The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

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

  I sported a pair of side-whiskers to mask my trepidation. I was seventeen, and had my own scout. I wasn’t sure how a member of the elite was supposed to behave with his scout. It was Bamie who had hired him. He was a local lad, utterly untutored, with a set of false teeth. His name was Patrick. He blacked my boots and served me coffee on a tray. A multitude of freshmen before me had abused him. He still wore their scars. He ducked every time I grabbed a book.

  “I won’t hurt you, Patrick,” I said, as kindly as I could. “What have lads from earlier classes called you?”

  “Dunderhead, kind sir.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.”

  “Oh, it’s customary,” he insisted, like a logician.

  “Then we’ll break that custom.”

  He was quite alarmed. “But it ain’t proper to call me by my Christian name. What will the other lodgers think?”

  I had to deal with this, my first dilemma on Winthrop Street.

  “I’ll call you Scout, since you are my scout, and you may call me Roosevelt, or Mr. Ted.”

  He chuckled to himself. He must have thought that I was untutored.

  I’d never been near a school, you see. I was considered too frail. So Harvard was my kindergarten. But my taxidermist’s shop and my study of birdcalls and flight patterns had made a scholar of me, and I didn’t need any Harvard zoölogist to tell Teddy Roosevelt about the nature of things. I studied on my own, away from the lab. But everything was interrupted in my sophomore year, after Papa was appointed Collector of Customs for the Port of New York by President Rutherford B. Hayes.

  It was Father’s moment of glory, his maiden voyage into the political swim. I could imagine our whole tribe sitting with Papa someday in the Governor’s mansion. My classmates all congratulated me. “Roosevelt, isn’t that bully for your Old Man,” they said. I was invited to speak at half a dozen clubs. I was glad that Papa wouldn’t have to bury himself in finance at the family “store.”

  The United States Custom House was a gigantic political plum. Situated on Wall Street, it had over a thousand collectors and clerks who benefited from all the booty that washed into the Port of New York. Papa assumed that Hayes had appointed him as a reward for his many years of service to New York. He hadn’t realized that the President was battling with Senator Roscoe Conkling, New York’s Republican boss, for control of the Party.

  Conkling was a handsome giant of a man, irresistible to the ladies. He loved to box, and wasn’t beneath threatening an opponent on the Senate floor. He had a pointed beard and dark red hair. He could not tolerate to be touched. He favored fawn-colored vests and gloves. And Boss Roscoe ruled his faction of the Republican Party with a simple wave of his glove. He didn’t block Father’s appointment at the Senate hearings. He stalled the appointment instead.

  Brave Heart couldn’t deal with such a devious, backhanded maneuver. He came down with stomach cramps, wailed into the night like Philoctetes. I am but a skein of smoke. But Papa did not have Philoctetes’ magic bow to relieve his pain and let arrows fly at that devil with the pointy beard. He took to bed. I visited him that Christmas, when the cramps seemed to subside. He was ghastly pale in his silk robe. I could not recognize the man who had once knocked about river rats with his fists in the wastelands of the West Side.

  “Father, I won’t return to Harvard. I’ll stay here and comfort you.”

  There wasn’t the least bit of luster in his china-blue eyes.

  “You’ll comfort me much more if you continue with your studies.”

  He told me how dear I was to him, how valuable, how I had never given him a moment of pain or displeasure. I was his Teedie, he said, and he feared for my future. “We cannot have so much corruption for such a long time and still survive.”

  He wasn’t only talking about the Collectorship that had failed to materialize. Papa could live with that. It was corruption at every level of the government. He’d gone out to Blackwell’s Island to see the insane, and what he saw were sleepwalkers in filthy shrouds. They wandered about like lost billy goats. Every last one of them had gone wild, their faces and fingers covered in grime—yet how timid they were to Papa’s touch. They whimpered at the least caress. Papa had to retrieve them from the island’s rocks, one by one, and return them to their keepers.

  “Teedie, these poor souls didn’t have a single champion. The guardians they had took food from their mouths. They were wards of a city that had abandoned them. They’re numbers, Teedie, in some forgotten book.”

  “You’ll fight for them, Father, when you’re feeling better.”

  He shut his eyes. “Whistle to me, son. I want to hear the birdcalls.”

  I sang the mating song of the male robin, that wavering warble that Papa loved, and the dry chip-chip-chip of the hairbird. His eyes fluttered and he fell asleep, his hand clutching mine. He suffered from peritonitis, a fatal inflammation of the intestinal wall, but the doctors hadn’t doomed him yet. And Brave Heart rallied next day. He was up and about. Papa dressed before I did. He was wearing his great scarf, his beaver hat, and winter boots. His face was waxen. The snow had been falling for a week and covered all the windowsills. Papa was in the mood for a sleigh ride, he muttered. He wouldn’t have the family coachman drive him around like an invalid. “I’m not dead, Mortimer. I can be my own whip.”

  I had to bundle up, with earmuffs and all. The sleigh was parked outside our door, not far from Little Dakota. We sat in the Roosevelt rocking carriage, with Papa at the reins, and went into the park.

  Papa wouldn’t sit still. He rose up and down in that rocking car and insisted upon his right-of-way. We could hear our runners eat into the ice with a gnawing sound. There were no birdsongs. Branches snapped in the wind, as we passed several other cars in our relentless whirl. A few members of the upper crust had come for a morning drive. Papa must have frightened them with his reckless abandon of the reins. He wasn’t pale in that blinding light off the snow.

  “Teedie, you can go back to Harvard now.”

  I WAS AS ROTTEN as my predecessors, alas. In my frustration and despair, I hurled books at the lonely boy I had inherited. That’s how hungry I was for news from West Fifty-seventh Street. I didn’t even fathom my own cruelty at first.

  “I’m sorry, Scout, I really am.”

  He rubbed his knuckles. “Understand, Mr. Ted. Your Papa’s groanin’.”

  I had a shandygaff with him at one of the local grogshops. And then a telegram arrived on February 9.

  TEEDIE COME HOME.

  I took the boat train from Boston, climbed off the cars, and onto one of the palace steamers at the Fall River wharf. I’d booked passage on the Priscilla, grand princess of the Fall River Line; she luxuriated in her own gleaming white decks. The Priscilla could sleep and feed a thousand passengers with all the comfort of a floating palace. She was the preferred steamer of Presidents, aristocrats, and Wall Street tycoons. Her dining salon had gilded balconies and the thickest carpets between Boston and the Battery. But I wasn’t trying to rub elbows with the Priscilla’s royal guests. I could have eaten at the captain’s table with industrial barons and debutantes from Beacon Hill. I dined alone in my cabin. I could not bear a long evening of banter about women’s bonnets and the etiquette of spittoons on board the Priscilla when I knew that Father was gravely ill, else I wouldn’t have been summoned so curtly.

  I stood out on the deck all night, as the Priscilla steamed around the perfidious mouth of Point Judith, with all its legends of mermaids who might lure men into the sea—there wasn’t a mermaid alive that could have enticed me in my black mood.

  I felt stuck in some strange, bloated eternity until the Priscilla arrived at her Hudson River pier. I rode uptown in a hired car. The coachman swayed from side to side as he dodged pedestrians, trucks, and other hired cars. His route was roundabout and frivolous. I had to change carriages in midstream as his horse began to hobble.

  Finally we got to Papa’s mansion near Little Dakota. There was an ominous vigil i
n front of the house; a hundred newsboys stood waiting in the slush and snow, cap in hand, like a choir robbed of song. With them was their watchman, Quentin Moss, sobbing softly to himself, his powerful body hunched over like a man with a broken back. For an instant he could not locate where he was. His eyes darted about. It was the newsboys who nudged the watchman and settled him. They were each clutching a candle, every one. The flames flickered in the wind and revealed their unwashed faces with a crooked glow. Their pockets were loaded with coins, I could tell. They’d come right from their routes to Papa’s vigil with penny candles. They didn’t cry, like Quent. The newsies swayed with their candles that burnt down to a nub. I cursed their devotion to Papa. It frightened me. But I could hear their silent chorus.

  Too late, Teedie, you’ve come too late.

  The servants were all sobbing. Mama wandered about in her white muslin wrap, like a ghost ship lost at sea. I couldn’t dislodge her from her slow dance. It was a widow’s dream.

  “Mama, I’m here.”

  She continued to drift.

  Couldn’t find Corinne, and Bamie, our Fearless General, mumbled to herself. Her corset must have been undone. Her spine was all curled. Her sad eyes sank deeper into her skull. I’m not certain she recognized me. It was Ellie who seemed in charge. I hadn’t realized how alike we looked. He was my taller, sturdier twin, without the side-whiskers.

  “Teedie, it was terrible. . . . Papa had such fear in his eyes. I’d never seen him like that.”

  We went into the morning room where Papa still lay on the chaise, with crumpled linen and spilled basins all about. His lion’s mane had gone all gray, with streaks of white. He was gaunt under his gray beard. I kissed him on the forehead and could not help my childish thoughts, the belief that I could wish Father back to life with a sincere song.

  “Brave Heart,” I uttered.

  Bamie burst through her chrysalis, went outside to the newsboys in a shawl, fed them bits of cake. “Missy,” said one of the boys, “can we see the Master?”

  My big sister allowed them to clump up the stairs, several at a time; they stood near the door, curtsied, and went back down. And it was only then that I recognized the enormity of their loss. They’d had one lone champion. Another philanthropist might sup with them, but wouldn’t arrive in evening clothes and share their meal with Father’s gusto. He’d entwined himself into their lives. They mattered to him almost as much as we did.

  That night I had a terrifying dream, the same dream that had haunted my childhood. A wolf-man with blood on his whiskers was waiting at the foot of my bed, prepared to pounce and gobble me up. It was Father who always woke me in the nick of time.

  “Teedie, I’m here.”

  Yet this dream was more terrifying. The wolf-man had Papa’s china-blue eyes, and its rusty fingernails were gone. It had supple hands and a groomed beard, without a trace of blood. I’d resurrected Papa in my own nightmare, without the totem of a single word. I was still mightily afraid of this wolf-man.

  Mittie entered my room in a muslin gown.

  “You were screaming, dear,” she said. She looked like some bird-child out of the forest.

  “I dreamt of Papa. . . . I’m all right. Go back to bed.”

  “Was he kind in your dream, dear?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  And she disappeared again. I was the boy scientist of Harvard Yard. I didn’t believe in omens. Still, I did believe that Papa had visited my bed in the guise of a werewolf, his admonitions reverberating in my skull like a magnificent drum.

  I FEAR FOR YOUR FUTURE, TEEDIE.

  So did I.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CYCLONE ASSEMBLYMAN

  1881–1883

  NO OTHER ROOSEVELT HAD EVER ENTERED MORTON HALL, a barn-like maze above a saloon near Fifth Avenue and the corner of Fifty-ninth. It was the headquarters and “shop” of the Twenty-first District Republican Club, filled with cobwebs and brass spittoons, and run by a gang of rowdies who were little better than the hooligans of Tammany Hall. They looked at me with grave suspicion, as if a burglar in evening clothes had happened upon their premises by chance, with mischief on his mind. I was a twenty-three-year-old rube with red side-whiskers. I caught the eye of a man who sat hunched behind the barn’s only table. He was Humble Jake Hess, Morton Hall’s legendary district leader, who’d risen out of the streets and cracked many a skull on his way up. Disappointed by the Democrats, he’d bolted to the Republican Party years ago. A brute with big hands, a melodious voice, and a rare sense of political strategy, he’d lost one of his earlobes at Gettysburg to a lead bullet and also had to limp around with a silver kneecap. He wondered why a rube from the “solid element” had wandered into a hall of saloonkeepers and horsecar conductors.

  “What is it are ye after, Johnny boy? And be quick about it.”

  “I’d like to become a member of Morton Hall,” I said.

  “And why would a lad like you be interested in such an unlikely miracle?”

  His brethren laughed and winked, and I was able to catch them off guard.

  “Because,” I said, “I’m going to be the next Assemblyman from this district.”

  Humble Jake was silent for a moment. He didn’t like the brashness of my remark. And he was cautious with me.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Good. I don’t like bachelors in our little arena. They’re not reliable.”

  I’d disturbed Humble Jake, aroused his curiosity, obliged him to think like a district leader within the comfort of his own club.

  “Do you have a profession, laddie?”

  “I’m a law student.”

  Humble Jake seemed suspicious. He didn’t admire lawyers, I imagine. I didn’t let him know that I was a slacker at Columbia. My classes were filled with details that were like fancy swordplay and had little to do with fairness. I couldn’t find much social justice in the law.

  “And what’s your name, perchance?”

  “Roosevelt,” I said.

  The hooligans stared at Humble Jake. Something was awry. Their leader had benefited from all the boodle of Republican politics. Roscoe Conkling had helped appoint him Manhattan’s Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, and Humble Jake couldn’t have been ignorant of the gent who had started the Children’s Aid Society. Father must have locked horns with Humble once upon a time, rescued little boys from the nightmare of Charities and Corrections. Humble Jake would have respected Papa’s persistence. His narrow eyes lit.

  “And am I speaking to the son of the late, highly regarded Theodore?”

  “You are.”

  Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter that Roscoe Conkling had ruined Papa. Humble Jake had a Roosevelt in his barn. I was given a badge to wear that differentiated me from every other hooligan. I have it yet—a metallic button with a dull sheen and the number “21” painted on it to mark Humble Jake’s district. There was no more mention of my being a candidate for the State Assembly, but I’d planted the seed. I had to go through all the rites of initiation, to feel the rough-and-tumble of politics at the barn. I visited local bars on Second Avenue with Humble Jake and got into fistfights with saloonkeepers, who wanted their liquor licenses lowered, while I wanted the licenses raised.

  “Ah,” Humble said, “you’re our resident teetotaler. I like that.”

  Members of my own clan considered me a maniac who deserved to be locked up on Blackwell’s Island. Roosevelts didn’t romp around in the mud of machine politics. Mother was horror-stricken.

  “Your grandmamma would crawl in her grave if she was ever notified that you were mingling with the riffraff. Such crude men—politicos.”

  I didn’t have to hide my mission from Bamie, like some heartsore Count of Monte Cristo. Bamie understood. “You’re attacking from inside their tent. Papa would be proud, Teedie.”

  But I did feel like a turncoat—Humble had taken me under his wing and put down any rebellion among the ranks. And I had no intention
of following the rough politics of Morton Hall. I was a reformer, like Brave Heart, and had always been.

  “The little lord is one of us,” he said and bowed with a bit of mockery. “We’re related, did ya know that?”

  Had Humble ever worked at Roosevelt & Son, carried plate glass on his back? No, it was nothing like that.

  “My nephew, Martin Hess, a plumber’s apprentice he was, served as your father’s paid substitute, during the late war.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “Father’s substitute was an Irish mechanic named Carter.”

  Humble rolled his eyes. “This Carter never served. He was a swindler. He sold your father’s ticket to another man. It was Martin who served.”

  “Did he survive?” I asked.

  “He did not. He fell at Antietam. Lost both his legs to a cannonball and bled out right on the battlefield. Nobody could find him at first. His carcass—what was left of it—disappeared.”

  “Don’t understand,” I muttered.

  Humble’s brow wrinkled. “Disappeared, I said. We had to hire our own ghoul.”

  I was lost, utterly adrift, among the artifacts of Humble’s language.

  “Ghoul, what ghoul?”

  “A corpse finder. There were dozens of them. It was once a lucrative profession. He finagled with the War Department on our behalf and dug up Martin’s remains with a bunch of other ghouls. We buried him proper, we did, buried what was left of Martin.”

  My plans to smash the Republican machine had melted down with the death and dismemberment of Martin Hess. I felt like a fraud.