Empire (74 page)

“Don’t be carried away. Think of all the new crimes we can commit. Let poor Emma rest in peace. I have never, once, thought of Denise. Why should you think of Emma, who, according to Plon, except for one nicely executed murder, was delightful, as a woman, and admirable as a mother?”

“You are immoral, Blaise.” Caroline wanted to be shocked; but felt nothing at all.

“I never said I wasn’t. I’m indifferent. You remember our last night in New York, at Rector’s? when you were so shocked by the way the whole room sang that song?—well, I was thrilled because I was just like the singers of that song.”

Caroline shuddered at the memory. The latest Victor Herbert musical contained a highly minatory song called “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” On the night that she and Blaise came, as it were, full circle, in their knowledge of each other, they had dined at Rector’s, and when the singer from the musical comedy entered the restaurant, he boomed out, “I want …” and the entire restaurant took up the chorus, and on the word “want” everyone banged a fist on the table. It was like a war being conducted by very fat people against—the waiters? or everyone on earth who was not as fat or as rich as they? “So Emma was right, to want what she wanted?”

“You have only one chance sometimes. Anyway, what she wanted,” Blaise brought down his fist on the table, and Caroline jumped in her chair, “she got, and that’s what counts, and because she did, you’re here.”

So, in the end, Caroline, the successful American publisher, was not the acclimatized American that her brother, her appendage, was. She wished Mr. Adams was on hand, to delight in the irony.

But the next day, when Mr. Adams was indeed on hand, with John and Clara Hay, there was no opportunity to discuss anything in private except the fading away of John Hay, whose hair was now as white as his beard, the result, he said, still capable of his old humor, “of the waters of Bad Nauheim, which etiolate—my favorite word that I never get a chance to use—all things dark, not to mention false. Clara’s henna is all gone.”

While Hay sat with Caroline in the sandstone thrones, Blaise and Frederika showed off the chateau, and even Henry Adams affected to be overwhelmed.

Caroline had not had much experience with the dying. But one of her aunts had been something of a devotee of death-beds, and if she so much as heard of someone moribund within a hundred miles, she was on her way, in somber black with Bibles and prayer-books, with medicines to speed the terminal to terminus, and with cordials to assuage the survivors’ grief. “You can always tell when they’re about to pass on by a certain strong light in their eyes, just toward the end. Well, that’s the glory coming.” Late for a highly significant death-bed, the Sanford aunt had hurried down a flight of stairs, fallen, broken her neck; and so was robbed of her shining glory, so long awaited by her friends.

But John Hay’s eyes were not in the least glorious. Rather, they were dull and glassy; he was also thinner and paler than he had been before the cure; but he had not lost interest in life, rather the reverse. He looked about him curiously. “I couldn’t imagine living in a poky house in Georgetown when you have all this. It even beats Cleveland.”

“Well, the house is splendid but the company’s poky. So I stay on in Washington. Besides, we didn’t sort out the estate till this spring.”

“Satisfactorily?” Hay gave her a shrewd look.

Caroline nodded. “As satisfactory as anything ever is. Anyway, I like my new sister-in-law.”

“I suppose you’ll get married again.”

“You sound disapproving.” Caroline laughed. “But then I’m a divorcée. I’m told if I go to Cleveland, I shall be stoned to death …”

“Only when taken, publicly, in adultery, by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. Oh, I shall miss this,” he said, with all sorts of resonance that tact required her not to explore.

“You go on to London?”

“Then Washington, then New Hampshire.”

“Why Washington in the heat?”

Hay sighed. “Theodore is there. Theodore is busy. When Theodore is busy, I feel constitutionally obliged to be on hand.”

“The Russians?” Caroline could no longer forget, even in the company of the dying, that she was a journalist.

“The Japanese, I should say. I’m so far removed from things. I have to read the foreign press with a sort of mental cypher-code to figure out what’s happening. Apparently, Theodore has been asked by the Japanese to arbitrate a peace treaty between them and Russia. But what is actually happening—if anything—I don’t know. Spencer Eddy—”

“Surrenden Dering?”

“The same. He’s posted in Petersburg. He came all the way to Bad
Nauheim to tell me that Russia’s falling apart. It seems that the Tsar is a religious maniac, and so the thirty-five grand dukes are running the country, which is to say they create endless confusion. The workers are on strike. The students are on strike. Maybe Brooks is right, after all. They’ll have their French Revolution at last. Meanwhile, what government they have has instructed Eddy to tell me that they’d like a convention with us, and I had to tell him that, thanks to the Senate and dear Cabot, there is no way of getting such a treaty as long as any senator has one constituent who might object.”

Adams joined them. He seemed immeasurably old to Caroline; yet, paradoxically, he never aged. He simply became more himself: the last embodiment of the original American republic. “I like your sister-in-law. She knows what
not
to show you on a tour of the house.”

“There’s so much
not
to be seen. There is dry-rot …”

“I think that’s what I’ve got.” Hay sighed. “I was finally examined by an austere Bavarian doctor who assured me, with touching Teutonic modesty, that he was the greatest expert on the heart in the world. As I believe everything I’m told, I said, ‘So what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You have a hole—or a bump,’ he was not consistent, ‘in your heart.’ When I asked why all the other great heart specialists had not noticed this hole or bump, he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t see it, or maybe they didn’t want to worry you.’ ‘Is it fatal?’ I asked. ‘Everything’s fatal,’ he said, with a confident smile. I must say he sort of grew on me. Anyway, he said he could delay the final rites, which, apparently, is a cinch for him.”

“I hate doctors. I never go to one.” Adams was firm. “They make you sick. Anyway, you look no worse—and no better—for all the waters that have flowed through you …”

“… and over me.” Hay stretched his arms. “I can’t wait to see Theodore, and tell him that I’ve been right all along about the Kaiser. Theodore thinks that because the Kaiser is, as Henry James says of Theodore, ‘the embodiment of noise,’ that he is mindless …”

“Like Theodore himself?”

“Now, Henry. Theodore has a mind that is chock-a-block with notions …”

“Thoughts, too?”

“Splendid thoughts. Anyway, the latest information is that the Kaiser, after pushing his stupid cousin, the Tsar, into declaring war on Japan, now realizes that Russia is
too
weak, even for his purposes, so he now is making frantic love to Japan, and to Theodore, too.”

“They are made for each other.”

“Not yet. But the Kaiser has a plan. Would to God I could go to Berlin to see him. He may be a reckless orator but he is a cold-calculator.”

Two menservants appeared, pushing a tea-table; and the croquet players joined them. Frederika did the honors, while Caroline and Clara walked beside the lake, keeping a careful distance from the swans. “He
seems
better.” Caroline could think of nothing else to say on that subject.

Clara was now huge, even monumental; her manner, as always, secure, declamatory. “He could live another year. Maybe more, if only he would leave Washington.”

“He won’t?”

“Not yet. We go to London, incognito, June second. Then we sail on the
Baltic
. Then he insists on going back to the State Department before we go on to New Hampshire. He does not trust Theodore.” Clara exhorted a willow tree’s reflection in the lake.

“Perhaps it’s best, to keep on, till …” Caroline did not finish.

“I wonder about you and Del.” Clara spoke for the first time to Caroline about her son. “I’m not sure—now—it would’ve been for the best.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“No. We never will. It’s when I see all this, I realize you are foreign. He was not.”

“I’m both. Or, maybe, neither.” Caroline was amused that Clara was still making censorious divisions between what was foreign, and probably bad, and what was American and entirely good. “At least I don’t publish the
Tribune
in French.”

Clara smiled, as she always did when she suspected that someone had made a joke. “Do you and Blaise get on?”

“We do now. We probably won’t in the future.” Caroline was surprised, as always, when she said what she actually thought.

“That’s my impression, too. The girl’s nice. But he does want to be like Mr. Hearst …”

“No more than I do …”

“Caroline! You are a lady.”

“But foreign.”

“Even so, you could never want to be like that dreadful man. Henry James returned our latch-key.” Clara’s mind was so constituted that she could make the leap from yellow journalism to the fact that Henry
James, who had gone off with the key to the front door of the Hay house, had returned it; and make the non sequitur seem part of some significant whole, which perhaps it was, ungrasped by Caroline, who suddenly recalled her discussion of keys with Blaise, both real and metaphysical.

“Will you see Mr. James in London?”

“If we have the chance. I don’t want John to see anyone except old friends. But the King insists. So we go to Buckingham Palace.”

“The King is political.”

“He likes John. I said,
No food
! The King eats for hours. We shall stay exactly one half hour, I said, no longer.” The two women sat on a bench, and watched the others at tea. Adams was walking up and down excitedly, a good sign. Hay sat huddled in his throne, a study in gray and white. Blaise sat on the edge of his chair like an attentive schoolboy. “Divorce still shocks me.” Clara hurled the commandment down the length of her figure, which even seated suggested Mount Sinai.

“We were never really married.” Caroline started to tell the truth, but then, not wanting to spend the rest of her life in France, she told not the truth but something true. “I was alone, after Del died. So I married a cousin for—protection.” Caroline hoped that she could successfully portray herself as helpless.

She could not, to Clara, at least. “I know.” She was peremptory. “Rebound. From grief. Even so, one might have waited until there was not a cousin but a true husband.”

“That’s all past. I’m alone now, and quite content. There’s Emma. What,” asked Caroline, imitating the manner of Clara, the non sequitur without ellipsis, “ever became of Clarence King’s children by the Negress?”

Clara blushed. Caroline knew victory. “They are still in Canada, I think. John and Henry help out. They tell me nothing, and I never ask.” Clara rose, ending the subject. Attended by Caroline, the mountain returned to the tea-table.

Hay was describing his meeting with the French foreign minister. “I was expressly forbidden by the President to speak to him, since I hadn’t first seen the Kaiser. But I, too, must be allowed my diplomacy. All the troubles in Morocco—no, not Perdicaris, not Raisuli …”

“Spare us your high drama.” Adams ceased pacing and sat in a chair too large for him. The two tiny glittering black patent-leather shoes were an inch from the ground.

“… are coming to a head, and the Kaiser is imposing himself on the French, and threatens to go to Morocco himself to take it away from them. Poor Delcassé is filled with gloom. With Russia on the verge of a revolution, the Kaiser has the only important army in Europe. The French don’t breed enough, he complained, and the English army is too small, so the Kaiser can do as he pleases, unless Theodore puts down his great boot …”

“Stick, isn’t it?” Adams interjected. “The one he says he carries when he speaks with a soft voice. The reverse, of course, is the case. He bellows, and there is no stick at all.”

“A large navy, Henry, is a big stick …”

“When war comes in Europe, it will be on land, and it will be won by land armies, and that will be Germany’s last chance to be king of the mountain.”

“We,” Clara said the last word, “will stay out.”

As the perfect day ended with a golden light breaking through the leaves of the west park, Caroline and Blaise and Frederika saw the last of the Hearts into their motor cars. Adams was off to join the Lodges, “part of my secret diplomacy to keep Cabot from John’s throat.” Caroline remembered too late that she had not mentioned to Adams the fragments of Aaron Burr’s memoirs. Fortunately, from the healthy look of him, there would be time during the winter in Washington.

“You must come see us at Sunapee.” Hay took Caroline’s hand; she almost recoiled from the coldness of his touch.

“I’ll come in July.”

“Come for the Fourth. We will all be there.” Clara kissed Caroline’s cheek. Then they were gone.

The young trio regarded the departure of the old trio with, on Caroline’s side, considerable regret. “They are the last,” she said.

“Last of what?” Frederika gazed bemusedly at her, hair suddenly dark gold in the slanting light.

“Last—believers.”

“In what?” Blaise turned to go inside.

“In … Hearts.”

“I believe in hearts.” Frederika had misunderstood. “Don’t you, Caroline?”

“I meant something else by Hearts, and what
they
were, and tried to be, made them different from us.”

“They aren’t different from us.” Blaise was final. “Except that they are old, and we aren’t. Yet.”

J
OHAN HAY
sat in a rocking chair on the verandah of The Fells and stared across the green New Hampshire lawn to the gray New Hampshire mountains with Lake Winnepesaukee between, so much flat shining water that reflected the deep clear blue summer sky. Exhaustion did not describe his condition. He had returned on June 15, and after a day at Manhasset with Helen, he had gone on to Washington, despite firm instructions from the President to go home. For a week in the damp heat of the tropical capital, he had done the business of his department, and plotted with Theodore on how—and where—to get the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He had found Theodore more than ever regnant, and the mammoth Taft apparently indispensable. The last bit of business that they had set in motion was to put an end to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which earlier administrations had used to keep the Chinese from immigrating to the United States. With the rise of Japan, paradoxically, the Yellow Peril must be put to rest as a means for politicians to frighten the people.