Empire

1

“WHY,” ASKED LIZZIE, “are autumn flowers darker than summer flowers, which are darker than spring flowers?”

“Is that a question?” Caroline sat on the lawn, a shawl between her and the damp grass. “If it is, you’ve asked the wrong person. I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there, and not be encouraged in any way.”

“The French love flowers.” Lizzie was assembling bouquets of zinnias and early chrysanthemums; she, too, sat on the lawn, a blanket beneath her, a wide-brimmed straw hat pushed to the back of her head: she looked like a handsome country boy.

“But we like to discover them indoors, in vases. You’re not afraid of chrysanthemums?”

“No. But then I’m not afraid of anything,” said the niece of General Sherman; and Caroline believed her.

“I’m glad Marguerite’s not here. She would make a scene. Chrysanthemums are only for the dead, we believe. She believes, that is.”

“She will come back?”

Caroline nodded. “The end of this month, when I go back to Washington. Thank you for my holiday.”

“Thank you. Without you, I would have gone mad in this house, with only my loved ones to keep me company.”

“The Senator’s less restless than he was.” Caroline was neutral. Don Cameron was ageing visibly; and drinking invisibly. Although never exactly drunk in their presence, he was never entirely sober. Daughter Martha was at what promised to be the sort of awkward age that might well last a lifetime. She was large, ungainly, unhappy; an exact opposite to her beautiful and gallant mother. Lizzie, wanting to do her best for the girl, did her worst. They had nothing in common but blood, that least of bonds. It was Henry Adams who had arranged that they take this house at Beverly, on Massachusetts’s north shore, not far from Nahant, where the Cabot Lodges summered. Only this summer, the Lodges and Adamses had gone to Europe, leaving the Camerons to their own devices, with only the Brooks Adamses for company, at not-so-nearby Quincy.

Earlier in the year, Don had cut back Lizzie’s allowance. She had barely been able to live in Paris on eight hundred dollars a month. When she had asked for a thousand, Don reduced the eight hundred; and then decided, capriciously, that they should all economize together, in the United States, where Martha must soon take her place in society, not to mention at school. Father, mother and daughter were now situated on the aptly named Pride’s Hill, surrounded by rented rural beauty, with only Caroline for company.

After Del’s death, Caroline had, with some misgivings, joined the Hay family in New Hampshire. She would have preferred to spend the summer in Washington’s heat, working at the Tribune, or even return to Newport, Rhode Island, and Mrs. Delacroix, but Clara Hay had been insistent; and so Caroline had gone, to Sunapee, to act the part of the widow that she might have been.

Hay had taken the death hard. “I see his face all the time now, always before me and always smiling.” Then he had read aloud to Caroline a curiously intimate and uncharacteristic letter from Henry Adams to Clara. For the first time, according to Clara, Adams alluded to the suicide of his wife: “I never did get up again, and never to this moment recovered the energy or interest to return into active life.” He had cautioned Clara not to allow Hay to break down as he had done, with the result, he had duly noted with devastating self-knowledge, that “I have got the habit of thinking that nothing is worthwhile! That sort of habit is catching, and I should not like to risk too close contact at a critical moment with a mind to be affected by it.” Hay had been both touched and amused by the Porcupine’s sharp clarity, charity.

When the Camerons had invited Caroline to Beverly, Clara had insisted that she go. “They are so deeply interested in themselves that you won’t have any time to think of yourself.” Caroline accepted the invitation; then sent Marguerite back to France to see the inevitable ailing mother that every lady’s maid possessed, even to her hundredth year, as a constant memento non mori.

The Camerons were indeed full of themselves, but as Caroline could never get enough of Lizzie, she was content to drift with them to summer’s end. Now the sea-wind was sharp with an autumnal chill. Soon the house, always sea-damp, would be shut up, and the Camerons would go-where? They were like so many flying Dutchmen, each on a separate track, and only briefly, as now, did their courses coincide.

They were joined by Kiki, Lizzie’s small overweight poodle, who leapt onto Lizzie’s lap and began, methodically, to lick Lizzie’s firm chin.

“Martha’s problem is that she is both lazy and vain. Which is worse?” Lizzie appeared to be addressing Kiki.

“I find both qualities endearing, at least in friends. Lazy people never bother you, and vain ones don’t involve themselves in your life. I wish I had such a daughter,” Caroline added, surprising herself; Lizzie, too.

“You really want children?”

“I just said that I did, so I suppose I must.” But, curiously, Caroline could never imagine having given birth to a child by Del. Worse, she had never been able even to fantasize what it might be like to make love to him.

“She wears my last year’s clothes.” Lizzie was neutral. “Don delights in her. She is more Cameron than Sherman. We are not so large. I think that she would like to marry that Jew. But I got her away in time.”

Earlier in the year, at Palermo, Lionel Rothschild, a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, had affixed himself to Martha. “The odd thing,” said Lizzie, “is that he is absolutely enchanting but…”

“A Jew.” Caroline had lived through the Dreyfus case in a way that no one who was not French could understand; and Caroline was, for all practical purposes, a Frenchwoman, impersonating an American lady. Caroline had favored Dreyfus in the civil war that had broken out in the drawing rooms of Paris. She had skirmished on many an Aubusson, heard the ominous hiss of enemy epigrams, the thudding sound of falling tirades; yet she herself knew no Jews. “At least the Rothschilds are very rich.”

“Worse!” Lizzie pushed her straw hat even farther back on her head. “The boy’s charming. But the race is accursed…”

“You sound like Uncle Henry.”

“Well, that is the way of our world, isn’t it? Anyway, she’s too young to marry…”

“And I’m too old.” Caroline got the subject back to herself. Since Del’s death, she had become more than ever interested in herself; and more than ever puzzled what to do about this peculiar person. She was apt to live a long time. But she had no idea how she was to occupy her time. The thought of half a century to be lived through was more chilling to her than the thought of an eternity to be dead in.

“No, you’re not too old.” Lizzie was direct. “But you’d better make your move soon. You don’t want to be the first-and last-woman publisher in the world or Washington or whatever, do you?”

“I don’t… I really don’t know. I miss Del.”

“That’s natural. You’ve had a shock. But some shocks are good-after the pain, of course. Have you ever noticed a tree after lightning’s struck it? The part that’s still alive is twice as alive as before and puts out more branches, leaves…”

“Unlike a woman struck by lightning, who is decently buried.”

“You are morbid. You’re also lucky. You are-will be-rich. You’re not like me, dependent on a man who is-happiest alone.”

The man, happiest when alone, seemed delighted to be walking arm in arm with Martha, dark-browed, tall, heavy. They came from the house, whose old-fashioned frame porch-piazza they called it locally-was ablaze with potted hydrangeas, neatly regimented by Lizzie. Kiki abandoned Lizzie; and leapt into Martha’s arms, while the red- faced patriarch smiled upon this homely scene.

Don Cameron was now nearly seventy; nearly fat; nearly very rich, though a sudden fall in the stock market the previous month had obliged him, for some days, to drink for two. Now news from the outside world had shaken them all. History was at work, “overtime,” in Lizzie’s phrase.

“There are still no newspapers,” said Don, slowly, carefully, arranging his bulk on Lizzie’s blanket. Martha stood, holding Kiki in her arms-Virgin with canine god, thought Caroline.

“Anyway, we think we can pronounce the name,” said Martha, and she pronounced, “Leon Czolgosz,” with two shushing sounds. “He is Polish, it seems.”

“An anarchist!” Don growled. “They’re everywhere. They’re out to kill every ruler in the world, like the king of