THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1902
Even past midnight, the terminal in Jersey City was noisy. Yawning passengers jostled past me, straggling the hundred yards from the railroad depot to the ferry, jabbering in a dozen tongues, wearing every conceivable garment—yarmulkes and caftans, silk hats and velvet-lapelled overcoats. Too many whiskies, not a wink of sleep, whiffs of the Orient and the Bronx—I could be forgiven a passing acquaintance with nausea. I took a spot in the ferry’s prow, where the cold, sharp wind cleared me like penance. I stood by the railing beneath a sliver of a moon and watched the Hudson River and its whitecaps.
What I saw beyond the whitecaps astonished me. Lights. Above the ground. From the skyscrapers—what a poetic word! Not skypiercers or skypunchers, but skyscrapers. I envied the man who coined it. Eight stories, twelve stories, eighteen stories, even thirty stories high. Their lights floated like low-hanging stars, just shy of the clouds, arrayed along Manhattan’s—another delightful new word—skyline.
A line of poetry came to me.
A tinkle of bells in the light,
Not bad.
A call to the wild in the night …
Not wild. This was civilization, or what passed for it. Tame? No.
A crashing of bells in the light.
A clashing of minds in the night.
Hmm, maybe. It came perilously close to meaning something. I was extracting my calfskin notepad from the inside pocket of my frock coat when cold water sprayed over the side, splashing my overcoat and drenching my valise. My three changes of clothes were no longer dry. Nor was I.
Hearing metal screech against metal was a relief; we had arrived at the Twenty-third street pier.
Climbing back onto land improved my spirits, not nearly as much as seeing at the end of the pier a strapping man with a square face and a drooping mustache. Theodore!
“Mr. Hay,” the man called as I drew near. It wasn’t Theodore. His voice was huskier. “The colonel sent me,” he said, reaching for my valise. He introduced himself as the coachman. “Franklyn, with a Y. Franklyn Hall.”
“Hello, Franklyn with a Y,” I said. “Mr. Hall, the pleasure is most definitely mine.”
The surrey jolted along the country roads and kept me awake. I wrapped myself in carriage blankets and stayed warm enough to think. And so I thought. About Theodore, mainly, with varying degrees of lucidity.
Among my foggier notions was the fear that he had summoned me to Long Island in order to fire me. Maybe almost dying had persuaded him that somebody else should stand next in line to the presidency. I couldn’t blame him. He and I got along just fine. Not that we were bosom buddies; Theodore didn’t really have any, other than that prig Henry Cabot Lodge. But I had known him well for at least a dozen years now and considered him a friend. I had made acquaintance with his daddy many years before that. Hadn’t Theodore Sr. attended the Lincolns’ ball the night in ’sixty-two that young Willie took ill? Later he introduced me to his older boy during a Hudson Valley rainstorm. Not that our personal history would matter much, if the younger Theodore was intent on letting me go. Still, I doubted that he was. For all of his flaws, he was neither coy nor cagey nor in any way a namby-pamby. If he wanted me gone, he would say so.
Then, let us assume (never assume, my old friend Nicolay used to say) that Theodore had summoned me for the reason he gave. The collision was no accident. The president believed it. Why did he believe it? I expected an earful on that. Did he have evidence beyond his pique? The man was operating on emotion—that seemed pretty clear, and understandable. And not to be pooh-poohed. Emotion, combined with discipline, had gotten Theodore far in life—and quickly. At the age of—what?—forty-three he had already accomplished more than any three men might in a lifetime. Merely thinking about it tuckered me out. Charging up San Juan Hill in his Brooks Brothers uniform put to shame anything I’ve ever done. (I spent my war shuffling papers for Lincoln and wooing Kate Chase.) Into one daunting job after another—as New York’s police commissioner, as governor, now as the leader of a turbulent land—Theodore felt deeply about things and, unembarrassed and unrestrained, acted. He worked on instinct; he was rarely in doubt. Lord knows, his judgment was not always right. But more often than not—even Henry would concede the point—it was. In less than a year, Theodore had proved to be a damn good president—bold, unafraid—even in the absence of an economic panic or a war.
I reached into my pocket and fingered his telegrams. I couldn’t read them in the dark, but I knew what they said.
COLLISION NO ACCIDENT. COME HERE TO SAGAMORE HILL.
NOW.
“Franklyn,” I said. We shared the surrey’s soft front seat. “How did you know when I was coming?” I had never specified a time, figuring to hire a hack.
“Been waiting awhile, sir.”
“How long?”
“Before sundown, sir. As soon as the colonel told me, I left.”
The carriage curved past a thin woodland. The darkness beyond the trees must be Long Island Sound.
Another question kept recurring: Why was he summoning me?
About that, I had a sneaking suspicion: Willie Lincoln. Somehow, Roosevelt had learned of my experiences in solving the unlikeliest of murders. Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son was only the first. I never spoke to anyone about my occasional forays as a detective (better, I must say, than my record in the ring), but Theodore had his own means of learning what he needed to know.
The surrey took a fork to the right off Cove Neck road. We passed the tennis court in the hollow and ascended the steep, sweeping lane to Sagamore Hill. Even in the scant moonlight, the three-story house loomed high on the hill. It was a grandmotherly sort of house, of a leisurely design, with a wraparound porch and more gables than Hawthorne could count. Lights flickered in the windows.
The carriage drifted to a halt beneath the porte cochere. On the porch, a ghost shimmered in the gaslight. Teeth flashed; a white shirtfront glistened. I climbed down from the surrey and saw the president, still dressed for dinner in a black cutaway, a pearl-gray tie, and a white waistcoat that strained at the buttons. His face was calm, resolute—serene. It was a young face of a young man who took himself seriously, indeed, as I hope any president would. He had a bull neck, a square chin, a muscleman’s shoulders, and nary a line in his brow. His girth had grown on the job; he reminded me of a walrus in formal wear. A silk ribbon dangled from his pince-nez. His mustache was assertive but trimmed and under control. The slight smile on his lips suggested he was gazing into a future that nobody else could see.
He leaned down as I mounted the four steps to the porch. His handshake was as strong and enveloping as ever, as if to say, Nothing is wrong with me. I noticed his right eye had swollen shut and his cheek was the size of a late summer peach.
“Dee-lighted to see you,” he said. “Just the very man I wanted to see.”
“You look terrible, Theodore,” I exclaimed. Only people who didn’t know him called him Teddy (he had disliked the nickname since his first wife died, for she had called him that), and I hadn’t earned the privilege of addressing him as Roosevelt.
“Don’t I look as if I have the mumps?” He snapped his teeth as he spoke, and clamped his jaw. His vitality bowled me over, given his injuries and his usual four or five hours of sleep. “Come in, come in.”
The front hall was an altar to the outdoors, paneled in oak and ornamented with the heads of animals unlucky enough to have crossed Theodore’s path. The fireplace was ablaze. Theodore led me into the library, on the right. He limped.
The room was dignified yet warm, with its bear rugs and a paneled wall of paintings of the men he admired—Lincoln, of course, and Grant, and at the center, his truest hero, the man whose name he carried. (When his adored father died, he dropped the Junior and insisted that his family call him Theodore instead of Teedie.) Now he was the nation’s twenty-sixth president, its youngest ever, rocking at his desk. The gaslight showed the cuts on his chin and the coal-black bruises across the upper right side of his face.
He was oblivious to my stare. “Thank you … for coming … at this … hour.” His teeth clacked, every syllable distinct. He pulled the bell cord and offered nourishment, alcoholic if I wished. I knew better than to ask if he would join me. I requested coffee, both for survival and to curry his favor, in case I was too optimistic about his intentions. “And what did you think of my New England tour?”
“A triumph, by all accounts,” I replied. The flattery was harmless enough and, by Washington standards, truthful.
He grinned, revealing acres of enamel. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“Especially the last day.” I nodded at his leg. “Staring death in the face.”
“Facedown, I would say,” Theodore cackled. “Really, I am not at all badly hurt. In my salad days, I suffered worse injuries at football and polo. I would have been ashamed then to acknowledge that I felt hurt. I wouldn’t care a snap of my fingers for what happened, if not for the death of poor Craig.”
“How about your boys?” I knew that the two youngest, Archie and Quentin, worshiped the glorious Craig. “Have you told them?”
A portly woman with thin silvery hair entered with a tray of coffee and crumpets. I was sorry to have disturbed the servants from their sleep, but I consoled myself: this was not my doing.
Once the servant withdrew, Theodore went on, “Not yet. Haven’t the heart.” I noticed a dampness on the president’s cheeks. “I hated having a man around me all the time, but after Buffalo it seemed I had no choice.” Two days short of a year earlier, an anarchist had entered the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, draping a handkerchief over his gun. President McKinley took eight days to die. “Rarely have I known anyone like Big Bill Craig. Nothing weak about him. The most faithful man I ever knew. A Scotsman, in the Queen’s Grenadiers. Volunteered for the Sudanese war and saved a comrade—wouldn’t talk about it. He marched six hundred miles across the desert from Alexandria to Khartoum, in relief of the mahdi’s siege, and arrived to find Gordon murdered.” Theodore’s fist shook, as if he were there. “An expert horseman he is—was…” It tore from his throat. “And a boxer besides. And with a sword! Put an apple between your chin and your throat—not mine, mind you—he would split it in half. He would slice right through a sheep with a single stroke, or so I’ve heard—and not from him. He has been teaching me the broadsword.”
I was aware of the president’s penchant for boxing, wrestling, and jujitsu, but his swordsmanship was a new one on me. A hard shake of the head restored a glitter to Theodore’s blue-gray eyes. He slurped coffee from a mug. He said, “And I will tell you just how bully I feel. To-morrow, you and I shall spar. To-day, I mean.”
“In your condition? I couldn’t.”
“Of course you could. And you shall.”
“You serious? You do have a few inches on me, I must say, and … a … uh, a few pounds.” More than a few. “Not to mention twenty years.”
“Sounds like a fair fight to me,” Theodore said.
The roller-skating in the hallway woke me before dawn. Each boyish shriek brought a louder response. Amid flurries of footsteps, a ball bounced, bounced, bounced off a wall. My wall.
I vaulted from my bed into the hallway. The littlest miscreant, the towheaded Quentin, gave me a frank look of disgust—me, the wrecker of his game, whatever his game happened to be at the moment. I resisted the urge to apologize, until I succumbed, and the four-year-old accepted with graciousness. I returned to bed and surprised myself when I burst into tears. I hadn’t done that in a while.
It was about Del, of course, our older son. Fifteen months had passed—it seemed like fifteen years—since he died. Every word of praise for our dead boy made the grief worse. Twenty-four years old, a tragic death, an accident, everyone said, and I believed it. I had no reason not to. Other than how I had treated him. That wouldn’t have explained anything, even if there were something to explain, which there wasn’t. That long-ago Sunday in my library, the afternoon sunlight slanting in, after I read his schoolboy essay on the Roman Forum (he asked me to!) and I told him it was sluggish and heavy. Like you, I had blurted. Which he was. And wasn’t it my fatherly privilege, if not my duty, to say so? You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken.
He was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and of course he took offense, and things were never quite the same between us. But I do have to say that it worked. He had shined at Yale, and President McKinley had just appointed him as his assistant private secretary, the same job I had held for Lincoln—and on Del’s own merits, not on mine. Del was six-foot-two, ridiculously taller than I am, able to hold his own in a fight or a council. He was the sort of good-natured fellow that everyone liked on sight. All of that promise, now dust and ashes. I was still learning how much grief a man could endure.
I tried to make my mind go blank, and I must have succeeded, at least this once, for when I opened my eyes again the sunlight was streaming in and the noise—was I imagining it?—seemed farther away. It was a comforting room, despite the narrow bed scraggly with straw. The dark wood of the hearth and furnishings felt sturdy, and the wallpaper had enough pastels to quell a lunatic. My grandfather’s pocket watch, on the side table, showed ten minutes to eight. Tardy for country life, but not for Sagamore Hill. Breakfast in the dining room, I understood, was not served until half past eight.
I was relieved to see the bathroom free of children. (The two older boys must be back at Groton.) I did what I needed to do, which took me a little longer than it used to, and put on a frock coat—mostly dry by now—and a baby blue cravat.
When I got to the dining room, I saw my mistake: Theodore was wearing a flannel shirt and knickers, as if dressed for a hunt.
“Morning, Hay,” he said. “I trust you slept well.”
I lied, then added, “And you?”
“Always,” he said. The high pitch of his quavering voice never failed to surprise, coming from the body of a bear. “The harder my day, the better I sleep.”
I marveled at a man without guilt or apparent self-doubt. Or maybe he was merely oblivious. Or young—he was bursting with the impetuosity of youth. (The answer was always: all of the above.)
The dining room at Sagamore Hill was a cozy place, with rose-colored wallpaper above the dark paneling, swirling with the aromas of coffee and bacon. The buffet was heaped with beefsteak, waffles, potatoes, blueberries, soft-boiled eggs. Theodore piled his plate high and seated himself at the head of the small oval table, waiting to eat as patiently as a dog would, funneling foodstuffs into his mouth
A whoop brought a barefoot boy bursting past me and into the dining room like an Apache into battle. His impish face was streaked with black—coal dust, could it be?
“Quenty-quee,” Theodore called. Quentin was the child who was most like the father, the daredevil nonchalant. I looked across at the president’s contorted face.
Archie flew by in full pursuit, his countenance serious below his low blond bangs. The seven-year-old clutched a bow and a real arrow, with a sharp stone point. He was wedging the arrow into the bowstring when he tripped on the wrinkled rug. The arrow went flying past my shoulder and into the eggs. Archie’s eyes, searching mine, grew as wide as silver dollars. No reason not to laugh—it was funny—and when I did, Archie joined in, less in mirth than in relief.
Quentin whooped again and thrust his hand into the blueberries, glancing sideways to see if his father was watching, which he was. The boy’s eyes never left his father’s as he popped a fistful of blueberries into his mouth. Theodore roared with laughter. No wonder Quentin was an undisciplined brat; he reminded me of Tad Lincoln minus the lisp.
From the doorway came a trill that might have unnerved a coyote. “And are we having a good time yet?” I recognized the lilt before I looked to the doorway and saw Princess Alice. The president’s eldest stood haughtily, as was her custom, neck stretched, chin raised, eyes piercing to the point of menace, all beneath a wasp’s nest of hair. In self-possession, Alice Roosevelt was eighteen going on forty. Her face had a marble beauty, feature by feature, albeit crammed together and (for my taste) a little too sharp. “You haven’t told them yet, have you, Father?” she said.
“Sister!” Theodore shouted.
“Told me what?” Quentin and Archie said in unison.
“Nothing!” the president said. “Eat your breakfast. You, too, Sister.”
“Oh, but I’m not hungry,” Alice said. “I merely wished to shake hands with our distinguished guest here. And not with you, Q.”
Quentin was licking clean his blue-stained hand.
I knocked heads in pleasant reverie, but instead I bowed and kissed the back of her hand and said, “The pleasure is mine.” She laughed, an airy sound. I felt lucky she didn’t have a snake around her neck or a revolver in her pocket (though I was assuming the latter).
The boys had filled their plates, and the president ordered Alice to take a seat—to my surprise, she obeyed—so he could recount the travails of their oldest brother. “They sicced the dogs on him,” Theodore said. “That’s what they did, out in Dakota. For shooting prairie chickens.”
Quentin perked up. “Are they like real chickens?” he said.
“Teddy is a prairie chicken,” Alice said. She and Teddy Jr., who was about to turn fifteen, were close.
“Listen … to … this,” their father said. “‘Set … Dogs … on … President’s … Son’—that’s the headline.” He spoke in staccato. “And below that, ‘South Dakota Populists Treated the Youth Boorishly.’” He was reading from the Evening Star I had left with him the night before. “‘Because he is President Roosevelt’s son, a large number of populist farmers in the vicinity of Arlington, South Dakota, combined to prevent Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, from shooting prairie chickens in their stubblefields.’”
“What’s a prairie chicken?” Quentin said.
“The article goes on,” Theodore said. “‘Scarcely had the party arrived when the farmers’ telephone was brought into service, and the news was spread, and the entire prairie was alive with farmers patrolling the fields and posting notices forbidding trespass.’” Alice shrieked with laughter. “Listen to this!” the aggrieved father went on. “‘Because he was the son of the president’—now this quotes a railroad’s vice president in Teddy’s hunting party—‘these populists, who … might … well … be … classed … as … anarchists…’ In the Dakotas; my beloved Dakotas!”
Theodore’s two years as a rancher in North Dakota had shaped his sense of himself—and Americans’ sense of him.
“Anarchists! Do you hear that? What the devil are they…?”
Quentin said, “What are prairie chickens?”
Theodore thumped his fist on the table, and the breakfast plates jumped.
“Are they like real chickens?” Quentin said.
Archie said, “Told me what?”
Everyone else had left the dining room when Roosevelt refilled his canyon-size coffee mug, stirred in seven lumps of sugar, and said, “It was no accident.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Do you have evidence?” I was enough of a lawyer to care, and maybe even enough of a detective.
“I don’t need evidence. I know.” He smacked his right fist into his left palm.
“But Theodore…” How do you argue with someone so sure of himself? Maybe I wasn’t being fair—how he loved to say On the other hand. The man knew what he didn’t know. Usually. “I would think that anyone investigating this…” I looked for a response and got none. “Would need evidence.”
“I know who was behind this.”
“Who, then?”
“The motorman.”
“Of the trolley?”
“Yes, who else?”
“How do you know this?”
“I saw his face. That’s all the evidence I need.” Theodore turned in my direction but looked through me.
“And what exactly did you see?”
“I saw a man intent.”
I waited, then said, “Intent on what?”
“Intent on whatever he was doing, which was ramming into my carriage, broadside. He was standing at the wheel, at the front of the trolley, looking directly at me. I saw him. And when I confronted him after the crash, he had the gall, the gall”—in full falsetto—“to tell me that he had the right-of-way. A damn outrage!”
I don’t remember ever hearing Theodore curse before. Was he mad at the collision or at the motorman’s defiance? Probably at both. “Why on earth would he want to do that?” I said.
“How should I know? That’s your job.”
“My job?”
Roosevelt’s eyebrows lifted.
I swore to myself. (I did not share Theodore’s compunction.) “I’ll try,” I said, despairingly enough that he might notice. He didn’t.
“Actually, I do know,” he said. “Or suspect, as you might prefer, given your ladylike sensibilities.”
I laughed. The man was so obvious. “By all means, please tell me your … suspicions.”
“The anarchists, of course. They assassinated McKinley. Why not me?”
I sighed, but he did have a point. “You’re saying the motorman is an anarchist?”
“Not saying anything. That’s for you to find out. I do know that Emma Goldman was arrested in Omaha not ten days ago for hatching a plot to murder me. She was also arrested, you will recall, after Buffalo. That soft-headed Leon Czolgosz listened to one of her lectures.”
“And she was released for lack of evidence.”
“Which doesn’t mean she was innocent,” Theodore said.
“Or guilty.”
“Only because the evidence was never found, perhaps. Assassinating leaders is what anarchists do, my dear John. Finding the evidence is your job.”
My stomach tightened. “Starting where, do you suppose?”
“At the top, of course.”
“The anarchists don’t have a top,” I said. “That’s why they’re anarchists. This isn’t the papists, with a hierarchy.”
“Nonsense. Every human organization has a hierarchy. Every animal kingdom has a top and a bottom—every phylum, every species, every family of wolves in a den.” Theodore was a verifiable expert in nature as well as in naval history, American history, the American West and wilderness, and animal skulls of too many descriptions. “Even anarchists have leaders. You know this, Hay. You just don’t want to admit it. Too rough for you.”
He was goading me, I knew that, to leave me no choice but to pursue his damn investigation and, not incidentally, to meet him in the ring. Amusement glinted in Theodore’s eyes. “Our Red Emma is back in New York, I understand,” he said. I was curious how he knew. “You should go see her. If an anarchist was involved, she will know.”
“And she will be only too pleased to spill everything to someone she’s never met.”
“You are a charming man, my dear John. You can open the door to China. You will get me my canal. You can talk a porcupine out of its quills. Surely you can persuade a woman to do what you ask.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “That is one thing I have never learned to do,” I said. “She is listed in the city directory, I imagine? Under Goldman comma Emma?”
“I couldn’t say. No need to. Cortelyou has made the arrangements. You will meet with her to-morrow morning, at eleven.”
“Father, must we entertain that old fart?” Alice said. Her eyelashes quivered—with mischief, I supposed—and her ivory skin looked translucent, surely cool to the touch.
“‘Young fart,’ if you please,” a Russian-inflected baritone boomed from the dining room doorway. Grand Duke Boris, a cousin of the tsar, was coming for lunch.
“Please forgive my daughter, Your Excellency,” the president said, standing by the sideboard, examining the borscht. “And may I welcome you, in our rather informal fashion, to my home at Sagamore Hill.”
Alice tilted her head and said, “Perhaps Mother will be along.”
“Sister!” the president snapped. “Not another word.”
I was well aware that Edith was off visiting Theodore’s aunt, to avoid meeting the tsar’s cousin, who had sipped champagne from a lady’s—well, a woman’s—slipper while in Chicago. Adee had wired me: “GRAND DUKE BORE-US NOT THE RECEPTACLE FOR CONFIDENCES.”
“Meow, meow,” Alice said, obeying the letter of her father’s dictum.
“You may leave now,” her father said, and with a tilt of her head and a switch of her tail, she complied.
The Russian guffawed. “The high spirits of youth,” he said. Grand Duke Boris had an unlined, rouged face and a pompadour; his scarlet tunic was covered in medals and featured gold epaulets that would have sunk a shark. He was shorter than I, and when he reached up to tap my shoulder, I imagined a crocodile’s chomp. Theodore recoiled.
“It is a pleasure, I must say,” Grand Duke Boris said, “to meet both of you gentlemen at once. The two grandest men in your government. An honor for myself, for Tsar Nicholas, and for my country.” His gaudy smile left cracks in his rouge. “But let me say, it is rare for the crown prince to be older than the monarch.”
Rather gauche, I thought, in referring to our statutory line of succession. In the absence of a sitting vice president, rights to the throne coursed immediately through the cabinet, starting with the oldest department first. Mine. This was not news to me, I assure you. It was a fact of my life, to which I had grown inured, and which affected my life not at all. That must sound silly to anyone’s ear, but it was true. For the most part, anyway.
“Ours is a young and vigorous nation, Your Excellency,” I replied. “It is right and proper for its ruler to be young and vigorous.” A perfect diplomatic response, I must say: sounds profound, says nothing, means less. “I should mention, sir, that my favorite color is gray. Matching my whiskers.”
The gun room, on the top floor, was clearly Theodore’s sanctum. Shotguns were propped up in the corners; books lined the shelves. The ceiling slanted in eaves, making a cave out of the dark decor. Archie was helping his father push the desk to the wall. I rushed over and kept the Tiffany lamp from toppling off. The Kodiak bear rug had been shoved aside. The woven rectangular rug remained. That, plus an oblong of floor, would serve as the ring.
No good could come of this. I felt certain.
I hadn’t sparred in a couple of years. Because of the demands of the job, trying to keep a disorderly world in line—so I told myself. But the truth was a lack of desire. Not none, to be precise. I had never known anything quite as vivid—indeed, life-affirming—as climbing into a ring and whaling away at someone who was whaling away at me. Even saving China from Europe’s depredations was like a lager next to a whisky. I loved having sparred, mixing it up with a bloke, making ourselves vulnerable to each other, proving … what? Something fundamental. I had done it more times than I cared to count. I had never been knocked down; I had always stood my ground. Yet there was no ignoring the fact that climbing into the ring (or, here, stepping onto the rug) still scared the bejesus out of me. Can’t say why, exactly. Getting hit, even in the face, rarely hurts for long. But scare me it does, and less and less do I see the point in bashing somebody else’s head and having mine bashed in return. I had proved whatever I needed to prove—courage, I suppose. Besides, the prospect of sparring with my boss—in front of his children, no less—eased none of the apprehension.
I wore a pair of Theodore’s old boxing trunks, requiring a rope as a belt to keep myself decent. Theodore had stripped to black trunks and a sleeveless, lemon-yellow shirt that showed a baboon’s shoulders and a buffalo’s belly. His right cheek was purple. His jowls were heavier and his face was lined more deeply than I had noticed before. His blue-gray eyes, naked without the pince-nez, looked clouded over.
“You ready?” he said. He seemed nervous, too.
“Always,” I replied.
Alice pulled the laces tight on her father’s brushed-leather gloves, and then on mine. She gazed past my right clavicle, never meeting my eyes. When she stayed on the red and gray patterned rug, I realized with a thud: she was the referee. Princess Alice probably thrived on watching people get hurt, possibly including her father. Certainly no exception made for me.
Theodore and I touched gloves and glared at each other in the customary way. For the moment, at least, I meant it. We stepped back into our corners. Alice’s forearm fell like a scythe. “Fight!” she declared.
Theodore came straight at me, unleashing two, three, four jabs. I realized that the glazed look in his eyes was near-blindness. (A couple of years later, a young artillery captain mauled blood vessels in the president’s left eye.) The man was charging like a rhinoceros, and the best defense was to step out of his way. Theodore rushed past me, stopping just short of the rope on the floor. He swiveled with an agility that belied his bulk and came straight at me again. No angles, no shrewdness, no strategy. Hadn’t the man learned anything about boxing as chess, as art? I stepped aside again. The next time he barreled through, I held my ground and socked him in the jaw. He looked surprised—and newly attentive.
He circled around me, his gloves low, almost tauntingly, staring hard at me, as if trying to peer into my soul. That was how I took it, anyway. I figured that my soul (such as it was) was my business, nobody else’s, not even his. Now the fight would begin.
I kept my gloves by my temples and, when he circled in front of a corner, I closed in, to annul his advantage in height. I delivered a jab, then a right cross, followed by an uppercut that caught him unawares. His head snapped back.
That enraged him, and he came at me more nimbly than I expected. I was too old, too slow, to move aside. He landed a hard right on my kisser; my upper lip scraped my teeth. I tasted blood.
Now I became enraged. Letting myself be humiliated would only diminish his respect for me, not to mention my own. I stayed away from his injured right side but advanced toward him with a jab and sent a hard right cross to his other cheek, followed by a thump to his jaw. He stumbled back.
I landed another jab and readied an uppercut, when I noticed something at the edge of my sight. A rumpled pile of clothes. At first I didn’t know what it was. Then I realized who it was: Quentin, doubled over.
Theodore had told him about Big Bill Craig.
My fist halted on its way to his father’s chin. I could not hurt another boy like I had hurt Del.
The president showed no such restraint. Spittle flew in my face as he pummeled me with a flurry of fists. My head was knocked back three or four times, and at last I pivoted and watched my opponent dance past. I considered punching him in the temple but held back. It was all I could do not to cry.
The breeze was blowing in from Long Island Sound. I could not see down to the water under the paltry moon, but I smelled the salt and heard the waves whipping up. Or was it the rhythmic drone from Cortelyou’s rocking chair, out here on the wraparound porch? The man never sat still, and his pattern never lost its cadence.
The president stood at the far edge of the porch, facing the sound. He had shed his coat and wore his white shirt from dinner. An assassin’s target, a shot through the heart. Which would make me … hmm, a suspect! Though only if he were shot in the back. And then which of us would be deemed likelier—Cortelyou or me?
Me. I had more to gain.
So everyone said, but I swore it wasn’t true. For one thing, I didn’t want to be president. Unlike my friend Henry, I never have. I’ve seen too much of it close up. Batting away complainants and sycophants all day long, dealing with the dolts on Capitol Hill—what I did for Lincoln would last a lifetime. I could never keep on a false smile hour after hour, and I pitied (and distrusted) anyone who could. For me, a fever unfelt, a fetish undesired.
And for another thing, consider Bruce Cortelyou, in the neighboring rocking chair, a man of vast ambition. Frighteningly efficient, brilliant as a bureaucrat, and (best I could tell) deceptive to his core. A chameleon, for certain. Indeed, he looked like Theodore—the bristly black hair, the pince-nez, the push broom mustache, the stolid face, the broad shoulders, the deep chest. I thought of him as the Prussian, although he was Dutch. He also looked a little like McKinley, his previous master; I swear I saw a resemblance around the cheekbones. Had he been obese while in Grover Cleveland’s employ?
“Justus Schwab’s saloon,” Cortelyou was saying. “Do you know where that is?”
“Should I?”
“I should hope not. It is an anarchists’ redoubt.” I had never heard anyone use redoubt in a sentence. “On East First street, number fifty, between First and Second avenues, just north of Houston.”
“I know New York a little, if anyone can,” I said. I had spent nearly five happy years toiling a mile and a half away, writing editorials at the New York Tribune. “Who is this Schwab?”
“Was.” Cortelyou rocked faster. “Tuberculosis, two years ago. His son runs it now. Rather a lowbrow place, and still a mecca for anarchists and nihilists and socialists and their ilk. Unkempt communists, too, you know the type.” I wondered where the kempt communists drank. “Our Miss Goldman was his closest … friend.” He held the word at a distance, like a wriggling eel. “Or so I understand.”
“Closest in what way—or ways?”
Cortelyou trained his gaze on an unseen point past the hollow. “With these people, who can tell?” he said. I noticed the jagged cut along his nose, but Cortelyou always sounded like he was catching a cold. “She received her mail there. And she still—what is the word?—frequents the place. I cannot say how often, but often. She will be expecting you to-morrow morning at eleven o’clock sharp.”
“I would have guessed that anarchists aren’t usually punctual.”
“I don’t regard this as a matter of amusement, Mr. Secretary.”
“When you survive to my stage of life, Mr. Cortelyou, everything is.”