by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
And I had a dream of such utter loneliness and despair that I could feel my head ride right off my shoulders and bounce across the convention hall like some monstrous gourd with a mustache and a pair of spectacles, as Hanna’s delegates and their wives in the balcony hissed and heaped their venom upon me with balled handkerchiefs of spit. . . .
Senator Platt had been the shrewd one, sauntering away in his ambulance. It was, indeed, war with a knife. And I was both victim and winner in the same sordid blow. I would become McKinley’s running mate—Cabot and his Minutemen had seen to that. And Fat Marcus could whimper that the maniac of San Juan Hill would soon be one heartbeat away from the presidency. A very long heartbeat it was, alas, much too long for the likes of me.
Yet in some inner recess, I was still that monstrosity, the dancing gourd. I must have encouraged Cabot, without encouraging him, encouraged Nannie, too, she with the purple eyes, who had more sway in Washington corridors than Cabot himself. Hanna was correct. I did not have to come to Philadelphia, sit with the New York delegation in my long-brimmed black hat, crouching like some candidate, a cougar prepared to kill.
I FOUND NANNIE IN the tea parlor back at the hotel, almost by accident. We sat like two conspirators, ordered a pot of China tea and a brace of buns. Every damn eye was on her. She was wearing a bodice of blue velvet and a military cape. She looked like a gorgeous Cossack in her Burgundy-colored boots.
“I’m selfish, Governor Ted. I spurred Cabot, led him on. I feel adrift without Edith sometimes.”
“Well,” I said, “I could have sat out the convention, stayed in Albany.”
She laughed. “Senator Tom would have flayed you alive.”
Delegates came up to her, knelt like acolytes. They all wanted to be part of her Washington salon. I might as well have been invisible.
“Oh, they’re amusing,” Nannie said. “They expected one of their own clique to suck up to the Major, and you got in the way.”
Then the muck-a-muck himself, Mark Hanna, appeared on the mezzanine, with its little sea of lamps and newspaper sticks, and asked Nannie if he might join us.
“Wouldn’t want to intrude, Mrs. Cabot.”
“Nonsense,” Nannie said and signaled the waiter to bring another chair.
Hanna took out a crumpled slip of paper from his pocket—it was a telegram, not from the Major himself, but from Miss Ida.
CONGRATULATIONS, GOVERNOR, FROM MY WILLIE.
MAY GOD GRANT YOU BOTH A LONG, LONG LIFE.
Hanna smiled at the ploy. I did not merit a note from the Major himself, but from his half-mad missus. I returned the telegram. “Please thank Ida for me.”
“Oh, I will thank her myself,” Nannie said. “She belongs to my Thursday reading club.”
Nannie was the clever one, the diplomat. She stroked Fat Marcus like a feathered bird. “We all want the same thing, Mr. Hanna. A smashing victory for the Major. Governor Roosevelt will do his part.”
Hanna gobbled a bun and left the table like a fat cavalier, kissing Nannie’s hand. She shut her eyes for moment; her eyelids wandered like a pair of stunned butterflies. “Oh, that awful man,” she said. “We will give him the dagger one of these days. We will rip apart his loins.”
Then all the savagery fled from her face as she patted her lips and poured both of us another cup of China tea.
CHAPTER 16
THE GHOSTS OF SAN JUAN HILL
1901
BAMIE HAD A CHILD AT FORTY-THREE.
William Sheffield Cowles Jr., a ruddy ten-and-a-half-pound boy with a spine that was as perfect as a polished row of piano keys, was born three years ago, while I ran for Governor. It was the one campaign of mine that Bamie had to miss. And Sister grieved about it. “Theodore, you might have captured another fifty thousand votes had you canvassed with the rabbis on the Lower East Side.”
“Bully,” I said, “and Boss Croker would have dented their skulls.”
Bamie’s husband, Commander Cowles, was stationed in that grim, gray War Department castle near the President’s palace, and Sister had rented a brick house on N Street that served as my home and headquarters while I was in Washington, as McKinley’s man. It was a very short interlude. I presided over the Senate until it went into recess, after four days.
“I’m done. Hanna doesn’t want me around. He says I might start another war.”
Bamie perused me with a pinched face. My little niece, Eleanor, was in London at the moment, where she attended a finishing school that Bamie herself had selected.
“Teedie, it doesn’t matter one bean what Hanna says. You will conquer them all.”
She watched me mope about. “The Major’s kind enough,” I said. “I had cake and wine in the Red Room with him and Ida. But I’m not allowed near the cabinet. I ought to wear a sign: ‘Part-Time President. All Speaking Engagements Welcome.’ . . . How is Dear Little Eleanor? Does she ask about her uncle?”
That hump on Bamie’s back she hid so well bristled under her shawl.
“I do not like to touch upon that topic, Theodore. She is confused about the relationship you had with her father. And I’m loath to discuss it.”
“Why?” I asked, like a little boy waiting to be slapped, though Sister had never slapped me once, not even when I put my pet salamander in the maid’s blouse and caused a panic in the parlor.
“I will not revisit what cannot be revisited,” she said. “I prefer to talk about your future.”
“I have none,” I said.
She saw how somber I was, and she didn’t laugh. “They fear you, Theodore, and they cannot survive without you. The Major is a porch politician. You’re the one who had to duel that tin Jesus, Jennings Bryan.”
“Bamie,” I said, “I did not duel Bryan. We never debated once.”
“But you followed his tracks,” she said like a huntress, “and outmaneuvered him wherever he went.”
That had been my strategy—to outdeliver Bryan—but I cannot measure how well I succeeded. The Major had all the money in the world behind him, with a hurricane of pamphlets and advertisements in the press, as biographers created one myth after the other about McKinley and TR, both bloodied in battle.
“Sister,” I said, “I think I saw Ellie.”
Her brow deepened and she slumped inside her corset of metal and bone. “Where?”
“I’m not sure. . . . On the battlefield.”
She neither barked nor laughed.
“In Cuba,” I insisted, “while I was charging up San Juan Hill. Ellie’s ghost just might have been there—might, I say, among the other troopers. I did not converse with him.”
She would not succor me. “Brother, you have never believed in ghosts—you dreamt of Ellie. Perhaps you will dream of him again.”
She kissed my forehead—it felt like an affectionate bee sting—and left her Teedie to build his own battlefields. . . .
THE SENATE WITHDREW FOR six months, and I returned to Sagamore Hill with Edith, Alice, and the bunnies. I had books to write—still, I’d never been so idle. I chopped wood, kept in touch with Riders in distress, but I had to hire the Pinks to locate some of my lost cavaliers, with ex-Trooper Taggart at my side. He still had his vitals in Chicago and the Far West. And he used his agency like a vast sweeping net that you might have once found on a whaler; he trolled for Rough Riders who had loosened their grip and did not have a targetable address. I expected as much of cowpunchers who wandered from rodeo to rodeo, ranch to ranch. Taggart had his affiliates track such rovers and keep a strict tally of each man’s whereabouts. We found every last one, those who were incarcerated, or had become a local nuisance. I spent weeks riding the rails with Taggart.
“I owe it to the regiment, sir. And it’s my great honor to travel with you.”
For the first time I could cash in on the title I had to wear. “Vice President” had a bit of prestige in the cattle towns of Montana and Wyoming. We were able to get five cavaliers out of the calaboose. And the Boone & Crockett Club paid for their upkeep
at a rest home in Nevada.
They all blubbered in my presence. That was the hardest part of rescuing them from their private hell.
“We damn let you down, Colonel. We disgraced the regiment.”
“You did not,” I said. “We trained you to fight and then pitched you aside.”
I gave them pocket money. I’d turned warriors into beggars, and it made me livid.
The worst of it was when we had to enter Indian Territory. Trooper Antonia Little Feather had been unmasked again. A certain prosecutor was holding her at the hall of justice in a pretentious little town called Hallelujah Springs. It was crammed with white settlers who hoped to make a killing once the Territory was admitted into statehood. They’d hurled most of the Indians out of this potential paradise. And Antonia Little Feather lost her luck. She fell afoul of the law in a barroom brawl. Antonia bashed a few skulls before the sheriff of Hallelujah Springs and his deputies arrested her and obliged her to strip. They discovered her discharge papers from the First Volunteers and handed her over to the town prosecutor, who wanted to build his reputation in the West. It was strictly illegal in the Territories for a woman to impersonate a man and was punishable with a hefty fine and three years in prison.
So we met with the prosecutor at the hall of justice, Bryson Carterett, and he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. Taggart did a little digging, and he discovered that Carterett owned half the town—the saloons, the barbershop, the dusty hotel, and the land that the hall of justice was built on.
He had a wicked, dancing smile, as if he’d just caught me by the seat of my pants. He was clutching Antonia’s discharge papers.
“Mr. Vice President, the First Volunteers, that’s another name for the Rough Riders, is it not?”
“It is,” I said to this despicable land baron.
“We wouldn’t want word to get out that the Rough Riders sheltered a female volunteer, and that Princess Little Feather fought in your ranks.”
“What are you proposing?” I asked.
“Well, that’s a good question. Colonel, someone like you might do miracles for this town. You could reside here for a month, break bread with us. You could talk up Hallelujah Springs in the corridors of Congress, and support our petition for statehood.”
I wished for one moment that I’d been a Strangler, with a Strangler’s copper coil.
“And what would that do for Little Feather?”
“Wonders,” said Carterett. “I’d release her outright in your custody, erase her very existence from our books.”
Taggart grabbed the back of my coat. “We’d like to have a glimpse of Little Feather before we conclude any deal.”
The young prosecutor stared at Taggart. “And who is this gentleman with the drag-foot, Mr. Vice President?”
“I’m a Pinkerton,” Taggart said.
Carterett smiled like a potentate. “You won’t find any Pinks in this town.”
“We’d still like to see Little Feather.”
A deputy brought her upstairs in some kind of sackcloth, the town’s own hair shirt. The sons of bitches had shaved her skull. She had bruises and bumps on her temples. Her nose was bleeding. She was all buckled up in chains, and Antonia could barely walk.
I didn’t want to ruin her exit from Hallelujah Springs with too much emotion. I signaled to her with my eyes. She didn’t meet my gaze. I had the damn indigos. I’d trained these troopers, and then abandoned them to dust.
Carterett surveyed the room, feasting on his success.
“Well, Mr. Vice President, do we have a deal?”
Taggart nudged me. “We’ll ponder a bit, and tell you tomorrow.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “I’d like Little Feather released on a bond. You have my word of honor, Mr. Carterett. We won’t run.”
“Of course,” he said. “Then you’d all be fugitives. But I’m not releasing Little Feather until we have a deal. The trooper stays with me.”
Taggart went down to the telegraph office, and after that we had breaded lamb chops for dinner at the land baron’s hotel. Taggart ate my portion. He gobbled up all the mashed potatoes and peas. He hummed throughout the meal. All I could remember was Antonia’s hair shirt.
I should have had more faith in Taggart. I went to bed in a sackcloth made of silk and woke in the morning to a different town. A confused rumbling had nagged at me in my sleep. The hotel seemed to rise up from its foundation and drift about in a dream. Finally I looked out the window in my silk nightshirt. I’d forgotten all about the Pinks. They arrived in buckboards, wearing dusters and wide-brimmed hats, with Winchesters cradled in their laps. I’d opposed them while I was Governor. They were mercenaries and strike-breakers at the beck and call of industrial barons. But they’d come here at Taggart’s behest like an army of locusts. They broke into the saloons and served themselves shots of whiskey, then pranced into the breakfast room and seized all the tables except our own. “Morning, Mr. Vice President,” they muttered, tipping the pointed brims of their felt hats, as they devoured every fried potato the kitchen could produce.
They were sinister in their thoroughness. They sent barbers and bank clerks off on a holiday, while the sheriff and his deputies were exiled within their own jailhouse. Carterett was a prince without his princelings inside the hall of justice. The Pinks devastated a dustbin like Hallelujah Springs through sheer attrition. Not a shot was fired. The Pinks preferred a bloodless coup whenever possible. They’d stripped the town and its prosecutor of all their privileges before noon.
Carterett wasn’t the same fellow when we returned to the hall of justice. He had Little Feather in her street clothes, with a hat on her bald head. That dancing smile of his had disappeared.
“Mr. Vice President, I will not tell a soul about Little Feather’s sexual secret, nor will I ever mention her name and the Rough Riders in a single sentence.”
I was merciless, like a man composed of arrowheads. “Mr. Prosecutor, you will do much more than that. You will forget that she ever existed, or else the Pinks will break every bone in your body.”
Antonia still had her bald head. I couldn’t send her back to the reservation. She was used to mischief. She would have to carry some kind of a flag.
“I’ve troubled you, Colonel,” she said. “And it will haunt my days. I should have joined the Army Nurse Corps.”
“Trooper, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We took the hill. You were our standard-bearer. That charge wouldn’t have been the same without you.”
But no reminiscences could help her now. We’d all become victims of that one little hour of glory. It was Taggart who came up with a solution. He could ease her into his Manhattan office as an undercover agent, where she could be both Anton and Antonia. Pinkertons were used to masquerades.
“But if she’s ever captured by some heartless gang . . .”
“Colonel, I won’t let her out of my sight.”
Yet I could never feel quite comfortable about Little Feather as a Pink. There was this nagging guilt. I had created my own little circus of war monsters. And no matter what I did, that circus wouldn’t go away. Linger it would as long as I lived.
CHAPTER 17
THE COWBOY KING
1901
I WAS ON A REMOTE ISLAND IN VERMONT WHEN THE President was shot.
He had two columns of soldiers in front of him, I believe, to funnel every visitor who wanted to shake his hand at the Expo. And I whispered to myself, the Pinks should have been there, or some of my Rough Riders. They would have spotted that peculiar boy with the golden curls, who clung to a handkerchief, a revolver hidden underneath. He could have been an angel or an anarchist. The Pinks would have wrestled him to the ground and carted him off. And the Major would still be alive. . . .
But I was Vice President on permanent recess. I had little to do with the Major and his wanderlust that summer. Our paths never crossed. I had no documents to sign. I saw none. I could have become prince of Saturn’s seventh moon as far as the Major wa
s concerned, and I would still have sat in the dark—official spokesman for an administration that made an invisibility of me. I was the Major’s man at a Vermont fish and game luncheon on Isle La Motte, in Lake Champlain. I wouldn’t wear a rose in my lapel, like the Major, who often awarded such a rose to some winsome bride visiting the White House. The water had an incredible purl, like tiny, moving cracks in a lake of solid green fire. A majordomo suddenly arrived with a very sour look. He whispered in my ear. A telephone call had come from the Secretary of State. The President had been hit, not once but twice, by a lunatic with a baby face inside the Temple of Music. One bullet managed to fall out before he was operated on at the Expo’s tiny hospital; the other bullet couldn’t be found. He was bundled across the half-lit streets of Buffalo by the hospital’s lone ambulance, with a policeman on horseback marking the traffic, then was taken to the Milburn mansion on Delaware Avenue, with its scatter of chimneys and solid brick front, where he had been staying with his wife. And when I arrived in Buffalo, I couldn’t get near the mansion in my carriage. My driver was forlorn. He had a holster at his side.
“We cannot move, Mr. Vice President. We might get killed in all the confusion. I recommend that we untangle ourselves the second we have a chance and return to the station.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m here to see the Major, and see him I will.”
The block had been roped off and was surrounded by a detachment of soldiers with bayonets. These soldiers did not take kindly to me.
“Who the hell are ye, son?” their sergeant growled. He must have recognized my spectacles and mustache. The Vice President meant as little to him as to the rest of the nation.
Cortelyou, the President’s own assistant, with his pince-nez and trim mustache pocked with silver, had to come out of the mansion and fetch me. He didn’t seem dee-lighted to have me on Delaware Avenue. The crisis had passed. The Major was on the mend. He would be back at work within weeks, Cortelyou predicted. I’d become kind of an embarrassment—a twilight creature who seemed to suggest something was out of joint at the Milburn mansion. Ida McKinley kept mumbling to herself. I couldn’t understand a word. One side of her face was a bit sunken, and I tried to soothe her. She kept pinching her own arms.