by Louis Bayard
Kermit sat in his armchair, nearly as familiar to him now as the one in his own study. He could see where his hands had left soft stains in the leather. In the next room, the doctor’s clock was still shuddering.
“No,” he said.
* * *
IT WAS, AFTER ALL, a terrible thing to stake all your hopes on love and find even love insufficient. Fathers died. Wives became … something other. Or else their husbands did. He still had heartful moments, it was true, when the memory of Belle (sitting next to him in his father’s car on a summer night) would flush through his veins or one of his own children (running into a room, falling asleep on top of the family Labrador) would tap some lode of joy. But these were the very moments when the Beast gripped the hardest—when the company of others became an unearthly torment.
“We have the most charming, accomplished friends in the world,” Belle once said. “Why must you always steer clear of them?”
“Because that’s the kindest thing I can think to do.”
It was startling then to see the rage well up in those still-beautiful eyes. “The kindest thing you could do would be to stop drinking.”
She didn’t understand; how could she? Drink was the one thing that stilled the Beast … kept faces from dissolving … preserved a sprout of hope in life’s humus. And so he drank. He drank at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner—every hour in between. He drank with a quite childish gratitude. Once, at a party for Admiral Byrd, he blacked out and woke the next morning in a corner of the club, under somebody’s raccoon coat. Pinned to his dinner jacket was a five-dollar bill for cab fare.
Belle’s doing. She could never quite give up on him, and for this, she could never be forgiven.
* * *
ARCHIE WAS THE ONE who sent him to the sanatorium. A lovely place in Hartford.
“You’re right to do it,” said Kermit. “I’d do the same.”
He had to laugh at how neatly Elliott’s words fit in his own mouth. It was almost a source of sadness that his uncle never came to visit anymore. They now had so much to talk about!
“I know,” Kermit would have said. “I understand.”
* * *
IT WAS IN HARTFORD, during a particularly grueling episode of withdrawal, that Luz unexpectedly walked into the room.
“Please,” he said to her.
(The orderly swerved around.)
“You have to see,” he said. “There was no way to bring him with us. He wouldn’t have come.”
(The orderly beckoned to someone in the hallway.)
“I would never have fired if I’d known he was there.”
She left without saying a word.
* * *
THE MOMENT HE WAS sprung from confinement, he called an old mistress.
“Let’s get lost,” he said.
* * *
IN THE END, THEY found him. (Cousin Franklin had the FBI at his disposal.) They sent him to Anchorage, the one place on earth where he couldn’t embarrass anyone. “Best to separate him,” said Archie, “from all those bad influences.”
But you’ve got it all wrong, he wanted to say. I am the influence. Wherever I go … I go.…
And so he did, all the way to the rim of the world.
June 3, 1943
Anchorage, Alaska
Every last trace of skin and muscle has peeled away from Major Marston’s face, and still he stands there in the slow-stealing twilight, flapping his jaw, his skull shining like a moon.
“I’m here to tell you,” he says. “There’s four thousand miles of coastline along the Bering Sea and the Arctic. Four thousand miles. How can we possibly patrol it? But the Eskimos, they know the terrain. Just one Eskimo guardsman is worth more than a dozen of our sentries. If you were to ask me which soldiers I’d walk into enemy gunfire with, I wouldn’t have to think about it, I’d say right out—”
“Please,” gasps Kermit.
He can feel the scrutiny from those barren eye sockets.
“You don’t look well,” says Marston.
“I’m not—I don’t—I’m not sure what’s…” Kermit’s hand forms a quivering lattice across his face. “I really must go.”
His limbs, without warning, jig into life and send the rest of him tottering up the hill. Toward the barracks.
“You don’t need any help?” calls Marston.
“No, thank you.”
“And you think you might speak to someone on my behalf?”
Someone … someone. He wants me to speak to … Cousin Eleanor? Cousin Franklin? One or the other. Both …
“Of course,” he calls back, with a reassuring wave.
“Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
He is no more than ten yards up the hill when the contents of the evening’s dinner spill out in a black sludge.
Panting, he rests his hands on his knees. Watches the last strands of vomit detach from his chin. Then he wipes his face and keeps walking.
* * *
HIS QUARTERS ARE, BY his own choosing, sparse. A bare lightbulb on the ceiling. Venetian blinds. A cot that sags and creaks even when he’s not in it. A plain wooden desk and a single bookshelf that holds a dictionary, a compendium of Portuguese sonnets, and a couple of signed Kipling volumes—all furry with dust, for even reading has lost its savor.
He goes to the washstand, pours some cold water on his face, then stands before the mirror. Normally he can only stand to look at himself in the morning. Now, with the sun finally bleeding into the horizon, he looks, if anything, paler and more bloated than before. How Father would cringe at the sight of him.
And for a moment he could actually be the old man, for he seems to be regarding himself from a great distance. Then, as if it were happening to somebody else, he watches a face slide into the gap over his right shoulder.
Luz.
It nearly stops his heart to see her standing there in plain view. Looking as she did when they first met. Her dark hair parted down the middle. Her eyes a flecked hazel. A necklace of vegetable beads against her dusky skin.
She is untouched by age—and such a rebuke to his own decay that he has to close his eyes. And then she speaks. For the first time since he left her by that lagoon.
You have carried it long enough.
He opens his eyes.
It is time, she says.
And now the tears are flowing, fat and warm, down his face. This is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to him.
“Yes,” he says.
Somewhere, in some buried recess of him, a voice of officialdom is registering its opposition.
What about your commission? Your estate? The disposition of your effects? What about your note? You can’t go running off without a note! There are considerations.…
That’s when the full beauty of his situation washes over him. He has nothing left to consider. One way or another, without even meaning to, he has cleared his life’s field of every last encumbrance.
Now, with that emptied prospect lying on every side of him, how soft, how frangible, is the line that tethers him to it. One snip of the scissors, that’s all he needs.
It is time, says Luz once more.
But still he hesitates. Living is a hard habit to break, after all. What pitches him forward at last is a voice.
Not Luz’s, not his own. Indeed, he spends some time identifying it, ruling out Father and Mother … Belle … the children … brothers, sisters … arriving finally, by process of elimination, at the most surprising speaker of all.
The Beast. Calling out in the weakest imaginable voice.
I want you to.
And with that, the final barrier falls. He is very nearly laughing as he sits on the edge of his cot and reaches into the drawer of his side table and draws out the Colt .45 service revolver.
How heavy it feels in his hands. Yet how nimbly his fingers push out the cylinder. (He can’t help smiling at those five bullets, snugly placed. Always loaded, always ready.) He positions the empty chamb
er at twelve o’clock. He pushes the cylinder back into place, listens for the click of the latch. He checks the chamber position one last time.
He casts his eyes toward the washstand and finds Luz still there. Smiling.
ALSO BY LOUIS BAYARD
The School of Night
The Black Tower
The Pale Blue Eye
Mr. Timothy
Endangered Species
Fool’s Errand
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LOUIS BAYARD is the author of the critically acclaimed The School of Night and The Black Tower, the national bestseller The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy, a New York Times Notable Book. He has written for Salon, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He lives in Washington, D.C.
ROOSEVELT’S BEAST. Copyright © 2014 by Louis Bayard. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Jacket design by Charles Brock / Faceout Studios
Jacket engraving courtesy of De Agostino Picture Library / Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bayard, Louis.
Roosevelt’s Beast: a novel / Louis Bayard.—First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8050-9070-3 (hard cover)—ISBN 978-1-4299-4686-5 (electronic book) 1. Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition (1913–1914)—Fiction. 2. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919—Fiction. 3. Brazil—History—1889–1930—Fiction. 4. Adventure fiction. 5. Historical fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A85864R66 2014
813'.54—dc23 2013028721
First U.S. Edition: March 2014
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.