POLICEMAN’S PARADISE, PART TWO
1897
SHE WAS PULITZER’S STAR, THE FIRST FEMALE ON HIS little fleet of crime reporters who was permitted a byline. Pulitzer himself had redeemed her, rescued her from a life of crime, taught her to write the terse copy he admired. Having gone undercover, she slipped into Blackwell’s Island, mingled with the lunatics, and exposed the island’s utter rot—the bribes, the barbarism, the sexual plunder. She was the only one on Pulitzer’s staff at the World who didn’t attack me outright, and it was a mystery until I read her byline and realized she was the same Nancy Fowler who had once been Manhattan’s most notorious bunco artist. Her previous intimacy with the underworld had given her an advantage over Pulitzer’s other star reporters. None of them could compete with Nan. And it wasn’t much of a miracle that she had her own distinct style—her “bite,” as crime reporters liked to say. With a little push from Pulitzer, Nan Fowler had developed a flair for the piquant.
And while Pulitzer’s other crime reporters were relentless in their attack on my stewardship at Mulberry Street, Nan softened her bite marks. She asked to accompany me on one of my midnight rambles, and I knew she might roast me alive, but I took the risk.
Her troubling height and pale blue eyes conjured up an image of my dead wife—I’d met Nan while Alice Lee was still alive. She had Alice’s winsome beauty, even if she was much older now and wrinkles had surfaced at the edge of her mouth.
“I don’t intend to flatter you, Roosevelt. I’m here to learn.” And then she smiled. “But how could I forget the Cyclone Assemblyman? You knew that Long John McManus had hired me to rub your nose in the dirt, and you still walked right into his den.”
“I couldn’t relinquish a damsel in distress.”
Her eyes fluttered with a disturbing intelligence. “I was hardly a damsel. I was paid a handsome sum to lead you into a trap. But I had never met a man as willful as you. It destroyed my equilibrium and my notion of a rube. . . . I’m glad you agreed to this ramble.”
Pulitzer had plucked her right out of the demimonde. But I wondered about Nan’s earlier incarnation as a banker’s wife with a brownstone and two tots, a boy and a girl. I was reluctant to meddle, but meddle I did. Here was a sad tale, more than sad, since her husband wouldn’t permit her to see her own children, who were still under his custody.
“But you have Pulitzer on your side. He can shake the whole court system. And I’m not powerless.”
Her face hardened, and she was the duchess I recalled from our first encounter in that maison close.
“I abandoned them,” she said. “I left them in their cribs, with the little toys and the wallpaper I had picked out at Lord & Taylor. I walked away. I was a madwoman looking for a madwoman’s delights, and I created my own circus of hell. But we are not here to discuss my domestic situation, Roosevelt. It’s your probity I’m after, not mine.”
She’d shunned the hydraulic elevator, recently installed, and climbed two flights to my office. I went into the armoire, pulled out a black sombrero and a red sash with tassels, and put them on. I must have amused her.
“I never realized that Mulberry Street was near the Badlands.” And she let out a full-throated roar. “Commissioner, you look like a Dakota cowboy who got lost in a snowdrift.”
I stared into her pale eyes, one bunco artist to another. “Well, isn’t that the whole point of a disguise? To create confusion and ample camouflage.”
“Mr. Roseyvelt,” she mumbled, mimicking my own roundsmen, “you are a Manhattan miracle.”
We marched down the stairs, almost like a bride and groom.
The roundsmen and stragglers from the Detective Bureau ogled us both. “Evenin’, Miss Nan, evenin’, Commissioner Ted.”
We walked east, into the darkness, the corner lamps a distant glow. But I wasn’t the Lighting Commissioner, at least not yet. I couldn’t control the eerie sense of danger that lurked after dark. Lower Manhattan had become a land of shadows. It wasn’t like the electric panorama along Fifth Avenue, with its constant carriage trade. Down here, we had thieves who masqueraded as roundsmen, and roundsmen who had their own little company of pickpockets. Policing was a “business” rather than a code of honor, rife with corruption and all the privileges of patronage. Corruption flourished, even under “the Reign of Terror,” as Democratic and Republican reporters dubbed my tactics. I’d barely made a dent. But I continued my midnight rambles, and I continued harrowing the other Commissioners. I had a dual purpose. As President of the Police Board, I also sat on the Board of Health. I could write summonses and shut down tenements that had turned into firetraps. The landlords feared me more than my own inspectors did. I was everywhere at once, as I went into the doss-houses and storefront distilleries with Nan, looking for coppers who were on the “coop,” snoring away amid the bedlam around them. We uncovered a dozen, and woke them out of their stupor. I gave each lad a summons to appear before my tribunal, while Nan scribbled her notes.
The corner lamps were like a blind man’s beacon. The fire in the globes had turned a pale winter blue, as we went into more doss-houses and distilleries. Roundsmen arrived out of nowhere and saluted me. Suddenly Lower Manhattan was brimming with as many coppers as cockroaches.
“Commissioner,” Nan said, “it’s a travesty. The roundsmen have rung the alarm. They know you’re out on a ramble. We have to try the right saloon if we want to catch a copper.”
I surveyed her under my pince-nez. Nan was right about the saloons. The ones with ties to Tammany never bothered to close. Roundsmen used these watering holes as their neighborhood nests, and completely forgot about errant patrolmen. So I decided on the most delinquent saloon in the district, the King’s Table, owned by King Callahan himself.
He had the grandest emporium on Third Avenue, a prince of a place, with gold spittoons and hammered silver on the walls. His zinc bar, the pride of Callahan’s saloon, was shipped over from a Dublin hotel. His clientele was predominantly German and Irish, with some uptown natives who preferred the raucous fun and flights of peril that might erupt any moment at the King’s Table. King was an ox of a man. He’d been a deputy inspector who made his fortune on Mulberry Street and poured it into the saloon.
I didn’t enter Callahan’s through the side door with Nan. I barreled into the front hall in my black sombrero. I’d been disingenuous with Pulitzer’s star reporter. I wasn’t wearing a disguise. I wanted Callahan’s lowlifes to recognize their pirate of a Police Commissioner. The six roundsmen who slept at the corner tables suddenly grew alert. A bully boy who must have been a recent recruit said, “King, should I dust this feller in the fancy hat?”
“Hush, now,” said King Callahan. “It’s His Nibs.”
“Then why is he bringing a chippie into a decent establishment, and him not using the ladies’ door? That’s a criminal act.”
Callahan knocked the bully boy off his barstool. “Pardon, Commissioner Ted. This imbecile failed to notice that the ‘chippie’ belongs to Mr. Pulitzer, but I remember when she was a thief, remember her well.”
“Stuff it, King,” Nan snarled, “or I’ll have His Nibs arrest the whole lot of you, with all your rotten deals under the table.”
Callahan bowed to her. “Didn’t mean to offend Your Highness.” He was having a rip of a time with the one man who was out to ruin him. “I rang the night bell, Commissioner, but it takes a while to clear the King’s Table of every lout.”
“King, I’m not interested in your clientele. You’re harboring roundsmen.”
“And that’s my shame,” he muttered. “I’ve been derelict, sir, in my duty.” And he growled at the six officers. They adjusted their tunics, put on their helmets, and paraded past me. I could have noted their badge numbers, chided them in public, demoted them to desk jobs at Mulberry Street, but that would have meant waging war with the other Commissioners. So I let them catch a glimpse of my ire—my disappointment in their dereliction. And that deep frown was enough to sear through their brass buttons and burn a hole in their collective hearts. These lads would not be caught cooping again at the King’s Table. I seldom had to warn a roundsman twice, even those under the sway of King Callahan.
I couldn’t even bask in the little glories I still had as Police Commissioner. I recognized a man with stark white hair who sat at one of the tables, and I realized that my forage into the saloon would not end well. Whitey Whitman he was, a deputy inspector I had forced to retire. Whitey once strode across Manhattan like a colossus; he ran prostitutes and a galaxy of pimps, protected gamblers from police raids, yet what irked me the most was that he preyed upon newsboys, ripped their pockets right out from under them. I reprimanded him at headquarters, or, as Sissy might say, I shriveled him in front of his own men. And here he was, with that splendid mane of white hair. He’d gone into the construction business, with the help of Tammany Hall and our own Republican bosses. His finances hadn’t suffered. He was far richer than any Roosevelt. Yet I had stolen what was essential to him—his hierarchy at headquarters. Mulberry Street had been his roost. He’d strut about in his braided sleeves with a certain majesty, cracking the skulls of boisterous men and boys, who’d been assigned to our cellar jail. But what troubled me about Whitman was that he had the angelic face of a choirboy. He was never loud. His voice was soft and silky, and that’s where his menace lay. He was the poet of violence. I’d never met another feller remotely like Whitey Whitman, not in the Badlands, with all its desperadoes. The Dakota man had some kind of a draw, a telltale delivery—a nervous tic, a sneer, a demonic laugh—but Whitey had none.
“Hello, Mr. Roseyvelt,” he said, in a voice that echoed the lazy Harvard drawl; his boots were propped up, and they had a brilliant sheen. “I’m going to scatter your brains in front of Pulitzer’s pet. Then I’ll treat her to a shandy.”
“Now, now, Whitey,” said King Callahan. “You can’t threaten the Police Commissioner.”
“Shut up,” Whitey said with that silken cord of his. “I’d like to hear from Madam—ah, I mean Miss Nan.”
“Mr. Whitman,” she said, “I will not drink your shandy.”
Whitey grinned. “Roseyvelt, I propose to marry her. You could perform the ceremony as our chief constable—while you can still hold a pen.”
He couldn’t have known that Miss Nan had once been a bride with two babies and a brownstone on Union Square.
“Up with your dukes, Whitey,” I growled like a grizzly, “and a little less of your gab.”
“Dukes,” he said, and Callahan’s white-haired angel turned waspish with one twist of his tongue. “I’m strictly an elbows man.”
The lads at the King’s Table understood his lingo. Whitey was a barroom brawler. It wouldn’t have mattered one atom to him that I had nearly won the lightweight cup at Harvard. I had boxed with fellow students in a ring, and brawled with politicians, who might have been ex-prizefighters, but I’d never tangled with a defrocked deputy inspector. Whitey Whitman had no rules. He was a reckless machine. He’d chewed off a man’s ear once, blinded others, and had beaten felons into a crippling insanity inside the Tombs.
He gulped down a shandygaff, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and with his tongue untwisted, he turned into an angel again. He was a head taller than Commissioner Ted, and had a much greater wingspan, so I had to crouch against his assault. I was tempted to wear my pince-nez, but he would have blinded me with the first whack of his elbow.
Callahan made one last appeal, as I took off my sombrero. “He’s an appointed official, Ted is, and if you murder him, boy-o, there’ll be no appeal from a sweet-talking attorney like Hummel or Howe. You’ll sit in Sing Sing until you’re catatonic.”
Whitey scoffed at him. “It’s a small matter. He humiliated me in front of my men.”
For a big lad he had the dainty feet of a dancer, and dance they did. He could have been the Harvard boy, and I the barroom brawler. I felt unmanned. I forgot all the lessons I ever had from “General” Lister, my boxing master at Harvard, who taught me how to hit as hard as I could and to waltz away from a blow.
Whitey bowed to Miss Nan like her knight-errant and moved in for the kill. I could barely keep up with his dancing gait. I wondered if he’d had his own “General” Lister to teach him a few tricks. But he had no need of a boxing master. He didn’t box. He pummeled me with his elbows while he maintained a whirlwind defense. I couldn’t get near enough to jab at him. Blood and spittle flew from my mouth in long, merciless strings that were like the melody of my own doom. I lost a molar somewhere. Whitey hopped about, expecting to dust me. But I wouldn’t fall. He seemed agitated; puckers appeared in his face, like self-inflicted wounds. And then I must have tripped against the leg of a chair.
Suddenly I was lying in the sawdust with a ball of blood in my mouth. I looked up at the darkening crystal of the chandeliers.
“Stay down, old Ted,” King Callahan buzzed in my ear. “Whitey’s been an orphan-maker many a time.”
And then I could hear Miss Nan over the roar of Whitey’s partisans at the King’s Table. “Keep your own counsel, Callahan. We have no need of an orphan-maker. . . . Roosevelt, get up. Right now.”
And I did. I spat that ball of blood into my cuff. I begged the Lord and my father’s ghost that I wouldn’t have an asthma attack or the Roosevelt colic in the middle of my bout. I couldn’t have counterattacked while wading in a bundle of my own filth. I couldn’t have counterattacked under any condition. It was Miss Nan who devised a strategy of combat that confused Whitey and hampered his gait. She smiled at him like some barroom sweetheart and blinked with her blue eyes. Whitey missed a step, mesmerized by that bunco artist turned crime reporter, in her own imagined brothel. I landed a right and a short left between his elbows, and it was as if I had the “General” right behind me. Give him a fistful of arrows in the solar plexus, Roosevelt. My combinations were like lightning in a velvet bottle. He had nothing to answer with once he dropped his guard. His elbows lumbered like detached limbs.
King Callahan stopped the bout. “I won’t have bloody murder in my saloon.”
But I still had an urge to do him bodily harm. I was a crusader despised in my own town, Manhattan’s Oliver Cromwell, who tried to shut every damn saloon on the Sabbath. To Callahan’s credit, he didn’t advertise himself as an innkeeper, didn’t turn his beer hall into a lodgers’ den, where prostitutes could parade in their petticoats or a Mother Hubbard and have their own little paradise. He was a saloon man, through and through, the King was, and he didn’t involve himself in that rascality of the Raines Law.
Whitey was another matter. Whitey found profit in those fraudulent hotels, with his own corral of prostitutes. And Whitey had a gamblers’ association, enforced by crooked roundsmen. He mocked my efforts to transform the police into genuine civil servants. A policeman’s badge meant a whole lot of boodle. Even after I had ousted him, Whitey held his own demonic dominion over Mulberry Street—I couldn’t root out all his rot. So I smashed at him instead. His partisans couldn’t help him now. They couldn’t rein in my blows. I hit him with a hook, gyrating like a bull with spectacular horns.
“Commissioner Ted,” he cried, “I succored your brother, I saved his life, more than once—on 102nd Street.”
Nan didn’t know enough about Elliott. I was the orphan-maker, not Whitey. I was the one who exiled Elliott from his children. I wouldn’t even let Ellie lie down in the sod with his wife.
Whitey clutched me with his claws. “I was kind to him, Commissioner Ted. I watched over the boy.”
“He wasn’t a boy,” I hissed. I put my sombrero back on and adjusted my pince-nez, while Nan wiped the blood from my mouth. That missing molar ached like the devil.
“Roosevelt,” she said, “I believe we’re finished here.”
OUR FINAL LANDING WAS at the headquarters of Senator Thomas Collier Platt, who held court at the Fifth Avenue when he wasn’t in Washington. Known as the “Easy Boss,” he wasn’t like his Democratic shadow, Dick Croker, the grandest of Grand Sachems, who rose up from the whimsical mayhem of his own street gang. Croker didn’t care for music or poetry and art. He was a mixer who may have clubbed many a man to death at the polls. He ruled Manhattan’s precincts, but he didn’t have Senator Platt’s wide appeal. Platt seldom spoke above a whisper. Platt had the sweet, soft hands of a violinist. Platt had even attended Yale College once upon a time. He read poetry to his children. But he was murderous in his own way. He could wreck the career of a Governor with one of his whispers. Presidents would arrive for a Sunday chat at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, sit in one of the mandarin corridors off the main lobby until the Senator was prepared to greet you in his Amen Corner—Platt had been a theology student at Yale. He slumped behind his mahogany desk, an heirloom of some sort, and looked like a cadaver in a gray suit. Senator Platt was a sallow man. He had the complexion of a spent candle. But his lips were always moist, and he stared out at you from the deep hollows of his eyes. Nothing got past the Senator’s gaze. And at the moment his gaze fell upon Nan. He didn’t care for crime reporters, any reporters at all. But he hadn’t objected to my bringing her here. And then I realized he had known Nan before she was baptized by Pulitzer. Perhaps he’d used her as a “swallow,” to entrap Republican Assemblymen he couldn’t keep in line. We were both escorted by one of his lackeys to the Amen Corner. You weren’t allowed to sit in his exalted presence, not at first. But he found a chair for Nan, an heirloom like his own, with a velvet-covered cushion.
“You’re a clever lad, Roosevelt, to bring Pulitzer’s little girl with you. What’s her name?”
He said all this in a menacing whisper, without gazing at me once.
“You know my name, Senator,” she said. “I’ve sat on your lap many a time.”
And the cadaver livened considerably.
“But that was in the old days. . . . Can you guess why the Commissioner dragged you here in the middle of the night?”
I could feel myself sliding down into some abyss. But Nan was as much a pol as Senator Platt.
“I suppose it was to eat your heart out,” she said. “To overwhelm you with my wit.”
“And your loveliness,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
But Nan was immune to the Easy Boss’s accolades. “I’m practically a grandma, Senator. My thighs are full of ripples.”
“Ripples an old man might admire,” he said before that sallow ice of his returned. “But you know the rules. You will not repeat a word you hear at this table. Or there will be damage. Mr. Ted wants a favor I cannot grant—to pluck him out of a big black hole at Police Headquarters.”
That big black hole was caused by a brand-new charter. Manhattan and the Bronx would marry Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island next year—1898—and become a Goliath known as Greater New York. The current Police Board would be out of business. “I have no future here, Senator Platt.”
I campaigned for Mr. McKinley, visited him in Canton, Ohio, right after the last election. I wanted a bit of the spoils, I suppose. I was an expert on America’s Navy, had analyzed the War of 1812 better than any man alive. I knew that we had to protect our sea lanes, “upholster” our antiquated warships. And as quietly as I could I petitioned for the post of Undersecretary of the Navy. Platt wasn’t unfamiliar with my desires. Yet he was out to make me bleed as much as he could, and turn me into a beggar man.
Finally he swiveled around and peered at me from the hollows of his eyes. The cadaver grinned. My sombrero and velvet sash must have beguiled him. He clapped those violinist’s hands with their long tapering fingers. “Roosevelt, is that what you like to wear on your midnight rambles?”
“Sometimes, Senator.”
“It’s no wonder the roundsmen draw pictures of you in their washroom—Mulberry Street’s very own cowboy at the helm.”
I was jolted a bit. I’d never seen his bald pate in the washroom at headquarters. Did he wander above the rooftops in his spare time? “And how are you privy to that piece of information, Senator?”
“Spies,” he said. “I have many, and you have none. You canceled the contracts of every police stool pigeon. And no decent detective can survive without his squeal. Any copper knows that.”
“But it’s immoral to hire professional thieves,” I said.
“Roosevelt,” he whispered, “I think you should have been the divinity student at Yale, not me. A cowboy clergyman!” He bent over his antique desk. “I’m not without resources. I spoke to McKinley. The President doesn’t trust your belligerent attitude. He thinks you’ll have us at Spain’s throat within six weeks. The people in the War Department are wary of you. Didn’t you write to the Governor about raising up a regiment of cowboy desperadoes to fight alongside the Cuban revolutionaries? Revolutions lead to other revolutions. It’s a bad habit. We have our own anarchists. I hear you’ve been receiving letter bombs.”
I wouldn’t whet his curiosity. “With matchsticks inside, sir, and cartridges filled with sand.”
He was no philosopher, this spent candle. Yes, I did try to mount a regiment of my own. We had to get Spain out of Cuba and the Philippines, had to get rid of her European rot. The Spanish fleet was in American waters, interfering with our own destiny.
“No, no,” he said. “We cannot have a warmonger sitting at such a sensitive desk.”
“And you mean to dissolve the Police Board.”
“If I can. . . . You were never a real Republican, Roosevelt. Go back to the Badlands. There you can crusade for whatever you want, and lead a revolution against some ranch. You can have your own colors in the Dakotas. Haven’t you noticed? You’re political poison. You should not have behaved like a Manhattan cowboy with the saloonkeepers. The lads love their Sunday shandygaffs.”
“I was upholding the law,” I said.
“Law, law, law. But Pulitzer’s little girl knows better than a rough-riding Police Commissioner, don’t you, Miss Nan?”
And I wondered if two pols were now ganging up against me. I’d have to fight against a new alliance—Boss Platt and Pulitzer’s pet.
She warbled like a sparrow. Perhaps it was a signal to the man who was a master of birdsongs.
“Senator Platt,” she sang, “I’m sure of one thing. I’ve been on this midnight ramble, and I have yet to taste a shandygaff.”
She made the cadaver laugh. He whispered to his errand boy, who returned with a shandy on a silver platter from the Fifth Avenue’s bar, which should have been shuttered at this hour.
The Senator was dee-lighted with himself. He watched Nan devour her beer and ginger ale in two gulps.
And now the cadaver turned into an elf, played the hapless politician. “I suppose the Commissioner will arrest me for serving alcohol at such a late hour.”
I was bellicose, I admit, bullheaded and harum-scarum. Perhaps it was because Papa had been such a peaceful man.
“Senator,” I said, “I’m in no mood to arrest you.”
“You couldn’t,” he said, winking to Nan. “Police Commissioners used to wear shiny gold badges encrusted with jewels. A badge like that inspired confidence. And what does my Manhattan cowboy wear? A silver badge that has all the patina and glory of tin.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “the old badges cost four hundred smackers apiece. Mine costs fifteen. I’ll take that as a sign of confidence. . . . Good morning, Senator.”
I bowed to His Majesty. I couldn’t battle it out with him. I’d have to retreat a little.
We withdrew from the Amen Corner, with pols huddled in every corridor, waiting for a nibble from Senator Platt. Why had he invited Nan into his inner sanctum, where he had allowed no other reporter? Her rise from the criminal class couldn’t have intrigued him. She was as wellborn as the Easy Boss himself. Perhaps he wanted her to bear witness to his autonomy over me. I was nothing but dust in his domain—we all were. He ruled like a doge, without mercy or reprieve.
We arrived in the hotel lobby and happened upon an altercation. The house detective was bickering with a lady in a fur coat and a feathered hat. He was very rude to her, this detective was. And he had a superior air, though he utterly lacked her breeding. She didn’t wear lip rouge. She wasn’t dollied up. I could perceive the situation. She was a guest at the Fifth Avenue who had run up considerable charges and didn’t have the means to pay her bill.
The detective pawed at her. “Out, I say. You’ll collect your things when you have the cash.”
He wouldn’t have strutted like that in broad daylight. No manager would have tolerated it. But the detective could make a fuss at five a.m. while there were no other guests around, just a ragged line of political hacks skulking in the corridors.
“Roosevelt,” Nan insisted, “you must stop that horrible creature, or I’m gonna break a flowerpot over his head.”
But I was paralyzed, as if I had suffered an attack of the colic, or a sulfurous wound. I could barely breathe. I recognized that lady in the feathered hat. She was Mrs. Morris, Elliott’s former mistress.
It was Nan who declared war on the house detective. “Sir, do you know who this gentleman is?”
“Santa himself,” said the hotel detective, who was having a bully good time in the Fifth Avenue’s cavernous lobby, with chandeliers that could have covered a battlefield. His laughter echoed right off the crystal teardrops. “But Santa’s a little too late for Christmas.”
I could have bitten off this houseman’s head. He was as ferocious as a toy grizzly bear. But I was all twisted up at the sight of Mrs. Morris. My bowels churned.
It was Nan who rescued me. “Sir, have you not seen his badge?”
The house detective had a moment of panic. He looked at my red mustache, as if he were appraising a stallion at his own private stable.
“Mr. Roseyvelt? I’m the innocent party here. This vulturous female is a vagrant. She belongs in the workhouse at Blackwell’s Island. She’s registered here under false pretenses, living off the fat of the land, but the Fifth Avenue Hotel ain’t a charity ward, I’ll have you know. Her credit is worthless. She signed fake notes.”
“I will vouch for her credit. Have the manager call Police Headquarters.”
The detective stroked his mustache. “Well, that’s a bird of a different feather. And I will apologize to all parties involved.”
He didn’t apologize. He pulled his derby over one eye and disappeared into that vastness, searching for some other transgression. And I was left with Mrs. Morris and her feathered hat.
“I did not ask for your help, Mr. Roosevelt,” she said in a musical voice, with a touch of acid.
Nan must have sensed something familiar in Mrs. Morris’ mysterious manner—another lady who had been bitten too hard. “Roosevelt, you have not introduced us.”
It seems Mrs. Morris had followed Nan’s articles in the World—her exposés of Manhattan rookeries.
“Nan,” I said, with a catch in my throat, “meet Mrs. Valentina Morris. She was a friend of my late little brother.”
“More than a friend,” said Mrs. M.
“That will suffice,” I answered as direct as I could. “Mrs. Fowler does not have to know your business. You can return to your room.”
But she was harder on me than she’d been with the house detective. “I will not accept your chivalry, Mr. Roosevelt. You are Elliott’s hangman brother.”
Ellie’s hangman.
The colic was gone. I was filled with fury.
“Madam, this conversation is over. Return to your room at once.”
But Mrs. Morris would not move. Her face was quivering. She was barely under control. I didn’t want to send for the wagon from Bellevue. She could never have gone back to the Fifth Avenue, not as a guest. Her belongings would have been bundled up and delivered to the madhouse.
“Madam,” I said in a neutral tone, “my brother deserted his children and his wife—for you.”
My words riled her even more—I was like Buffalo Bill shooting candles in the dark. I must have hit the mark.
“Mr. Roosevelt, I never kept Elliott from his children. He was a devoted father. But he did not enjoy your matrimonial bliss. His marriage was not blissful.”
My temples were pounding. “I will not listen.”
She crumpled up in front of Nan, sobbing in the Fifth Avenue’s hollow foyer. The chandeliers had their own strange, silent music that seemed to fill the cavern like a sinister balloon. I took Mrs. M. in my arms, shielding her from that eerie silence. Was it to soothe her, or rescue my soul from damnation? I was like some whiskey judge in the Badlands. I’d condemned my brother, stolen him from the daughter he loved—lanky little Eleanor. Indeed, I was the orphan-maker.
“Madam, I beg you, return to your room.”
I could feel the heartbeat through her winter robes. It thumped like some great primitive bird. I watched Mrs. M. shuffle toward the passenger cars with a shambling gait. Had I been ripped of all humankind in the Badlands, become as relentless as the cougar?
“Roosevelt,” Nan said, “you must show a little mercy to that poor woman. It does seem that she did love your late brother.”
“She was his paramour,” I said, prim as a deacon.
Nan pounced on that word. “Paramour.”
“I’d rather end this conversation right now,” I said, playing the deacon again.
“No one can hear us,” she said, her nostrils flaring with anger. “We are all alone in the lobby of a hotel where your rival reigns like an emperor behind a desk that belongs in a dollhouse.”
“The Senator isn’t my rival.”
“What is he, then?” she asked.
“A son of a bitch.”
She laughed. But it did not embolden me. I was not my father’s son. I did not have his Brave Heart. Papa could produce the impossible, make my asthma disappear—in our carriage rides through the cold winter, on his own version of the midnight ramble. I could breathe like a brand-new boy as we sped through the deserted streets, with one lantern after the other glowing like a lopped-off head. It was a ride that resembled no other ride, right after the war, when discharged soldiers in random uniforms sometimes haunted the avenues.
Father always stopped for such a soldier, gave him a few coins and asked where he had fought. Perhaps he had helped this very lad during his own days as an Allotment Commissioner. There wasn’t another soul who had Papa’s sense of service. We’d return after an hour, Papa exhausted, his eyes sinking fast, his beard disfigured in the wind, and I utterly refreshed, reborn on this ramble. . . .
WE STOOD UNDER THE great awning on Madison Square, and stared at the hotel’s grandiloquent clock tower, its numerals etched in gold, yet it was not nearly as tall as Edison’s arc lamps that lit Broadway with a nocturnal sunrise. I could imagine my own Antarctic moon in the middle of Manhattan—whiter than white. I wasn’t done with our ramble. I didn’t have to seek out slackers in the tenement district, or worry about some relic from the old Swamp Angels wandering from sewer to sewer after a significant swipe of jewelry or hard cash. There were no Swamp Angels this far uptown.
So I accompanied Nan. Carriages stopped for us on Madison Avenue, even at this hour, but I waved them on. And then a wagon that resembled a railroad car came to a sudden halt with its team of six horses. The coachman never bothered to look at us.
A door opened. “Get in,” a voice barked at us from the interior.
We climbed onto the wagon’s metal lip and hopped aboard. Pierpont Morgan sat in the cushions with his ruinous nose. He suffered from a rare skin disease that wasn’t curable, even with Morgan’s millions. And he preferred to sit in the dark, even with his fellow bankers. His nose swelled up like a pocked pear with oozing pores—a wound on his face. Morgan was a singular man. He’d filled this enormous vault with medieval manuscripts and paintings of the Dutch masters—it was his museum on wheels. He had a palazzo on Madison, but the banker didn’t like to sleep. He went on his own midnight rambles in this ironclad car.
I had a strange affinity with the robber baron. He’d also lost his first wife, Amelia, who died in his arms, died of tuberculosis. Amelia had walked around in a veil to cover up her gauntness. She was so thin and frail in the end that she couldn’t stand up, and Pierpont had to carry her from place to place. He never quite recovered from that marriage. He had a new wife, but she was a blue blood who didn’t share his mania for art treasures and suffered from a chronic depression. Morgan had many mistresses. And I didn’t approve of the way he trampled upon the marriage bed. But he was as much of a philanthropist as my father, and a grand patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there was a rumor that he had subsidized a lying-in hospital to provide for his own progeny of illegitimate children. He had melancholic fits where he took to mumbling for weeks at a time. He sat there in the dark, his banker’s eyes like burning coals.
Nan introduced herself. “I’m Fowler of the World.”
“Ah,” the banker mumbled, “the famous Mrs. Fowler.” We had to strain to catch every word. “Did you not call me a criminal a few days ago?”
“I did, sir.”
“You said I do not pay my workers a living wage. But I keep this damn city humming with the men and women I employ. Are you a socialist, Mrs. Fowler?”
“No,” she whispered. “But you are a tyrant, sir.”
There was a long silence in this rocking carriage.
“TR,” Morgan suddenly said out of the darkness, “you must resign. You’re massacring the police. The very best detectives have retired rather than face one of your inquisitions. They were dependable. I could count on them.”
“Yes, you hired them as your sheriffs,” I said. He was the most powerful banker in the world. The President was a dwarf compared to Pierpont Morgan, who served as banker to the United States. But he had short shrift at 300 Mulberry Street. My roundsmen and captains were not beholden to him, and neither was I. He could comfort the Mayor with his millions and promise Boss Platt a palazzo for the Republican Party. I desired none of that swag.
His ire rose up. I could not recognize the Dutch masters in their gilded frames. The pirate with his pulsing blue nose was angry with me. “A man has want of a sheriff in this town, TR. My messengers are being attacked in broad daylight.”
“I haven’t seen a formal complaint. And you have your own guards,” I said.
His eyes blazed out at me. It was the rare man who could stare back at Pierpont Morgan, but I did try. He could bring down empires with a look, and here he sat in his dark carriage, rambling across Manhattan until it was time to appear on Wall Street, or perhaps he wouldn’t appear at all, and he would wander in this wagon until the end of his days.
“It would be a mark of weakness,” he muttered, “to have messengers from J. P. Morgan accompanied by armed guards.”
He had little interest in me now that I wouldn’t do what he demanded. And he looked at Nan, who must have reminded him of some lost mistress. “Child, it’s impolite not to stare at my nose.”
The tycoon couldn’t intimidate Nan. “I’m not a child,” she said.
“Nevertheless, there’s still my nose—it oozes. It’s septic without a septic tank. Have you read Cyrano?”
“Of course,” she snapped.
“Well, Cyrano would have frightened the audience out of their seats with a nose like mine.”
Nan returned his gaze with her own blue darts. “But he would not have frightened me, Mr. Morgan.”
Pierpont Morgan knocked his fists together like a Gaelic chieftain. “TR, I like this little socialist of yours.”
His carriage lurched to a halt. The coachman pounded from the roof. We’d arrived at Bysie’s brownstone. Pierpont Morgan had already gone on to other matters. We no longer existed in that banker’s brain of his. There was a stab of sunlight on the carriage door. We hopped down from the metal lip, with Pulitzer’s girl reporter clutching my hand. The horses neighed, and that impossible railroad car hurtled along. I had my own fit of melancholy on Madison Avenue.
Two philanthropists, Father and that financial pirate. They’d founded hospitals and museums and charity wards. I summoned up the image of Papa’s beard and broad shoulders, that quiet vitality of his. He didn’t have Morgan’s thirst for empire. I loved him, and I would have shriveled at the first sign of his wrath.
Oh, Father, you should have survived those damned politicians. You would have made a marvelous Customs Collector.
I could feel a tug at my sleeve.
Sissy had come out onto the sidewalk with her latest companion, Eleanor, my little niece, who wore Sissy’s discards and resembled a rag doll with a weak chin.
Sissy bowed to Nan. “I’m his firstborn. Who are you?”
I introduced one and all, while Sissy displayed her badge that the tinsmith had fashioned at headquarters.
“Gawd,” Nan said, “a second Commissioner Roosevelt. And is Eleanor your deputy?”
“She will be. I have yet to swear her in.” Then Sissy turned to me. “TR, Mother has the ague. And she is not in the mood to countenance any outsiders. But Cook is making biscuits, and Mrs. Fowler must stay.”
Nan seemed reluctant to enter Bamie’s winter palace. Perhaps my “firstborn” reminded her of the tots she had tossed aside during her long career as a bunco artist. But Baby Lee was hard to resist. She led Nan under the stone steps and into the kitchen. Cook was delighted. Cook followed all of Mrs. Fowler’s undercover exposés, her descent into the demimonde without so much as a pocket pistol.
“Do ya wear disguises, mum?”
“There isn’t much artistry in a disguise,” she said, winking at my red sash. “I prefer a lighter touch.”
“But your face, mum. It must be known by now.”
Nan shifted expressions, went from a harpy to a young girl. Eleanor and Sissy were entranced. Cook grew hysterical and nearly spoiled the scones.
We all sat around the rugged wooden table, while Cook poured coffee and China tea, with milk and cream and maple syrup.
“Mum, what was your hardest case to crack?”
“I don’t have cases,” Nan said. “I’m not a Pinkerton. I do not have the power—or the will—to make an arrest. I simply write about what I see.”
Cook was bewildered. She’d never talked so much since we had hired her. “There were arrests, mum, after your last encounter.”
“Yes, sometimes there’s a tiny crack in the underworld.”
But she could have been a Pink. She had an acute picture of her surroundings. She sensed the sadness in Eleanor’s narrow shoulders, a sadness I did not want to see. I had blinded myself, blotted out my brother’s little girl. I played bear with her and the bunnies, let her accompany us on our summer strolls, treated her to ice cream, as if Elliott had never existed and Anna Roosevelt had never lived or died. But it was Nan who whispered to Eleanor, buttered a scone for her, braided her hair. And then she began to shiver. She could have been possessed, riven by some lightning bolt.
“TR,” Sissy asked, “does Mrs. Fowler have the ague?”
“I doubt it.”
Sissy would not be sidetracked.
“Mrs. Fowler, do you have children of your own?”
Nan broke out of her electric dream. “Yes, Sissy, I’m afraid I do. A girl and a boy. They’re both a little older than you and Eleanor.”
“What are their names?” asked Sissy, bold as ever.
Nan paused, as if to dredge up her past, like some devilish accountant. “Melody . . . and Paul.”
“Melody,” my daughter said, “is a most unusual name.”
“Mrs. Fowler, Mrs. Fowler,” Eleanor asked, jumping up and down with more vigor than I had ever seen, “can they come and play with us?”
“Dearest,” Nan said, stroking Eleanor, “that is quite impossible.”
Nan clutched her fists, got up from the table, thanked Cook, said goodbye to the girls, and ran out like a waif. She was a waif, and it did not matter how Pulitzer had anointed her, or how many followers she had.
She stopped for a moment to stare at me. “You must not desert that child—Eleanor.”
“She’s my niece,” I said. “I have not deserted her.”
“Yet she wears the high socks and short skirts of an orphanage.”
I could have had Whitey Whitman’s elbows in my face. “She lives with her Grandmamma—in Tivoli-on-the-Hudson,” I said. “And half her clothes come from Sissy’s closet.”
“I am talking about the other half,” Nan said. And then Pulitzer’s waif wandered into the wind with that haunted look of hers.
I felt like a sea captain who had to face the wreckage he had just helped administer—on land, rather than at sea. This midnight ramble, I fear, had caused more pain than I had ever imagined. I was no Caliban, part monster, part magician. I could not bring back Melody and Paul, whereas little Eleanor, with her hand-me-downs, was almost a picture of Nan’s very own grief. No wonder Nan had clung to her—both were members of the same orphanage, an icehouse frozen in time, both were waifs. I doubt Nan would visit me again.