Empire

1

FOUR OF THE ORIGINAL Five Hearts were gathered in Henry Adams’s study, to John Hay’s delight. Although the pale April sun filled the study, Adams as always had a fire blazing and the smell of wood-smoke mingled agreeably with that of the masses of daffodils and lilies-of-the-valley the incomparable servant, Maggie, had placed everywhere. The fourth Heart-Clarence King-stood with his back to the fire, Adams to his right, all admiration like a schoolgirl, and Clara to his left, all fondness like a sister, while King talked rapidly and brilliantly and coughed and laughed at his own coughing, and coughed again. “I have a spot on my lung now, the size of a dollar-why always a dollar, I wonder? But better the coin than the greenback. I thought the sun would cure me, as it always has before, but Florida has failed me, as Florida has failed so many before me, including you, John. Didn’t you want to be a congressman from there in 1864?”

“From there, oh, yes,” said Hay. “I like to pretend it was President Lincoln’s idea, to get friends into Congress. But the carpetbag I took to Florida was all my own…” And then, Hay completed to himself, just as I was about to quit as the President’s secretary, he was shot. Hay wondered, yet again, how strange it was that he, who dreamed now so much at night, no longer encountered the Ancient in his dreams.

Although Clarence King was dying, he was determined to go in a great display of mind and wit and energy. He was bearded like Hay and Adams: the three had more or less synchronized their beards, each allowing the rakish moustaches of youth to act as foundation for the stately beards of middle age.

Hay had been shocked at the change in King, who had arrived some days before, haggard and ill-kempt. But William and Maggie had taken him in hand; put him to bed; fed him magnificently. “Tuberculosis does wonders for the appetite,” King had announced at the first meal-High Communion, Adams had called it-of the Hearts, and Hay noticed that a fifth place had been left at table for the fifth never-to-be-mentioned Heart, Clover Adams. Except that King, quite naturally, would repeat something that Clover had said, and Adams seemed not at all perturbed; but then King could do no wrong for Henry Adams, who had declared his friend the greatest man of their generation, causing Hay a pang of ignoble envy; but then Henry Adams had always been in love-there was no other word-with the geologist, naturalist, philosopher, world-traveller, creator of mining enterprises, Renaissance man who, now that his life was near its end, had managed to fail on the grandest scale. He had been wiped out in the depression of ’93, and though he still went exploring in the Yukon and other parts of the world, he was now merely a brilliant geologist, employed by others. There would be no King Mine, no King fortune, no King widow and children; only the memory that the Hearts all had of a glorious companion who could sit up till dawn speaking on the origins of life, and, presumably, they could go look at a mountain called Clarence King, a superb peak in the Sierra Nevada.

A mountain and a memory were not much, thought Hay; but then what a life King had had. While Adams and Hay had sat at desks, reading and writing, or hovering on the periphery of power, King had explored and mapped the West, and written marvellously of the new world he had discovered, not to mention the geological wealth that other men would exploit. So taken with the idea of King was Adams that he had fled from Harvard to the Far West to travel with King, to rough it. In later years they had often travelled together, most recently to Cuba. Each had developed a passion for Polynesian women, “old-gold girls,” as they would cryptically refer to these palpable visions, unknown to Hay. Then, in 1879, King became director of the United States Geological Survey, a bureau created largely for him, with considerable assistance from Senator James G. Blaine, who was less than amused when the novel Democracy, suspected to be a work by one of the Hearts, lampooned him as the venal Senator Ratcliff. Hay had often wondered if Henry Adams had, somehow, instinctively, harmed the man he loved and envied above all others. By 1880, King had departed the only office that he had ever wanted; he had also entered the lives of John and Clara Hay; and, thus, due to highly elective affinities, Five Hearts beat as one until Clover Adams swallowed potassium cyanide; and then there were Four. Soon, Hay thought bleakly, as April light made glitter King’s feverish eyes, there would be Three; then Two, One, None. Why?

King answered, as if he had looked into Hay’s mind. “When I went mad that day in the lions’ house in Central Park, I was positive that I had seen God, and He was, simply, a huge mouth, maw, with teeth, sharp, sharp-and hungry, oh, so hungry to dine on us. That’s why we exist, I thought, to feed Him. Then a Negro-someone’s butler from a house in Madison Avenue-enraged me, and I struck him. One tends to violence in the lion house, particularly in the presence of one’s Maker who is also one’s devourer, and I was taken away by the police in a state of purest ecstasy, and committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum…”

“On Halloween,” said Adams, happy to contemplate, yet again, the sacred story. “Then we went off to Cuba in February. There were no lions there.”

“Ah, but there was that maw, always in attendance. Always hungry. Is Theodore as dreadful as ever, now he’s vice-president?”

“I had hoped that name would not be spoken on this day of days,” said Adams. “Theodore’s luck is relentless and inexorable, like the Chicago Express.”

“He was,” said Clara, justly, “less noisy than usual. You must give him credit for that, Henry.”

“But there weren’t many occasions for noise.” Hay had been surprised by the dignity of Teddy’s inaugural speech to the Senate, given during a lull in a particularly squalid filibuster. In that cigar-smelling chamber where weary senators dozed, Teddy had taken the oath of office as vice-president; and then, cryptically, he had spoken of the great things in store for this particular generation of Americans. “As we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.” At that moment, a storm broke over the Capitol and the sound of rain on the skylights of the Senate chamber put Hay, suitably, in mind of war. Given the chance, Teddy would try to expand the American empire; but vice-presidents are not given such opportunities, as Teddy knew. “This office is the ultimate grave of my political career,” he had said to Lodge accusingly; but then he liked to blame Lodge for driving him to accept a nomination never offered him by President or party leaders. Teddy had simply seized the prize-or, as Hay always thought of the vice-presidency, “persimmon.” During the autumn, he had spoken in twenty-four states to audiences that so thrilled him that he was inspired to refer to William Jennings Bryan as “my opponent.” The Major said that he had been amused by these slips; but Hay suspected that the Major’s tolerance for the Colonel was not great. Certainly, the overwhelming Republican victory in November was spoiled for McKinley by’ those who suggested that it was not he but his glamorous running-mate who had ensured the million votes by which the Republicans had won.

“Teddy was not in town very long,” said Adams. “He presided over the Senate on March fourth. Then Congress adjourned until next December, and he went home to that ugly house of his on Long Island.”

“I wonder,” said the practical Clara, “where they will live. And how. Edith says there’s no money, and all those children. Bamie-his sister-has found a house here, but only for herself.”

“Our Madame Maintenon?” asked King, moving from fireplace to an armchair too low and narrow for the second-largest of the Hearts. Clara, the largest, had her own special non-Adams-proportioned chair. “Otherwise, I shall simply stand when I’m in your study.”

“We could do worse.” Adams extended alabaster hands toward jonquil-yellow flames. “She’s sounder than Teddy. But he’ll vanish from public life. He was astonished to find that between March fourth and next December, the vice-president has no duties at all. He will probably write another half-dozen books.”

“No,” said Hay, delighted that he could delight his fellow Hearts with the higher gossip. “Teddy has suddenly succumbed to ambition. He means to… what word shall I use? He means to do something that only Clarence among us has ever done.”

“Lechery in the South Seas?” Adams’s eyes were bright.

“No. Something more unusual, more… alarming.”

“What?” cried Clara.

“Work!” shouted Hay.

“Oh, Lord save us! Save him!” Clarence sank from chair to floor, on his knees-no great distance-hands clasped in prayer. “Theodore Roosevelt will actually work for a living?”

“Something Henry and I would never dream of doing…”

“No, no. You are not pure, John.” Adams was stern. “You have worked as an editor and a journalist and a businessman. I have never worked…”

“Professor at Harvard? Editor of the North American Review?”

“Neither was proper work. Certainly, I did not make my living from all that showing off…”

“What, please tell me,” King was still on his knees, “is the vice-president going to work at?”

“The law! He is going to go to law school.” Hay was pleased by the general excitement.

“An American vice-president, in office, at law school?” Adams’s horror was not affected.

“I can’t imagine your great-grandfather taking courses at Columbia while waiting for General Washington to die, but Teddy…”

“… is out of sight,” said King, an addict of Bowery slang. Then he pulled himself, with some difficulty, Hay noticed, back into the tiny armchair. “How do you know this?”

“At the White House, he cornered the Chief Justice, and told him that as he was still quite young with a lot of time on his hands, he wanted to qualify for the bar. The Chief Justice was alarmed, of course. But when he saw how serious Teddy was, he said that he’d give him a reading list for the summer, and once Congress convenes, he’ll tutor Teddy, ‘quiz him’ was the phrase he used to me, every Saturday night.”

“Theodore is not like other people,” said Clara, as neutrally as she could say anything!

“If Clarence is our Renaissance man…” Adams began.

“… Teddy is our Baroque boy,” completed King. “We live in wondrous times. What does the Major think of all this?”

“If I didn’t know, I’d tell you,” Hay repeated Seward’s favorite line. “Actually, the President is more than ever the Buddha these days. He’s leaving at the end of the month for a six-week trip around the country, accompanied by, among others, me. At last,” said Hay, turning to King, “I shall see your California. The President launches a battleship at San Francisco, and I’ll be there, chatting of open doors and peace, while General MacArthur continues his slaughter of Filipinos.” Hay wondered what errant electrical circuit in his brain had made him advert to the one subject that he-and the Administration-never acknowledged. Particularly now, when the war-no other word for it, privately-was over. Aguinaldo had been captured in March, shortly after the inauguration. Presently, before they started across the country, the President would issue a decree declaring the “insurrection” at an end.

Hay did not allow the others to pick up on his unexpected use of the word “slaughter.” “By the end of the month, of course, the business is over.” He spoke rapidly, and was aware of a shortening of breath. Heart? To die, suddenly, at the heart of the Hearts would be poetic. “I shall get them, by the way.”

“Get what?” asked King, through a series of dry coughs. Perhaps all the Hearts might stop at once, like four clocks someone had forgotten to wind.

“The Philippines. The Major thinks that the State Department, not the War Department, should administer them. Root agrees, I am happy to say. In October I shall be lord of all the isles.”

“What about the canal?” King coughed. “Will you be lord of the isthmus, too?”

“We must get the treaty through the Senate first.” Hay was again short of breath: must not panic. “They’ve rejected two versions so far, despite England’s surprising complaisance. Pauncefote and I are now ready with a third version, which we will submit to our masters in the Senate come December.” Hay took a deep breath; felt better; noticed that Clara was watching him with some alarm, which, in turn, alarmed him. Did he look-did he sound?-so ill? He glanced at Adams to see if the Porcupine had noticed anything wrong, but the Porcupine was looking at Clarence King, whose lower face was covered with a handkerchief, even though the fit of coughing had stopped. How fragile we have become, thought Hay; then he rallied. “Of all our friends I hate Cabot Lodge the most.”

“John.” Clara was reproving.

“Oh, Cabot’s hateful.” Adams turned his gaze from the dying King to the blazing fire. “I’ve always detested him, while delighting in his friendship. I think that Cabot’s problem is shyness.”

“No senator was ever shy.” King chiselled out the sentence as if on marble.

“Shyness?” Hay had not thought the ever-grinding Cabot shy. But perhaps he was, and disguised the fact with endless commentaries broken by sudden acts of treachery toward friends.

“Yes, shyness,” Adams repeated. “He is one of nature’s Iagos, always in the shadows, preferring to do evil to nothing…”

“And nothing to good.” Hay made his addition to the indictment. “So if Cabot’s Iago, McKinley must be his Othello.”

“No, no.” Adams was firm. “After all, Othello trusted Iago. I think it most unlikely that our Ohioan Augustus trusts-or even notices-Cabot. No. I see Theodore in the part of Othello. They complement each other. Theodore all action and bluster, Cabot all devious calculation. Cabot is the rock on which Theodore will sink.”

“I like Cabot.” Clara put a stop to the conversation. “He is also Brooks’s brother-in-law. He is practically your relative, Henry.”

“That is no recommendation, Clara, to a member of the house of Atreus…”

“From Quincy, Mass.” King liked to deflate the Adamses. Their peculiar self-esteem was matched only by their sense of general unworthiness. All in all, Hay was happy not to be the member of a great family’s fourth generation. Better to be one’s own ancestor; one’s own founding father. What would Del become, he wondered, in the twentieth century that had begun, as Root had maintained, January 1, 1901? Hay had already spent four months in the new century (Queen Victoria had wisely died after three weeks of the new epoch) and was more than ever convinced that it was just as well that he would miss nearly all of it. Del, on the other hand, might experience more than half the century. Father wished son luck.

2

CAROLINE GREETED DEL at the door to her office, abuzz with the first-and always precious to her-flies of spring. Del was larger than when he had left; there was more chest, more stomach; he also seemed taller. They shook hands awkwardly. Mr. Trimble watched them, all benignity. He had given his unsought blessing to the match. “A woman must not be alone too long,” he had said, “particularly in a Southern town like Washington.”

Caroline had just returned from New York, where she had said good-by to Plon, who had sailed for home, enriched by two cigarette cases.

Now Del had come to take her to lunch. They faced each other across the rolltop desk. “Were you really pro-Boer?” asked Del.

“Were you, really, secretly pro-British?” Much of Bryan’s attack on McKinley had been the President’s pro-British policy, the result of that conniving Anglophile the Secretary of State, John Hay, and his equally sinister son, who was American consul general-nepotism, too!-at Pretoria.

“Yes,” said Del, to Caroline’s surprise. “But only secretly. No word ever passed my diplomatically sealed lips. I was the soul of caution, like Father.”

“Well, we were pro-Boer because our readers-and advertisers-are, or were. Anyway, now it’s over. Your team has won. Ours has lost.”

“And the Irish and the German riff-raff have all joined the Democratic Party where they belong. What next?”

John Hay had told her that he doubted Del would want to stay on in the diplomatic service; but then Hay usually said what others wanted to hear. He knew that Caroline could not bear the thought of being a diplomat’s wife, moving from post to post around the world.

But Del chose not to answer her directly. “You’ll see what’s next.”

“When?”

“Today. At lunch.”

Mystified, Caroline took her place in the Hays’ family carriage, which proceeded from Market Square into Pennsylvania Avenue, then headed north. “There are more electrical cars,” Del observed. “And telephone wires.” Like spaghetti, wires were strung every which way on posts in the bright noon-light, which made their shadows on the avenue resemble an elaborate spider’s web. The trees along the sidewalk were in new bloom. Washington’s April was so like Paris’s June that Caroline was, suddenly, homesick: by no means the proper mood for a young lady who had not seen her fiancé for a year. She noted her opal ring on his finger; tried to imagine a wedding ring on her own; thought instead of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. She and Blaise had agreed that neither would go there until the will had been finally settled. Marguerite was suicidal. Caroline was stoic.

“I am stoic,” she said to Del, apropos nothing at all. But he was speaking to the driver. “We’ll go in from the south side.” They were now opposite the immaculately restored and redecorated façade of Willard’s. Black children stood on the sidewalk, holding out clusters of daffodils and blossoming dogwood switches, pale pink, white. White.

“The White House?” asked Caroline.

“Yes. We’re having lunch with the President.” Del’s small eyes gleamed; he would be, one day, as large as his mother, she thought, and she wondered if she could be happy with so huge a masculine entity.

Although the south door of the White House had been originally designed as the mansion’s great entrance, nothing in Washington ever turned out as planned. For instance, the Capitol on its hill faced, magnificently, a shanty town, while its marble backside loomed over Pennsylvania Avenue and the unanticipated city’s center. The city had been expected to grow west and south; instead it had grown east and north. The Executive Mansion had been designed to be approached from the river through the park, with a fine view of Virginia’s hills across the river; but the unexpected primacy of Pennsylvania Avenue had obliged the tenants to make the northern portico the main entrance, and only secret or private visitors were encouraged to drive through the now muddy park to the somewhat forlorn grand entrance, where curved stairs looked as if they had been designed for an al fresco republican coronation of the sort that the Venetian doge endured atop stairs of equal pomp.

The downstairs corridor was empty. As always, Caroline was fascinated by the casualness of the White House. Except for a single policeman, who sat reading a newspaper inside the door, they had the shadowy corridor to themselves. “How easy it would be,” whispered Caroline, though if ever walls had no ears, it was these, “to stage a coup d’état.”

“Who would bother?” Del seemed genuinely surprised by the idea. “The place is too big.”

“This house is very small.”

“The house is nothing,” said Del, as they started up the creaky steps to the main floor. “It’s the country that’s too big for that sort of thing.”

In the main entrance hall, crowded as usual with visitors, Mr. Cortelyou greeted them in front of the Tiffany screen. “The President will join you in the family dining room. She’s joining you.”

“She’s better?” asked Del.

But Cortelyou was now stowing them in the small presidential elevator; then he shut the door, and remained behind. Rattling alarmingly, the elevator rose. Caroline clutched Del’s arm: would the machine be stuck? Would they die of suffocation before help came? But after what seemed like a purgatorial if not presidential term, they came to a halt, and Del led the way into the living quarters. One of the Germans opened the door to the dining room, where the table was set for four. To Caroline’s surprise, Mrs. McKinley was already in her place. Had she been carried in, and set upright, like a doll? The face was unreal in its prettiness. Like so many women whose career is illness, she looked younger than her years. “Miss Sanford,” the voice was nasal, like a crow’s cawing, “I’m glad to see you again. Sit down here, next to me. The Major sits on my other side. I don’t know why Mr. Hay’s department fusses so when a husband and wife want to sit together at supper. After all, that’s why you get married, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure, Mrs. McKinley. But, then I’m not married…”

“Yes,” said the First Lady, and smiled. The smile was indeed lovely; and like a young girl’s. “Well, you’ll make a fine couple, and with money, too. Did you know that the Major’s the only honest man we’ve ever had as president? Mr. Cleveland came here poor as can be, but when he left he was able to buy that mansion of his in Princeton. Well, the Major and I have finally, after all these years of scrimping, been able to buy our old house in Canton, Ohio, and guess how much we paid?”

“I don’t know,” said Caroline, who did know. The Tribune had already carried the story.

“Fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars, and the Major’s going to spend three thousand more-which is all we have left-on fixing it up so that when I’m feeling poorly, like last summer, we can just hole up there, and he can still be president, with the telephone and all. Do you play cribbage, dear?”

“No. But I can always learn.”

“You ought to. Euchre is a good card game, too. I always win, you know. It’s important when you’re a wife, to have something to do.”

“Miss Sanford has her newspaper.” Del meant to be helpful; and failed.

Mrs. McKinley buried her sudden frown in the bouquet of hot-house roses beside her plate. “I never read those… things.”

“Neither do I,” said Caroline quickly. “I only publish, which is very much like… like cribbage, I think,” she added nonsensically. Why, she wondered, was she here? Obviously to be approved of by the Major and his lady as Del’s wife; but why was that so important?

The Major stood in the doorway, large and serene, eyes glowing with-was it opium he was supposed to take? In his left silk lapel he wore a pink carnation, to set off Ida’s pink roses. Caroline got up from her chair and curtseyed. The President crossed to her; he took her hand and, gently, seated her again. The low and beautiful voice was as rustic as Ida’s but without the canting nasality. “I’m glad you could come, Miss Sanford. Sit down, Mr. Hay. Ida…” Fondly, he touched his wife’s face; fondly, she kissed his hand. Caroline noted how pale each was. But then he had nearly died of pneumonia after the New Year’s reception, and she had had a nervous collapse the previous summer. Caroline tried to imagine what it was like to be at the head of such a vigorous, loud nation; and failed.

Lunch was as simple and as enormous as the President’s dove-gray waistcoated paunch, which began very high indeed on his frame and curved outward, keeping him from ever sitting close to table, which accounted, no doubt, for the single shamrock-shaped gravy stain on the black frock-coat that hung in perpendicular folds to left and right of the huge autonomous belly, like theater curtains drawn to reveal the spectacle. Quail was followed by porterhouse steak which preceded broiled chicken, each course accompanied by a variety of hot bread-wheat muffins, corn sticks, toast, and butter. Butter flowed over everything, and the Major ate everything while Ida picked at this and that. Del, Caroline noted with alarm, kept pace with the President: two of a kind, obviously. Would Del be as fat? Across Caroline’s future fell a shadow, every bit as large and fateful as President McKinley’s stomach.

The President spoke of the coming trip across the country. “Mrs. McKinley will make the effort.” He gazed at her fondly. She munched a quail’s leg. “Her doctor comes, too. And your father, of course. In fact, I want the whole Cabinet with me. Not everyone can get to see us here in Washington…”

“Seems like everyone does.” Mrs. McKinley frowned.

“But they don’t. So we’ll go to them. It’s very frustrating for me, these front-porch campaigns, having to stay home in Canton. Because I like… I really like going to see the folks…”

“I don’t.” Ida spread butter over a length of cornbread. “Never have. Always wanting something, the folks, from my dearest.”

The President ignored her obbligato. “You get a sense of what they’re thinking about, which you don’t in this place. You also get a chance to talk straight to them, without the papers coming in between.”

“You know, Miss Sanford has one of those newspapers, dearest. I told her she should learn to play euchre. Much better way to pass the time. You can win money, too, if you gamble, which is a sin.” Ida looked suddenly sly.

“I like your paper, Miss Sanford. Much of the time,” the Major added with a droll blink of the huge eyes.

“We like your Administration, Mr. President. Much of the time.”

McKinley laughed. “You may like us even more of the time after this trip.”

“The President,” Del made his contribution, “is going to speak out, against the trusts…”

“Like Colonel Bryan?” Caroline could not resist.

“Perhaps more like Colonel Roosevelt.” The Major was bland.

“But most like President McKinley.“ Del was enthralled by the Major, Caroline decided.

“The President’s going to meet the problem head on. He’s also going to discuss the tariff. He wants commercial reciprocity.”

Ida hissed at Del. The President’s face did not change expression. Del did not stop talking. “He’s going to challenge the Senate at last…”

Ida hissed Del even more loudly. As Caroline turned to look at her hostess, McKinley with a practiced gesture flipped a buttery napkin over his wife’s head; but not before Caroline had got a glimpse of the mouth as it set in a ghastly rictus, while the wide-open eyes showed only the whites. Beneath the napkin the hissing continued.

“I hope you won’t write this in your newspaper.” McKinley helped himself to a Spanish omelette which had appeared just when Caroline had prayed for deliverance from food.

“No, Mr. President. I understand that all this is,” Ida was now making a gurgling sound, “in confidence.”

“Caroline is discreet, sir.” But Del was nervous.

“I’m sure. Unlike Mr. Hearst.” McKinley shook his head; spoke with his mouth full. “Have you been reading the New York Journal? Not only am I the most hated creature on the American continent, their exact words, in spite of my reelection…”

“You even beat Bryan in his home state…”

“But I lost New York City by thirty thousand votes. Anyway, they’ve now written that if bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”

“That is-atrocious!” Caroline was shocked; she was even more shocked that she had not seen the story. Del explained why. “After the first run, Mr. Hearst killed the story. So it wasn’t in the later editions. For once, the Yellow Kid figured he’d gone too far, even for him. And Blaise,” Del added. Mrs. McKinley was now silent beneath her napkin.

“All the more curious,” said the President equably, “because Mr. Hearst had just sent me one of his editors to apologize for the things they wrote about me during the election.”

When a Kentucky governor had been killed, Hearst’s irrepressibly savage employee Ambrose Bierce had written a quatrain that had shocked the nation:

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast

Cannot be found in all the west;

Good reason, it is speeding here

To stretch McKinley on his bier.

“Hearst wants to be the Democratic candidate in ’04,” said Del. “He figures Bryan’s had his last chance, now he’s getting into place.”

“I wish him luck.” McKinley was mild. Caroline wondered if he was as serene as he appeared; or was he, simply, a consummate actor? “Anyway, I shall be out of it. I shall never run again.”

“That will upset Father,” said Del. “He’s already talking you up for a third term.”

“We’d better put a stop to that.” McKinley turned to his wife. As neck and shoulders were no longer rigid, he removed the napkin.

“There’s nothing more boring-I say-than talking about the tariff.” Ida picked up where she had left off.

“Then let’s not talk any more about it.” The Major smiled at her; and indicated for the waiter to bring them the first of several pies, “I want my second term to be truly disinterested. I want to do the sort of things that ought to be done but which you can’t do if you’re fretting about being reelected.”

“Poor Mark Hanna,” murmured Caroline.

McKinley gave her an amused, appreciative look. “He’ll have his problems, I suppose. But I’ve made up my mind.”

“He’s sick.” Ida sounded pleased. She helped herself to apple pie; if nothing else, the fit had given her a good appetite. Did she know? Caroline wondered. Or did she not notice that the game course had abruptly given way to dessert?

“Do you think,” asked Caroline, “that there’s any chance of Mr. Hearst being nominated?”

McKinley shook his head. “He is much too unscrupulous-too immoral-too rich. But if, let’s say, he managed, somehow, to buy the nomination, he could never be elected. Curious that he should call me the most hated creature in America, when I am-reasonably popular, while he is the one who is hated.”

“Reasonably hated,” added Caroline.

“Reasonably hated,” McKinley repeated; then he turned to Del. “Have you told her?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you told your father?”

“I’ve told no one at all.”

“It was,” said Ida, staring intently at Caroline, “my idea.”

“What is-it, Mr. President?”

“I’m appointing Del assistant private secretary to the president, with the understanding that when Mr. Cortelyou moves out and-and up, Del will be secretary.”

Del turned pink with pleasure.

Caroline saw immediately the eerie symmetry. “It is the same position that John Hay had, when he came to Washington with President Lincoln.”

“I think it fitting.” The President smiled; dried his lips with a napkin, just missing a shiny buttery spot on the Napoleonic chin.

“Oh, that was so long ago.” Ida was entirely in the present when she was not out of time altogether.

“But to look a long way ahead,” said Caroline, “thirty-eight years from now, if you are like your father, you will be secretary of state.”

“In the year,” McKinley paused; not so much to count as to marvel, “1939. What on earth will we be like then?”

“Gone, dearest. In Heaven, with little Katie. And good riddance to everybody else.” Mrs. McKinley put down her napkin. “We’ll have coffee in the oval parlor.” The President helped her up, while Caroline and Del flanked the sovereign couple. “I’m glad Del’s marrying you.” Thus Ida gave her blessing to the appointment and the marriage. Caroline was relieved, for Del’s sake. Whether or not she married him, she wished him well; realized that this was the greatest day of his life so far. As Lincoln had lifted the young John Hay out of the irrelevant mass and placed him squarely in history, so McKinley now lifted the son.

They proceeded into the oval sitting room, where the coffee service had been set up.

“When do you start work?” Caroline helped the President arrange the drooping First Lady in a green velvet chair.

“In the fall,” said Del.

“After the tour.” In his antimacassared rocking chair, McKinley rocked slowly back and forth, gently settling the contents of that huge stomach. “Shall I tell your father? or do you want to?”

“You should, sir.”

“No.” Caroline was firm. “Del must confide in his father, this one time, anyway.”

“Your young lady is a born politician.” The Major bestowed the highest accolade within his gift. Then smiled at Caroline, and she was struck, yet again, by the beauty of his plain face. Over the years, goodness of character had transformed what might otherwise have been a dull, somewhat bovine appearance into an almost god-like radiance-almost because, unlike most gods, there was no fury, no malice, no envy of mortal happiness in William McKinley, only a steady radiant kindness, like a comforting nimbus about that great head, whose rounded chin reflected the afternoon sunlight, thanks to the butter with which it was, like some sacred balm, anointed.

3

NICOLAY WAS PROPPED UP in an armchair beside a coal fire. A faded tartan-patterned blanket covered the lower part of a body preparing soon to be in fact what it looked even now to be, a skeleton. The beard was wild, long, white. The eyes-nearly blind and oversensitive to light-were covered by a green shade. Hay recognized nothing in this old man of the young secretary who had persuaded President Lincoln to bring Johnny Hay to Washington as assistant secretary. “We can’t bring all Illinois,” Lincoln had complained. But Hay had joined the White House staff; shared a bed and an office with Nicolay, five years his senior. Later, in the aftermath of that heroic era-the American Iliad, Hay always thought-the two men had together spent a decade writing the story of Lincoln. Then Nicolay had been given a sinecure as a marshal at the Supreme Court; then he became ill and retired. Now he lived in a small house on Capitol Hill with his daughter, on the margin of the American present but at the center of its past.

Although Nicolay no longer resembled the man that he had been, Hay was conscious that despite his own numerous debilities he himself was still very much Johnny Hay, who had simply glued on a beard and lined his face with a pencil in order to impersonate an old man-an old man of state; and so had managed to fool everyone but himself. He knew that he was doomed to be forever what he had been, young and appealing and-the word that he had come to hate, charming, even as he charmed, and charmed. Those whom the gods wish to disappoint they first make charming.

“You’re making headway, I hope.” Hay indicated the desk where papers and open books were piled. Nicolay was at work on yet another Lincoln book, recently interrupted by a trip up the Nile.

“Oh, I try to work. But my head is not what it was.” Hay marvelled that the Bavarian-born Nicolay still spoke with a German accent.

“Whose is?”

“Yours, Johnny.” Back of the wild white King Learish beard; the young Nicolay was smiling. “You grow more fox-like with time…”

“The fox is weakening, Nico. The dogs have got the scent. I hear the huntsman’s bugle.” Hay was a master of the elegiac note.

“You’ll go to ground.” Nicolay’s hand shook as he pulled the tartan tighter about himself. The hand was white, bloodless, dead. “It is good news about your boy,”

Hay nodded, wondering why he himself had not been pleased. In recent years, since Pretoria, in fact, he had come to admire and like his son; yet he did not want him to be so vividly and precisely his own replacement. Now that the son had started up glory’s ladder, the father must prepare to surrender his own place higher up; ladder, too. “Del will go far,” he said. “I never thought he’d have what it would take, but the President did-does. Del’s like a son to the President.”

“And not to you?” Nico stared at Hay, who looked at a copy of the now faded lithograph of Lincoln with his two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. Had he ever been so young?

“Well, yes, to me, too. But he’s more like his mother:… Anyway, he’s at the start and we’re at the end.”

“You’re not.” Nico was flat. “I am. I’ll die this year.”

“Nico…” Hay began.

Nico finished, “I think there’s nothing next. What do you think?”

“I don’t-think. There’s not much now. I’ll say that.”

“Religion,” Nicolay began, but stopped. Both stared at the neutral fire.

“I go, at last, to California.” Hay’s mood lightened at the thought. “We start tomorrow. The President and the Postmaster General and I and forty others. We shall, yet again, bind up the wounds of the South, and then on to Los Angeles, and a fiesta, and San Francisco, where the rest of the Cabinet joins us, except clever Root, who says he must stay close to the War Department, where he directs our far-flung empire. Do you think it wise?”

“What wise?” Nico was drifting off.

“The empire we’re assembling. Do you think,” Hay was curious to know what Nico would answer, “that the Ancient would approve?”

Nico’s response was quick. “The Ancient, no. The Tycoon, yes. He was of two minds, always.”

“But he acted with a single view.”

“Yes, but he thought for such a long time before he acted. The cautious Ancient and the fierce Tycoon held long debates, and Mr. Lincoln, in the end, arbitrated, and handed down his decision.”

“The Major took a long time making up his mind.”

“The Major is not Mr. Lincoln.”

“No. But he is as essential to us in his way. I think we have done the right thing. I was persuaded of it when I was in England, and saw what prosperity-and civilization-empire had given them. Now they begin to falter. So we must take up the burden.”

Nico looked at Hay directly. “Mr. Lincoln would never have wanted us to be anyone’s master.”

“Perhaps not.” Hay had long since given up trying to imagine how Lincoln would have responded to the modern world. “Anyway, it’s done. We are committed.”

“When does Del move into the White House?”

“In the fall. For now, he’ll be working with Mr. Adee at the State Department while I’m gone… He plans to marry the Sanford girl.”

“The Hays have a dowsing rod for money.”

“Del is also a Stone…”

“A golden Stone. Well, are you pleased?”

Hay said that he was; and he was. “They will marry in the fall. Helen, too, I think, to the Whitney boy…”

“We’ve come a long way from Illinois.”

“I wonder.” With age, Hay was more than ever conscious of what might have been; yet could not conceive of any ladder that might have been better than the one that he had climbed, almost without effort, almost to the top. “I don’t think I ever wanted to be president.” Hay addressed the coal in the grate.

“Of course you did. Have you forgotten you?” Nico addressed Hay.

“I must have.”

“I haven’t. You were ambitious. You tried, twice, to go to Congress. Surely it was not for the company you’d find there.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Hay answered Nico’s not-so-rhetorical question. “Anyway, I have pretty much forgotten me. Even so, it is odd that for one year I was next in succession to the President. So I did get pretty high up that particular ladder, which I may-or may not-have wanted to climb.”

“McKinley’s health is excellent.” Nico laughed; and coughed.

“Unlike mine. After this trip, I go to New Hampshire for the rest of the summer. We’ll all be there. Del and Caroline, too.” Hay indicated the lithograph on the wall. “Do you ever dream of him?”

Nico nodded. “All the time. I dream of you, too. As you were then.”

“What sort of dreams?”

“The usual, for those of us at the end.” Nico’s fragile fingers pulled at his wiry beard. “Things have gone wrong. I can’t find important papers. I go through the pigeon-holes in his desk. I can’t read any of the handwriting, and the President is anxious, and the trouble-”

“ ‘This big trouble.’ ” Hay nodded. “He never said ‘Civil War.’ Fact he never said war at all. Only this big trouble. This rebellion. How does he seem to you in the dreams?”

“Sad. I want to help him, but can’t. It’s very frustrating.”

“I don’t dream of him at all any more.”

“You’re not so close to the end as I.”

“Don’t say that! But what’s the end got to do with dreams? I dream most of the night, and nearly everyone I meet in my dreams is dead. But I never dream of him. I don’t know what that means.”

Nico shrugged. “If he wants to pay you a call he will, I suppose.”

Hay laughed. “Next time you see him tell him I’d like a visit.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Nico with Germanic gallows humor, “face to face. In Heaven, or wherever it is we politicians end up.”

4

BLAISE AND PAYNE WHITNEY CROSSED the quadrangle, festooned with banners celebrating various class reunions. This was their third reunion, and Blaise had agreed to attend only because Caroline had said that Del Hay would be there, the first member of their class to have made his mark in the world. “You will be envious,” she had said, well pleased. They would all meet in New Haven, and then Del and she and Payne would take a trip on Oliver Payne’s enormous yacht; then Del and she would go on together to Sunapee in New Hampshire, where Mr. Hay was enjoying his ill-health in the bosom of the family. When Blaise had told the Chief about the reunion, the Chief had said, “Cultivate young Mr. Hay.”

Connecticut’s high summer was tropical in its heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of roses and peonies and the whiskey that the graduates were drinking from flasks as they hurried from party to party. Blaise wondered why he had not enjoyed Yale more than he had. “You were in too much of a hurry to get started,” said Payne, breaking into his thoughts. “You should’ve stayed long enough to graduate instead…” Payne broke off not so much out of tact as for lack of sufficient polite vocabulary to describe Hearst, devil incarnate to his class.

“Graduate or not, it’s made no difference at all.” Blaise was accurate. They were now at the edge of the pseudo-Gothic campus. Beyond a row of trees was Chapel Street and their hotel, the New Haven House. A streetcar gasped to a halt. Men in straw hats and women in wide-brimmed hats and flowery dresses got off, and made their way onto the campus. Del and a group of classmates were still at the hotel, where there would be, he had assured Blaise, champagne, “to celebrate my victory over the Boers and the English.”

“Are you Mr. Hearst’s partner?” asked Payne, as they crossed the street, filled with carriages and electrical cars, all converging upon the college.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Blaise was never entirely sure just what his relationship to the Chief was. Principally, he was a money-lender. He would have preferred to be an investor, but Hearst allowed no one to buy any part of a Hearst newspaper. Also, casual as Hearst was about money, he always paid back his debts to Blaise, with interest. Meanwhile, Blaise learned the business; learned it better, in a sense, than Hearst himself, for Blaise saw the business as just that, while Hearst, more and more, regarded his newspapers as mere means to an all-important end: his own presidency in 1904, followed, no doubt, by a Napoleonic dictatorship and self-coronation.

Although Blaise had no political ambition, he quite liked the power that went with the ownership of a newspaper. A publisher could make and break local, if not national, figures. Blaise had also watched, with a degree of fury, Caroline achieving what he ought to have done by now. She was taken very seriously in Washington because her newspaper was read and she no longer lost money. Inadvertently, he had driven her to be what he wanted to be. The irony of the situation was peculiarly unbearable. More than once, he had considered handing over her inheritance in exchange for the Tribune; yet such an exchange would have been an admission that she had, totally, won. Also, he was by no means certain that she would agree to the arrangement. In a few years, she would not only have her inheritance but the newspaper, too-not to mention the President’s secretary for a husband, while Blaise would still be in Hearst’s shadow, holding a purse that was less and less needed, as gold flowed from the Dakotas into Phoebe Hearst’s account. At the corner of the hotel, Blaise vowed that he would buy the Baltimore newspaper, jinx though it was supposed to be. He must start his life.

“I suppose the best time of my life was here at Yale.” Payne at twenty-four was nostalgic. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything to top having rowed for Yale at Henley, even if I was a substitute oar.”

“Oh, I’m sure something else will happen to you, during the next fifty years.”

“I’m sure it will, too. But don’t you see? I’ll be old by then. I was young here.” This threnody was cut short by a sudden eruption of young men and women from the hotel lobby into the street. Blaise and Payne were shoved against a wall. To Blaise’s amazement, one of the young people was Caroline; in her right hand she held high an empty champagne glass, as if she were about to propose a toast.

“Caroline!” Blaise shouted. But if she heard him, she paid no attention, as she hurried to join the others, now gathered in a circle on the sidewalk opposite an ice-cream vendor. To an idle observer, it looked as if a dozen young people had been possessed, like so many medieval zealots, by an overpowering passion if not for God for ice cream. But then, as Blaise and Payne hurried to join the party, the ice-cream vendor abandoned his livelihood and joined the circle, from whose center a loud cry sounded, chilling Blaise’s blood. He had never before heard Caroline so much as weep, much less cry out like a wounded animal.

Blaise pushed to the crowd’s center, where he found Caroline on her knees, still holding the empty champagne glass carefully balanced, as if she were fearful of spilling its long-since-spilled contents. In front of her, on his back, was Del Hay, arms and legs flung wide, akimbo, like a comic doll.

Caroline touched Del’s face with her unencumbered hand; Del’s mouth was ajar, and blood streamed down his chin, while the gray eyes stared, intelligently, upward at his recent friends.

“Stand back! Stand back!” A voice of authority was heard. But no one heeded it. “Caroline,” Blaise murmured in her ear; she did not look at him but she did give him her glass to hold. “He fell, from the third floor,” she said. “He was sitting in the open window, talking to us, and leaned back, and fell. Like that.” Blaise helped her up. The others had now made a passage for two policemen, who stared, dumbly, at the figure on the sidewalk. Then one of them squatted down and felt for the pulse in the right wrist; as he did, the hand flopped over, revealing a gold ring, without its jewel.

“My ring,” said Caroline. Blaise had never seen her so marvellously collected; or so entirely mad, from shock. “The opal’s gone.” While the policeman examined Del for signs of life, Caroline got down on her hands and knees on the red-brick sidewalk and searched for the missing jewel. Amazed-and embarrassed-bystanders stood back, as she, politely, said, over and over again, “I’m sorry. Do you mind moving? His ring is broken, you see. The stone fell out.”

“He’s dead,” said the policeman, who was now checking the neck for a pulse; then he shut the staring eyes.

“Oh, good,” Caroline exclaimed, “I’ve found it!” She got to her feet, triumphantly. “Look,” she said to Blaise, as the policemen carried away Del’s body, and the crowd dispersed. “Here’s the fire opal-for luck, for some, they say. But,” she frowned at the stone in the palm of her hand, “it’s cracked in two.” Sunlight struck the stone in such a way that for a moment Blaise’s eyes were dazzled by what seemed to be firelight. “I wonder if it can be fixed.” Caroline’s hand shut over the stone. Blaise took one arm. Payne took the other.

“I’m sure it can,” said Blaise. “Let’s go inside.”

The lobby was dim and cool after the bright heat of the street. Just inside the door, Caroline became herself again. She turned to Payne. “How do we tell Mr. Hay?”

“I don’t know.” Payne was now in shock. “Thank God Helen isn’t here.”

“Let Mr. Hay find out on his own.” Blaise was practical. “There’s nothing we can do…”

“That we’ve not done.” Caroline put the broken stone in her handbag. “I should have taken the warning seriously, that opals are bad luck.” Happily, they were joined by Marguerite, loudly wailing; and as Caroline comforted her maid, Blaise knew that she would be all right. On the other hand, he wondered, briefly, about the universe. Was it all right? or was the whole thing meaningless and random, and insensately cruel?