WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1902
“You should have come, Henry,” I said. “You’d have hated it.”
Henry Adams had the good grace to laugh. It was a merry sound, so different from the Brahmin breathiness of his chatter. “Labor Day is a silly idea to start with,” he said. “Mr. Cleveland’s sop to the unions. So, when is Capitalists’ Day, pray tell?”
“Every day is Capitalists’ Day,” I replied.
“You ought to know, Hay,” Henry jabbed. Then: “The lawyers lost, you say.”
“Eight to two, on Georgetown College’s campus. The doctors hit the ball too damn hard. So did the lawyers, but right at someone.”
“I find a certain pleasure in that, I must say, old boy.”
Henry was well aware that I am a lawyer, though I have had the luck never to have practiced a day. “You don’t find pleasure in anything, Henry,” I said. “I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed his unhappiness more. Part of your charm.”
“Only a part?”
Our daily stroll usually began in Lafayette Square, in our topcoats and silk hats, around four o’clock in the afternoon. The walks had been Clara’s idea—what wasn’t?—and not only to keep me, at the venerable age of sixty-three, in (you should pardon the expression) boxing trim. Mainly it was to lure me away from my office, in that sand castle next to the White House, the State, War, and Navy Building, whose architect had killed himself a year after the final geegaw was squeezed on. Lately, the world had cooperated. It’s a pain in the arse to be a world power—how I’ve missed spending all summer in New Hampshire—but I shouldn’t complain. This summer was the quietest since the mid-’nineties, or certainly in the four years since McKinley had done me the dubious honor of making me his secretary of state. (Not that I played hard to get; I just made it look that way.) Theodore, probably against his better judgment, had kept me on.
To-day Henry and I dispensed with our topcoats, for the afternoon was hot and humid—womb-like, in my way of thinking. Henry was wearing his starched frock coat, wing collar, and funereal cravat. He looked even paler than usual, his cheeks thinner. More hair seemed to have migrated from his scalp to his pointed, devilish beard; he looked like the oversize brain that he was. Yet I had never known a man so honest, in his intellect and in his morals.
We glided to a stop, without conferring, along the western edge of the square, in front of 22 Jackson Place northwest. The sturdy brick town house with the pretentious Greek temple pediments over the windows was serving as the temporary White House. The real one was being renovated, cellar to attic, adding a western wing for the president’s executive offices.
“You know, Theodore is a stupid, blundering, bolting bull calf,” Henry was saying. The diamond stickpin in his cravat caught the afternoon light.
“Tell me, Henry, what do you really think?”
“And he might have arranged this accident by himself. He is capable of it, you know.”
“That’s cynical, Henry, even for you.”
“But plausible. For a president, you know, character is destiny.”
“Why on earth would you ever think that?” I teased. Henry’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been presidents, of which he never tired of reminding me. But, as usual, Henry had a point. Too often, I made the mistake of judging presidents as people—idiotic, I know, for a secretary of state, but I had befriended enough of them since Lincoln not to be cowed. And in this regard, I had to admit that Theodore came up a little short. (Not that I was pure.) Yes, he had the noblest traits—intelligence, fidelity, passion, sincerity, honesty, a grasp of history, a good heart, not to mention gobs of courage, physical and moral. His undeniable virtues were entangled, however, with a fixation on himself and a belief in his own rightness that scared me. He was warm to his friends (his thank-you notes were sonatas in paper and ink) but quick to belittle his political opponents as aunties or eunuchs. You didn’t want him at your dinner table if anyone else had a desire to talk. Here was a man of substance and probity who was still in many ways a child; you had to remember, as his best man said, that Theodore was about six years old. I liked him, I did—I made allowances for youth. Maybe he was stuffed fuller with talents than any mortal could handle with grace.
Cortelyou’s wire had come before noon, telling of the collision and the two arrests. The president was “considerably bruised” but not injured seriously, and Governor Crane had escaped without a scratch. But (from Cortelyou, it was probably an afterthought) William Craig was dead. No explanation.
Not Craig! Even now it was hard to believe. What a horror! Nothing like Del, of course, our late and intensely lamented son, but still. What a man Craig was! The man any man wanted to be. An accomplished boxer, wrestler, and swordsman; a war hero, muscled but modest; an invincible man. Yet his pectorals couldn’t protect him. And if his couldn’t, whose could?
“He loves the drama.” Henry was harping on Theodore. “He adores being the center of attention.”
“To the point of almost killing himself?”
“Especially then. For a grand exit. But he didn’t, did he? A narcissist—that is what that sex-crazed doctor in Vienna would call our well-bred Mr. Roosevelt.”
“Henry, I shall never take you seriously again.”
“No need to, old boy. I take myself seriously enough for both of us.” And at that, Henry squirmed—rather a rarity. A famed historian in his own right, he thought right well of himself. But didn’t we all? (Most Washingtonians, you should remember, are self-selected.) But this time, apparently, his discomfort was not about pride. “There is something I need to show you,” he said.
Henry bolted across Jackson Place and into Lafayette Park. This was the true center of the nation and more and more, therefore, of the civilized world. The iron fence was gone, a victim of democracy run amok—as Henry would rail—but the maples and elms were still in full leaf. Good ol’ Andy Jackson faced us on his rearing horse—the “tippy-toe statue,” as Tad Lincoln used to call it. How Henry hated looking from his bedroom window at his grandpappy’s rival—twice—for the presidency! Along the east and west sides of the park, in the Federalist-style brick town houses, resided ghosts from the past—of Seward and Sumner, of Webster and Blaine, of Decatur and McClellan. On the third side, to the north, Henry and I had built our houses side by side. (I hesitate to call mine a mansion, but others do.) From my bedroom I could see across the park to the White House, to the second-story room where I had slept in Lincoln’s day. Yet the park remained as tranquil as ever. The bowers of trees, the curves of gravel paths, the dawdling civil servants, the benches with courting couples—the place felt removed from the world yet surrounded by it, pressed in by it, like the eye of a hurricane. Beyond Lafayette Square, Henry liked to say, the country began.
I scrambled to keep up. It was rare that Henry outpaced me. I knew where he was going before he got there.
Marcus Alonzo Hanna was living there now, next to the ugly new opera house. The cream-colored brick house had a turret-shaped foyer and a second-floor balcony with a wrought iron railing. The senator from Ohio was the industrialist who had purchased the White House for William McKinley in ’ninety-six, and Roosevelt feared him as a rival for the Republican nomination in ’aught-four. But Hanna wasn’t the lure—not for Henry. Of that I was certain. Henry was drawn by a ghost, although not a ghost from the past. Lizzie’s ghost. A living ghost, as I understood all too well. Henry had loved her once; now it was my turn. But was it love or infatuation? I had spent far too much effort debating the subject and hating myself for it.
“Electric cars are the enemies of humanity,” Henry Adams pronounced. “So sayeth the kaiser.”
“Then it must be true,” Clara said, pouring the tea. She knew how to handle Henry—with gentle mockery. My wife’s empathy was absolute, so she was rarely if ever disappointed in Henry, or in anyone else, including me. Her advantage was low expectations—the secret to happiness in life. I admired that in her. Envied it, in fact. Tried to emulate it and usually fell short. (But what else was new?) She had only the highest expectations for herself.
“Did you hear about the electric streetcar that rammed the rear of a train?” Henry said. “A couple of months ago—you were at the Fells.” That was our lake house in New Hampshire. “Happened in the city here, on Four-and-a-half street southwest. Threw the trolley from its tracks and tossed the passengers from their seats. Scared the poor devils half to death. And just the other day, the frightened horse on Wisconsin avenue that collided with one of those steam-spewing automobiles. Only by some miracle was nobody—”
“We are living in an age of miracles,” I pointed out, watching the cream in my tea coalesce into the shape of Luzon.
“And those miracles will murder us all,” Henry said. “I should prefer the twelfth century over the twentieth any day of the week. Less brutal, for one thing. And grander in conception. The finest epoch in Christian civilization, as the construction of Chartres and of Mont-Saint-Michel will attest.” Henry’s forearm swept close to the teapot, alluding (although never admitting) to his current opus. I happened to know, by way of Lizzie, that he was just finishing the first draft. “And compared to what, may I ask? The Kodak, naphtha lamps, rubber tires?”
“How about the dentistry?” Clara cooed.
We were taking tea, as we ordinarily did, in my library. I loved this room, more than any I had ever called my own. It had plush chairs and mahogany woodwork and Oriental rugs and a pair of stuffed white cranes perched near the ceiling, above the carved settees. The fireplace was a yellow marble, the hearth a reddish rock. Books overflowing the shelves piled up on the floor. Clara (and Henry, of course) thought the room overfurnished, but I found the clutter a comfort. It swaddled me, and besides, I knew where everything was. I was sitting in my maroon leather armchair.
“Did he have a family, John?” Clara said. She was still thinking about Craig.
“He was to get married next month,” I replied. “At the White House. To a lovely girl.”
The conversation turned to the price of anthracite coal, quadrupled since the miners had walked out last spring, thence to the unending mess in the Philippines, before settling on an issue that mattered more: Should lilies rather than roses decorate the tables at our younger daughter’s wedding? Alice was marrying a congressman’s son (not exactly a recommendation) at month’s end at the Fells. The nuptials promised to be less fancy—and less expensive—than Helen’s were (to a Whitney!) last winter. Yet Del, our wise and smiling son, would be absent again.
Clara said, “What do you think, Uncle Henry?” That’s what our children called our next-door neighbor and dearest friend.
“I think that Alice will look so beautiful,” he replied, “that no one would notice, lily or rose.”
Clara beamed. She, too, was beautiful—to me, at least. Her features were blunter than Venus de Milo’s; her body, sturdier. The candor of her gaze told you she was nobody’s fool. Yet kindness was written all over her face; her deep brown eyes gave root to laugh lines. The bloom in her cheeks made my knees weak. When Clara smiled, she lit up a room. I liked being in that room—loved it, really. Still do. That’s what made whatever I was feeling for Lizzie that much worse.
Henry was holding forth on the autumnal troubles of daisies when a perfunctory knock brought James gliding in, a silver tray in his hand. The butler was a slight man with cappuccino-colored skin and a fringe of white hair. “Fer you, suh,” he said.
The yellow envelope rested on a silver tray. Few people knew where to reach me in the late afternoon. I used the ivory-handled dagger, a gift from the Abyssinian emperor, to slit open the envelope with a savagery that surprised myself. From Cortelyou, was my guess.
Wrong.
“HAY,” the telegram began. Cortelyou would have said “MR. SECRETARY”—or nothing, to save a few cents. “COLLISION NO ACCIDENT. COME HERE TO SAGAMORE HILL.”
Cortelyou would have omitted “HERE.”
Only one of my correspondents would be so peremptory.
“THEODORE.”
I read the wire aloud. “First train in the morning,” I announced.
Henry seemed shaken, uncharacteristically groping for words. “I told you,” he declared. “He arranged it.”
I described Henry’s surmise to Clara.
“That is nonsense, Henry,” she said, “and you know it.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” Henry replied, his stubbornness engaged. “Indeed, I know nothing about nothing. That is part of my charm.”
“Yes, we all admire your ignorance, Henry,” I said.
“More, my dear Mr. Adams?” said Clara, nodding at his half-empty porcelain teacup.
Henry shook his head. “I wouldn’t make it home.”
He was rising from the wing chair when another perfunctory knock produced the butler. “Pardon me, suh. Just came.”
“More and more, James, the world is like that,” I said, reaching for the dagger. “Any bets on who?”
“Whom,” Henry said.
“No, who,” I replied, a little too pleased with myself.
The telegram, from Oyster Bay, New York, consisted of a single word.
“NOW.”
The State, War, and Navy Building was experiencing its customary dearth of activity at five forty-five on a weekday afternoon. Alvey Adee, however, was at his rolltop desk—he was always at his desk. The top was crowded with medicine vials, ink bottles, and an orderly stack of paper two feet high. He was writing on a long pad in his meticulous hand—he regarded typewriters as the enemy of thought—while puffing on a corncob pipe. The tobacco smelled sweeter than his habitual blend.
“Adee!” I shouted.
No response.
The steel-nib pen was scratching, and I waited until it paused before stepping to his right ear and shouting again, “Adee, I need you!”
“My four favorite words.” Adee looked up. His vast forehead and lush beard lent him a scholarly look, but the sky-blue eyes behind the pince-nez showed a sparkle inside. His face would come alive whenever his attention turned to something that interested him, which was nearly everything. Born deaf, he had been mute as a boy, before gaining a modicum of hearing as a young man. I never figured out how much of that faculty he had, for he was skilled at using his deafness to ignore what he preferred not to hear, an advantage in negotiating with foreigners—and with Americans. I had known him since soon after the war (the real war, not the splendid little one against Spain), when he took my place as the secretary of legation in Madrid. Since the ’eighties, as the second assistant secretary of state, he had learned everything about everything and everyone. My indispensable aide.
“The maharajah has returned.” Adee’s speech was soft on consonants, elusive on Rs, and nasal on vowels, as from a mouth stuffed with gauze. Most people had trouble understanding him, but I never did. His lack of embarrassment about his lack of hearing has always charmed me.
“And will be leaving right away,” I said. “For Sagamore Hill. I’ve been … summoned.” Adee’s eyes widened, but he knew not to inquire. “So, what do we have on the boil?”
“The usual pleasantries,” Adee said. He reported on the overnight wires from London, from Paris—and the one from Vienna. “Seems it wasn’t the Austrian prince of Braganza who was arrested in London without all of his clothes, allegedly in the company of other men, but rather the emperor’s heir apparent himself, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
I couldn’t resist a giggle. “Well, live and let live,” I said.
As Adee described the kaiser’s latest complaint about Venezuela as a deadbeat on German loans, Margaret Hanna slipped into the room and stood behind him. She was a big-boned woman in her early thirties—my guess—with mannish features and dark French braids that reached the small of her back. She was Adee’s able assistant and, while Spencer Eddy was away, mine as well. She was unrelated to the odious senator, although most people assumed otherwise, which I found annoying. No sign Adee did. Or Margaret.
“And here she is,” Adee announced—“our Miss Riflery of 1902. The Labor Day tourney, she was the victor. At one hundred yards.” Margaret blushed. “And speaking of Venezuela, I would like to extend her correspondence duties to include Central and South America—the entire hemisphere. If that suits you. She has really been doing it already.”
“Of course,” I said.
“And allow me to reply to the kaiser’s note wishing the president a full and speedy recovery. Every word of it a lie.”
“The task has found its master,” I said. “But on this, let him be a liar. We have our hands full with him as it is. Anything in the Philippines?”
“Nothing for us. Let the fat man handle it.” Taft, the governor-general of the distant islands, had mostly but not entirely quelled the insurrection by Filipinos who had been foolish enough to believe that America’s conquest of imperial Spain would bring them independence. Little had they counted on the newest world power’s feeling so full of itself. (I mean us.)
“And the Roumanian Jews?” I reminded him.
“I’ll have a draft on your desk by the time you return, Hay. And when, if I may ask, might that be?”
I shrugged. The answer was not up to me.
The Pennsylvania Railroad Station always gives me the willies, especially at night. Not because of anything physical. The building itself, the square brick tower and the crenellated facade, had a startling elegance. Its location was beyond compare, at the corner of Sixth and B streets northwest, amid the trees and winding carriageways of the National Mall. The problem for me was its history. The bronze star in particular. It decorated the floor in the ladies’ waiting room on the exact spot where President Garfield had collapsed after an office-seeker of shaky sanity shot him in the back. (I had interviewed Guiteau once myself. He was as nutty as a pecan pie.) I had stood by Garfield’s bier. By Lincoln’s and McKinley’s, too. I wondered if the common denominator was me.
The high-ceilinged station was dimly lit. My footsteps echoed. A few passengers sat, mostly by themselves, in the waiting room pews. I gave the bronze star a wide berth as I rushed through to the platform and onto the train.
My compartment was in the third car, and I left my valise (I took a perverse pride in not needing a porter) and went in search of the club car. It was unoccupied save for two elderly men with high collars and pinched cheeks—bankers, was my guess—and a dapper young chap with a distracted, melancholic air. I chose a high-backed upholstered chair in the far corner and gazed at the arched ceiling with light fixtures shaped like hard-nippled breasts. I ordered a Dewar & Sons whisky, a double.
An Evening Star was splayed across the low marble table. I tidied up the pages and glanced across the front. A prediction by Pennsylvania’s vile senators that the anthracite coal strike would be settled within a week—how quickly they would be proved wrong. The missing troop ship from Manila had arrived in San Francisco—Adee had told me that. An unfunny cartoon about the war games off the New England coast. The new limit on automobiles’ speed through Rock Creek Park, of twelve miles per hour—so as not to scare the deer, I supposed. (The limit in Baltimore was half that.) I feared that these clattering, smoky machines were here to stay—the gasoline-powered ones, I mean. Or who knows? Maybe the quieter, electrical ones would win the day.
I read that last item twice, scanning for a reason to hope, and only then turned to the leftmost column on the page.
PRESIDENT INJURED
Narrowly Escaped Death in Collision.
CAR STRUCK HIS COACH
One of His Companions Killed
DRIVER WILL RECOVER
MR. ROOSEVELT ONLY SLIGHTLY HURT.
Others of the Party Severely Shaken Up and Bruised—Wild Rumors Started.
Wild rumors! That was my bailiwick. Or the president’s.
“… when near the Country Club”—a most avid reader was I—“an electric trolley on the Pittsfield and Lenox street railway was noticed coming at a terrific rate of speed. Mr. Craig signaled for the motorman to stop, but he apparently paid no attention to the warning and the car came plunging on. The President’s carriage was literally smashed to pieces. A witness of the accident stated that the motorman was speeding his car in order to reach the club…”
I fished Theodore’s telegrams from my pocket: “COLLISION NO ACCIDENT.”
The whisky arrived just in time.