1876 (55 page)

My pen delays ... Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word. I seem to be making a book of maxims.

Jamie took me to Madame Restell’s house, where the usual charming women and eager men were gathered in her comfortable rich salons.

Jamie promptly went to the card room to gamble, leaving me with Madame Restell; she affected to be glad to see me once again. At her insistence I took brandy from a waiter, despite the bad effect it always has on my heart.

“We’re neighbours.” Madame grinned at me; her bright knowing eyes are like some quick flesh-eating bird’s, forever on the lookout for provender.

“You do know everything.”

“Well, I do see you coming and going from the Sanford house. But”—she frowned—“I don’t really know
everything
.
For instance, the charming Mrs. Sanford. I liked her so much.”

“What about her?”

“Well ... She is dead.”

“Absolutely. And horribly so, for us.”

“But why?”

“You tell me.” I was hard. “
You
know. I don’t. I do know that Denise wanted a child and that you told her that she could have one, safely, if she followed your regime. Well, she followed it, and she died.”

Madame Restell was silent for some minutes. Past her shoulder I could see the gaming room. Handsome women stood back of the intent card players, no doubt giving signals to their partners.

Then Madame Restell said, “I saw Mrs. Sanford for the last time a year ago when she came here to ask me if she could ever have a child and I said, no, never. I was as blunt as I have ever been to anyone in my life because I liked her.”

The room began to enlarge and contract. I thought I might faint or, better yet, die. “But last summer when my daughter came to see you, didn’t you say ...”

“I have never met your daughter, Mr. Schuyler.”

I should have stopped right there, for I saw dawning in those old bright bird’s eyes a truth that no one must ever know. But I could not stop myself. “The special nurse. She came from you, didn’t she?”

“I sent no special nurse. And I have played no part at all in what has happened.”

I have no memory of walking home. Although not drunk, I was not sane.

I went straight to Emma’s room. She was reading in bed. She smiled; looked lovely.

“I’ve just come from Madame Restell.”

Emma put down her book. She looked at me, and her face did not change expression.

I sat down in a chair because my legs had given way. I looked at Emma; saw her as she had been that evening in Philadelphia at the desk in Sanford’s railway car. I saw two figures entwined in a summer gazebo and I knew exactly what had happened. I knew what Emma had done. Or thought I did.

Emma was to the point. “Madame Restell does not like failure, Papa. It is bad for business.”

“Was she lying to me?”

Emma sighed; made a bookmark of her comb. “If it was only you, I wouldn’t mind. You know the truth. You know I was devoted to Denise and that if I had had to choose between her and Sanford ...” Emma stopped; took the comb out of the book and kept her place with one finger. “Anyway, to save her professional reputation Madame Restell is going to tell everyone in New York her terrible story. That’s why we’re running away to France.”

“What did happen?”

“Nothing except what you already know. Madame Restell thought that Denise, with care, had a good chance of surviving—”

“Only a good chance?”

“Yes. Denise insisted that we pretend that there was no risk at all. But there was. That’s why I begged her not to—go ahead. But she did.”

“Madame Restell says that she never sent anyone to look after Denise.”

“For a woman who does not exist, Madame Restell’s assistant demanded a very large salary. She can be produced—though
I
never want to see her again.”

“Madame Restell says that she has never met you.”

Emma smiled. “Never having met people is Madame Restell’s usual form of tact. Shall I describe the horrors of her drawing room?”

“No. I am relieved.” I got to my feet. Emma kissed her hand to me, and as she did I saw between us, for a brief hallucinatory moment, a single white locust blossom spinning slowly, slowly, like a summer snowflake.

“Bonne nuit, cher Papa.”

“Sleep well,” I said, and meant it.

Emma opened her book and began to read.

I came back to this room.

I have just taken a double draught of laudanum.

I HAVE MOVED into a pleasant room at the Buckingham Hotel (seventeen dollars a day, with excellent meals) across the avenue from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. My room at the back looks out upon the large vegetable garden of a very pleasant farm just west of Fifth Avenue.

I work with Bigelow on the book. I write occasional articles for the
Post
.
I dine out every night but, miraculously, I am losing rather than gaining weight and so I feel, at times, almost young again. Certainly the loss of excess flesh makes all the more intense, even rapturous, my cigarine interludes.

Bryant, I fear, is not long for this world, but then he is—what? eighty-two, no, eighty-three years old. I do worry what will happen to me when he is dead, since I have lost the
Herald
now that Jamie has turned Coriolanus and gone into exile whilst the young editors at the
Post
know me not.

Bryant has asked me to do an article on our old friend Fitz-Green Halleck. “Because I simply haven’t the time. Besides, I’ve already paid him lengthy homage at the New York Historical Society.”

This morning—a fine May day—I was both journalist and memorialist, for I was called upon to say a few words at the unveiling of a statue to Halleck in the Central Park.

Bryant also spoke, as did that luminary, His Fraudulency himself, the President of the United States Rutherford B. Hayes, a true lover, to hear him tell it, of our home-grown American sweet-singers or warblers.

We sat on a wooden platform beside the bronze statue that looks not at all like the Halleck I knew, but then the best statues, unlike the best words, always lie.

I read my short, short speech, recalling the Shakespeare Tavern group of which Halleck was the presiding genius. On my feet, I was so much at ease that I am half convinced that I should attempt, at last, the lecture circuit once the book is finished.

I did not get a chance to talk to the President. Bryant had seen to it that no one could get at Mr. Hayes without first stepping over Bryant’s long legs.

Hayes is an impressive-looking, rather stout man with a naturally fierce expression. I stared at him with some fascination, for he is, after all, my creation, a major character in the book that I am writing. It is not often that writers are actually able to see their fictional creatures made flesh.

A Special Despatch to The New York Evening Post

by William Cullen Bryant

It is with the greatest sorrow that I am obliged to record here the sudden death of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a friend, a colleague, one of the last sharers with me of the old times in Knickerbocker’s town.

I saw my old friend the morning of the day he died, May 16, 1877, in the Central Park, where we were both present at the unveiling of a statue commemorating our common long-dead friend the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck. In fact, Mr. Schuyler was writing a description for this newspaper of that memorial service when he died.

I find it peculiarly poignant, always, when a colleague of so many years dies. I had known Mr. Schuyler since he first wrote for the
Evening Post
, nearly half a century ago. But his true fame rests securely upon those valuable historical works that he composed during a lifetime spent for the most part in Europe.

Perhaps the most exemplary of his works is that compelling and incisive study,
Paris Under the Communists
.

At the time of Mr. Schuyler’s death, he was at work ...

THE END.

AS IN
Burr
AND
Washington, D
.
C
., I have mixed real people with invented ones. Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his daughter, Emma, are invented (though by now Charlie seems very real to me). Also made up are Mr. and Mrs. Sanford, as well as the atrocious William de La Touche Clancey. Readers of Henry Adams will duly note the resurrection of Baron Jacobi.

The other characters all existed, saying and doing pretty much what I have them saying and doing. I have moved about history only twice. First, the news of the unpleasantness of Little Big Horn was not published on June 27; actually, the press delayed the story until July 6—in order not to shadow the national centennial on the Fourth. Second,
Tom Sawyer
was published in serial form in the Spring of 1876; book publication did not follow until December. I have moved the publication of the book to the beginning of 1876 so that Mark Twain could say all the things that I have him saying (and indeed he said or wrote during this period) to Charlie.

Although I have a deep mistrust of writers who produce trilogies (tetralogists are beyond the pale), I have done exactly that.
Burr
,
1876
and
Washington, D
.
C
.
record, in sequence, the history of the United States from the Revolution to—well, the beginning of Camelot. Certain characters from
Burr
reappear in
1876
while
Washington, D
.
C
.
records the doings of, among others, the son and grandson of Mr. and Mrs. William Sanford.

Professor Eric L. McKitrick and E. McKitrick have together gone over the text of
1876
, firmly pointing out inadvertent errors and anachronisms. My thanks to them.

August 15, 1975

GORE VIDAL
wrote his first novel at the age of nineteen while overseas in World War II.
Williwaw
was published in 1946. Thirty years later
1876
is being published.

During three decades as a writer, Vidal has written with success and distinction novels, plays, short stories and essays. He has also been a political activist. As a Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat there in half a century. From 1970 to 1972 he was co-chairman of the People’s Party.

In 1948 Vidal wrote the highly praised, highly condemned novel
The City and the Pillar
, the first American work to deal sympathetically with homosexuality. In the next six years he produced
The Judgment of Paris
and the prophetic
Messiah
.
In the fifties Vidal wrote plays for live television and films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the television plays became the successful Broadway play
Visit to a Small Planet
.
Directly for the theater he wrote the prize-winning
The Best Man
.

In 1964 Vidal returned to the novel. In succession, he created three remarkable works:
Julian
,
Washington
,
D
.
C
.,
Myra Breckinridge
.
Each was a number one best seller in the United States and England. In 1973 Vidal produced his most admired and successful novel
Burr
, as well as his collected essays
Homage to Daniel Shays
.