The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

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

“Aren’t they part of your district, Teddy?”

  “No,” I said. “Not this far north.”

  “Humble’s the Commissioner of Charities. Couldn’t he do something?”

  And I had to explain the peculiar tick of government to my wife.

  “If the other Commissioners come by, they’ll round up the children and take them to Blackwell’s Island. They’ll starve, Alicy, or vanish in the fog. Their lives won’t be worth more than a pinch of salt. They’re better off in the Badlands with whatever little family they have left.”

  We brought six or seven lunch pails on our next ride.

  “Teddy, dear, couldn’t we take some of these children on a picnic to Leeholm?”

  I’d bought a splendid parcel of land out on Oyster Bay that spread across forest and field, with an unhindered view of the Sound. There we planned to build our own hilltop manor, with a wraparound porch and plenty of fireplaces. “Leeholm,” as I called it in honor of Alice, would have ten bedrooms, at least ten, where we could raise our own brood. I hired an architect, planned the stables—a pony for each member of the tribe. While the architect’s sketches still sat in the parlor of our new home on West Forty-fifth Street, Alice was thinking of the ill-fed scarecrows from the Badlands she would invite to Leeholm.

  “Alice, what if their parents object? We can’t just kidnap these tykes.”

  “Pooh-pooh,” she said. “We’ll invite the children and their parents.”

  I didn’t argue. It would be years before Leeholm was ever built. And she’d have her own little bunnies to care about by then.

  I HAD TO RETURN to the Capitol. I was prince of the Nightingales now. I shaved off my side-whiskers. The barons and their minions reviled me in the papers that their masters owned, financiers like Jay Gould, who dipped into the public treasure as often as he could. For the New York World and its Democratic Party faithful, I was an aristocratic snob in tight trousers and a pince-nez with a gold ­tassel. Still, most of the journalists favored me. And while the barons hid in the shadows, I attacked Jay Gould in front of the Assembly. I didn’t have much of a choice—it was attack or die.

  I was startled to see McManus here. I could have sworn that Humble had Long John locked away for good. Some judge in Jay Gould’s pocket must have freed him from the Tombs. He was Gould’s personal bagman, and I caught him whispering with several Nightingales, my very own precinct captains. So I had to act.

  “Mr. Speak-ah, Jay Gould and his associates have done all possible harm to this establishment. They are common thieves, and they belong to that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class.”

  I could picture Jay, the cavalier pirate, with his velvet collar and patriarchal beard and the nimble patter of his priceless pigskin shoes. I liked nothing about the man. I accused him of corrupting this very House with his bribes. My fellow Assemblymen said that their little Manhattan rooster had gone too far. By Godfrey, I hadn’t gone far enough!

  I had to worry about other matters. Alice had a siege of morning sickness, and I didn’t want to leave her stranded in our little cove on West Forty-fifth Street, at the mercy of strangers. So we moved back in with Mama and Bamie. Now Alice wouldn’t be alone when I was in Dutch town. I was chairman of a special committee to investigate corruption in the City and County of New York, and I was not beholden to the barons and their little tricks.

  Hearings were held in the once-opulent ballroom of the Metropolitan Hotel at Broadway and Prince. Papa’s firm, Roosevelt & Son, had supplied the ballroom’s plate-glass mirrors. But that was many years ago. There were now cracks in the plate glass, and a blue crust across the edges of each mirror. The Metropolitan had thrived into the 1850s. It was one of the few hotels in Manhattan that allowed the slaves of its Southern clientele to live right on the premises. It fell into disrepair after the Civil War. Mary Lincoln loved to stay at the Metropolitan. The President’s widow would wander through its halls with bags of jewelry to help pay for her lavish lifestyle at this ragged and run-down hotel. The clerks told me tales of how she often dressed for dinner in torn skirts, would hide a chicken wing in her napkin, and nibble on it all night. She’d accost strangers in the hall and declare how she had once lived in the President’s mansion. She’d forget her own room number, and a bellboy had to escort her, with the house key. He didn’t want her pennies. But she’d wink at him. “Keep the cash. You’ll get rich.”

  She was one more member of the Metropolitan’s menagerie.

  Still, the hotel did have a cut rate. That’s why the Committee on Corruption rented the ballroom, despite its creaky chairs and tables with crooked legs. There wasn’t an empty seat at this desolate palace. I was maestro of my very own opera and amusement park. I tore into witnesses, all the loyal hacks in local government who had been appointed by Party patronage and fell asleep in their sinecures. I dubbed each and every one Rip Van Winkle. The press was dee-lighted.

  ROOSEVELT ON THE RAMPAGE

  My own great dee-light was that Bamie and Alice were at the hearings. Alice sat on a gigantic pillow. Her face was puffy and she had a slight rash, but her doctor told us not to be alarmed—it was all benign, he said, indications of her advanced pregnancy. I was alarmed to see that yellowish tint and her swollen fingers, but I did not want to worry my wife.

  My star witness was the county sheriff, a mean little cuss who milked his office and ran rampant over everyone under his charge—prisoners, various deputies, and luckless tenants who lost the ability to pay their rent. He was the tool of landlords, bankers, and Party bosses. His name was Archibald Towne. He had a waxed mustache and a cat’s green eyes. I couldn’t do much about the tribute he collected from his deputies, or the cash he took to keep Republicans from the polls, and all his loot from the landlords. None of this appeared on any ledger. But I could torment him over his transportation bills. He sat in his seat, under a swaying chandelier, and winked at the city’s own counsel, Samuel Bratt, a shyster from Tammany Hall.

  “Mr. Roseyvelt,” declaimed the sheriff to an audience of Democrats, sent from the Wigwam—Tammany headquarters—to flood the ballroom with Party loyalists. “You are going astray, sir, prying into a gentleman’s personal affairs.”

  “Tell him, Townie,” sang the loyalists. “Tell the rube where he belongs.”

  “Quiet,” I said, pounding the committeemen’s table with a pepper grinder from Mama’s kitchen that served as a gavel.

  “Mr. Towne, your private carriage is your own affair. But we have the right to know the cost of your sheriff’s van.”

  The sheriff mocked me with his murderous eyes. He was a murderer, having starved a dozen prisoners half to death at the Ludlow Street Jail.

  “It’s a pity, Mr. Roseyvelt, but the ledger for that particular item has been lost—in a fire. It was an act of God.”

  The sheriff didn’t realize that my own team of detectives had discovered his “lost” ledger in a warehouse that was considered a dumping ground and a graveyard.

  “Ah,” I said, producing the ledger. “This is also an act of God.” I didn’t care how many hidden bank accounts the sheriff had. The ledger was perfectly clear. He was charging the City of New York five hundred dollars a day, which would have been enough to hire a whole fleet of sheriff’s vans. I asked him if the ledger was genuine. He didn’t even glance at it once.

  “It’s genuine enough,” he said.

  “Then how can you explain this outlandish expense?”

  “I cannot,” he said. “It could have been a bookkeeper’s error. I didn’t make the entries, Mr. Roseyvelt.”

  He could afford to exult in his chair. He lived in a modest house on Water Street. His fortune must have been invested under a fictitious name, perhaps by Jay Gould or another financier. I could poke at him with some imaginary lance, but I was nothing more than a minor nuisance. And the sheriff’s own shyster decided to embarrass the Corruption Committee.

  “Mr. Chairman, we would like to assist you in your inquiry and have the Honorable H
umble Jake Hess appear in the witness box. Have you any objections, sir?”

  “No,” I hissed without hesitation. Humble was not on my list. But I had to call him or I would have been accused of nepotism.

  My clerk shouted, “The Commonwealth of New York calls Jacob Hess, Commissioner of Charities.”

  Humble sauntered across the ballroom and occupied the sheriff’s vacated seat. Sam Bratt grinned from ear to ear, like a mad pirate sniffing my destruction. I never hid the fact that I was Humble’s protégé.

  “Mr. Chairman, you seem a bit taciturn. Shall I question the Commissioner for you?”

  I started to protest, but Humble signaled to me with the rapid beat of an eye.

  “That’s your privilege, Counselor,” I said.

  I’d gone to Columbia Law with this shyster—he’d been in one or two of my classes. He was some kind of a grub, who lapped up every word of our law professors. Bratt was in his glory now. He hovered over Humble’s chair.

  “Commissioner Hess, can you tell us how you happened upon your current employment?”

  “Easily done. Senator Roscoe Conkling waved his magic wand.”

  The shyster paused for a moment to punctuate the drama.

  “Not the presidential hopeful and recently retired Republican Party boss?”

  “The same,” Humble said.

  “Presto!” said the shyster, with a grin that could have swallowed up half his face. “You were appointed Commissioner, just like that. And what were your qualifications?”

  “None.”

  All the Party loyalists laughed and stamped their feet, as the shyster moved closer and closer to Humble.

  “And how did Roscoe Conkling acquire his thunder, his magic, his tricks?”

  Humble stared into that audience of Democrats. “From the greatest thunderer of them all.”

  “And who is that?” the shyster asked.

  “Your own boss, Honest John Kelly, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall—himself soon to be retired.”

  The shyster’s mouth swelled with spit. “Honest John is not my boss. I have none.”

  Humble sat like a soldier. “It’s a pity, then. I was there the day you were appointed. I was in the Mayor’s office with Mr. Conkling and Honest John. The Mayor was sound asleep. Honest John says to one and all, ‘We’ll need to bring a new lad onto the Corporation Counsel, some fellah who isn’t too bright and won’t get in our hair.’ I nominated you.”

  “I won’t listen,” the shyster said. “This hearing is adjourned until further notice.”

  I pounded the table with Mama’s pepper grinder. “You’re not the chairman, Mr. Bratt. The witness stays where he is.”

  The shyster muttered to himself and fled the ballroom with Sheriff Towne and most of their Democratic lackeys. I’d never have called upon Humble, since neither of us swam in neutral waters. But here he was as a witness, and here I meant him to stay.

  Humble unraveled the entire skein of misery and desolation, commencing with his department. His investigators couldn’t prevent the bribery on Blackwell’s Island. It didn’t matter how many crusades he went on. The crusaders were often as corrupt as the guards, who sought sexual favors from female clerks and lads with longish hair, while older orphans preyed on younger ones. The island itself, with its public hospital, its penitentiary, its orphan and insane asylums, was one vast crime school, and its graduates returned to Manhattan as living, breathing carrion.

  This was the future that Father had foretold, a city and a nation of troglodytes. And Humble had outlined it all in his little picture of Blackwell’s Island.

  “Then what is the solution, Commissioner Hess?”

  “Only one,” Humble said. “Send Blackwell’s to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Ah, it will simply rise again as some other forlorn Atlantis with the very same asylums.”

  I didn’t wait around with Humble. “Dismissed!” I growled with a knock of my pepper grinder, and I rushed home with Alice and Bamie to West Fifty-seventh Street in this injurious weather. A blinding fog had clung to Manhattan and most of the Northeast Corridor for the past week. The ferries had stopped running. There was a relentless drizzle and an endless delay on the rails, as signals suddenly disappeared between stations. The fog worsened. There was a green mist on most walls; elevated trains were becoming suicide rides as cars spilled off their tracks; the odor of dung and rotting produce wafted from street to street. We locked every window at the mansion, drew the curtains, and lived in a universe of lamplight, a yellow land as dense as the fog.

  I’d almost forgotten Mama. I raced upstairs to her room. She wasn’t asleep. She ruled from her bed with a lingering cold. That’s why she hadn’t come to the hearings.

  “I’m so proud of you, Teedie—the Roosevelt name in every newspaper. And your father would be proud. Do you think Papa’s ghost was at the hearings, guiding you?”

  I did not believe in ghosts. “His presence, Mama, certainly. I had no other guiding hand but his.”

  She sat under the covers in her chiffon cap, like a philosopher, my Lady Voltaire, a blizzard of memories in her blue eyes.

  “Teedie, Papa would like a word with you.”

  I pretended to listen, and there was so much eagerness on her moon-white face, so much unbridled passion for a message from Papa’s ghost, I had to deliver something—a postal card from another world. I conjured as best I could, told how Father had been beside me at the committee table.

  She shut her eyes, and her lids were as fine as the finest crêpe, with blue veins in them. “Teedie, did he tell you to attack or retreat?”

  “Attack, Mother.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s him.”

  And her touch of panic was gone, as she sat like a prisoner in a royal bedroom filled with Father’s relics, that beloved silver box of his with all its artifacts and trinkets—a watch fob with a frayed thread, a key chain of solid gold that once hooked into his belt, a pocketknife that was probably a Christmas gift or memento from Roosevelt & Son; how I could recall that handle of pure pearl and that blade with a British crown etched into the surface, like a mark of absolute fealty. He never picked at his nails with that knife, or cut the strings of a package. But he did reattach a renegade earpiece of my spectacles with the tightening of a screw, and cut the pages of a book that arrived from Harper & Brothers—there was no other sound on the planet like the musical scratch of Papa’s knife against an uncut page, repeated again and again.

  ALICY STILL HAD THAT yellowish cast under the yellow lamplight. Her doctor reassured me. He was in attendance now day and night, as he went from Alice to Mittie like some angel in silent, velveteen shoes. “You must not endanger your bill,” Alice said. “You know how the barons love to bribe. They won’t be as brazen with you in the House.”

  Humble must have taught Alice his own particular art. I had to nurse that damn “Roosevelt Bill” through the legislature, get all the Nightingales in line. But I couldn’t rally my troops from a citadel in Manhattan.

  I was restless, thinking of the Black Horse Cavalry and the harm they could do. I had that caged-wolf feeling while I wandered through the mansion. I went into Mother’s room and borrowed the pearl-handled knife from Father’s silver trinket box. I needed whatever talisman I could get to win against those Albany pirates.

  There wasn’t a cab to be found in this suicidal weather. I strode through the stinking miasma, where folks were invisible a few feet away, and arrived at Grand Central Depot, which looked like a tower of dripping yellow blood; the fog had crept inside the depot, and I had to skirt around a caravan of pickpockets. The train shed was an eerie spectacle of darkness at midday—the incredible illumination of its glass ceiling was gone forever, it seemed. I felt utterly abandoned in this vast tunnel of blanketed light. I lost my bearings for a moment. Suddenly I was part of Mama’s landscape, a ghost among ghosts. Still, I managed to climb aboard the afternoon train to Dutch town.

  A telegram from Alice was waiting for me when I
arrived at my hotel.

  MOTHER RALLYING. I AM FINE. GO BACK TO WAR.

  But I didn’t have the appetite for a cockfight at the Capitol.

  And then Alice went into labor while I was rehearsing my Nightingales. A bellboy knocked on the door of our rallying room with a yellow slip from Ellie.

  JOY ABOUNDS AT WEST 57.

  DELICIOUS BABY DAUGHTER.

  There wasn’t much rancor at the Capitol on Wednesday morning—my enemies hailed me in the corridors; even McManus smiled. “Congratulations, Mr. Ted.” Then a third telegram arrived while I was on the Assembly floor.

  COME HOME.

  ALICE AND MAMA IN TROUBLE.

  EMBALMED IN A FUNNEL of black smoke, my train crept along the Hudson Valley into the deepening fog. The lamps in the car went out. I could not see the sky, or trees, or a bit of railroad track. I was the lone passenger, it seemed. No conductor appeared. Surely there were other passengers—a drummer, a Black Horse Cavalryman, a Nightingale or two? And then a man sat down next to me in the dark. He could have been a captain or a colonel, since he had a kind of military manner.

  “What are you doing here, bub?”

  “My wife and mother are ill,” I said.

  He laughed in the rudest sort of way. “This isn’t the hospital car,” he said.

  The lights flickered for a moment. I caught the man’s features. He looked like Jay Gould, but Gould had his own private line. Gould wouldn’t have boarded a public car, not in a fog that squatted over Albany. We were stalled several times, waiting for some bell or whistle that never sounded once. And when we arrived at the depot that night near eleven, my rude companion was gone. . . .

  Elliott met me at the door with such a shivering look of anguish, I had to shy away from my own brother, or run howling at an invisible moon.

  “There’s a curse on this house,” he said.

  Our bedroom was like an army barracks. Doctors and nurses fluttered about. I nearly knocked over a nurses’ stand. I couldn’t even tell if my baby daughter was in her bassinet. Bamie whispered in my ear. “Bright’s disease. Alice’s kidneys are failing.”