Empire (25 page)

“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, criss-crossed 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
he
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 dextrous 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.”