The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  Meanwhile, Bamie had to boss the servants around and scrutinize the butcher bills, after Brave Heart finally went to war—in his own fashion.

  Father became an Allotment Commissioner, you see. Sutlers had taken advantage of Union soldiers, getting them to buy whiskey at astronomical prices, so they didn’t have a penny in their pockets. The sutlers were an army unto themselves. Half of ’em wore the Union blue, borrowed from the War Department with extravagant bribes. The other half looked like undertakers, mean and malicious in their black frocks and cavalrymen’s boots, several with sabers at their side. After Father was appointed a commissioner by President Lincoln himself, he traveled from camp to camp in the dark of winter, chasing after the sutlers and convincing raw recruits to send money home to their families. The sutlers fought back, surrounding Father at one encampment, attacking him with their sabers, and he had to whack at them with a loose board from a picket fence until the sabers flew into the wind. He’d return home with frostbitten hands and feet, his collar clotted with blood; it was Bamie who nursed him, rubbing Father in hot cloths until all the numbness—and clots of blood—disappeared.

  But while he was away, Bamie watched over us. She’d inherited Father’s broad shoulders. The servants were terrified of her masculine air. The hump on her back couldn’t diminish her. She had a swarthy complexion, like an Arabian prince. I called her our own little Atlas, who carried the weight of the Roosevelt clan on her crooked back.

  “Teedie, you haven’t done your breathing exercises. Papa will be disappointed in both of us.”

  “But Papa let me smoke a cigar,” I muttered in my defense.

  “You’re seven years old. You can’t strut around like a Mississippi gambler.”

  She’d dress Corinne, comb Elliott’s hair, and attend to Mama, who was more and more of a recluse after Sherman’s men broke through Bulloch Hall on their march to the sea and robbed every pot and pan and picture from the walls. Bamie had to treat her like a delinquent child.

  “Mother, if you won’t eat, I’ll have to force food down your gullet like a stranded chick.”

  “I declare,” Mittie said, “you shouldn’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice. I’m far from stranded. I’m in mourning, child.”

  “Well, then mourn with a full mouth.”

  That’s how Bamie got her way. And when she caught one of our servants stealing gold coins from the family strongbox, Bamie fired him on the spot. He was an out-and-out rascal, this fellow, Mr. Hynes, whom Papa had hired during the war when it was hard to find first-class help. He’d arrived with a lukewarm recommendation from one of Father’s banker friends. Hynes was a dipsomaniac. He’d wander about, dancing with invisible creatures, crashing into tables, as he did his phantom waltz with a terrible lust in his eye. Seems he couldn’t live without the bottle. And he tried to bully my sister.

  “You don’t have the authority to fire me, girl. You’re ten years old.”

  “Eleven, Mr. Hynes. And I have all the authority in the world. Your employer, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Sr., has bonded me.”

  The dipsomaniac was worried now. He might have been a crack thief, but he didn’t have Bamie’s iron intellect.

  “What sort of bond?”

  She handed him a scroll. I’m not sure it made much sense, but it did have Papa’s signature. And this wayward butler was wary of written documents. Still, Hynes wouldn’t leave. He’d slobber one moment, repent the next. He even proposed marriage to my eleven-year-old sister. “I’ll cure that hump, Miz Bamie. I’ll kiss it to death.” Bamie had to fend him off with a fly swatter. Mama couldn’t stop him. Nobody could. And he continued to prey upon a household whose single monitor was a child who had to wear a harness.

  Bamie wrote to Papa, of course, though it was hard to track him down. He was often in the saddle ten hours a day. But Hynes ran out of luck while he lorded it over us. We could hear Father’s key turn in the latch. He’d come home without warning. He remembered the last time Bamie and I had stood at the front door, waving to him, and he couldn’t get that image out of his mind. I’m not sure what he felt about Mama and her devotion to the South, when he himself was an Allotment Commissioner, saving Union boys from the sutlers’ avariciousness.

  Still, he could read the current situation in Bamie’s eyes. And Papa caught the butler wearing his boots.

  Hynes whipped his head back and forth and hopped out of Papa’s boots. I could see that Papa wanted to slap Hynes into hell. But he muffled his rage somehow. The Roosevelts did not strike their servants—it was considered vile.

  “Mr. Hynes, you will return the money you stole. You will apologize to my daughter, and then you will disappear from Manhattan. Should I ever find you in someone else’s employ, I will not show you the least bit of mercy.”

  Hynes was no better than the sutlers, taking advantage of us like that, proposing marriage to an eleven-year-old girl. Father was a pinch away from throttling him. So Hynes repaid every last dollar, and had to leave without a red cent. He bowed, called me and Ellie the little masters, slobbered over my sister’s hand, kissing it again and again, and vanished into the fog, one more forgotten soul.

  I WOULD WANDER ON my own while Father was away. I passed a market at Union Square, with its endless caravan of open-air stalls, and discovered a dead seal laid out on its own coffin of wood. Its whiskers were still wet. It looked like a black torpedo with flippers and webbed toes. Its belly was as pink as congealed blood. The seal had been killed in the harbor, according to the fishmongers. I wasn’t quite sure if the seal’s meat was ever sold. But its carcass resided there on a board day after day. The fishmongers soon became my friends. They said that the seal had been put there as a kind of circus attraction, to draw customers into the market. They could tell how devoted I was to that dead seal and they didn’t discourage my visits. I measured its length and girth with a folding pocket foot rule. I drew pictures of my first specimen.

  One day the seal was gone. And that vanished carcass grabbed at my heart and gave me palpitations. It was curious how much dearer it was to me dead than alive. I might not have been attracted to the same seal swimming in the harbor like a primordial creature. My poor seal had begun to putrefy, the fishmongers said, and it was pulling customers away from the market. But they had a gift for me—the seal’s skull. I was startled by how tiny and delicate it was. The fishmongers had shaved off the flesh and boiled the seal’s head in a pot. I could cradle the skull in my hands. I marveled at its mandible, at its jagged rows of teeth, how yellow the bones were. I put the skull in a shoe box under my bed.

  I’d become a zoölogist before I was seven. I started the “Teedie Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in my room, collecting whatever specimens I could—snails and birds and the carcasses of chipmunks. My museum stank up the house, our chambermaid said—and after she refused to clean my quarters, the entire collection was relocated to a storage bin in the back hall. Bamie was rather neutral about my endeavors, though she never discouraged me. She was much too busy hiding Mother’s near-criminal devotion to Jeff Davis and the Stars and Bars and having to deal with the household budget. She barely had a minute to herself.

  Given her bewilderment over Mother’s peccadilloes, large and little, it was Father who took delight in my studies. He’d return from a visit to the camps with his frozen feet and watch me stooped over the seal’s skull, squirrel bones, and other little treasures in the back hall. I’d outgrown that original storage bin, and Brave Heart bequeathed me another. He scrutinized all the notes I had kept and stared into my eyes.

  “Teedie, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A scientist,” I said without a lick of hesitation.

  “You’ll be poor as a church mouse,” he said. “And you’ll have to economize—Bamie will watch over all your bills. But I’ve made enough, son, to keep you afloat. If you’re a scientist, a real scientist, you can’t turn into a dilettante. I won’t allow that.”

  “Father, I’ll be as s
erious as serious can be—I’m seven years old.”

  Brave Heart smiled behind the little strands of gray in his beard. “Ah, I nearly forgot.”

  In the spring we went out into the wild garden in our back yard, with its lone cow and family of peacocks with clipped feathers, and we listened to birdcalls. I could warble the different tunes and mating calls. I’d become a master of birdsong. Sound was everything to me. I could shut my eyes and gather myself into a competing symphony of songs.

  “Papa, that’s our blue jay.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Two long notes and one short trill. That’s our blue jay showing off.”

  I also kept track of the plumage. I drew the anatomies of bird after bird. Father found me a box of pastels with every color in creation—pastels that had come from an ornithologist’s private studio, and even those colors weren’t enough. Nature was far more various than human desire and human will.

  We went into the woods on Long Island a few summers after the war. I mimicked every birdcall.

  “Teedie, you’re a darn magician.”

  “No, Papa, I’m a scientist. I trained my ear.”

  Later Father would let me study with a taxidermist, and I went everywhere with a supply of arsenical soap to preserve the skin of whatever creature I mounted. I had a special toothbrush that I kept in my kit. But the maid was careless, and she mixed up all my toothbrushes; so, like a country doctor, I had to keep my own taxidermist’s bag. But no matter how successful I was with my mounts, I couldn’t control the marks of woe on my father’s face.

  “Son, you’ll have to make your body just like you’ve been making your mind,” he said, looking at my pitiful arms and legs. It was Bamie who had to fight off the hooligans in our back yard. A bloody nose was bad enough, but I didn’t want to lose the sketches in my notebooks to some young highwayman on the prowl.

  So Father installed a gymnasium in our mezzanine. I exercised with Elliott sometimes, and sometimes alone. Ellie was taller and had much more of a natural build, but I had to labor over every little band of muscle. I had my first shotgun when I was thirteen—a silver-plated piece of French design. Ellie was a much better shot, while I had to squint at every target. That’s when I realized how nearsighted I was.

  Papa furnished me with a pair of spectacles that were like metallic peepers; a new landscape unfolded like a miraculous fan. For the first time, the very first, I could peer through a blurry void and distinguish light and line. I could do all my anatomical drawings inside my head, and I discovered even more colors—it was like staring at the splendor of a peacock’s tail and picking at an array of feathers—real feathers, not imagined ones.

  Father wouldn’t allow me to fall into a taxidermist’s funk, where all I could think about were my specimens and Zeus, my pet garter snake. I had to accompany him to the Newsboys’ Lodging-House, a sandstone castle on West Eighteenth Street; he’d built this lodging-house with his own hands, had worked with the stonemasons, had supplied the glass. He’d sup with these boys in his silk cravat and tails, and I supped with them, too, with my pet snake in my pocket. I witnessed every spoonful, while I had a trace of arsenic on my sleeves from my little taxidermy shop at home.

  The lodging-house had its own night watchman, who was also caretaker, banker, and part-time cook. His name was Quentin Moss. Papa had hired Quent and vouched for him. Quent might have been an ex-prizefighter or a jailbird, but he’d come fully bonded by my father, and nothing else mattered. He kept the newsboys’ receipts, doled out petty cash, filled their bellies, and attended to their wounds—they were often pounced upon by street gangs, with the encouragement of the police.

  Newsies kept arriving out of the lampless night. They were a pitiful lot, their pockets weighted down or ripped from their pants, their shoes in a shamble, their faces bloodied from some recent attack; Father had noticed that dilemma before I was ever born. He knew no legislation in the world could help these boys, not the commissioners and the judges who belonged to some political boss or corrupt administration. These were orphans and runaways who couldn’t be schooled, who would have ended up in an asylum until they were vacant, soulless vessels, and so Father kept his foundlings in this sandstone castle, where they could be sheltered and fed, and have their own primitive bank accounts.

  Father had six generations of Roosevelts at his rear, bankers and traders in glass, and he took nothing for granted. The Roosevelts had arrived in Manhattan as pig farmers, and Father never forgot the smell of manure that clung to the family name. He was a burly man who had helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History with that financial pirate, Mr. Pierpont Morgan. But his charities, it seemed to me, captured more of him than the culture of Manhattan ever could. That’s why he was here at this lodging-house.

  I must have been fifteen at the time, struggling with my tutor to learn Greek, desperate to read Philoctetes, about a hunter with a festering foot—somehow, that hunter on his uninhabited island, abandoned by his fellow warriors, appealed to me. No man lives here—I am but a skein of smoke. And after a severe attack of asthma, when I must have moaned like Philoctetes, I said to Papa with all the severity of a fifteen-year-old snob, “Father, not one of these boys will ever sit for Harvard’s entrance exams.”

  A rage built up in Brave Heart—he turned root-red, and for a moment I feared he would strike me. But he calmed himself and caressed my ear.

  “They are better hunters than you are. They’ve been hunting all their lives. And perhaps the industrious ones, the clever ones, will own a newsstand. I’ve financed as many boys as I can. And others will pick up grammar and become reporters, or runners at police court. But you mustn’t flaunt your privilege, Teedie.”

  I’ve been plagued by his words ever since. And perhaps that’s why I have striven so much, even if I often wasn’t aware of what I was striving for. We moved into a mansion on West Fifty-seventh Street, with a half mile of mullioned windows, right at the border of the Badlands. And Father rented a summerhouse in Oyster Bay, on Long Island’s North Shore. He called it Tranquillity. It had white columns and a verandah that must have reminded Mittie of Bulloch Hall. Brave Heart wanted to soothe my mother, but she was beyond soothing. She’d withdrawn into her own antebellum world.

  I prepared for Harvard on that wide porch, with my main tutor, Arthur Hamilton Cutler, a recent graduate who already had a mythical reputation as a molder of young men; none of the lads he tutored had ever failed Harvard’s entrance exams. He was still in his twenties, an ambitious fellow with bulging eyes. He had a curled mustache, and he blinked a lot, out of excitement, I’d bet. Perhaps he only felt comfortable in the presence of tycoons and philanthropists like my father. He must have thought of me as a future benefactor. Cutler liked to hunt and fish. After our studies, we would often whistle birdcalls together. We shot quail in the woodland behind Tranquillity. My tutor was always welcome at our table. I think Bamie took a fancy to him. She fed him Brussels sprouts roasted in the finest oil. But Mr. Cutler was much more interested in Brave Heart. He talked of holding special classes at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House.

  “Cutler, you’d have to start from scratch.”

  “I might find a way, sir.”

  Mr. Cutler could see how unsettled Papa was. His newsboys couldn’t find much purchase in Philoctetes and all the other classics. They had to be schooled in the wild, and Father was aware of that. He had some of their wildness. He’d never been near Harvard Yard. He’d served his apprenticeship with his own father at 94 Maiden Lane, headquarters of the family “store,” Roosevelt & Son. “Plate Glass & Looking Glass Plates” was written right on the front of that nondescript building.

  Father found more pleasure in his newsboys than in the family business. Plate glass wasn’t much on his mind, I suppose. One night he drew me out of my little taxidermy shop and dragged me to the lodging-house. “Did you bring Zeus?”

  “Of course, Papa. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him. W
hy?”

  He paused for a moment, as if he were contemplating a business deal at Roosevelt & Son. “I told the boys that you were a keeper of snakes. They’d like to meet Zeus.”

  “Papa,” I said, “I’m a taxidermist, not an animal trainer.”

  “Well,” he said with a shrug, “you’ll have to lie.”

  And lie I did. I had Zeus slither into a boy’s ragged trousers, then resurface near his neck, and wrap himself around another boy’s arm, like a living bandage. The newsies were dee-lighted. And Papa was as full of mischief as the boys themselves. “More tricks,” he said. “More tricks.”

  I HAD TO SUFFER through the worst case of the Roosevelt colic in creation—I lived and slept on the pot. Cutler had prepared me for Harvard as best he could. Oh, I could sing my Sophocles, how the Greeks had to swipe Philoctetes’ magic bow if they wanted to take Troy. But I’d never dealt with other scholars in a classroom. I was afraid, mightily afraid, that I’d shit my pants in the middle of Harvard Yard.

  It was Bamie who took the night boat up to Boston that summer; Bamie, the clever one, with a drummer’s eye for detail. She hiked across Cambridge in her skirts, appealing to passersby, and picked a boardinghouse on Winthrop Street, where I would live during the next four years. She bartered with the landlady, Mrs. Richardson, and shaved down the price a notch or two. She had my rooms painted and furnished, and fitted up with coal for the winter. She was, with her deeply set dark blue eyes and sad face, our “Fearless General,” as my little brother had dubbed her. Bamie was indispensable.