Taft 2012

by Jason Heller

  Then it landed. It bounced. It rolled.

  Right into the cup.

  “Bully! Kowalczyk, did you see that?” Taft thrust his half-club into the air. “Incredible. My first drive in a hundred years, and by golly it’s a hole in one.”

  “Ready for the next one, Mr. President?”

  Taft squared his body and stared into the magical glowing green. There’d be time to go outside after lunch. Or tomorrow.

  http://www.etsy.com/listing/62899327/clip-on-taft-mustache

  HANDMADE! WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT MUSTACHE

  Did you know that William Howard Taft was the last president to wear a mustache? Now you can pay tribute with this stylish clip-on version. It’s an absolute must-have accessory for any political junkie this season! You, too, can evoke the spirit of a more dignified American era at any costume party, activist rally, rock concert, or just for fun around town. Made of white felt flecked with silver glitter, it measures eight inches tip to tip. And it’s styled just like Taft’s signature crumb catcher, with both ends cheerily upturned so you can smile three times as hard as a wimpy clean-shaven person! Gentle plastic clip won’t hurt your septum.

  Ships from United States.

  FROM THE DESK OF REP. RACHEL TAFT (Ind.–OH)

  Notes—Fri. 18th—meeting with Fulsom Foods lobbyist

  —International Foods Act to include provisions governing proper handling of overseas livestock involved in producing food item imports. Fulsom lobbyist says impractical, will bankrupt small farmers. I point out Fulsom doesn’t in fact work with small farmers but with poverty-wage laborers in giant agri-factories. Lobbyist suggests revisiting definition of “small farmers.” I suggest Fulsom meditate on well-established definition of “regulation.” Conversation is off to a great start.

  —Is he serious? Fulsom wants to debate the definition of “food”? Not “processed food” or “raw food” or “organic food” or “healthy food,” but the whole concept of food??? Is this to do with genetic modification? No—what he calls “more sophisticated” method of chemical synthesis. Will look at their white paper but am highly dubious to say least.

  —No, I cannot give out a mailing address at which Wm Howard might receive housewarming gift of a Fulsom Baskotti Bounty. Come on, now.

  CLASSIFIED

  Secret Service Incidence Report

  BBO20111119.005

  Agent Ira Kowalczyk

  At 0925, guard detail attempted to escort Big Boy to visit Library of Congress on foot, per his insistence. Made it two blocks east before rock-star phenomena kicked in: crowd amassed at a faster rate than the expedition’s walking speed. Big Boy was swarmed by civilians. Guard maintained tight perimeter, but the crowd was too enthusiastic to maintain a respectful distance per my instructions. Mob stopped short of being a riot, with everyone smiling and cheering and waving and snapping cell-phone photos, but the expedition was obviously unsustainable in this fashion so we returned to Big Boy One. Big Boy insists on going out again despite the security risk, so we will try it incognito. He won’t shave off his mustache, so we’ll trim it as small as he’ll let us and put him in a T-shirt and baseball cap.

  SEVEN

  If it weren’t for the street signs, Taft would have already been lost. Even in his own day, the city had been a labyrinth, at least compared to Cincinnati. Granted, Cincinnati was a far larger city. But Cincinnati had been a home. A genial city, an honest city. Washington, however, was run by a perverse logic as confounding as the city’s layout. Taft’s mind, sharp as it was, had always knotted itself into a pretzel trying to figure it out, just as his calves knotted now as he ambled in the general direction of Union Station and the Supreme Court.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a stiff rubdown with some witch hazel,” he muttered, smiling as he did so at an elderly woman passing him on the sidewalk. She scowled at him as if he he’d wagged his tongue at her. “And that’s another difference between Washington and Cincinnati,” he added as soon as she was out of earshot.

  Oh, but it felt good to stretch his legs and see people, no matter how surly they might be, no matter what ridiculous clothes he had to wear or how many plainclothes agents were in a ten-foot radius. His head felt clearer than it had in a long, long time. Even before his hibernation—he snorted at the word’s ursine connotation; surely some venomous journalist had already applied it to him—things had been tumultuous. The election had been a disastrous affair all around, a humiliation inexorably unfolding around him day by day for a solid half-year as Teddy—his friend, his mentor, the very man who’d encouraged him to run for president in the first place—stepped back into the limelight to denigrate Taft’s performance with ever more colorful language, ever more vehement invective.

  And yet, the electorate had loved that about Teddy, hadn’t they? They loved his safari-hunting, warmongering, hot-air-spouting passion. By the time November rolled around, even Taft had been resigned to the situation. Wilson seemed a solid enough fellow. Let him spend every night losing sleep over the world’s endless, bloody conflicts! And, in all honesty, Taft had felt a massive weight leave his shoulders the instant Wilson and his wife stepped into the White House that morning in March of 1913. Already Taft had been looking forward to returning to Cincinnati, finding work, perhaps even going on a real diet. He’d tried to manage his weight while in office, but then, out of the limelight, he hoped to peel off the extraneous seventy pounds he’d put on since being sworn in four years prior.

  Of course, he’d never had the chance. As he rounded a corner onto D Street, he tried to focus his newly sharpened thoughts on the day he’d disappeared. All he could remember was taking a walk in the rain—then waking up with Butt chasing him across the South Lawn—

  Wait. Butt? He’d meant Kowalczyk, of course. How odd.

  Then it all came back to him. Butt. His aide-de-camp. His dearest friend. He had died—but not after Taft’s disappearance. Butt had died in April 1912, along with his traveling companion on the Titanic, Francis Millet. That’s why Taft had built the Millet–Butt Memorial Fountain, just across the way from the South Lawn Fountain. That’s why Taft had, in his oafishness, blundered toward the fountains after waking. It was one of the few things his exhumed brain had been able to remember.

  Taft shuddered. It was only just past noon, but a chill had crept into his bones. He pulled his coat tighter about him. His stomach grumbled.

  “I hear you, old friend,” he said, changing course abruptly and crossing the street, incurring the wrath of a honking and altogether too fast automobile. So much was new in Washington; a hundred years, after all, was a hundred years. But surely there were some things from the old days that remained. “Yes, I hear you.”

  THE COUNTER OF WALDEMANN’S DELI hadn’t changed. Taft had to restrain himself from rubbing his eyes. The televisions in the corners of the room never used to be there, of course. And people surely never used to sit at the tables while speaking on their telephones. These telephones—so tiny, and no cables!—should have surprised Taft, but oddly they did not. In fact, he was more surprised when Susan had told him wireless telephones had come into vogue only a few years earlier. In his time, Marconi’s telegraphy had successfully transmitted Morse code between ships on open water. For some reason, he’d assumed they’d all have wireless telephones in his own lifetime.

  That was to say, his natural lifetime.

  But the rest of it looked the same. The gleaming counters. The checkered-tile floors. Even—yes!—the framed photograph of Taft and Butt hanging on the wall, although it had faded and collected dust to the point of being almost unrecognizable. He started to call Kowalczyk in from the door, where he stood guard, to show him the memento, before he remembered that incognito was the order of the day.

  “You gonna order?” The gruff voice came from behind the counter, but all Taft could see was the top of a bald head with a paper hat perched askew there on it.

  Taft froze. That voice. He knew it.

  “Mr. Waldemann?”r />
  The short man peered up at him from behind the counter. He wielded a cleaver in one hand and a bottle of mustard in the other. “No, it’s the Meat Fairy. Come on, I ain’t got all day. What’s your order?”

  Taft couldn’t believe it. Surely Mr. Waldemann, the proprietor of Waldemann’s Deli, had been dead for decades. Yet here stood his spitting image.

  Of course. Waldemann’s had always been a family business. Three generations of Waldemanns had worked behind the same counter together when Taft and Butt had come here every Thursday for lunch. It was one of their rituals; each week, under the pretext of a round of golf, the two of them would sneak out, evade the Secret Service, and stroll down to Waldemann’s for a brisket sandwich. He felt for all the world like a boy playing hooky again; he and Butt would laugh and gossip about the White House staff while gorging themselves on sandwiches as tall and as wide as their hats.

  And this little man? Why, he must be Waldemann’s descendent. His voice, his temperament, his lack of height: all Waldemann.

  “Yes, sir. My apologies. I’d like a double brisket sandwich on rye, if you please. And an egg cream.”

  “On rye, eh? As opposed to …?” He lowered his head, grumbled, and began slapping at the side of an electric meat-shaving contraption. Once the rickety machine reached a sufficiently high pitch, he began feeding a skull-sized chunk of beef into it.

  The smell engulfed Taft. Oh, how he’d loved these sandwiches. He’d always had a hard time explaining just how comforted food made him feel. When the world was at his door and the dogs were barking at his heels, eating was the best way to take his mind off it all. The orderliness with which he ate his food, the fastidious way he’d mop up each morsel.… He knew that, in many ways, he spent so much time eating simply as a means of procrastination. He’d always had that problem, even as an athletic and relatively well built young man. But what was one to do when facing the enormity of all the world’s problems? Especially when, without fail, they all wound up on his desk?

  “Order up!” yelled Waldemann, who then rang a bell on the counter. The same bell the Waldemanns had always rung. The sound made Taft’s mouth burst into salivation. At the end of the counter sat a monumental sandwich and what may well have been a halfgallon of egg cream in a tall, frosty glass.

  Taft had to keep himself from running to the cash register. Once there, he pulled out the wallet Kowalczyk had given him. “Here, good sir. How much will it be?”

  “Nine seventy-five.”

  Taft gaped. He looked at the cash register to make sure he’d heard right. A sawbuck? For a lone man’s lunch? What had happened to this country? He’d have to look into the state of the economy. As soon, of course, as he’d finished this marvelous-looking sandwich. As Waldemann stared at him, Taft flipped through the wallet’s contents, pulling out and then pocketing a series of what appeared to be colorful, rigid business cards. Finally he found the (odd-looking!) currency. He handed a $10 bill to Waldemann, who squinted at him.

  “Keep the change, dear fellow.” Taft grinned at his own munificence.

  “A whole quarter? Gee, you’re too kind.”

  Indeed, Taft had to agree.

  Duly equipped with sustenance, Taft found the table toward the back of the small eatery, the one that had been unofficially reserved for him and Butt during the era of their frequent patronage. Remarkably—and, he liked to muse, due to his unassuming nature—he seemed to go mostly unrecognized during their weekly lunches. But at least once a month, a wide-eyed patron would approach him and either ask to shake his hand or make some unceremonious quip about the girth of both his gut and his government.

  But that was before. Today, a woman sat at his table, buried in a newspaper, oblivious to his presence.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, approaching from across the table. “I would like to ask you a favor. This table has … a certain sentimental attachment to me. Would you at all mind if I asked you to move?”

  The woman peered over the top of her paper at him. She was middle aged and a light-skinned Negro, Taft now noticed—no, he must remember to think African American, as Miss Weschler had told him was now proper—but dressed deceptively young for her age. She blew across her cup of coffee, her eyes still on him. “You know, it’s been fifty years since a white man made me give him my seat. I’m not so sure I want to go back to that right now.”

  Taft didn’t quite catch the meaning of her words, but he got the cut of her jib.

  “My deepest apologies, ma’am. I didn’t mean to put you out.”

  “I was joking. No offense taken.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not in the mood to move to another table, but you’re more than welcome to join me.”

  Taft grinned and sat down. “My name is Bill,” he offered.

  “Well, of course it is, dear. My name is Dee Dee.” She held out her hand.

  What a remarkably self-possessed woman! “Delighted,” he said, taking it. Bold and strong—now that’s how one shakes hands, regardless of one’s gender. His mother had shaken hands that way. Nellie, too.

  “Out for a stroll, Bill?”

  “Yes, indeed! I’ve always loved a brisk day in D.C. Sometimes it’s the only thing that can lift my spirits.”

  She nodded toward the sandwich he’d already begun attacking. “That and some brisket.”

  “Too true, too true. You know, Dee Dee,” he said, washing down a mouthful of meat with a swallow of rich, sweet egg cream, “D.C. isn’t my native land, but I do believe that if I’d ever lived here by choice rather than necessity, I’d have come to enjoy it much more than I do.”

  “I hear that. I’m no native either. I’m from New Orleans. Katrina made me move up here, to live with my daughter.”

  “And who is this interloping Katrina?” he asked, abandoning the egg cream’s inadequate straw and tipping back the glass for a gulp.

  She laughed. “Oh, you are too funny. Here.” She picked up a napkin and reached toward his face. “You’ve got that stuff all over your mustache.”

  Taft didn’t flinch. What a novel development. Clearly, a white man and a Negro woman sitting together in a restaurant was of no matter in the twenty-first century. He was less surprised than perhaps he should have been. He was, after all, a Republican, a member of the party of progress. In his heart of hearts, he had always believed it an inevitability that racial tensions would somehow ease as America grew and prospered, and that “separate but equal” was but a temporary measure.

  Some had thought the president should address the question. But for the executive branch to overstep its boundaries and poke its nose into such social matters was, in Taft’s estimation, unconstitutional. Of course … he hadn’t balked at stretching executive power to bust trusts or form the Postal Savings System. Was he merely rationalizing his handling of the Negro issue? Had he been a coward? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d shied away—or outright run away—from one of the many urgent issues that had pressed like the stone of Sisyphus upon his administration.

  “There,” said Dee Dee, wiping the last of the egg cream from his whiskers, “that’s better. Lord, are you always such a mess?”

  “Just a hearty eater,” he said with a chuckle. “Some say I’m famous for it.”

  “Oh, really?” She leaned across the table, a mischievous look on her face. “Bill, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I know who you are.”

  “Oh?”

  “Uh-huh. Seen you on TV. You were even in my history books when I was a little girl.”

  Taft felt a blush creep up his neck. “History books. I must confess, that’s rather flattering.”

  “Flattering? Bill, you’re legendary! The Great Missing President. The man with the mustache. The bathtub guy.”

  Taft’s face drooped. “Bathtub? People still talk about that?” He pushed away his plate, which he realized he’d emptied without knowing it. “What else do you know about me? What else do the history books say?”

  “Oh, don’t f
ret. People don’t pay much attention to history anymore.” She glanced past Taft, and her eyes narrowed. “Except for Waldemann over there. Bill … is that your fan club?”

  Taft looked over his shoulder. Waldemann had approached the Secret Service agents and appeared to be suspiciously interrogating them. In his hand, the deli owner held the framed photo of Taft and Butt that had been on the wall, presumably undisturbed, for over a hundred years. A rectangle of brighter paint marked the spot where it had hung.

  With his other hand, Waldemann was pointing at him.

  Dee Dee nudged Taft’s glass of egg cream. “I think you’ve been made, Bill. Better drink up.” She stood up and gathered her coat and purse. He could have sworn she winked at him. “Sorry our little chat had to get cut short. Maybe I’ll run into you for lunch some day. If they ever let you out again.”

  KCMO Talk Radio 710

  The following message is paid for by Kansas City Leaders for Responsible Development.

  Three years into the worst American economy since the Great Depression, we don’t need government inventing more and more taxes to weigh down hardworking small-business owners. But the elitists on the Kansas City Council just don’t understand. They think you can afford to pay higher taxes every year, even though you’re making less. The small-business tax rate this year is already as high as 39 percent. It’s enough to make you wish for the days of William Howard Taft. After all, when Taft was president, businesses paid only 1 percent. Tell you what, City Council—next year, why don’t you try thinking a little more like Taft?

  From Taft: A Tremendous Man, by Susan Weschler:

  During the course of America’s existence every type of man has been president: schemers, brutes, drunkards, braggarts—even a few good men. But there was one thing they all shared: the burning ambition to be president.

  But not Taft. Of all the U.S. presidents who followed George Washington, only Taft never aspired to the office. He’d always felt his true calling was on the Supreme Court, an honor he was painfully forced to bestow on others while he served as president. Afterward, he’d retreat to his own office and count the minutes until his four-year term was up. Some historians wondered: Was it selfish to be a reluctant president? Shouldn’t he have resigned if he’d hated it so much? In a word: no. Because Taft had people depending on him, and no matter what he might wish for himself, he would never let them down. People like his wife, Nellie, and his friend Roosevelt, both of whom did have selfish motives for pushing and pulling Taft into office. Nellie had always dreamed of being first lady, and Roosevelt wanted a successor who’d honor him, who’d continue his policies without ever outshining him.