1891–1894
THE DARLINGS OF ALBANY CUTTHROATS THEY WERE, reeking in perfume and rotten silk, Big Bill Howe, with all his corpulence and diamond rings, and Little Abe Hummel, the angelic one, with his fiddler’s fists. They’d sent their runner, with a personal note.
MUST SEE YOU.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
HOWE & HUMMEL.
I scratched out their seal and scribbled, Messrs. H & H, I have no time for such mysteries. You’re welcome to meet with my counselor.
A second runner came, with my message crossed out.
BEST TO HAVE A HEART TO HEART.
WOULDN’T WANT THIS TELEGRAPHED
TO YOUR ATTORNEY, MR. R.
YOU WILL LIVE
I’d just come back from a sojourn in North Dakota. I’d gone there of my own accord after an uprising of the Sioux on a reservation near the Little Missouri. They’d torn the settlement apart, set the commissary on fire. I saw a hill of ruins that belched gray smoke. These Sioux weren’t strangers to me. I’d watched them ride their painted ponies across my ranch. Now they skulked in their moccasins, with whiskey eyes, like prisoners wandering in and out of the smoke. They’d become hostage to the local Indian agent, a chap called Curly Bell, who was a bounty hunter with pockmarks on his skull. Bell had been buying up parcels of Indian land and stealing grub, it seems. The Sioux didn’t have a single say over their lives. Their children had no schools to speak of. This agent had been double-dealing at the post, selling alcohol under the counter. I fired him on the spot. He spat in my face.
“Commissioner, your word don’t mean piss. I’m the President’s man.”
Indeed, he had Pinkertons as armed guards. I still intended to bring him up on charges before the Civil Service Commission. I wrote out my report to President Harrison, who had appointed me to the Commission, thinking it would be a sinecure, a political plum, like it was for the pair of louts who were my fellow Commissioners, but I had a job to do, and I would damn well do it. Mr. President, the tribes had good reason to rebel. We need paid Indian judges and police, not Pinkertons. And we can’t have schools without school teachers. Nor can we have agents who have no understanding of tribal justice. The Indian Bureau cannot sit wantonly outside the Civil Service. That is a prescription for disaster and despair.
The next time I returned to Indian land, a Pink approached me with a Winchester cradled in his arms. He handed me a slip of paper. That was the oddment of it all. He hadn’t come to do Curly’s bidding and tussle with me. He was a mere messenger for those two Manhattan pirates.
They must have hired the Pinks to locate my whereabouts. But I hadn’t informed a soul, not even my fellow Commissioners. I should have gone back to the District to file my report. I went to Manhattan instead, on a whim, to lick my wounds. The Dakota Sioux would have no respite from that lying Indian agent. They’d have to suck on clay and school themselves on the wind of their own words. Their rifles were locked inside the armory. They wouldn’t rise up again. The Pinks weren’t put there to patrol the reservation. The Indian Bureau had hired those damn detectives to scatter the Sioux, a clear violation of the Dawes Act. I couldn’t rely on Harrison, that little gray man. So I sulked in Bamie’s parlor. And I had to contend with the theatrics of Howe & Hummel.
“What is so urgent that you had to track me to a reservation in the middle of nowhere?”
Both of them had suspenders embroidered in gold. But Hummel had frayed cuffs. His collar was imperfect. He was trying to look like a slightly elegant hobo, but he still looked tatterdemalion to me.
“Commissioner,” said Little Abe, “the Pinks are in our pocket. We can have them vanish from the Badlands at a moment’s notice.”
“But that’s not why you’re here,” I said.
“No,” said the fat man in the elegant sleeves. He had his own foyer at Delmonico’s, filled with chorus girls, and that’s where he mingled with politicians and members of the criminal class. He was known as Velvet Bill, because he could hypnotize a jury with the purr of his voice. He could also toss an occasional lightning bolt. He was irresistible in patent-leather shoes, as he performed his slick ballet. A banking scion might murder his mistress or his wife in front of half a dozen diners at Delmonico’s, and Howe would have him declared insane. The banker would serve a month or two in the millionaires’ ward on Blackwell’s Island, and reclaim his throne at Chemical or Chase. And this wizard, Velvet Bill, had sent the Pinks to look for me in South Dakota.
“TR, it’s a delicate subject. That’s why we asked for a private rendezvous, not a visit to our offices, where the press might be involved. We are not looking for scandal. We represent a certain Catherina Mann, otherwise known as Miss Katie.”
I stared hard at these pirates through the gold rim of my pince-nez, but I could not get them to squirm.
“And what does your client have to do with me?”
“Very little,” said Velvet Bill, “and quite a lot.”
“She was your brother’s mistress . . . and still is,” said Abe Hummel, who had a habit of hurling Velvet Bill’s darts and bolts. I’d dealt with Howe & Hummel at hearings in Albany and Manhattan, where they represented the usual riffraff summoned to testify before some oversight committee. Silent Abe would whisper into a ruffian’s ear, and it was Abe’s testimony we heard, Abe’s non sequiturs. He had a talent for getting his clients to rumble and reveal nothing at all.
“Gentlemen, my brother’s mistresses are not my concern.”
“Ah,” said Velvet Bill, his thumbs hooked into his waistcoat. “But Katie Mann is very much your concern. She was your brother’s chambermaid, come all the way from Bavaria. He seduced Miss Katie, sir, had trysts with her in the attic. She carried his child. Your brother has abandoned her and moved to Europe with his family for the duration.”
“He’s taking the cure,” I said. “He’s currently at a sanitarium in Graz.”
“But the damage has been done. Her reputation is at stake—and so is yours.”
And now it was apparent why the Pinks had hunted me like a pack of hounds. These pirates were sniffing blood and money, Roosevelt blood and Roosevelt money.
“I won’t be privy to blackmail,” I said. “This chambermaid could have had a hundred suitors.”
“Hardly,” said Hummel. “The girl is pure. We have a locket inscribed to her and letters in Elliott’s hand.”
I knew about the mistresses. There had been other lawyers, other claims, other letters “in Elliott’s hand.” But I’d tossed those shysters out of my parlor. None of them had the ammunition and the audacity of Howe & Hummel, who could pick and choose their clients like the most brazen of killer vultures. Velvet Bill rarely lost a case in court. That’s why the accused always settled with the injured party, however extravagant the claim. No one seemed to want Velvet Bill’s corpulent shadow to linger very long.
“And what is the name of this wanton child, the unwanted one?”
The pirates were humming to themselves.
“You mean the little bastard?” Velvet Bill asked in a silky voice, with a wink to his partner.
I scowled at him. “Yes, the little bastard.”
“El-li-ott Roose-velt Mann,” Hummel said, pronouncing every syllable like a sinister song. They expected me to strike back. But I had encountered their tricks in court.
“A Roosevelt, you say?”
They nodded in unison like a pair of thieves.
“And on the certificate of birth, what father is listed?”
“None,” said Velvet Bill, “none so far. Born out of wedlock, that’s what is inscribed.”
“And the laundress will want a bit of relief?”
“Chambermaid, sir,” said Hummel, “who had her own room in Mr. Elliott’s Manhattan townhouse until a short while ago. . . . She couldn’t survive on less than ten thousand dollars.”
They could not see my anger—or my contempt. They were rogues of the law, who thrived on human carrion. There was little doubt in my mind that Elliott had dallied with Miss Catherina Mann. I had hoped he might change his habits after he fell in love, and it wasn’t with a creature from the demimonde. He couldn’t have found such an exquisite beauty at a brothel. Miss Anna Hall of Tivoli-on-the-Hudson could hurl any male into an absolute spell of devotion with her shapely figure and the rare blue eyes of a startled fawn. Later I would find out that she was frivolous, that she cared more about her own little pleasures than curbing Elliott’s appetites and wild promenades. He ruined Bamie’s parties with his drunken jaunts. I no longer invited him and Anna to Sagamore Hill. Ellie couldn’t stop drinking. And he’d become addicted to morphine after a bad spill on the Meadowbrook polo grounds. He had bloated cheeks and sullen eyes. And Anna seemed to care about little else than the social calendar. I felt sorry for their children. I was quite fond of little Eleanor, a creature who had not inherited a pinch of her mother’s charm. She was the ugly duckling of the Roosevelt clan, with a terrible overbite and no chin at all. And philanderer that he was, Elliott still adored the duckling.
“I suppose you went to my little brother first for the ten thousand.”
Silent Abe sucked me in with his solemn eyes.
“That we did, TR, we most certainly did. But he denied any knowledge of the liaison, denied it most vehemently, even after we read him portions of his own letters to Miss Katie.”
It wouldn’t have mattered. Elliott had used up most of his inheritance, and he relied on Bamie for hard cash. He absconded to France with his brood. Anna rented a house on a quiet street in Neuilly, and she went on a binge, buying up hats at the Bon Marché. In the end, it was Bamie who paid for the hats, Bamie who went over Elliott’s bills like an exchequer with a crooked back. But Neuilly couldn’t save my little brother. He fell into a deep gloom and was carted off to Graz.
“The little boy, where can I find him?”
“Outside your door,” said Silent Abe, with his angelic smile.
I was furious. “Has she been waiting all this time with the boy?”
“Miss Kate brought him in a bassinet,” said Velvet Bill. “Shall I invite her in?”
She was plump and blond, and had a slightly bovine look about her, with shoulders as broad as Bamie’s. She had the thickened wrists of a mechanic. But her eyes weren’t hard at all. She was wearing a locket, Elliott’s, I assumed, in the shape of a golden heart. The bassinet was huge, and she nearly tottered under the burden of it.
“Help her, for God’s sake!”
Velvet Bill clutched the bassinet and plunked it on Bamie’s sideboard.
“Herr Roosevelt, I do not mean to bother,” the chambermaid chirped in a Bavarian accent.
“Ah,” said Silent Abe, “you mustn’t converse with Mr. Roosevelt on your own, my dear. We’re your representatives. We have your best interests at heart. Mr. Hummel and I are your voice in all matters regarding Master Elliott.”
She wasn’t bovine at all. I’d misjudged her out of some idiotic sense of superiority. My own anger had blinded me. She was a Bavarian girl who had lived in Elliott’s attic and meant to find a husband in America—she found my little brother instead, and was rewarded with a baby out of wedlock.
She clutched at the chain guarding her throat, as her body rocked back and forth with a rapid, irregular rhythm. Her anguish couldn’t have been rehearsed, no matter how artful Hummel was in such manipulations.
“He promised to marry me . . . and I listen.” And then she began to weep.
“Now, now,” said Silent Abe, “mum’s the word. We’ll have our moment in court.”
“The baby,” I said.
And she reached into the bassinet with such a delicate swipe of her shoulders that I was immediately drawn to her. She was no hireling of Howe & Hummel. She held the little boy in her arms, while I had to endure a dizziness of shame. Elliott Roosevelt Mann. The boy had the crystalline glare of Ellie’s eyes and the contours of his forehead.
“Might I see the woman alone?” I asked the two pirates.
“Can’t be done, TR,” said Velvet Bill. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”
He must have signaled somehow. Fräulein Katie curtsied and was gone—with the little boy in the bassinet.
“Well, what will it be?” asked Silent Abe. “Amicable or not? A poor chambermaid like Miss Katie could rip into a jury’s heart . . . if we fed her a few significant phrases.”
“Out,” I said. “Get out.”
The pirates knew they had won. They’d penetrated the Roosevelt castle, and they didn’t have to rely on the firepower and brutal force of the Pinks. They had a buxom chambermaid, a bassinet, and a little boy cursed—or blessed—with Ellie’s looks. I wired Sister, who’d gone to comfort Anna and the children in Neuilly. Elliott had fled the sanitarium in Graz and was on the prowl somewhere.
ELLIE UNSOUND.
ANNA MUST RETURN WITH THE CHILDREN.
HE AND ANNA MUST LIVE APART.
I WILL NOT BE SWAYED ON THIS MATTER.
Someone had to seize the reins. The moment Anna left for the States, Little Brother showed up in Neuilly, like some madcap magician in a purple cape. He was on morphine again. He’d attached himself to a drunken artiste, who was as depraved and besotted as he was. They had masquerade balls where men and women strutted about in the raw, and pissed on the garden wall like wild beasts. I tried to lure Ellie back home. I cut off all his funds. He got into a brawl with several firemen, and was hospitalized for a month. Even that didn’t cure him. He took up with a band of clochards, lived like a beggar on the banks of the Seine. He stole scraps of food. He had a terrific row at the local gendarmerie. My little brother had become the wolf-man of Paris, with whiskers that covered his ears. Sensing his own precipitous decline, he had himself committed to the insane asylum at Suresnes. But he had no intention of remaining there. He maneuvered to have himself released.
Bamie returned with Anna, and she was much less sanguine about having Elliott declared a lunatic.
“Teedie, he loves Anna desperately.”
“And fornicates behind her back.”
Sister rose up on her beleaguered spine. She had to wear special shoes that lent a little violence to her movements, like a battering ram.
“You cannot instruct him in morals, you cannot. He does not have your gifts, Theodore.”
“Have you seen the girl?” I asked Sister.
“What girl?”
“Katie Mann. You know, Anna’s Bavarian chambermaid. He wrote her love letters, promised to marry her. And now Miss Katie is a mother.”
Bamie squinted at me. One of her eyes was weaker than the other. “Her lawyers are Howe & Hummel, I imagine. You fell for their monkeyshines. They presented you with a boy in a bassinet. It’s their bread and butter—paternity cases.”
“The boy is real,” I said. “The letters are real, and so is the locket.”
Sister turned away from me. I could see the flare of her back, despite the corset she wore, with metal bands. “Ellie will be lost if we betray him now—you must go to that madhouse on the hill and reason with him. He loves you. He will listen.”
THERE WAS A DONKEY CART waiting at the depot. I did not see another soul. I was the one and only passenger in the first-class carriages to get off the train in Suresnes. The conductor saluted, as if I were a general in a satin coat. I wouldn’t wear a duster on such a short trip. I wasn’t a cowboy in a sandstorm. I was a bereaved brother, searching for a solution to Elliott’s nightmares. The driver of the cart arrived in a top hat and a slightly ragged cape. He thought it a miracle that I could chat with him in French. He did not have a high regard of Americans.
“They are all lazy, monsieur—and rich.”
I wouldn’t argue with such a lout.
We began to wind our way into the hills. I could see the Seine at a precipitous angle. In the sunlight, the river was a layer of burnished glass. I could not find a ripple. The birdcalls were deafening. I had to hum the different songs.
“Ah, you are a specialist, a professor of birds? They come here very often, the birdmen, with their notebooks and colored chalk. They belong in the asile.”
The donkey stopped moving on the steepest hill.
“We will have to walk, monsieur—she is a lazy girl.”
I climbed down from the cart, approached the ass, and blew softly into her ear.
The driver was mystified, as the donkey continued her climb along the rocks. But I did not get back into the cart. The château suddenly appeared from behind a thicket of trees like a mirage rising out of a sudden scatter of birds—it gave the singular impression of a fortress with moist skin. The walls were white. The turrets clicked in my ear like castanets. . . .
I was startled at first. There were no wards at Suresnes, no knotted waistcoats to calm the violent ones, no tubs with electric currents to exorcise a demon or shock the morbidity out of some stranger. The lobby was as luxurious as any grand hotel inscribed in Baedeker’s. The manager wore a monocle. The women paraded in petticoats and parasols. I did not see one maniac wandering about in a soiled nightshirt. But I did see a birdman carting a nightingale in a red cage. I wondered what he was doing here. Was he an inmate or an entertainer? I answered the nightingale’s call with a long tweet of my own. And then the birdman and I had a duet. He was wearing slippers and a laboratory coat.
“Ah, you’ve come with the Audubon people.”
“No, my brother is locked up in this hotel.”
He peered at me from behind the bars of the red cage.
“We don’t lock up people, monsieur. We are not savages in Suresnes. We comfort our patients. . . . Your brother must be the polo player with epileptic fits.”
“Elliott doesn’t have epilepsy. He’s an alcoholic.”
“And yet he faints from time to time. He blacks out, cannot recall who or where he is. He has seizures, monsieur. . . . You will find him upstairs.”
The birdman bowed to me and went off with his nightingale. He was the chief quack of this clinic. A nurse led me to Elliott’s quarters. My brother had a hand-carved armoire and a canopied bed. He did not seem glad to see me. His jaw was rippling. His mouth was full of spittle. His eyes had a vacant sheen. That boyish charm was gone, that air of lightness he once had, that pull of the born athlete. I could never compete with Elliott on a pony.
He was wearing a rumpled foulard and a flared shirt with torn elbows, like a deranged artist in some magnificent castle cage. He performed a pantomime in my presence, as if I were an invisible interloper, there and not quite there. He swiped a basket from the table, dug his fist inside, and began to distribute imaginary crumbs.
“Ellie, what on earth are you doing? Kiss me, for God’s sake. I’m your brother.”
Not a whisper of hello, or even a challenge about my right to invade his quarters. He kept distributing the crumbs.
“I’m parceling out pieces of cake,” he said, “to all the urchins. You were with us, Teedie. The beggars were a frightful nuisance. And the odor was oppressive in that heat.”
“Where?” I asked. “When?”
And suddenly my brother swelled out as if a bellows were hidden in his torn shirt. “Our guide got lost. We strayed into a back alley, and the urchins descended upon us; the little monsters overpowered Papa and clawed at our clothes. Papa broke free and acquired a basket of cakes . . . and we fed the little monsters, scattered all the crumbs.”
I did recall our panic, the sea of faces and fists, and Brave Heart’s resilience, his ingenuity in buying a basket of cakes.
“But why does this play on your mind? It was years and years ago—in some sour alley in Naples.”
“Because,” he said, “I can still hear the suck of their mouths as they gobbled the cake. Bamie was marvelous. She stood with Papa, toe to toe. . . . How was the crossing, old boy?”
I didn’t quite know how to answer him. Specks of clarity had returned to his eyes. I tried to summon up the crossing for Ellie, the perpetual rocking of the paquebot, the wind that swept from cabin to cabin—it was much safer in second class—and finally overturned the captain’s table, so that we sat with silverware and lamb stew in our laps.
“I was on my arse with a chatterbox, Ellie. She was on intimate terms with some lost cousin of ours. Frightful stuff—a black sheep who escaped our grasp. A regular Bluebeard. I had to listen while we were camping out. I told her that this cousin didn’t concern us. We weren’t the Roosevelts of Hyde Park. We were the North Shore clan, with plenty of Bluebeards of our own.”
I couldn’t entertain Ellie. All his bonhomie was gone again. I could not recognize my own brother—the dash, the vigor, the hearty appetite. He looked bloated and forlorn.
“Where’s Bamie?” he asked. “Why isn’t she here?”
Bamie had accompanied him to Graz. She swayed the masters of the asylum into allowing her to occupy the room next to his—it had never been done before, that a patient should have his own personal keeper. Sister remained in Graz as long as he did—until he ran away.
“Damn you,” I said. “She’s with your wife and children.”
That didn’t satisfy Elliott. “You cannot keep me in this dungeon,” he said. “I won’t allow it.”
“Dungeon,” I repeated, staring out past his balcony. The river glistened like a long, silver snake, and the songbirds flew from hill to hill like rockets with a feathery twist.
“You hate me,” he said. “You resent me.”
I did not know how to rekindle that love and bonhomie we once had, on the field and off. We’d been playmates together, rivals, and champions. We’d annihilated entire teams with Ellie’s grace and my resilient right arm. “Why should I resent you, why?”
“That disaster at Oyster Bay,” he said. “Edith lost her baby, and you cannot forgive me. You were sprawled on the grass like a dead man. You barely had a pulse.”
It was the Challenge Cup. And I was master of the field. But I could not keep up with Elliott’s litheness, with the singsong of his moves. His mallet had much more magic than mine. Brother rode me into the ground. Our ponies collided. I could see a great rip in the sky before I fell. Yes, I’d frightened Edie, and she had a miscarriage. And Meadowbrook won the cup—three years ago.
“That’s how little you think of me,” I said. “I’m vengeful and spiteful.”
“Why else am I in this madhouse?”
He was in a château without one lock on its windows. He’d roamed the streets of Paris with an army of clochards, caused havoc wherever he went. Was I supposed to applaud?
“You sent my wife and babies back to the States, commanded them. It was like a court-martial. I was never even consulted about my own desperate fate.”
I didn’t want to stir up my brother, remind him of the widow he took up with after Anna left, of the bacchanals in the back garden, of the gendarmes who were called in, fisticuffs in the street with firemen, of whiskers that covered his ears during midnight rambles along the Seine.
He began to shiver, and he turned away from me. My little brother was sobbing. “I cannot bear it without Eleanor, not a moment, Teedie.”
I had robbed Elliott of the one creature he loved the most, gangly little Eleanor, whose mother dressed her like a ragamuffin, in hand-me-downs. Anna couldn’t be bothered to shop for her own daughter. And the little girl inherited half her wardrobe from Baby Lee, the other half from Edith, who shopped with her at Altman’s, much to Anna’s dismay.
Ellie must have brought one of Brave Heart’s old cigar boxes to Suresnes. It still had its own curious perfume—or perhaps I imagined the aroma of Papa’s tobacco leaves. Little Brother retrieved a batch of letters from the cigar box.
“She writes me every single day, and I do not have the heart to answer. . . .”
“Come,” I said, removing the pencil box from my waistcoat. “I’ll help you write to Eleanor.”
I always kept a box of pencils somewhere on my person. I hoped to sketch that nightingale in the lobby.
Elliott laughed, though it was not the sound of a sane man—it did not have a seasoned timbre. He could have been a satanic little boy caught in an act of mischief. Perhaps a tub with electric current might have jolted my brother out of his sad display.
“You as my amanuensis? That’s a clever card. What would you write to Eleanor on my behalf? That her father was a wolf-man who terrorized Paris and had to be locked away?” He paused, wiped the spittle from his tongue with a crumpled handkerchief, and his satanic smile returned. “I do recall a wolf-man with whiskers who visited your dreams—as a boy. Didn’t I sleep with you in your bed during those visitations? Didn’t I drive him off with a flap of my arms and a fierce yell, like one of your cowboys?”
“You did.”
“Then where’s the loyalty?” he asked.
“But I am loyal,” I had to insist.
“And I’m the prodigal son. I disappointed Father. I did not have that strength you could summon up like a Sioux warrior, that clarity of purpose. You wrote your books, you had a ranch, and now you catch the foxes in the henhouse as our Civil Service Commissioner.”
“And failed at all three,” I said. “My books do not sell. I cannot bring my cattle to market—the blizzards have wiped me out. Elliott, there are more and more foxes in the henhouse. The Pinks are about to slaughter the Sioux, and I will not be able to stop their carnage. The President is blind to all my requests.”
“And you will fail here, too,” he said. “I will leave this henhouse. My lawyers are preparing a letter for my release. You cannot kidnap my wife and children.” He clenched his fists. “I’ll kill you first, Teedie, I swear I will.” He was sobbing again. “I try to write Eleanor. The words won’t come. . . . Why do you have such little faith in your own brother?”
“Katie Mann,” I suddenly volunteered.
He was fumbling now, the polo player without his mallet and his pony.
“I am not aware of such a creature,” he said. But he’d never learned how to dissemble. He’d gone to Morton Hall once or twice, and the riffraff nearly stole his pocketbook and his pants. His mouth was quivering. “Who is—Katie Mann?”
“Your mistress. You had no difficulty writing her dozens of letters. You gave her a golden locket—from Tiffany’s, I trust. You talked to her of marriage. You used all the cunning of a safecracker. And when Howe & Hummel peppered you on her behalf, you fled the scene of the crime. . . . You did not have the ten thousand Hummel demanded.”
For a moment his blue eyes were clear as crystal. “Twenty,” he said. “They demanded twenty thousand.”
“And what about Elliott Roosevelt Mann?”
I watched a mask form like a film of molten metal over his face.
“Don’t believe a word. Hummel borrowed the brat from an orphanage. He’s a bunco artist. Bamie must not give him a cent. He will hound her for additional payments for the rest of her life.”
I stared at him now with the unbridled fury of a hunting hawk. “Ellie, I saw the little boy with my own eyes. He has your face and your carriage, he even winks like one of us. He is a Roosevelt, even if we deny it in court, and stave off Hummel and his army of Pinks. . . . Did you really tell the poor girl that you would marry her?”
“Yes.”
“And the locket,” I said, “was the sign and the cement of some insane clandestine romance?”
“But it wasn’t from Tiffany’s—I swear.”
He’d rotted that poor girl, left her in a pinch with a boy who would never comprehend who he really was. And we had to eclipse the little boy and his mother—or we would be pulled into a royal scandal about the Roosevelt baby in the closet.
“I’ll stay at Suresnes,” he said. “I’ll give up the family name if you like. I’ll disappear.”
It was pure Elliott, that fusillade, a bit of bravura, as if he were still in the saddle, riding across some polo grounds within his skull. No. Brother would return within a fortnight. I’d found him a little clinic in Illinois. He’d have to undergo a rigorous five-week cure. We’d enroll him as a certain Mr. Peters. Bamie took care of all the details, I told him.
“And after that?” he asked in a wavering voice.
Bamie was far more charitable. But I had to insist. “You will keep away from Anna and the children for two years.”
His mouth was quivering. “Two years. That’s monstrous.”
It was monstrous, but I couldn’t have him siring a litter of brats, like a champion horse on the prowl. “You are living on borrowed money, Elliott, and on borrowed time. You must prove your worth.”
“And my redemption,” he said, “to a heartless brother with the brave heart of an oak. . . . I must visit Eleanor, at least.”
I had to deny him even that. But he’d brought himself to ruin, and I had to save Anna and the children at all cost.
“Brother, you’re a brute, and you’ve always been one. I’ll kiss you now.”
Papa always kissed us. We’d hover around the great bear, and savor the silky scratch of his whiskers. It was our biggest treat, finer than peaches and ice cream on our summer porch. But there was a hint of malice in Ellie’s kiss, like the hollow clack of a solitary soldier.
IT WAS THE LAST TIME I saw Ellie alive. I had been playing toy soldiers and toy kings with his life and mine. Perhaps he might not have faltered if the fates hadn’t been so unkind. The solitary soldier did indeed go out to the clinic in Illinois, disguised as Mr. Peters, and took the cure. He kept his promise and did not seek Anna and the children. Little Brother resurfaced in the wild as a gentleman farmer, who managed an enormous estate near Abingdon, Virginia. The isolation seemed to suit Elliott. He prospered for a while, paid off his debts, a bronzed god in the burning sun. I hadn’t reckoned that Anna could not survive without her solitary soldier. Their separation roiled her mightily, and she died of diphtheria, just like that—she was all of twenty-nine. Six months later, their older boy, Elliott Jr., succumbed to scarlet fever, and my brother broke. He abandoned his Virginia estate and fell out of sight.
He floundered somewhere, I suppose, and I must admit that I was occupied with other matters. The woodlands were dying in the Far West during the irreversible march of settlement. So I formed an association of amateur riflemen, hunters all—the Boone & Crockett Club—and it was our sacred duty to preserve the forests and an abundance of forest creatures. I appeared before Congress as president of Boone & Crockett. I warned that Yellowstone was being overrun by every sort of commercial parasite and would soon become a wasteland. “Gentlemen, we cannot have a national park and wildlife preserve of mountains and rivers and rich dark soil while we have plunderers and wastrels marching about. Yellowstone Park will dissolve into an ocean of dead sand and sea where plants cannot grow and where the elk and bison cannot feed.”
And when the Park Protection Act of 1894 was passed, giving sanctuary to every bird and beast in Yellowstone, certain Senators rose up to shake my hand. They weren’t ignorant of all my other woes. As Civil Service Commissioner, I was at war with John Wanamaker, the department-store king, who had been named Postmaster General and heartily believed in the spoils system. The moment I went after some crooked postmaster in Indianapolis or Philadelphia, that hypocritical haberdasher had him shipped off to another venue or hid him where he couldn’t be touched. And I had my old problems with the Indian Bureau. Local agents were relying on Pinkerton detectives to police their reservations. The Pinks weren’t much better than the Stranglers. I had to fend them off as best I could. The Department of Interior wasn’t much help—it was swollen with spoils like some lazy leviathan. I had to arrive unannounced at a reservation with my Winchester and fire the Indian agent in front of his own men. Of course, the folks at Interior wouldn’t back me up. And sometimes I had to stare down an entire arsenal of Pinks. That’s how it went on the Shoshone reservation in Wyoming. The Pinks caught me at dusk, a dozen of them. They all wore their derbies and waistcoats, with badges pinned to their chests in silver and gold. And they were carrying Colts.
“Mr. Roosevelt,” said their leader, a Pinkerton lieutenant with a filthy collar and a dyed mustache. “Some might consider you a trespasser, sir, here to harm the general population with that rifle of yours.”
I looked into the dull, dead light of his eyes.
“And others might consider you bandits, being reckless with Shoshone men and women.”
He smiled his waxen smile and introduced himself as Detective Taggart, the Pink in charge of all Wyoming.
“Sir, we have the law on our side. Agent Adams invited us here. We’re fully bonded. Would you care to have a look at my license?”
“I know how a license looks, Detective. But how many Shoshone have you killed?”
He calculated with those dead eyes peering out of his skull. “Four—so far. They drew on us. We didn’t have much of a selection.”
His bravos began to fidget in their waistcoats. They’d expected to bushwhack me without a bundle of words. The Indian agent was on their side, or else they wouldn’t have acted. They could blame my death on a drunken Shoshone warrior. But I cut into their calculations with the scythe of an ex-lawman.
“I’ve written to your bosses in Chicago,” I said. “And I keep a strict agenda. I like to account for every minute. I’ve told the people at Interior how disheartened I am with your waxed mustaches, your Winchesters, and your fancy Colts, how you should never have been allowed on Indian lands.”
And while he was pondering, I happened to dig the barrel of my Winchester into the knuckle between his eyes. He lost that swagger of his. His fellow Pinks put down their Colts and vanished into the grayness.
“I’d find another locale if I were wearing your shoes, Detective Taggart.”
I put Taggart into my report, and that tale must have reached his superiors. The Pinks were pulled from the Shoshone reservation. But I couldn’t clean up every bit of Indian land. The Pinks were like their own nation. I returned to inspecting post offices. I wondered if Wanamaker and I would come to blows. And that’s when I heard about Ellie. He was back in Manhattan, had leased a limestone house on West 102nd Street, leased it under the name of Mr. Eliot. He was cohabiting with a certain Mrs. Valentina Morris. I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Morris was the same widow who had shared his house in Neuilly after Anna returned to America. She was an alcoholic, like my brother. That much I knew. Bamie had visited him behind my back. She’d come from London, where she found herself a beau, a naval man attached to the American Embassy. Perhaps she did not want to worry me about Elliott when I was feuding with Wanamaker, the Pinks, and various postmasters and Indian agents. She didn’t think I could survive such an onslaught. But I did. It was Ellie who didn’t survive. He was gulping down bottles of absinthe—nothing but green poison—with his paramour, and in a fit of delirium, he climbed out his parlor window and tottered on the sill like a crazed circus performer; it was Mrs. Morris and Elliott’s valet who coaxed him back in. That night he had a series of convulsions and died right in his own bed.
I was in Washington, tilting against impossible windmills, when a telegram arrived from Sister next morning.
ELLIE GONE.
COME HOME.
HER FACE WAS UNDER A VEIL. But I caught the fineness of her features and the wistful, luminous longing of her brown eyes. Her fingers were also fine. She was dressed in the blackest weeds, like the most loyal of widows. She sat on a simple ladder-back chair beside my brother’s bed, and I couldn’t intrude upon her mourning, ask her to leave the very room she had shared with Ellie. Mrs. Morris was present by the laws and privileges of her private domain. I was glad Ellie hadn’t spent his last days in a hovel, like his hobo boulevardiers of Paris. There were no bottles of brandy and green mint lying about. He had a picture of Anna and Eleanor on the mantel. He wasn’t bloated now, didn’t have that furrow of anger and grief I had encountered in Suresnes. That graceful brother of mine had always lived on a trampoline. Elliott was the handsome one, with the musical gait of a poet, while I could only mimic the music of birdcalls.
I kissed him on the cheek. It did not have the waxen feel of the dead. I went into the parlor. It was packed with mourners, whom Ellie must have acquired like a contagion at the local saloon. They reminded me of the rabble at Morton Hall. They’d been his drinking companions. They called me Mr. Eliot.
“He was a sport, your brother was. Never denied us a nip or a two-dollar bill.”
I was troubled by their very presence in the parlor, by the sour perfume of their unwashed clothes. It irked me that Elliott had comported with such riffraff. At first I thought their devotion was feigned. I was wrong. They wanted something I could not give—camaraderie—but I couldn’t sit there in silence. I drank from the same schooner of shandygaff. Alcohol had always made me aggressive, even at Harvard, where I would scrap with my Porcellian brothers after a sip of wine.
Bamie arrived. She had forgotten to wear her special shoes in the tempest of her own grief. She was hunched over, like someone who had been stricken, or had received a terrific stripe to the face. I should have asked her about London and her new beau, the naval attaché, but I did not seem to have that musical gift of speech, soused as I was with shandygaff.
“We will have to bury him, Theodore. He has a plot in Tivoli beside Anna.”
“No,” I said. “He belongs to us. We will bury him in Greenwood next to Brave Heart and Mittie . . . and Alice.”
“But think of Eleanor and little Hall. They will want their mother and father in the same plot.”
“He is my brother,” I said. “He will lie down with us—in Greenwood. That is final.”
She wouldn’t contradict me in front of Elliott’s drinking companions, even if they could hardly hear a word.
“And we must do something for poor Mrs. Morris.”
“Why?” I asked. “They drank from the same bottle—his devilment is also hers.”
“But she cared for him, Teedie. She paid his bills. And now she is heavily in debt. She cannot remain in this house.”
“I will not indulge his concubine. She can remain here until the lease is up.”
“Papa wouldn’t have been so harsh,” she said. And she looked at me out of that keen sadness she’d had, even as a child, when Papa was away at war as an Allotment Commissioner, and she had to run the household and deal with conniving servants before she was ten.
Bamie had never been unfair. She’d inherited Brave Heart’s feel for charity, while fighting wicked postmasters and the Pinks had made me rambunctious.
“Teedie, we will talk another time . . . when you do not have such a bitter taste on your tongue.”
She sat with the mourners for a little while, comforted Mrs. Morris, fondled Ellie’s ear, and then she was gone. I went back into the bedroom. I was bitten with bile. I was still that deputy sheriff lost in a world of black ice. Mrs. Morris’ shoulders began to heave in her ladder-back chair. I seized her up like a ruffian, took her in my arms. I could not treat her gently, but we did our own little war dance. She began to murmur.
“I loved him, Mr. Ted, I really did.”
“I know.”
I released her from that fierce grip, and she walked out of the room. I was all alone with the rumpled corpse of my baby brother. I could hear the hiss of the lamps, as the light seemed to lick his face like an ornament. And then he rose up, this dead brother of mine.
“Teedie, you are in big trouble.”
I would not speak to the phantasm. He was growing whiskers, like that werewolf who had haunted me as a boy.
“Where is Granny?”
I was puzzled by that remark. He didn’t mean Grandmamma Bulloch, who had died years ago. He didn’t mean Grandma Mary, Anna’s mother. He meant Eleanor. Anna called the little girl Granny, because she had such a serious, solemn face. And Baby Lee picked up on that taunt, like a talisman.
—Father, when is Granny going to stay with us again? Do I have to look at my twin? She wears all my clothes.
Edie invited Eleanor to stay with us during the summers, when we were at Sagamore Hill. Her own mother couldn’t seem to take care of that child. Eleanor became another one of my little bunnies. I didn’t pamper her, but Edie did. Edie gave her a sewing kit, and they darned my socks with a fanciful stitch. She sat in the parlor, where Edie taught her penmanship with a personal flourish.
“Where is Granny?”
I started to cry, and my little brother fell back into his quietus. I was frightened to be with Ellie now. It was much of a muchness with John Wanamaker and the Indian Bureau. I’d never win no matter how many errant postmasters and agents I uncovered.
I could not seem to check my own tears.
Then Mrs. Morris returned, minus her veil. Her dark eyes had a startling gleam in the little penumbras of light.
“You shouldn’t have banished him, Mr. Ted—taken his children away.”
I was still besotted. “I will not be lectured to by his drinking partner—you deviled him, madame.”
“Oh, I did much more than that,” she said with a puckish smile.
“Should I have left him in Paris with his army of mendicants? He would have perished in the streets.”
“That would have been better than banishment. He was lost without little Eleanor. Can you imagine for one moment the happiest day in his life? Your sister with the broken back brought Eleanor here to 102nd Street . . . like Cinderella in a glass carriage.”
I was riddled with shame and doubt. “Bamie does not have a broken back.”
“Your sister could see that Elliott was dying, but you could not. That visit revived him. Your sister was Elliott’s secret agent. She had to bribe Eleanor’s nanny and return her to Central Park—within the hour. They had ten, fifteen minutes together. It was their little paradise, without intruders.”
“Stop! Not another sound.”
She smiled again. “I will be as silent as the dead—and the damned.”
She curtsied in her petticoats and was gone.