1881–1883
NO OTHER ROOSEVELT HAD EVER ENTERED MORTON HALL, a barn-like maze above a saloon near Fifth Avenue and the corner of Fifty-ninth. It was the headquarters and “shop” of the Twenty-first District Republican Club, filled with cobwebs and brass spittoons, and run by a gang of rowdies who were little better than the hooligans of Tammany Hall. They looked at me with grave suspicion, as if a burglar in evening clothes had happened upon their premises by chance, with mischief on his mind. I was a twenty-three-year-old rube with red side-whiskers. I caught the eye of a man who sat hunched behind the barn’s only table. He was Humble Jake Hess, Morton Hall’s legendary district leader, who’d risen out of the streets and cracked many a skull on his way up. Disappointed by the Democrats, he’d bolted to the Republican Party years ago. A brute with big hands, a melodious voice, and a rare sense of political strategy, he’d lost one of his earlobes at Gettysburg to a lead bullet and also had to limp around with a silver kneecap. He wondered why a rube from the “solid element” had wandered into a hall of saloonkeepers and horsecar conductors.
“What is it are ye after, Johnny boy? And be quick about it.”
“I’d like to become a member of Morton Hall,” I said.
“And why would a lad like you be interested in such an unlikely miracle?”
His brethren laughed and winked, and I was able to catch them off guard.
“Because,” I said, “I’m going to be the next Assemblyman from this district.”
Humble Jake was silent for a moment. He didn’t like the brashness of my remark. And he was cautious with me.
“Are you married?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Good. I don’t like bachelors in our little arena. They’re not reliable.”
I’d disturbed Humble Jake, aroused his curiosity, obliged him to think like a district leader within the comfort of his own club.
“Do you have a profession, laddie?”
“I’m a law student.”
Humble Jake seemed suspicious. He didn’t admire lawyers, I imagine. I didn’t let him know that I was a slacker at Columbia. My classes were filled with details that were like fancy swordplay and had little to do with fairness. I couldn’t find much social justice in the law.
“And what’s your name, perchance?”
“Roosevelt,” I said.
The hooligans stared at Humble Jake. Something was awry. Their leader had benefited from all the boodle of Republican politics. Roscoe Conkling had helped appoint him Manhattan’s Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, and Humble Jake couldn’t have been ignorant of the gent who had started the Children’s Aid Society. Father must have locked horns with Humble once upon a time, rescued little boys from the nightmare of Charities and Corrections. Humble Jake would have respected Papa’s persistence. His narrow eyes lit.
“And am I speaking to the son of the late, highly regarded Theodore?”
“You are.”
Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter that Roscoe Conkling had ruined Papa. Humble Jake had a Roosevelt in his barn. I was given a badge to wear that differentiated me from every other hooligan. I have it yet—a metallic button with a dull sheen and the number “21” painted on it to mark Humble Jake’s district. There was no more mention of my being a candidate for the State Assembly, but I’d planted the seed. I had to go through all the rites of initiation, to feel the rough-and-tumble of politics at the barn. I visited local bars on Second Avenue with Humble Jake and got into fistfights with saloonkeepers, who wanted their liquor licenses lowered, while I wanted the licenses raised.
“Ah,” Humble said, “you’re our resident teetotaler. I like that.”
Members of my own clan considered me a maniac who deserved to be locked up on Blackwell’s Island. Roosevelts didn’t romp around in the mud of machine politics. Mother was horror-stricken.
“Your grandmamma would crawl in her grave if she was ever notified that you were mingling with the riffraff. Such crude men—politicos.”
I didn’t have to hide my mission from Bamie, like some heartsore Count of Monte Cristo. Bamie understood. “You’re attacking from inside their tent. Papa would be proud, Teedie.”
But I did feel like a turncoat—Humble had taken me under his wing and put down any rebellion among the ranks. And I had no intention of following the rough politics of Morton Hall. I was a reformer, like Brave Heart, and had always been.
“The little lord is one of us,” he said and bowed with a bit of mockery. “We’re related, did ya know that?”
Had Humble ever worked at Roosevelt & Son, carried plate glass on his back? No, it was nothing like that.
“My nephew, Martin Hess, a plumber’s apprentice he was, served as your father’s paid substitute, during the late war.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Father’s substitute was an Irish mechanic named Carter.”
Humble rolled his eyes. “This Carter never served. He was a swindler. He sold your father’s ticket to another man. It was Martin who served.”
“Did he survive?” I asked.
“He did not. He fell at Antietam. Lost both his legs to a cannonball and bled out right on the battlefield. Nobody could find him at first. His carcass—what was left of it—disappeared.”
“Don’t understand,” I muttered.
Humble’s brow wrinkled. “Disappeared, I said. We had to hire our own ghoul.”
I was lost, utterly adrift, among the artifacts of Humble’s language.
“Ghoul, what ghoul?”
“A corpse finder. There were dozens of them. It was once a lucrative profession. He finagled with the War Department on our behalf and dug up Martin’s remains with a bunch of other ghouls. We buried him proper, we did, buried what was left of Martin.”
My plans to smash the Republican machine had melted down with the death and dismemberment of Martin Hess. I felt like a fraud.
“Humble, I’m here to hurt your benefactor, Boss Roscoe Conkling.”
“Aw, I knew that,” Jake said. “I could read the larceny in your face the moment you arrived. I says to myself, what’s an aristocratic pup doing at Morton Hall? Truth is Boss Roscoe’s a son of a bitch. I’d like to maim him myself.”
I was a far cry from the Count of Monte Cristo. “Then I have no business being here, Humble. I’ve betrayed your trust. Should I return my badge and resign from the club?”
“Not at all,” he said, as his hand hovered over that missing earlobe, his souvenir from Gettysburg. “Roosevelt, you aren’t ashamed of us, are you? Why haven’t ye brung your missus to the barn?”
I HAD COURTED HER as if I were courting a cougar. That’s how persistent I was. I wanted Alice, and I had to pursue her until she wanted me. It’s a simple tale. I fell in love with Miss Alice Lee of Chestnut Hill during my junior year at Harvard, nine months after Papa passed. She had honey-blond hair and pale blue eyes, and she was a very tall girl at seventeen. Her hands and feet were already bigger than mine. It was excruciating. Alice had the long, gliding step of an athlete. She was already an expert archer, and no matter how many targets I went after and how many bows I strung, I couldn’t compete with her bull’s-eyes.
“Teddy, you are the most impatient boy I have ever seen.”
I’d met Alice through a classmate of mine, Dickie Saltonstall, who came from an endless line of Harvard graduates—the Saltonstalls were the most Brahmin of Boston Brahmins. Dick advised me to be more temperate in my pursuit of Alice.
“Roosevelt, you’ll frighten her away with that damn ardor of yours. Doucement, old boy. You’d break Lightfoot’s legs at such a pace.”
I’d had Lightfoot delivered to Boston with my dogcart, so I could visit Chestnut Hill at a gallop. I’d ride that horse through the roughest terrain. I had to conquer Chestnut Hill. I did have two ambassadors—Mama and Bamie. Bamie could read her own fate in the looking glass—a spinster with a crooked back. Her eyes withdrew deeper into her skull, but she and Mama rode up to Chestnut Hill to reconnoiter with Mr. and Mrs. Lee. Mr. Lee was a banker whose firm had invented the idea of a safe-deposit box in an underground vault. Whatever valuables you had would always be secure in one of Lee’s vaults. He wasn’t stern, and he didn’t undervalue me and my clan, but he thought that his pale princess was too young to be a bride.
“We value Theodore,” said this master of the underground vault. “But where’s the rush?”
Mittie was the clever one. While Bamie blustered, Mama spooned her vanilla trifle and never mentioned marriage. “Oh,” she said, “when it’s ripe and all, Teedie and Alice can come and live with us on West Fifty-seventh Street. We will surely have an apartment prepared. I have reserved an entire floor. It will be waiting, Mr. Lee.”
That was the clincher. Lee couldn’t resist the exotic charm of Mother’s moonlight complexion and the seductive softness of her voice. The nuptials were arranged right in the middle of that vanilla trifle. I did hide something, however. I’d had a rough patch with Dr. Dudley Sargent, the college physician. He said that countless attacks of asthma and years of heavy exercise had weakened the walls of my heart. He was very firm in his prognosis. Even running up a flight of stairs might put a strain on my heart. I had to be as sedentary as a monk, or I wouldn’t have much longer to live. I should have talked to Bamie about it, confessed to Alice, but it would have cursed my future, left me a chronic invalid. So I lied. I hadn’t lost my vigor, and I wouldn’t be damned by Dr. Dudley. I bought Alice a sapphire engagement ring and announced our wedding plans on Valentine’s Day, and what a Valentine it was. The teetotaler drank champagne. I wasn’t surly as I had often been after one of my rare benders with classmates at the Porcellian Club. I drank in Alice’s honey-blond hair, as her pale eyes glowed in the lamplight.
“To my Valentine of Valentines, whom no other man on earth will ever know as I do.”
My champagne glass shattered with the sudden force of my movements, but Mr. Lee didn’t mind the spots on his silk cravat, while Mrs. Lee wept with a farrago of feelings that I could never hope to summon up. She caressed my sleeve, a scintilla of champagne in her eyes.
“Dear, dear boy, you will look after our little girl, won’t you?”
We were married at Chestnut Hill on my twenty-second birthday, and spent our honeymoon at Tranquillity, Papa’s retreat on Oyster Bay. We had the whole house to ourselves, with servants and horses. Alice rarely left my sight. We sat on the same verandah that had reminded Mama of her father’s old plantation and we watched the palace steamers of the Fall River Line ply across the Sound with their booming whistles and great abundance of lights, and I thought of my own voyage on the Priscilla two years ago, when I arrived from Boston on the night boat too late to catch Brave Heart’s last breaths. I didn’t want to engulf Alice in my moment of melancholy. I missed Father yet, missed him more and more, even in the dreamland of my delight. The hunter had his sweet prey. . . .
I did bring Alice to Morton Hall. The hooligans were suspicious at first. Females seldom appeared at the club, except for an occasional floozy. And these lads were at a loss how to relate to Alice. They hid their own huge paws under the table. Half of them had broken hands from all the electioneering they did. But Alice soon won them over. They were hypnotized by her perfume and the long strides of her rhythmic gait. My wife must have reminded them of some ideal filly in a race that was never run.
Humble had ordered lemonade and tea biscuits from Delmonico’s. He’d put on a wrinkled cravat for the occasion.
“Ah, Mrs. Ted, your husband has captured our hearts.”
Alice caught Humble at his own hyperbole. “Not as much as he has captured mine, Mr. Hess.”
I could feel the weave of pleasure on his face. “You’d honor me, ma’am, if you called me Humble—that is my moniker at Morton Hall.”
“And I’ll be your Alice,” she said.
Humble preened in front of his hooligans. “I can tell you’re a lady—from your accent, ma’am. But it’s not Manhattan gilt. You’re countrified.”
“And what about you?” Alice asked.
“I’m also countrified. I was born in Little Bavaria, near the Bowery. That was a lifetime ago, and the accent has rubbed off.”
“But you haven’t lost your gilt,” Alice said, delivering her own salvo.
My darling made the rounds, and every hooligan in the barn revealed a gnarled paw to let Alice have a good shake of the hand. She wasn’t shy or remote with that crowd. I’d misjudged my pink little wife. She had an inborn sense of politics, or perhaps she understood my own longings to be part of the mix.
Humble had been undecided about my fate until this moment. The Party stalwarts were against having an interloper speak for them in the State Capitol. But Humble pushed back.
“Miss Alice, we’d like to run your husband as our man from the Twenty-first. He’d represent our district in Albany.”
Alice had him purring now. “And what appeal would he have for the voters?”
“What could be better than a Dutchman in Dutch New York? Fifth Avenue is within our bailiwick. And isn’t Mr. Ted one of the swells?”
I hadn’t rehearsed Alice, hadn’t coached her in the least. But she startled Humble and his cohorts. Bamie must have scouted the district with Alice, run with her to catch a horsecar, peeked into the window grille of a local saloon.
“And will the saloonkeepers side with him?” she asked with an ambiguous smile.
Humble seemed in command again. “Certainly, Miss Alice, if I say so.”
“But my husband’s allegiance is different,” she said. “He will vote with his heart’s command, and not with the Party’s own symbols. That might cause you some pain.”
“Not at all,” Humble said with his own ambiguous smile. “Mr. Ted is what we call a ‘Nightingale’ in Republican parlance. Each Party can afford one, and only one.”
Like the king’s jester, I thought.
“Humble, I won’t be Conkling’s fool—that’s too high a price.”
“Ah, Conkling ain’t much at Morton Hall. He’s a ghost.”
I was bewildered. “A ghost who still breathes?”
“The red beard has retired, and we have our Nightingale,” Humble said, seizing Alice and waltzing her across the barn with the tempestuous sounds of a tuba exploding from his cheeks while his stalwarts laughed and stamped their feet with all the madness and joy of men from the Twenty-first District of Manhattan.
THERE WASN’T MUCH ROOM for a Nightingale in that dear old dull Dutch town of Albany, with a wind that howled off the Hudson and cold fronts that chilled you to the quick. I was Mr. Jane-Dandy, the Manhattan rube, the youngest lad in the State Assembly. I wore my red side-whiskers, a pince-nez with a gold tassel, and a peacoat from my Harvard days. The veterans at the Capitol mocked me and called my peacoat “an ass-buster,” because the wind crept up my cylindrical trousers from Savile Row. They were a venal lot, looking to line their pockets. This “Black Horse Cavalry” was corrupt beyond measure, allied to Party bosses whose one allegiance was to the little corridors of power they had cobbled together from their various districts.
I meant nothing to the Black Horse Cavalry. I was a hindrance, who interrupted the humdrum proceedings with my calls of “Mr. Speak-ah,” in my high-pitched voice. They couldn’t doze comfortably in their cushions as I hustled about, trying to rip into yet another bill that would fleece the public treasure. They’d have to get rid of that downstate pup from the Silk Stocking District—“a Fifth Avenue fellah.” And they summoned Long John McManus, their enforcer in the Assembly, who was one of Tammany’s proudest lieutenants.
I might have been bushwhacked if Humble hadn’t been waiting for me at my hotel on North Pearl, near the riverfront. He’d arrived on the night train and was in a grim mood.
“Humble, what’s wrong? Have I betrayed your trust?”
“Not at all,” he said, crushing the crown of his bowler with his big hands. “You’re a Nightingale after my own heart. But they mean to toss you in a blanket. It’s their way of humiliating you, Mr. Ted. McManus is their instrument. He’s tossed many a lad, obliged them to leave Albany in disgrace. And I can’t interfere. I’ve been sworn to silence.”
“Where are they now?” I asked.
The Delavan House was a dusty temperance hotel right across from the railroad yards. Liquor wasn’t allowed in the rooms or in the lobby, but you could find whiskey everywhere, in canisters, flasks, and canteens, in teapots, coffee cups, and milk bottles. The Delavan was where bosses from both Parties conspired when they weren’t attacking one another in the cavernous chambers of the Capitol, jumping out of some closet with an Indian war cry. The Delavan was their haven, their private retreat, and as good a spot as any to hide a strumpet or to trap an unsuspecting rube.
And so I played my part, walking into the Delavan in my peacoat and cylindrical trousers. McManus, with his apelike appearance, was convening in a corner with other members of the Black Horse Cavalry. He had his run of the Delavan, drinking whiskey out of a teapot. I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t respond. I tapped his shoulder again. He sniffed the foul air of the Delavan with his enormous nostrils—Albany was overrun with breweries, and the entire town stank of stale beer and the rot of coal tar in the river from the chemical works.
That great din of Albany barons and their vassals turned to a polite rumble. They could sense the massacre. Their gray eyes seemed swollen in the weak light.
“What’s this?” McManus asked with another long sniff. “Do I smell a Harvard brat? His Royal Majesty Mr. Nightingale?”
McManus was showing off to the Democratic and Republican chieftains. I had realized within a week or two that there was little difference between the Parties: judges, lawyers, bankers, business tycoons, and political bosses divvied up the power among themselves. Humble must have realized that, and he exiled himself to Morton Hall. He’d come to Dutch Land to warn me about McManus, but he wasn’t a loyal Dutchman; he wasn’t Dutch at all; he fled Albany as soon as he could and returned to his fiefdom in the Twenty-first.
I watched Long John wink to his lackeys. I read behind his ruse. A number of cavalrymen rose from their table. They didn’t even attempt to hide the horse blanket that was rolled up under the table. While a pair of cavalrymen stooped over to unfurl the blanket, several others approached me with wild-eyed grins. They meant to grab my arms and hold me in place for McManus. I socked the first one and sent him sailing into the other cavalrymen. And then I socked the second.
McManus didn’t like this sudden twist in his own parlor. “Roseyvelt, that’s downright rude.”
“Long John, I hear you mean to toss me,” I said.
McManus still had his audience, the barons and members of the Black Horse Cavalry, who smirked into their fists.
“Toss you? Why the hell would I do that to a fine fellah like you?”
They were all tittering, and I had to put a stop to that or they’d go on razzing me in the halls of the State Capitol for the rest of my stay.
I tapped Long John’s shoulder a third time.
“Don’t you ever try to toss me, Mr. McManus. If you ever try, I’ll kick you in the balls.”
McManus had murder on his mind. His jaw twitched. By Godfrey, I would have to kick him in the balls. But he couldn’t get a simple nod from a single baron. They had expected entertainment, a novice Assemblyman who had made a nuisance of himself tossed into the fetid air at the Delavan to the delight of their vassals, and McManus had made a mess of things, had bungled it all. They didn’t want a spill of blood, not mine or his. So Long John had to pretend that he was still the master.
“I’ll break you,” he muttered under his breath, and then he bowed extravagantly to satisfy the barons. “You’ve had your fun, Mr. Nightingale. Go about your business.” He hoped to mock me by whistling the nightingale’s song. But McManus was utterly off-key. He sounded like a whiskey salesman. I had to warble the miraculous chip-chip-chip of the nightingale. I warbled every variation, every twitter.
Despite themselves, the barons and their Black Horse Cavalry were enthralled. They clung to every little splash of melody. Nothing in their own cynical lives had prepared them for that prolonged plangent cry. I completed my nightingale’s song and marched out of the Delavan, with two of the cavalrymen sitting in a daze on the beer-soaked floor.
I ROSE LIKE A ROCKET after my encounter with McManus. More and more Assemblymen abandoned the stalwarts and joined my little clique of Nightingales. We couldn’t outgun the Black Horsemen, but we could annoy the barons, who did not want their duplicity revealed. I began talking to the press about various bills the barons had smothered in the Assembly.
The Cigar Makers’ Union had introduced a bill to ban the manufacture of cigars in tenements. And I was put on a committee to examine the merit of such a bill. We’d never been near a tenement, not one of us. What aroused my suspicion was that the manufacturers themselves owned many of the tenements, and thus served as landlords to the myriad cigar makers they employed. So I went on my own inspection tour of tenement land.
The cigar makers lived in damp, sunless hovels on Rivington Street, often five or six to a room, children and women working deep into the night, with tobacco leaves piled everywhere, and breathing in that raw, red tobacco dust.
I saw children of six crouched over their workbenches, some of them as humpbacked as Bamie, tobacco leaves stored behind them in towers of moist blankets. Not one of them would ever see the inside of a schoolroom. I wasn’t some wizard of the courts but a freshman legislator on a fact-finding mission. I had no right to reprimand their mothers and fathers, or whoever else was in charge of these tenement factories, but reprimand them I did.
My rebukes fell into a mountain of tobacco leaves. These Hebrew cigar makers and their families rarely understood a word of English, or else played mum. Finally the foreman of one such factory did speak up. He was the uncle of an entire crew, sixteen adults and children in three rooms. He had his cutting knife, but he didn’t menace me. This fellow had been run out of some hovel in Prague for trying to organize the cigar makers into a little army and he rode right past the immigration officers at Castle Garden with a false set of papers. He was never an anarchist, he insisted, more like a Bohemian Robin Hood. God knows what his real name was. The others at his shop called him Kapitán. His English was impeccable. He could rattle on without a flaw.
I smoked a cigar with him to be polite. I shivered at first, because the very act of biting into one of the Captain’s cigars summoned up the rich aromas of my childhood. Father had taught me how to inhale precious air with the help of a fine Havana during my worst asthma attacks.
I didn’t mollycoddle this cigar maker.
“Captain, do ye know who I am?”
He didn’t hesitate. “You, sir, are the Cyclone Assemblyman.”
That’s what they called me inside the Capitol. I was everywhere at once, the great meddler, poking into other Assemblymen’s affairs. How else could I get anything done? I had to meddle.
I perused that tenement shop with its tobacco towers and the soft, disheartening scratch of women and children as they sheared tobacco leaves with knives shaped like crooked crescents.
“And you, sir, have children sitting there mummified on a bench.”
“Mummified?” he said. “I have them exercise in the back yard. We all go out for lunch—hard-boiled eggs and root beer.”
“And how many hours do they work a day?”
“Fifteen,” the Captain said.
“That’s inhuman,” I told him.
But he wasn’t perturbed. “How else could we survive? Who would benefit if I had to close the shop? The landlord would bring in another cadre of cigar makers. It would also fail—fifteen hours. That’s the formula of success, Mr. Roosevelt.”
“And how would you define success?”
His mask of a face shimmered in the dusty light. “By becoming a landlord, sir. You have to own five or six tenements and have a multitude of factories and shops. Isn’t that what they call laissez-faire capitalism? Well, I’m a capitalist.”
I couldn’t argue with this rogue Robin Hood. I went back to Albany, determined to steer the Cigar Bill out of committee and onto the Chamber floor.
“Mr. Speak-ah, we are perpetuating a system of child slavery. We must break up this coterie of landlords and their poisonous arsenal of tenement shops. We cannot sit idle while children cough themselves into an early grave with tobacco dust in their lungs.”
I pounded into the barons and their Black Horse Cavalry. I courted every journalist I could. We Nightingales attacked. The stalwarts stumbled, and the bill sailed through the Assembly. But there was a bit of intrigue in the Chamber. Some jackal stole the final draft of the bill and it never arrived on the Senate floor. We’d been outflanked by the barons. I planned to reintroduce the bill next year, but first I had to persuade my constituents to bring back their Cyclone Assemblyman.
McManus swaggered into the Kenmore, where I kept a little flat. He was gloating with spittle on his tongue. “Albany isn’t for you, boy-o. You shouldn’t have mocked me at the Delavan. I’ll find you in a dark corner of the Capitol one day, and you’ll wish you were dead.”
And that’s when he saw Alice gliding down the stairs of the Kenmore in a green dress. Most Assemblymen didn’t bring their wives with them to this dank Dutch village with its foul effluvia riding right off the river. But I didn’t relish being apart from Alice. She endured the isolation and biting wind so that we could have quiet dinners and quiet nights at the Kenmore.
McManus had a crazy gleam in his eyes. I didn’t like how he ogled Alice. “Ah, you’re a picture of perfection, Mrs. Roseyvelt.”
Alice appraised him with her pale eyes. She must have sensed some deep splinter beneath his cruel streak, like the staggered cry of the nightingale.
“I hope you will sup with us one evening, Mr. McManus, and tell me all about yourself.”
“I’d love to, ma’am. I’m your husband’s peer—and his rival. We do wonders together. He’s kind of a miracle man, the little saint of cigar rollers. What would we do without him?”
And he loped out of the Kenmore with a triumphant grin.
I WAS NO BETTER than a robber baron.
I had to steal a honeymoon for Alice and myself every other weekend at West Fifty-seventh Street, even while Mother grew more and more mysterious and morose. She donned a white chenille net to keep the dust and grime out of her hair and wore this white net at dinner parties. She also kept up the ritual of two daily baths—the first to suds herself, and the second to rinse off the thick crust of soap, with a maid constantly beside her, as if Mother were Marie Antoinette. “Darlings, I cannot find another method to fight all the filth of Manhattan.”
Bamie was the loyal clerk who kept track of Mama’s bills. Mama always overspent, leaving a wild trail of purchases, while Bamie was right behind her with Papa’s old, worn, leather-bound passbook from the Chemical Bank, handed down to Bamie herself like some musty amulet. Thank heaven my wife was freed of such money matters, since she had an allowance from the Lees of Chestnut Hill. Mama and Alice were famous together, almost as famous as sisters, one very tall and the other very short; both were country girls who loved to wear white, and neither of them had much use for the relentless pace of Manhattan.
“Alice, dear, people move so fast and talk so fast, I’m always a few steps behind. I’d wager that not a single soul ever runs to catch a horsecar in Boston and Chestnut Hill.”
She’d never seen the cars in Cambridge, with Harvard lads like myself hanging from every available rail and limb. But I wouldn’t contradict her. Besides, Mother was manageable until Elliott returned after sixteen months from a hunting trip to India, Singapore, and Saigon, with a small fortune of elephant tusks and tiger skins. Little brother had game bags galore. I envied him, have to admit. I must have inherited Mama’s mad flamboyance, the residue of Bulloch Hall. I hunted Bengal tigers in my dreams, even while I marched from tenement to tenement in the Hebrew quarter, inquiring about errant cigar makers and children covered in red dust.
I congratulated Ellie on his great success—he’d dined with maharajahs, stared into the bloodshot eyes of man-eating tigers, raced after rogue elephants—but he couldn’t seem to settle in. He was like a vagabond with a royal address.
“I don’t have Teedie’s fanatical grit,” he told Alice. “I’m a different animal.” He couldn’t stay sober. He would start to drink at breakfast time, appear at the table with gin on his breath. He was having seizures, would black out from time to time, and attack me in his delirium.
“I’ll slit your throat one day, I will. Look at me. I’m that werewolf you dreamt about as a child. But this werewolf is made of flesh and bone.”
I could not consider my own little brother a maniac, but I still locked our bedroom door at night. And I’d find Ellie outside the door when we awoke.
“Forgive me, Teedie. I am not myself.”
I’d escort him to his bedroom and put him under the covers, like Brave Heart might have done when Ellie was a little boy. I sat with him until he fell asleep. Mother wandered in and seized me around the shoulders, this birdlike woman with her white hairnet. “Teedie, I am lost without your father—lost. Didn’t he appeal to you on his deathbed?”
She’d forgotten that I missed Papa’s agony altogether; I was on the night boat from Boston, breathing in the moon on the main deck of the Priscilla, that maharajah of the Fall River Line, when Brave Heart made his last request, according to Mother.
“Darling, didn’t he whisper, Watch over Ellie, watch over Ellie! I was right there.”
I couldn’t discount Mother’s conversation with a ghost. Father might have whispered something.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER ATTENDING a lecture at the Century, a haven for artists, poets, editors, and bon vivants, I stumbled upon an altercation on a side street. The lamps were very shallow. But three men, ruffians really, were annoying a young woman in the finest clothes. It mystified me why this elegant young lady did not have an escort. She could have been a pigeon put there for my benefit, as part of some entrapment. Still, I could not abandon her. It was not in my nature to do so.
I tapped one of the ruffians with my stick. “You, young fellow, stop pestering that girl.”
He smiled at me, this jackal, who was wearing a gaudy silk scarf. “And you, sir, should not interfere in what is not your business. Tell him, Nan.”
The young woman seemed at a loss. She did not encourage me to stay, did not smile or wink. She had a bit of blood on her mouth. She was tall and had pale eyes, like my Alice.
“You are very kind, sir, but . . .”
“That’s not good enough, Nan,” said the young jackal. “Tell him to scatter.”
He shoved her with his filthy hands. She tottered for a moment, like a child’s top. And that’s when I thrashed him with my stick. The two other jackals leered at me like Halloween lanterns from the Irish quarter near Third Avenue. I thrashed them, too. I didn’t even realize the temper I had. The rooster in me had been aroused. And I was beyond caring whether this Nan was a pigeon or not.
The jackals ran off with their swag—Nan’s parasol, pocket handkerchief, and purse. She seemed utterly bereft, but she did not seek my counsel. I was bewildered and a bit rash. I wiped the blood from her mouth with my handkerchief. She couldn’t have been a chambermaid or a thief’s companion. She had the strict carriage and soft, melodious voice of a duchess—or a songbird. I had to query her.
“Miss Nan, are you related to those rough boys?”
“No,” she answered in the same melodious voice. It was even more of a riddle. I could have given her some hard cash and hailed down a cab. But I had a fanatical grit, as Ellie said. I couldn’t rest until I got to the bottom of things.
“Yet they knew your name.”
Her lip trembled. She didn’t have one coarse feature. I took her hand.
“I’ll help you.”
“You can’t,” she cried. “You can’t. You had better go.” And the duchess removed her hand from my pigskin glove with a slow, silky glide, as if we’d just been pirouetting at Windsor Palace.
“Where do you live?”
“Not far,” she said, avoiding that inquisitive steel in my eyes. But it was difficult for her to play at some sham. She’d given me as many clues as she could; I still followed her across the street. We arrived at a brownstone with a narrow stoop. My duchess had lost her composure and the delicate flow of her carriage—she’d been rehearsed at a local charm school.
I followed her up the stairs. I wondered if we’d come to a maison close. Women in silk gowns and gaudy satin corsets were parading on the stairs with their cadets, who wore derbies at a devilish angle. These cadets bowed like counterfeit courtiers. None of them had a touch of grace.
“Ah, what a handsome prince.”
“He’s mine,” the duchess said, knocking off their derbies and scattering the women in their silk extravaganzas. Soon there wasn’t a soul.
The duchess turned to me in her duress—I wasn’t a stranger she’d found on the street. She’d lost her bearings, her sense of purpose, and she panicked. “Mr. Roosevelt, they’ll crucify you if you go up one more flight. A whole arsenal is waiting.”
“Shh,” I said. “It’s too late.”
I gathered the duchess up in my arms like a renegade bride, stepped onto a landing of oilcloth, and rushed through a door that was slightly ajar. I wasn’t surprised by the reception committee—photographers with their flash pans, a police captain with all his ribbons on display, burly detectives from Mulberry Street with shields pinned to their vests, and Long John McManus. I stared into the flash pans and their crackles of light with my signature smile, a toothy Roosevelt grin. I still had the duchess cradled in my arms.
“Well,” said McManus, “if it isn’t the people’s champion, trafficking in white slavery. Captain Striker, accompany the pup to your precinct.”
Striker hadn’t expected me to smile in front of the flash pans. I was a popular Assemblyman, with half the papers in Manhattan writing about my holy war with the barons. He could be exiled to a precinct in the cow pastures of the Bronx with one false move.
“Your Honor, why the hell are you in a house full of whores?”
McManus groaned. “What’s wrong with you, Denny? Take him away. This squirt will swear that he was helping a damsel in distress.”
I put the duchess down and let her spin on her own two feet. She didn’t belong in a maison close.
“Speak up,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The duchess squeezed her eyes shut and stood there blindly, wagging her head, while Alice walked in with another policeman. McManus and his cronies meant to cripple me in their private cul-de-sac with oilcloth on the floor.
They shouldn’t have brought my wife.
McManus bowed to her, doffing his black derby. He must have been so, so sure of himself to take such a big gamble. He’d sent for Alice long before I arrived.
“Sorry to involve you in this mess, ma’am. But we didn’t summon you on a whim. Your husband is in the white slavery racket.”
There wasn’t any fear in Alice’s pale eyes, just flecks of fire.
“Why did you have a policeman knock at this late hour, Mr. McManus? You frightened my mother-in-law. I was half asleep.”
McManus doffed his hat again. “Ah, but we thought you might want to know about your husband’s liaison with another gal.”
I’d kept Alice away from every bit of sordidness I encountered as an Assemblyman. But she had an archer’s agility, as if she could conjure up McManus and dismantle him in the same fall of an arrow.
“Long John,” she said, “the only liaison my husband has ever had is with me.”
“That’s not true,” McManus said. “That’s not true.”
I hit him. It wasn’t out of malice, but to break his stride and end his streak of insufferable lies. I might have broken a knuckle. He could have swatted me with one of his gigantic paws. Yet he didn’t. He displayed the medallion of blood on his mouth as a war trophy and presented himself as a victim of the Manhattan rube.
“Mrs. Roseyvelt, ma’am, I did not lay a finger on your husband, not once. And please listen to Nancy.”
My duchess was a songbird of a different kind. All her veneer rubbed off. Her features hardened, and that soft, pliable face turned into a snarl. The duchess’s diction was much more rarefied.
“He is a very cruel man, your husband. He kept me on a leash. He has disgusting habits. I had to perform monstrous tricks.”
Alice wavered for a moment; that’s how skilled was the duchess, who tossed out details like time bombs.
“My buttocks are raw from all his biting, Mrs. Roseyvelt. I can show you the marks.”
Alice removed a pocket watch of solid silver from her purse, stared at the dials, said, “That’s not my Ted,” and proceeded to wind the watch. I heard a heavy padding in the hall, and then Humble Jake Hess appeared. I wasn’t surprised. Jake had informers everywhere in his district. Someone must have summoned him from Morton Hall.
Humble sniffed about. He had his own sense of drama. He kissed Alice’s hand with his native gallantry, ignored McManus, and lit into Captain Striker. “You shouldn’t have become Long John’s linchpin, Dennis, a lad like you from my district. Couldn’t you tell that this little party wasn’t kosher?”
“Humble,” the captain said, “I—”
“Shut up. You cannot pick on my Assemblyman.”
He slapped Nan, and I didn’t like it at all. Her arms flailed and she fell to the floor. I didn’t care how she had flimflammed me.
“Humble,” I said, “we do not hit women.”
“Oh, yes, we do, Mr. Ted. And please do not meddle. This gang was out to ruin your career. Mrs. Nancy Fowler is the best bunco artist in Manhattan. She was once part of your social set.”
“A real duchess,” I murmured to myself.
Humble did a kind of entrechat and plucked Mrs. Fowler off the floor. He was very light on his feet, as he told me all about the duchess.
No one had neglected her, tossed Nan into the street. She preferred the Life, as petty criminals loved to call their own little craft. She was, according to Humble, a natural steerer and a dip. That’s how she met McManus. He was a pickpocket and a prizefighter—before he moved into politics and stole elections for Tammany Hall.
“Ain’t that so, Long John?”
“Aw, Humble,” McManus said. “We were only having a little fun with the rube.”
Humble seized McManus’ derby and stomped on it. “Captain Striker, since when do you allow confidence men and their molls to operate in your back yard?”
“Jake,” the captain muttered, “have a heart. Long John has all the barons on his side.”
Humble smoothed the ribbons on the captain’s chest.
“Arrest him, or I’ll smash your skull. And take the dip—she goes down with him.”
He chased out all the detectives and the photographers with their flash pans.
I felt sorry for the duchess after Humble told me her tale. She abandoned her brownstone on Union Square, left her banker husband and two children, with servants, draperies, and silver, to satisfy her wanderlust in the Manhattan underworld. She’d traded in her identity for the identity of a dip. Yet I was riveted to her, as if her own fanciful tale had come out of the stories I’d heard from Mittie as a boy—with every sort of monster and enchantress. Mother, you see, had had her own slave companion at Bulloch Hall, a ragged little girl called Toy, who dressed in Mother’s hand-me-downs and slept on a straw mattress near her bed. Toy was the bold one, who risked the wrath of the Bullochs. She would gambol on the rooftop of Bulloch Hall and swipe sweet potato pie from the cookhouse. Toy and Mittie were both cognizant of a diabolic queen—Deirdre—who floated above the roofs and gobbled little girls. This queen had once been the bride of a local manor lord, a lazy, boisterous lout who could not manage his own plantation—or his bride. She fled the manor in nothing but her nightgown and declared herself queen of the countryside, with the right to pillage.
And one night, in the midst of a storm that bent every tree within a mile of Bulloch Hall, the renegade queen appeared outside Mittie’s window with silver eyelashes and a puddle of blue paint on her cheeks. “Come, my little ones,” she beckoned in a birdlike song that was hard to resist. Mittie might have gone with Deirdre into the dark wind, but it was Toy who held her back, Toy who noticed that wild sense of despair and destruction beneath the puddle of blue. Mrs. Fowler was the same sort of enchantress, the same renegade queen, resurrected right out of Mother’s tale. I admired her pluck, that perfect stride she had—it frightened and exhilarated me, as if I were one step away from the void. Perhaps we all were.