“It is now a Sanford newspaper.” Caroline felt a ringing in her ears which could be either victory, or nausea from too much cigar smoke.
Vardeman himself took her through the Tribune offices, in a three-story brick building with arched windows that looked out on the north side of Market Square, a curiously ill-defined, and hardly square, open area between Seventh and Ninth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue. “A wonderful location,” said Vardeman, sincerely. “This is the heart of the commercial district, where all our advertisers are.”
“Or will be,” said Cousin John.
Caroline stood on the dirty stoop beneath the faded sign Washington Tribune and looked across the square, a riot of electrical and telephone wires, of turreted red brick modern buildings in the medieval style which she realized that Henry Adams, in his serenely ruthless way, was imposing on the capital city. To Caroline’s left the Center Market loomed, a combination of windowed exposition hall and Provençal cathedral, whose brick walls were the color of dried blood-Washington’s emblematic color, in which were set not stained-glass windows but dusty panes of conservatory glass. Here farmers from Virginia and Maryland brought their produce; and here in the vast interior, democracy reigned, with everyone buying and selling. Vardeman identified two banks in nearby C Street. “The one on the left held our mortgage,” he said. “But not any more.”
They entered a small waiting room, where no one waited. Dusty creaking stairs led to the offices and the newsroom, while a corridor, the length of the small building, led to the presses which were located in a converted stables at the back. Caroline could never get enough of the actual business of printing. Rolls of paper affected her rather the way bolts of silk affected Mrs. Jack Astor, while the smell of printer’s ink gave her not only an instant headache but, equally, swift delight. In a pleasurable haze, she met her new employees. The chief printer was the money-maker; and appropriately grave. He was German; spoke with an accent; came from the Palatinate. Caroline spoke German to him; and was certain that she had won his heart. Cousin John asked to see invoices; and lost the newly gained heart.
The editorial offices overlooked Market Place. The editor was a tall Southerner, with red hair and side-whiskers. “This is Mr. Trimble, the best editor in Washington, and a Washingtonian, too. Almost as much a native as the darkies,” Vardeman added; he was prone, Caroline had noticed, to mentioning darkies rather more often than was entirely necessary. “What,” asked Caroline, “is a true native?”
“Oh, you’ve just got to be born here. I mean, you don’t have to be like Mr. Sanford’s Apgar relatives, who go back to the first day.” The voice was high but not unpleasant.
“Are there Washington Apgars?”
Cousin John nodded. “Apgars are everywhere. They outnumber everyone else because they marry everyone. Some of them came here in 1800, I think. They were in dry,” said Cousin John sadly, “goods.”
“My family came with General Jackson,” said Mr. Trimble. “You can always tell when us natives got here by our names. The Trimbles, like the Blairs, came with Jackson, and after we settled in, we never went home, any more than the Blairs did. Nobody goes back to Nashville if he can help it.”
“But the President-Jackson, that is-does, or did,” said Caroline, charmed by her new editor.
“Well, he couldn’t help it,” said Mr. Trimble. “What do you intend to do with the old Trib?”
“Why-be successful!” Caroline’s ears were now ringing again; she wondered if she was about to faint. Where once there had been four Poussins there was now a newspaper and a printer’s shop in an African city half a world away from home. Was she mad? she wondered. More important, could she win? She was certain that in the war with Blaise she had just won a significant battle if not the war itself, but Blaise was now, oddly, secondary to the newspaper, which was hers-became hers, as she sat at a rolltop desk to write out the second and final payment on her account at the Morgan Bank; and gave it to Vardeman, who then signed the various documents that Cousin John had brought with him. The transfer was complete.
“You will see a lot of me, Mr. Trimble.” Caroline was now at the door. “I’m here for at least a year. Maybe forever.”
“Are we to continue as before?”
“Oh, yes. Nothing is to be changed, except the circulation.”
“How will you change that?” asked Vardeman, with something less than his habitual ceremony: the check in hand gave him gravity.
“Have you no murders to report?” asked Caroline.
“Well, sure. I mean, we put the police news on the last page, like always. But it’s just the usual. A body found floating in the river…”
“Surely, from time to time, a beautiful woman is pulled out of the muddy cold dark Potomac River. A beautiful young woman perhaps divided into sections, and wearing only a negligée.”
“Caroline,” murmured Cousin John, so shocked that he used, in public, her first name.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right. No negligee could survive being quartered.”
“The Tribune is a serious paper,” said Vardeman, thick lips suddenly compressed like punctured bicycle tires. “Devoted to the Republican Party, to the tariff…”
“Well, Mr. Trimble, let us never forget our seriousness. But let us also remember that a beautiful young woman, murdered in a crime of passion, is also a serious figure if only to herself, while the crime-murder-is the most serious of all, in peacetime, that is.”
“You want… uh, yellow journalism, Miss Sanford?” Trimble was staring at her, a look of amusement in his pale blue eyes.
“Yellow, ochre, café au lait,” tactlessly, she looked at yellow-brown Vardeman, “I don’t care what color. No, that’s not true. I am partial to gold.”
“What about the gold standard?” asked Cousin John, eager to make light of everything that she had said.
“As a friend of Mr. Hay, I favor that, too. Whatever,” Caroline added as graciously as she could, “it is. You see, Mr. Trimble, I am a serious woman.”
“Yes, Miss, I see that all right, and I’ll send someone over to police headquarters right now to see what they got in the morgue.”
Caroline recalled Hearst on the floor, making up the front page of the Journal, the murdered woman slowly coming, as it were, alive under the embellishments. “Do that,” she said. “But remember that the illustration on the front page…”
“Front page,” groaned Vardeman, looking out at Market Square.
“… need not resemble too closely what is actually in the morgue.”
“But we… you… the Tribune is a newspaper,” said Vardeman.
“No,” said Caroline. “It is not a newspaper. Because there is no such thing as a newspaper. News is what we decide it is. Oh, how I love saying ‘we.’ It is a sign of perfect ignorance, isn’t it?” The ringing in her ears had stopped; she had never felt so entirely in command of herself. “Obviously earthquakes and election results and the scores of… baseball teams,” she was proud to have remembered the name of the national sport, “are news, and must be duly noted. But the rest of what we print is literature, of a kind that is meant to entertain and divert and excite our readers so that they will buy the things our advertisers will want to sell them. So we must be-imaginative, Mr. Trimble.”
“I shall do my best, Miss Sanford.”
In the street Cousin John turned on her, with unfeigned anger. “You can’t be serious…”