Empire by Gore Vidal Read Free Book Online Page A

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 the key. In the thirteen years since Adams had found his dead wife on the floor, he had not mentioned her to Hay—or to anyone that Hay knew of. Adams had simply locked a door; and that was that.
    But Hay was experiencing vivid pain; and so was less than his usual tactful self. “Compared to King, we have lived in Paradise, you and I.”
    A tall, tentative figure appeared on the terrace. Hay was relieved at the diversion. “Here I am, White,” he called out to the embassy’s first secretary, just arrived from London.
    White pulled up a chair; refused a cigar. “I have a telegram,” he said. “It’s a bit crumpled. The paper is so flimsy.” He gave the telegram to Hay, who said, “Am I expected, as a director of Western Union, to defend the quality of the paper we use?”
    “Oh, no. No!” White frowned, and Hay was suddenly put on his guard by his colleague’s nervousness: it was part of White’s charm to laugh at pleasantries that were neither funny nor pleasant. “I can’t read in the dark,” said Hay. “Unlike the owl … and the porcupine.” Adams had taken the telegram from Hay; now he held it very close to his eyes, deciphering it in the long day’s waning light.
    “My God,” said Adams softly. He put down the telegram. He stared at Hay.
    “The German fleet has opened fire in Cavite Bay.” This had been Hay’s fear ever since the fall of Manila.
    “No, no.” Adams gave the telegram to Hay, who put it in his pocket. “Perhaps you should go inside and read it. Alone.”
    “Who’s it from?” Hay turned to White.
    “The President, sir. He has appointed you … ah … has offered to appoint you …”
    “Secretary of state,” Adams finished. “
The
great office of state is now upon offer, to you.”
    “Everything comes to me either too late or too soon,” said Hay. He was unprepared for his own response, which was closer to somber regret than joy. Certainly, he could not pretend to be surprised. He had known all along that the current secretary, Judge Day, was only a temporary appointment. The Judge wanted a judgeship and he had agreed to fill in, temporarily, at the State Department as a courtesy to his old friend the Major. Hay was also aware that the Major thoughthighly of his