“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes.” The room was itself again. “I’m often faint when I get up too quickly. But the odd thing was-I thought I was in Mr. Lincoln’s office. You know, with its dark green walls, and the gold stars, one for every state, we used to say, that was trying to get away.”
Roosevelt walked Hay to the door, his thick arm firmly through the older man’s. “I see him sometimes.”
“The President?”
Roosevelt opened the door to his secretary’s office. “Yes. That is, imagine him vividly. It’s usually at night in the corridor, upstairs, at the far end…”
“The east end.” Hay nodded. “There was a water-cooler in the hall, outside his office. He would drink cup after cup of water.”
“I’ll look for that next time I see him. He is always sad.”
“There was a good deal to be sad about.”
“My problems are so slight compared to his. Curious, to measure oneself with him. I don’t think I’m immodest when I say I’m very much superior to most of the politicians of our time. But when I think of what greatness he had…” Roosevelt sighed, a most un-Rooseveltian sound. “You must get some rest, John.”
Hay nodded. “Once the treaty’s done, I’m going south.”
“Bully!” Roosevelt was again his own best imitation.
4
THE GREAT HOLLOW SOUND of metal striking the thick bole of a magnolia tree brought Caroline and Marguerite to the window of the Georgetown house. A motor car had, somehow, got from N Street onto the sidewalk and into the largest of Caroline’s two magnolias. At the wheel was Alice Roosevelt, a feathered hat now jammed over her implacable blue eyes, while at her side Marguerite Cassini, looking both beautiful and terrified, waved her hands in front of her, in a gesture which Caroline took to be, literally, the wringing of hands, something that only her own histrionic Marguerite ever did.
Caroline hurried into the street, where an elderly Negro man was working hard to open the door on Alice’s side of the car; it had jammed.
“The brakes!” Alice was accusing. “They don’t work. It’s your chauffeur’s fault.”
“It’s my fault, when Father finds out.” Marguerite got out of the car. Caroline helped the Negro to free the Republican Princess, who then shoved her hat back in place; leapt to the ground; thanked the Negro; and said, “Tell the police to take this bit of junk back to the Russian embassy, in Scott Circle. It is the ugliest house there. They can’t miss it.”
“My father-” Marguerite began.
“Your father? My father. That’s the problem. He wouldn’t let me buy a car, you know.” Alice led Caroline into her own house, while Marguerite Cassini gave the Negro elaborate instructions. “I can’t fathom him. There are times when he seems to be living in another century. I had picked out this splendid roadster. Too killing. And he said, no. Never. Women are not to drive, or smoke, or vote. I agree on the vote, of course. It will just double the same old vote. Even so… What’s it like, being married?”
They were now in the back parlor, overlooking the small garden where, because of the season, only late ominous chrysanthemums grew. The trees had lost their leaves; and in the small goldfish pond, a large goldfish had bellied up, a victim to overeating.
“Serene. The same, actually. John’s mostly in New York with his law firm. I’m mostly here with the paper; and the child.”
The two-month-old Emma Apgar Sanford was less noisy than Caroline had anticipated, and though not yet the best of company, she was a benign presence in the house, and Caroline, against Marguerite’s advice-no longer heeded, ever-breast-fed her daughter, and noted with awed wonder how large her gravid breasts had become. She was, for the first time in her life, à la mode in the grand fleshy world.
Marguerite Cassini now made her hardly climactic entrance. Caroline admired her beauty; but nothing more. The shadow of Del seemed, mysteriously, attached to her. Caroline had heard it said that the opal ring that had broken in half on the New Haven pavement had been a gift from Countess Cassini. Plainly, fiction’s war with truth was never-ending. Marguerite went straight toward the open box of chocolates from Huyler’s, the city’s principal confectioner. Each Washington house ordered its own mixture, and Caroline had introduced white chocolate to Washington, a novelty still controversial in those circles where the Tribune’s Society Lady so hungrily moved. “You shouldn’t eat chocolate. You’ll get fat,” Alice announced. “I never eat dessert. Just meat and potatoes, like Father.”
“Perhaps you’ll be as stout as he is,” said Marguerite, looking suddenly Mongol-or was it Tartar?-or were they the same? The friendship between La Cassini and Alice was the talk of the town, and by no means confined to the Society Lady’s circles. In the current troubles between Russia and Japan, President Roosevelt tended to take the Japanese side, to the fury of Cassini, who had roared in Caroline’s presence, “The man’s a pagan! We are a Christian nation like the United States, and he sides with yellow savage pagans.” At the White House, Russian greed was sadly deplored. The Administration was ready to acquiesce in Japan’s proposal that Russia might annex Manchuria if Japan could be allowed to take over Korea as well. The Tribune tried to be even-handed but tended, thanks to Mr. Trimble, to favor Russia, to the President’s fury. At the center of the new Cabinet room, he had made Caroline a long speech on the tides of history while a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looked wearily away from the seated woman, the marching President. Lately, Cassini tended to kiss rather too warmly Caroline’s hand at receptions, and Marguerite had thanked her for her editorial support. “It’s so difficult for me,” she had sighed, “now that I am doyenne of the diplomatic corps.” With Pauncefote’s death, Cassini had become the senior chief of mission at the capital. As his hostess, Marguerite sailed first into every official gathering; meanwhile, the President’s daughter defied her father and made Marguerite her friend, all because, as only Caroline knew, the President had refused to allow Alice to own a red automobile, and so Alice had commandeered the Russian Ambassador’s machine. The previous summer Alice and Marguerite, like Arctic explorers, had driven together to Newport, to the fearful applause of the public, to the horror of pedestrians run down, of motorists forced off the road. After today’s collision, Caroline was fairly certain that the relationship between Alice and Marguerite was about to undergo a sea-change. Cassini would deny them the use of his car; and Japan would triumph over Russia. The causal links, as Brooks Adams liked to say.
“What am I wearing tomorrow at the British embassy?” asked Alice, opening her handbag, removing a cigarette case and, as expertly as any clubman, lighting up. Caroline still experienced mild shock whenever she saw this; and had said so. “But,” Alice had assured her, “everyone will be doing it now that I do.”
“But you don’t do it beneath your father’s roof.”
“I do it out the window, a technicality he has come to respect. So what am I wearing?”
“The dark blue velvet, with lace at the throat…” Caroline began.
“I won’t lend you my sable again.” Marguerite was squashing the chocolates with her fingers; she liked only soft centers.
Both Mrs. Roosevelt and Alice liked to invent elaborate costumes, which they did not possess, and then give the White House press secretary descriptions of these fabulous creations, which would be written of, ecstatically, in every “Society Lady” page. As it was, neither lady could afford much of anything to wear, though, of the two, Alice was somewhat richer. When Caroline had caught on to the White House game, Alice had asked her to help invent costumes, which Caroline would describe in the Tribune, to the amazement of those who had actually seen what the Roosevelt ladies had been wearing.