“Whose is?”
“Yours, Johnny.” Back of the wild white King Learish beard; the young Nicolay was smiling. “You grow more fox-like with time…”
“The fox is weakening, Nico. The dogs have got the scent. I hear the huntsman’s bugle.” Hay was a master of the elegiac note.
“You’ll go to ground.” Nicolay’s hand shook as he pulled the tartan tighter about himself. The hand was white, bloodless, dead. “It is good news about your boy,”
Hay nodded, wondering why he himself had not been pleased. In recent years, since Pretoria, in fact, he had come to admire and like his son; yet he did not want him to be so vividly and precisely his own replacement. Now that the son had started up glory’s ladder, the father must prepare to surrender his own place higher up; ladder, too. “Del will go far,” he said. “I never thought he’d have what it would take, but the President did-does. Del’s like a son to the President.”
“And not to you?” Nico stared at Hay, who looked at a copy of the now faded lithograph of Lincoln with his two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. Had he ever been so young?
“Well, yes, to me, too. But he’s more like his mother:… Anyway, he’s at the start and we’re at the end.”
“You’re not.” Nico was flat. “I am. I’ll die this year.”
“Nico…” Hay began.
Nico finished, “I think there’s nothing next. What do you think?”
“I don’t-think. There’s not much now. I’ll say that.”
“Religion,” Nicolay began, but stopped. Both stared at the neutral fire.
“I go, at last, to California.” Hay’s mood lightened at the thought. “We start tomorrow. The President and the Postmaster General and I and forty others. We shall, yet again, bind up the wounds of the South, and then on to Los Angeles, and a fiesta, and San Francisco, where the rest of the Cabinet joins us, except clever Root, who says he must stay close to the War Department, where he directs our far-flung empire. Do you think it wise?”
“What wise?” Nico was drifting off.
“The empire we’re assembling. Do you think,” Hay was curious to know what Nico would answer, “that the Ancient would approve?”
Nico’s response was quick. “The Ancient, no. The Tycoon, yes. He was of two minds, always.”
“But he acted with a single view.”
“Yes, but he thought for such a long time before he acted. The cautious Ancient and the fierce Tycoon held long debates, and Mr. Lincoln, in the end, arbitrated, and handed down his decision.”
“The Major took a long time making up his mind.”
“The Major is not Mr. Lincoln.”
“No. But he is as essential to us in his way. I think we have done the right thing. I was persuaded of it when I was in England, and saw what prosperity-and civilization-empire had given them. Now they begin to falter. So we must take up the burden.”
Nico looked at Hay directly. “Mr. Lincoln would never have wanted us to be anyone’s master.”
“Perhaps not.” Hay had long since given up trying to imagine how Lincoln would have responded to the modern world. “Anyway, it’s done. We are committed.”
“When does Del move into the White House?”
“In the fall. For now, he’ll be working with Mr. Adee at the State Department while I’m gone… He plans to marry the Sanford girl.”
“The Hays have a dowsing rod for money.”
“Del is also a Stone…”
“A golden Stone. Well, are you pleased?”
Hay said that he was; and he was. “They will marry in the fall. Helen, too, I think, to the Whitney boy…”
“We’ve come a long way from Illinois.”
“I wonder.” With age, Hay was more than ever conscious of what might have been; yet could not conceive of any ladder that might have been better than the one that he had climbed, almost without effort, almost to the top. “I don’t think I ever wanted to be president.” Hay addressed the coal in the grate.
“Of course you did. Have you forgotten you?” Nico addressed Hay.
“I must have.”
“I haven’t. You were ambitious. You tried, twice, to go to Congress. Surely it was not for the company you’d find there.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Hay answered Nico’s not-so-rhetorical question. “Anyway, I have pretty much forgotten me. Even so, it is odd that for one year I was next in succession to the President. So I did get pretty high up that particular ladder, which I may-or may not-have wanted to climb.”
“McKinley’s health is excellent.” Nico laughed; and coughed.
“Unlike mine. After this trip, I go to New Hampshire for the rest of the summer. We’ll all be there. Del and Caroline, too.” Hay indicated the lithograph on the wall. “Do you ever dream of him?”
Nico nodded. “All the time. I dream of you, too. As you were then.”
“What sort of dreams?”
“The usual, for those of us at the end.” Nico’s fragile fingers pulled at his wiry beard. “Things have gone wrong. I can’t find important papers. I go through the pigeon-holes in his desk. I can’t read any of the handwriting, and the President is anxious, and the trouble-”
“ ‘This big trouble.’ ” Hay nodded. “He never said ‘Civil War.’ Fact he never said war at all. Only this big trouble. This rebellion. How does he seem to you in the dreams?”
“Sad. I want to help him, but can’t. It’s very frustrating.”
“I don’t dream of him at all any more.”
“You’re not so close to the end as I.”
“Don’t say that! But what’s the end got to do with dreams? I dream most of the night, and nearly everyone I meet in my dreams is dead. But I never dream of him. I don’t know what that means.”
Nico shrugged. “If he wants to pay you a call he will, I suppose.”
Hay laughed. “Next time you see him tell him I’d like a visit.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Nico with Germanic gallows humor, “face to face. In Heaven, or wherever it is we politicians end up.”
4
BLAISE AND PAYNE WHITNEY CROSSED the quadrangle, festooned with banners celebrating various class reunions. This was their third reunion, and Blaise had agreed to attend only because Caroline had said that Del Hay would be there, the first member of their class to have made his mark in the world. “You will be envious,” she had said, well pleased. They would all meet in New Haven, and then Del and she and Payne would take a trip on Oliver Payne’s enormous yacht; then Del and she would go on together to Sunapee in New Hampshire, where Mr. Hay was enjoying his ill-health in the bosom of the family. When Blaise had told the Chief about the reunion, the Chief had said, “Cultivate young Mr. Hay.”
Connecticut’s high summer was tropical in its heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of roses and peonies and the whiskey that the graduates were drinking from flasks as they hurried from party to party. Blaise wondered why he had not enjoyed Yale more than he had. “You were in too much of a hurry to get started,” said Payne, breaking into his thoughts. “You should’ve stayed long enough to graduate instead…” Payne broke off not so much out of tact as for lack of sufficient polite vocabulary to describe Hearst, devil incarnate to his class.
“Graduate or not, it’s made no difference at all.” Blaise was accurate. They were now at the edge of the pseudo-Gothic campus. Beyond a row of trees was Chapel Street and their hotel, the New Haven House. A streetcar gasped to a halt. Men in straw hats and women in wide-brimmed hats and flowery dresses got off, and made their way onto the campus. Del and a group of classmates were still at the hotel, where there would be, he had assured Blaise, champagne, “to celebrate my victory over the Boers and the English.”
“Are you Mr. Hearst’s partner?” asked Payne, as they crossed the street, filled with carriages and electrical cars, all converging upon the college.