Empire (35 page)

“Why not both?” Adams was more than ever bristling porcupine.

“He prefers either- or to simultaneity. He has confided to me that if the Russians and the Germans were to obtain China’s Shansi province, we would be at their mercy …”

“So we must arm to the teeth. That means more ships, more Admiral
Mahan, more noise from Teddy! Oh, I am sick of the whole lot.” The fire, sympathetically, exploded behind Adams. Both men started. Then Adams sat in his favorite small leather chair opposite Hay’s favorite small leather chair. The children’s study, the large Clara had called the room, designed as it was entirely for the comfort of great small men, and charming nieces. “I admire Brooks’s theory as far as I can understand it—nations as organisms. Nations as stores of energy, slowly depleting unless refuelled. I grasp all that. But I want only to understand the theory, which I don’t, really, and neither does he, while Brooks wants to
apply
the bloody thing. He’s mad. He’s got all sorts of people who should know better excited, including you.”

“Nothing excites me, Henry, except your excitement.”

“Weil, I am excited when I think of him. Brooks thinks England will collapse soon. So do I. He thinks we’ll inherit their empire. I don’t, at least not for long. I want us to build a sort of Great Wall of China, and hide behind it as long as possible. In the next quarter century the world’s going to go smash. Well, I’m for staying out of the smash as long as possible. You see, I’m anti-imperialist. Don’t tell Teddy or Lodge or Mahan. I’m for letting the whole thing smash up, and then, later, we might find some pieces worth picking up. Meanwhile, forget the Philippines. Forget China. Let England sink. Let Russia and Germany try to run the machine, while we live on our internal resources, which are so much greater than theirs. They’ll end by going bust, and why should we go bust with them?”

“Perhaps,” said Hay, startled by so much unexpected vehemence, not to mention so vast a sea-change in the Adams cosmogony, “we shall not be allowed to stay out, in order to pursue your—scavenger policy, of picking up the pieces.”

“Scavengers thrive on the battles of others. Anyway, we are getting in much too deep in Asia.”

“I thought you always wanted us to have Siberia …”

“But only as a scavenger, as loot, after the Tsar and his idiot court—those thirty-five grand dukes—have managed to destroy their ramshackle empire. I certainly wouldn’t send Admiral Dewey and General Miles to Port Arthur.”

“What about Teddy? We could always send him, alone, with a gun over Petersburg. In a balloon, of course.”

“Filled with air from his own strenuous lungs. I saw him when he was here last week. He swore, yet again, that he did not want to be vice-president.”

Hay sighed. “The Major doesn’t want him. Mark Hanna has already had one heart attack, attributable to Teddy. He was at his desk in the Senate, reading a newspaper account of Teddy’s fierce determination
not
to be vice-president, when, with a terrifying cry, he slumped to the floor, near dead of a Teddy-inspired heart attack.”

“Well, he is now completely recovered.” Adams stared gloomily into the fire. “He was brought here to breakfast.”

“Mark Hanna!” Hay was horrified; no one so low had ever come to an Adams breakfast. “Who
dared
bring him?”

“Cabot. Who else? It was, he said, for my—education.”

Clara and Helen made a joint entrance. Adams and Hay rose to greet them as if they had not all just met at tea beneath their joint roof. In order to maintain perspective, as Hay put it, meaning sanity, he walked every afternoon, no matter how cold, with Adams; then they would join Clara at her tea-urn. During these long walks, Hay was able to relate exactly what was on his mind while Adams was able to tell him, with great charm, what was not on the Secretary of State’s mind but ought to be.

Helen was now thinner; and altogether lovely to her father’s prejudiced eye. It was taken for granted that, in a year’s time, she would marry Payne Whitney, a handsome son of a handsome father, who was also deeply corrupt politically, and a master of Tammany. William C. Whitney was also a maker of money and, like Hay himself, a marrier of money, in the form of the large—why were heiresses always so large?—Flora Payne, who had died, leaving not so much a bereaved husband as a bereaved bachelor brother, Oliver Payne, the wealthiest of the lot. Then when Whitney remarried, Oliver Payne declared war on his one-time brother-in-law and with extraordinary and elaborate monetary bribes detached two of Whitney’s four children from their father: a daughter, Pauline, and a son, Harry Payne Whitney. Happily, the stormy brothers-in-law that once had been both approved of Helen, who behaved like a minister plenipotentiary as she made her way between the warring houses. William Whitney, once spoken of for president, was now being investigated by Governor Roosevelt because he owned streetcar lines in New York City. Whitney had been in Cleveland’s Cabinet; was an ally of Bryan; was, thought Hay, more than a match for Teddy, whose reforming tendencies, thus far, were more rhetorical than real.

“Colonel Payne is coming, isn’t he?” asked Helen, with more anxiety than her father felt warranted.

“He is doing me the honor, dearest infant. But then I hold open house for all Ohio, always. It is the Adams destiny in the fourth generation.”

Clara laughed. “One Stone and one Payne are hardly all Ohio.”

“But one Mark Hanna and one McKinley are one nation,” said Hay.

“One Republican Party, anyway. It seems,” said Adams, brightening, “that all presidents now come from Ohio. Garfield, Hayes, the Major. And they have quite obliterated the founders with their Western Reserve glory.”

“Dear Henry,” murmured Hay, “you do lay it on.”

The room filled up. Adams had invited twenty guests, the optimum number, he felt, for a dinner party. There was a possibility of general conversation, if someone other than the host proved to be brilliant. If no such paladin emerged, guests could speak across the table if they chose, an impossibility at a vast formal dinner where conversation, in Noah’s Ark twos, shifted to left and right with each course.

Hay noted several senators of the sort that Adams would never have invited were it not for Hay’s treaty: he appreciated the Porcupine’s sacrifice. Dowdily, Lord and Lady Pauncefote arrived, an equally dowdy daughter in tow.

Adams—the worst of guests; in fact, guest no longer of anyone except the Hays—was the best of hosts. Expertly, he moved his menagerie around the study like a sheepdog. But Del got past him to speak to his father. As they talked, Hay studied his own nose at the center of Del’s face; thus, nature would continue him through Del and, after Del, their plainly unlosable nose would be carried on into future generations, a reminder of one Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, master of all trades, as he once vaingloriously proclaimed to Adams, and a jack of none.

“The President says you’re to instruct me, Mr. Secretary.”

“You have no instructions, Consul-General, except the general one that I always give. What you have never said cannot be used against you.”

“I shall be silent to the Boers and silent to the English …”

“But write long reports to me and—to the President?” Hay was curious to know just what the Major expected of Del.

“I am to keep him informed, he said. Nothing more. You know how he is.”

“Not as well as you.” Del blushed at this. “You have his confidence.” Hay was aware of the sententious note in his voice. “Do not abuse it.”
Why, Hay wondered, was he so expert at always striking the wrong note with Del when, with everyone else, he had always had—owed his career to, in fact—perfect pitch?

“Why should I?” The gentle Del was now angry; and Hay could not think how to placate him. He looked for a diversion, and one stood in the doorway, the last of the guests, wearing a splendid dark gold gown. Caroline was greeted by Adams, who kissed her hand, something he rarely did with nieces, but then she was more fine Paris lady than humble American niece. Hay had always thought her a splendid catch, unlike Clara, who was less than enthusiastic but could give no reason why Del ought not to marry someone so extraordinarily rare. Yet Clara still went on and on about foreignness as if she had never left Amasa Stone’s house in Cincinnati. It was Hay’s fear that Caroline would take the year of Del’s absence and find someone more grand. Hay did not have the usual American
nouveau riche
conviction that to be new and rich was a sign of God’s anointment and so to be preferred to quarterings and coronets and money that had been aged in land. He had come from nowhere, like his father-in-law, and he could, he always feared, revisit nowhere at a moment’s notice. Fortunes lost were less of a novelty at century’s end than fortunes won.

Caroline joined them. “You’re late,” said Del.

“I have been,” suddenly Caroline stammered, “at the office. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a woman to say?”

“Say or do?” asked Hay, charmed.

“Both. At first, the fact that I have an office was a novelty here. Now it is a source of—
chagrin
.” She used the French word.

“The other girls are just jealous,” said Del.

“Oh, the ‘other girls’ rather like the idea. It means that I am completely out of the way, and no competition. It’s the men who grow distressed.”

“We are the superfluous sex.” Del looked at her more than fondly. If he was as much in love as Hay suspected, he was to be envied; at least, by his father, whose fondness for Clara had never once resembled love. Of course, he and Clara had been older when they met; and the world much younger; and marriage a matter, mostly, of sets of silver and linen, and relatives to be shared and propitiated, and money.

“What kept you at this sinister office of yours?” Hay quite liked the idea of a young woman publishing a newspaper in sordid Market Place.

“You,” said Caroline; the hazel eyes looked directly into his own. Wildly, he imagined that he, not his son, was engaged to this splendid
creature, who had, on her cheek, like a beauty mark, a small delicate charming smudge of printer’s ink. Hay had spent much of his own youth among printing presses.

“What about Father?” Del seemed anxious. Hay could only delight in the pale rose-pink cheek with its coquettish dot of blue-black ink.

“Wouldn’t you rather wait until after dinner?” Caroline started to back away, and stepped into Root, who was approaching them.

“I won’t be able to eat unless I know what horrors the press plans to rain down upon my head.” Hay could not make up his mind which he despised more, the loud ignorant venal Senate or the equally loud ignorant venal press. On balance, as he had been both a journalist and an editor, he despised the press more. He understood the journalist in a way that he could never understand the egomaniacal senator, who saw himself as the nation incarnate and mindless, and loud, loud, loud.

“Miss Sanford, don’t keep us in suspense. What has come over the wire?” Root looked at Hay. “The War Department has been cut off from the world ever since the last freeze. We could be invaded, and never know it.”

“The
New York Sun
would probably keep you informed,” said Caroline, producing from her handbag a press cutting. “This is tomorrow’s
Sun
. Governor Roosevelt has attacked your treaty.”

Hay took the cutting, and pretended to read, though he could see nothing without the pince-nez which rested on his chest. “I suppose,” he observed mildly, “that this is why Cabot did not come tonight.”

“I grow bored with Teddy,” said Root, baring his teeth. He took the cutting from Hay. “He wants the canal to be armed, by us.”

“If the Senate does not accept the treaty,” Hay’s words sounded to himself as if from a great distance, “I shall have no choice but to resign.”

“If you do,” said Root thoughtfully, “you will take Teddy down with you. The President will never forgive him.”

“Then I shall have done
two
excellent things.” Hay remembered to smile. “Let us not,” he said, “discuss this with the others. Let them read of my shame tomorrow.”

He turned to Caroline. “You are publishing Teddy’s statement?”

“On page three …”

“Where it belongs,” said Root.

“I have an entire family murdered by a single ax, on page one,” said Caroline.

“Good girl!” Hay was amused at last. “First things first, always. Is Del’s nose like mine?”

“Yes. A perfect copy. I’m fascinated at the way physical features continue in families from generation to generation.” She echoed, nicely, his own perception.

“Your mother …”

“I know.”

But Hay was certain that Caroline did not know the rumors about the famous Princesse d’Agrigente.

After dinner, Caroline and Del and Helen Hay were bundled into the back of a sleigh for a long moonlight ride to the hamlet of Chevy Chase.

“Russia must be like this. Just like this!” Helen exclaimed, as they passed from town into open snowy country: a world without color, only black, white and shades of gray, and sudden flashes of diamond-glitter as moonlight struck ice. Clara had insisted, without subtlety, that Helen join them on their last ride, and Caroline had been as pleased as Del was displeased. Caroline got no joy from having her hand pressed beneath a sable rug, while a stolen kiss, anywhere, simply depressed her. She was not like other girls; she had accepted her uniqueness without distress; she was prepared, or so she thought, for everything, including the whole business of two anatomies entwined, and the prickling of fig-leaves or whatever, but she could not bear the step-by-careful-step American courtship. At least in Paris, marriages were business affairs, like the mergers of railroads.

Helen chattered incessantly of Payne. How he and his sister Pauline had chosen their bachelor uncle, Oliver, over their handsome—
band-some
, she repeated—father. She would make no judgment, while the other brother, Harry, and sister, Dorothy, chose to remain with their father. “You cannot know, Caroline, what it is like to live in a family with such, such Shakespearean emotions, emotions!”

“But I can
imagine
, Helen.” Actually, Caroline suspected that there had been something Jacobean about her own parents. Why did her father never mention the, always, “dark” Emma? Why had Blaise told her that Mrs. Delacroix’s eyes entirely vanished at the mention of Emma? Then, back of all, there was Aaron Burr, worth a dozen Whitneys, a gross of Paynes. Nevertheless, old Oliver Payne, who seemed to Caroline to be all malignancy, coming between father and children and buying two of them outright from their father because the father had remarried three years after the death of Oliver’s sister, Flora, deified by brother, it was said, as once he had deified or at least revelled in his handsome, handsome, as Helen would say, brother-in-law. “But then
we always think our own families more original than anyone else’s.” Caroline thought that she had scored a point as their driver hurtled over a smooth untracked ivory field, close by a farmhouse where a single window filled space and time with a square of yellow light, the only color in their night world.