Empire

penny that might give himself pleasure, there was no production of the opera in his lifetime; no life, either. Caroline vowed that she would not make the same mistake.

Don Cameron’s voice was slow, rumbling, hoarse. “Well, you could at least try it out.”

“But, my dear Senator, I am already so beautifully machined. At Lamb House, I am fitted out like the latest, most modern manufactory, geared for the most intense production, with a chief engineer who is hopelessly wedded to that intricate, fine-grinding mill that he performs upon with a positively virtuoso’s touch…” Henry James spoke in a low, deep resonant voice, well-produced by a huge barrel of a chest that contained a singer’s lungs, thought Caroline, for his breath never gave out, no matter how long and intricate the sentence.

Cameron was persistent. “You’ll never regret trying it out. I know. I tried it out. I’m no writer but it could change your life.”

“Ah, that!” began James.

Adams broke in. “What is it?”

“I already showed you.” The small, red, suspicious eyes turned toward Caroline now. “I’m selling the thing-the rights, that is-for Europe. Exclusive rights.”

“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; thanks to the Colonel, she knew rather a lot about the tricks of opera singers as well as opera, “has now in his exile… no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance-and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor-or tempter-will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description-ever so lucid, so compelling, even-of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint- Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic-or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add- interest save…”

“What… what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoon’s serpent.

“It’s this typewriter I’ve been promoting,” said Senator Cameron.

“For an instant, I thought it was some sort of home guillotine,” said Caroline.

“Homely utensil?” Adams asked; then answered his own question. “Well, why not? We could certainly use one in Lafayette Square.”

“Now if Mr. James would just give us an endorsement,” began Senator Cameron.

“But I am wedded, Senator, to another. I am-let me pronounce once and for all the honorable name- united to the Remington typewriter-machine, and have been for close to two wonderfully contented and happy years.”

“You manipulate it yourself?” Caroline could not visualize the ponderous Mr. James confronting a metal machine, stubby fingers tapping.

“No,” said Henry Adams. “He paces about the garden room of his house and unfurls his sentences into the ear of a typewriter-machinist who turns them into Remingtonese.”

“Which is, at its best, so like English,” added Henry James, eyes sparkling. Caroline vowed that she must one day really read him. Except for Daisy Miller, required reading for every American girl in Europe, Caroline had always steered clear of the books of the man that so many knowing Americans in Paris referred to as the Master.

“I’ll bring it over to your place anyway.” Cameron was dogged. “Get your man to try it out. There’s a fortune in these new gadgets. Where’s Lizzie?”

No one knew. She was not in the room. As Cameron made his way through a group of children to the hallway, Mr. Eddy bowed low to the statesman, who did not see him.

“Our good Don is persistent,” said Henry Adams; and though the tone was agreeable, the expression of the face was not. Caroline saw that James had noticed, too.

“It must be very hard, no longer being in the Senate, after so many years, at the center.” James was uncharacteristically tentative.

“Oh, I think he has a good enough time. He’s rich, after all. He’s got the place in South Carolina to worry about…”

“It must be even harder for La Dona, as you, not I, call her.” James was studying Adams’s face with acute interest.

“She has not been well.” Adams was neutral; flat. “That’s why Don and I formed our syndicate, to take this place for the summer, to unite us all.”

“She is thriving then?”

But Henry Adams was saved from answering by the butler, who was at last permitted to come into his brilliant own. The long cadaverous figure of Mr. Beech stood very straight in the doorway, as his basso voice ecstatically proclaimed, “His Excellency, the Ambassador of the United States of America, and Mrs. John Hay.”

“I shall now say ‘hurrah’ three times, I think,” said Henry James, “and very loud, too.”

“Don’t,” said Adams.

The Hays were a curious-looking couple. He was small, slender, bearded, with, at a distance, a boy’s face that, close up, was like a delicate much-wrinkled beige chamois skin. Hay wore a pointed beard, like all the others; his full head of hair was parted in the middle and dyed the same dull chestnut color as the hair of his tall, fleshy, large- faced wife, who looked even larger and more formidable than she was when standing beside her husband. Caroline could see Del’s face peering out of Clara’s; but except for the turned-up nose, saw no resemblance to Del at all in Hay, who came toward them, hand outstretched to greet Henry James. They were old friends.

“In fact,” said James, more to Caroline than to anyone, “when I needed employment on this side of the water, Mr. Hay-this was a quarter-century ago, and the world was younger, as were we, to strike the Dickensian note of spacious redundancy-Mr. Hay, as an editor of the New York Tribune, persuaded, with who knows what wiles, that worthy paper to take me on as its inadequate Paris correspondent.”

“Easily the wisest thing I ever did.” Hay’s voice was low and precise and, that rare thing to Caroline’s critical ear, agreeably American. “Now you are become so great that I have your bust in my library, along with Cicero’s. Adams often compares the two of you-the originals, that is, not the busts. Every day he thinks up something new to say, when he pays me a call.” Del had told Caroline a good deal about the curious Hay-Adams living arrangements at Washington.

Ever since the Civil War, Hay and Adams had been friends; the wives, too, had liked each other, a source of amazement to Caroline, who said as much, amazing Del, who was innocent. When the Hays at last abandoned Cleveland, Ohio, where Hay had first worked for-and then with-Mrs. Hay’s father, they had come to Washington to live, largely because Henry Adams lived there; and he lived there because, as he had told Caroline, it is a law of nature that Adamses gravitate to capitals. Since he would never be president like his two ancestors, he could at least live opposite the White House, where each Adams had, so disastrously, presided; and thus, close to “home,” he could write, think, and even make-through backstage maneuvering-history.

In due course, Hay and Adams had built a double house in Lafayette Square, a red brick Romanesque affair, whose outside Caroline already knew from photographs and whose inside Del intended for her to get to know. But though the two houses were physically joined, there was no connecting inner door. In this joint house, Hay had finished his interminable life of Lincoln while Adams had written much of his long account of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, demonstrating, as Del had observed, how the Adamses, though seldom mentioned in the text, had almost never been wrong-unlike their opponents, Jefferson and Madison and the terrible Andrew Jackson, whose statue at the center of Lafayette Park was daily visible to Henry Adams, who, daily, chose not to look at this ungainly reminder of his grandfather’s political ruin, not to mention that of the republic. For was it not with Jackson that the age of political corruption which now flourished began? But despite the city’s ever-present mephitic corruption, the two wealthy historians lived contentedly side by side, influencing events through various chosen instruments, among them Senator Don Cameron, hereditary czar of Pennsylvania. When Lincoln wondered if Don’s father, Simon Cameron, would steal once he was secretary of war, a Pennsylvania colleague observed that, well, he