The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

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

“Humble, I’m here to hurt your benefactor, Boss Roscoe Conkling.”

  “Aw, I knew that,” Jake said. “I could read the larceny in your face the moment you arrived. I says to myself, what’s an aristocratic pup doing at Morton Hall? Truth is Boss Roscoe’s a son of a bitch. I’d like to maim him myself.”

  I was a far cry from the Count of Monte Cristo. “Then I have no business being here, Humble. I’ve betrayed your trust. Should I return my badge and resign from the club?”

  “Not at all,” he said, as his hand hovered over that missing earlobe, his souvenir from Gettysburg. “Roosevelt, you aren’t ashamed of us, are you? Why haven’t ye brung your missus to the barn?”

  I HAD COURTED HER as if I were courting a cougar. That’s how persistent I was. I wanted Alice, and I had to pursue her until she wanted me. It’s a simple tale. I fell in love with Miss Alice Lee of Chestnut Hill during my junior year at Harvard, nine months after Papa passed. She had honey-blond hair and pale blue eyes, and she was a very tall girl at seventeen. Her hands and feet were already bigger than mine. It was excruciating. Alice had the long, gliding step of an athlete. She was already an expert archer, and no matter how many targets I went after and how many bows I strung, I couldn’t compete with her bull’s-eyes.

  “Teddy, you are the most impatient boy I have ever seen.”

  I’d met Alice through a classmate of mine, Dickie Saltonstall, who came from an endless line of Harvard graduates—the Saltonstalls were the most Brahmin of Boston Brahmins. Dick advised me to be more temperate in my pursuit of Alice.

  “Roosevelt, you’ll frighten her away with that damn ardor of yours. Doucement, old boy. You’d break Lightfoot’s legs at such a pace.”

  I’d had Lightfoot delivered to Boston with my dogcart, so I could visit Chestnut Hill at a gallop. I’d ride that horse through the roughest terrain. I had to conquer Chestnut Hill. I did have two ambassadors—Mama and Bamie. Bamie could read her own fate in the looking glass—a spinster with a crooked back. Her eyes withdrew deeper into her skull, but she and Mama rode up to Chestnut Hill to reconnoiter with Mr. and Mrs. Lee. Mr. Lee was a banker whose firm had invented the idea of a safe-deposit box in an underground vault. Whatever valuables you had would always be secure in one of Lee’s vaults. He wasn’t stern, and he didn’t undervalue me and my clan, but he thought that his pale princess was too young to be a bride.

  “We value Theodore,” said this master of the underground vault. “But where’s the rush?”

  Mittie was the clever one. While Bamie blustered, Mama spooned her vanilla trifle and never mentioned marriage. “Oh,” she said, “when it’s ripe and all, Teedie and Alice can come and live with us on West Fifty-seventh Street. We will surely have an apartment prepared. I have reserved an entire floor. It will be waiting, Mr. Lee.”

  That was the clincher. Lee couldn’t resist the exotic charm of Mother’s moonlight complexion and the seductive softness of her voice. The nuptials were arranged right in the middle of that vanilla trifle. I did hide something, however. I’d had a rough patch with Dr. Dudley Sargent, the college physician. He said that countless attacks of asthma and years of heavy exercise had weakened the walls of my heart. He was very firm in his prognosis. Even running up a flight of stairs might put a strain on my heart. I had to be as sedentary as a monk, or I wouldn’t have much longer to live. I should have talked to Bamie about it, confessed to Alice, but it would have cursed my future, left me a chronic invalid. So I lied. I hadn’t lost my vigor, and I wouldn’t be damned by Dr. Dudley. I bought Alice a sapphire engagement ring and announced our wedding plans on Valentine’s Day, and what a Valentine it was. The teetotaler drank champagne. I wasn’t surly as I had often been after one of my rare benders with classmates at the Porcellian Club. I drank in Alice’s honey-blond hair, as her pale eyes glowed in the lamplight.

  “To my Valentine of Valentines, whom no other man on earth will ever know as I do.”

  My champagne glass shattered with the sudden force of my movements, but Mr. Lee didn’t mind the spots on his silk cravat, while Mrs. Lee wept with a farrago of feelings that I could never hope to summon up. She caressed my sleeve, a scintilla of champagne in her eyes.

  “Dear, dear boy, you will look after our little girl, won’t you?”

  We were married at Chestnut Hill on my twenty-second birthday, and spent our honeymoon at Tranquillity, Papa’s retreat on Oyster Bay. We had the whole house to ourselves, with servants and horses. Alice rarely left my sight. We sat on the same verandah that had reminded Mama of her father’s old plantation and we watched the palace steamers of the Fall River Line ply across the Sound with their booming whistles and great abundance of lights, and I thought of my own voyage on the Priscilla two years ago, when I arrived from Boston on the night boat too late to catch Brave Heart’s last breaths. I didn’t want to engulf Alice in my moment of melancholy. I missed Father yet, missed him more and more, even in the dreamland of my delight. The hunter had his sweet prey. . . .

  I did bring Alice to Morton Hall. The hooligans were suspicious at first. Females seldom appeared at the club, except for an occasional floozy. And these lads were at a loss how to relate to Alice. They hid their own huge paws under the table. Half of them had broken hands from all the electioneering they did. But Alice soon won them over. They were hypnotized by her perfume and the long strides of her rhythmic gait. My wife must have reminded them of some ideal filly in a race that was never run.

  Humble had ordered lemonade and tea biscuits from Delmonico’s. He’d put on a wrinkled cravat for the occasion.

  “Ah, Mrs. Ted, your husband has captured our hearts.”

  Alice caught Humble at his own hyperbole. “Not as much as he has captured mine, Mr. Hess.”

  I could feel the weave of pleasure on his face. “You’d honor me, ma’am, if you called me Humble—that is my moniker at Morton Hall.”

  “And I’ll be your Alice,” she said.

  Humble preened in front of his hooligans. “I can tell you’re a lady—from your accent, ma’am. But it’s not Manhattan gilt. You’re countrified.”

  “And what about you?” Alice asked.

  “I’m also countrified. I was born in Little Bavaria, near the Bowery. That was a lifetime ago, and the accent has rubbed off.”

  “But you haven’t lost your gilt,” Alice said, delivering her own salvo.

  My darling made the rounds, and every hooligan in the barn revealed a gnarled paw to let Alice have a good shake of the hand. She wasn’t shy or remote with that crowd. I’d misjudged my pink little wife. She had an inborn sense of politics, or perhaps she understood my own longings to be part of the mix.

  Humble had been undecided about my fate until this moment. The Party stalwarts were against having an interloper speak for them in the State Capitol. But Humble pushed back.

  “Miss Alice, we’d like to run your husband as our man from the Twenty-first. He’d represent our district in Albany.”

  Alice had him purring now. “And what appeal would he have for the voters?”

  “What could be better than a Dutchman in Dutch New York? Fifth Avenue is within our bailiwick. And isn’t Mr. Ted one of the swells?”

  I hadn’t rehearsed Alice, hadn’t coached her in the least. But she startled Humble and his cohorts. Bamie must have scouted the district with Alice, run with her to catch a horsecar, peeked into the window grille of a local saloon.

  “And will the saloonkeepers side with him?” she asked with an ambiguous smile.

  Humble seemed in command again. “Certainly, Miss Alice, if I say so.”

  “But my husband’s allegiance is different,” she said. “He will vote with his heart’s command, and not with the Party’s own symbols. That might cause you some pain.”

  “Not at all,” Humble said with his own ambiguous smile. “Mr. Ted is what we call a ‘Nightingale’ in Republican parlance. Each Party can afford one, and only one.”

  Like the king’s jester, I thought.

 
“Humble, I won’t be Conkling’s fool—that’s too high a price.”

  “Ah, Conkling ain’t much at Morton Hall. He’s a ghost.”

  I was bewildered. “A ghost who still breathes?”

  “The red beard has retired, and we have our Nightingale,” Humble said, seizing Alice and waltzing her across the barn with the tempestuous sounds of a tuba exploding from his cheeks while his stalwarts laughed and stamped their feet with all the madness and joy of men from the Twenty-first District of Manhattan.

  THERE WASN’T MUCH ROOM for a Nightingale in that dear old dull Dutch town of Albany, with a wind that howled off the Hudson and cold fronts that chilled you to the quick. I was Mr. Jane-Dandy, the Manhattan rube, the youngest lad in the State Assembly. I wore my red side-whiskers, a pince-nez with a gold tassel, and a peacoat from my Harvard days. The veterans at the Capitol mocked me and called my peacoat “an ass-buster,” because the wind crept up my cylindrical trousers from Savile Row. They were a venal lot, looking to line their pockets. This “Black Horse Cavalry” was corrupt beyond measure, allied to Party bosses whose one allegiance was to the little corridors of power they had cobbled together from their various districts.

  I meant nothing to the Black Horse Cavalry. I was a hindrance, who interrupted the humdrum proceedings with my calls of “Mr. Speak-ah,” in my high-pitched voice. They couldn’t doze comfortably in their cushions as I hustled about, trying to rip into yet another bill that would fleece the public treasure. They’d have to get rid of that downstate pup from the Silk Stocking District—“a Fifth Avenue fellah.” And they summoned Long John McManus, their enforcer in the Assembly, who was one of Tammany’s proudest lieutenants.

  I might have been bushwhacked if Humble hadn’t been waiting for me at my hotel on North Pearl, near the riverfront. He’d arrived on the night train and was in a grim mood.

  “Humble, what’s wrong? Have I betrayed your trust?”

  “Not at all,” he said, crushing the crown of his bowler with his big hands. “You’re a Nightingale after my own heart. But they mean to toss you in a blanket. It’s their way of humiliating you, Mr. Ted. McManus is their instrument. He’s tossed many a lad, obliged them to leave Albany in disgrace. And I can’t interfere. I’ve been sworn to silence.”

  “Where are they now?” I asked.

  “At the Delavan.”

  The Delavan House was a dusty temperance hotel right across from the railroad yards. Liquor wasn’t allowed in the rooms or in the lobby, but you could find whiskey everywhere, in canisters, flasks, and canteens, in teapots, coffee cups, and milk bottles. The Delavan was where bosses from both Parties conspired when they weren’t attacking one another in the cavernous chambers of the Capitol, jumping out of some closet with an Indian war cry. The Delavan was their haven, their private retreat, and as good a spot as any to hide a strumpet or to trap an unsuspecting rube.

  And so I played my part, walking into the Delavan in my peacoat and cylindrical trousers. McManus, with his apelike appearance, was convening in a corner with other members of the Black Horse Cavalry. He had his run of the Delavan, drinking whiskey out of a teapot. I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t respond. I tapped his shoulder again. He sniffed the foul air of the Delavan with his enormous nostrils—Albany was overrun with breweries, and the entire town stank of stale beer and the rot of coal tar in the river from the chemical works.

  That great din of Albany barons and their vassals turned to a polite rumble. They could sense the massacre. Their gray eyes seemed swollen in the weak light.

  “What’s this?” McManus asked with another long sniff. “Do I smell a Harvard brat? His Royal Majesty Mr. Nightingale?”

  McManus was showing off to the Democratic and Republican chieftains. I had realized within a week or two that there was little difference between the Parties: judges, lawyers, bankers, business tycoons, and political bosses divvied up the power among themselves. Humble must have realized that, and he exiled himself to Morton Hall. He’d come to Dutch Land to warn me about McManus, but he wasn’t a loyal Dutchman; he wasn’t Dutch at all; he fled Albany as soon as he could and returned to his fiefdom in the Twenty-first.

  I watched Long John wink to his lackeys. I read behind his ruse. A number of cavalrymen rose from their table. They didn’t even attempt to hide the horse blanket that was rolled up under the table. While a pair of cavalrymen stooped over to unfurl the blanket, several others approached me with wild-eyed grins. They meant to grab my arms and hold me in place for McManus. I socked the first one and sent him sailing into the other cavalrymen. And then I socked the second.

  McManus didn’t like this sudden twist in his own parlor. “Roseyvelt, that’s downright rude.”

  “Long John, I hear you mean to toss me,” I said.

  McManus still had his audience, the barons and members of the Black Horse Cavalry, who smirked into their fists.

  “Toss you? Why the hell would I do that to a fine fellah like you?”

  They were all tittering, and I had to put a stop to that or they’d go on razzing me in the halls of the State Capitol for the rest of my stay.

  I tapped Long John’s shoulder a third time.

  “Don’t you ever try to toss me, Mr. McManus. If you ever try, I’ll kick you in the balls.”

  McManus had murder on his mind. His jaw twitched. By Godfrey, I would have to kick him in the balls. But he couldn’t get a simple nod from a single baron. They had expected entertainment, a novice Assemblyman who had made a nuisance of himself tossed into the fetid air at the Delavan to the delight of their vassals, and McManus had made a mess of things, had bungled it all. They didn’t want a spill of blood, not mine or his. So Long John had to pretend that he was still the master.

  “I’ll break you,” he muttered under his breath, and then he bowed extravagantly to satisfy the barons. “You’ve had your fun, Mr. Nightingale. Go about your business.” He hoped to mock me by whistling the nightingale’s song. But McManus was utterly off-key. He sounded like a whiskey salesman. I had to warble the miraculous chip-chip-chip of the nightingale. I warbled every variation, every twitter.

  Despite themselves, the barons and their Black Horse Cavalry were enthralled. They clung to every little splash of melody. Nothing in their own cynical lives had prepared them for that prolonged plangent cry. I completed my nightingale’s song and marched out of the Delavan, with two of the cavalrymen sitting in a daze on the beer-soaked floor.

  I ROSE LIKE A ROCKET after my encounter with McManus. More and more Assemblymen abandoned the stalwarts and joined my little clique of Nightingales. We couldn’t outgun the Black Horsemen, but we could annoy the barons, who did not want their duplicity revealed. I began talking to the press about various bills the barons had smothered in the Assembly.

  The Cigar Makers’ Union had introduced a bill to ban the manufacture of cigars in tenements. And I was put on a committee to examine the merit of such a bill. We’d never been near a tenement, not one of us. What aroused my suspicion was that the manufacturers themselves owned many of the tenements, and thus served as landlords to the myriad cigar makers they employed. So I went on my own inspection tour of tenement land.

  The cigar makers lived in damp, sunless hovels on Rivington Street, often five or six to a room, children and women working deep into the night, with tobacco leaves piled everywhere, and breathing in that raw, red tobacco dust.

  I saw children of six crouched over their workbenches, some of them as humpbacked as Bamie, tobacco leaves stored behind them in towers of moist blankets. Not one of them would ever see the inside of a schoolroom. I wasn’t some wizard of the courts but a freshman legislator on a fact-finding mission. I had no right to reprimand their mothers and fathers, or whoever else was in charge of these tenement factories, but reprimand them I did.

  My rebukes fell into a mountain of tobacco leaves. These Hebrew cigar makers and their families rarely understood a word of English, or else played mum. Finally the foreman of one such factory di
d speak up. He was the uncle of an entire crew, sixteen adults and children in three rooms. He had his cutting knife, but he didn’t menace me. This fellow had been run out of some hovel in Prague for trying to organize the cigar makers into a little army and he rode right past the immigration officers at Castle Garden with a false set of papers. He was never an anarchist, he insisted, more like a Bohemian Robin Hood. God knows what his real name was. The others at his shop called him Kapitán. His English was impeccable. He could rattle on without a flaw.

  I smoked a cigar with him to be polite. I shivered at first, because the very act of biting into one of the Captain’s cigars summoned up the rich aromas of my childhood. Father had taught me how to inhale precious air with the help of a fine Havana during my worst asthma attacks.

  I didn’t mollycoddle this cigar maker.

  “Captain, do ye know who I am?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “You, sir, are the Cyclone Assemblyman.”

  That’s what they called me inside the Capitol. I was everywhere at once, the great meddler, poking into other Assemblymen’s affairs. How else could I get anything done? I had to meddle.

  I perused that tenement shop with its tobacco towers and the soft, disheartening scratch of women and children as they sheared tobacco leaves with knives shaped like crooked crescents.

  “And you, sir, have children sitting there mummified on a bench.”

  “Mummified?” he said. “I have them exercise in the back yard. We all go out for lunch—hard-boiled eggs and root beer.”

  “And how many hours do they work a day?”

  “Fifteen,” the Captain said.

  “That’s inhuman,” I told him.

  But he wasn’t perturbed. “How else could we survive? Who would benefit if I had to close the shop? The landlord would bring in another cadre of cigar makers. It would also fail—fifteen hours. That’s the formula of success, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “And how would you define success?”

  His mask of a face shimmered in the dusty light. “By becoming a landlord, sir. You have to own five or six tenements and have a multitude of factories and shops. Isn’t that what they call laissez-faire capitalism? Well, I’m a capitalist.”