Empire

ever, truly meet.”

“But you can. There is, after all, the high middle ground,” said Henry James, who had been listening, the ruins of an elaborate pudding before him.

“Where-what is that?” Caroline turned her full gaze on that great head with the gleaming all-intelligent eyes.

“Why that is art, dear Miss Sanford. It is a kind of Heaven open to us all, and not just Jim Bludso and his creator.”

“But art is not for everyone, Mr. James.” Del was respectful.

“Then there is something not unlike it, if more rare, yet a higher stage, a meeting ground for all true- hearts.”

On the word “hearts,” Caroline felt a sudden premonitory chill. Did he mean the specific mysterious five or did he mean just what he said? Apparently, he meant just that, because when she asked what this higher stage was, Henry James said, simply, for him: “Dare one say that human intercourse which transcends politics and war and, yes, even love itself? I mean, of course, friendship. There-you have it.”

2

IN WICKER CHAIRS, placed side by side on the stone terrace, John Hay and Henry Adams presided over the Kentish Weald, as the summer light yielded, slowly, very slowly, to darkness.

“In Sweden, in summer, the sun shines all night long.” Henry Adams lit a cigar. “One never thinks of England being almost as far to the north as Sweden. But look! It’s after dinner, and it’s light yet.”

“I suppose we like to think of England as being closer to us than it really is.” Carefully, John Hay pressed his lower back against the hard cushion that Clara had placed behind him. For some months the pain had been fairly constant, a dull aching that seemed to extend from the small of the back down into the pelvis, but, of course, ominously, the doctors said that it was the other way around. In some mysterious fashion the cushion stopped the pain from exploding into one of its sudden borealises, as Hay tended to think of those excruciating flare-ups when his whole body would be electrified by jolts of pain-originating in the atrophied-if not worse-prostate gland, whose dictatorship ordered his life, obliging him to pass water or, painfully, not to pass water, a dozen times during the night, accompanied by a burning sensation reminiscent of his youth when he had briefly contracted in war-time Washington a minor but highly popular venereal infection.

“Are you all right?” Although Adams was not looking at him, Hay knew that his old friend was highly attuned to his physical state.

“No, I’m not.”

“Good. You’re better. When you’re really in pain, you boast of rude health. How pretty Del’s girl is.”

Hay looked across the terrace to the stone bench where his son and Caroline had combined to make a romantic picture, suitable for Gibson’s pen, while the remaining houseguests-it was Monday-floated like sub-aquatic creatures in the watery half-light. The children had been removed, to Hay’s delight, Adams’s sorrow. “Do you recall her mother, Enrique?” Hay had a number of variations of Henry’s name, playful tribute to his friend’s absolute unprotean nature.

“The darkly beautiful Princesse d’Agrigente was not easy, once seen, ever to forget. I knew her back in the seventies, the beautiful decade, after our unbeautiful war was won. Did you know Sanford?”

Hay nodded. The pain which had started to radiate from the lumbar region suddenly surrendered to the pillow’s pressure. “He was on McDowell’s staff early in the war. I think he wanted to marry Kate Chase…”

“Surely he was not alone in this madness?” Hay sensed the Porcupine’s smile beneath the beard, pale blue in the ghostly light.

“We were many, it’s true. Kate was the Helen of Troy of E Street. But Sprague got her. And Sanford got Emma d’Agrigente.”

“Money?”

“What else?” Hay thought of his own good luck. He had never thought that he could ever make a living. For a young man from Warsaw, Illinois, who liked to read and write, who had gone east to college, and graduated from Brown, there were only two careers. One was the law, which bored him; the other, the ministry, which intrigued him, despite a near-perfect absence of faith. Even so, he had been wooed by various ministers of a variety of denominations. But he had said no, finally, to the lot, for, as he wrote his lawyer uncle, Milton: “I would not do for a Methodist preacher, for I am a poor horseman. I would not suit the Baptists, for I would dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man.” This last was disingenuous. Hay had always been more than usually susceptible to women and they to him. But as he had looked, at the age of twenty-two, no more than twelve years old, neither in Warsaw nor, later, in Springfield, was he in any great demand as a ladies’ man.

Instead, Hay had grimly gone into his uncle’s law office; got to know his uncle’s friend, a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln; helped Mr. Lincoln in the political campaign that made him president; and then boarded the train with the President-elect to go to Washington for five years, one month and two weeks. Hay had been present in the squalid boardinghouse when the murdered President had stopped breathing, on a mattress soaked with blood.

Hay had then gone to Paris, as secretary to the American legation. Later, he had served, as a diplomat, in Vienna and Madrid. He wrote verse, books of travel; was editor of the New York Tribune. He lectured on Lincoln. He wrote folksy poems, and his ballads of Pike County sold in the millions. But there was still no real money until the twenty-four-year-old Cleveland heiress Clara Stone asked him to marry her; and he had gratefully united himself with a woman nearly a head taller than he with an innate tendency to be as fat as it was his to be lean.

At thirty-six Hay was saved from poverty. He moved to Cleveland; worked for his father-in-law-railroads, mines, oil, Western Union Telegraph; found that he, too, had a gift for making money once he had money. He served, briefly, as assistant secretary of state; and wrote, anonymously, a best-selling novel, The Bread- Winners, in which he expressed his amiable creed that although men of property were the best situated to administer and regulate America’s wealth and that labor agitators were a constant threat to the system, the ruling class of a city in the Western Reserve (Cleveland was never named) was hopelessly narrow, vulgar, opinionated. Henry Adams had called him a snob; he had agreed. Both agreed that it was a good idea that he had published the book anonymously; otherwise, the Major could not have offered him the all-important embassy at London. Had the Senate suspected that Hay did not admire all things American, he would not have been confirmed.

“Money makes the difference.” Hay took a deep puff of his Havana cigar: what on earth, he suddenly wondered, were they to do with Cuba? Then, aware not only of the vapidity of what he had said but also of the thin blue smile beneath the thick blue beard in the chair beside him, he added, “Not that gilded porcupines would know-except by hearsay-what it is like to be poor and struggling.”

“You wrench my heart.” Adams was sardonic. “Also, my quills were not heavily gilded at birth. I have acquired just enough shekels to creep through life, serving the odd breakfast to a friend…”

“Perhaps you might have been less angelic if you’d had to throw yourself into…”

“… wealthy matrimony?”

A spasm of pain forced Hay to cough. He pretended it was cigar smoke inhaled, as he maneuvered his spine against the pillow. “Into the real world. Business, which is actually rather easy. Politics, which, for us, is not.”

“Well, you’ve done well, thanks to a rich wife. So has Whitelaw Reid. So has William Whitney. So would have Clarence King had he had your luck-all right, good sense-to marry wealthily and well.”

Below the terrace, in the dark woods, owls called to one another. Why, Hay wondered, was the Surrenden nightingale silent? “Why has he never married?” asked Hay: their constant question to one another. Of the three friends, King was the most brilliant, the handsomest, the best talker; also, athlete, explorer, geologist. In the eighties all three had been at Washington, and, thanks largely to King’s brilliance, Adams’s old house became the first salon, as the newspapers liked to say, of the republic.

“He has no luck,” said Hay. “And we have had too much.”

“Do you see it that way?” Adams turned his pale blue head toward Hay. The voice was suddenly cold. Inadvertently, Hay had approached the forbidden door. The only one in their long friendship to which Hay had not