Empire (31 page)

“As a matter of good taste …”

Caroline laughed. “Good taste is the enemy of truth!”

“Who is truth’s friend?”

“No one in Washington—that I’ve met, anyway. I hope my peculiar
métier
doesn’t embarrass you.” To say that Del was conventional was to say everything.

“No, no. You are like no one else, after all.”

“You will do well in …”

“Diplomacy?”

“Pretoria.” They both laughed; and entered the “sumptuous mansion,” as the
Tribune
always described any home with a ballroom, at whose center stood the splendid Mrs. Washington McLean, flanked by her daughter Millie, a handsome little woman, aglitter with diamonds, and the happy white-haired, teak-faced, gold-braided bridegroom. Although Caroline had not been to many of Washington’s hard-pan affairs (so named because these new rich had, often as not, made their millions with a hard pan in some Western creek, prospecting for gold), she recognized from her own newspaper’s reports numerous city celebrities, permanent residents, often from the West, builders of new palaces along Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues, those two great thoroughfares of the fashionable West End. She herself always caused something of a stir, as a grand Northern or European, or whatever she was, personage who had taken on the proprietorship of a dull small-town newspaper and made it incontrovertibly and shockingly yellow. No one could guess her motive. After all, she was a Sanford; engaged, more or less, to the equally rich Del Hay; yet she spent her days in Market Square, dealing in murders and, lately, civic corruption; and her evenings at home, where few of Washington’s cliff-dwellers or hard-panners were ever invited, assuming that they would come to the house of so equivocal a maiden.

For company, Caroline had taken up with the Europeans, particularly with Cambon, the French minister; and with the recently ennobled British ambassador, Lord Pauncefote. Although she found the twice-divorced Russian ambassador, Count Arthur (surely, Arturo? she had said) Cassini, amusing and predictably gallant, she had followed Mrs. Hay’s advice and steered clear of him and his beautiful sixteen-year-old “niece,” who was, actually, his daughter by a one-time “actress,” now installed at the Russian embassy as the girl’s governess. The Washington newspapers had been almost as savage as the Washington gossips. Out of deference to Clara Hay, Caroline had avoided the Cassinis and the McLeans. Now she felt exhilarated as she stepped into the gilded room. Where the Hays and the Adamses and the Lodges were discreetly wealthy, and lived lives of muted splendor, prisoners to good taste and devotees of civilization at its most refined, the McLeans flaunted the inexhaustible contents of their hard pan. Guiltily, Caroline was more delighted by the vulgar kingdom than by the known one.

Caroline and Del made their way down the receiving line. The
Admiral was gracious. “Tell Mr. Hay how much I appreciated his letter.”

“I will, sir.”

“Is Mr. Hay coming?” asked Millie, a pretty woman, Caroline decided, for forty-nine.

“I believe he is with the President tonight,” Del lied smoothly, and Caroline was pleased that he had taken so well to the world that he would be obliged to make his way in.

“We
expected
the President.” The new Mrs. Dewey smiled hugely; the teeth were discolored. But the huge doll’s eyes were a marvelous blue.

“There is a crisis,” murmured Del. “In the Philippines.”

The small, imperial Mrs. Washington McLean regarded the young couple with mild curiosity. “We don’t see much of you, Mr. Hay,” she said. “We don’t see you at all, Miss Sanford.” This was neutral. The style was very much that of
the
Mrs. Astor.

“I hope,” said Caroline, “that that will change.”

“I do, too.” A thin smile hardly lit a face entirely shadowed by a diamond-studded bandeau lodged half an inch above small eyes. “I shan’t be here forever.”

“You go back to Cleveland, to be renewed?”

“No. To Heaven, to be redeemed.”

Then Caroline found herself face to face with John R. McLean himself. He was tall, with the limpid blue eyes of his sister, and a neatly trimmed moustache. “Well, it’s you,” he said, staring down into Caroline’s face. “Come on. Let’s talk. Unless you want money from me. I don’t give money, outside the family.”

“How wise.” Then, exquisitely pretentious, Caroline began to quote Goethe in the original German: apropos a father’s duties.

Startled, McLean completed the quotation, in German. “How did you know I speak German?”

“You were at school at Heidelberg. You see? I study my fellow publishers.”

McLean began to hiccup, eyes misty with pleasure, or so Caroline hoped. “My stomach,” he said, “has been eroded by its own acids. Come into the library. Away from these people.”

They sat before a huge fireplace, where great logs burned. The firelight was reflected in the dark blue leather bindings of the books, arranged like so many Union soldiers on parade in their mahogany shelves. “You can never make that paper a success.” He gave her a glass
of champagne; he poured himself soda water. The library door was firmly shut to the other guests. When McLean noticed that her eyes were on the door, he laughed. “Two publishers can’t compromise each other.”

“Let us hope Mr. Hay sees our relations so practically.”

“I am told that he’s an agreeable young man. We’re all of us from Ohio, you know. At least Clara Stone is. John Hay’s from nowhere. A sort of gypsy who’s taken to stealing power instead of babies.”

“How else,” asked Caroline, displeased, “is power obtained if it is not taken from someone else? I realize, of course, some power is inherited, the way you inherited the
Enquirer …
”

McLean was amused. “Me, an idle heir! Well, that’s a new one. I built on an inheritance, you might say—like your friend Hearst.” From a log, bright blue Luciferian flowers suddenly bloomed.

McLean stared at Caroline a moment. “I won’t ask you why you’re doing this,” he said finally. “I get pretty tired of people asking me that. If they can’t see why you—why we—do it,” he was suddenly attractive to her, now that he was collegial, “there’s no way of telling them. But since you’re a handsome young woman with a fortune, and Del Hay to marry, how long can you be so … original?”

“As long as you, I suppose.”

“I’m a man. We’re allowed to marry and we’re allowed—delighted to do business. No lady that I know of has ever set out, so young, while single, to do anything like this.”

Caroline studied the white smoke which had replaced the blue flame-flowers. “Why,” she asked, “are you so eager to be president?”

“How do you know I am?”

“That’s coy, Mr. McLean. That is maidenly. You give me the sort of answers that I’m supposed to give you. Why do you want it so badly that you took on the President in his own home state, and lost, as you knew you were going to?”

McLean’s hiccups returned, louder than the fire’s hissing and sputtering. “I didn’t expect to lose. It was close. The President’s on spongy ground back home. This empire business isn’t popular with the folks.”

“But prosperity is, and the President’s clever. That war of his ended the bad times, and even the farmers are complaining less than usual, which means that McKinley will defeat Bryan again.” How proud, Caroline thought, Mlle. Souvestre would be: one of her girls dealing with a man on equal terms.

McLean stared at Caroline with true wonder. “Somehow or other,
I got the impression that you were only interested in the more revolting contents of our city’s morgue.”

Caroline laughed. “I’m not entirely ghoulish. In fact, I don’t like the contents of the morgue at all. But I am curious as to how living people manage to end up on marble slabs, and I share my curiosity with our readers, few as they are.”

“Mr. Hay—the father—must talk freely with you.”

“I listen—freely—to everyone.” Caroline stood up. “We’ve been here too long. I am compromised. Shall I scream?”

“I would be deeply flattered, and Mrs. McLean would be deeply proud—of me.” McLean got to his feet. They stood in front of the fire. Over the mantel hung a splendid fraudulent Rubens. Caroline had seen two exact copies of the same painting in New York. In dealing with innocent Americans, Old Europe’s forgers had grown careless. “You are interested in our political life, and I am surprised. Most young … most women are not. How did this happen?”

“I went to a good school. We were taught to question everything. I do. Now then, Mr. McLean, which of us—the
Enquirer
or the
Tribune
—shall question the war?”

“The war?” McLean blinked. “What war?”

“The Filipino war of independence, what else? We seem to be losing it.”

“Losing it? I guess you didn’t see this morning’s Associated Press wire. General Otis has captured the president of the so-called Philippines Congress, and has made secure all of central Luzon. The war, as you call it, is just about over.”

“Aguinaldo is still free. But you know far more than I about all this.” Half-heartedly, Caroline turned herself into polite
jeune fille
. “I had only hoped that someone might explain just how the … the morgues in those islands got so filled up, and why.”

McLean took her arm; he was suddenly paternal, and almost, for him, affectionate. “You know more than any young woman I’ve ever met. But you haven’t quite got the clue to all of this …”

“Clue?”

McLean nodded. They were at the door. “I’m not going to tell you, either. You’re too smart as it is.”

The door was flung open, and there stood Mrs. John R. McLean, small of chin, blue of eyes, dark of skin. “You two are a scandal,” she observed mildly.

“We are at that.” McLean was wry. “But then that’s our business. Now, young lady, a question.”

“Before my very eyes,” said Mrs. McLean, plainly not disturbed.

“And ears,” her husband added. He turned to Caroline. “Do you mean to sell out to Hearst?”

“No. I also don’t mean, if I can help it, to sell out to my brother—half-brother—Blaise.”

“If you can help it?” McLean watched her face closely, as though studying a clock which may or may not be keeping correct time.

“Blaise has tied up my share of our inheritance. I may not get what is mine until 1905. It is possible that I shall run out of money before then.…” Caroline could see that Mrs. McLean was far more shocked by this talk of money than she would ever have been by the thought of a romantic interlude between husband and young woman. But McLean had seized the point.

“If you ever need money for the
Tribune
,” he said, “come to me.”

“Pop!” Mrs. McLean’s dark complexion seemed smeared with ash by firelight. The pale eyes protruded.

“Mummie!” McLean responded in kind, their princely eminence abandoned for the homely lowland of the common hard pan. McLean turned to his wife and took her arm. “Don’t you see that the best thing in the world is for me to have this lovely child running the
Tribune
, with my money, than have her go sell it to that bastard …”

“Pop!” The voice resounded like thunder.

“I have heard the word,” said Caroline. “In Market Square,” she added, demurely.

“… William Randolph Hearst.” McLean concluded; and led the two ladies back into the ballroom.

Caroline was greeted by her new friends of the diplomatic corps. Jules Cambon was a lively cricket of a man, always pleased to see what he regarded as a countrywoman. He was also, he liked to say, an
American
bachelor: Madame Cambon had refused to join him in the Washington wilderness. Lord Pauncefote was a lawyer turned diplomat; he had been posted to Washington for ten years, and knew the intricacies of the capital even better, Hay liked to say, than the Secretary of State. Pauncefote’s face was wide, made even wider by fleecy side-whiskers, whose white was emphasized by the rich red claret color of the huge face. Pauncefote was also an expert on the legal intricacies governing international canals. He had been involved in the creation of the Suez Canal; now he was again at work, with Hay, drawing up
the protocols which would govern the canal that the United States was planning to build across the Central American isthmus. Once Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected, America’s military power would be doubled, while, it was whispered in the Senate cloakroom, England’s would be halved.

“We are hopeful,” said the old man to the group of government officials surrounding him. As Congress was not yet in session, there were few tribunes of the people present to celebrate the hero of Manila Bay. Pauncefote bowed to Caroline. “Miss Sanford. I am speaking shop, and will now desist.”

“Don’t! Go on. It is my shop, too. The
Tribune
has already thundered its approval of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.”

“Would that the Senate will do the same next month.” Actually, the
Tribune
editorial, the work of Trimble, had suggested that since the United States was building—and paying for—the canal, the United States must have the right to fortify the canal, which the treaty, out of deference to an 1850 convention between England and the United States, would deny. But just as Pauncefote began to express his government’s views of canals, Mrs. Admiral Dewey joined them, a sumptuous doll, Caroline decided, who had at last found herself a proper doll’s house. She explained to Caroline, “We couldn’t live in that tacky house in Rhode Island Avenue. So I’ve bought Beauvoir, a pretty place in Woodley Lane. Do you know it?”

Caroline did not.

“It’s like being in the country, but still in the town. I can’t wait to start fixing it up. For years I’ve owned quantities of the most lovely blue-and-white Delft tiles, and now I’m going to be able to use them.”

“In the kitchen?”

Mrs. Dewey’s huge doll’s eyes blinked like—a doll’s. “No. In the drawing room. Of course, the house is rather small, but then we don’t need anything large. There are no children now. Only my husband’s trophies. And what trophies! You saw the gold sword the President gave him at the Capitol?”

“From a great distance.” The ceremony had been impressive, if somewhat bizarre. Never before had a reigning president sat in front of the portico while the center of attention was not himself, the sovereign, but a military man. McKinley had carried off his difficult assignment with his usual papal charm, and Caroline had accepted, gratefully, Hay’s characterization of the President as a medieval Italian prelate. While the Admiral was being celebrated by the vast crowd, the President
had smiled beautifully at no one. Only once was he utilized. He was obliged to present a gold sword to the Admiral, with a few murmured words, no doubt in Church Latin.