Empire (11 page)

Blaise smiled at the memory, and started unconsciously to mouth the word as he crossed the coupolaed hall at whose center a number of Tammany types had gathered about His Honor the Mayor, Robert Van Wyck, brother to the gubernatorial candidate.

But Blaise was doomed never to know what wisdom the Mayor was dispensing in the rotunda, because a tall old man with silver hair and rose-tinted side-whiskers, Dennis Houghteling, the Sanford family lawyer, signalled him from the marble staircase. “I have been with the Clerk of Wills,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice, the only voice that he had. Because the Colonel refused even to visit, much less live, in the United States, Mr. Houghteling had been, in effect, the Sanford viceroy at New York, and once a month he reported in careful detail the state of the Sanford holdings to its absent lord. Since Blaise had known Mr. Houghteling all his life, it was only natural that when it came time to probate the last of his father’s many wills, the matter would be entrusted to the senior partner of Redpath, Houghteling and Parker, attorneys-at-law.

“All is well,” whispered Houghteling, putting his arm through Blaise’s, and steering him to an empty marble bench beneath a statue of De Witt Clinton. “All is well as far as the
law
is concerned.” Houghteling began to modify; and Blaise waited, with assumed patience, for the lawyer to tell him what the problem was. Meanwhile, the Mayor was making a speech beneath the cupola. The vowels echoed like thunder while the consonants were like rifle shot. Blaise understood not a word.

“As we know, the problem is one of interpretation. Of cyphers; or of a single cypher to be precise—and its ambiguity.”

Blaise was alert. “Who will ever contest our interpretation of an ambiguous cypher?”

“Your sister will certainly contest our interpretation …”

“But she’s in England, and if the will’s been probated, as you say …”

“There has been a slight delay.” Houghteling’s whisper was more than ever insinuating. “Your cousin has spoken up, on behalf of Caroline …”

“Which cousin?” There were, that Blaise knew of, close to thirty cousins, in or near the city.

“John Apgar Sanford. He is a specialist in patent law, actually …”

Blaise had met Cousin John, a hearty dull man of thirty, with an ailing wife, and many debts.

“Why has he got himself involved?”

“He is representing your sister in this.”

Blaise felt a sudden chill of ancrer. “
Representing
Caroline? Why? We’re not in court. There’s no contest.”

“There will be, he says, over the precise age at which she comes into her share of the estate …”

“The will says that when she’s twenty-seven, she’ll inherit her share of the capital. Until then I have control of the entire estate. After all, Father wrote that will himself, with his own hand.”

“Unfortunately, he—who usually refused to speak French—wrote his will in rather faulty French, and since the French number one looks just like an English seven, though unlike a French seven, your cousin is taking the position that the Colonel intended for this will to conform with the earlier ones; and that your father meant for Caroline to inherit at twenty-one, not twenty-seven, half the estate.”

“Well, it looks like twenty-seven to me. How did it look to the clerk?”

“I translated the text for him.
Of course
, the English version says twenty-seven …”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Twofold. Your cousin says that we have deliberately misinterpreted your father, and he will now contest our … interpretation of the figure.”

“
He
will? How can he? Only Caroline can and she’s three thousand miles away.”

“Your first supposition is correct. He obviously cannot contest a will with which he has nothing to do. Your second supposition—the geographical one—is mistaken. I have just spoken to your sister. She arrived this morning from Liverpool. She is stopping at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

Blaise stared at the old lawyer. In the background, someone proposed three cheers to Mayor Van Wyck, and the rotunda reverberated with cheering; like artillery being fired. Martial images filled Blaise’s head. War. “If they contest what my father wrote, I shall take them through every court in the country. Do you understand, Mr. Houghteling?”

“Of course, of course.” The old man tugged at his rose-pink whiskers. “But, perhaps, it would be more seemly to come to an agreement. You know? A compromise, say. A settlement …”

“She must wait for her share.” Blaise got to his feet. “That’s what my father wanted. That’s what I want. That’s what it is going to be.”

“Yes, sir.” Thus, the crown passed from Colonel Sanford to Blaise, who was now sole steward, for the next six years, of fifteen million dollars.

J
OHN HAY
stood at the window of his office in the State War and Navy Building, a splendid sort of wedding cake designed, baked and frosted by one Mullett, an architectural artificer who had been commissioned a dozen years earlier to provide mock-Roman shelter for the three great departments of state, all in a single building within spitting distance of that gracious if somewhat dilapidated Southern planter’s home, the White House, to the east. From the window of the Secretary of State’s office the unlovely greenhouses and conservatories of the White House—like so many dirt-streaked crystal palaces—were visible through the trees, while in the distance Hay could make out, across the Potomac, the familiar green hills of Virginia, enemy country during the four years that he had been President Lincoln’s secretary.

Now here I am, he thought, trying hard to summon up a sense of drama or, failing that, comedy; he got neither. He was old; frail; solitary. Clara and the children had stayed on at the Lake Sunapee house in New Hampshire. Accompanied only by Mr. Eddy, Hay had marched into the State Department that morning at nine o’clock, and taken control of the intricate and confusing department, where more than sixty persons were employed in order to … what?

“I am curious, Mr. Adee. What does the Secretary of State actually
do
?” Hay shouted at his old friend,
dear
friend, Alvey A. Adee, the second assistant secretary of state. They had first met when both had been posted in Madrid during the time that the self-styled hero of Gettysburg, the one-legged General Dan Sickles, American minister to Spain, was scandalously ministering to Spain’s queen as her democratic lover. Seven years Hay’s junior, Adee had even collaborated with Hay on a short story that had been published in
Putnam’;
and, joyously, they had divvied up the cash. Madrid had been a quiet post in the late sixties.

Now Adee carefully groomed his gray Napoleonic beard and moustaches; he used a tortoise-shell comb but, happily, no pocket mirror as in the old days. Adee was the most exquisite of bachelors, with a high voice which, in moments of stress, broke into a mallard’s cackle. Although deaf, he was very good at guessing what it was that people said to him. All in all, he was the ablest man in the American foreign service as well as a superb literary mimic. At a moment’s notice, Adee could write a poem in the manner of Tennyson or of Browning; a speech in the style of Lincoln or of Cleveland; a letter in the style of any and every sort of office-holder. “Each of the secretaries comes here with his own notion of work.” Adee put away the comb. “Your immediate predecessor, Judge Day, spent his five months here fretting about his next judgeship. Of course, he only took the job as a favor to the President when poor Mr. Sherman …” Adee sighed.

Hay nodded. “Poor Uncle John, as we call him, was too old by the time he got here. If this were a just world …”

“What a conceit, Mr. Hay!” Adee produced an amused quack.

“I am prone to the sententious. Anyway, he should have been president years ago.”

“Well, the world’s all wrong, Mr. Hay. Anyway, you tried hard enough to get the old thing elected.” Adee took a small vial of cologne from his pocket and shook a drop or two on his beard.

Hay rather wished that Adee were able to present a somewhat more virile face to the world. As it was, the Second Assistant was not unlike Queen Victoria, with a glued-on beard. “Obviously, I don’t work hard enough. But my question’s quite serious. What do
I
do?”

“What you
should
do is let me do most of it.…”

“Well, we are old collaborators, of course …”

“I’m serious, Mr. Hay. Why wear yourself out for nothing? There are dispatches from all around the world to be read—and replied to. I do most of that, anyway. I also write a really masterful letter of sympathetic rejection to would-be office-seekers, many of them nephews to senators.”

Hay had a sudden, vivid vision of the tall fragile figure of President Lincoln, looking very much like “the Ancient” that his two young secretaries had nicknamed him, besieged in the upstairs corridor of the White House by men and women, shoving petitions, letters, newspaper-cuttings at him. “Whitelaw Reid now wants the embassy at London,” Hay began.

But Adee was studying his glistening nails, and did not hear him. He
must read lips, Hay thought. When Adee’s eyes are not upon your mouth, he does not hear. “You’ll be relieved to know that you now have nothing to offer anyone. The President has given away just about all the posts to keep his senators happy.”

“I can still pick the first assistant secretary …”

“There is a rumor …” Adee began; but a soft knock at the door interrupted him. “Come,” said Adee, and a smiling Negro messenger entered to present Hay with a silver-framed photograph. “This just arrived, Mr. Secretary. From the British embassy.”

Hay placed the extravagantly signed photograph on his desk, so that Adee could also enjoy the figure depicted, a somewhat larger, stouter, bemedalled version of Adee’s own. “The Prince of Wales!” Adee’s accent now became, unconsciously, British. He mimicked compulsively, as the chameleon shifts its color to suit the landscape. “We’ve all heard what a success you were with the royal family. In fact, Her Majesty was quoted in the
Herald
, indirectly, of course, as saying that you were the most interesting ambassador that she had ever known.”

“Poor woman,” said Hay, who had read the same story with quiet pleasure. “I told her Lincoln stories. And dialect stories. It was like being out on the Lyceum circuit. No matter how old the joke—or the Queen—the audience laughs.”

Adee’s accent recrossed the Atlantic and hovered somewhere near Hay’s native Warsaw, Illinois. “I reckon your main job will be to help our good President, who knows nothing of foreign affairs and has no time to learn. He is mortally tired now of having been his own secretary of state for two years while running and winning a war and instructing our delegation to the peace conference in Paris, except he’s not sure what he wants them to do.” Adee stared at Hay’s lips. “As far as I can tell, that is,” he added.

Hay had heard the same rumor: indecision in the White House; hence, confusion in Paris. “Do get me all the Paris dispatches. I’d better find out just what’s been said so far.”

Adee frowned. “I’m afraid we don’t get to see them here. Judge Day always reported directly to the President.”

“Oh.” Hay nodded, as if he approved. But the first warning bell had now sounded. Unless he acted quickly, he was to be excluded from the peace treaty by his predecessor’s indifferences.

Mr. Eddy was at the door. “The White House just telephoned, sir. The President can see you anytime now.”

“Have we a
telephone
?” asked Hay, who disliked the invention, not
only for its dreadful self but for its potential threat to his beloved Western Union.

“Oh, yes,” said Adee. “We are very modern over here. We have one in our telegraph office. Personally, I hear nothing at all when I put it to my ear. But others
claim
to hear voices, like Joan of Arc. There’s also one in the White House, in what was the President’s war-room.”

“Surely, the President doesn’t, personally, use that … that menacing contraption?”

“He says that it is addictive.” Adee was judicious. “He says that he enjoys the knowledge that he can always hang up when he is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear, and then he can pretend that the connection was broken by accident.”

“The Major has become guileful.”

“He’s a successful war-leader. It is inevitable,” said Mr. Adee. “Shall I walk you over to the mansion?”

Hay shook his head. “No, I’ll go alone. I need to arrange my thoughts, such as they are.”

“What to do with the Philippines?”

“Above all.” Hay sighed. “We must decide, and soon.”

Hay stepped out into the dim high-ceilinged corridor, where a single policeman stood guard. Usually, the State Department was one of the most tranquil, even somnolent, of the government’s ministries, on the order of Interior, where, barring the rare excitement of the odd Indian war, a man could sleep his way through the life of an administration, or get a book written. But since the events of the summer, new translators had been added to the State Department, and the slow stream of paper into and out of Mr. Mullett’s masterpiece was now engorged.

Hay was greeted respectfully by numerous functionaries whose functions were as unknown to him as their persons. But he pretended to recognize everyone, the politician’s trick, with a raise of an eyebrow if the face looked remotely familiar, a bob of the head if not; geniality was the politician’s common tender.

Outside, in Pennsylvania Avenue, Hay was pleased at the absence of journalists. He was not expected until the next day, when he would take the oath of office. For now, no one paid the slightest attention to him except an old black man who was pushing a cart that contained everything needed for the sharpening of knives, the repair of scissors. They had seen each other for years in the street. After a solemn greeting, the old man said, “I didn’t know you was living on this side of the road.”

Hay laughed. “No. I’m still living there.” He pointed to the dark red brick fortress, all turrets and arches, where he and Adams, like two medieval abbots, lived. “But I’m working here now.”