Empire (55 page)

At the door to the drawing room, Caroline was astonished to see Mrs. Jack Astor, like some celestial peacock—or was it hen?—in the Washington back yard. “It is like one of those Brueghel paintings,” the deep voice sounded in the crowded room. “The wedding of village swain to milkmaid.”

“Attended by a fairy godmother, all in gossamer and jewels …” Caroline began.

“
 … witch
, dear Caroline. What am I doing in so bucolic a place?”

“It reminds you of Newport, Rhode Island, I suppose.”

“No. Rhinebeck-on-Hudson when we give our annual harvest feast to the yokels, and I see to it that their trestle tables are wreathed in poison ivy.” Mrs. Jack’s laughter was enjoyable if not precisely contagious. All round them, awed Washington ladies were staring at the fashionable Mrs. Astor, never before seen in the capital city. Caroline was agreeably aware that her own stock was rising rapidly.

“Are you a friend of the Hays?” asked Caroline.

“No, not really. But I am enamored of this creature, so young, so potentially appalling …”

Mrs. Jack had put out an arm and swept the imperious Alice Roosevelt toward her. “You see? I came. Your rustic revels are now complete.”

“So proud the Astors!” exclaimed Alice, in no way, ever, to be outdone, even by the superb Mrs. Jack. “When they were nothing but German Jews, kosher butchers, when we Roosevelts …”

“… were running away from the Indians, in your clumsy wooden shoes, which I see you’re wearing today,” she added, glancing down at Alice’s rather large squared-off slippers. “How suitable …”

“Isn’t she foul!” Alice turned, delighted, to Caroline.

“No, no. She is fair. But her bite is lethal.”

“Rabid!” Alice gazed with delight on Mrs. Jack. It was no secret that the President’s oldest child was also, in his own words, “the only one of us with any money,” inherited from her dead mother. She was also bent on being a Fashionable, something unknown in Roosevelt circles, a family not unlike the Apgars when it came to dowdy self-satisfaction.

There was a sudden murmur all about them, as the President and Mrs. Roosevelt approached, led by John Hay, like an ancient chamberlain. “Alice, we’re leaving,” the President announced.

“You’re leaving. I’m staying.”

“Alice,” murmured her stepmother.

“Mrs. Jack Astor.” Alice presented the swan to the barnyard geese.

Mrs. Jack made an elaborate curtsey.

“Do stop that!” The President was unamused.

“She does it very well.” Edith smiled a queenly smile.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Jack rose now to her full height. “Why do you call us ‘the idle rich’?” She gave the President a mocking smile. “We are never idle.”

“Some are less idle than others,” began the President, plainly not comfortable.

“While some are less rich than others,” acknowledged Mrs. Jack. “Even so, you must not generalize about your loyal subjects, or we shall all vote for Bryan next year.”

“Then
everyone
will be less rich.” The President was now retreating from the room. Alice remained. If nothing else, Caroline found her refreshing. But then the entire Roosevelt family was a surprise to a world that had come to look upon the White House as a seedy boardinghouse for dim politicians
emeriti
. Caroline’s “Society Lady,” as the woman in question signed herself in the pages of the
Tribune
, was thrilled with the change in Washington’s
ton
, as she liked to call it, rhyming the French word, to Caroline’s immeasurable joy, with the English word that denotes a measurement of weight.

“This place has possibilities.” Mrs. Jack was looking about the room. The diplomatic corps was its usual colorful self; and the few men of state were, if not actually gentlemen, got up as if they were. Only the wives—the poor wives, as Caroline thought of them—gave away the game. They were redolent of the back yards of small towns; and always frowning with anxiety, fearful of letting down the
ton
.

Caroline had been disagreeably surprised to meet the wife of James Burden Day. For one thing, she had not expected him to marry so unexpectedly, and, for another, to marry someone from “back home” when he had already entered the relatively great world of Washington, where he was, relatively, related to those ubiquitous gentlefolk the Apgars. Caroline assumed that Day’s wife was the price of his congressional seat. None of this was her business.

“If the wives were subtracted,” Mrs. Jack said aloud what Caroline was thinking, “the result would be a lot more amusing than anything we’ve got in New York.”

“Only,” said Caroline sadly, “they refuse to be subtracted.”

“Try division.” Mrs. Jack gave her a sudden sharp, knowing look; and Caroline, for no reason that she could ascertain, gasped.

Clara Hay gathered them up. “Come on, you two. Amuse Colonel Payne.”

“Surely, he dislikes ladies,” began Mrs. Jack.

“Who doesn’t,” whispered Caroline, taking advantage of Clara Hay’s deafness.

“All the more reason for him to make a fuss over
you
, Mrs. Astor.” Clara was firm, always firm; she was also generally right. Colonel
Oliver Payne was thrilled to be surrounded by Mrs. Astor and Miss Sanford.

“We must,” said Mrs. Jack, voice more throaty and menacing than ever, “find
you
a husband—I mean, a wife, Colonel.”

B
LAISE
had accompanied his editor Hapgood to New York City to observe the election of the Chief to Congress, a foregone election, as Hearst had left nothing to chance. The original Democratic nominee, Brisbane, had stepped aside, to make way for his employer; and Hearst was duly confirmed as Tammany’s Democratic nominee in the Eleventh District. For this safe Democratic seat, the new head of Tammany, the cheerful Charles Francis Murphy, asked only that the
Journal
whole-heartedly support Tammany’s candidate for governor. Hearst had agreed.

Now Blaise and Hapgood stood in windy Madison Square, where some forty thousand people were gathered to hear the election results, and view the fireworks laid on by the
Journal
. “He sure knows how to spend the money,” observed Hapgood, with awe.

“Sometimes I think that that’s all he knows.” Blaise was sour. He, too, had spent money in Baltimore; in fact, the money spent was now at his side, a stout Teutonic man with a huge moustache, the paradigm of Hearst journalists in the copious flesh. But even Hapgood had so far failed to increase circulation figures. Currently, their hopes were based on a series about miscegenation, the one subject certain to thrill their readers, or so Hapgood, the Marylander, maintained. Blaise envied Caroline
her
city. When the capital was dull, there was Embassy Row; when the embassies were short of news, there was the White House, a never-ending source of “warm human interest,” to use the current phrase. Stories about the Roosevelt children and their ponies in the elevator, their appearances at state sessions on stilts, their snakes and frogs at table, and, above all, the Jovian sovereign Theodore, conducting himself like a king, destined by birth to his high estate. Caroline need do nothing to fill the columns of her paper; they filled themselves. All he had was miscegenation; and then what?

Blaise had wanted to join Hearst at the Lexington Avenue house, but Hapgood suggested that they get a sense of the crowd first. “After all, if the Chief”—although he worked for Blaise now, the Chief was still the Chief—“is going to be the candidate in ’04, we’ll get some sense of it now, from the crowd.”

“A lot of Bowery.” Blaise knew his Manhattan crowds. “Also Tammany.” Everyone was in a gala mood. Huge transparencies celebrated Hearst’s victory of fifteen thousand eight hundred votes over his dim Republican adversary; and his lead over the entire ticket by thirty-five hundred votes, which made him the largest Democratic vote-getter in the state. Tammany’s governor-to-be was not-to-be: in a close race, he had lost to the Republicans. This then was the night that Hearst had dreamed of. He had won his first election in the biggest possible way.

Blaise and Hapgood found themselves not far from a band which kept playing, rather tactlessly, “California, Here I Come,” a tribute to Hearst’s origin rather than to his adopted domicile, which was now dispatching him to Washington. Overhead a manned balloon was lit up with colored lanterns. The crowd was festive, as well they should be; free schooners of beer were being served at one end of the square beneath the legend “William Randolph Hearst, Labor’s Friend,” while nearby an electrical sign proclaimed, “Congress Must Control the Trusts,” a not-so-subtle reminder that the current president was less than arduous in his efforts to master the country’s owners.

Hearst’s socialism—if that was what it was—always bemused Blaise, who never ceased, for a moment, to be loyal to his own class and could not conceive any other loyalty. Although Hearst would have to pose as a friend of the working-man and the enemy of the rich if he wanted to replace William Jennings Bryan as the plain people’s tribune, he was not entirely the demagogue others thought him. The rich Mr. Hearst, who had inherited his money, disliked those other rich men, who had inherited theirs. He was genuinely attuned not so much to the hard-working worthy poor as he was to those excluded from society itself. Himself a sort of outlaw, he not only lived outside the law but used law to flout law. Hearst might yet strike that nerve in a still-savage land which would make him its natural leader. Blaise was, suddenly, aware that he was present at an historic moment, the genesis of what might be an astonishing, even Napoleonic career.

As if to emphasize and punctuate the Napoleonic image, Madison Square exploded—literally exploded. Blaise fell to his knees on the pavement, while Hapgood sat down beside him with a crash. Sound-waves buffeted them like Montauk surf. The band stopped playing. Then the screaming began; and the sound of ambulances. Overhead the balloon hovered; then began its descent. The electrical sign still threatened the trusts, but the various transparencies had been abandoned, as people ran, in panic, from the square, where something, Blaise could not tell what, had blown up.

“Anarchists!” Hapgood was now on his feet, ever the reporter, the Hearst reporter.

In the cool autumn air there was the acrid scent of—what?—gunpowder, Blaise decided, as he and Hapgood, like brave soldiers in a battle, hurried against the fleeing crowd. Let others run from battle;
they
would go to war.

The fire department arrived just as Blaise and Hapgood found the source of the explosion, a small cast-iron mortar inside of which a fireworks bomb had gone off, igniting dozens of other bombs. The principal damage had been to the windows of a building nearby. The glass had been pulverized, and like so many icy lethal bullets had laid low dozens of men, women and children. Some stood, screaming, faces bleeding; others lay ominously still on the pavement. Blaise stared down at a man, spread-eagled face down; in the back of his neck there was a diamond-shaped piece of glass which must have severed the spine. To Blaise’s amazement there was no blood, only the glass, shining in the lamplight, and the dark slit, rather like a letterbox into which someone had tried to insert a glass message.

“How many dead, wounded?” Blaise was delighted by his own coolness; and realized what a truly easy time of it Roosevelt must have had at San Juan Hill. Everything so fast, so shocking, so pointless.

“At least a hundred, I’d say.” Hapgood’s notebook was out; and he was writing and looking simultaneously; then police and firemen made them move on.

Hearst was seated at his Napoleonic desk; he had forgone, no doubt forever, the bright plaids and festive ties of his Prince Hal days. Now he was in a statesman’s black frock-coat, with a black bow tie and a white shirt. The legs once so haphazardly arranged upon the desk were set, side by side, beneath it, as he talked into the telephone to Brisbane at the
Journal
office. George Thompson, now elephantine in appearance, had warned Blaise that the Chief was “handling the misadventure in Madison Square.”

Blaise sat on the sofa opposite, as he had so often before in his days as apprentice. The Willson girls, each in a glittering ball gown, were at the opposite end of the museum-like room, playing Parcheesi. Somewhere, a supper party was being laid on to celebrate the victory of the rising political star. But for now, Hearst listened, murmured questions, shut his eyes as if better to visualize not the explosion in the square but the headlines that would describe it. Finally, he put down the receiver.

“I was there,” said Blaise.

With professional skill, Hearst questioned Blaise; took notes; ignored the chatter of the Willson girls. “There will be lawsuits,” he said finally, “even though the district attorney’s prepared to exonerate us. Well, it’s done. The important thing is to keep Roosevelt on the run. He’s been an ass over the coal-miners. You see, he’s the worker’s enemy.”

“Yes,” said Blaise. It was odd to hear the Chief express political opinions. As a rule, he was indifferent to the rights and wrongs of any issue. All that mattered was how to play the news. Now he himself meant to be the news. Blaise wondered if Hearst understood the risk that he was running. He who had devoted a lifetime to making lurid fictions of others was now himself a candidate for re-creation. Blaise was not certain what a petard was but he understood about self-hoisting. Meanwhile, he congratulated the newest star in the political firmament.

Hearst was matter-of-fact. “I should’ve gone for the governorship. But there wasn’t the time, and 1904’s almost here, and we’ve got nobody to put up against Roosevelt. I’ve got Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles?”

“A paper there. The
Examiner
, I’m calling it. Then Boston’s next.”

“What about Baltimore?”

“I’ll need some organizing there, Blaise. Maybe you could see to it.” Hearst swung back and forth between newspapers and politics as if the two were the same, which perhaps they were to him at the moment, and if they were, Blaise saw trouble ahead. One could not be both inventor of the American world and the thing invented.