by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
I couldn’t argue with this rogue Robin Hood. I went back to Albany, determined to steer the Cigar Bill out of committee and onto the Chamber floor.
“Mr. Speak-ah, we are perpetuating a system of child slavery. We must break up this coterie of landlords and their poisonous arsenal of tenement shops. We cannot sit idle while children cough themselves into an early grave with tobacco dust in their lungs.”
I pounded into the barons and their Black Horse Cavalry. I courted every journalist I could. We Nightingales attacked. The stalwarts stumbled, and the bill sailed through the Assembly. But there was a bit of intrigue in the Chamber. Some jackal stole the final draft of the bill and it never arrived on the Senate floor. We’d been outflanked by the barons. I planned to reintroduce the bill next year, but first I had to persuade my constituents to bring back their Cyclone Assemblyman.
McManus swaggered into the Kenmore, where I kept a little flat. He was gloating with spittle on his tongue. “Albany isn’t for you, boy-o. You shouldn’t have mocked me at the Delavan. I’ll find you in a dark corner of the Capitol one day, and you’ll wish you were dead.”
And that’s when he saw Alice gliding down the stairs of the Kenmore in a green dress. Most Assemblymen didn’t bring their wives with them to this dank Dutch village with its foul effluvia riding right off the river. But I didn’t relish being apart from Alice. She endured the isolation and biting wind so that we could have quiet dinners and quiet nights at the Kenmore.
McManus had a crazy gleam in his eyes. I didn’t like how he ogled Alice. “Ah, you’re a picture of perfection, Mrs. Roseyvelt.”
Alice appraised him with her pale eyes. She must have sensed some deep splinter beneath his cruel streak, like the staggered cry of the nightingale.
“I hope you will sup with us one evening, Mr. McManus, and tell me all about yourself.”
“I’d love to, ma’am. I’m your husband’s peer—and his rival. We do wonders together. He’s kind of a miracle man, the little saint of cigar rollers. What would we do without him?”
And he loped out of the Kenmore with a triumphant grin.
I WAS NO BETTER than a robber baron.
I had to steal a honeymoon for Alice and myself every other weekend at West Fifty-seventh Street, even while Mother grew more and more mysterious and morose. She donned a white chenille net to keep the dust and grime out of her hair and wore this white net at dinner parties. She also kept up the ritual of two daily baths—the first to suds herself, and the second to rinse off the thick crust of soap, with a maid constantly beside her, as if Mother were Marie Antoinette. “Darlings, I cannot find another method to fight all the filth of Manhattan.”
Bamie was the loyal clerk who kept track of Mama’s bills. Mama always overspent, leaving a wild trail of purchases, while Bamie was right behind her with Papa’s old, worn, leather-bound passbook from the Chemical Bank, handed down to Bamie herself like some musty amulet. Thank heaven my wife was freed of such money matters, since she had an allowance from the Lees of Chestnut Hill. Mama and Alice were famous together, almost as famous as sisters, one very tall and the other very short; both were country girls who loved to wear white, and neither of them had much use for the relentless pace of Manhattan.
“Alice, dear, people move so fast and talk so fast, I’m always a few steps behind. I’d wager that not a single soul ever runs to catch a horsecar in Boston and Chestnut Hill.”
She’d never seen the cars in Cambridge, with Harvard lads like myself hanging from every available rail and limb. But I wouldn’t contradict her. Besides, Mother was manageable until Elliott returned after sixteen months from a hunting trip to India, Singapore, and Saigon, with a small fortune of elephant tusks and tiger skins. Little brother had game bags galore. I envied him, have to admit. I must have inherited Mama’s mad flamboyance, the residue of Bulloch Hall. I hunted Bengal tigers in my dreams, even while I marched from tenement to tenement in the Hebrew quarter, inquiring about errant cigar makers and children covered in red dust.
I congratulated Ellie on his great success—he’d dined with maharajahs, stared into the bloodshot eyes of man-eating tigers, raced after rogue elephants—but he couldn’t seem to settle in. He was like a vagabond with a royal address.
“I don’t have Teedie’s fanatical grit,” he told Alice. “I’m a different animal.” He couldn’t stay sober. He would start to drink at breakfast time, appear at the table with gin on his breath. He was having seizures, would black out from time to time, and attack me in his delirium.
“I’ll slit your throat one day, I will. Look at me. I’m that werewolf you dreamt about as a child. But this werewolf is made of flesh and bone.”
I could not consider my own little brother a maniac, but I still locked our bedroom door at night. And I’d find Ellie outside the door when we awoke.
“Forgive me, Teedie. I am not myself.”
I’d escort him to his bedroom and put him under the covers, like Brave Heart might have done when Ellie was a little boy. I sat with him until he fell asleep. Mother wandered in and seized me around the shoulders, this birdlike woman with her white hairnet. “Teedie, I am lost without your father—lost. Didn’t he appeal to you on his deathbed?”
She’d forgotten that I missed Papa’s agony altogether; I was on the night boat from Boston, breathing in the moon on the main deck of the Priscilla, that maharajah of the Fall River Line, when Brave Heart made his last request, according to Mother.
“Darling, didn’t he whisper, Watch over Ellie, watch over Ellie! I was right there.”
I couldn’t discount Mother’s conversation with a ghost. Father might have whispered something.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER ATTENDING a lecture at the Century, a haven for artists, poets, editors, and bon vivants, I stumbled upon an altercation on a side street. The lamps were very shallow. But three men, ruffians really, were annoying a young woman in the finest clothes. It mystified me why this elegant young lady did not have an escort. She could have been a pigeon put there for my benefit, as part of some entrapment. Still, I could not abandon her. It was not in my nature to do so.
I tapped one of the ruffians with my stick. “You, young fellow, stop pestering that girl.”
He smiled at me, this jackal, who was wearing a gaudy silk scarf. “And you, sir, should not interfere in what is not your business. Tell him, Nan.”
The young woman seemed at a loss. She did not encourage me to stay, did not smile or wink. She had a bit of blood on her mouth. She was tall and had pale eyes, like my Alice.
“You are very kind, sir, but . . .”
“That’s not good enough, Nan,” said the young jackal. “Tell him to scatter.”
He shoved her with his filthy hands. She tottered for a moment, like a child’s top. And that’s when I thrashed him with my stick. The two other jackals leered at me like Halloween lanterns from the Irish quarter near Third Avenue. I thrashed them, too. I didn’t even realize the temper I had. The rooster in me had been aroused. And I was beyond caring whether this Nan was a pigeon or not.
The jackals ran off with their swag—Nan’s parasol, pocket handkerchief, and purse. She seemed utterly bereft, but she did not seek my counsel. I was bewildered and a bit rash. I wiped the blood from her mouth with my handkerchief. She couldn’t have been a chambermaid or a thief’s companion. She had the strict carriage and soft, melodious voice of a duchess—or a songbird. I had to query her.
“Miss Nan, are you related to those rough boys?”
“No,” she answered in the same melodious voice. It was even more of a riddle. I could have given her some hard cash and hailed down a cab. But I had a fanatical grit, as Ellie said. I couldn’t rest until I got to the bottom of things.
“Yet they knew your name.”
Her lip trembled. She didn’t have one coarse feature. I took her hand.
“I’ll help you.”
“You can’t,” she cried. “You can’t. You had better go.” And the duchess removed her hand fro
m my pigskin glove with a slow, silky glide, as if we’d just been pirouetting at Windsor Palace.
“Where do you live?”
“Not far,” she said, avoiding that inquisitive steel in my eyes. But it was difficult for her to play at some sham. She’d given me as many clues as she could; I still followed her across the street. We arrived at a brownstone with a narrow stoop. My duchess had lost her composure and the delicate flow of her carriage—she’d been rehearsed at a local charm school.
I followed her up the stairs. I wondered if we’d come to a maison close. Women in silk gowns and gaudy satin corsets were parading on the stairs with their cadets, who wore derbies at a devilish angle. These cadets bowed like counterfeit courtiers. None of them had a touch of grace.
“Ah, what a handsome prince.”
“He’s mine,” the duchess said, knocking off their derbies and scattering the women in their silk extravaganzas. Soon there wasn’t a soul.
The duchess turned to me in her duress—I wasn’t a stranger she’d found on the street. She’d lost her bearings, her sense of purpose, and she panicked. “Mr. Roosevelt, they’ll crucify you if you go up one more flight. A whole arsenal is waiting.”
“Shh,” I said. “It’s too late.”
I gathered the duchess up in my arms like a renegade bride, stepped onto a landing of oilcloth, and rushed through a door that was slightly ajar. I wasn’t surprised by the reception committee—photographers with their flash pans, a police captain with all his ribbons on display, burly detectives from Mulberry Street with shields pinned to their vests, and Long John McManus. I stared into the flash pans and their crackles of light with my signature smile, a toothy Roosevelt grin. I still had the duchess cradled in my arms.
“Well,” said McManus, “if it isn’t the people’s champion, trafficking in white slavery. Captain Striker, accompany the pup to your precinct.”
Striker hadn’t expected me to smile in front of the flash pans. I was a popular Assemblyman, with half the papers in Manhattan writing about my holy war with the barons. He could be exiled to a precinct in the cow pastures of the Bronx with one false move.
“Your Honor, why the hell are you in a house full of whores?”
McManus groaned. “What’s wrong with you, Denny? Take him away. This squirt will swear that he was helping a damsel in distress.”
I put the duchess down and let her spin on her own two feet. She didn’t belong in a maison close.
“Speak up,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The duchess squeezed her eyes shut and stood there blindly, wagging her head, while Alice walked in with another policeman. McManus and his cronies meant to cripple me in their private cul-de-sac with oilcloth on the floor.
They shouldn’t have brought my wife.
McManus bowed to her, doffing his black derby. He must have been so, so sure of himself to take such a big gamble. He’d sent for Alice long before I arrived.
“Sorry to involve you in this mess, ma’am. But we didn’t summon you on a whim. Your husband is in the white slavery racket.”
There wasn’t any fear in Alice’s pale eyes, just flecks of fire.
“Why did you have a policeman knock at this late hour, Mr. McManus? You frightened my mother-in-law. I was half asleep.”
McManus doffed his hat again. “Ah, but we thought you might want to know about your husband’s liaison with another gal.”
I’d kept Alice away from every bit of sordidness I encountered as an Assemblyman. But she had an archer’s agility, as if she could conjure up McManus and dismantle him in the same fall of an arrow.
“Long John,” she said, “the only liaison my husband has ever had is with me.”
“That’s not true,” McManus said. “That’s not true.”
I hit him. It wasn’t out of malice, but to break his stride and end his streak of insufferable lies. I might have broken a knuckle. He could have swatted me with one of his gigantic paws. Yet he didn’t. He displayed the medallion of blood on his mouth as a war trophy and presented himself as a victim of the Manhattan rube.
“Mrs. Roseyvelt, ma’am, I did not lay a finger on your husband, not once. And please listen to Nancy.”
My duchess was a songbird of a different kind. All her veneer rubbed off. Her features hardened, and that soft, pliable face turned into a snarl. The duchess’s diction was much more rarefied.
“He is a very cruel man, your husband. He kept me on a leash. He has disgusting habits. I had to perform monstrous tricks.”
Alice wavered for a moment; that’s how skilled was the duchess, who tossed out details like time bombs.
“My buttocks are raw from all his biting, Mrs. Roseyvelt. I can show you the marks.”
Alice removed a pocket watch of solid silver from her purse, stared at the dials, said, “That’s not my Ted,” and proceeded to wind the watch. I heard a heavy padding in the hall, and then Humble Jake Hess appeared. I wasn’t surprised. Jake had informers everywhere in his district. Someone must have summoned him from Morton Hall.
Humble sniffed about. He had his own sense of drama. He kissed Alice’s hand with his native gallantry, ignored McManus, and lit into Captain Striker. “You shouldn’t have become Long John’s linchpin, Dennis, a lad like you from my district. Couldn’t you tell that this little party wasn’t kosher?”
“Humble,” the captain said, “I—”
“Shut up. You cannot pick on my Assemblyman.”
He slapped Nan, and I didn’t like it at all. Her arms flailed and she fell to the floor. I didn’t care how she had flimflammed me.
“Humble,” I said, “we do not hit women.”
“Oh, yes, we do, Mr. Ted. And please do not meddle. This gang was out to ruin your career. Mrs. Nancy Fowler is the best bunco artist in Manhattan. She was once part of your social set.”
“A real duchess,” I murmured to myself.
Humble did a kind of entrechat and plucked Mrs. Fowler off the floor. He was very light on his feet, as he told me all about the duchess.
No one had neglected her, tossed Nan into the street. She preferred the Life, as petty criminals loved to call their own little craft. She was, according to Humble, a natural steerer and a dip. That’s how she met McManus. He was a pickpocket and a prizefighter—before he moved into politics and stole elections for Tammany Hall.
“Ain’t that so, Long John?”
“Aw, Humble,” McManus said. “We were only having a little fun with the rube.”
Humble seized McManus’ derby and stomped on it. “Captain Striker, since when do you allow confidence men and their molls to operate in your back yard?”
“Jake,” the captain muttered, “have a heart. Long John has all the barons on his side.”
Humble smoothed the ribbons on the captain’s chest.
“Arrest him, or I’ll smash your skull. And take the dip—she goes down with him.”
He chased out all the detectives and the photographers with their flash pans.
I felt sorry for the duchess after Humble told me her tale. She abandoned her brownstone on Union Square, left her banker husband and two children, with servants, draperies, and silver, to satisfy her wanderlust in the Manhattan underworld. She’d traded in her identity for the identity of a dip. Yet I was riveted to her, as if her own fanciful tale had come out of the stories I’d heard from Mittie as a boy—with every sort of monster and enchantress. Mother, you see, had had her own slave companion at Bulloch Hall, a ragged little girl called Toy, who dressed in Mother’s hand-me-downs and slept on a straw mattress near her bed. Toy was the bold one, who risked the wrath of the Bullochs. She would gambol on the rooftop of Bulloch Hall and swipe sweet potato pie from the cookhouse. Toy and Mittie were both cognizant of a diabolic queen—Deirdre—who floated above the roofs and gobbled little girls. This queen had once been the bride of a local manor lord, a lazy, boisterous lout who could not manage his own plantation—or his bride. She fled the manor in nothing but her nightgown and decla
red herself queen of the countryside, with the right to pillage.
And one night, in the midst of a storm that bent every tree within a mile of Bulloch Hall, the renegade queen appeared outside Mittie’s window with silver eyelashes and a puddle of blue paint on her cheeks. “Come, my little ones,” she beckoned in a birdlike song that was hard to resist. Mittie might have gone with Deirdre into the dark wind, but it was Toy who held her back, Toy who noticed that wild sense of despair and destruction beneath the puddle of blue. Mrs. Fowler was the same sort of enchantress, the same renegade queen, resurrected right out of Mother’s tale. I admired her pluck, that perfect stride she had—it frightened and exhilarated me, as if I were one step away from the void. Perhaps we all were.
CHAPTER 3
LEEHOLM
1884
THE WIND RATTLED THE PANES, AND THE SNOW PILED up like pyramids, blocking all the carriages to Broadway, yet Alice, my Alice, dreamt of a sleigh ride through the park. “Oh, Teddy, it will be our own grand little adventure.” She was a country gal who would not give in to the unwieldy cavalcade of city life. So I summoned our man, and he rescued Father’s sleigh from some hidden perch. We wrapped ourselves in bearskins and blankets, and ventured across the park, into the Badlands of the West Side. Little Dakota had been built up bit by bit since my sleigh rides with Papa during the war. The river rats were all gone, driven out of the territory by the police and several citizens’ brigades. The Bloomingdale Asylum and the orphanages were still there, and we passed many a shantytown as we rode from hill to hill. The impoverished souls of Manhattan had no other avenues to possess near the park; we discovered our own route among the human wreckage, as we zigzagged along.
My wife often stopped to feed a child from our lunch pail. She felt a sudden kinship with such hilltop tykes, with their bulging scarecrow eyes and clothes that were about to unravel.