Empire (3 page)

“We could be fat together,” murmured Caroline, wondering if she had revealed herself in a
murmured
aside about Blaise, or had the voice been normal? Normal, she decided, when the puzzled Del asked her to
repeat herself. She asked, “What is your impression of his character?”

“I don’t know any more. I haven’t seen him since he quit Yale and went to work for the
Morning Journal
.”

“Even so, you were his classmate. You know him better than I do. I’m just the half-sister, back home in France. You’re the—contemporary in America.”

“I think Blaise wanted to get his life started earlier than most of us do. That’s all. He was—he is—in a hurry.”

“To do what?” Caroline was genuinely curious about her brother.

“To live it all, I suppose.”

“And you’re not?”

Del smiled; the teeth were like a child’s first set, small irregular pearls; he also had dimples and a turned-up nose. “I’m lazy. Like my father says
he
is, but isn’t. I don’t know what I shall do with myself. But Blaise knows just what he wants.”

Caroline was surprised. “Last year he wanted to study law. Then he quit Yale and went to work for a newspaper, of all things. And what a newspaper!” Caroline had yet to hear anything good of the
Journal
or its proprietor, the wealthy young Californian William Randolph Hearst, whose mother had recently inherited a fortune from his near-illiterate father, Senator George Hearst, a crude discoverer of gold and silver mines in the West. It was the Senator who had set up his cherished only son as a newspaper proprietor, first with the
Daily Examiner
in San Francisco and then with the
Morning Journal
in New York, where young Hearst had spectacularly succeeded, through a form of sensational journalism known as “yellow” (fires, alarums, scandals), in surpassing Mr. Pulitzer’s original “yellow”
New York World
. The
Journal
was now, in its own words, “the most popular newspaper on
EARTH
.” “And Blaise delights in Mr. Hearst,” said Caroline. “And I delight in hearing about Mr. Hearst.”

“But you’ve never met him?”

“No. No. He is not to be met, I gather. He goes to Rector’s with actresses.
Two
very young actresses, I am told. Sisters.”

“He is a cad.” Del said the final word; there would be no appeal.

“So why does Blaise want to work for him?”

This time Del’s smile was more grown-up and knowing: the baby teeth unrevealed by smooth lips. “Oh, Miss Sanford, has no one told you yet about power?”

“I read Julius Caesar’s handbook in school. I know all about it. You
start at first light and then, by forced marches, you surprise the enemy and kill them. Then you write a book about what you’ve done.”

“Well, the newspapers are now the book you write. Blaise has simply taken a shortcut. He has gone straight to the end-result.”

“But isn’t it better—if that’s what you want—to win a war first?”

“But that’s exactly what Mr. Hearst has done, or thinks he’s done. All those stories of his about how the Spanish blew up our battleship.”

“Didn’t they?”

“Probably not, according to Father. But it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now. Anyway, Blaise is in the midst of it. He wants to be powerful. We all noticed that.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m far too easy-going. I’d rather marry, and be happy, like my father.”

“But the Ambassador has always been at the center of—forced marches at first light.”

Del laughed. “It was the others who got up early to do the marching. Father just wrote the book.”

“Ten volumes, in fact.” Caroline had yet to meet anyone who had been able to read all the way through the ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln by John Hay and his fellow secretary to the President, J. G. Nicolay. Caroline had not even made the attempt. The Civil War had no interest for her, while Lincoln himself seemed as remote as Queen Elizabeth, and rather less interesting. But then she had been brought up on Saint-Simon, in whose bright pages there were no saints with stovepipe hats making sententious appeals to the Almighty, only a king who was compared, quite rightly, to the sun, in bed and out.

Mrs. Cameron appeared on the terrace. “Del!” she called. “Your father wants you. He’s in the library.” She went inside.

“What,” asked Caroline, as they returned to the house, “are the Five of Hearts?”

“Where did you hear about that?”

“I saw some letter-paper. I asked Mrs. Cameron. She was mysterious.”

“Well, don’t mention the subject to Mr. Adams, ever.”

“Then he must be a Heart?”

“It was long ago,” was all that Del said.

Caroline returned to her room; and dressed for lunch. She had come to Kent without a maid; old Marguerite had gone to Vichy to take the waters. In the past, Caroline had always travelled with a mademoiselle,
who was half governess and half maid. But now, in her twenty-first year, Caroline was an orphan; and she could do as she pleased. The problem was that she was not certain where pleasure for her might ultimately lie. In any case, until the Sanford estate was settled, she was in limbo. And so she had chosen to spend August with Del and his family at the “summer embassy,” presided over by the Camerons and the
Porcupinus Angelicus
, their name for Henry Adams, who was indeed prickly as a porcupine if not always much like an angel.

But, happily, Adams was now in a celestial mood, at least with Caroline, who found him alone in the yellow drawing room, so called because, with age, the frayed green damask on the walls had turned a sickly yellow, made even sicklier by the contrast with the heavily gilded—and dusty—furniture. Was dusty to be emblematic of the state of an English August, or merely her own state of mind?

Henry Adams was shorter than Caroline; and she was less than Amazonian. At sixty, Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, as he was inexorably identified, possessed a full white beard, carefully barbered to a point, a full moustache, a high, pink, shining bald head—the Adams birthright, he liked to say—and a full paunch held ever so slightly forward in order to balance properly the small round figure that existed only to support the large round brain-crammed head of America’s great historian, wit, dispenser of gloom—not to mention lover of Lizzie Cameron. But were they, actually, lovers? wondered Caroline, realizing that the country of her father was not that of her own birth and education, and as the chronicler, Adams, was no Saint-Simon, there were no rogue bastards to occupy his pen, though such things did exist in American history, but hidden from view, like the old story that her own grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, was the bastard son of that dark son of the American republic Aaron Burr, who had, so tremendously, like Lucifer, fallen.

“Dear Miss Sanford.” Henry Adams’s old bright eyes were very alert; but the smile was curiously tentative for one so venerable. “You do illuminate at least one sexagenarian’s summer.” The accent was British. But then Adams had matured in England, as his father’s secretary when that dour and gelid statesman had been President Lincoln’s minister at London during the Civil War. Like so many entirely Anglicized Americans, Adams affected to despise the British. “They are impenetrably stupid,” he would say, with quiet delight when confronted with some new demonstration of British dimness.

“Mr. Adams.” Caroline mocked a reverent curtsey. “Is the war concluded to your satisfaction?”

“Well, it is all over, which satisfies me. But then for two years the Cuban business drove me so wild that there was a movement to confine me to the Washington Zoo. At the mention of ‘Cuba Libre,’ I would howl—like a wolf at the full moon.” Adams bared his teeth; looked to Caroline not unlike a wolf at noon. “But then I always lose my head when others are calm. The moment they get off
their
heads,
I
am calm. Once the war began, I was serene. I knew we had our man of destiny securely in place.”

“Commodore Dewey?”

“Oh, infant! Commodores are simply playthings in war-time.”

“But he took Manila, and defeated the Spanish fleet, and now everyone wants us to stay, at least the English do.”

Adams tugged the tip of his pointed beard with, she noted, a small rosy hand that was more like a baby’s than that of an old man. He cocked his head to one side. “We students of history—no matter how dull—like to know just who it was who put an admiral, like a chess piece, in Far Eastern waters—soon to be called Far Western, as what’s west to us is what’s true west.”

“My brother Blaise says it was Mr. Roosevelt, when he was at the Navy Department. Blaise says he did it without telling his superiors.”

Adams nodded approvingly. “You are getting closer. Our young bumptious friend Theodore—a student of
my
young bumptious brother Brooks—deserves more credit, certainly, than the knight—admiral, that is—I think in chess terms—that checkmated Spain. But whose hand directed our castle Theodore?”

A flight of children, led by Martha, filled up the room. All the girls surrounded Uncle Dordie, a name Martha had invented for Mr. Adams, whose pockets turned out to be filled with hard candies, that were promptly and ruthlessly suppressed by Mrs. Cameron. “Not before mealtimes, Dor!” she announced, confiscating whatever she could pry loose from clenched fists.

Other houseguests were now entering the drawing room, without announcement, to the butler’s sorrow. But Mrs. Cameron’s word was final at the summer embassy. Only officialdom was proclaimed. The rest came pell-mell.

To Caroline’s surprise, Adams turned back to her and resumed their conversation where it had broken off. “In those affairs where the balance of power in the world suddenly shifts, there must be a consummate player, who calculates his moves. This player puts Theodore at the Navy Department so that he will put the Admiral at Manila; he then responds to the sinking of the
Maine
with a series of moves that lead
to a near-bloodless war, and the end of Spain as a world-player, and the beginning of the United States as an Asiatic power …”

“I am in suspense, Mr. Adams! Who is the consummate player?”

“Our first man of destiny since Mr. Lincoln—the President, who else? The Major himself. Mr. McKinley. Don’t laugh!” Adams frowned severely. “I know he is supposed to be a creature of Mark Hanna and all the other bosses, but it’s plain to me that they are
his
creatures. They find him money—a useful art—so that he can deliver us an empire, which he has! The timing is exquisite, too. Just as weak England begins to loosen her grip on the world, just as Germany and Russia and Japan are jostling one another to take England’s place, the Major preempts them all, and the Pacific Ocean is ours! Or soon will be, and the new poles of power will be Russia on the eastern landmass and the United States on the west, with England, ours at last, in between! Oh, to be your age, Miss Sanford, and to see the coming wonders of our Augustan age!”

“In Paris, Mr. Adams, you once told me that you were a lifelong pessimist.”

“That was on earth. I am now in Heaven, dear Miss Sanford, and so my pessimism ended with my earthly life. Up here, I am not even a porcupine.” The moustache twitched at the corners as he looked up at her—how small he was, she thought, angelic and diabolic.

They were joined by Don Cameron, who smelled of whiskey, and by the stout, bald, bearded figure of Henry James, who had just arrived from his house at Rye. When Caroline was very young, the novelist had been brought to Saint-Cloud by the Paul Bourgets. She had been impressed when James had spoken to her entirely in unaccented French; she had also been intrigued by an American whose two Christian names were affixed to no family name—Henry James What? she asked her father. The Colonel neither knew nor cared. He disliked literary men, except for Paul Bourget, whose aggressive snobbism gave Sanford quiet pleasure: “Can’t read his books. But he knows
le monde de la famille
.” When the Colonel did use a French phrase, it was always eerily mispronounced; yet the Colonel had a good ear; and loved music if not musicians. He had even written an opera about Marie de’Medici, which no one would put on unless he himself paid for the production. But as he was the sort of man who would never spend a penny that might give himself pleasure, there was no production of the opera in his lifetime; no life, either. Caroline vowed that she would not make the same mistake.

Don Cameron’s voice was slow, rumbling, hoarse. “Well, you could at least try it out.”

“But, my dear Senator, I am already so beautifully
machined
. At Lamb House, I am fitted out like the latest, most modern manufactory, geared for the most intense production, with a chief engineer who is
hopelessly
wedded to that intricate, fine-grinding mill that he performs upon with a positively virtuoso’s touch …” Henry James spoke in a low, deep resonant voice, well-produced by a huge barrel of a chest that contained a singer’s lungs, thought Caroline, for his breath never gave out, no matter how long and intricate the sentence.

Cameron was persistent. “You’ll never regret trying it out. I know. I tried it out. I’m no writer but it could change your life.”

“Ah,
that
!” began James.

Adams broke in. “What is
it
?”

“I already showed you.” The small, red, suspicious eyes turned toward Caroline now. “I’m selling the thing—the rights, that is—for Europe. Exclusive rights.”

“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; thanks to the Colonel, she knew rather a lot about the tricks of opera singers as well as opera, “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess.
Mais en tout cas
, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”