by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
Sagamore Hill required another chief clerk, but Bamie was reluctant to intervene. A delicate wire connected the former mistress of Sagamore Hill and the current one, and that wire could be untangled in a moment of duress. Bamie inherited her old bedroom on the second floor, and we took her furniture out of the barn—her chiffonier, her footstools, her four-poster, her lamps with the Chinese shades. And suddenly we had two women in iron corsets, though Sister’s was permanent, and Edith’s wasn’t.
I sensed the confusion in Little Alice, as if the tiny planet she had constructed with Edith at Sagamore Hill had started to crumble. For a moment she could not locate herself and wondered aloud if she belonged to Auntie Bye or Edith, and I was somewhere in the middle—her older brother, perhaps, another sibling . . . with a mustache.
Baby Lee grew imperious—it must have been out of fright. “Auntie, you haven’t combed my hair in ages.”
And Sister’s crooked back seemed to slump right into the sea outside Edith’s window. She must have wanted to hug the little girl and bite her arms to death with love and devotion.
“Child,” Sister said, just as imperious, “don’t you have a nurse?”
“But Nurse doesn’t know how to brush, not like you.”
“Well, you have a papa.”
And Little Alice stared at me with the subtlest of pinpricks in her blue eyes.
“Gracious, where is he, then?”
Little Alice owned the two of us, and she wasn’t even four.
“Child,” Sister said, “I have bills to pay. Do you want this house to collapse? You won’t have butter with your bread.”
It was Bamie who taught Little Alice how to converse with illustrious strangers and to cut a slice of bread into little truncheons, and butter each truncheon with a delicate stab of the butter knife. It didn’t matter what Edith did, or how the two of them had conspired. Baby Lee was still Bysie’s girl.
“I could help you,” Alice said. “I’m good with figures. Mother taught me, you know.”
Baby Lee was hurling barbs like a gunslinger. It wasn’t Auntie alone who had given her so much poise. Edith had contributed to the education of that little monster. She sat with Auntie at Edith’s desk, propped up on a kind of oversized pincushion. The entire staff at Sagamore Hill had to parade in front of this desk. They weren’t equipped to deal with a humpbacked czar and a blue-eyed czarevna who guarded every banknote and silver coin.
“Are you satisfied with your employer?” Auntie Bye asked the furnaceman.
“Yes, mum.”
“Then why do you come to us with coal on your chin? It’s a sign of disrespect.”
The furnaceman hopped about on one leg, like a stork with a fortune of black feathers.
“I’m down in the coal bin, mum. I have to breathe in all the coal dust.”
“Don’t you have a washbasin?”
“Most certainly, mum.”
“Then wash,” Auntie Bye said and ordered him out of her sight once Alice handed him his wages.
Now it was the czarevna’s chance. No one was spared. She interrogated her own nursemaid.
“Nurse, why are you always so sad around me?”
“It’s part of my profession, Little Mum. I’m not paid to smile. I have to keep track of your tricks.”
“Then do so with a smile. Or you will be dismissed.”
The nursemaid was cunning, of course. “You didn’t hire me, Little Mum. Mistress did.”
“Ah,” Auntie said, “but Mistress is not herself at the moment. And we are her surrogates.”
The nursemaid bristled. “I have seldom taken orders, mum, from a child who is in my own charge.”
But Bamie was at her best. “Little Mum is under my supervision. And you can consider her my lieutenant. You may go now.”
Those servants who had tried to take advantage of Edith’s malaise soon discovered that they could not slacken for a moment—nor could I.
“You must go back into government service, Theodore. The nation is in dire need of you. There are spoilers, spoilers in every government post.”
I was weary of Republicans and Democrats. They seemed to have the same barons and mischief-makers. “Did you forget my last campaign? The Cowboy Candidate couldn’t even conquer City Hall.”
“Yes,” she said, “but that campaign will earn you dividends—in the future. You were the youngest candidate ever.”
Indeed, she wanted me to return to the old heave-ho, but it wasn’t politics that really chafed her.
“You have left me to drift, Theodore. I must pretend that Little Alice is mine again when the truth is I am barren. That child was my angel of mercy.”
I started to speak, but I could sense her rancor—in the stiffening of her back. She loved me to distraction, but she had her own private well, and I could not breach the darkness of it.
“Brother, do not say another word, or I will scream. I will sit next to Edith in a sun mask. We will swallow this house in one great splash of silence.”
Sister returned to her chores as interregnum mistress of Sagamore Hill and did not abandon the czarevna. I was at their mercy. It was Little Alice who delivered my daily allowance, coin by coin. She was already an heiress. Grandfather Lee had bequeathed her a yearly stipend that was far greater than mine. Edith guarded every cent for her, even during her little exile on the sofa.
Her collapse didn’t last into the spring. One afternoon she removed the metal stops of her corset. Her face was no longer half frozen. She was back at her desk. The servants bowed to her with a look of conquest in their eyes. “Morning, mistress.”
There wasn’t a conflict of power. The two mistresses remained perfectly civil. Edith thanked my sister.
“We are forever grateful, Bysie.”
It was the czarevna who had the most to lose. She went back to being a child. She had to stop giving commands to her own nurse. And I had my Edith again. She had not been a wife to me in months. I could play the big bad bear. “My darling,” she said, “can you forgive me? It was like living in a cave.” We could fire the wet nurse. Edith wandered around with my male heir in her arms, carried Little Prince Ted from room to room.
Bamie hired a cab and left in the middle of the night. She did not want a blizzardy goodbye. She left a note pinned to the scale in my dressing room.
TEEDIE, YOU MUST FIND ANOTHER REPLACEMENT DURING EDITH’S NEXT FIT.
I CAN NO LONGER PLAY THE PART.
I HOPE ALICE WILL NOT FORGET HER AUNTIE BYE.
YOUR DEVOTED BAMIE.
Edith had her bedroom stripped; the furnaceman carried Sister’s bedposts and footstools into the barn. I watched him from the piazza, as he crisscrossed the road with every article on his back, tottering under the weight of it all, while I had a clean view of the orchards and the woods and the wheat fields that dipped down into the swollen water.
CHAPTER 7
ELLIE
1891–1894
THE DARLINGS OF ALBANY CUTTHROATS THEY WERE, reeking in perfume and rotten silk, Big Bill Howe, with all his corpulence and diamond rings, and Little Abe Hummel, the angelic one, with his fiddler’s fists. They’d sent their runner, with a personal note.
MUST SEE YOU.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
HOWE & HUMMEL.
I scratched out their seal and scribbled, Messrs. H & H, I have no time for such mysteries. You’re welcome to meet with my counselor.
A second runner came, with my message crossed out.
BEST TO HAVE A HEART TO HEART.
WOULDN’T WANT THIS TELEGRAPHED
TO YOUR ATTORNEY, MR. R.
YOU WILL LIVE
TO REGRET.
I’d just come back from a sojourn in North Dakota. I’d gone there of my own accord after an uprising of the Sioux on a reservation near the Little Missouri. They’d torn the settlement apart, set the commissary on fire. I saw a hill of ruins that belched gray smoke. These Sioux weren’t strangers to me. I’d watched them ride their painted ponies
across my ranch. Now they skulked in their moccasins, with whiskey eyes, like prisoners wandering in and out of the smoke. They’d become hostage to the local Indian agent, a chap called Curly Bell, who was a bounty hunter with pockmarks on his skull. Bell had been buying up parcels of Indian land and stealing grub, it seems. The Sioux didn’t have a single say over their lives. Their children had no schools to speak of. This agent had been double-dealing at the post, selling alcohol under the counter. I fired him on the spot. He spat in my face.
“Commissioner, your word don’t mean piss. I’m the President’s man.”
Indeed, he had Pinkertons as armed guards. I still intended to bring him up on charges before the Civil Service Commission. I wrote out my report to President Harrison, who had appointed me to the Commission, thinking it would be a sinecure, a political plum, like it was for the pair of louts who were my fellow Commissioners, but I had a job to do, and I would damn well do it. Mr. President, the tribes had good reason to rebel. We need paid Indian judges and police, not Pinkertons. And we can’t have schools without school teachers. Nor can we have agents who have no understanding of tribal justice. The Indian Bureau cannot sit wantonly outside the Civil Service. That is a prescription for disaster and despair.
The next time I returned to Indian land, a Pink approached me with a Winchester cradled in his arms. He handed me a slip of paper. That was the oddment of it all. He hadn’t come to do Curly’s bidding and tussle with me. He was a mere messenger for those two Manhattan pirates.
IMPERATIVE.
HOWE & HUMMEL
They must have hired the Pinks to locate my whereabouts. But I hadn’t informed a soul, not even my fellow Commissioners. I should have gone back to the District to file my report. I went to Manhattan instead, on a whim, to lick my wounds. The Dakota Sioux would have no respite from that lying Indian agent. They’d have to suck on clay and school themselves on the wind of their own words. Their rifles were locked inside the armory. They wouldn’t rise up again. The Pinks weren’t put there to patrol the reservation. The Indian Bureau had hired those damn detectives to scatter the Sioux, a clear violation of the Dawes Act. I couldn’t rely on Harrison, that little gray man. So I sulked in Bamie’s parlor. And I had to contend with the theatrics of Howe & Hummel.
“What is so urgent that you had to track me to a reservation in the middle of nowhere?”
Both of them had suspenders embroidered in gold. But Hummel had frayed cuffs. His collar was imperfect. He was trying to look like a slightly elegant hobo, but he still looked tatterdemalion to me.
“Commissioner,” said Little Abe, “the Pinks are in our pocket. We can have them vanish from the Badlands at a moment’s notice.”
“But that’s not why you’re here,” I said.
“No,” said the fat man in the elegant sleeves. He had his own foyer at Delmonico’s, filled with chorus girls, and that’s where he mingled with politicians and members of the criminal class. He was known as Velvet Bill, because he could hypnotize a jury with the purr of his voice. He could also toss an occasional lightning bolt. He was irresistible in patent-leather shoes, as he performed his slick ballet. A banking scion might murder his mistress or his wife in front of half a dozen diners at Delmonico’s, and Howe would have him declared insane. The banker would serve a month or two in the millionaires’ ward on Blackwell’s Island, and reclaim his throne at Chemical or Chase. And this wizard, Velvet Bill, had sent the Pinks to look for me in South Dakota.
“TR, it’s a delicate subject. That’s why we asked for a private rendezvous, not a visit to our offices, where the press might be involved. We are not looking for scandal. We represent a certain Catherina Mann, otherwise known as Miss Katie.”
I stared hard at these pirates through the gold rim of my pince-nez, but I could not get them to squirm.
“And what does your client have to do with me?”
“Very little,” said Velvet Bill, “and quite a lot.”
“She was your brother’s mistress . . . and still is,” said Abe Hummel, who had a habit of hurling Velvet Bill’s darts and bolts. I’d dealt with Howe & Hummel at hearings in Albany and Manhattan, where they represented the usual riffraff summoned to testify before some oversight committee. Silent Abe would whisper into a ruffian’s ear, and it was Abe’s testimony we heard, Abe’s non sequiturs. He had a talent for getting his clients to rumble and reveal nothing at all.
“Gentlemen, my brother’s mistresses are not my concern.”
“Ah,” said Velvet Bill, his thumbs hooked into his waistcoat. “But Katie Mann is very much your concern. She was your brother’s chambermaid, come all the way from Bavaria. He seduced Miss Katie, sir, had trysts with her in the attic. She carried his child. Your brother has abandoned her and moved to Europe with his family for the duration.”
“He’s taking the cure,” I said. “He’s currently at a sanitarium in Graz.”
“But the damage has been done. Her reputation is at stake—and so is yours.”
And now it was apparent why the Pinks had hunted me like a pack of hounds. These pirates were sniffing blood and money, Roosevelt blood and Roosevelt money.
“I won’t be privy to blackmail,” I said. “This chambermaid could have had a hundred suitors.”
“Hardly,” said Hummel. “The girl is pure. We have a locket inscribed to her and letters in Elliott’s hand.”
I knew about the mistresses. There had been other lawyers, other claims, other letters “in Elliott’s hand.” But I’d tossed those shysters out of my parlor. None of them had the ammunition and the audacity of Howe & Hummel, who could pick and choose their clients like the most brazen of killer vultures. Velvet Bill rarely lost a case in court. That’s why the accused always settled with the injured party, however extravagant the claim. No one seemed to want Velvet Bill’s corpulent shadow to linger very long.
“And what is the name of this wanton child, the unwanted one?”
The pirates were humming to themselves.
“You mean the little bastard?” Velvet Bill asked in a silky voice, with a wink to his partner.
I scowled at him. “Yes, the little bastard.”
“El-li-ott Roose-velt Mann,” Hummel said, pronouncing every syllable like a sinister song. They expected me to strike back. But I had encountered their tricks in court.
“A Roosevelt, you say?”
They nodded in unison like a pair of thieves.
“And on the certificate of birth, what father is listed?”
“None,” said Velvet Bill, “none so far. Born out of wedlock, that’s what is inscribed.”
“And the laundress will want a bit of relief?”
“Chambermaid, sir,” said Hummel, “who had her own room in Mr. Elliott’s Manhattan townhouse until a short while ago. . . . She couldn’t survive on less than ten thousand dollars.”
They could not see my anger—or my contempt. They were rogues of the law, who thrived on human carrion. There was little doubt in my mind that Elliott had dallied with Miss Catherina Mann. I had hoped he might change his habits after he fell in love, and it wasn’t with a creature from the demimonde. He couldn’t have found such an exquisite beauty at a brothel. Miss Anna Hall of Tivoli-on-the-Hudson could hurl any male into an absolute spell of devotion with her shapely figure and the rare blue eyes of a startled fawn. Later I would find out that she was frivolous, that she cared more about her own little pleasures than curbing Elliott’s appetites and wild promenades. He ruined Bamie’s parties with his drunken jaunts. I no longer invited him and Anna to Sagamore Hill. Ellie couldn’t stop drinking. And he’d become addicted to morphine after a bad spill on the Meadowbrook polo grounds. He had bloated cheeks and sullen eyes. And Anna seemed to care about little else than the social calendar. I felt sorry for their children. I was quite fond of little Eleanor, a creature who had not inherited a pinch of her mother’s charm. She was the ugly duckling of the Roosevelt clan, with a terrible overbite and no chin at all. And philanderer that he was
, Elliott still adored the duckling.
“I suppose you went to my little brother first for the ten thousand.”
Silent Abe sucked me in with his solemn eyes.
“That we did, TR, we most certainly did. But he denied any knowledge of the liaison, denied it most vehemently, even after we read him portions of his own letters to Miss Katie.”
It wouldn’t have mattered. Elliott had used up most of his inheritance, and he relied on Bamie for hard cash. He absconded to France with his brood. Anna rented a house on a quiet street in Neuilly, and she went on a binge, buying up hats at the Bon Marché. In the end, it was Bamie who paid for the hats, Bamie who went over Elliott’s bills like an exchequer with a crooked back. But Neuilly couldn’t save my little brother. He fell into a deep gloom and was carted off to Graz.
“The little boy, where can I find him?”
“Outside your door,” said Silent Abe, with his angelic smile.
I was furious. “Has she been waiting all this time with the boy?”
“Miss Kate brought him in a bassinet,” said Velvet Bill. “Shall I invite her in?”
She was plump and blond, and had a slightly bovine look about her, with shoulders as broad as Bamie’s. She had the thickened wrists of a mechanic. But her eyes weren’t hard at all. She was wearing a locket, Elliott’s, I assumed, in the shape of a golden heart. The bassinet was huge, and she nearly tottered under the burden of it.
“Help her, for God’s sake!”
Velvet Bill clutched the bassinet and plunked it on Bamie’s sideboard.
“Herr Roosevelt, I do not mean to bother,” the chambermaid chirped in a Bavarian accent.
“Ah,” said Silent Abe, “you mustn’t converse with Mr. Roosevelt on your own, my dear. We’re your representatives. We have your best interests at heart. Mr. Hummel and I are your voice in all matters regarding Master Elliott.”
She wasn’t bovine at all. I’d misjudged her out of some idiotic sense of superiority. My own anger had blinded me. She was a Bavarian girl who had lived in Elliott’s attic and meant to find a husband in America—she found my little brother instead, and was rewarded with a baby out of wedlock.