POLICEMAN’S PARADISE, PART THREE
1897
HOUSE OF MORGAN DECLARES
WAR ON MULBERRY STREET
CALLS TEDDY MANHATTAN’S
LITTLE TIN CZAR
THE PAPERS HAD A HOPPING GOOD TIME SCRAPING MY feet to the fire while Pierpont introduced a police commissioner all his own. That damn Pink, Detective Taggart, had been put in charge of the New York office—only he was Major Taggart now, and with a military swagger, too. He’d developed a drag-foot since the last time I saw him. He had the same dyed mustache, but his collar was clean—and starched—in Manhattan. He hadn’t lost his Wyoming luster and flair. Taggart and his team of detectives went around in a wagon plated with metal—a gift from the old pirate, I presume. They did whatever mischief they could for Piermont and his cabal of financiers. Quietly, rampantly, they’d become a rival police force, with their own badges, billies, and silver-backed Colts.
Taggart was as cruel and calculating as he had been in the Far West. The Pinks broke up strikes, loaned themselves to landlords affiliated with Morgan, tossing out tenants who were behind in their rent, dragging them down the stairs, two at a time, leaving them in a bundle out on the sidewalk, like so much carrion to be collected. These victims had little recourse. Taggart was willing to take on my Mulberry Street men who got in his way. He would flash his silver badge and claim that local jurisdiction meant a sack of piss to him. He belonged to the “federals,” he said. Pinkertons had been the bodyguards of Presidents, and certain Senators on Capitol Hill. But he hadn’t counted on the flying squad. My bicycle patrol kept pace with his war wagon, and even the best of the Pinks couldn’t outmaneuver Sergeant Raddison. They battled billy to billy in front of the Hester Street stalls, while shirts and ladies’ underpants went flying onto the fire escapes, like a tatter of pale flags. Storekeepers and shoppers were caught in the mêlée. But Raddison himself watched over the civilians, while his lads bloodied the Pinks, who were no match for cops in striped trousers and nautical caps.
The Pinks filed a civil complaint. Harassment, they said. And of course they hired Howe & Hummel, with their silky touch and sour perfume. Hummel himself arrived at headquarters with the Major, while Sergeant Raddison stood at my side. He had become one of my aides in his spare time. He was wearing a nautical cap, as if he’d risen out of the East River like a demigod.
“TR,” said Silent Abe, looking as rumpled as ever, “you mustn’t feud with the Pinks. The Major and you are on the same side.”
“And what side is that?” I asked.
“Law—and order.”
“Mr. Hummel,” I said, “the Major’s idea of law and order is much different from mine. He works for Pierpont Morgan, keeps Morgan’s enemies in check, and does favors for his friends.”
“Now, now,” said Silent Abe, “that’s a touch unfair. Not one bank messenger has been waylaid since the Pinks arrived.”
“Yes, they’re busy lads. The Pinks have tossed tenants into the gutter . . . and broken the backs of innocent cigar makers.”
“Innocent?” Taggart said with a smirk. “They’re all rabble. They’ve been inciting riots. They spend whatever time they have manufacturing diabolic stink bombs and tossing them at their own bosses. . . . Commissioner, you are reviled in your own town, while we are cheered wherever we go.”
“That’s not how I recall it,” said Sergeant Raddison. “I had to save one of your own lads from the mob.”
“That’s a laugh,” said Silent Abe. “Does the mob dictate law and order, TR? Then we might as well surrender to savages.”
My girl secretary, Miss Minnie, with her coquettish eyes and brilliant black hair, brought around biscuits and cups of hot coffee, pampering the Major with marmalade and spoons of sugar.
“Thank you, Minnie, dear,” said Silent Abe Hummel with a biscuit crumbling in his mouth, while the Major stood aloof. He’d posed with his war wagon in several gazettes, and was much too fine for Mulberry Street.
“We will win, Roosevelt, we always do,” said the Major. “Even McKinley is on our side. And so is the Mayor. Your midnight rambles haven’t changed a bloody thing. Roundsmen still gamble during their tours and enjoy a pail of beer. My men never drink. We aren’t open to bribes. Headquarters will be cluttered with ghosts in another six months. Mark my word. . . . Come, come,” he said to his lawyer in the pink shirt. “We will get no satisfaction here.”
“Ah, but reasonable men have to be reasonable,” said Silent Abe, nibbling on a biscuit like a rodent. “Surely we can arrive at an agreement. . . . We’ll divide the turf. Major Taggart will have his little kingdom, TR, and you will have yours.”
Hummel stared right through my pince-nez and saw that he couldn’t arrange a truce between Taggart and Mulberry Street. Silent Abe was certain of his own powers, but not of a Pinkerton with dead eyes. Taggart was a bit sinister, wearing a mustache that hid a face full of scars.
Hummel sighed, sensing his own defeat. Yet Howe & Hummel never deserted a client. “Ah, a compromise, right here. Miss Minnie, will you put down the biscuits, please, and supply us with a steel-tipped pen and a bottle of ink?”
Taggart wasn’t buying any of Silent Abe’s silk. He had faith in his war wagon and the fealty of his detectives.
“Hummel, can’t you tell that the little tin czar is on the way out? We don’t require compromises with TR’s detectives.”
“Then why did you offer to come?” asked Silent Abe.
“To count the cobwebs on the wall.”
And he left with his drag-foot, winking once at Miss Minnie.
“Then it will be civil war and a long, long stretch in the courts,” said Silent Abe, as he trundled out, looking for Taggart.
Meanwhile, Miss Minnie did her best to hide her affection for the Major out of loyalty to me. His cruelty didn’t seem to frighten her at all. Perhaps she was on a holiday of sorts, drawn to macabre detectives with a covenant to kill. It was a dream marriage, and I did not disabuse Minnie of her phantom love affair. Taggart had sized her up for another reason. He wanted to occupy my chair, seize Mulberry Street for himself.
TAGGART MARCHED WITH THE Fenians, scraping along with his drag-foot, had lunch with the Mayor, and was the lion of Newspaper Row. Reporters and photographers flocked to Taggart, followed him and his war wagon from place to place. It didn’t seem to matter much that the Pinks trampled upon innocent grocers who were in arrears, smashed their windows, tossed their produce into the streets, and posed with each and every culprit on a pile of foodstuff turned to flotsam on dry land. The Pinks also had their own supply of stool pigeons and made spectacular arrests. They appointed themselves civilian sheriffs, and the courts upheld their right to do so. They captured pickpockets and highwaymen who had come from crime schools in Chicago and Baltimore, plucked them right off the ferry docks and train depots, men in homburgs and fur hats, like bankers wearing handcuffs. They swooped down on a team of burglars in the midst of a prodigious robbery, while my lads at Mulberry Street looked like bunglers and no-accounts—I was the Commissioner of nothing, nothing at all.
Yet I wasn’t idle. Manhattan now had twelve exchanges and fifty thousand telephones, and I made sure that headquarters was connected to every precinct, every municipal department, including the Mayor’s office, every merchandise mart, and every significant family, the only ones that could afford the subscription price of five hundred dollars. Thus we had our own umbilical cord to certain select souls. We could steer the flying squad into riot areas in a matter of minutes. But my wheelers never seemed to get there first. The Pinks arrived before Sergeant Raddison did. They had an uncanny gift to be at a riot or the scene of a crime.
The Major was either a magisterial detective, or he was privy to information that shouldn’t have been in his pocket. He had a source inside Mulberry Street. I wondered if that source was my celebrated secretary. Was Taggart romancing Miss Minnie on the sly? I had Sergeant Raddison follow her, I’m ashamed to admit. He went wherever Minnie went. He waited outside the stoop of her Brooklyn tenement, rambled behind her at market stalls, even bumped into Minnie once.
“Why, Sergeant, what are you doing here? Are you in training?”
“Indeed,” he said. “I like to track beautiful girls.”
The vigil ended right there.
“Sir,” the Sergeant said, “it’s not your Minnie—unless she and that killer have an unbreakable code.”
There was only one other source—the telephone dispatcher at Mulberry Street who directed calls to the precincts. We had a look at his bankbook. Sergeant Fleischer, a former roundsman, was suddenly awash in cash. I did not sit in judgment, relieve him of his pension or his rank. I had to be as wily as the Pinks.
I sat Fleischer down in my office and shut the door.
“When did Taggart first approach you?”
I’d frightened the poor fellow out of his wits. His eyes seemed to recede into his skull, and I could see nothing but two bloodshot balls. “Your silence condemns you, Fleischer. Speak!”
He patted his lips with a crumpled handkerchief, and his mouth opened like a raucous melody.
“It was on the very day the Pinkerton visited headquarters, sir. He slipped an envelope under my seat.”
“Laden with cash,” I said. That was Taggart’s motive in coming here. It wasn’t about any mythical truce. He meant to bribe as many coppers as he could.
My former roundsman wasn’t a fool. “I think I will need representation, sir—Howe & Hummel.”
“Fine,” I said. “Have your Hummel. But you’ll step into my Commissioner’s court and I’ll fleece you of everything you own. Hummel is not that fond of paupers.”
So Sergeant Fleischer began to sing like a Mulberry Street canary, and thus we had our little ruse. But there was a complication, alas—a fog had settled in and refused to burn off, even in brilliant patches of sunlight. Our bicycle cops banged into civilians and members of their own illustrious unit, but I couldn’t permit the fog to let the Pinks slip into their own camouflaged oblivion.
Here I was, sworn to protect the populace as Police Commissioner, and I faked a robbery—at a bridal shop on Grand. I had my dispatcher call this fake crime in to the Pinks. His voice was trembling, but he gave no other signal to Taggart.
“The Major will murder me,” Fleischer said.
“He will not. A crime was reported, and you dispatched it to the nearest precinct.”
I couldn’t be bothered with Taggart’s spies, crime reporters from the World, who had their cubbyholes across the street from headquarters. What could they discern with their binoculars in such ruinous weather? I’d never catch Taggart on my own. I had to join Raddison and his flying squad as an undercover agent. I borrowed a bicycle, the squad’s striped trousers, a woolen cape, and a nautical cap. And we vanished into the fog. We all had our whistles, and our billies tucked under our belts. We had our lamps on; the meager glow didn’t do much good in that miasma. Our bicycles were equipped with bells, but the piercing peal was swallowed up by the fog. Our whistles worked. Their shrill bleat seemed to carve a path into the descending dark. Wagons lurched out of our way, as we raced along Mulberry Street. A pushcart went flying—soggy sausages floated in the still air. We avoided pedestrians by Sergeant Raddison’s own strange aeronautics. He rose up on his rear wheel like a bronco and was a pinch more visible than the rest of us. And so he was our guide and our compass needle. He had an uncanny gift to locate where we were.
“Mr. Roosevelt, sir, a little to your left, or you’ll crash into that horse cart.”
Yet we managed to arrive on Grand without a single collision. Grand Street was still Lower Manhattan’s great shopping district. The Williamsburg ferry brought a flurry of passengers from Brooklyn in search of bargains and exotic merchandise. They were like a bunch of prowlers, with money in their pockets. They seldom smiled; shopping, it seems, was almost a crime.
We’d come to the land of bridal shops, with an explosion of veils and gowns in window after window. I had selected the Glass Slipper, at Orchard and Grand, as the site of our fictitious crime, because it was the Cinderella of bridal shops. It had an assortment of mannequins that reared up out of the fog like living creatures in their bridal veils.
I dared not dwell too long, not while I wore a billy and was with the flying squad. We hadn’t notified the clerks at the Glass Slipper of the little communion with the Pinks that was about to take place. These clerks might have warned the Major. And so they were mystified at the sight of wheelers in front of their mannequins.
“Raddison, what if Taggart doesn’t show?’
“He will, Mr. Roosevelt. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
I doubted Raddison for a moment. And then I heard the distant rumble of Taggart’s war wagon—it cut through the fog like an ironclad turtle, an amphibious creature that might prosper both on land and on sea. Taggart was the first to leap down, even with his limp. His agents followed right behind him. He’d brought a battery of reporters and photographers to re-enact his arrest of bridal veil thieves, as he imagined a robbery in progress at the Glass Slipper. He dangled half a dozen handcuffs like exotic pieces of jewelry. And he did a curious dance with his drag-foot, a stuttering cakewalk.
He stopped right in the middle of his dance when he saw my wheelers. We should never have arrived first. He couldn’t believe that he had been outmaneuvered by a bunch of bicycle boys. But he was nimble enough to shift gears.
He clapped his hands in that infernal weather and looked me in the eye. “You staged this whole affair,” he said. “I should have figured—a bridal shop on Grand Street.”
And he had to decide how much his private police force was worth. He had his coterie with him. But reporters seemed much more interested in my nautical cap than in a monstrous turtle on wheels and a little lord with a drag-foot. He scattered the reporters and squinted hard at Raddison’s broad shoulders. He couldn’t risk a battle on Grand Street, with clerks floating about and wax brides in the window.
He returned to his war wagon.
“Roosevelt,” he said, “you wasted the city’s resources. You’ll suffer for that.”
And suffer I did.
There were no immediate squabbles with the Mayor’s office. But I was summoned to Senator Platt’s headquarters. I’d given my bicycle back to the flying squad, and I couldn’t race to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in this dense, sepulchral shroud. I stumbled along and arrived on Fifth Avenue by some mysterious fate—it was like wandering into a wet wall, with my lungs a paper windlass about to collapse.
Boss Platt had no petitioners this afternoon. I found him in his Amen Corner, dining on trout almondine and glazed carrots, while he guzzled champagne.
“Will you join me in a glass? Ah, I forgot. You’re a teetotaler.”
I had to outmaneuver him, if only this once. “Senator, I’ll have a sip.”
“Boy!” the Easy Boss rumbled with a forkful of carrots and fish in his mouth.
A bellboy in his fifties, wearing a soiled maroon jacket, arrived with a slight case of the trembles. He must have been a lost cousin of Platt’s. “Will you bring the Commissioner a flute of the bubbly, for Christ’s sake?”
The bellboy disappeared and returned with a flute of champagne.
We drank a toast, the Senator and I. “To peace and war!”
Platt winked. “To our peace and other men’s war!”
He took another forkful of trout, while the champagne drummed inside my skull. “Bravo,” the Senator said, clapping his exquisite, half-female hands. “Roosevelt, you’re on the wrong track. Mulberry Street is not for you. You’re too visible in the worst sense—staging robberies in downtown bridal shops to undermine the Pinkertons. That won’t stick. We have to put you where you can do less damage. I just talked to the President. He agrees. He doesn’t want to look at any more cartoons of you in a cowboy hat, lassoing some poor devil of a Republican. You will have another outpost—the State, War, and Navy Building. Congratulations. You’re the new Undersecretary of the Navy.”
I did not feel enlightened. “And I’m the last to learn?”
Platt had been ten moves ahead of me all along. “That’s politics, son. Remember—if you start a war in your first six weeks, you can expect the guillotine.”
But he wasn’t finished with me, not yet. “You’re an infant, Roosevelt. The presidency has nothing to do with reform. It’s a paradise of patronage. And don’t you forget that. We’re kicking you out of Manhattan.”
The Senator smiled warily, as much as a cadaver could, among his cortege of henchmen, hacks, and vigilantes—the Senator’s Stranglers had silk wires; they got rid of you without much of a trace, sent you into political purgatory.
I swallowed his insults, his taunts. I would never have guessed it, but the muck-a-muck had given me a ticket out of Police Headquarters. I could reform the Navy. Perhaps he and President McKinley didn’t care, as long as I was tucked away in the War Department’s monolithic castle, kept out of sight.
One of the Stranglers now approached and whispered in his ear. The Senator nodded and picked up the telephone receiver on his desk. “Roosevelt, it’s Mulberry Street.”
A female corpse had been found floating in the East River. Normally it wouldn’t have been my concern. I seldom visited the morgue at Bellevue. But this corpse had been carrying items that did relate to me—letters and a cigarette case from my departed brother. I could tell who it was without a glimpse of her bloated body. Mrs. Valentina Morris. I’d paid her bills religiously. She still had her suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and she chose to take a swim. My own personal roundsman, who looked after me in police matters, asked if I wanted to claim whatever belongings she had of my brother’s.
“Commissioner,” said my roundsman, “she could be listed as a Jane Doe, and I could collect her stuff.”
“No,” I said into the mouthpiece of Boss Platt’s silver phone. “She deserves better treatment than that. I won’t have her shoveled into a paupers’ grave at Hart Island.”
I didn’t lie. I told Senator Platt the sordid tale.
“An apparent suicide, sir. My brother left his wife for this Valentina woman. She loved him. I’m sure of that. She was residing at your hotel.”
“Penniless, I suppose,” Boss Platt said, stroking his chin with those splendid fingers.
“I took care of her without meddling too much.”
I couldn’t seem to placate him.
“That’s all fine, Roosevelt, but we can’t have our new Undersecretary associated with this very sad affair. Go to the morgue, son. Collect whatever you can. But she’ll have to be buried as a Jane Doe.”
MY ROUNDSMAN SUMMONED A patrol wagon to the Fifth Avenue, and we rode that car right into the heart of an hallucination that was like a blizzard in the Badlands, but without the ice dust that could freeze you in your tracks; we were lost for a while in the lurid atmosphere, a climate in which men and wagons seemed to float. We did arrive at those iron balconies near the East River, where madmen paraded until they were whisked by ferry to Blackwell’s Island. Bellevue had its own labyrinth of pavilions. We went right to the morgue, which had a magnificent loggia and a skylight that could have been a dark lozenge in this mysterious patch of weather.
Mrs. M. was lying on a table with a lamp over her and a shower head. She was wrapped in a grubby silk blanket with a tiny part of her bosoms showing. She wore a locket around her neck, a silver locket with a silver chain. The morgue attendant, who wanted to please me, tried to rip the chain from her throat.
“Don’t put your filthy paws on her,” I shouted in that echo chamber, my voice booming off the walls.
My anger was misplaced, and I bowed to the morgue attendant. But I was much more interested in the chief coroner, who was wrapped in a wrinkled white muslin coat and had a pince-nez with a tassel, like my own. I’d grabbed him away from Philadelphia, offered him a princely sum, far beyond our budget. The Mayor didn’t dare intervene. New York’s Finest deserved the finest of pathologists. He’d cracked cases on his own, had uncovered significant clues. He lectured everywhere, trained young coroners about the lessons and quirks of morbidity. He’d become a myth among other coroners, this Dr. Ferdinand Jessup. His eyesight was almost as poor as mine, and his origins were obscure. He’d been a morgue attendant until he trained at a medical college. He didn’t have a Harvard degree, and was no Porcellian brother of mine, but I liked Jessup. I always imagined him as one of my father’s protégés, though I doubt he had ever lodged with newsboys.
I squinted at Mrs. M. on the slab, disturbed by her evanescent beauty; drowning hadn’t disfigured her, not at all—her mouth had a vivid wetness; her nostrils were perfectly pink, and seemed to stir in the semidarkness. I couldn’t help myself, as I imagined Elliott nuzzling her mouth.
“Jessup, was there any hint of foul play?”
I scrutinized his brittle mustache; the chief coroner was unkempt.
“None, Commissioner. Not one bruise or laceration or break in the skin. It was like fishing a mermaid out of the sea. But I fear she was a troubled creature, perhaps prone to severe neurasthenia.”
His words hit like a procession of hammer blows. I didn’t want to have the Roosevelt colic, not at this death house.
“Jessup, I see a dead woman with a blue sheen. Where are any signs of this damn neurasthenia business?”
“Look at the eyelids, Commissioner, how narrow they’ve become, how they’ve lost their elasticity. That’s an indication of damage to the human spirit, a kind of rigor mortis of the soul.”
I was growing savagely irritated at this unkempt cockatoo. “Jessup, are you some metaphysician now?”
He fondled the ragged ends his mustache. “Commissioner, I deal only in clinical reports.”
I had half a mind to send him back to Philadelphia.
“You won’t include her on the paupers’ run to Hart. I want her buried at Greenwood. I’ll provide the plot.”
“Understood,” he said. “Another Jane Doe from the deep.”
I took Elliott’s cigarette case and the cache of billets-doux, which Mrs. M. had bundled into a pigskin pouch. I never signed for them—that was the privilege of a Police Commissioner. Still, I felt remorse as I walked out of Bellevue. I’d violated that woman, stolen her love letters.
I gave my roundsman the leather pouch. I had no interest in reading about Elliott’s romance. I would have burnt the letters in Bysie’s fireplace, with the pouch.
“You tell Jessup, tell him now, that this item must not appear in any ledger. The pouch is to be buried in Jane Doe’s box.”
I waited, stood under the wrought-iron balconies, with the nagging odor of the East River in my nostrils. I could see the madmen perform on the balconies, in the wisps of light. They must have been actors of some kind, players who had lost their reason. I couldn’t quite understand their garbled tongue. Perhaps they were speaking nonsense at Bellevue. Like dogcatchers bearing giant nets, their keepers chased them back into the hospital, but they would reappear at another balcony, as if they were irresistible somehow. I wanted to toss up some coins to them, but I didn’t dare. I might have been the only spectator, an audience of one. And then the roundsman returned, with a curious light on his back—the noisome smells had abated, as the fog lifted for a moment. His hair was utter gold.
“You told Jessup? Nothing written. No ledger.”
“That pouch never existed, sir.”
The sun was gone, all gone, and we were back in that nocturnal gray.
I had emasculated Elliott, gutted him, like a trapper, in the name of Roosevelt morality. And I, who had boxed, wrestled, hunted, and remade my pathetic body with an iron will, fell victim to my own wild thoughts. I was on another kind of ramble, voyaging somewhere. By Jupiter, I could see Mrs. M. marching toward the river without her shoes, steadfast, alert—this was no suicide, no leap into the currents. The woman had her own iron will, a sweeping panorama of bliss. Monstrous, yes, but not without a touch of divinity. She’d loved Elliott beyond the point of madness—that, that was a gift. She had turned her own body into a sepulcher with letters she must have memorized and recited in her sleep. And she would have them under the riptides, under the rowers’ oars to Hart Island, under all the suicide runs.
The patrol wagon, drawn by an old lame mare, had come through the fog. We climbed aloft, the roundsman and I, sat among nightsticks, battering rams, and other police paraphernalia at our feet.
The driver, a young sergeant in the horse patrol, bearing a handsome set of whiskers, asked in the gentlest voice, “Where to, sir?”
The Dakotas, I wanted to say.
“Ramble a bit.”
MISS MINNIE SERVED BISCUITS to one and all, biscuits she had baked herself in her tiny Brooklyn flat and had carried across the ferry like one of Morgan’s own bank messengers. She couldn’t stop sobbing.
“We will never learn to survive without you, Commissioner Ted.”
She’d been my police “wife,” who kept the ogres from my door. I waltzed her around my desk until her crying jags disappeared.
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
I did not believe in sentimental attachments. I walked where I had to walk like a whirlwind, and then ripped that whole panorama from my mind. I had been that way as a rancher in the Badlands, as deputy sheriff, or Civil Service Commissioner, and President of the Police Board.
I wasn’t always fond of souvenirs. But it was Raddison who pierced my armor. I was loath to leave him and the flying squad. His wheelers had chipped in to buy their boss a parting gift, a nautical cap stitched in silver thread. I wore that cap with honor—and with ease. I’d never had a cop with Raddison’s magnificent bearing, a swimmer’s broad shoulders and the waist of a girl. I remember how we rode like banshees to that bridal shop in the fog and made a fool of Taggart, who had no one to arrest, not even mannequins in a window.
Still, I couldn’t avoid Taggart and his beady-eyed detectives, who serenaded me from my own stoop at headquarters.
He’s the lad who won our hearts
With his four eyes and white teeth
Terrible, terrible ted
I sauntered down the stairs and met Taggart on the stoop with his Pinks. He was smiling like a wicked jack-o’-lantern, wrapped in a silk scarf. “Ta, Mr. Ted.”
I bowed to him as uncivilly as I could.
“You, sir, are Morgan’s pet tiger. You will not grin the next time we meet. That is certain.”
I had a departing Commissioner’s final privilege, as I rode across to Long Island City on a police barge, filled with water cannons and firemen’s hooks, the captain tooting his foghorn in my honor, while the river roiled beneath us and sprayed my prize nautical cap in foam. I took the rails to Oyster Bay, and pedaled from the station on my final lap as Police Commissioner, on the lookout for the familiar gray wisdom of Sagamore Hill and its slanting roofs.
LITTLE TED WAS THE FIRST of our bunnies to attend a public school, a little clapboard one-room affair at Cove Neck, with sunken floorboards and a potbelly stove. I’d had scant time until now to meet with Ted’s classmates, the sons and daughters of local farmhands and silver polishers, several of whom worked at Sagamore Hill. Edith had been far more attentive than I. She’d gone to Bloomingdale’s with Baby Lee and had bought out almost half the toy department. She told the clerks that these toys were for public school children at Glen Cove, none of whom had ever had a toy from Bloomingdale’s; the clerks met for a moment and decided to chip into the bounty.
And my wife and daughter marched out of Bloomingdale’s with a bulging sack of toys. Edith wouldn’t distribute the treasure until I spoke to the children.
“The wilderness is all we will ever have,” I said. “Animals are our future—and our friends. If you find a bird with a broken wing, you must mend it.”
A blond boy, the son of a nearby farmer, raised his hand. “And foxes, kind sir, are they not our friends?”
This lad would become a lawyer, I could tell—another Velvet Bill in the making.
“I found a wounded fox, Mr. Roosevelt; he had escaped one of your hunting parties with a broken leg. I hid him in Father’s barn, mended him with a splint. I did not want to return him to the forest—and the fox hunters. I kept him, sir. And he is my friend.”
“Your pet,” I told him with a certain shiver. I could not lecture to this boy about hunters and the hunted, how his red fox invaded chicken coops, devoured birds and squirrels. I could see the perverse pleasure on Edith’s face. She did not admire my trophies, my kills. Neither did Baby Lee. Edith had never been mistress of the hunt. I was incoherent with this blond boy, babbling to him about game preserves, and farms where foxes were bred. It was his teacher, Mrs. Cummings, who came to the rescue and asked me about birdcalls. I warbled a duet between a male and female sparrow, the male’s constant chirrup, chirrup, and the female’s brusque, almost belligerent chatter. Even the blond boy lost a little of his glumness, as the children imitated my birdsongs.
That’s when Edith opened her sack. She asked the children to shut their eyes, count to three, and express their own deepest desires.
“Skates,” said the son of a silver polisher. And Sissy plucked a pair of roller skates out of the sack. The boy nearly liquefied.
“A sled,” said the daughter of a carpenter. And Sissy pulled out a toy sled with a team of hand-crafted reindeer. Sissy had dolls and fire engines, cap pistols, and windup mice on wheels. . . .
“Mr. Roosevelt,” asked the same blond boy with the red fox in his father’s barn, “would you have something for my new companion? A toy, perhaps, that a red fox would relish.”
I had not been to Bloomingdale’s with Sissy and Edith. I had not ravaged the entire toy department.
“Oh, we have a perfect pet,” Sissy sang. She dug in with both hands and pulled an article out of the sack’s deep well. It was a silk spider on a string.
The blond boy was dee-lighted. “Thank you, sir. You are most gracious.”
I was rattling off about myself when I had a vision of the rescued red fox bounding across the classroom. The fox had a bit of silver on its coat, a silver spot, like a healed wound. It had the wanton, moonstruck eyes of a hunter, and a slivering black tongue. This room could have been the fox’s private henhouse.
But it did not harm the children. Its eyes were emblazoned on me alone. I waited, waited for it to leap. And then this renegade fox began to chirrup like a male sparrow, which was maddening enough, until it broke into human speech.
—Teedie, you will go from hunter to being hunted, it intoned.
I would not converse with this fox.
—You will wear a wounded flag, and walk like a blind man without your specs.
I could feel a tug at my arm. “Theodore,” Edith whispered, “you’ve been staring at the wall.”
The fox had fled. But I could not catapult myself back into this sunken classroom. I was lost, alone, in a land of chirruping children at Glen Cove.