien race. “A city of hotels,” she said, as they passed a huge Romanesque building, with a turreted tower.

“And medieval cathedrals.” Sanford did not appreciate the great new post office, behind which had once flourished Marble Alley, with its thousand brothels, once known locally as “Hooker’s division” since the girls had been so busily employed by that general’s troops.

“The influence of Mr. Adams?”

“His architect’s, yes. Washington, thanks to Mr. Richardson, has leapt from first-century Rome to twelfth-century Avignon, with almost nothing in between.”

“That means there’s still a renaissance to look forward to.” The carriage turned into E Street, and stopped before yet another Adams-influenced building, all low arches and high-peaked roofs. Across the building’s pale rough stone front, a sign proclaimed: The Washington Post. Out-of-town newspapers also maintained offices in the Post’s building, their names inscribed on upper windows. Caroline duly noted that the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner shared an office. Mr. Hearst had already dropped his anchor at the capital in the form of a scandalously brilliant California newspaperman called Ambrose Bierce. The Pittsburgh Dispatch and the Cleveland Plain Dealer also advertised from fourth-story windows. The names of these newspapers, unknown to her a few months ago, now caused pleasurable reverberations in her head.

In front of the Post building, there was a large newsstand where out-of-town-and even out-of-hemisphere-newspapers were on sale. Beneath an awning, next to the busy newsstand, a high blackboard stood, covered with mysterious white and yellow lines.

“What is that for? A lottery?”

“Baseball scores. From all over the country.”

“Is that the game,” asked Caroline, “they play with a wooden stick?”

“Yes.” Sanford smiled. “As someone who is about to become deeply involved in American life, I suggest you know all about baseball.” Sanford now led her into Gerstenberg’s Restaurant, next door to the Post. The interior was smoky, and smelled of vinegar-of sauerkraut, to be exact, she decided sadly; she had never been inclined to German cuisine. A German waiter in shirt-sleeves and red galluses led them past the crowded bar. “Newspapermen,” whispered Sanford, as if warning her of lepers in a lazaret.

They were established at a table in the back, close to the swing-door to the kitchen. Huge schooners of beer sailed past them, and any moment Caroline expected to be drowned by one; but the waiters were as dexterous as they were loud. Then the man they had come to meet joined them.

Josiah J. Vardeman was a mulatto. Quite unprepared for anyone so exotic, Caroline gazed in fascination at the red kinky hair, café au lait skin and unmistakably Negroid features in which were set pale gray eyes. Mr. Vardeman was not yet forty; dapper in appearance; elaborate in manners. “I am late, Miss Sanford. Forgive me. I have been with advertisers. You can imagine. Good to see you again, Mr. Sanford.”

Caroline stared at Sanford, who looked at her innocently. He had intended to surprise her; and he had succeeded. “I see you are tolerant of the opposition,” she said. Vardeman looked bewildered; she explained, “I mean you come here …”

“Oh, yes. A German place. But then my father’s family were German. From the Rhineland.”

“I meant here, next to your opposition, the Washington Post.”

“Oh, that.” He laughed. “Well, we are so much older. We can afford to be nice to the new folks. I’m not saying I wouldn’t mind having some of their advertisers. They’re good at business, those people. We’re not, sad to say. But we Vardemans are an old family, and I guess old families lose some of their vigor, don’t they? Europe’s full of that, I reckon.”

Caroline then knew delight. “Old family? Oh, Mr. Vardeman, we’re all of us-everyone there is-as old as Adam and Eve and no older.”

“I am second to none in my belief in Scripture, Miss Sanford, but families that have had great men in them sort of dry up at the roots, you might say, and the next crop or two don’t amount to all that much.”

“I wouldn’t know. My own family is nondescript except for one ancestor, perhaps.” How on earth, she wondered, could she get this extraordinary creature deeper into genealogy?

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Oh, no one very highly regarded nowadays, or even known-Aaron Burr,” she said, hoping that the name would mean absolutely nothing.

She was disappointed. Vardeman clapped his hands. “We are practically related!” Caroline was pleased to see that a number of surprised, not to mention suspicious, looks were turned in their direction. Cousin John looked very pale indeed; to compensate, no doubt, for this new relation. “My mother was a Jefferson. One of the Abilene, Maryland, Jeffersons. So your ancestor was my ancestor’s vice-president.”

Caroline expressed delight and wonder. She had always heard that Jefferson had had a number of children by a mulatto slave girl; no doubt, this was the descendant of one of them, passing, as perhaps they all did by now, for white. In any case, Caroline knew that she had at least one thing in common with Mr. Josiah J. (for Jefferson?) Vardeman: each was descended, literally, from a bastard. Now it was her task to have something else in common.

“I am interested, as my cousin has told you, in acquiring the Washington Tribune. I have developed a passion for newspapers…”

“Devilish expensive passion,” murmured Sanford, lighting a cigar. Caroline felt like a man; like a business man. This was life. She wished that she knew how to smoke! A cigarette smoked openly in a German restaurant would quite overshadow Mrs. Fish’s girlish capers at lofty Sherry’s. Mr. Vardeman, lineage forgotten, was watching her attentively. “There are,” she said, “five thousand shares in all, and all owned by you or your family,”

“Yes. It’s always been a family newspaper. First, Mr. Wallach owned it. Then he started up the Evening Star. I’m third generation of his family. A cadet branch,” he added, not knowing, Caroline decided, what the phrase meant.

Caroline took a deep breath; and inhaled her cousin’s cigar smoke. No, she would not take up cigarettes, she decided; she coughed once, and said: “I accept your offer of twenty-two dollars and fifty cents for each of the five thousand shares.” Next to her, Sanford coughed. She had taken him by surprise. But she had not taken herself by surprise. She had spent a lot of time in N Street, thinking. She was betting almost everything that she had on a single throw of the dice.

Mr. Vardeman stared at her, as if not certain whether he was being included in a particularly high-toned verbal game. Then, as she gave no signal that she was anything other than serious, he said, “What will you do with a newspaper, if I may ask? They’re not easy or cheap to run, as I can tell you firsthand. The Tribune loses money every issue. We’d have to close down if it weren’t for our printing shop, and all those visiting cards they make for everybody. Mr. Sanford’s told you about our books, I guess.” Mr. Vardeman had finished his stein of beer. At the bottom of the now-empty mug, Caroline noted the ominous legend “Stolen from Gerstenberg’s.”

“Indeed I have,” said Cousin John. “And there’s no doubt that the Tribune’s name is a great one in the city. But the Post and the Star have sewed up the town. What can anyone do to change that?” He looked at Vardeman, who looked at Caroline, who said, “I’m sure there are new things to be done. Who would have thought Mr. Hearst could have revived the New York Journal?” This was a daring move, because for all that Caroline knew, Blaise and Hearst might already have been in correspondence with Vardeman. On the other hand, she had had tea with Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the sweetly stern mother of the most ambitious man in publishing, if not the United States, and Mrs. Hearst had said, “I have spent all that I intend on my son’s newspapers. I now want to spend money on educating young Americans.”

“So that they will be too clever to read your son’s newspapers?”

The old lady had looked, first, severe; then she had laughed. “I had not thought of that.” Then she had proceeded to speak longingly of California, and of a university at an exotic place called Palo Alto. What her son was doing for journalism, she would do for education. Plainly, mother and son would be forever at cross-purposes.

“Mr. Hearst’s people were down here a few months ago. They looked over the plant, the books, everything. They’re still very interested.” Vardeman’s attempt at selling was perfunctory. He did not expect anyone to pay the price he was asking for what was, essentially, a run-down printer’s shop.

“Do we have,” asked Caroline tentatively, “an agreement?”

Solemnly, Vardeman extended his hand across the table. Solemnly, Caroline shook it. “The Tribune,” said the now former publisher, “is no longer a Wallach-Jefferson-Vardeman newspaper-after forty-two long, long years,” he added somewhat anti-climactically.

“It is now a Sanford newspaper.” Caroline felt a ringing in her ears which could be either victory, or nausea from too much cigar smoke.

Vardeman himself took her through the Tribune offices, in a three-story brick building with arched windows that looked out on the north side of Market Square, a curiously ill-defined, and hardly square, open area between Seventh and Ninth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue. “A wonderful location,” said Vardeman, sincerely. “This is the heart of the commercial district, where all our advertisers are.”

“Or will be,” said Cousin John.

Caroline stood on the dirty stoop beneath the faded sign Washington Tribune and looked across the square, a riot of electrical and telephone wires, of turreted red brick modern buildings in the medieval style which she realized that Henry Adams, in his serenely ruthless way, was imposing on the capital city. To Caroline’s left the Center Market loomed, a combination of windowed exposition hall and Provençal cathedral, whose brick walls were the color of dried blood-Washington’s emblematic color, in which were set not stained-glass windows but dusty panes of conservatory glass. Here farmers from Virginia and Maryland brought their produce; and here in the vast interior, democracy reigned, with everyone buying and selling. Vardeman identified two banks in nearby C Street. “The one on the left held our mortgage,” he said. “But not any more.”

They entered a small waiting room, where no one waited. Dusty creaking stairs led to the offices and the newsroom, while a corridor, the length of the small building, led to the presses which were located in a converted stables at the back. Caroline could never get enough of the actual business of printing. Rolls of paper affected her rather the way bolts of silk affected Mrs. Jack Astor, while the smell of printer’s ink gave her not only an instant headache but, equally, swift delight. In a pleasurable haze, she met her new employees. The chief printer was the money-maker; and appropriately grave. He was German; spoke with an accent; came from the Palatinate. Caroline spoke German to him; and was certain that she had won his heart. Cousin John asked to see invoices; and lost the newly gained heart.

The editorial offices overlooked Market Place. The editor was a tall Southerner, with red hair and side-whiskers. “This is Mr. Trimble, the best editor in Washington, and a Washingtonian, too. Almost as much a native as the darkies,” Vardeman added; he was prone, Caroline had noticed, to mentioning darkies rather more often than was entirely necessary. “What,” asked Caroline, “is a true native?”

“Oh, you’ve just got to be born here. I mean, you don’t have to be like Mr. Sanford’s Apgar relatives, who go back to the first day.” The voice was high but not unpleasant.

“Are there Washington Apgars?”

Cousin John nodded. “Apgars are everywhere. They outnumber everyone else because they marry everyone. Some of them came here in 1800, I think. They were in dry,” said Cousin John sadly, “goods.”

“My family came with General Jackson,” said Mr. Trimble. “You can always tell when us natives got here by our names. The Trimbles, like the Blairs, came with Jackson, and after we settled in, we never went home, any more than the Blairs did. Nobody goes back to Nashville if he can help it.”

“But the President-Jackson, that is-does, or did,” said Caroline, charmed by her new editor.

“Well, he couldn’t help it,” said Mr. Trimble. “What do you intend to do with the old Trib?”

“Why-be successful!” Caroline’s ears were now ringing again; she wondered if she was about to faint. Where once there had been four Poussins there was now a newspaper and a printer’s shop in an African city half a world away from home. Was she mad? she wondered. More important, could she win? She was certain that in the war with Blaise she had just won a significant battle if not the war itself, but Blaise was now, oddly, secondary to the newspaper, which was hers-became hers, as she sat at a rolltop desk to write out the second and final payment on her account at the Morgan Bank; and gave it to Vardeman, who then signed the various documents that Cousin John had brought with him. The transfer was complete.

“You will see a lot of me, Mr. Trimble.” Caroline was now at the door. “I’m here for at least a year. Maybe forever.”

“Are we to continue as before?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing is to be changed, except the circulation.”

“How will you change that?” asked Vardeman, with something less than his habitual ceremony: the check in hand gave him gravity.

“Have you no murders to report?” asked Caroline.

“Well, sure. I mean, we put the police news on the last page, like always. But it’s just the usual. A body found floating in the river…”

“Surely, from time to time, a beautiful woman is pulled out of the muddy cold dark Potomac River. A beautiful young woman perhaps divided into sections, and wearing only a negligée.”

“Caroline,” murmured Cousin John, so shocked that he used, in public, her first name.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right. No negligee could survive being quartered.”

“The Tribune is a serious paper,” said Vardeman, thick lips suddenly compressed like punctured bicycle tires. “Devoted to the Republican Party, to the tariff…”

“Well, Mr. Trimble, let us never forget our seriousness. But let us also remember that a beautiful young woman, murdered in a crime of passion, is also a serious figure if only to herself, while the crime-murder-is the most serious of all, in peacetime, that is.”

“You want… uh, yellow journalism, Miss Sanford?” Trimble was staring at her, a look of amusement in his pale blue eyes.

“Yellow, ochre, café au lait,” tactlessly, she looked at yellow-brown Vardeman, “I don’t care what color. No, that’s not true. I am partial to gold.”

“What about the gold standard?” asked Cousin John, eager to make light of everything that she had said.

“As a friend of Mr. Hay, I favor that, too. Whatever,” Caroline added as graciously as she could, “it is. You see, Mr. Trimble, I am a serious woman.”

“Yes, Miss, I see that all right, and I’ll send someone over to police headquarters right now to see what they got in the morgue.”

Caroline recalled Hearst on the floor, making up the front page of the Journal, the murdered woman slowly coming, as it were, alive under the embellishments. “Do that,” she said. “But remember that the illustration on the front page…”

“Front page,” groaned Vardeman, looking out at Market Square.

“… need not resemble too closely what is actually in the morgue.”

“But we… you… the Tribune is a newspaper,” said Vardeman.

“No,” said Caroline. “It is not a newspaper. Because there is no such thing as a newspaper. News is what we decide it is. Oh, how I love saying ‘we.’ It is a sign of perfect ignorance, isn’t it?” The ringing in her ears had stopped; she had never felt so entirely in command of herself. “Obviously earthquakes and election results and the scores of… baseball teams,” she was proud to have remembered the name of the national sport, “are news, and must be duly noted. But the rest of what we print is literature, of a kind that is meant to entertain and divert and excite our readers so that they will buy the things our advertisers will want to sell them. So we must be-imaginative, Mr. Trimble.”

“I shall do my best, Miss Sanford.”

In the street Cousin John turned on her, with unfeigned anger. “You can’t be serious…”

“I have never been more serious. No.” She stopped herself. “That’s not true. What I mean to say is that I have never been serious about anything until now.”

“Caroline, this is… this is…” He launched like an anathema the word. “Corruption.”

“Corruption? Of what? The newspaper readers of Washington? Hardly. They know it all. Of the Tribune, a dull, dying paper? The word doesn’t apply. I see no corruption in what I mean to do. Perhaps,” she was judicious, “we shall offer a true reflection of the world about us. But you cannot blame a mirror for what it shows.”

“But your mirror willfully distorts…”

“A newspaper has no choice. It must be partisan in one way or another. But where is the corruption in this case?”

“An appeal to base appetites…”

“Will increase circulation. I did not make those appetites base.”

“But that is corrupt, to pander to them.”

“To gain readers? Surely, a small price to pay for…” Caroline stopped; a herdic cab had seen them, and now drew up to the front step.

“To pay for what?”

“To pay, Cousin John, for power. The only thing worth having in this democracy of yours.” More than a generation separated Caroline from Henry Adams’s Mrs. Lightfoot Lee; now, Caroline decided, it was possible for a woman to achieve what she wanted on her own and not through marriage, or some similar surrogate. She had not realized to what an extent Mlle. Souvestre had given her confidence. She not only did not fear failure, she did not expect it. “Which is probably proof that I am mad,” she said to Cousin John, as he helped her down from the cab, in the dense lemon-scented shade of the twin magnolia trees.

“I don’t need any proof of that,” he said, quite ignoring the non-sequitur nature of her remark: they had been talking of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling and the ever more intricate games that were now being played at law.

Caroline led her cousin into the house, to be greeted by Marguerite with complaints about the cook, who appeared, rumbling what sounded like powerful voodoo curses against Marguerite. As usual, the crisis was based upon misunderstanding. Parisian French and Afro-American seemed always at cross-purposes. Caroline was placating the confusion of two languages, as she led Cousin John into the narrow, dim, cool drawing room that ran the length of the small house, where they sat in front of a fireplace of white marble, filled now with ceramic pots containing early roses, an innovation that had caused deep laughter in the kitchen: “Flowers is for the yard. Wood’s for the fire.”

“I wish you were more enthusiastic.” Caroline wished there was a stronger word that she could use. But their relationship was insufficiently comfortable. He seemed to think that they might yet be engaged; and she allowed him to think this on the sensible ground that as anything is possible most things are improbable. Their cousinage was also a complication. He was, above all, a Sanford; and took himself seriously, in loco parentis.

“You must,” said Cousin John, surprisingly, “meet my cousins, the Apgars. They live in Logan Circle. It’s not the West End, of course; but old Washington still prefers that neighborhood. You should have some solid friends here.”

“Unlike the Hays?” She was mischievous.

“The Hays are too grand to be of use, if you should need them, while the Apgars are always here and ready to…”

“In dry goods still?”

“One branch, yes. Apgar’s Department Store is the second largest after Woodward and Lothrop. Most are lawyers. I have told the ladies to call.”

“I’ll ask the department store Apgars to advertise in the Tribune.” Caroline was serious. “The spring sales-is that what they call them?-have started.” She had become a devoted reader of advertisements.

“Well you could ask, I suppose.”

“Is Mr. Vardeman common?” Caroline suddenly recalled the reddish tight curls, sand-colored face.

“I should think very.”

“No, I meant is it common for mulattoes to mix with the white people?”

Cousin John was amused. “No. But he has been allowed, in many circles, to pass, and that does happen here, in certain circles. I’d be much happier if you’d settle in New York, where you belong.”

Caroline surveyed the naval mementoes on the wall opposite. A crude painting of a ship in flames, from the War of 1812, about which she knew nothing, beneath crossed sabres topped by a commodore’s hat. Under glass, a torn British ensign. “I feel as if I’ve been transported to the Roman empire,” she said. “You know, the interesting part, toward the end.”

Cousin John laughed. “We think it’s hardly begun, the United States.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” But Caroline was sure of nothing about this peculiar country except that its excessiveness appealed to her: there was far too much of everything except history. But that would come, inexorably, and she meant to be, somehow, in the mainstream of it. Suddenly, she saw history as nothing more than the Potomac River, swift yellow and swirling about dun-colored rocks that seemed to have been hurled down from the severe wooded heights of Virginia, where grew vines whose laurel-like leaves could cause human skin to erupt in itching sores. The likeness between victor’s laurel and victim’s poison ivy had not been lost upon Caroline when she had first been warned by Helen Hay as they drove out to the bronze memorial that Henry Adams had commissioned Saint-Gaudens to create, a memorial to that dead Heart, Clover Adams. Almost as symbolic of the city as the poisoned laurel was the seated, sorrowing veiled figure, with no inscription and, oddly, no agreed-upon sex: it could be a young man, or a young woman. Characteristically, Henry Adams would not say which.

“I shall see Apgars.” Caroline was reassuring. “Besides, I shall have no choice, this summer, with everyone gone.”

“You won’t stay either.” Cousin John was firm. “The heat is intolerable.”

“I can tolerate quite a lot. But I shall occasionally long for the cool of…” She stopped.

“Newport, Rhode Island?”

“No. Saint-Cloud. Is the house mine or not?”

“Divided, until a decision’s made. What next-with Blaise?”

“I don’t know. I shall see what he has to offer me now.”

During the next week Caroline spent most of each day at the office of the Tribune. She got to know Mr. Trimble as well as she thought she should know an employee who was also a man and not a servant, a new sort of relationship for her. She spoke to the printer in German; tried to inspire him to an even greater output of visiting cards, wedding and funeral announcements, invitations of every sort, but the season was drawing to a close and not even her exhortations could inspire the government ladies to pay more calls on one another, or to excite even more young couples to the altars of Protestant St. John’s or of Catholic St. Mary’s. Most of her evenings were spent behind the magnolia sentinels, teaching Marguerite-and the African woman-English. Del was put off for the moment while she considered the awesome fact of matrimony and Pretoria, in reverse order, actually; but Del did not know that Cousin John had retreated to New York and his other life, the law. Mr. Hay was trying to avoid a war with England over Canada or with Canada over England. Caroline was amused to note that Hay never referred to Canada by name; only as “Our Lady of the Snows.” Thus far, no Apgar lady had called at N Street. Thus far, no new advertisers had called at the Tribune offices. But Caroline was well pleased by Trimble’s efforts to emulate Hearst. A corpse or two had found its way to the front page for the first time, ever. Each corpse had resulted in a dozen cancellations; each corpse had sold a thousand more newspapers on the stands. Caroline now knew what it was to be Hearst; but without his resources.

On a Wednesday afternoon, Caroline was in the compositor’s room, studying the next day’s front page with her printer. A cat slept on the window-sill, oblivious to the noises of Market Square. In the next room she could hear Trimble’s voice, coaxing an advertiser. Disloyally, Caroline moved from the first to the third page a story concerning the Virgin Islands, which Hay thought that the United States might be obliged to buy from Denmark for the five million dollars made available by the Senate, courtesy of Senator Lodge. A robbery in the West End, specifically Connecticut Avenue, took the place of the Virgin Islands, and one Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham was now world-famous-or capitally famous-for having been robbed during the night of her diamonds. Caroline had inserted the adjective “fabulous” before the word “diamonds,” despite the objection of the elderly reporter, who had said, “They were just run-of-the-mill stuff, Miss Sanford. A pin. A ring. Earrings.”

“But aren’t the Binghams rich?” Caroline toyed with the notion of a crime ring: “Connecticut Avenue’s Reign of Terror” she saw a headline (as usual, with her, too long); then a sub-headline: “Where will the thieves strike next?”

“The Binghams own the Silversmith Dairies. They advertise with us, or used to. Yes, ma’am, they’re rich enough. But the jewels-”

“Priceless heirlooms of one of Washington’s oldest and most aristocratic families,” Caroline had added to the story. “If that does not delight the Binghams, nothing will,” she said to Trimble, who was amused but dubious, as always, of her inspirations. “We shall be awash with milk advertising,” she promised now that Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham’s jewels were about to be first-page news, and her place in the city’s highly fluid patriciate inscribed boldly if not in a book of gold in meaningful type-set.

The black doorkeeper stood in the doorway. “There’s a gentleman, Miss, who wants to talk to the publishers, to Mr. Vardeman.”

“What about?” Caroline picked up an engraving of the Bing-ham mansion; and indicated that it was to be at the center of the column.

“He says he’s from Mr. Hearst. His name’s the same as yours, Miss.”

Caroline stood up straight; seized the nearest of many rags and rubbed, as best she could, the ink smudges from her fingers. “Did you tell him who the publisher is?”

“No, ma’am. He was pretty clear he wanted to see Mr. Vardeman.”

“I’ll see him in the office.” Caroline had taken for herself a small dim room overlooking the printing shed in the brick yard. A framed copy of her first front page was behind the modest desk (“Body of unknown beauty found nude at Navy Yard”). Two incongruous Louis XVI chairs were the only furniture in the room. The spring’s first flies made mid-air carousels.

Blaise was satisfyingly astonished. “What are you doing here? Where’s Vardeman?”

“Mr. Vardeman is devoting his time to genealogy. He is descended from Thomas Jefferson, he believes, which gives the two of us a lot to talk about…”

“You bought the Trib?”

“I bought the Trib.”

They faced one another: implacable enemies as only the identical can be. “You did this to spite me.”

“Or delight me. Sit down, Blaise.”

Sulkily, he turned the gilded chair backwards and straddled it as if he were riding a horse. Demurely, she sat at her desk, strewn with unpaid bills. She wished now that she had paid more attention to Mlle. Souvestre’s excellent but dull teacher of mathematics.

“How much,” asked Blaise, “did it cost you?”

“Two or three Poussins.”

“My pictures!”

“Our pictures. I shall pay you your share, of course, when you give me my share of-”

“That’s for the lawyers.” Blaise was looking about the dismal office. Caroline was pleased at the amount of squalor she could endure. She regretted that she had not followed her first impulse to hang on the wall a lurid four-color portrait of Admiral Dewey, with the legend “Our Hero.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Blaise.

“I’ve never understood why whenever someone is truly serious, someone always says that. Of course I’m serious. I am,” Caroline lowered her lashes shyly, the way Helen Hay did when the waiter brought around dessert, “working here, as publisher and editor, just like Mr. Hearst.”

Blaise laughed, without joy. He had seen the framed front page; and guessed that it was her work. “There’s more to this than murders,” he said.

“Yes. There’s Mrs. Hearst’s money to pay his debts. Or was. She goes back to California. She will not help him any longer.”

“Who’ll pay your debts? The old Trib loses money like a sieve.”

“I suppose that I will. From the estate.”

Blaise swept the gold chair to one side; and walked over to the window and stared through the fly-specked glass at the print shop beneath. “That makes money. The paper loses it.” He turned around. “How much do you want?”

“I’m not selling.”

“Everything has its price.”

Caroline laughed. “You’ve been in New York too long! That’s the sort of thing very fat men say at Rector’s. But not everything is for sale. The Tribune’s mine.”

“Mr. Hearst will pay you double what you paid, which must have been around fifty thousand dollars.”

“He hasn’t got the money, I know. I have met his mother.”

“One hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Blaise sat on the window-sill. He wore a light gray coat which was now, visibly, beginning to darken from the room’s dust. “For everything. That’s three times what this wreck of a paper’s worth.”

Caroline thought Blaise uncommonly attractive at this moment. Anger was his invigorating emotion. What was her own? Time would answer that, she decided; and then she made Blaise gloriously beautiful, by turning mere anger to plain fury with the words: “You don’t want to buy this for Mr. Hearst. You want to buy it for yourself. You are double, as the fat men say at Rector’s, crossing him.”

“Damn you!” Blaise sprang from the window-sill. The back of his gray frock coat veined with spider-webs and the mummies of a dozen flies who had found in the Tribune ‚s window frame their final Egypt.

“I might-if you stop damning me-let you have half the paper if you let me have my half of the…”

“Blackmail! You come here behind my back, knowing that I… knowing that the Chief must have a Washington paper, and tricked that nigger into selling-”

“I didn’t trick him. And is he really a nigger? The subject is very delicate here. It is like the Knights of Malta. You know, how many family quarterings can you produce? Anyway, if you’re interested, there is a very engaging Negro newspaper here called the Washington Bee. Since niggers and-by association?-blackmail so much concern you, you should talk to the proprietor, a Mr. Chase. I can introduce you. He is, perhaps, too moral for Mr. Hearst, but he might sell, and then you-or Hearst-will have a true Washington paper, entirely black, like the town.”

Blaise looked less attractive as fury was replaced by anger, and a revival of his native cunning. “How can you pay all those bills on your desk…?”

“I didn’t know you could read upside down.”

“Red ink, yes.”

“I have my income, such as it is. I have,” she improvised, “helpful friends.”

“Cousin John? Well, he can’t help you, and John Hay doesn’t dare unless he wants the Journal down on him.”

“I don’t think he’s afraid of Mr. Hearst, or much of anyone. You see, he has,” she explained demurely, “a bad back.” Caroline rose. They faced one another at the room’s center. As they were the same height, blue eyes glared straight into hazel ones.

“I won’t give up any part of the estate,” said Blaise.

“I won’t give up the Tribune.”

“Unless you go broke.”

“Or sell it to Mr. Hearst, and not to you.”

Blaise was pale now; he looked exhausted. Caroline recalled a precocious girl at Allenswood who had actually been seduced. The girl’s highly secret report to Caroline, her best friend, was the only firsthand account that Caroline had ever received from that Strange country where men and women committed the ultimate act. Although Caroline had pressed for specific details (the statuary in the Louvre had created a number of confusions, those leaves), the girl had been, maddeningly, spiritual in her report. She spoke of Love, a subject that always mystified, when it did not annoy, Caroline; and could not be persuaded to tear the leaf from the mystery. But the girl had described the transformation in the young man’s face from the archangel that she saw him to satyr or, a kindly second thought, wild animal, and how the face, all scarlet one moment, went gray-white, with exhaustion, or whatever, the next. So Blaise now resembled a lover at transport’s end. But what, Caroline wondered, was the transport itself like? Mlle. Souvestre had suggested that if her students were really curious about what she always referred to with not-so-delicate irony as “married life,” they study Bernini’s Saint Teresa at Rome. “Allegedly, the saint is in the throes of religious ecstasy, the eyes are closed, the mouth is disagreeably ajar. The expression is cretinous. It is said that Bernini was inspired not by God but by the grandest of human passions.” When asked if “married life” at its peak was similar to a confrontation with the Holy Ghost, Mademoiselle had said firmly, “I am a freethinker and a virgin. You must apply elsewhere for instruction in ecstasy, and after you have left Wimbledon.”

“Come,” said Caroline graciously, “let me show you the paper.”

Together they entered the long compositors’ rooms. Trimble, in shirt-sleeves, was correcting a galley at the long table. The cat was still asleep in the window. The city reporter was writing on a new typewriter-machine, bought by Caroline during the second day of her proprietorship. “I find the noise of typing soothing,” she said to the silent Blaise. “I am responsible for the Remington. It’s what Henry James uses.” Caroline looked at her pale brother expectantly; but his silence, if possible, deepened. “I’ve asked the reporters not to achieve the same results. Fortunately, they only admire Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis. This is the managing editor, Mr. Trimble.”

The two men shook hands, and Caroline said, as an afterthought, “My half-brother Blaise Sanford. He works with Mr. Hearst, at the Journal.”

“Now there is a paper.” Trimble was flattering. “You know, last winter we heard a rumor that you people were going to buy us.”

“Since then Mr. Hearst has drawn in his horns,” said Caroline. “He’s not acquiring for the moment.”

“What’s your paid circulation?” asked Blaise.

“Around seven thousand,” said Trimble.

“I was told ten last winter.”

“Mr. Vardeman liked to exaggerate, I guess. Our advertising’s increased in the last month,” he added.

“Cousin John got us Apgar’s Department Store. They are having their sales now.”

The political reporter, thin of neck, red of cheek and eye, already partly drunk, approached. “Mr. Trimble, here’s an item. I don’t suppose it’s worth bothering with. From the White House.”

“Oh, dear,” said Caroline. Although she was personally fascinated by politicians if not politics, she found the subject, as dealt with by the press, sinister in its dullness. Only those who were themselves political could find exciting or even fascinating the Tribune’s political news. Happily, most of newspaper-reading Washington was involved in government and they would read any political news. But Caroline, as always in imitation of Hearst, wanted to extend the readership to those who found politics as dull as she did, the majority. Graphic details of murders, robberies, rapes were what people wanted to read, a lurid golden thread running through the gray pages. But she wanted even more diversions for her readers-or readers-to-be. The political reporter, as if sent by Heaven, now gave her exactly what she wanted.

“I was over talking to Mr. Cortelyou…”

“The President’s secretary,” said Caroline, helpfully, to Blaise, who was again turning a healthy pre-transport red.

“He said there’s no news from the Philippines. Then when asked what the President was doing at the moment, he said, ‘He’s out driving,” and I said, ‘Well, that’s not much of a story,’ and he said, ‘Well, he’s driving in a motor car for the first time.’ So there’s an item, I guess. A smallish item, I guess.”

Trimble sighed. “A very smallish item. For the social page.”

“No,” said Caroline. “For the front page.” She had never felt so entirely heroic as she did now, showing off to Blaise.

“What’s the lead?” asked Trimble.

“First president ever to drive in an automobile.” Caroline was prompt.

“But is that true?” asked Trimble.

“Mr. Hearst wouldn’t care, and, I’m afraid, I don’t either.”

“I think it’s true,” said the political reporter. “Grover Cleveland tried to get into a motor car several years ago. But because he’s so fat, he wouldn’t fit. Fact, nothing fits him except this one orange summer suit that his young wife hates, and finally got him to give away when she threatened to denounce him to the Irish as an Ulsterman.”

“Wonderful!” Caroline was indeed pleased. “That’s what we want in your story. Do write it all. Now.”

As the reporter was shuffling toward the Remington, Caroline stopped him. “What sort of motor car was it?”

“A Stanley Steamer, Miss Sanford.”

Caroline turned to Trimble. “Put that in the sub-head. Then we shall ask the Stanley Steamer people to advertise.”

“Well…” Trimble was grinning now; he had got her range. Then both started as the door to the room was slammed shut. Blaise had fled.

“Your brother’s kind of… moody?”

“Well, his mood is certainly black today. He and Mr. Hearst did want this paper, in fact, he just asked me to sell it to him, and I said no.”

Trimble frowned. “Would you make a profit?”

“Yes.”

“You should sell. We haven’t a chance. The Star and the Post have us beat.”

Caroline’s pleasure in the Stanley Steamer story was now replaced by that sense of doom which often visited her when she awakened in the early hours of the morning, and wondered what on earth she was doing in a small house in Georgetown, publishing a newspaper that might, eventually, ruin her. “If it’s so hopeless, why does Hearst want to buy?”

“He’ll pour in money. He don’t care what he loses. And he’ll have a Washington power-base. He’s running for president.”

Caroline was momentarily distracted. “How do you know that?”

“Friend at the Journal told me. Hearst thinks Bryan can’t win, and he can.”

“How curious! The first time I spoke to him, he said he wanted Admiral Dewey.” But Caroline had grasped a point interesting to her in a way that politics was not. “You haven’t been talking to the Journal about a job, have you?”

Trimble’s pale blue eyes now avoided her own, she hoped, steady gaze. “We’re losing circulation every month,” he said.

“Not on the newsstands.”

“That’s no money really. Advertising rates are fixed by your paid subscriptions.”

“Then we’ll hold a-what is it?-you know, money for nothing? A lottery.”

“With what money?”

“If you stay, I’ll go in deeper.”

Trimble looked at her, most curiously. “Why are you doing this?”

“I want to.”

“Is that all?”

“I should think that that was everything.”

“But no woman… no lady has ever run a newspaper that I know of, and there aren’t many men who have the knack either.”

“You will,” said Caroline, no question in her voice and no appeal, “stay.”

Trimble smiled. They shook hands gravely.