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wore a pointed beard, like all the others; his full head of hair was parted in the middle and dyed the same dull chestnut color as the hair of his tall, fleshy, large-faced wife, who looked even larger and more formidable than she was when standing beside her husband. Caroline could see Del’s face peering out of Clara’s; but except for the turned-up nose, saw no resemblance to Del at all in Hay, who came toward them, hand outstretched to greet Henry James. They were old friends.
    “In fact,” said James, more to Caroline than to anyone, “when I needed employment on this side of the water, Mr. Hay—this was a quarter-century ago, and the world was younger, as were we, to strike the Dickensian note of spacious redundancy—Mr. Hay, as an editor of the
New York Tribune
, persuaded, with who knows what wiles, that worthy paper to take me on as its inadequate Paris correspondent.”
    “Easily the wisest thing I ever did.” Hay’s voice was low and precise and, that rare thing to Caroline’s critical ear, agreeably American. “Now you are become so great that I have your bust in my library, along with Cicero’s. Adams often compares the two of you—the originals, that is, not the busts. Every day he thinks up something new to say, when he pays me a call.” Del had told Caroline a good deal about the curious Hay-Adams living arrangements at Washington.
    Ever since the Civil War, Hay and Adams had been friends; the wives, too, had liked each other, a source of amazement to Caroline, who said as much, amazing Del, who was innocent. When the Hays at last abandoned Cleveland, Ohio, where Hay had first worked for—and then with—Mrs. Hay’s father, they had come to Washington to live, largely because Henry Adams lived there; and
he
lived there because, as he had told Caroline, it is a law of nature that Adamses gravitate to capitals. Since he would never be president like his two ancestors, he could at least live opposite the White House, where each Adams had, so disastrously, presided; and thus, close to “home,” he could write, think, and even make—through backstage maneuvering—history.
    In due course, Hay and Adams had built a double house in Lafayette Square, a red brick Romanesque affair, whose outside Caroline alreadyknew from photographs and whose inside Del intended for her to get to know. But though the two houses were physically joined, there was no connecting inner door. In this joint house, Hay had finished his interminable life of Lincoln while Adams had written much of his long account of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, demonstrating, as Del had observed, how the Adamses, though seldom mentioned in the text, had almost never been wrong—unlike their opponents, Jefferson and Madison and the terrible Andrew Jackson, whose statue at the center of Lafayette Park was daily visible to Henry Adams, who, daily, chose not to look at this ungainly reminder of his grandfather’s political ruin, not to mention that of the republic. For was it not with Jackson that the age of political corruption which now flourished began? But despite the city’s ever-present mephitic corruption, the two wealthy historians lived contentedly side by side, influencing events through various chosen instruments, among them Senator Don Cameron, hereditary czar of Pennsylvania. When Lincoln wondered if Don’s father, Simon Cameron, would steal once he was secretary of war, a Pennsylvania colleague observed that, well, he would probably
not
steal a red-hot stove. When Simon had heard this, he demanded an apology. The congressman complied, with the words “Believe me, I did
not
say that you would not steal a red-hot stove.”
    Hay’s career had seemed at an end when he moved into the Romanesque fortress opposite the White House. But then, as the political dice were again cast and Ohio, yet again, was about to produce a president, the obvious candidate was the state’s governor, one William McKinley, known as the