“The cow…” Caroline repeated absently; then her voice trailed off as, politely, she gave the woman her hand. “But this is thrilling,” she began.
Blaise understood her disappointment. Since James Burden Day was uncommonly fetching, Blaise suspected that Caroline’s phantom list of possibilities might once have included him. The speed with which Caroline now set out to charm Kitty convinced Blaise that he was right. “Mr. Day never hinted that he might… And to you!” she exclaimed, eyes radiant, as if with admiration for Kitty. “Oh, he is lucky! We are lucky to have you in Washington. Aren’t we, Blaise? Except you live in Baltimore…”
“Oh, no, I don’t,” Blaise growled.
But Caroline was not to be stopped. “Was it so sudden? We heard nothing here, and between Frederika’s mother and the Tribune’s ‘Society Lady,’ we’re supposed to know everything.”
“Well, it was sudden,” said Kitty. She had a low nasal voice of the sort that Blaise liked least in a country where nearly everyone’s voice got on his nerves.
“We got married,” said Day, “on election day. We’d always planned that,” he added.
“Only if you were elected.” Kitty was flat in her humor. “I wasn’t about to marry somebody who was going to stay on in American City, and practice law like everybody else. No, sir,” she said to Caroline, who took the “sir” in easy stride. “I wanted to get out of the state almost as bad as Jim, Representative Day, I guess I have to call him now.”
“Surely not at breakfast.” Caroline was gracious.
Mrs. Bingham, sensing discord or at the least drama, approached and Frederika fled. “Isn’t this a surprise?” The voice was accusing. “Mr. Day never let on that he was going home to get both elected and married, to Judge Halliday’s daughter. Judge Halliday,” Mrs. Bingham explained, “is to that state what Mark Hanna is to Ohio, and then some.”
Blaise noticed that Day was smiling, with embarrassment. On the other hand, Kitty looked as if she had indeed, like the fabulous feline, swallowed the canary. As Caroline now prepared to rise to new heights of insincerity, Blaise was suddenly conscious of the degree and intensity of his sister’s sexuality, no less powerful for her innocence or, rather, ignorance. He wondered, perversely, what it would be like to switch roles with her; then, looking at Day and Kitty, thought better of it. The sort of wall that a man might breach no woman could, at least not in their world. Here the cards were entirely stacked against women; only men could play a relatively free hand.
Kitty spoke of houses and servants, and Caroline offered to help with both. Day turned to Blaise. “I hope we’ll see you, now that you’re nearby.”
“I hope so, too.” Then Blaise added recklessly, “But I won’t be nearby. I’ll be right here.”
“In Washington?” The sandy eyebrows arched.
“Yes, in Washington. New York’s too far away and Baltimore is nowhere at all. I’m looking for a house,” he improvised, inspired by Caroline. She was not the only one who could spin a bright web in company.
“Then we’ll see more of you.” Day was easy; charming. “It won’t be the same, though, without Del.”
“I think I shall build a house,” said Blaise, allowing for no sentiment. “In Connecticut Avenue. The best of country life, the best of village life. She would never,” Blaise lowered his voice, not that Caroline and Kitty could have heard either of them in the noisy room, “never have married Del.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I know her,” Blaise lied. “Better than myself,” Blaise told the truth.
4
JOHN HAY WAS AT THE WINDOW to Henry Adams’s study, looking down on the passersby. The Porcupine was always amazed at how many people Hay could recognize, particularly now that everyone they knew had been so dramatically transformed by age. “General Dan Sickles, with crutches,” Hay announced, as the aged, blear-eyed warrior, murderer, and queen’s lover hobbled beneath the window in icy H Street.
“Surely, he’s dead.” This season, Adams affected to believe that everyone of their acquaintance was dead unless proven otherwise.
“He may well be dead.” Hay was judicious. “But he has taken to moving about, like Lazarus. Where is his leg, by the way?”
“Shot off at the battle of Gettysburg, which he nearly lost for us, the four-flusher.”
“No. No.” Hay turned round in the window seat, and settled his back as comfortably as he could against cushions. “When the leg was detached, by cannonball, Sickles sent someone to find it. Then he had a charming box made for it so that he could carry it around with him. I think he said he was going to give it to one of his clubs in New York.”
“Another point against New York. I would not allow Sickles in any club, much less his leg.” Adams sat beside the fire; he wore a mulberry velvet smoking jacket. As always on Sunday, the breakfast table was set more elaborately than usual. At noon, the guests would arrive. Hay was never entirely sure how many were directly invited and how many simply showed up. When queried, Adams looked mysterious. “All is random,” he would murmur. “Like the universe.”
But this morning, all was not random in their lives. Adams had come back from Europe at the end of December, in time to attend, on New Year’s Day, Clarence King’s funeral in New York City. He had stayed on in the city longer than usual. He had been, he wrote Hay, astonished by King’s will; but said no more.
The previous night, at dinner with the Hays, Adams had whispered in Hay’s ear that he would like to see him, alone, before breakfast the next day. When Hay arrived, Adams had been maddeningly mysterious, as he went slowly through the drawers of his escritoire, collecting bits of paper, while Hay, finally, retreated to the window and the view of the passersby, many of them slipping and falling most agreeably upon the frozen pavement. Only the one-legged Sickles was entirely sure-footed.
“The will,” Adams said, at last.
“The estate…?” Hay was more to the point.
“Well, there will be money. Our friend’s collection of pictures and bric-a-brac is stored in Tenth Street, in New York City, and once sold off at auction should provide enough money for any reasonable contingency.”
“What, dear Henry, is ‘reasonable’ and what is the ‘contingency’?”
But Adams was staring at the fire as if it were the sun and he a worshipper. “You know, John, that for King, in his robust way, and for me, in my crabbed way, woman is all things in Heaven and earth…”
“Your twelfth-century virgin…”
“Our Virgin; as revered in that last cohesive century, and memorialized at Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres.”
Although Hay never wearied of Adams’s enthusiasms, currently focussed on the idea of woman as virgin, and mother of God, he failed to make any connection between the Porcupine’s ongoing literary work of celebration and Clarence King, who had died a bachelor. But Adams was not to be hurried, and Hay settled back in the window seat, and stared at Blake’s mad Babylonian monarch, on all fours, munching grass. “King always saw the male as being rather like the crab’s shell, to be discarded when no longer needed, by the crab-by woman, that is. She is the essential energy that uses the shell, and then lets it go. Obviously, King was a more primitive, basic man than I. Although each of us celebrated the idea of woman, I see her as the virgin queen of an ordered, perfect world while he celebrated an earthier, more primitive great-mother goddess, rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals.”