Empire by Gore Vidal Page A

had stopped during the summer. “It might not be before the first of the year.”
    “Houghteling says next week.” The Chief’s voice was flat. “There’s a lot of money there.”
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Blaise was beginning to feel clammy. “Anyway there are two of us, my sister—half-sister—and me.”
    “Now is the time to get in on the ground floor,” said Hearst. “Now’s your chance. I’ve got my eye on Chicago, Washington, Boston. I want a paper in every big city. You …” The voice trailed off.
    “Aren’t I sort of young to be … a partner?” Blaise suddenly went on the offensive. Why, after all, should he be nervous with Hearst when he had—or would soon have—the money that Hearst needed?
    “Well, no one said anything about you being a partner.” Hearstmight have laughed if he had thought of it. But he did not; he continued to frown. “I guess you could certainly buy an interest.”
    “Well, yes. I guess I could.” But Blaise had spent enough time with the
Journal’s
dispensers of red ink to know that everything belonged to Hearst, personally; and there was, thus far, no sort of “interest” that could be sold. Blaise chose not to press the matter. He had his own plan, which might, or might not, include the Chief. More to the point, “I really don’t know how much I’m going to end up with, or for how long,” he added cryptically.
    “Well, that’s your affair.”
    George was at the door. “Miss Anita Willson and Miss Millicent Willson to see you, sir.” George kept the straightest of faces.
    “Tell them to wait in the parlor.” Hearst rose.
    “Get on to Decker.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    As Blaise walked down the hall, he saw the Willson sisters, staring at themselves in a mirrored screen in the parlor. They were plump, pretty, blond. At the paper there were those who thought that the Chief favored Millicent, who was only sixteen; others thought that he preferred the older Anita; a few thought that he enjoyed each of them, either separately or together, according to what degree the imagination of the speculating journalist had been depraved. All agreed that the two girls were very effective as part of a dancing group called the Merry Maidens, currently appearing at the Herald Square Theater in
The Girl from Paris
. As George opened the front door for Blaise, the Chief must have entered the parlor, because there were delighted cries. “Oh, Mr. Hearst! Mr. Hearst! We never dreamed there was that much chocolate in the world!” The voices were tough Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Hearst’s response was not audible. George’s eyes became slightly more round. Blaise stepped into the elevator.
    Park Row was crowded with end-of-day traffic. Streetcars rattled down the center of the street while smart and less smart carriages stopped at City Hall. Blaise made his way, tentatively, from street corner to curb, careful to avoid as best he could the mounds of horse manure that the Mayor had promised would be removed at least twice a day. Blaise tried to envisage a city without horses; in fact, he had already tried his hand at fantasy. In the
Sunday Journal
, he had described a future world of horseless carriages. As it was, the Chief himself drove a flashy French automobile, fuelled by gasoline. Unfortunately, the only vivid difference between a horseless future and thepresent would be the necessary and unmourned absence of something that Blaise and the Sunday editor, the young indecorous Merrill Goddard, spent a whole morning trying to find euphemisms for. At the end, Goddard had shrieked, “Sanford, call it shit!”
    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