Empire (60 page)

“Crazier in a way.”

“We must,” said Jim, as he left the room to rejoin the house-party, “keep an eye on him.”

“A cold blue eye.”

“On those six fingers, particularly.”

DESPITE
Marguerite’s pleas, Caroline joined the yachting party. “I must seem absolutely all right,” she said, “until …”

“Until … what?”

“I do what I have to do.” This sentence released a torrent of mercifully silent tears. Actually, Caroline had no plan for the coming catastrophe. She must be cool, she told herself; do nothing rash; tell no one, certainly.

The father of her child-to-be looked very handsome, as he lounged on the after-deck of the yacht, the unlovely bulk of Block Island just back of him. The other guests were in the main salon, waiting for lunch to be announced. Although Caroline had been careful to avoid Jim, she had not been able to resist fresh air. She who had never in her life fainted now feared just that. The sensations inside her body were ominous, to say the least; and anything could happen.

“I probably shouldn’t have come.” Jim smiled. “But Blaise insisted, and I’m in his debt—for Mr. Hearst, or Mr. Brisbane, I suppose.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Caroline managed to animate her voice. “Of course,” she added.

“I’d no idea people really lived like this.”

“Does it tempt you?”

“No. What I do is more interesting. I’m never bored, while these folks …”

“Give dinner-parties for their dogs.”

“I just met Mr. Lehr.” Jim grimaced.

“I will not protect you …”

“That poor girl he’s married to …”

“You saw that?”

“We’re not all that simple back home.”

“I never thought you were.” Caroline was pleased that, thanks to the shock of her situation, she felt no desire at all for Jim. He, on the other hand, was radiating sexual energy like one of Henry Adams’s dynamos. She would have to discourage him, she decided, not quite certain what the etiquette of a pregnancy at this point required, or allowed. The doctor that she had visited, anonymously, in Baltimore, had been so interested in his fee for the planned abortion that she had not gone back to him. Instead, she had waited; she did not know for what.

“You’ll be going back to American City now …?”

Jim nodded. As the mouth still had its appeal for her, she gazed upon Block Island instead. “On Monday. Kitty’s pregnant.”

“Oh, no!” Caroline’s astonishment was so genuine that she feared that she had given herself away.

But Jim simply grinned. “Well, that’s what you get married for, you know.”

“I don’t—know.” Caroline saw a good deal of gallows humor in the situation. “I can imagine, naturally.” She was her usual self now. “Is she ill? I mean does she have—spells of sickness?”

Jim nodded, without much interest. “There’s always a bit of feeling bad, I guess.”

“When will it … the child, that is, be born?”

“October, the doctor thinks.”

The same month that Caroline’s would be due. He had gone from one bed to the other, perhaps even on the same day, like a rooster. For the first time, she realized just how dangerous the male was. The superior physical strength was bad enough, but the ability to start new life, with a single inadvertent thrust, was truly terrifying. Mlle. Souvestre had been right. Better the Sapphic life, the “white marriages” between ladies, than this sweaty black magic.

Blaise appeared in the doorway. “Lunch is ready.” For once, Caroline was grateful for his interruption.

“I have no appetite,” she said, accurately, and entered the ship’s salon just as a gong sounded from the dining room. Harry Lehr took her arm, as if for a cotillion.

“I had no idea our congressmen were so attractive.” For a guilty instant, Caroline wondered if Harry Lehr knew. But, of course, he could not know, and her heart beat less rapidly. She wondered if she was going to become entirely furtive in character, thus giving away her game to everyone.

“You mean Mr. Day?” Caroline smiled at Mamie Fish, who nodded in a queenly way. “He’s Blaise’s friend.”

“They’re an attractive couple, aren’t they?” Lehr laughed, musically. Caroline joined in; she had, suddenly, a plan.

A
T EXACTLY NOON
, Caroline entered the Waldorf-Astoria’s Peacock Alley, now largely deserted. Fashionable New York could not be found within a hundred miles of the city, while working New York was largely shut down. The emptiness and stillness of the great rooms was somewhat alarming. Paris must have been like this, she thought, when Bismarck was at the gates.

Beneath a potted palm sat John Apgar Sanford, somewhat balder, somewhat grayer than the year before when they had last met in Washington, and he had reported his usual failure to budge Mr.
Houghteling. Since she would inherit soon, no matter what, they had given up the case. “You didn’t say in your telegram what you wanted to see me about, but I assumed it would be the case, so I’ve brought the key documents.” He held up a leather case.

“That’s all right,” she said, and seated herself opposite him. “It’s not about the case, actually.” She had rehearsed a number of openings but none was right. She would, she had decided, depend on inspiration; but now that she was with him, there was none, only a mild panic.

John asked about various Washington Apgars. Caroline began with a wrong move. “One has even been elected to Congress. James Burden Day. I think his mother was an …”

“Grandmother, I believe,” John nodded, “was an Apgar. I’ve met her.”

“The wife is charming.” Then Caroline abandoned this most dangerous of subjects. “You must find …” She could not finish this sentence.

But John took in stride the sentiment. “Yes, it is quite lonely for me. In spite of a plentitude of Apgars, I have no family life now, none at all.”

“We Sanfords are also few.”

“Very few indeed. Blaise …” John did not finish.

Caroline did not begin. That subject was abandoned, stillborn. “I have been thinking,” she said at last, in lieu of inspiration, “about getting married.”

“I suppose that is natural, of course.” John seemed unsurprised; also, uninterested.

“Soon, there will be the inheritance.” She played her great card at once.

“Yes. You will be very well-off indeed. From what I gather, Blaise did not—do as we feared. There are still certain loans to Mr. Hearst outstanding, but Mr. Hearst is good for them. Otherwise, the inheritance is intact. I hope,” John smiled wanly, “you are not being married for your fortune …”

“Like one of Mr. James’s poor ladies? No, I don’t think that enters my … calculation, so far. Is patent law so difficult?”

John looked surprised. “It is not difficult, no. But it is not easy to make a living at it. I’ve changed firms, as you know. But my wife’s long illness …” The voice trailed into embarrassed silence.

“Things have not been easy for you, John. I know that. I’m sorry. Truly,” she added, pleased by her own display of warmth. She quite liked him; she also liked very much her liking him. “You once did me
the,” Caroline stared up at the palm tree, half expecting to see if not a monkey a coconut ready to fall, “honor of proposing to marry me.”

“Oh, I do apologize,” John stammered; turned pale. “It was after … after …”

“She had died. I wished that I had known her. She was a …”

“… a saint,” John filled in.

“Exactly the word that I was going to use. I have now thought over your proposal—somewhat slowly, I must admit. It’s been—what? Four years at least. And I accept.” It was done.

Caroline decided that John’s look of astonishment was not the greatest tribute ever paid her. Had she, somehow, imperceptibly, aged? Or was he otherwise engaged? Certainly, she knew nothing of his life. For all she knew, he might have a full-time and exigent mistress, perhaps a Negress, living in Flushing like Clarence King’s secret wife. “But … but, Caroline …”

“You cannot say that this is so sudden, John.” Caroline was beginning, almost, to enjoy herself.

“No. No. Only I never dreamed … I mean … why me?”

“Because you asked me. Remember?”

“But surely others have …”

“Only Del Hay, and he is dead. You and I, we are both—survivors.”

“I can’t think what to say.” John looked as if a coconut had indeed fallen from the trees, and struck him a sharp blow.

“You can say yes, dear John. Or you can say no. I can accept either. But I can’t accept indecision. You must not think it over in your deliberate legalistic way. I want the answer now, one way or the other.”

“Well, yes. Yes. Of course. But …”

“What is the but?”

“I have lost everything. We were—my family, that is—wiped out two years ago, when the Monongahela Combine failed, and then her illness …”

“I have,” said Caroline softly, “enough for two. Or I will have soon enough.”

“But it’s not right that the wife support the husband …”

“Of course it’s right. It is done all the time, even in Newport, Rhode Island,” she added for dramatic emphasis.

“I don’t know what to think.”

She was relieved that there was no sexual aura to John. He was more like a brother to her, a conventional
American
brother, she felt obliged to note in her deposition to the high tribunal of her conscience which
was now sitting in judgment on her. Blaise, though only half a brother, was possessed of the same sort of dynamo that she had responded to in Jim. But John Apgar Sanford was like Adelbert Hay; he was comfortably, undisturbingly present; and no more.

“I shall be able to help you financially,” she said, abandoning any attempt at coquetry, which even if it were her style was irrelevant to the current proceeding.

“That would be mortifying.” John was acutely uncomfortable.

“ ‘A fair exchange is no robbery,’ as the French say.” Caroline gazed at the palm fronds overhead. “So I shall explain exactly what is to be exchanged for what. I know that you are, of all the family here, the most worldly, the most experienced.” Caroline saw fit to lay it on rather heavily, as she was by no means certain what his response was going to be. “You handled Blaise superbly, and I am, of course, grateful.” The fact that John had done nothing at all for her was beside the point, as she methodically set him up for man-of-the-worlddom.

“I did what I could.… He’s difficult, yes.” John was at sea.

Caroline threw out her net. “In marrying me, you will not only get the support that you need in your … uh, endeavors but you will be able to provide me with a father for my child.” Caroline gazed at him, with what she hoped were luminous, madonna-like eyes.

John had gone pale. John had misunderstood. “Naturally, in marrying, the thought of a family is all-important to me, to carry on the name …”

“
Our
name,” Caroline murmured, wondering how to explain herself.

“Our name, yes. We are both Sanfords. So your monogram won’t change, will it?” He laughed without mirth. “I always regretted not having children with my wife, my first wife, but her illness …” The voice again trailed off.

“I think, John, I have not expressed myself with that clarity which you, as a lawyer, so rightly pride yourself in.” Caroline now felt rather like one of Henry James’s older European ladies, ready to launch some terrible bit of information at a dim-witted American ingenu. “I was not speaking of a future hypothetical fatherhood for you, but of an imminent motherhood for me … in October to be precise, which is why I am eager to be married this week, at City Hall, where I have already made inquiries.”

John gasped, but at least he had understood. “You …” But he exhausted all his breath in startled exhalation.

As John inhaled, Caroline said, “Yes, I am pregnant. I cannot tell you who the father is, as he is a married man. But I can tell you that he was my first—and only—lover. I feel like that chaste king of Spain who …” But caution stopped her from repeating Mlle. Souvestre’s favorite story about how the ascetic King Philip had finally gone to bed with a woman and promptly contracted syphilis. John might not be ready for this story.

“He—the father is in Spain?” John was doing his best to grasp the situation.

“No, he is in America. He is an American. He has visited Spain,” she improvised, hoping to erase King Philip from the court—courtship?—record.

“I see.” John stared at his shoes.

“I realize that I am asking for a very great deal, which is why I said at the very beginning that there would be an exchange between us, useful to each.” Caroline wondered what she would do in John’s place. She would, probably, have laughed, and said no. But she was not in John’s place, and she could not measure either his liking for her person or his need for her fortune. These two imponderables would determine the business.

“Will you continue to see him?” John came swiftly to the necessary, for him, point.

“No.” Caroline lied so seldom that she found it quite easy to do. Would she now become addicted to lying, and turn into another Mrs. Bingham?

“What will you do about the newspaper?”

“I shall go on with it. Unless
you
would like to be the publisher.” This was definitely Mrs. Binghamish: Caroline had no intention of ever losing control of the
Tribune
.

“No. No. I am a lawyer, after all, not a publisher. I must say, I have never come across a … a case like this.” He looked at her, worriedly; a lawyer mystified by a client.

“I thought that pregnant ladies were always getting married in the nick of time.”

“Yes. But to the man who … who …”

“Made them pregnant. Well, that is not possible for me.”

“You are in love with him.” John was bleak.

“Don’t worry, John. I shall be as good a wife as I can, given my disposition, which is not very wifely, in the American way, that is.”

“I suppose you will want to look at my books …”

“You are a collector?”

“My
financial
books …”

“I am not an auditor. You have debts. I’ll pay what I can now. When I inherit, I’ll pay the rest. I assume,” Caroline suddenly wondered if she ought not to bring in an auditor; she laughed uneasily, “I assume that your debts are not larger than my income.”