Empire

“Tomorrow. Tell him nothing above Forty-second Street. I don’t want to be a farmer.”

“Are you moving?”

Hearst nodded. “They’re tearing down the Worth House. This year. Just as I finished fixing it up.” Hearst gestured to show off what looked to be an auction warehouse. Statuary in crates, dozens of paintings turned face to wall, while others that ought to have been face to wall were displayed as in a provincial French museum; chairs piled one on top of the other, reminiscent of the Louis XV Room of the Hoffman House after a dinner. “There’s a possibility in Chicago,” he said, swinging his long legs to the floor.

“For a house, sir?”

“No, a newspaper. To buy.”

“The News!”

“No. They won’t sell. But I could take over another one. Cheap.” Hearst glanced innocently at Blaise. “That is, cheap for you. Expensive for me right now. Next year my mother’s moving back to California.”

“She won’t… help?”

“She’d rather not, she says. She’s already in for, maybe, ten million. Then there’s Washington. The Tribune’s close to shutting down. Of course, there aren’t any votes in the District. But you can always have fun scaring the politicians.”

Blaise was puzzled. “Votes? I thought you wanted readers.”

“Well, I want both. I’ve got New York, San Francisco, and now Chicago-with a bit of luck. The Democratic Party’s up for grabs.”

“You want to grab it?”

“Somebody has to. You see, the press has a power that no one understands, including me. But I know how to make it work…”

“To get readers. Votes are something else.”

“I wonder.” The Chief stretched his arms. “My mother’s met your sister.”

“Oh.” Blaise was guarded. He wanted no one, least of all Hearst, to know about the war between brother and sister. At the moment, they communicated only through lawyers. Caroline had appealed a lower court’s ruling; now they awaited a higher court’s decision on the arcana of the cyphers one and seven. Meanwhile, to Blaise’s surprise Caroline had settled not in New York, where the courts were, but in Washington, where, presumably, Del Hay was. Before Blaise had been able to stop her, she had sold the Poussins for two hundred thousand dollars; she now could afford to buy a vast amount of American law. But Houghteling had chuckled when he heard the news and said that, even so, she might well be twenty-seven by the time the case was settled in her favor. Irritably, Blaise had then pointed out that he was the one in a hurry, not she. At the moment relations with the Chief were good; but the Chief’s moods were volatile, to say the least. Now was the time to help him buy the Chicago newspaper. Later, old Mrs. Hearst might again come to her son’s aid; or he might even start to make more than he spent, a not likely prospect for a man who was in the habit of offering a good journalist double his usual salary, simply to get him away from the competition.

“Your sister came to look at my mother’s house. But it was too big, she said. Your sister said, that is. She’s intelligent, Mother says. Why does she like Washington?”

“I think it’s the Hay family that she likes.”

“He’s practically an Englishman by now.” Hearst’s short attention span had snapped. Mother, sister, John Hay were as one with Captain Dreyfus and “Maple Leaf Rag.” “You go to Washington. Take a look at the Tribune. Don’t let on you have anything to do with me. I’ll scout out Chicago.”

Blaise was delighted with the assignment; less delighted with the thought that he might see Caroline; alarmed when the Chief said, “Pay a call on Mother. Tell her how hard I work. How I don’t smoke or drink or use bad language. And tell her how much you like schools.”

“But I don’t.”

“But she does. She’s just started one for girls, up at the Cathedral. Maybe the two of us could go there and teach the girls-you know, journalism.” The Chief had come as close as Blaise had ever heard him to a smutty remark. “Give my regards to your sister.”

“If I see her,” said Blaise. “She moves in refined circles.”

2

IN MARCH CAROLINE had arrived at the outermost ring of the republic’s circles, when she rented a small rose- red brick house in N Street, which ran through a part of dilapidated Georgetown, reminiscent of Aswan in Egypt, where she had once wintered with her father and his arthritis. There was hardly a white face to be seen; and the owner of the house, a commodore’s widow of pronounced whiteness, hoped that she would not mind “the darkies.” Caroline pronounced herself entranced; and hoped, she said, to hear tom-toms in the night. The widow said that as there were, happily, no Indians nearby, tom-toms would not sound; on the other hand, a good deal of voodoo was practiced between the Potomac River and the canal. She did not recommend it, in practice. The commodore’s widow left behind her a large black woman, who would “help out.” It was agreed that Caroline would take the house for at least one year. On the brick sidewalk in front of the house two vast shiny-leaved magnolia trees put the front rooms in deepest shadow, always desirable, Caroline had remarked, when living in the tropics. Predictably, Marguerite was stunned to find herself marooned in Africa, with an African in the kitchen.

From the outermost circle, Caroline moved to the innermost: the dining room of Henry Adams, where breakfast was served for six each mid-day and no one was ever invited; yet the table was never empty except for this particular morning, when Caroline ate Virginia smoked ham and biscuits made with buttermilk, and the host, more round than ever, discussed his departure the next day for New York; and then a tour of Sicily with Senator and Mrs. Lodge. “After that, I shall spend the summer in Paris, in the Boulevard Bois de Boulogne. The Camerons are there. She is there, at least. No more coffee, William,” he said to the manservant, William Gray, who poured him more coffee, which he drank. “Do you know a young poet, an American, named Trumbull Stickney?”

Caroline said, accurately, that she knew very few Americans in Paris. “While we don’t seem to know any French,” said Adams, judiciously. “We go abroad to see one another. I gather that Mrs. Cameron is Mr. Stickney’s muse this spring. If I were young, I would not be jealous. As it is, I writhe.” But Adams seemed not to be writhing at all. “You must come over-or back in your case-and show us France.”

“I don’t know France at all.” Caroline was again accurate. “But I know the French.”

“Well, I can show you France. I tour the cathedrals yet again. I brood on the relics of the twelfth century.”

“They are… energetic?”

Adams smiled, almost shyly. “You remembered? I’m flattered.”

“I’d hoped for more instruction. But just as I move to Washington, you go away. I feel as if you had created me, a second Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, and then left me in mid-chapter.” Caroline was now on forbidden territory. No one was ever supposed to suggest that Adams might be the author of the novel Democracy, whose heroine, a Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, settles in Washington in order to understand power in a democracy; and is duly appalled. Caroline had delighted in the book, almost as much as she did in its author. Of course, there were those who thought that John Hay had written the novel (he had been photographed holding a copy of the French edition and wearing a secret smile); others thought that the late Clover Adams, a born wit, was the author. But Caroline was certain that Adams himself had written his quintessential book of Hearts. He never, with her, denied- or affirmed-it. “The lesson of that amorality tale is-stay away from senators.”

“That’s not difficult.”

“In Washington? They are like cardinals in Renaissance Rome. You can’t avoid them. That’s why I flee to the twelfth century, where there were only three classes: the priest, the warrior and the artist. Then the commercial sort took over, the money-lenders, the parasites. They create nothing; and they enslave everyone. They expropriated the priest-don’t you like to hear all this at breakfast?”

“Only when there is honey in the comb,” said Caroline, spreading the wax and honey over a piece of hot cornbread. “I can take quite a lot of priests expropriated. And the warriors…?”

“Turned into wage-earning policemen, to defend the money-men, while the artists make dresses or paint bad