Empire

reflected the afternoon sunlight, thanks to the butter with which it was, like some sacred balm, anointed.

3

NICOLAY WAS PROPPED UP in an armchair beside a coal fire. A faded tartan-patterned blanket covered the lower part of a body preparing soon to be in fact what it looked even now to be, a skeleton. The beard was wild, long, white. The eyes-nearly blind and oversensitive to light-were covered by a green shade. Hay recognized nothing in this old man of the young secretary who had persuaded President Lincoln to bring Johnny Hay to Washington as assistant secretary. “We can’t bring all Illinois,” Lincoln had complained. But Hay had joined the White House staff; shared a bed and an office with Nicolay, five years his senior. Later, in the aftermath of that heroic era-the American Iliad, Hay always thought-the two men had together spent a decade writing the story of Lincoln. Then Nicolay had been given a sinecure as a marshal at the Supreme Court; then he became ill and retired. Now he lived in a small house on Capitol Hill with his daughter, on the margin of the American present but at the center of its past.

Although Nicolay no longer resembled the man that he had been, Hay was conscious that despite his own numerous debilities he himself was still very much Johnny Hay, who had simply glued on a beard and lined his face with a pencil in order to impersonate an old man-an old man of state; and so had managed to fool everyone but himself. He knew that he was doomed to be forever what he had been, young and appealing and-the word that he had come to hate, charming, even as he charmed, and charmed. Those whom the gods wish to disappoint they first make charming.

“You’re making headway, I hope.” Hay indicated the desk where papers and open books were piled. Nicolay was at work on yet another Lincoln book, recently interrupted by a trip up the Nile.

“Oh, I try to work. But my head is not what it was.” Hay marvelled that the Bavarian-born Nicolay still spoke with a German accent.

“Whose is?”

“Yours, Johnny.” Back of the wild white King Learish beard; the young Nicolay was smiling. “You grow more fox-like with time…”

“The fox is weakening, Nico. The dogs have got the scent. I hear the huntsman’s bugle.” Hay was a master of the elegiac note.

“You’ll go to ground.” Nicolay’s hand shook as he pulled the tartan tighter about himself. The hand was white, bloodless, dead. “It is good news about your boy,”

Hay nodded, wondering why he himself had not been pleased. In recent years, since Pretoria, in fact, he had come to admire and like his son; yet he did not want him to be so vividly and precisely his own replacement. Now that the son had started up glory’s ladder, the father must prepare to surrender his own place higher up; ladder, too. “Del will go far,” he said. “I never thought he’d have what it would take, but the President did-does. Del’s like a son to the President.”

“And not to you?” Nico stared at Hay, who looked at a copy of the now faded lithograph of Lincoln with his two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. Had he ever been so young?

“Well, yes, to me, too. But he’s more like his mother:… Anyway, he’s at the start and we’re at the end.”

“You’re not.” Nico was flat. “I am. I’ll die this year.”

“Nico…” Hay began.

Nico finished, “I think there’s nothing next. What do you think?”

“I don’t-think. There’s not much now. I’ll say that.”

“Religion,” Nicolay began, but stopped. Both stared at the neutral fire.

“I go, at last, to California.” Hay’s mood lightened at the thought. “We start tomorrow. The President and the Postmaster General and I and forty others. We shall, yet again, bind up the wounds of the South, and then on to Los Angeles, and a fiesta, and San Francisco, where the rest of the Cabinet joins us, except clever Root, who says he must stay close to the War Department, where he directs our far-flung empire. Do you think it wise?”

“What wise?” Nico was drifting off.

“The empire we’re assembling. Do you think,” Hay was curious to know what Nico would answer, “that the Ancient would approve?”

Nico’s response was quick. “The Ancient, no. The Tycoon, yes. He was of two minds, always.”

“But he acted with a single view.”

“Yes, but he thought for such a long time before he acted. The cautious Ancient and the fierce Tycoon held long debates, and Mr. Lincoln, in the end, arbitrated, and handed down his decision.”

“The Major took a long time making up his mind.”

“The Major is not Mr. Lincoln.”

“No. But he is as essential to us in his way. I think we have done the right thing. I was persuaded of it when I was in England, and saw what prosperity-and civilization-empire had given them. Now they begin to falter. So we must take up the burden.”

Nico looked at Hay directly. “Mr. Lincoln would never have wanted us to be anyone’s master.”

“Perhaps not.” Hay had long since given up trying to imagine how Lincoln would have responded to the modern world. “Anyway, it’s done. We are committed.”

“When does Del move into the White House?”

“In the fall. For now, he’ll be working with Mr. Adee at the State Department while I’m gone… He plans to marry the Sanford girl.”

“The Hays have a dowsing rod for money.”

“Del is also a Stone…”

“A golden Stone. Well, are you pleased?”

Hay said that he was; and he was. “They will marry in the fall. Helen, too, I think, to the Whitney boy…”

“We’ve come a long way from Illinois.”

“I wonder.” With age, Hay was more than ever conscious of what might have been; yet could not conceive of any ladder that might have been better than the one that he had climbed, almost without effort, almost to the top. “I don’t think I ever wanted to be president.” Hay addressed the coal in the grate.

“Of course you did. Have you forgotten you?” Nico addressed Hay.

“I must have.”

“I haven’t. You were ambitious. You tried, twice, to go to Congress. Surely it was not for the company you’d find there.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Hay answered Nico’s not-so-rhetorical question. “Anyway, I have pretty much forgotten me. Even so, it is odd that for one year I was next in succession to the President. So I did get pretty high up that particular ladder, which I may-or may not-have wanted to climb.”

“McKinley’s health is excellent.” Nico laughed; and coughed.

“Unlike mine. After this trip, I go to New Hampshire for the rest of the summer. We’ll all be there. Del and Caroline, too.” Hay indicated the lithograph on the wall. “Do you ever dream of him?”

Nico nodded. “All the time. I dream of you, too. As you were then.”

“What sort of dreams?”

“The usual, for those of us at the end.” Nico’s fragile fingers pulled at his wiry beard. “Things have gone wrong. I can’t find important papers. I go through the pigeon-holes in his desk. I can’t read any of the handwriting, and the President is anxious, and the trouble-”

“ ‘This big trouble.’ ” Hay nodded. “He never said ‘Civil War.’ Fact he never said war at all. Only this big trouble. This rebellion. How does he seem to you in the dreams?”

“Sad. I want to help him, but can’t. It’s very frustrating.”

“I don’t dream of him at all any more.”

“You’re not so close to the end as I.”

“Don’t say that! But what’s the end got to do with dreams? I dream most of the night, and nearly everyone I meet in my dreams is dead. But I never dream of him. I don’t know what that means.”