Hay did not allow the others to pick up on his unexpected use of the word “slaughter.” “By the end of the month, of course, the business is over.” He spoke rapidly, and was aware of a shortening of breath. Heart? To die, suddenly, at the heart of the Hearts would be poetic. “I shall get them, by the way.”
“Get what?” asked King, through a series of dry coughs. Perhaps all the Hearts might stop at once, like four clocks someone had forgotten to wind.
“The Philippines. The Major thinks that the State Department, not the War Department, should administer them. Root agrees, I am happy to say. In October I shall be lord of all the isles.”
“What about the canal?” King coughed. “Will you be lord of the isthmus, too?”
“We must get the treaty through the Senate first.” Hay was again short of breath: must not panic. “They’ve rejected two versions so far, despite England’s surprising complaisance. Pauncefote and I are now ready with a third version, which we will submit to our masters in the Senate come December.” Hay took a deep breath; felt better; noticed that Clara was watching him with some alarm, which, in turn, alarmed him. Did he look-did he sound?-so ill? He glanced at Adams to see if the Porcupine had noticed anything wrong, but the Porcupine was looking at Clarence King, whose lower face was covered with a handkerchief, even though the fit of coughing had stopped. How fragile we have become, thought Hay; then he rallied. “Of all our friends I hate Cabot Lodge the most.”
“John.” Clara was reproving.
“Oh, Cabot’s hateful.” Adams turned his gaze from the dying King to the blazing fire. “I’ve always detested him, while delighting in his friendship. I think that Cabot’s problem is shyness.”
“No senator was ever shy.” King chiselled out the sentence as if on marble.
“Shyness?” Hay had not thought the ever-grinding Cabot shy. But perhaps he was, and disguised the fact with endless commentaries broken by sudden acts of treachery toward friends.
“Yes, shyness,” Adams repeated. “He is one of nature’s Iagos, always in the shadows, preferring to do evil to nothing…”
“And nothing to good.” Hay made his addition to the indictment. “So if Cabot’s Iago, McKinley must be his Othello.”
“No, no.” Adams was firm. “After all, Othello trusted Iago. I think it most unlikely that our Ohioan Augustus trusts-or even notices-Cabot. No. I see Theodore in the part of Othello. They complement each other. Theodore all action and bluster, Cabot all devious calculation. Cabot is the rock on which Theodore will sink.”
“I like Cabot.” Clara put a stop to the conversation. “He is also Brooks’s brother-in-law. He is practically your relative, Henry.”
“That is no recommendation, Clara, to a member of the house of Atreus…”
“From Quincy, Mass.” King liked to deflate the Adamses. Their peculiar self-esteem was matched only by their sense of general unworthiness. All in all, Hay was happy not to be the member of a great family’s fourth generation. Better to be one’s own ancestor; one’s own founding father. What would Del become, he wondered, in the twentieth century that had begun, as Root had maintained, January 1, 1901? Hay had already spent four months in the new century (Queen Victoria had wisely died after three weeks of the new epoch) and was more than ever convinced that it was just as well that he would miss nearly all of it. Del, on the other hand, might experience more than half the century. Father wished son luck.
2
CAROLINE GREETED DEL at the door to her office, abuzz with the first-and always precious to her-flies of spring. Del was larger than when he had left; there was more chest, more stomach; he also seemed taller. They shook hands awkwardly. Mr. Trimble watched them, all benignity. He had given his unsought blessing to the match. “A woman must not be alone too long,” he had said, “particularly in a Southern town like Washington.”
Caroline had just returned from New York, where she had said good-by to Plon, who had sailed for home, enriched by two cigarette cases.
Now Del had come to take her to lunch. They faced each other across the rolltop desk. “Were you really pro-Boer?” asked Del.
“Were you, really, secretly pro-British?” Much of Bryan’s attack on McKinley had been the President’s pro-British policy, the result of that conniving Anglophile the Secretary of State, John Hay, and his equally sinister son, who was American consul general-nepotism, too!-at Pretoria.
“Yes,” said Del, to Caroline’s surprise. “But only secretly. No word ever passed my diplomatically sealed lips. I was the soul of caution, like Father.”
“Well, we were pro-Boer because our readers-and advertisers-are, or were. Anyway, now it’s over. Your team has won. Ours has lost.”
“And the Irish and the German riff-raff have all joined the Democratic Party where they belong. What next?”
John Hay had told her that he doubted Del would want to stay on in the diplomatic service; but then Hay usually said what others wanted to hear. He knew that Caroline could not bear the thought of being a diplomat’s wife, moving from post to post around the world.
But Del chose not to answer her directly. “You’ll see what’s next.”
“When?”
“Today. At lunch.”
Mystified, Caroline took her place in the Hays’ family carriage, which proceeded from Market Square into Pennsylvania Avenue, then headed north. “There are more electrical cars,” Del observed. “And telephone wires.” Like spaghetti, wires were strung every which way on posts in the bright noon-light, which made their shadows on the avenue resemble an elaborate spider’s web. The trees along the sidewalk were in new bloom. Washington’s April was so like Paris’s June that Caroline was, suddenly, homesick: by no means the proper mood for a young lady who had not seen her fiancé for a year. She noted her opal ring on his finger; tried to imagine a wedding ring on her own; thought instead of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. She and Blaise had agreed that neither would go there until the will had been finally settled. Marguerite was suicidal. Caroline was stoic.
“I am stoic,” she said to Del, apropos nothing at all. But he was speaking to the driver. “We’ll go in from the south side.” They were now opposite the immaculately restored and redecorated façade of Willard’s. Black children stood on the sidewalk, holding out clusters of daffodils and blossoming dogwood switches, pale pink, white. White.
“The White House?” asked Caroline.
“Yes. We’re having lunch with the President.” Del’s small eyes gleamed; he would be, one day, as large as his mother, she thought, and she wondered if she could be happy with so huge a masculine entity.
Although the south door of the White House had been originally designed as the mansion’s great entrance, nothing in Washington ever turned out as planned. For instance, the Capitol on its hill faced, magnificently, a shanty town, while its marble backside loomed over Pennsylvania Avenue and the unanticipated city’s center. The city had been expected to grow west and south; instead it had grown east and north. The Executive Mansion had been designed to be approached from the river through the park, with a fine view of Virginia’s hills across the river; but the unexpected primacy of Pennsylvania Avenue had obliged the tenants to make the northern portico the main entrance, and only secret or private visitors were encouraged to drive through the now muddy park to the somewhat forlorn grand entrance, where curved stairs looked as if they had been designed for an al fresco republican coronation of the sort that the Venetian doge endured atop stairs of equal pomp.
The downstairs corridor was empty. As always, Caroline was fascinated by the casualness of the White House. Except for a single policeman, who sat reading a newspaper inside the door, they had the shadowy corridor to themselves. “How easy it would be,” whispered Caroline, though if ever walls had no ears, it was these, “to stage a coup d’état.”