Jay Gould's end finally came in December of that year, not five months after Cyrus Field's passing. It was said that he declined all the more rapidly from the day of Field's service, that he seemed a man for whom there was no hope and no consolation. Tilden had told no one but Margaret of his curious conversation with a man who saw no evil in the harm he did to those he did not admire, but who seemed to see damnation in the harm he did to a better man and who saw his only hope of salvation to be in restoring the good man he'd broken. It was an obsession that Tilden never quite understood. But, as Margaret pointed out, many dark workings of the mind are beyond all reason and understanding. What of Collis P. Huntington, who built his great house on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and then refused to live in it upon hearing a chance remark that rich men build fine homes only to die in them? What of A. T. Stewart, who spent millions on a gallery of fine paintings and then allowed not a single human being to see them, not even a servant with a feather duster? What of Russell Sage, who will inquire into the cost of a man's suit upon meeting him and will eat no meal costing more than a dollar though he's worth fifty million? Tilden agreed. He could think of none among the very rich men he'd known who'd been spared some sort of madness. Perhaps madness is what is required of one who aspires to be rich. Madness and an essential unattractiveness, because Tilden could also think of none he'd care to meet again in this world or the next if the choice were his.
“Move to Chicago, Tilden,” she said. “Be with me and Jonathan.”
“Come back to New York,” he replied. “You'll find greater peace there with Jay Gould gone.”
“In my mind,” she answered, ”I see Jay Gould's fallen body. And I see a circle of dogs closing on it. The dogs will always be there, Tilden. They'll be there for you, too, in the end.”
“You could watch my back, dear Margaret, as John Flood used to do.”
”I will watch sunsets with you, I will watch our child's face on Christmas mornings, I will watch your naked body on a moonlit beach. But I will not watch your back, Tilden. No one with a choice should live that way.”
So quickly did the years go by. It seemed no time at all before Margaret, who was then to the Chicago Sun very nearly what her friend Nelly Bly had been to the New York World, saw on the wire service reports that Teddy Roosevelt had been commissioned a lieutenant colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry soon after the opening of hostilities with Spain. A phone call to his office on the new Chicago-New York telephone connection confirmed an appalling intuition that Tilden Beckwith, heaven save us, had dashed on down to enlist as one of Teddy's cowboys.
“The Rough Riders are not cowboys, dear Margaret. They might just be the finest light cavalry in the world short of the Ogalala Sioux.”
“Whatever. Tell me that you have not enlisted.”
“What choice have I? Our nation is at war. As long as I have no wife to mourn me, I must do my duty. Of course, if I were married, it would be another matter.”
”I am your wife, Tilden. License or no, I have been your wife for ten years. Have you enlisted or have you not?”
”I have just enough time to rush to Chicago and marry you before the troopship leaves. Then you can come back with me and wave tearfully from the pier.”
“Tilden, you didn't!”
“Not yet. I thought I'd give you a chance to prevent it.”
“I see.”
“You see what?”
“Teddy turned you down.”
“That's not exactly true at all.”
Margaret howled with glee. “He said you're too old, didn't he?”
“Thirty-eight is not old. Teddy's forty, for God's sake.”
“He did. He wouldn't take you,” she whooped.
“This is not a laughing matter, Margaret.”
“Get out here, Tilden. Let's see how old thirty-eight really is.”
“What an absolutely shocking thing to suggest on a public telephone.”
“When, Tilden?”
“Friday next. My wife, you say.”
“If you need proof, wait till you see me box your ears for upsetting me.”
The war with Spain vaulted Teddy into a limelight he never relinquished and of which he took full advantage. He no sooner returned a hero than he announced himself a candidate for governor of New York and won the election handily. Margaret and Tilden traveled to Albany to attend his swearing in. Tilden met privately with Teddy over breakfast during his second day in office. It amused Teddy to tell him that there was already talk of his running for vice president in another two years just on the strength of a single hill climb in Cuba, not that he had any interest in that office. In any case, there was enough to do as reform governor of the state of New York. There was a civil service to be restructured, a wilderness to be conserved, Indian children to be educated, and Negro children to be integrated into New York's schools. On the matter of civil service, he asked, would Tilden believe that there are those who resist the notion that a policeman ought to be able to read and write or be able to approximately identify the president of the United States?
“Clubber Williams,.by the way, is finished.” Teddy rapped the table. “I've told him I'll have his resignation in January or I'll have him in prison by June. It might interest you that his house in Greenwich, the Cos Cob section of it, actually, contributed as much as anything to his downfall. He had trouble recalling how he could buy a Connecticut estate, buy a yacht, and spend thirty-nine thousand dollars on a dock for it, all on a salary of thirty-five hundred a year.”
“Careful budgeting, perhaps,” Tilden suggested dryly.
He recalled the Lexow Committee of the previous year, which had established that the opportunities for acquiring wealth as a New York City police officer were so great that an appointment as a $1200-a-year patrolman sold for as much as $300 on a sliding scale that brought an average of $15,000 for a captaincy.
“One must admire the man's boldness, however. I've always liked audacity in a fellow, no matter what his other sins. I've admired your audacity,Tilden.''
There was something about the way Teddy left that last sentence hanging, as if incomplete. Tilden decided to let it go.
“Has he ever bothered you again, Tilden?”
“Who? You mean Williams?”
“Yes. Did he ever put any further pressure on you, either in Gould's interest or his own?”
“No.” Tilden's eyes narrowed. “I’d never even seen him again except from a distance around town. Teddy, why are you asking?”
“No particular reason.”
“Hogwash.”
Teddy squirmed in his seat. ' 'I thought you and Charlotte would have married by now.”
”I thought we would as well. One day we will.”
”I wondered if there is perhaps something in your past, some secret, some regret, the exposure of which by Williams or Gould or someone else might possibly bring tragedy to a marriage once undertaken.”
“In my past, you say.”
“Yes.”
‘‘‘‘Teddy, what on earth are you talking about?”
His friend looked away. “Gould asked me a question once. He asked me if you could look me in the eye and tell me you did not murder Ella.”
“Look at me, Teddy.”
Roosevelt met his eyes.
“Ella ran from me into a blizzard. I went after her to keep her from going to Ansel Carling. She fell in the snow and I stood over her for what now seems no more than a minute or two. It must have been a great deal longer.”
“And she died there?”
“If I had not gone after her, if I had not stood over her, she would probably not have died. That much is true, Teddy. There is no way around it.”
“Was it in your heart to cause her death?”
”I do not think so.”
“When you left her... when you turned away, what were your thoughts?”
“To be rid of her. To send her and the child back to Philadelphia. To pre
sent Ansel Carling with a bill.” Tilden indicated his fist.
“To divorce her, you mean.”
“Teddy”—Tilden leaned forward—“you are about to tell me that if divorce was on my mind, then I could not have believed that she was dead or dying. I have tried to believe that as well. It is not always easy. I have satisfied myself that I can do little but go on with my life and await God's judgment at the end of it.”
“Well”—Teddy folded his napkin—“when that happens, perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a pardon from the governor of New York in your pocket.”
More years peeled by. Teddy did accept the vice-presidential nomination, he was elected on William McKinley's ticket, and nine months later a stunned nation learned that McKinley had been mortally wounded and that this “damned cowboy” would inevitably be president of the United States. Tilden was a frequent visitor to Washington, once staying for six months as an adviser on the abuses of an unregulated securities industry, and for another four months as a member of Roosevelt's reelection committee. Teddy's first six years in office effectively ended the days of the great robber barons. They were men whom Teddy and Tilden despised as individuals, yet there could be no denying that this relative handful of men had literally built this country. Whether they did so out of personal greed was academic. The government could not have done what they did. It had neither the competence nor the imagination nor the freedom of action. But the government under Roosevelt did learn to put reins on them and to use them, even to learn from them.
Near the end of Teddy's second term, Tilden traveled to Chicago to witness Jonathan's graduation from New Trier High School in Evanston. Jonathan would be. attending Northwestern University in the fall on, to Tilden's soaring delight, a full four-year baseball scholarship. For the next two years he saw Jonathan play as often as his schedule permitted and read with pride the occasional reports that the Chicago White Sox had a covetous eye on him. That pride turned mixed in 1907, when Jonathan announced he was quitting school to pitch for the White Sox at $3000 a year. That was twice, he told his mother, what he was likely to earn at any other livelihood upon graduation. Margaret was unimpressed by that argument, as was Tilden. But Tilden did recognize that athletic careers can be cruelly short and that the opportunity might not come along again. He extracted a promise that Jonathan would keep up with his studies even while traveling with the team and that he would eventually return for his degree.
Jonathan's career was even briefer than Tilden anticipated, lasting not quite two seasons. The pitch on which he'd built his reputation was the spitball, followed by two variations of his own design called the scuffball and the greaseball. By the end of the very year he'd signed, both leagues outlawed the spitball and all other creative uses of foreign matter. Jonathan spent the intervening winter trying to develop an alternate repertoire, but his efforts, particularly on his fastball, brought on a worsening tendinitis in his shoulder. The White Sox kept him on for the better part of the 1909 season, but the shoulder failed to improve. He was retired in time to register for the fall term at Northwestern. Jonathan graduated the next year, stayed on as a graduate instructor and baseball coach, and eventually became an associate professor of English literature.
In 1916, the Great War in Europe erupted in full fury. Jonathan tried to enlist as a flyer but was rejected because of his age, twenty-seven. A relieved Margaret then prevailed upon him to wait out the current school year before trying any other branch of the service. During that year, Jonathan began keeping serious company with a former repertory actress who was the drama coach at Northwestern, Barbara Holman. Sweetheart or no, there was a war on and many of Jonathan's friends were already in France. Jonathan volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force in June of 1917. He passed the physical and was as good as in uniform when he was asked to raise his right hand for the oath. An officer, one he recognized as an acquaintance of his mother's, asked him to please raise his hand higher. Jonathan complied but with obvious pain and difficulty. The officer asked him to step out of ranks and report to another room for further examination by a doctor. The doctor concluded that Jonathan's chronic shoulder problem was such that he could neither salute nor sight a rifle satisfactorily. Jonathan was sent home. When he asked his mother whether she'd seen a certain officer lately, she could not imagine, she insisted, what he could be talking about. This near miss, however, became the impetus for Barbara Holman to press her intentions. They were married at the end of l917.
To Margaret's astonishment, Tilden arrived for the wedding in a private railway car. He had advised her that he might bring another guest or two. Margaret let out a shriek as Laura Hemmings stepped from the car behind him, towing Dr. Miles Palmer, whom she'd long since married, and their two blond daughters, both in their early teens. Next came Big John Flood in one of his wildly checked suits that never quite fit him, Nat Goodwin with the latest and last of his seven wives, and a waving, shouting Peggy Gannon, who was in her fourth term in the Connecticut State Legislature. Last off, his bellowing voice preceding him, was all three hundred pounds of the former heavyweight champion of the world, “Yours truly, John L. Sullivan,” as he announced his presence to the city of Chicago. Teddy Roosevelt, who'd been ill for some time, was represented by five dozen hothouse roses for Margaret and an autographed photo of himself for the newlyweds, framed in the claws of a bear he'd shot in Wyoming.
The next two years, however, brought more sorrow than joy. Most of the joy attended the birth of Tilden's grandson, Whitney Corbin. Margaret had hoped that the boy would be named for Tilden, but Jonathan had chosen to honor his mother with his first-born by giving the baby her unsuspectedly false maiden name. At the christening, Margaret could only shrug helplessly at Tilden, who crossed his eyes in return.
The first sorrow came with the passing of John L. Sullivan not long after the wedding. A heart attack took him at his small Massachusetts farm the following February. Tilden was a pallbearer, as was Jake Kilrain. Margaret missed the funeral because she was traveling on assignment from her newspaper but came later and spent several days with Kate Sullivan, John's widow.
Less than a year later came the numbing news that Teddy Roosevelt had died in his sleep of a blocked artery in his chest. Margaret rushed to New York when word came over the wire service. It was her first return to that city, except to change trains, in nearly thirty years. She attended the funeral at Sagamore Hill with Tilden and John Flood, both of whom were honorary pallbearers. Tilden did not speak at the service nor could he. have done so if he'd been asked. He was crushed. Most of that winter passed before Tilden was able to accept a world in which there was no more Teddy. Margaret stayed a month with him, then forced him to spend another month with her in Evanston. They had no sooner recovered from that loss when the influenza epidemic, which was killing millions worldwide, reached into Evanston and took Barbara Holman Corbin. She was carrying Jonathan's second child at the time. Margaret and Lucy Stone Tuttle undertook to raise young Whitney just as they'd raised his father.
In the meantime, Huntington Beckwith, the false son sired by Ansel Carling, grew up, was sent to Yale, and then to Columbia Law School. He was sent anywhere he had the slightest interest in going as long as it kept him away from Beckwith & Company. Margaret reminded Tilden on several occasions, the latest being on one of their stays at a charming Wisconsin inn they'd discovered, that Huntington could hardly be blamed for the circumstances of his birth. Truth be told, his life thus far seemed more blameless than either of theirs.
“But that's just it,” Tilden said, agreeing. “There's no blame to him but there's little else, either. No passion, no joy, no friends to speak of, no interest in athletics, and above all he's extremely neat. I detest neat people. He doesn't even perspire. His body somehow repels dust. He speaks only when he is spoken to, and while he's waiting to be addressed he sits there and watches. Like cats watch. I detest cats and neat people with equal feeling.”
“He resembles Ansel Carling, doesn't he,�
�� Margaret said softly.
”I suppose he must. My right fist develops a twitch whenever I stand close to him.”
“You have not been kind to him, Tilden.”
”I am not kind to cats, either. But they go away and he doesn't.”
“You cannot punish him for Ella's sin, Tilden. That is wrong. It is also unworthy of you. Can there be no place for him in your business if not in your heart?”
“As for my heart, it has been filled to overflowing for more than thirty years. It has been broken again and again by a great lady whom I seem doomed never to possess. Even the spaces between my heartbeats are filled with you. It's a wonder that I find room to love Jonathan as well.”
“And Whitney? Not Whitney?” She smiled.
“Whitney, too. He fills the cracks where my heart has broken in the knowledge that he will never call me Grandfather.”
“He'll know one day. I promise.”
“Yet one more uncertain treasure.”
“What is that?”
. “It's from a poem I read. I regularly torture myself by reflecting on it. It goes, ‘Margaret's love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure? Endless torments dwell about thee. But who would live, and live without thee?”
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