The Fifth Heart (42 page)

The six men took turns riding the lift down in pairs. Holmes rode down with the vice-president. At the bottom, the two men had to take care in stepping up the seven inches the heavy elevator had sunk below the level of the first floor.

The Supervising Inspector General of Steamboat Inspection and his secretary were standing in the lobby, their faces red with indignation.

“Thank you, Mr. Dismont,” said the vice-president to the flustered Steamboat Inspector General. “I will be in touch regarding any future weekend needs for your office.”

“This is ridiculous,” muttered Dismont as he and his secretary jumped the seven inches down into the elevator to ride back up to their offices and while Holmes held the front door for the vice-president.

Outside on the sidewalk, Stevenson turned to the detective. “Is it, Mr. Holmes?”

“Is what, sir?”

“Is our whole effort . . . no, is this entire talk of attempted assassination by anarchists . . . ridiculous? Are we all
being
ridiculous?”

“We’ll know soon enough, Mr. Vice-President.” Holmes touched the handle of his walking stick to the brim of his top hat and turned away up Constitution Avenue.

O
n Saturday morning, Henry James received a hand-delivered message from John Hay asking if James could drop by that afternoon—anytime that afternoon—for a talk that would take no more than a few minutes.

James did stop by the mansion commanding the corner of H and 16th Streets, taking care to time his stop late enough after lunch and early enough before tea time so as not to put Hay to any obligation.

James had barely given his hat and coat and cane to Benson when Hay hurried from his study to shake James’s hand, thank him for coming, and lead him into the parlor.

“I’ve always admired the two kinds of stone you and Clara chose for this room,” said James, settling into the deep leather chair to which Hay had gestured.

“Do you?” asked Hay, looking around idly as if he’d not looked at the stone—or the parlor—for some time. “The African marble is called Aurora Pompadour, I seem to recall, and the rest is Mexican onyx.”

“My favorite combination of stone in your lovely home may be the yellow fireplace in the library with its reddish or pink hearth,” said James.

“Oh, yes . . . that hearthstone was damnable hard to find. Everything was either too red or too pink or too . . . something. As it was, we decided on that very subdued reddish porphyry . . . ‘Boisé d’Orient’ I think they called it. Would you care for something to drink, Harry?”

“No . . . thank you. This is a restful pause in the middle of my constitutional. Walking allows my mind to wander back to work. I’ve been pondering a new play, but nothing clear enough to talk about yet.” James had hurried that last phrase in, to make sure they would not be discussing his work.

“Then I’m doubly sorry for intruding on your Saturday afternoon,” said Hay. “But I thought a fair warning was due to you.”

“Warning?”

“And an apology,” said Hay. “You and Mr. Holmes should be receiving an invitation to a tiny dinner party for tomorrow evening, nothing elaborate, just Adams and a few friends here at the old fort. Half the sincere apology is for such short notice.”

“And the second half?” murmured James.

“You asked for discretion when you arrived—your presence not to be advertised, that is—but that was almost two weeks ago, Harry. You know how word gets around in this small town in spite of all our efforts.”

“Of course,” said James. “And I am delighted to hear that Adams is back and I look forward to seeing him.”

“He says that he never dines out,” Hay said, still seeming somewhat distracted. “But you know as well as I that that’s all hogwash. Henry has fewer full-fledged dinner parties next door, but he’s as social as ever. He simply wants to
appear
the recluse.”

“I possess some kindred feeling there,” said James. “May I ask who else will be attending besides Adams? King’s not back in town, is he?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Hay. “I sent a cable to his Union Club in New York but haven’t received a reply. He’s probably a mile underground in Mexico by now, up to his earlobes in gold nuggets or diamonds.”

James waited.

“The rest of the party will be made up of the usual suspects,” continued Hay. James remembered all too well going to a mediocre play—little more than a comic-romance melodrama, really—in London with the Hays and how for days afterward John had kept repeating that (to James) eminently forgettable line—“The party will be made up of all the usual suspects.” Knowing the rather tight Washington social circles the Adamses, Hays, et al. had always moved within, James caught at least a glimmer of the humor Hays found in “all the usual suspects”.

“Don and Lizzie are coming,” said Hay. “And Lodge and Nannie, of course. And Adams . . . the whole thing is a sort of welcome-home thing for Adams. And . . . oh, yes . . . when you inquired about the children last week, I told you that Alice, Helen, Clarence, and Del were all away at school, but Del has the weekend off from St. Paul’s Academy and Helen will also be joining us.”

“Wonderful,” said James, who loathed having children—even nearly grown children—at a dinner party. “It’s been far too long since I’ve seen them. You said in a recent letter that Del has had quite the growth spurt?”

Seventeen-year-old Adelbert—“Del”—Hay had always struck Henry James (and probably his father John Hay, as well) as a rather slow, dull, uninteresting boy. But James hadn’t seen any of the four children since the Hay family’s last
en masse
descent upon London at least five years ago.

“Amazing growth spurt,” laughed Hay. “Del’s over six feet tall now and weighs more than two hundred pounds. And he’s become quite the athlete at St. Paul’s. He’s going to Yale in the autumn and plans to go out for football.
Football
, Harry. American football, where one rarely uses one’s feet.”

“Football?” James said blankly. The name, in an American context, rang only the faintest of bells. “But not what we call soccer?”

“No, an entirely new game,” said Hay. “Evidently it was invented—or, rather, adapted from European football and rugby, mostly rugby, I think, and its rules laid down—a dozen or so years ago by a Yale undergraduate at the time, a certain Walter Camp, who became general athletic director and . . . head football coach . . . whatever that means. Football is all the rage at Ivy League colleges now, Harry. It seems that Harvard and Yale have been in a deadly annual football competition for some years. Last year, a Harvard chess master named Lorin Deland introduced a devastating new play or maneuver or move or . . . something . . . called ‘the Flying Wedge’—no clue as to what that means—but Yale still managed to win, six to zero. Del can’t wait to play under Walter Camp’s tutelage.”

“And Helen will also be here tomorrow night?” said James. He would have stabbed himself in both eyes with a dull knife if that is what it would have taken to get off the subject of sports. “She must be . . . eighteen?”

“Yes,” said Hay. “And she’s very dedicated these days to writing poetry and even some short fiction. Don’t let her corner you, Harry.”

“In London last, she was a lovely and invigorating interlocutor at age thirteen,” said James. “I can only imagine how pleasant it would be now to be ‘cornered’ by her to pursue the discussion of all things literary.”

“Adams needs to meet Sherlock Holmes,” said Hay, his voice suddenly serious. “That’s the primary reason for this gathering . . . not that Adams wouldn’t have arranged to see
you
at the earliest possible opportunity, Harry. He was distraught at having missed your first week here. But I wasn’t sure what to tell him about . . . the whole Holmes thing. Do you think it will be Sherlock Holmes or Jan Sigerson who will appear tomorrow night?”

“To whom did you address the invitation?” asked James.

“To Mr. Holmes.”

“Then I wager that it will be Mr. Holmes who appears.”

“Oh . . . I almost forgot,” said Hay as he walked James through the foyer to the door. “We’ve also invited . . . as Adams and Wendell always call him . . . the Boy.”

“The Boy,” mused James. “Oh, you mean . . . oh! Oh, my. Oh, dear. I keep forgetting that he’s in Washington these days.”

“I made him promise to be on his best behavior,” said Hay.

James’s smile was three parts irony to two parts anticipation. “We shall see. We shall see.”

* * *

Sherlock Holmes had been invited as “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” to the 8 p.m. Hays’ Sunday dinner gathering so he arrived as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. His second and third steamer trunks had caught up to him via the British Embassy in Washington, so he wore the latest London fashion in white tie and black tails, soft pumps so highly polished that they could be used as a signaling mirror in an emergency (but not the overly flexible Capezio black jazz oxfords so popular with the younger set for a long night of dancing), a crimson-lined black cape, the silkiest of silk, six-and-a-half-inch-tall top hat, a formal vest with lapels and scooped front, a brilliantly white formal shirt with a stand-up rather than wing collar, and—since it was a dinner, not a ball—no white gloves.

The other men were dressed similarly—no sign of the less formal (and, to Holmes, definitely déclassé) new “tuxedo jacket”—and, upon their introduction by Hay, Holmes had to award Henry Adams the laurels for oldest, most worn, and by far most beautiful jacket of the evening, although Henry Cabot Lodge’s shining new threads must have cost five times the price of Adams’s time-worn perfection. The only man there that night who did not look to have been born into his clothes was Hay’s heavily muscled and bull-necked teenaged son, Del, who seemed to be bursting out of his formalwear even as they all watched.

The ladies, with only a few missed cues, were also upholding the highest standards of modern French-American design.

The group had only a few minutes for introductions and polite conversation before they were called into the dining room.

Holmes had to admit to a feeling of admiration. He’d dined with the Prince of Wales, the King of Scandinavia, and more elite and sophisticated hosts in England, France, and around the world, but he couldn’t remember a more beautiful room, chandelier, or table. Realizing that this dining room might comfortably seat fifty at a State Department banquet, Holmes marveled at how Clara Hay had arranged it to perfection for the twelve of them—four women and eight men.

The dinner was lopsided in terms of gender, but Clara and John Hay had made up for that in careful placement of their guests and beautiful but low centerpieces that hid no one’s face from anyone else. After they found their seats—there seemed to be a white-tie-and-tails servant behind every chair to help them with the extreme effort of scooting in or scooting out—Holmes took a minute to appreciate the seating arrangements.

At the head of the table was not John Hay, as one would expect in the man’s own home, but Henry Adams. The placement emphasized the “Welcome home, Henry” aspect of the dinner, but Holmes also suspected that the chair provided to Adams had a little higher seat, a little extra cushion, and thus put the short, bald man at eye height with everyone else.

Down the right side of the table—Holmes’s side—was first the newly sworn-in Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (perfectly groomed down to his perfectly cropped beard and mustache, but cold of eye—
very
cold of eye), then the stolid but animated Clara Hay (whose gown of royal-blue silk blended with satin and a design of garnet-colored peacock feathers with sleeves and trim of garnet-colored silk-satin and velvet would have been absolutely breathtakingly original if it hadn’t been featured in that March’s issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
), and then Pennsylvania Senator James Donald Cameron (whose dark eyes seemed as sadly drooping as his thick mustache), then Sherlock—who found himself sitting directly across the table from Henry James and who knew at once that this was no accident, since at mid-table both of them could then field questions from both ends of the table—and to Sherlock’s left, young “Del” Hay smiling and ham-fisted but obviously comfortable with formal dining in such elite company as Henry Adams, Senator J. Donald Cameron, author Henry James, and the ice-eyed congressman-billionaire only this month turned U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

At the end of the table to Holmes’s left was seated the other “special guest” of the evening, Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Other than hearing from Henry James that Adams and Hay and Clarence King and the late Clover Adams had sometimes referred to young Roosevelt whom they’d known for many years as “the Boy”, Holmes knew little about the man.

But Holmes was interested in what he saw. Merely in the act of helping young Helen Julia Hay, to his left, into her seat and then taking his own chair and beaming down both sides of the table, Theodore Roosevelt radiated aggression. With small eyes squinting out from behind pince-nez, a military-trimmed mustache, and rows of teeth that seemed strangely aligned top and bottom, a horse’s teeth, a fierce stallion’s pre-breeding grimace, and a powerful, coiled, compact body that made athlete Del Hay’s tall form seem to shrink by comparison, the grinning Theodore Roosevelt seemed prepared to attack everyone at the table.

Or eat them whole
, thought Holmes.

John Hay’s 18-year-old daughter Helen Julia sitting to the Rooseveltcreature’s left was, to Holmes’s always objective eye for such things, one of those rare beautiful female creatures who actually lived up to the image of the new “Gibson Girl”—long, white neck, her hair swept back close to that perfect head until it rolled most naturally into a gay Gibson Girl puff, her soft chiffon dress emphasizing the modern ideal of a woman as tall and slender yet with ample bosom and hips, all while giving off a sense of high intelligence mixed with an athlete’s glow.

Then across the table from Holmes was Henry James, his balding dome seeming to give off an extra beneficial glow in the candlelight. Holmes could see in an instant that James was in his native element, even at an extraordinary table such as this at which sat two senators, a man who was a grandson and great-grandson of Presidents of the United States, several of the wealthiest men in America, no fewer than four famous historians, three of the most beautiful women Holmes had seen in years, and an energetic young cannibal flashing his tombstone-sized teeth.