Empire

Paris convent.

As boiled beef relentlessly followed fowl, and the conversation in the dining room grew both louder and slower, Henry James said that, yes, indeed he had met Caroline’s grandfather. “It was in ’76.” He was suddenly precise. “I had decided to make my… deliberate removal to Europe, like Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, who had made his thirty years earlier. He had always intrigued me, and I had noticed, most favorably, for The Nation, his Paris Under the Communards. I can still see him in bright summer Hudson riparian light, on a lawn at river-side, somewhere north of Rhinecliff, a Livingston house behind us, all white columns and cinnamon stucco, and we spoke of the necessity, for some, of living on this side of the Atlantic, some distance from our newspapered democracy.”

“Was my mother with him?”

James cast her a sidelong glance; and helped himself to horseradish sauce. “Oh, she was there, so very much there! Madame la Princesse d’Agrigente. Who can forget her? You are very like her, as I told you at Saint- Cloud…”

“But not so dark?”

“No. Not so dark.” James was then drawn by his other table partner, Alice Hay, who resembled her father- small, shrewd, quick-witted; also, pretty. Although Caroline had not found either of Del’s sisters particularly sympathetic, she did not in the least mind their company, particularly that of Helen, who sat across the table, next to Spencer Eddy, who seemed infatuated with Helen’s precociously middle-aged radiance. She was like her mother, large-bodied, with glowing eyes and quantities of glossy hair, all her own.

Suddenly, Senator Cameron shouted, “What’s this?” He sat at the head of the table, as befitted the married co-host. In one hand he held a silver serving-spoon from which hung a gelatinous mass, rather like a jellyfish, thought Caroline.

“A surprise,” said Mrs. Cameron, from her end of the table. The Curzon child promptly burst into tears: the word “surprise” had not a happy association.

“What is this?” Senator Cameron turned his small fierce eyes upon the butler.

“It is the… corn, sir. From America, sir.”

“This is not corn. What is this mess?”

From behind the coromandel screen that hid pantry from dining room, the cook appeared, like an actress who had been waiting in the wings for her cue. “It is the corn, sir. As you said to make it. Boiled, sir. Should I have left the seeds in it?”

“Oh, Don!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a most genuine sound in that often dramatically charged household. “It’s the watermelon. She mistook it for the corn.” In the general laughter, not shared by Cameron, the cook vanished.

“Father thinks now that we shall keep all the Philippines,” said Del. “The Major has come round, he says. But it hasn’t been easy. All those people who didn’t want us to take on Hawaii last summer are at it again. I can’t think why. If we don’t take up where England’s left off-or just given up-who will?”

“Does it make so much difference?” Although Caroline had been delighted by the war’s excitement, she could not see that there had been any earthly point to it. Why drive poor weak old Spain out of the Caribbean and the Pacific? Why take on far-off colonies? Why boast so much? It was not like Napoleon, who did appeal to her because he had, himself, wanted the world, which Mr. McKinley did not seem to want to be bothered with, unlike that friend of her hosts, a man to whom they all referred, with an inadvertent baring of teeth, as Thee-oh-dore, who had managed, under fire, to lead some of his friends to the top of a small hill in Cuba, without once breaking his pince- nez. The fuss in the newspapers over Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his so-called Rough Riders was as great as the fuss over Admiral Dewey, who had actually defeated Spain’s Pacific fleet and occupied Manila. For reasons obscure to Caroline, the newspapers thought “Teddy” the greater of the two heroes. Therefore: “Does it make so much difference?” was not idly posed.

Del told her of all the dangers that might befall the world if the German kaiser-whose fleet was even now in Philippine waters-were to acquire that rich archipelago in order to carry out the current dream of every European power, not to mention Japan, the carving up of the collapsed Chinese empire. “We had no choice, really. As for allowing Spain to stay on in our hemisphere, that was an anachronism. We must be the masters in our own house.”

“Is all the western hemisphere, even Tierra del Fuego, a part of our house?”

“You’re making fun of me. Let’s talk about the theater in Paris…”

“Let’s talk about men and women.” Caroline felt suddenly as if she had had a revelation about these two hostile races. The differences between the two sexes were known to her in a way that they could never be known to an American young lady. Although American girls were given a social freedom unknown in France, they were astonishingly sheltered in other crucial ways, their ignorance nurtured by anxious mothers, themselves more innocent than not of the on-going plan of Eden’s serpent. Del looked at her, startled. “But what shall we say about-about men and women?” Del’s flush was not entirely from the August heat and the heavy meal.

“I’ve thought of one difference. At least between American men and women. Mr. James called the United States ‘the newspapered democracy.’ ”

“Mr. Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a government without a press and a press without a government, he would choose a press without a-”

“How stupid he must have been!” But when Caroline saw Del’s hurt expression-plainly, he had identified himself with the sage of Monticello-she modified: “I mean, he was not stupid. He just thought that the people he was talking to were stupid. After all, they were journalists, weren’t they? I mean if they weren’t journalists of some sort, how would we know what he said-or might have said, or didn’t say? Anyway, back to men and women. We women are criticized, quite rightly, for thinking and, worse, talking about marriage and children and the ordinary people we have to deal with every day and the lives we have to make for our husbands or families or whatever, and this means that as we get older, we get duller and duller because we have, at the end, nothing left but ourselves to think about and talk about and so we become perfect-if we’re not already to begin with-bores,” Caroline concluded in triumph.

Del looked at her, quite bewildered. “So if you are-like that, then men are… what?”

“Different. Boring in a different way. Because of the newspapers. Don’t you see?”

“You mean men read them and women don’t?”

“Exactly. Most of the men we know, that is, read them, and most of the women we know don’t. At least, not the news-what a funny word!-of politics or wars. So when men talk to one another for hours about what they have all read that morning about China and Cuba and… Tierra del Fuego, about politics and money, we are left out because we haven’t read those particular bits of news.”

“But you could, so easily, read them…”

“But we don’t want to. We have our boredom and you have yours. But yours is truly sinister. Blaise says that practically nothing Mr. Hearst prints is ever true, including the story about how the Spaniards blew up the Maine. But you men who read the Journal, or something like it, will act as if what you read is true or, worse, as if, true or not, it was all that really mattered. So we are excluded, entirely. Because we know that none of it matters-to us.”

“Well, I agree newspapers are not always true, but if… foolish men think they are true-or perhaps true-then it does matter to everyone because that is how governments are run, in response to the news.”

“Then worse luck for foolish men-and women, too.”

Del laughed at last. “So what would you do if you could alter things?”

“Read the Morning Journal.” Caroline was prompt. “Every word.”

“And believe it?”

“Of course not. But at least I could talk to men about Tierra del Fuego and the Balance of Power.”

“I prefer to talk about the theater in Paris… and marriage.” Del’s lower larger face reddened; the small forehead remained pale ivory.

“You’ll be the woman? I’ll be the man?” Caroline smiled. “No. That’s not allowed. Because we are divided at birth by those terrible newspapers that tell you what to think and us what to wear and when to wear it. We cannot,