1862–1878
FIRST THERE WAS A METALLIC AROMA, THE TASTE OF TIN in my mouth. Then the monster would appear with rusty fingernails, his yellow eyes swaying like twin lanterns in the dark, his fierce red whiskers clotted with human blood. He crouched at the foot of my bed, prepared to gobble.
“Fingers first,” the werewolf muttered. I could feel the walls of my chest collapse as I began to wheeze. It was always worse at night, when I would have great, rumbling gasps, with the wolf-man’s yellow eyes riveted to mine, gaze upon gaze, like some diabolic vigil. As a boy with a scientific bent, I didn’t believe in monsters of any kind. Yet it was hard to reconcile rusty fingernails and red whiskers. And the wheezing wouldn’t stop.
We couldn’t have a doctor constantly at my call, waiting with a candle. But I did have Brave Heart. My Auntie Anna had given Father that name and it clung to him for life. She said that Father reminded her of Mr. Brave Heart, whom she confused with another character, the gallant guardian who slays wicked giants and protects women and children from lions in Bunyan’s classic about Christian souls.
Our Brave Heart was a bearded man with broad shoulders. He didn’t wear a helmet and a sword. He was a merchant prince who might have stepped out of Christian allegory. The unfortunate mattered as much to him as the family fortune. Father possessed a leonine look. I could have imagined him slaying giants and werewolves in another world. He gave me my breath, willed it to me. He would carry me from room to room in the middle of the night, push air into my lungs with the forceful rhythm of his gait. I drank cups of black coffee delivered from his hand and was smoking cigars before the age of five. Each puff, Father said, would replenish me. And when nothing else worked, Father would carry me in a blanket down to the stable and have the night watchman rig up the Roosevelt high phaeton with its pair of long-tailed horses and we rode into the wind. I’ve never had as fine an adventure in all my years. It was like sitting in the clouds, way above the horses’ heads, racing along in that sloped carriage.
We careened around other carriages and delivery cars. Father was an excellent whip. His long-tails never stumbled in their traces, never went awry. He drove us to the shanties and scorched plains of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was so far from civilization that we called it the Badlands. Our Little Dakota was stuffed with scrap heaps and desolate shacks where the impoverished lived near river rats hiding from the law. Nothing bothered Brave Heart. We passed the campfires of one robbers’ roost after another. Such desperate men learned not to tinker with our carriage. If the untutored attacked us with a pipe, a rock, or any other missile, Father would lash at these river rats with his horsewhip until they landed on their rumps and sat there in one great tangle.
“Teedie, has your breath come back?”
All that excitement among the campfires had made my lungs whistle with clean air. I did not dream of a wolf-man on that ride.
“Sir, I’m fit as a combustion machine.”
Father wasn’t being reckless. He hadn’t dealt with the river rats to entertain me and my lungs. He had to declare his right-of-way, or we would have had to stick to a prescribed path. And on we went into the Badlands, with its shantytowns, orphanages, and insane asylum. He liked to wear his linen duster on these long treks. It had very wide pockets, and he’d always stop in his traces whenever he found an abandoned kitten on the road. He’d hop down from the carriage, scoop up the kitten, and stuff it into his pocket. Tomorrow we’d bring this stray to a pet shop on Third Avenue run by a pair of spinsters. It was an orphan, most likely, chased out of some litter. Father had a fondness for the ragged, the lonely, and the lame.
We had a little patch of bad luck on this particular early morning ride. One of our wheels fell off, and the carriage would have spun out of control if Brave Heart hadn’t leaned over the long-tails and pulled on the rigging with all his might. We sat there at a terrible tilt. Father hadn’t forgotten his toolbox, but first he had to chase down the missing wheel. And now every damn robbers’ roost in Little Dakota had us at a disadvantage. Several lubbers arrived. They were dressed in motley gear. One had a cape and an eye patch; another had torn pajamas out of the lunatic asylum; a third had a military tunic. They were all carrying lanterns, lead pipes, and long sticks.
“Lookee here,” said their leader, wrapped in his cape. “Don’t make a fuss, or we’ll harm the boy.”
I had Brave Heart with me and shouldn’t have panicked, but I did. My combustion machine went out of whack. My lungs couldn’t catch a lick of air. Father cradled me in his arms.
“Are you deef?” asked the river rat. “Pay attention, or that boy will strangle on his own snot. Give us your fancy carriage and we’ll be gone.”
Father pushed air into my lungs with his powerful hands and waited until the wheezing stopped. Then his touch turned delicate, as if I were a boy out of a doll hospital. The phaeton remained at a wicked angle without one wheel, and Father had to prop me against his seat, while the river rats poked him with their wanton pipes and sticks.
“This is your last chance, bub.”
Father didn’t say a word, and the rats smiled, thinking he was silent out of fear.
These louts hadn’t taken the least measure of such a man. The roots of his beard went crimson in the lantern light. He’d left his whip on the footrest of the carriage, and he had to pounce on the river rats with his bare hands, sending them all a-scatter with a series of quick blows. Afterward I watched him suck the blood from his raw knuckles. He was still shivering with rage. He had to steady the horses, whisper to them, rub their noses.
He fixed the wheel, sullying his frock coat and lingering in the same long silence. The sun began to rise over the Bloomingdale Asylum and its somber row of black chimneys, creating a fan of light that looked like very fat fingers. I was glad, glad, that I had been born, despite the frozen fist in my lungs, despite the wolf-man at the foot of my bed, and the sudden bouts of diarrhea that we called the Roosevelt colic. I belonged to Brave Heart’s company of orphans, even if I wasn’t an orphan at all.
THE ROOSEVELT RESIDENCE HAD a line of black rails that swept across our little balcony like a runaway musical score. Perhaps that runaway score was a premonition, because there was pandemonium on East Twentieth Street when war broke out. Mittie, as we called Mama, was a genuine Southern belle with black hair and skin as fine and pale as porcelain. She grew up at Bulloch Hall, a plantation in old Cherokee country near the Chattahoochee River.
Mama’s eldest sister, Auntie Anna, lived with us, too, together with Grandmamma Bulloch. They’d fallen on hard times after Pappy Bulloch died and couldn’t make ends meet. Grandmamma wore a lace cap, and when Papa had to entertain Union generals, Grandmamma would vanish into some secret corner of the house.
Once, while the Union generals sniffed brandy and puffed on their Havanas in the parlor, Papa excused himself for a moment and went on a mission to find Grandmamma. He looked everywhere. Finally he discovered her in a closet on the fifth floor, where the servants lived. Grandmamma sat in the dark by her lonesome, wrapped in a shawl, with a cat’s blazing eyes. She wasn’t caught in a dream. She was as coherent as a lightning bolt.
“I’m a burden to ya, Brave Heart,” she said.
“You are not. You’ve been kind to the children.”
“Kindness isn’t the occasion here,” she said. “I’ve insulted you in front of your Yankee generals. We’re kin now, and I should have served the hors d’oeuvres and made pleasant chatter. But I can’t. It jars upon my feelings, sir.”
Papa didn’t say another word. He gathered Grandmamma Bulloch in his arms and carried her downstairs to the room she shared with Auntie Anna. He pretended not to notice the Rebel flag in her room.
Father wanted to join the Union Army, but two of Mama’s brothers were already with the Rebels. So how could he volunteer and compromise Mama’s own people? He had to hire a substitute, an Irish lad, to fight in his place. And it cut right into his soul. He couldn’t run away to war and he had to tolerate the Stars and Bars in his own house. I felt his shame, and it was my shame, too. His shoulders slumped and at times he looked like a sullen black bear. I worried that he might go on a rampage. But there were no river rats around, just Roosevelts and Bullochs, and he loved us all.
My sister Bamie—a contraction of bambina—must have been dropped from her cradle, because she had to wear a harness for her curved spine. Father was determined to fix her humped back. But she never did outgrow that ailment, even with the harness. My brother Elliott, or Ellie, was long and limber, like Brave Heart, while Corinne was the war baby, with blond curls. Mother marched around in white muslin like a somnambule the longer the fighting lasted. She plotted with her own sister and Grandmamma Bulloch to send contraband—handkerchiefs and sweaters—across the lines. So it was Bamie who began to look after us, curved spine and all. We loved Mama, we all did. But she suffered from palpitations and melancholy fits. Papa was passionate about her from the moment they met. He bought her trinkets and babied her; he’d laugh and call Mama his fifth child, whereas Bamie was more of a mother to us by the time she was ten. Grandmamma Bulloch died one afternoon in the middle of a sentence about Yankee pilferers and pirates; Mama and Auntie Anna both fell into a profound despair.
Meanwhile, Bamie had to boss the servants around and scrutinize the butcher bills, after Brave Heart finally went to war—in his own fashion.
Father became an Allotment Commissioner, you see. Sutlers had taken advantage of Union soldiers, getting them to buy whiskey at astronomical prices, so they didn’t have a penny in their pockets. The sutlers were an army unto themselves. Half of ’em wore the Union blue, borrowed from the War Department with extravagant bribes. The other half looked like undertakers, mean and malicious in their black frocks and cavalrymen’s boots, several with sabers at their side. After Father was appointed a commissioner by President Lincoln himself, he traveled from camp to camp in the dark of winter, chasing after the sutlers and convincing raw recruits to send money home to their families. The sutlers fought back, surrounding Father at one encampment, attacking him with their sabers, and he had to whack at them with a loose board from a picket fence until the sabers flew into the wind. He’d return home with frostbitten hands and feet, his collar clotted with blood; it was Bamie who nursed him, rubbing Father in hot cloths until all the numbness—and clots of blood—disappeared.
But while he was away, Bamie watched over us. She’d inherited Father’s broad shoulders. The servants were terrified of her masculine air. The hump on her back couldn’t diminish her. She had a swarthy complexion, like an Arabian prince. I called her our own little Atlas, who carried the weight of the Roosevelt clan on her crooked back.
“Teedie, you haven’t done your breathing exercises. Papa will be disappointed in both of us.”
“But Papa let me smoke a cigar,” I muttered in my defense.
“You’re seven years old. You can’t strut around like a Mississippi gambler.”
She’d dress Corinne, comb Elliott’s hair, and attend to Mama, who was more and more of a recluse after Sherman’s men broke through Bulloch Hall on their march to the sea and robbed every pot and pan and picture from the walls. Bamie had to treat her like a delinquent child.
“Mother, if you won’t eat, I’ll have to force food down your gullet like a stranded chick.”
“I declare,” Mittie said, “you shouldn’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice. I’m far from stranded. I’m in mourning, child.”
“Well, then mourn with a full mouth.”
That’s how Bamie got her way. And when she caught one of our servants stealing gold coins from the family strongbox, Bamie fired him on the spot. He was an out-and-out rascal, this fellow, Mr. Hynes, whom Papa had hired during the war when it was hard to find first-class help. He’d arrived with a lukewarm recommendation from one of Father’s banker friends. Hynes was a dipsomaniac. He’d wander about, dancing with invisible creatures, crashing into tables, as he did his phantom waltz with a terrible lust in his eye. Seems he couldn’t live without the bottle. And he tried to bully my sister.
“You don’t have the authority to fire me, girl. You’re ten years old.”
“Eleven, Mr. Hynes. And I have all the authority in the world. Your employer, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Sr., has bonded me.”
The dipsomaniac was worried now. He might have been a crack thief, but he didn’t have Bamie’s iron intellect.
“What sort of bond?”
She handed him a scroll. I’m not sure it made much sense, but it did have Papa’s signature. And this wayward butler was wary of written documents. Still, Hynes wouldn’t leave. He’d slobber one moment, repent the next. He even proposed marriage to my eleven-year-old sister. “I’ll cure that hump, Miz Bamie. I’ll kiss it to death.” Bamie had to fend him off with a fly swatter. Mama couldn’t stop him. Nobody could. And he continued to prey upon a household whose single monitor was a child who had to wear a harness.
Bamie wrote to Papa, of course, though it was hard to track him down. He was often in the saddle ten hours a day. But Hynes ran out of luck while he lorded it over us. We could hear Father’s key turn in the latch. He’d come home without warning. He remembered the last time Bamie and I had stood at the front door, waving to him, and he couldn’t get that image out of his mind. I’m not sure what he felt about Mama and her devotion to the South, when he himself was an Allotment Commissioner, saving Union boys from the sutlers’ avariciousness.
Still, he could read the current situation in Bamie’s eyes. And Papa caught the butler wearing his boots.
Hynes whipped his head back and forth and hopped out of Papa’s boots. I could see that Papa wanted to slap Hynes into hell. But he muffled his rage somehow. The Roosevelts did not strike their servants—it was considered vile.
“Mr. Hynes, you will return the money you stole. You will apologize to my daughter, and then you will disappear from Manhattan. Should I ever find you in someone else’s employ, I will not show you the least bit of mercy.”
Hynes was no better than the sutlers, taking advantage of us like that, proposing marriage to an eleven-year-old girl. Father was a pinch away from throttling him. So Hynes repaid every last dollar, and had to leave without a red cent. He bowed, called me and Ellie the little masters, slobbered over my sister’s hand, kissing it again and again, and vanished into the fog, one more forgotten soul.
I WOULD WANDER ON my own while Father was away. I passed a market at Union Square, with its endless caravan of open-air stalls, and discovered a dead seal laid out on its own coffin of wood. Its whiskers were still wet. It looked like a black torpedo with flippers and webbed toes. Its belly was as pink as congealed blood. The seal had been killed in the harbor, according to the fishmongers. I wasn’t quite sure if the seal’s meat was ever sold. But its carcass resided there on a board day after day. The fishmongers soon became my friends. They said that the seal had been put there as a kind of circus attraction, to draw customers into the market. They could tell how devoted I was to that dead seal and they didn’t discourage my visits. I measured its length and girth with a folding pocket foot rule. I drew pictures of my first specimen.
One day the seal was gone. And that vanished carcass grabbed at my heart and gave me palpitations. It was curious how much dearer it was to me dead than alive. I might not have been attracted to the same seal swimming in the harbor like a primordial creature. My poor seal had begun to putrefy, the fishmongers said, and it was pulling customers away from the market. But they had a gift for me—the seal’s skull. I was startled by how tiny and delicate it was. The fishmongers had shaved off the flesh and boiled the seal’s head in a pot. I could cradle the skull in my hands. I marveled at its mandible, at its jagged rows of teeth, how yellow the bones were. I put the skull in a shoe box under my bed.
I’d become a zoölogist before I was seven. I started the “Teedie Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in my room, collecting whatever specimens I could—snails and birds and the carcasses of chipmunks. My museum stank up the house, our chambermaid said—and after she refused to clean my quarters, the entire collection was relocated to a storage bin in the back hall. Bamie was rather neutral about my endeavors, though she never discouraged me. She was much too busy hiding Mother’s near-criminal devotion to Jeff Davis and the Stars and Bars and having to deal with the household budget. She barely had a minute to herself.
Given her bewilderment over Mother’s peccadilloes, large and little, it was Father who took delight in my studies. He’d return from a visit to the camps with his frozen feet and watch me stooped over the seal’s skull, squirrel bones, and other little treasures in the back hall. I’d outgrown that original storage bin, and Brave Heart bequeathed me another. He scrutinized all the notes I had kept and stared into my eyes.
“Teedie, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A scientist,” I said without a lick of hesitation.
“You’ll be poor as a church mouse,” he said. “And you’ll have to economize—Bamie will watch over all your bills. But I’ve made enough, son, to keep you afloat. If you’re a scientist, a real scientist, you can’t turn into a dilettante. I won’t allow that.”
“Father, I’ll be as serious as serious can be—I’m seven years old.”
Brave Heart smiled behind the little strands of gray in his beard. “Ah, I nearly forgot.”
In the spring we went out into the wild garden in our back yard, with its lone cow and family of peacocks with clipped feathers, and we listened to birdcalls. I could warble the different tunes and mating calls. I’d become a master of birdsong. Sound was everything to me. I could shut my eyes and gather myself into a competing symphony of songs.
“Papa, that’s our blue jay.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Two long notes and one short trill. That’s our blue jay showing off.”
I also kept track of the plumage. I drew the anatomies of bird after bird. Father found me a box of pastels with every color in creation—pastels that had come from an ornithologist’s private studio, and even those colors weren’t enough. Nature was far more various than human desire and human will.
We went into the woods on Long Island a few summers after the war. I mimicked every birdcall.
“Teedie, you’re a darn magician.”
“No, Papa, I’m a scientist. I trained my ear.”
Later Father would let me study with a taxidermist, and I went everywhere with a supply of arsenical soap to preserve the skin of whatever creature I mounted. I had a special toothbrush that I kept in my kit. But the maid was careless, and she mixed up all my toothbrushes; so, like a country doctor, I had to keep my own taxidermist’s bag. But no matter how successful I was with my mounts, I couldn’t control the marks of woe on my father’s face.
“Son, you’ll have to make your body just like you’ve been making your mind,” he said, looking at my pitiful arms and legs. It was Bamie who had to fight off the hooligans in our back yard. A bloody nose was bad enough, but I didn’t want to lose the sketches in my notebooks to some young highwayman on the prowl.
So Father installed a gymnasium in our mezzanine. I exercised with Elliott sometimes, and sometimes alone. Ellie was taller and had much more of a natural build, but I had to labor over every little band of muscle. I had my first shotgun when I was thirteen—a silver-plated piece of French design. Ellie was a much better shot, while I had to squint at every target. That’s when I realized how nearsighted I was.
Papa furnished me with a pair of spectacles that were like metallic peepers; a new landscape unfolded like a miraculous fan. For the first time, the very first, I could peer through a blurry void and distinguish light and line. I could do all my anatomical drawings inside my head, and I discovered even more colors—it was like staring at the splendor of a peacock’s tail and picking at an array of feathers—real feathers, not imagined ones.
Father wouldn’t allow me to fall into a taxidermist’s funk, where all I could think about were my specimens and Zeus, my pet garter snake. I had to accompany him to the Newsboys’ Lodging-House, a sandstone castle on West Eighteenth Street; he’d built this lodging-house with his own hands, had worked with the stonemasons, had supplied the glass. He’d sup with these boys in his silk cravat and tails, and I supped with them, too, with my pet snake in my pocket. I witnessed every spoonful, while I had a trace of arsenic on my sleeves from my little taxidermy shop at home.
The lodging-house had its own night watchman, who was also caretaker, banker, and part-time cook. His name was Quentin Moss. Papa had hired Quent and vouched for him. Quent might have been an ex-prizefighter or a jailbird, but he’d come fully bonded by my father, and nothing else mattered. He kept the newsboys’ receipts, doled out petty cash, filled their bellies, and attended to their wounds—they were often pounced upon by street gangs, with the encouragement of the police.
Newsies kept arriving out of the lampless night. They were a pitiful lot, their pockets weighted down or ripped from their pants, their shoes in a shamble, their faces bloodied from some recent attack; Father had noticed that dilemma before I was ever born. He knew no legislation in the world could help these boys, not the commissioners and the judges who belonged to some political boss or corrupt administration. These were orphans and runaways who couldn’t be schooled, who would have ended up in an asylum until they were vacant, soulless vessels, and so Father kept his foundlings in this sandstone castle, where they could be sheltered and fed, and have their own primitive bank accounts.
Father had six generations of Roosevelts at his rear, bankers and traders in glass, and he took nothing for granted. The Roosevelts had arrived in Manhattan as pig farmers, and Father never forgot the smell of manure that clung to the family name. He was a burly man who had helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History with that financial pirate, Mr. Pierpont Morgan. But his charities, it seemed to me, captured more of him than the culture of Manhattan ever could. That’s why he was here at this lodging-house.
I must have been fifteen at the time, struggling with my tutor to learn Greek, desperate to read Philoctetes, about a hunter with a festering foot—somehow, that hunter on his uninhabited island, abandoned by his fellow warriors, appealed to me. No man lives here—I am but a skein of smoke. And after a severe attack of asthma, when I must have moaned like Philoctetes, I said to Papa with all the severity of a fifteen-year-old snob, “Father, not one of these boys will ever sit for Harvard’s entrance exams.”
A rage built up in Brave Heart—he turned root-red, and for a moment I feared he would strike me. But he calmed himself and caressed my ear.
“They are better hunters than you are. They’ve been hunting all their lives. And perhaps the industrious ones, the clever ones, will own a newsstand. I’ve financed as many boys as I can. And others will pick up grammar and become reporters, or runners at police court. But you mustn’t flaunt your privilege, Teedie.”
I’ve been plagued by his words ever since. And perhaps that’s why I have striven so much, even if I often wasn’t aware of what I was striving for. We moved into a mansion on West Fifty-seventh Street, with a half mile of mullioned windows, right at the border of the Badlands. And Father rented a summerhouse in Oyster Bay, on Long Island’s North Shore. He called it Tranquillity. It had white columns and a verandah that must have reminded Mittie of Bulloch Hall. Brave Heart wanted to soothe my mother, but she was beyond soothing. She’d withdrawn into her own antebellum world.
I prepared for Harvard on that wide porch, with my main tutor, Arthur Hamilton Cutler, a recent graduate who already had a mythical reputation as a molder of young men; none of the lads he tutored had ever failed Harvard’s entrance exams. He was still in his twenties, an ambitious fellow with bulging eyes. He had a curled mustache, and he blinked a lot, out of excitement, I’d bet. Perhaps he only felt comfortable in the presence of tycoons and philanthropists like my father. He must have thought of me as a future benefactor. Cutler liked to hunt and fish. After our studies, we would often whistle birdcalls together. We shot quail in the woodland behind Tranquillity. My tutor was always welcome at our table. I think Bamie took a fancy to him. She fed him Brussels sprouts roasted in the finest oil. But Mr. Cutler was much more interested in Brave Heart. He talked of holding special classes at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House.
“Cutler, you’d have to start from scratch.”
“I might find a way, sir.”
Mr. Cutler could see how unsettled Papa was. His newsboys couldn’t find much purchase in Philoctetes and all the other classics. They had to be schooled in the wild, and Father was aware of that. He had some of their wildness. He’d never been near Harvard Yard. He’d served his apprenticeship with his own father at 94 Maiden Lane, headquarters of the family “store,” Roosevelt & Son. “Plate Glass & Looking Glass Plates” was written right on the front of that nondescript building.
Father found more pleasure in his newsboys than in the family business. Plate glass wasn’t much on his mind, I suppose. One night he drew me out of my little taxidermy shop and dragged me to the lodging-house. “Did you bring Zeus?”
“Of course, Papa. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him. Why?”
He paused for a moment, as if he were contemplating a business deal at Roosevelt & Son. “I told the boys that you were a keeper of snakes. They’d like to meet Zeus.”
“Papa,” I said, “I’m a taxidermist, not an animal trainer.”
“Well,” he said with a shrug, “you’ll have to lie.”
And lie I did. I had Zeus slither into a boy’s ragged trousers, then resurface near his neck, and wrap himself around another boy’s arm, like a living bandage. The newsies were dee-lighted. And Papa was as full of mischief as the boys themselves. “More tricks,” he said. “More tricks.”
I HAD TO SUFFER through the worst case of the Roosevelt colic in creation—I lived and slept on the pot. Cutler had prepared me for Harvard as best he could. Oh, I could sing my Sophocles, how the Greeks had to swipe Philoctetes’ magic bow if they wanted to take Troy. But I’d never dealt with other scholars in a classroom. I was afraid, mightily afraid, that I’d shit my pants in the middle of Harvard Yard.
It was Bamie who took the night boat up to Boston that summer; Bamie, the clever one, with a drummer’s eye for detail. She hiked across Cambridge in her skirts, appealing to passersby, and picked a boardinghouse on Winthrop Street, where I would live during the next four years. She bartered with the landlady, Mrs. Richardson, and shaved down the price a notch or two. She had my rooms painted and furnished, and fitted up with coal for the winter. She was, with her deeply set dark blue eyes and sad face, our “Fearless General,” as my little brother had dubbed her. Bamie was indispensable.
I sported a pair of side-whiskers to mask my trepidation. I was seventeen, and had my own scout. I wasn’t sure how a member of the elite was supposed to behave with his scout. It was Bamie who had hired him. He was a local lad, utterly untutored, with a set of false teeth. His name was Patrick. He blacked my boots and served me coffee on a tray. A multitude of freshmen before me had abused him. He still wore their scars. He ducked every time I grabbed a book.
“I won’t hurt you, Patrick,” I said, as kindly as I could. “What have lads from earlier classes called you?”
“Dunderhead, kind sir.”
“Well, we can’t have that.”
“Oh, it’s customary,” he insisted, like a logician.
“Then we’ll break that custom.”
He was quite alarmed. “But it ain’t proper to call me by my Christian name. What will the other lodgers think?”
I had to deal with this, my first dilemma on Winthrop Street.
“I’ll call you Scout, since you are my scout, and you may call me Roosevelt, or Mr. Ted.”
He chuckled to himself. He must have thought that I was untutored.
I’d never been near a school, you see. I was considered too frail. So Harvard was my kindergarten. But my taxidermist’s shop and my study of birdcalls and flight patterns had made a scholar of me, and I didn’t need any Harvard zoölogist to tell Teddy Roosevelt about the nature of things. I studied on my own, away from the lab. But everything was interrupted in my sophomore year, after Papa was appointed Collector of Customs for the Port of New York by President Rutherford B. Hayes.
It was Father’s moment of glory, his maiden voyage into the political swim. I could imagine our whole tribe sitting with Papa someday in the Governor’s mansion. My classmates all congratulated me. “Roosevelt, isn’t that bully for your Old Man,” they said. I was invited to speak at half a dozen clubs. I was glad that Papa wouldn’t have to bury himself in finance at the family “store.”
The United States Custom House was a gigantic political plum. Situated on Wall Street, it had over a thousand collectors and clerks who benefited from all the booty that washed into the Port of New York. Papa assumed that Hayes had appointed him as a reward for his many years of service to New York. He hadn’t realized that the President was battling with Senator Roscoe Conkling, New York’s Republican boss, for control of the Party.
Conkling was a handsome giant of a man, irresistible to the ladies. He loved to box, and wasn’t beneath threatening an opponent on the Senate floor. He had a pointed beard and dark red hair. He could not tolerate to be touched. He favored fawn-colored vests and gloves. And Boss Roscoe ruled his faction of the Republican Party with a simple wave of his glove. He didn’t block Father’s appointment at the Senate hearings. He stalled the appointment instead.
Brave Heart couldn’t deal with such a devious, backhanded maneuver. He came down with stomach cramps, wailed into the night like Philoctetes. I am but a skein of smoke. But Papa did not have Philoctetes’ magic bow to relieve his pain and let arrows fly at that devil with the pointy beard. He took to bed. I visited him that Christmas, when the cramps seemed to subside. He was ghastly pale in his silk robe. I could not recognize the man who had once knocked about river rats with his fists in the wastelands of the West Side.
“Father, I won’t return to Harvard. I’ll stay here and comfort you.”
There wasn’t the least bit of luster in his china-blue eyes.
“You’ll comfort me much more if you continue with your studies.”
He told me how dear I was to him, how valuable, how I had never given him a moment of pain or displeasure. I was his Teedie, he said, and he feared for my future. “We cannot have so much corruption for such a long time and still survive.”
He wasn’t only talking about the Collectorship that had failed to materialize. Papa could live with that. It was corruption at every level of the government. He’d gone out to Blackwell’s Island to see the insane, and what he saw were sleepwalkers in filthy shrouds. They wandered about like lost billy goats. Every last one of them had gone wild, their faces and fingers covered in grime—yet how timid they were to Papa’s touch. They whimpered at the least caress. Papa had to retrieve them from the island’s rocks, one by one, and return them to their keepers.
“Teedie, these poor souls didn’t have a single champion. The guardians they had took food from their mouths. They were wards of a city that had abandoned them. They’re numbers, Teedie, in some forgotten book.”
“You’ll fight for them, Father, when you’re feeling better.”
He shut his eyes. “Whistle to me, son. I want to hear the birdcalls.”
I sang the mating song of the male robin, that wavering warble that Papa loved, and the dry chip-chip-chip of the hairbird. His eyes fluttered and he fell asleep, his hand clutching mine. He suffered from peritonitis, a fatal inflammation of the intestinal wall, but the doctors hadn’t doomed him yet. And Brave Heart rallied next day. He was up and about. Papa dressed before I did. He was wearing his great scarf, his beaver hat, and winter boots. His face was waxen. The snow had been falling for a week and covered all the windowsills. Papa was in the mood for a sleigh ride, he muttered. He wouldn’t have the family coachman drive him around like an invalid. “I’m not dead, Mortimer. I can be my own whip.”
I had to bundle up, with earmuffs and all. The sleigh was parked outside our door, not far from Little Dakota. We sat in the Roosevelt rocking carriage, with Papa at the reins, and went into the park.
Papa wouldn’t sit still. He rose up and down in that rocking car and insisted upon his right-of-way. We could hear our runners eat into the ice with a gnawing sound. There were no birdsongs. Branches snapped in the wind, as we passed several other cars in our relentless whirl. A few members of the upper crust had come for a morning drive. Papa must have frightened them with his reckless abandon of the reins. He wasn’t pale in that blinding light off the snow.
“Teedie, you can go back to Harvard now.”
I WAS AS ROTTEN as my predecessors, alas. In my frustration and despair, I hurled books at the lonely boy I had inherited. That’s how hungry I was for news from West Fifty-seventh Street. I didn’t even fathom my own cruelty at first.
“I’m sorry, Scout, I really am.”
He rubbed his knuckles. “Understand, Mr. Ted. Your Papa’s groanin’.”
I had a shandygaff with him at one of the local grogshops. And then a telegram arrived on February 9.
TEEDIE COME HOME.
I took the boat train from Boston, climbed off the cars, and onto one of the palace steamers at the Fall River wharf. I’d booked passage on the Priscilla, grand princess of the Fall River Line; she luxuriated in her own gleaming white decks. The Priscilla could sleep and feed a thousand passengers with all the comfort of a floating palace. She was the preferred steamer of Presidents, aristocrats, and Wall Street tycoons. Her dining salon had gilded balconies and the thickest carpets between Boston and the Battery. But I wasn’t trying to rub elbows with the Priscilla’s royal guests. I could have eaten at the captain’s table with industrial barons and debutantes from Beacon Hill. I dined alone in my cabin. I could not bear a long evening of banter about women’s bonnets and the etiquette of spittoons on board the Priscilla when I knew that Father was gravely ill, else I wouldn’t have been summoned so curtly.
I stood out on the deck all night, as the Priscilla steamed around the perfidious mouth of Point Judith, with all its legends of mermaids who might lure men into the sea—there wasn’t a mermaid alive that could have enticed me in my black mood.
I felt stuck in some strange, bloated eternity until the Priscilla arrived at her Hudson River pier. I rode uptown in a hired car. The coachman swayed from side to side as he dodged pedestrians, trucks, and other hired cars. His route was roundabout and frivolous. I had to change carriages in midstream as his horse began to hobble.
Finally we got to Papa’s mansion near Little Dakota. There was an ominous vigil in front of the house; a hundred newsboys stood waiting in the slush and snow, cap in hand, like a choir robbed of song. With them was their watchman, Quentin Moss, sobbing softly to himself, his powerful body hunched over like a man with a broken back. For an instant he could not locate where he was. His eyes darted about. It was the newsboys who nudged the watchman and settled him. They were each clutching a candle, every one. The flames flickered in the wind and revealed their unwashed faces with a crooked glow. Their pockets were loaded with coins, I could tell. They’d come right from their routes to Papa’s vigil with penny candles. They didn’t cry, like Quent. The newsies swayed with their candles that burnt down to a nub. I cursed their devotion to Papa. It frightened me. But I could hear their silent chorus.
Too late, Teedie, you’ve come too late.
The servants were all sobbing. Mama wandered about in her white muslin wrap, like a ghost ship lost at sea. I couldn’t dislodge her from her slow dance. It was a widow’s dream.
“Mama, I’m here.”
She continued to drift.
Couldn’t find Corinne, and Bamie, our Fearless General, mumbled to herself. Her corset must have been undone. Her spine was all curled. Her sad eyes sank deeper into her skull. I’m not certain she recognized me. It was Ellie who seemed in charge. I hadn’t realized how alike we looked. He was my taller, sturdier twin, without the side-whiskers.
“Teedie, it was terrible. . . . Papa had such fear in his eyes. I’d never seen him like that.”
We went into the morning room where Papa still lay on the chaise, with crumpled linen and spilled basins all about. His lion’s mane had gone all gray, with streaks of white. He was gaunt under his gray beard. I kissed him on the forehead and could not help my childish thoughts, the belief that I could wish Father back to life with a sincere song.
“Brave Heart,” I uttered.
Bamie burst through her chrysalis, went outside to the newsboys in a shawl, fed them bits of cake. “Missy,” said one of the boys, “can we see the Master?”
My big sister allowed them to clump up the stairs, several at a time; they stood near the door, curtsied, and went back down. And it was only then that I recognized the enormity of their loss. They’d had one lone champion. Another philanthropist might sup with them, but wouldn’t arrive in evening clothes and share their meal with Father’s gusto. He’d entwined himself into their lives. They mattered to him almost as much as we did.
That night I had a terrifying dream, the same dream that had haunted my childhood. A wolf-man with blood on his whiskers was waiting at the foot of my bed, prepared to pounce and gobble me up. It was Father who always woke me in the nick of time.
“Teedie, I’m here.”
Yet this dream was more terrifying. The wolf-man had Papa’s china-blue eyes, and its rusty fingernails were gone. It had supple hands and a groomed beard, without a trace of blood. I’d resurrected Papa in my own nightmare, without the totem of a single word. I was still mightily afraid of this wolf-man.
Mittie entered my room in a muslin gown.
“You were screaming, dear,” she said. She looked like some bird-child out of the forest.
“I dreamt of Papa. . . . I’m all right. Go back to bed.”
“Was he kind in your dream, dear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
And she disappeared again. I was the boy scientist of Harvard Yard. I didn’t believe in omens. Still, I did believe that Papa had visited my bed in the guise of a werewolf, his admonitions reverberating in my skull like a magnificent drum.
I FEAR FOR YOUR FUTURE, TEEDIE.
So did I.