“He works for universal peace-whatever that is-stasis?-through terrestrial warfare. You have said it all.” But Hay was well-pleased with the speech, as was the President. The emphasis was on the essential conservatism of the allegedly progressive Roosevelt. The tariff needed reform, true, but that was best done by the magnates themselves. This went down very well in New York City, where the President had been obliged to go, hat in hand, to beg money from the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Thanks to the essential conservatism of Parker, the great magnates, from Belmont and Ryan to Schiff and Ochs, were financing the Democratic Party. Roosevelt, with no Mark Hanna to raise money, was obliged to make any number of reckless accommodations in order to extort money from the likes of J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman. Meanwhile Cortelyou was blackmailing everyone he knew to give to the campaign.
Hay had never seen anything quite like Roosevelt’s panic: there was no other word to describe his behavior during the last few months of a campaign that he had no chance of losing. Bryan had stayed aloof until October; then he moved amongst his people warning them of Roosevelt’s shady campaign financing practices and of his love for war. Bryan seldom had much to say about Parker, who ended by losing not only the entire West but New York State, the source of his support. It was the greatest Republican victory since 1872. Theodore was-and continued to be-ecstatic. He had also insisted that Hay stay on for the second term.
“I should get a telescope.” Adams squinted in the bright sun. “Then I could see who pays calls on Theodore. I’ve been waiting for a glimpse of J. P. Morgan’s incandescent nose ever since I got back.”
“That particular incandescence is probably already out of joint. I don’t think Theodore will humor him, or any of the others.”
“Betrayal?” Adams’s eyes shone.
“
“A bad sign.”
“He also says that if the Democrats were to come out for nationalizing the railroads, they would sweep the country.”
“Why not?” was the response of the co-author of
Hay managed to be perpendicular when Lizzie Cameron entered the room with her daughter, Martha, who was, at eighteen, larger, darker, duller than her mother, who was still, in Hearts’ eyes at least, the world’s most beautiful woman, the Helen of Troy of Lafayette Park, now resident, mysteriously, at the Lorraine, a New York City residential hotel in Forty-fifth Street, convenient to the theaters, and Rector’s, and museums, where Martha was to be finished off at last and then, her mother prayed, grandly married. “La Dona.” Adams welcomed his beloved with a deep bow; bestowed a kiss on Martha’s cheek. “I never thought to see the two of you here again.”
“Oh, yes, you did. John,” Lizzie took Hay’s hand and gave him the cold appraising Sherman look, “go to Georgia. This minute. You are mad to stay on here. I’ll wire Don…”
“I’d be madder to go now we’ve got you back, if only for the Diplomatic Reception.” Lizzie had asked Henry to put her and Martha on the guest list for the January 12 Diplomatic Reception at the White House. This would be, in effect, Martha’s official, and inexpensive, social debut.
“I’m a pauper!” Lizzie let drop her ermine cape on the small chair by the fire, where Adams always sat. Then she sat on the cape.
“You’re not a pauper. Don’t be dramatic, Mother.” Martha had her father’s weighty manner if not actual weight. “Mother wants to reopen Twenty-one. I think she’s mad.”
“Everyone, it would appear, is mad today.” Hay sat on a sofa’s arm, from which he could stand up without effort. “Don’t discourage your mother. We want her back. Next door to us. Forever.”
“See?” Lizzie stared up at Martha, whose body now blocked the fire. In the bright air Hay watched as motes of dust floated and glittered like minuscule fragments of gold, a pretty sight-if of course he was not having another seizure like the one where he had imagined himself in Lincoln’s office. He dared not ask the others if they, too, noted the bright dust.
Then Clara greeted mother and daughter, and their diminished circle was closed at last. “What sort of husband would you like?” asked Clara, as if she herself could provide one, according to Martha’s specifications.
“Rich.” Lizzie was still radiant, Hay decided; and unchanged.
Adams was still besotted with her; and unchanged. “The rich are boring, La Dona.”
“I think I’d like Mr. Adams.” Martha was cool. “He is never boring, except when he sees a dynamo.”
Clara, a master of small talk, disliked idle talk. “Blaise Sanford. He’s the right age. He’s built himself a palace in Connecticut Avenue. He’s half-owner of the
“You set them in motion, I have the Russians to deal with. They’ve just surrendered Port Arthur to the Japanese.” Hay held up the folder containing the Moscow dispatches.
Adams was suddenly alert. “Now the pieces rearrange themselves. Brooks predicted this, you know. Now let’s see if his next prediction comes true. Russia will undergo some sort of internal revolution, he says, and their empire will then fall apart or, if they survive the revolution, expand at our expense. England is at an end, civilization shudders to a halt, and…”
“I cannot get enough of your gloom.” Hay did enjoy the Porcupine’s chiliastic arias. “But we’ve got Japan to deal with in Asia, and a peace to be made in order to keep…”
“Open doors.” Everyone, including Martha, repeated the magic meaningless phrase.
“I would rather be known for that than for ‘Little Breeches.’ ”
“I’m afraid, sonny,” said Adams contentedly, “your future fame will rest on an ever greater vulgarity, ‘Perdicaris alive…’ ”
“ ‘… or Raisuli dead!’ ” the others intoned.
“The fatal gift for phrase,” sighed Adams, as happy as Hay had ever seen him, with Lizzie beside him, and all the remaining Hearts in the room. Then, as if to complete Adams’s felicity, the door to the Bright study now framed the thick rotundity of his houseguest, whose bald head shone in the winter light, like Parian marble, whose great eyes looked merrily but shrewdly on the company. “I have,” intoned Henry James, “already, in the literal sense, merely, broken my fast, but as rumors of a late-ah,
“What-or, rather, who is this?” James held the card close to his eyes.
“Delivered by its owner while you were out.”
“ ‘George Dewey,’ ” James read in a voice resonant with awe, “ ‘Admiral of the Navy.’ My cup runneth over, with salt water. Why,” he addressed the room, “would a national hero, whom I’ve not had the pleasure-honor- distinction of meeting, descend, as it were, from the high, glorious-ah, poop-deck of his flagship, which I can imagine moored with chains of gold in the Potomac, all flags unfurled, and submit himself to dull earth in order to pay a call on someone absolutely unknown in heroic circles, and less than a ripple, I should think, in naval ones?”
Hay found James in his old age far more genial and less alarming than in his middle age. For one thing, the appearance was milder since he had shaved off his beard; in fact, the resulting combination of bald head and rosy smooth ovoid face put one in mind of Humpty Dumpty. “You are a fellow celebrity,” said Hay. “That’s all. The press, which defines us all, celebrates both you and him. Now he comes to celebrate you and, in the act, celebrates himself yet again.”
“He is a wondrous fool,” said Adams. “Stay longer and I’ll invite him here.”
“No. No. No. The ladies of America are waiting for me to tell them about Balzac. So much-ah, money can be earned by lecturing, I had no idea.”
James had not been in Washington since 1882; and he had not been in the United States for some years. “Contemptible, effete snob!” Theodore Rex would roar whenever the name was mentioned. But Theodore was himself sufficiently a snob, if not effete, to realize that since the reigning novelist of the English-speaking world had
