by John Smolens
“YOU must be exhausted, Presley,” McKinley said. He was awake, lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. His stomach was an enormous mound beneath the linen sheet. “You’ve been sitting there the whole night.”
Rixey got up from the chair by the window. “I must have dozed off, Mr. President.”
“Indeed.” Slowly McKinley turned on his side, which in itself was a good sign. He faced the large electric fan that had been installed in the corner of the room. “The breeze is wonderful. You know how Mrs. McKinley and I detest the heat. I trust she is keeping cool as well?”
“Yes, sir. They have installed fans in most of the rooms. The first lady is resting comfortably, and she’ll visit you later.” Rixey took the mercury thermometer from the nightstand and shook it out. “Let’s see how we’re doing this morning.”
“I feel very good.”
“Pain?”
“No. Stiffness, yes. But not pain, really.”
“You slept through the night, it seemed.”
“I dreamed of food.” The president tilted his head back and opened his mouth.
Rixey inserted the thermometer, making sure it was under the tongue. “I realize you’re hungry, but I think we’ll have to wait to give you anything. The other doctors and I have consulted on that and we think it’s best to continue to give you nourishment by injection for the time being.”
The president mumbled something around the glass thermometer.
“Doctors?” Rixey said. “How many? Too many, perhaps. But they all agree that you are making great progress.”
McKinley nodded. His eyes looked very alert.
They waited a minute in silence, and then Rixey removed the thermometer and read it. “Only slightly above normal,” he said. “Good.”
“Then I might have something to eat?”
“Not yet.”
“Perhaps a cigar?”
“Definitely not! Now I’ll bring my colleagues in and we’ll take your other vitals.”
“That should sufficiently exhaust me.”
“Perhaps we might give you a little broth later today.”
“God bless you!”
Rixey went to the door and told the nurse waiting in the hall that the president was awake. He remained by the door, and watched as the group of doctors gathered about the bed.
Cortelyou came into the room and whispered, “He’s looking like he’s ready to get up and walk.”
“He rested well through the night and does seem stronger,” Rixey said quietly. “But I don’t quite have the confidence of some of my colleagues.”
“Want to hear a terrible irony?” Cortelyou asked. “Do you know what was in another room at the exposition hospital during the operation? One of these new X-ray machines. It had been brought to be displayed as part of the exposition—and nobody even knew it was there! That might have enabled them to locate the other bullet lodged in his back?”
“It might have,” Rixey said.
“Well, it gets worse. This morning an X-ray machine was delivered here at the house—sent by Thomas Edison himself. But some of the doctors looked it over and determined that it was missing a part and wouldn’t work.” Cortelyou raised a hand to smooth back his shiny dark hair. “At least there’s good news from New York.”
“J. P. Morgan?”
“Yes. Even though the stock market doesn’t open for a few more hours, he has sent word that there are no signs that Wall Street will panic.”
FOR hours Hyde sat watching the street from the window of his room on the second floor. He knew what he should do: go down to the canal and crew on any barge bound for Albany. Run, get out of Buffalo—it had been the answer since he was twelve, when the protectory wanted to put him on an orphan train. They called it “placing out.” He had read letters sent back from other boys who had been put on trains and sent west. In small-town depots the boys would be lined up on the platform and local families could pick one. It was like an auction, and in most cases the boys lived on a farm, where they were worked like animals. Several of the boys wrote that they’d tried to escape, but because the land was so flat and empty, they were easily caught and returned to their owners. They were prisoners, they were slaves, and Hyde wanted nothing to do with being placed out. Every time there was talk of an orphan train, he’d run away.
And he always ran to the Erie Canal. It went east and he felt safer on water. Marcus Trumbull said you could better see what was coming at you across water. Trumbull’s barge was called the Northern Light, and he was himself an orphan, eventually taken in by a farming family with land on Cripple Creek, north of Otsego Lake. Hyde’s first job was as a hoggee—he walked the mules along the towpath, for which he received a few pennies a day, food, and a berth on board at night. By the time he was fifteen, he’d walked to Albany and back several times.
Hyde eventually became a first-rate pilot and lived on board the Northern Light for several years, until Trumbull got into an arm-wrestling match in Utica. One night at Dominique Picard’s whorehouse it took Trumbull more than six hours to beat Red-Eye Sam, the strongest arm on the Erie Canal. A lot of bargemen lost money over the match, and in the early-morning hours several friends of Red-Eye who took exception to their losses came aboard the Northern Light. Trumbull and Hyde put up a good fight but were outnumbered. In the end the boy was held down and made to watch while Trumbull’s right arm was hacked off with a meat cleaver. It took him two days to bleed to death in Picard’s bed. For good measure the Northern Light was burned to the waterline.
Trumbull used to say that a man who had no home, no family, was free to go wherever he wanted. At night they would often attend workers’ meetings held in factory towns along the canal. Speakers got the audience riled up over higher wages and better hours, and then the police would usually show up and bust heads. Trumbull liked to say he believed the socialists with one ear. You don’t keep your barge moving, you end up in one of them factories, where you can’t see the sun rise and set on the water. So Hyde considered the canal home, but this time he couldn’t run to it so easily, not while Motka was still working in Big Maud’s house. He was unaccustomed to thinking about a woman the way he thought about Motka. It made him nervous, and he tried not to think of her being a whore. He supposed it was love.
In the evening he watched as a boy came down the street and climbed the porch. He knew that the boy had been sent by Norris, who wanted a meeting at the Three Brothers Café Sunday morning. Hyde also knew he had no choice. The president of the United States had been shot and there was no running from this now.
He found Norris sitting in a back booth, eating steak and eggs. Norris hardly acknowledged him when he sat down, and worked on his plate in a serious, thorough fashion. The fried eggs—at least half a dozen of them—had been broken, their yolks smeared over the blackened top of an enormous T-bone, which was blood-raw in the middle. There was a side dish of baked beans, laced with sweet-smelling molasses.
Hyde ordered coffee.
There was a stack of newspapers next to Norris’s elbow. “Nobody found Czolgosz,” Norris said, tapping the papers with the point of his steak knife, leaving a red-yellow dollop to soak into the page. “Nobody found Fred Nieman. He was your man and you didn’t find him in time. It’s in all the papers, you know.”
“I was there, right outside that building.”
“Yes, well, apparently he was inside the Temple of Music and he managed to walk right past half the U.S. Army with a gun in his hand.”
“And Pinkertons. The papers say there were plenty of them, too.”
“True,” Norris said. “But you were the only one who knew what he looked like.”
“The crowd was huge,” Hyde said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Norris cut into his steak and forked a large piece into his mouth. “What wasn’t your fault, Hyde?”
“The whole thing. Czolgosz acted alone. He’s the most solitary man I’ve ever seen and he never stopped moving. No one—no one—was going to sto
p him. He is what he says he is, Fred Nobody.”
“Well, he’s somebody now, the papers are making sure of that,” Norris said, chewing deliberately. “And you are nobody, mister. I’ll tell you something else: I don’t believe he acted alone. No. Maybe, just maybe, you’re in on it, too? You and that little Russian whore?” He watched Hyde’s face, and smiled. “Ah, so you’re sweet on her. I can understand why.” Norris looked down and cut his steak. “It all fits, Hyde. You spent a lot of time with Czolgosz. I think he convinced you to help him. He recruited you. Just like I recruited you—or thought I did. You’ve never been certain about all this—you lack … conviction. I can see it in your eyes. You believe in his ‘duty’—that’s what the papers are saying he calls it. Maybe he convinced you to set me up so I would think I had him covered. Maybe you just didn’t try as hard as you could to find him.”
“That’s not true, none of it.”
“Who knows what the truth is? Do you?”
“You believe we’re all the same. Ignorant criminals.”
“I think it’s a crime you people were ever allowed in this country.” Norris took a flask from inside his coat and topped up his coffee. He put the flask away and leaned over his plate. “Now let me eat in peace.”
“You owe me money.”
Norris wiped up egg yolk with a piece of bread. “You and Czolgosz and I have one thing in common: Russian cunt.” He paused, and ran his tongue out to collect a bit of crust from the corner of his mouth. “I know that both you and Czolgosz were with the little bitch shortly before he shot the president.”
“I went there to try and stop Leon. I told you that. Czolgosz is not afraid for his own life—that’s why he was dangerous. I said that to those men in that house on Delaware Avenue.”
Norris put his fork down, got his wallet out of his coat pocket, and placed a five-dollar bill next to Hyde’s coffee cup. He took up the knife and resumed cutting his meat. “Pick it up and we’re square.”
Hyde hesitated, and then as he reached for the bill Norris swiftly drew the blade of the steak knife across his wrist. Hyde stared down at his hand as though he’d never seen one before. For a moment there was the neatest straight line in the flesh, and then blood flowed out.
“Now we’re square,” Norris said.
Hyde got to his feet, holding his hand against his coat, and left the restaurant.
MOMENTS after Hyde left the café, Norris looked toward the counter. A young man in a gray suit named Jack Feeney got up and didn’t look in Norris’s direction, though he briefly touched the brim of his hat as he went to the front door. He paused a moment out on the sidewalk, and then followed Hyde down the street. Norris pushed his plate aside and took out his cigar case.
THE regular medical bulletins issued from the front steps of the Milburn house were so reassuring that some government officials left Buffalo on Tuesday and returned to Washington. The vice president also made plans to rejoin his family in the Adirondacks.
Rixey remained in McKinley’s room for hours at a time. He was exhausted, but he found his nerves were even more frayed when he wasn’t near his patient. McKinley’s pulse held steady, between 112 and 122, and his temperature hovered around 100 degrees. His urinary output was low, but the doctors agreed that wasn’t a great cause for concern under the circumstances. He received nutritional enemas three or four times a day, and was given small sips of beef broth.
The president received guests for short durations. The doctors and nursing staff rotated into the room with military precision. Mrs. McKinley came often, but the first lady was so overwrought that she had to spend most of the time in bed in a room down the hall. McKinley’s brother had come out from Ohio and was a great comfort to the first lady. The son of Abraham Lincoln, Robert, who was the president of the Pullman Company, traveled to Buffalo aboard his private railway car and paid a brief visit to the president.
Tuesday night Rixey could not sleep. It was after three a.m. and he sat in the chair by the window, gazing at the president, who lay on his back under the bedsheets. He heard the creak of floorboards out in the hall and went to the door. Opening it, he found Cortelyou in his bathrobe. Without speaking, Rixey returned to his chair by the window. Cortelyou came into the room and stood at the end of the bed; after several minutes he took the chair from the writing desk, placed it next to Rixey’s, and sat down.
“The other doctors are all sleeping through the night, Presley,” he said quietly. “Some are talking about leaving Buffalo.”
“I keep thinking about President Garfield. When he was shot in the back at that train station in Baltimore, it took seventy-nine days for him to die. From what I understand, he suffered from an abundance of physicians, too. But they could not agree on treatment and essentially he died as a result of neglect.”
“That’s certainly not the case here,” Cortelyou said. “This procedure this afternoon—does it have any significance?”
“I don’t think so. When we removed some of the sutures around the external wound, we found that a slight infection has developed there. We will continue to wash the skin with a solution of iodine and hydrogen peroxide. If the infection worsens, we’ll open the wound a little more and we may have to remove some of the skin.”
“Should this be mentioned in the bulletins?”
“The consensus among the doctors is that this is a typical reaction. Overall, they believe he’s headed for a full recovery.”
“But what do you think?” Cortelyou asked.
Rixey stroked his mustache with his fingers. “I think we should see how he is by, say, tomorrow afternoon before we say anything about this in a bulletin. Some of the doctors are even talking about giving him solid food soon. And the president seems to be very comfortable—he’s not mentioned experiencing any significant pain.”
“Then you should be sleeping like a baby.”
“So should you, George.”
“But here we are, Doctor.”
Women nurses could not be asked to perform enemas on the president, so three male nurses had been brought from the nearby marine hospital. Wednesday morning they came to Cortelyou’s room while he and Rixey were preparing the next press release.
“We wish to speak to Dr. Rixey in private,” Palmer Eliot said.
“Mr. Cortelyou should hear whatever you have to say,” Rixey said.
“All right,” Eliot said.
“Come in, please,” Cortelyou said.
He sat at the desk and Rixey remained standing, while the three men sat on the daybed. Eliot was a hospital steward and had clearly been designated to speak for the other two; he sat between Vallmeyer and Hodgins, who were both privates. All three men wore white tunics and had identical close-cropped haircuts.
“Is there a change?” Rixey asked.
“The enemas, sir,” Eliot said. “The president’s rejecting them.” He gazed at Rixey, seeming hopeful that he wouldn’t have to continue. “Things were going well at first. But now …” He shook his head.
“Which kind?” Rixey asked. Cortelyou turned to him. “George, we’ve given him Epsom salts and glycerin to help clear his bowels, and that’s been successful. And three or four times a day we give a nutritive enema. With a stomach wound it’s the best way to provide some nourishment.”
“What’s it consist of?” Cortelyou asked.
“Egg, water, and a little whiskey,” Rixey said.
“Interesting,” Cortelyou said.
“That’s the one that we just gave him, sir,” Vallmeyer said. “It just won’t stay in him. It’s doing him no good now.”
Rixey said, “All right. Try again in two hours and report to me.”
They all sat still.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Cortelyou said softly.
Almost gratefully, the three men got up from the daybed and filed out of the room. Rixey looked out the window at the groups of men gathered on the sidewalk and in the street: Secret Service, Pinkerton agents, soldiers, and the ubiquitous members of the
press. They smoked, they talked, they appeared bored.
“We haven’t mentioned enemas in any of the press releases,” Cortelyou said. “I want to give the public sufficient information, but it seems only prudent to not mention such procedures. I’m not going to change that policy, not now.” He held up the sheet of paper. “This release is already written. I think we should deliver it downstairs and wait and see what happens in the next few hours.”
Rixey nodded. “I don’t envy you, George, always having to gauge these things.”
Cortelyou got up from his desk. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to issue a public announcement about the state of the president’s rectum.” He went to the door and, before opening it, he said, “I could use a good stiff whiskey myself.”
“No egg?”
“And no water,” Cortelyou said. He smiled briefly, though it seemed to require considerable effort. “And I’d prefer to have it administered in a more traditional manner.”
They went out into the hall and down the main stairs. The front door was open and through the screen door they could see that a crowd of reporters had already assembled on the lawn in anticipation of the next press release.
That night the weather changed and a high wind buffeted the Milburn house, rustling its ivy-covered brick walls. Rixey dozed on and off in the chair by the window while McKinley slept peacefully. That afternoon the surgical team had removed more infected skin from around the superficial bullet wound. It was decided that this, too, should not be mentioned in the press bulletins. Instead, Cortelyou announced that the president had been allowed to eat a small piece of toast, and he was taking larger quantities of beef broth. Many of the physicians who had been hovering about the Milburn house since last Friday had now left. They believed that the president’s condition had progressed beyond the point where peritonitis might develop. As a navy surgeon, Rixey had seen his share of gunshot wounds. After the initial critical period, recovery was always slow but steady. To some degree, he was relieved to see the doctors disperse. What the president needed was solitude and rest.