by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
She clutched at the chain guarding her throat, as her body rocked back and forth with a rapid, irregular rhythm. Her anguish couldn’t have been rehearsed, no matter how artful Hummel was in such manipulations.
“He promised to marry me . . . and I listen.” And then she began to weep.
“Now, now,” said Silent Abe, “mum’s the word. We’ll have our moment in court.”
“The baby,” I said.
And she reached into the bassinet with such a delicate swipe of her shoulders that I was immediately drawn to her. She was no hireling of Howe & Hummel. She held the little boy in her arms, while I had to endure a dizziness of shame. Elliott Roosevelt Mann. The boy had the crystalline glare of Ellie’s eyes and the contours of his forehead.
“Might I see the woman alone?” I asked the two pirates.
“Can’t be done, TR,” said Velvet Bill. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”
He must have signaled somehow. Fräulein Katie curtsied and was gone—with the little boy in the bassinet.
“Well, what will it be?” asked Silent Abe. “Amicable or not? A poor chambermaid like Miss Katie could rip into a jury’s heart . . . if we fed her a few significant phrases.”
“Out,” I said. “Get out.”
The pirates knew they had won. They’d penetrated the Roosevelt castle, and they didn’t have to rely on the firepower and brutal force of the Pinks. They had a buxom chambermaid, a bassinet, and a little boy cursed—or blessed—with Ellie’s looks. I wired Sister, who’d gone to comfort Anna and the children in Neuilly. Elliott had fled the sanitarium in Graz and was on the prowl somewhere.
ELLIE UNSOUND.
ANNA MUST RETURN WITH THE CHILDREN.
HE AND ANNA MUST LIVE APART.
I WILL NOT BE SWAYED ON THIS MATTER.
Someone had to seize the reins. The moment Anna left for the States, Little Brother showed up in Neuilly, like some madcap magician in a purple cape. He was on morphine again. He’d attached himself to a drunken artiste, who was as depraved and besotted as he was. They had masquerade balls where men and women strutted about in the raw, and pissed on the garden wall like wild beasts. I tried to lure Ellie back home. I cut off all his funds. He got into a brawl with several firemen, and was hospitalized for a month. Even that didn’t cure him. He took up with a band of clochards, lived like a beggar on the banks of the Seine. He stole scraps of food. He had a terrific row at the local gendarmerie. My little brother had become the wolf-man of Paris, with whiskers that covered his ears. Sensing his own precipitous decline, he had himself committed to the insane asylum at Suresnes. But he had no intention of remaining there. He maneuvered to have himself released.
Bamie returned with Anna, and she was much less sanguine about having Elliott declared a lunatic.
“Teedie, he loves Anna desperately.”
“And fornicates behind her back.”
Sister rose up on her beleaguered spine. She had to wear special shoes that lent a little violence to her movements, like a battering ram.
“You cannot instruct him in morals, you cannot. He does not have your gifts, Theodore.”
“Have you seen the girl?” I asked Sister.
“What girl?”
“Katie Mann. You know, Anna’s Bavarian chambermaid. He wrote her love letters, promised to marry her. And now Miss Katie is a mother.”
Bamie squinted at me. One of her eyes was weaker than the other. “Her lawyers are Howe & Hummel, I imagine. You fell for their monkeyshines. They presented you with a boy in a bassinet. It’s their bread and butter—paternity cases.”
“The boy is real,” I said. “The letters are real, and so is the locket.”
Sister turned away from me. I could see the flare of her back, despite the corset she wore, with metal bands. “Ellie will be lost if we betray him now—you must go to that madhouse on the hill and reason with him. He loves you. He will listen.”
THERE WAS A DONKEY CART waiting at the depot. I did not see another soul. I was the one and only passenger in the first-class carriages to get off the train in Suresnes. The conductor saluted, as if I were a general in a satin coat. I wouldn’t wear a duster on such a short trip. I wasn’t a cowboy in a sandstorm. I was a bereaved brother, searching for a solution to Elliott’s nightmares. The driver of the cart arrived in a top hat and a slightly ragged cape. He thought it a miracle that I could chat with him in French. He did not have a high regard of Americans.
“They are all lazy, monsieur—and rich.”
I wouldn’t argue with such a lout.
We began to wind our way into the hills. I could see the Seine at a precipitous angle. In the sunlight, the river was a layer of burnished glass. I could not find a ripple. The birdcalls were deafening. I had to hum the different songs.
“Ah, you are a specialist, a professor of birds? They come here very often, the birdmen, with their notebooks and colored chalk. They belong in the asile.”
The donkey stopped moving on the steepest hill.
“We will have to walk, monsieur—she is a lazy girl.”
I climbed down from the cart, approached the ass, and blew softly into her ear.
The driver was mystified, as the donkey continued her climb along the rocks. But I did not get back into the cart. The château suddenly appeared from behind a thicket of trees like a mirage rising out of a sudden scatter of birds—it gave the singular impression of a fortress with moist skin. The walls were white. The turrets clicked in my ear like castanets. . . .
I was startled at first. There were no wards at Suresnes, no knotted waistcoats to calm the violent ones, no tubs with electric currents to exorcise a demon or shock the morbidity out of some stranger. The lobby was as luxurious as any grand hotel inscribed in Baedeker’s. The manager wore a monocle. The women paraded in petticoats and parasols. I did not see one maniac wandering about in a soiled nightshirt. But I did see a birdman carting a nightingale in a red cage. I wondered what he was doing here. Was he an inmate or an entertainer? I answered the nightingale’s call with a long tweet of my own. And then the birdman and I had a duet. He was wearing slippers and a laboratory coat.
“Ah, you’ve come with the Audubon people.”
“No, my brother is locked up in this hotel.”
He peered at me from behind the bars of the red cage.
“We don’t lock up people, monsieur. We are not savages in Suresnes. We comfort our patients. . . . Your brother must be the polo player with epileptic fits.”
“Elliott doesn’t have epilepsy. He’s an alcoholic.”
“And yet he faints from time to time. He blacks out, cannot recall who or where he is. He has seizures, monsieur. . . . You will find him upstairs.”
The birdman bowed to me and went off with his nightingale. He was the chief quack of this clinic. A nurse led me to Elliott’s quarters. My brother had a hand-carved armoire and a canopied bed. He did not seem glad to see me. His jaw was rippling. His mouth was full of spittle. His eyes had a vacant sheen. That boyish charm was gone, that air of lightness he once had, that pull of the born athlete. I could never compete with Elliott on a pony.
He was wearing a rumpled foulard and a flared shirt with torn elbows, like a deranged artist in some magnificent castle cage. He performed a pantomime in my presence, as if I were an invisible interloper, there and not quite there. He swiped a basket from the table, dug his fist inside, and began to distribute imaginary crumbs.
“Ellie, what on earth are you doing? Kiss me, for God’s sake. I’m your brother.”
Not a whisper of hello, or even a challenge about my right to invade his quarters. He kept distributing the crumbs.
“I’m parceling out pieces of cake,” he said, “to all the urchins. You were with us, Teedie. The beggars were a frightful nuisance. And the odor was oppressive in that heat.”
“Where?” I asked. “When?”
And suddenly my brother swelled out as if a bellows were hidden in his torn shirt. “Our guide got lost. We strayed into
a back alley, and the urchins descended upon us; the little monsters overpowered Papa and clawed at our clothes. Papa broke free and acquired a basket of cakes . . . and we fed the little monsters, scattered all the crumbs.”
I did recall our panic, the sea of faces and fists, and Brave Heart’s resilience, his ingenuity in buying a basket of cakes.
“But why does this play on your mind? It was years and years ago—in some sour alley in Naples.”
“Because,” he said, “I can still hear the suck of their mouths as they gobbled the cake. Bamie was marvelous. She stood with Papa, toe to toe. . . . How was the crossing, old boy?”
I didn’t quite know how to answer him. Specks of clarity had returned to his eyes. I tried to summon up the crossing for Ellie, the perpetual rocking of the paquebot, the wind that swept from cabin to cabin—it was much safer in second class—and finally overturned the captain’s table, so that we sat with silverware and lamb stew in our laps.
“I was on my arse with a chatterbox, Ellie. She was on intimate terms with some lost cousin of ours. Frightful stuff—a black sheep who escaped our grasp. A regular Bluebeard. I had to listen while we were camping out. I told her that this cousin didn’t concern us. We weren’t the Roosevelts of Hyde Park. We were the North Shore clan, with plenty of Bluebeards of our own.”
I couldn’t entertain Ellie. All his bonhomie was gone again. I could not recognize my own brother—the dash, the vigor, the hearty appetite. He looked bloated and forlorn.
“Where’s Bamie?” he asked. “Why isn’t she here?”
Bamie had accompanied him to Graz. She swayed the masters of the asylum into allowing her to occupy the room next to his—it had never been done before, that a patient should have his own personal keeper. Sister remained in Graz as long as he did—until he ran away.
“Damn you,” I said. “She’s with your wife and children.”
That didn’t satisfy Elliott. “You cannot keep me in this dungeon,” he said. “I won’t allow it.”
“Dungeon,” I repeated, staring out past his balcony. The river glistened like a long, silver snake, and the songbirds flew from hill to hill like rockets with a feathery twist.
“You hate me,” he said. “You resent me.”
I did not know how to rekindle that love and bonhomie we once had, on the field and off. We’d been playmates together, rivals, and champions. We’d annihilated entire teams with Ellie’s grace and my resilient right arm. “Why should I resent you, why?”
“That disaster at Oyster Bay,” he said. “Edith lost her baby, and you cannot forgive me. You were sprawled on the grass like a dead man. You barely had a pulse.”
It was the Challenge Cup. And I was master of the field. But I could not keep up with Elliott’s litheness, with the singsong of his moves. His mallet had much more magic than mine. Brother rode me into the ground. Our ponies collided. I could see a great rip in the sky before I fell. Yes, I’d frightened Edie, and she had a miscarriage. And Meadowbrook won the cup—three years ago.
“That’s how little you think of me,” I said. “I’m vengeful and spiteful.”
“Why else am I in this madhouse?”
He was in a château without one lock on its windows. He’d roamed the streets of Paris with an army of clochards, caused havoc wherever he went. Was I supposed to applaud?
“You sent my wife and babies back to the States, commanded them. It was like a court-martial. I was never even consulted about my own desperate fate.”
I didn’t want to stir up my brother, remind him of the widow he took up with after Anna left, of the bacchanals in the back garden, of the gendarmes who were called in, fisticuffs in the street with firemen, of whiskers that covered his ears during midnight rambles along the Seine.
He began to shiver, and he turned away from me. My little brother was sobbing. “I cannot bear it without Eleanor, not a moment, Teedie.”
I had robbed Elliott of the one creature he loved the most, gangly little Eleanor, whose mother dressed her like a ragamuffin, in hand-me-downs. Anna couldn’t be bothered to shop for her own daughter. And the little girl inherited half her wardrobe from Baby Lee, the other half from Edith, who shopped with her at Altman’s, much to Anna’s dismay.
Ellie must have brought one of Brave Heart’s old cigar boxes to Suresnes. It still had its own curious perfume—or perhaps I imagined the aroma of Papa’s tobacco leaves. Little Brother retrieved a batch of letters from the cigar box.
“She writes me every single day, and I do not have the heart to answer. . . .”
“Come,” I said, removing the pencil box from my waistcoat. “I’ll help you write to Eleanor.”
I always kept a box of pencils somewhere on my person. I hoped to sketch that nightingale in the lobby.
Elliott laughed, though it was not the sound of a sane man—it did not have a seasoned timbre. He could have been a satanic little boy caught in an act of mischief. Perhaps a tub with electric current might have jolted my brother out of his sad display.
“You as my amanuensis? That’s a clever card. What would you write to Eleanor on my behalf? That her father was a wolf-man who terrorized Paris and had to be locked away?” He paused, wiped the spittle from his tongue with a crumpled handkerchief, and his satanic smile returned. “I do recall a wolf-man with whiskers who visited your dreams—as a boy. Didn’t I sleep with you in your bed during those visitations? Didn’t I drive him off with a flap of my arms and a fierce yell, like one of your cowboys?”
“You did.”
“Then where’s the loyalty?” he asked.
“But I am loyal,” I had to insist.
“And I’m the prodigal son. I disappointed Father. I did not have that strength you could summon up like a Sioux warrior, that clarity of purpose. You wrote your books, you had a ranch, and now you catch the foxes in the henhouse as our Civil Service Commissioner.”
“And failed at all three,” I said. “My books do not sell. I cannot bring my cattle to market—the blizzards have wiped me out. Elliott, there are more and more foxes in the henhouse. The Pinks are about to slaughter the Sioux, and I will not be able to stop their carnage. The President is blind to all my requests.”
“And you will fail here, too,” he said. “I will leave this henhouse. My lawyers are preparing a letter for my release. You cannot kidnap my wife and children.” He clenched his fists. “I’ll kill you first, Teedie, I swear I will.” He was sobbing again. “I try to write Eleanor. The words won’t come. . . . Why do you have such little faith in your own brother?”
“Katie Mann,” I suddenly volunteered.
He was fumbling now, the polo player without his mallet and his pony.
“I am not aware of such a creature,” he said. But he’d never learned how to dissemble. He’d gone to Morton Hall once or twice, and the riffraff nearly stole his pocketbook and his pants. His mouth was quivering. “Who is—Katie Mann?”
“Your mistress. You had no difficulty writing her dozens of letters. You gave her a golden locket—from Tiffany’s, I trust. You talked to her of marriage. You used all the cunning of a safecracker. And when Howe & Hummel peppered you on her behalf, you fled the scene of the crime. . . . You did not have the ten thousand Hummel demanded.”
For a moment his blue eyes were clear as crystal. “Twenty,” he said. “They demanded twenty thousand.”
“And what about Elliott Roosevelt Mann?”
I watched a mask form like a film of molten metal over his face.
“Don’t believe a word. Hummel borrowed the brat from an orphanage. He’s a bunco artist. Bamie must not give him a cent. He will hound her for additional payments for the rest of her life.”
I stared at him now with the unbridled fury of a hunting hawk. “Ellie, I saw the little boy with my own eyes. He has your face and your carriage, he even winks like one of us. He is a Roosevelt, even if we deny it in court, and stave off Hummel and his army of Pinks. . . . Did you really tell the poor girl that you would marry her?�
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“Yes.”
“And the locket,” I said, “was the sign and the cement of some insane clandestine romance?”
“But it wasn’t from Tiffany’s—I swear.”
He’d rotted that poor girl, left her in a pinch with a boy who would never comprehend who he really was. And we had to eclipse the little boy and his mother—or we would be pulled into a royal scandal about the Roosevelt baby in the closet.
“I’ll stay at Suresnes,” he said. “I’ll give up the family name if you like. I’ll disappear.”
It was pure Elliott, that fusillade, a bit of bravura, as if he were still in the saddle, riding across some polo grounds within his skull. No. Brother would return within a fortnight. I’d found him a little clinic in Illinois. He’d have to undergo a rigorous five-week cure. We’d enroll him as a certain Mr. Peters. Bamie took care of all the details, I told him.
“And after that?” he asked in a wavering voice.
Bamie was far more charitable. But I had to insist. “You will keep away from Anna and the children for two years.”
His mouth was quivering. “Two years. That’s monstrous.”
It was monstrous, but I couldn’t have him siring a litter of brats, like a champion horse on the prowl. “You are living on borrowed money, Elliott, and on borrowed time. You must prove your worth.”
“And my redemption,” he said, “to a heartless brother with the brave heart of an oak. . . . I must visit Eleanor, at least.”
I had to deny him even that. But he’d brought himself to ruin, and I had to save Anna and the children at all cost.
“Brother, you’re a brute, and you’ve always been one. I’ll kiss you now.”
Papa always kissed us. We’d hover around the great bear, and savor the silky scratch of his whiskers. It was our biggest treat, finer than peaches and ice cream on our summer porch. But there was a hint of malice in Ellie’s kiss, like the hollow clack of a solitary soldier.
IT WAS THE LAST TIME I saw Ellie alive. I had been playing toy soldiers and toy kings with his life and mine. Perhaps he might not have faltered if the fates hadn’t been so unkind. The solitary soldier did indeed go out to the clinic in Illinois, disguised as Mr. Peters, and took the cure. He kept his promise and did not seek Anna and the children. Little Brother resurfaced in the wild as a gentleman farmer, who managed an enormous estate near Abingdon, Virginia. The isolation seemed to suit Elliott. He prospered for a while, paid off his debts, a bronzed god in the burning sun. I hadn’t reckoned that Anna could not survive without her solitary soldier. Their separation roiled her mightily, and she died of diphtheria, just like that—she was all of twenty-nine. Six months later, their older boy, Elliott Jr., succumbed to scarlet fever, and my brother broke. He abandoned his Virginia estate and fell out of sight.