1901
I WAS ON A REMOTE ISLAND IN VERMONT WHEN THE President was shot.
He had two columns of soldiers in front of him, I believe, to funnel every visitor who wanted to shake his hand at the Expo. And I whispered to myself, the Pinks should have been there, or some of my Rough Riders. They would have spotted that peculiar boy with the golden curls, who clung to a handkerchief, a revolver hidden underneath. He could have been an angel or an anarchist. The Pinks would have wrestled him to the ground and carted him off. And the Major would still be alive. . . .
But I was Vice President on permanent recess. I had little to do with the Major and his wanderlust that summer. Our paths never crossed. I had no documents to sign. I saw none. I could have become prince of Saturn’s seventh moon as far as the Major was concerned, and I would still have sat in the dark—official spokesman for an administration that made an invisibility of me. I was the Major’s man at a Vermont fish and game luncheon on Isle La Motte, in Lake Champlain. I wouldn’t wear a rose in my lapel, like the Major, who often awarded such a rose to some winsome bride visiting the White House. The water had an incredible purl, like tiny, moving cracks in a lake of solid green fire. A majordomo suddenly arrived with a very sour look. He whispered in my ear. A telephone call had come from the Secretary of State. The President had been hit, not once but twice, by a lunatic with a baby face inside the Temple of Music. One bullet managed to fall out before he was operated on at the Expo’s tiny hospital; the other bullet couldn’t be found. He was bundled across the half-lit streets of Buffalo by the hospital’s lone ambulance, with a policeman on horseback marking the traffic, then was taken to the Milburn mansion on Delaware Avenue, with its scatter of chimneys and solid brick front, where he had been staying with his wife. And when I arrived in Buffalo, I couldn’t get near the mansion in my carriage. My driver was forlorn. He had a holster at his side.
“We cannot move, Mr. Vice President. We might get killed in all the confusion. I recommend that we untangle ourselves the second we have a chance and return to the station.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m here to see the Major, and see him I will.”
The block had been roped off and was surrounded by a detachment of soldiers with bayonets. These soldiers did not take kindly to me.
“Who the hell are ye, son?” their sergeant growled. He must have recognized my spectacles and mustache. The Vice President meant as little to him as to the rest of the nation.
Cortelyou, the President’s own assistant, with his pince-nez and trim mustache pocked with silver, had to come out of the mansion and fetch me. He didn’t seem dee-lighted to have me on Delaware Avenue. The crisis had passed. The Major was on the mend. He would be back at work within weeks, Cortelyou predicted. I’d become kind of an embarrassment—a twilight creature who seemed to suggest something was out of joint at the Milburn mansion. Ida McKinley kept mumbling to herself. I couldn’t understand a word. One side of her face was a bit sunken, and I tried to soothe her. She kept pinching her own arms.
“Miss Ida, it will all work out. You’ll see.”
She recovered her mental state for a moment and inspected me like a general. “Are you the boy who cleans the slop?”
“Sort of,” I said.
She had a shrewdness in her eyes of the half insane. “You’re not that boy. You’re my husband’s hangman. Where’s your gloves?”
“I’m the Vice President, ma’am.”
She inspected me again, from top to bottom. “Did you enter through the servants’ door?”
Ida wasn’t insane, not at all. “You’ll be kind to my Willie, won’t you? Tell him that he shouldn’t forget his wife.”
The cabinet had me under hook and wire. I wasn’t permitted much of an audience with the Major. The sons of bitches kept me in the vestibule for an hour—confidential stuff, one of McKinley’s ushers said. I wasn’t entitled to share such urgent matters. And in the cabinet’s eyes I didn’t exist. I was like an alligator’s extra tail. Finally the door opened to the President’s suite. It had the unmistakable waft of chloroform. There were no doctors present, not even a damn nurse to wipe the Major’s brow. His bedroom had been turned into the Ship of State.
McKinley wore a silk robe in bed, with satin pillows propped up behind him. His owlish eyebrows had been combed. A barber must have sneaked in before I arrived. There wasn’t an idle hair to be had on his cleft chin. But no powder in the world could have hid his pale, waxy complexion.
I felt that I had fallen upon some rehearsed tableau. The Major had a pen in his fist. Cortelyou and the cabinet stood around him like a handful of hawks. He glanced up from the document he was signing.
“Roosevelt, how kind. . . . You’ll make sure the assassin isn’t harmed. Leon, isn’t it? I can’t pronounce his second name. I don’t want him beaten.”
There was no assassin, I wanted to say, not yet. But I would have had to inform the President that Leon Czolgosz was still alive.
“Pan America,” he said. “We will own this new century, Roosevelt, and why shouldn’t we celebrate this ownership with a fair? Did you see the electric shower, delivered from Niagara Falls—an empire of light? We destroyed the darkness, killed it. I challenge you to find a single shadow at the world’s fair.”
The Major started to cough. One of his eyes wandered all over the place. The pen dropped out of his hand.
“Can I do anything?” I asked. “I mean, can I . . . ?”
“Not at all,” said Cortelyou. I had no right to be in a mansion surrounded by bayonets.
I shook the President’s vacant hand, clotted with black ink.
“Come visit us again, Roosevelt. I’ll be your personal guide. We’ll both take the Trip to the Moon. God knows what we’ll find.”
I’d gone to that pavilion at the Pan-American fair months ago, with Edith, Alice, and the bunnies. It was crammed with midgets who danced and sang and went around with baskets of green cheese; moonstruck, the midgets were half mad from all the wattage, that constant pounding of electric light.
Then I heard a soft sob from the vicinity of the bed, like the mewling of an animal in pain. “I’ve ruined the Expo, Cortelyou. How silly of me to go and get myself shot. People will shun the fair. I’ve slowed down the century and cost Buffalo a bundle.”
“Nonsense,” said Cortelyou. “The receipts have gone up after that unfortunate incident. . . . Customers are always curious.”
I WASN’T ALLOWED ACCESS to him after that. They closed ranks, McKinley’s loyal men. I had nothing to look at but John Hay’s distinguished beard in the mansion’s vestibule. I admired the Secretary of State. He’d been Lincoln’s confidential secretary, had worked beside him when he was a very young man—that lent the Secretary an aura of angel dust. He had a peculiar method of pursing his lips, as if he were about to swallow his own tongue.
“Theodore, you’ve been a good soldier to come here from Vermont. All of us are humbled by your act. But it might give the wrong impression to have you with us in Buffalo . . . as if we were preparing for a presidential wake.”
I left for the railroad station, in the President’s own carriage with its pair of palominos and a luxurious silvered roof. There was still a bullet in the Major’s body, lodged somewhere at the back of his stomach. The surgeon had sewn the wound with black silk, but the bullet remained. I was not as sanguine as Cortelyou or John Hay. The Major had that sour smell of a man who was not on the mend.
I knew they would have to call me back, and this time there would be a touch of panic, a flutter perhaps in Cortelyou’s voice, or whoever else had to make the call. I was derelict while the Major was alive, the outcast of Sagamore Hill. But I would not allow a sickbed in Buffalo to interfere with my vacation plans. I’d been a hunter and a soldier in the field, even if my soldiering had been very short; and I could almost divine the day when gangrene would set in around a lost bullet.
Edith had chosen a cottage at the site of a former mining camp on Mount Marcy, in the Adirondacks. The mining camp had been turned into a posh resort and a haven for hunters and mountain climbers. The site was as rustic as ever, with deer licks and bird sanctuaries galore. It had a horse-watering station called the Lower Works. Alice insisted on exploring one of the abandoned mine shafts with Archie and Kermit, and a forest ranger accompanied them.
“It’s dangerous,” Edith said. “They might fall . . . and disappear.”
The ranger tried to reassure her. He’d descended the shaft many times, and he had Alice and the two boys cinched to a harness connected to him. But Edith was restless until her bunnies returned.
“Mother,” Alice said, with coal marks on her face, “it was pure dee-light. I could listen to the darkness breathe.”
The next morning we left the bunnies in care of a governess, and Edith and I departed with a couple of rangers on a trip to Lake Colden, five or six miles from the campsite, with tiny ripples in the lake’s surface, soft as wind-blown silk. There was a light drizzle, and Edith borrowed the yellow mackintosh I had worn in Cuba. We could not see Mount Marcy in all the mist. Edith had her boots from Abercrombie’s, or she couldn’t have accomplished the climb in that rugged terrain. Her fist was balled in mine.
“A young Pole, wasn’t he? And an anarchist, the assassin. No one can pronounce his name. Wasn’t he a disciple of Emma Goldman?”
“The crowd would have killed that boy, gobbled him up, Cortelyou said. But the Major had to beg for mercy . . . with a bullet in him.”
Edith shivered under her mackintosh. “Then we should consider ourselves lucky that you weren’t harmed on our own visit to the fair. I remember that tower of electric lights. And all the domes—it was like the City of God.” She started to laugh. “I expected angels to descend.”
“They did,” I said. “Guides appeared from all the pavilions and followed Alicy around.”
Edith scolded me. “It’s your fault. You’ve turned your own daughter into a siren. She breaks the heart of every boy she meets.”
I didn’t want to dwell on that. Alice was sixteen and couldn’t be controlled by a governess. She joined a gypsy camp once in the forest around Cove Neck, and I had to chase them off our property, or she might have eloped with the caravan and married the gypsy king. She lived within her own civility, and there was no way to barter with her. But she was kind to the bunnies, even if she confused them with her various rôles. Was she their sister, or Auntie Alice, who fell from the sky? Still, Edith had raised her as her own, despite their bickering. My wife never wavered once.
We arrived at Lake Colden, had a campfire feast, and slept in a cabin that smelled of mothballs. The drizzle still clung to us in the morning, but I decided to push on. Edith elected to return to the mining camp with one of the rangers. She had a quizzical look, as if I might get lost in some great unknown.
“It’s a mountain, Edie, not heaven or hell.”
That couldn’t reassure her. “It has caverns, dear, and what if I never find you again?”
“You’ll find me,” I said. And we kissed in front of the two rangers. I recalled our senseless quarrel in the ice house at Tranquillity, almost thirty years ago, when I should have held tight to my fourteen-year-old Cleopatra, not let her slip from my grasp. I would have remained a drifter without her. I might have joined Cody’s Wild West, or settled in as a deputy sheriff.
I climbed deeper into the mist with the second ranger. I nearly tripped once or twice, and could have tumbled into a ravine, but I was cinched to the ranger now. We climbed belt to belt. The fog lifted for a moment, and I could see a swirl of forest with no outline and no end. But the fog rolled back in, and the ranger said there was too much grayness surrounding us to arrive at the next peak. And so we climbed down from that treacherous terrain. We met other rangers at an outpost near a little lake called Tear-of-the-Clouds. They knew we were coming and had packed a hamper lunch for both of us. But we didn’t stay long.
Another ranger ran up from the hollows with a telegram in his hand, like a tiny yellow banner in the wind. That banner was no flag of glory. I suspected what it was about. The President had suffered a relapse.
I returned to our cottage at Camp Tahawus in my wet clothes. I was too damn tired to take a sponge bath. We ate dinner in front of the fire. My wife made me put on my blue Rough Rider flannels and a pair of dry socks. The fire crackled a lot, and the sparks flew around us. I dreamt of Brave Heart, delivering the finest sheets of glass, long before I was ever born. I imagined him in a workman’s blue bib, and with a boy’s whiskers, not a full beard. Papa might have found a home for my lion had he still been alive. He wouldn’t have pawned her off to a bushel of zookeepers in the Bronx, not even at the call of science. Papa knew how to take care of kittens, even if they were warlike. . . .
Alice had already picked out a ranger to marry. All that climbing must have made me giddy.
“We won’t stop you,” I said. “But you’ll have to live in a hut for the rest of your life.”
“Father, it couldn’t be worse than that icy mansion on Eagle Street.”
I was feeling demonic with my daughter. “Aren’t you gonna introduce us to your beau?”
I had caught her off guard. She hadn’t contemplated complete compliance on the part of an ogre.
“Father, he’s frightened of you. William says you might get him fired.”
“But you were cinched to him in a mine shaft. That’s almost like a marriage.”
It was Edith who put an end to our little war. She said I was tired, and Alice’s marriage plans would have to wait.
I went to bed at nine. I slept with Edie in a narrow bunk, a kind of sleigh bed.
A ranger woke us a little before midnight—it was Alice’s current fiancé. He handed me a telegram and left. It was from the Secretary of State.
PRESIDENT DYING.
CABINET THINKS YOU SHOULD LOSE NO
TIME COMING.
Ah, why did I feel all in a twist? The Major’s factotums needed me now—lose no time coming. They couldn’t run the country with a corpse in the President’s bed.
A buckboard was waiting outside the cottage. It was a seven-hour drive down the precipitous slopes to North Creek Station. There would be several relays; one team of horses couldn’t make that descent. I was startled to see that my driver was the same young forester who had handed me the telegram—Alice’s erstwhile fiancé. I did not utter a peep about Alice. Both of us were wearing mackintoshes. We were the victims of a summer sirocco—a wind and rain that blew dust into our eyes. My specs turned into blinders; I had to keep wiping them with my neckerchief from the Rough Rider campaign. That couldn’t kill the dust, and I pulled my black slouch hat over my ears. I must have looked like a desperado on the run.
The driver was poor at the reins. I had to steady him, or we wouldn’t have had much of a buckboard.
“You’ll do fine, son,” I said into the biting rain.
“Mr. Vice President, I didn’t propose to your daughter. I can swear on that. Yes, our hands touched—once. That was the whole of it.”
“Look at the road, son. I’m sure Alice will release you from any obligation.”
I had to chuck pebbles at the horses’ flanks, or we might never have arrived at Aiden Lair Lodge, halfway to North Creek. The landlord, Mike Cronin, was a seasoned whip. With his broad shoulders and his dark beard, he reminded me of Brave Heart. I thanked the young ranger. He could rest at the lodge that night. I didn’t have much time to reassure him.
“Son, you should be careful about escorting young ladies into a miner’s shaft. The real danger isn’t the dark.”
And I climbed into Cronin’s buckboard in my Rough Rider mackintosh and desperado’s hat. The young ranger had cost us half an hour.
“Cronin, you’ll have to rush.”
“This road ain’t a picnic, Mr. Vice President. There are too many damn curves. We could miss a curve and fall a few hundred feet.”
“Well, we’ll have to risk it.”
The landlord had two big black Morgans and an excellent rig. I did not fear the slopes. The Morgans seemed to have memorized every curve, like the bends in a river. One of those black beauties stumbled, but we didn’t lose any ground. That’s the kind of whip the landlord was. There was no visibility at all in the fog. I had to rise up on my haunches and shake the lantern. We had the devil of a time spotting boulders in the middle of the road. I worried about our weight on the log bridges—the logs rumbled beneath the horses’ hooves like some hidden eternity. But the Morgans got us through that summer sirocco.
We passed swamps and a graveyard, and a tiny village that wasn’t even on the map. It was the lantern that led us, and the landlord’s firm grip. Froth gathered at the horses’ mouths like crooked plumes. “Landlord,” I said, “damn this ride. We have to let the horses blow, or we’ll slip into the next creek.” The landlord leapt down from the buckboard and wiped the lather from the Morgans’ coats with a red rag that he took from his pocket. He had a gentleness about him that was genuine.
“You were right, Mr. Roosevelt. The horses needed a blow.”
We crossed a crooked little bridge into North Creek with a loud rattle. There was already a crowd on Main Street. They looked hypnotized, as if I were some gilded creature that rose out of the morning mist. “There he is! That’s him.” We arrived at the depot. There were several soldiers, a couple of bodyguards, detectives, and clerks, with a grimness about them—and a train with my own private carriage. One of the clerks handed me a telegram from John Hay.
THE PRESIDENT PASSED AT 2:15 THIS MORNING.
I must have been the last to learn. The soldiers looked at me with a strange awe.
“Mr. President,” their captain said, saluting me.
“I’m in limbo, son,” I said. “Neither here nor there. I haven’t earned that title yet. You can call me Colonel Roosevelt . . . or Mr. Ted.”
I climbed aboard. The soldiers had bayonets. The bodyguards wore holsters and black derbies. They were attached to some macabre presidential detail. I sat in a velvet seat on the handsomest locomotive of the Delaware & Hudson line. I commandeered one of the clerks and dictated a telegram to my wife.
DARLING, TAKE THE BUNNIES HOME.
MAKE SURE ALICE DOESN’T MARRY SOMEONE ON THE CLIMB DOWN.
I dictated another to John Hay.
And then I dismissed the clerks, the detectives, and the soldiers with the bayonets.
The captain was suspicious of my command. “Mr. Hay told us not to let you out of our sight, sir. We are to guard your life—to give up our own lives if necessary.”
“Captain,” I said, “Mr. Hay isn’t here, and I am in charge of the nation. You can guard my life from the next car. But right now I want to be alone.”
And so that’s where they assembled, the entire little platoon.
This elite contraption had its own cook. I ordered sandwiches and cake for all my guardians and clerks, and had the porter bring me coffee in a silver pot like the ones at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I drank out of the Delaware’s own porcelain cup. I savored the biscuits and cucumber sandwiches, just as they served them at Brown’s in London, where I had stayed as the mysterious stranger who married Edith Carow in a dark church. This Pullman belonged to the president of the line. It was a princely carriage. I believe it even had a compartment for his mistress. I did a bit of exploring. Her compartment wasn’t locked. I could read an entire narrative in her nightgowns and vials of perfume. I felt like an interloper in another man’s private affairs. Still, I needed a bit of diversion. I did not want to think of Buffalo and bullet wounds, of Ida weeping in her rumpled dress, and McKinley lying in state, his toenails under the covers.
So I sipped my coffee. But I did not have my little idyll before the crush of public office landed on my head. President Roosevelt. The carriage lurched forward with a terrific jolt. I went flying out of my seat with the porcelain cup in hand. I could not rescue the railroad’s cup—it shattered into pieces. The coffee spilled onto the curtains. The entire platoon stumbled into my Pullman, bayonets aloft.
“It might be those damn anarchists,” the young captain said. “A coordinated attack to bring down the presidency. There’s too much at stake. We will have to squire you from now on.”
The conductor arrived with a sullen look—it seems that the Delaware Executive Express had crashed into a handcar that had been left haphazardly along a route that was supposed to have been cleared all the way from North Creek to Buffalo; a couple of trainmen and a soldier had suffered injuries in the caboose. A crew had to be called in to clear the debris; an ambulance arrived. I got out of the carriage with my bodyguards behind me and talked to the trainmen. I gripped the soldier’s hand.
“Colonel, I was with you on the run up San Juan Hill.”
I should have recognized him. I had that gift never to forget a face. “Which regiment, son?”
“The Ninth, sir.”
I still couldn’t recognize that face. It irritated me. “I hope you didn’t watch me embarrass myself.”
“No, sir. You charged like a windlass with a bandanna flying from your hat. It was edifying—better than having a trumpeter at your ear.”
The boy hadn’t seen me crawling on my knees without my specs. I was grateful for that.
I returned to my carriage. The porter brought me another one of the railroad president’s porcelain cups. I watched Mount Marcy disappear into the distance with its desolate peak. My mind collected around details—the chips in the ceiling of the Red Room, the White House’s ragged carpets that Edie would inherit. And then it all began to drift. I imagined myself in Buffalo Bill’s circus. The whole caboodle: Edith wrapped in an unfamiliar coat, guarding a rifle as tall as she; Alice in the tulle of a high-wire acrobat, with Ted, Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and little Quentin as her assistants. And I was wearing a black wide-brimmed hat like the kind Custer favored. We had become the featured attraction of Cody’s cavalcade—the Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, sharpshooters, acrobats, and entertainers. Our likeness was on every handbill and appeared in painted colors on the canvas flaps of the master tent.
I’d abandoned politics and writing for the show business, in my phantasm. Edie didn’t complain. She took control of our salary. Little Eleanor had come with her overbite and gawky limbs, a kind of ragged Cinderella. She helped us change our costumes and was part of Alice’s performance, a minor acrobat. I didn’t have much of a tussle with Buffalo Bill. He had his act and we had ours. But whenever we appeared, folks stood up and yelled, “The Cowboy, the Cowboy—and his Clan.”
We were in a panorama of cowboys, and that still didn’t seem to count. Cody’s buckskin garb had become too familiar, like his silver beard and his waspish waist. He could have been cut from cardboard. But I was the gunfighter with stubby fingers and specs, and I had no ambition beyond that. I’d become the antithesis of everything Brave Heart had believed in. I didn’t rescue stray kittens at Cody’s Wild West, or provide lodging for newsboys. I was an entertainer now. I made my entrance on Little Texas, my cowpony, retrieved from Cuba and our barn at Sagamore Hill, with that white star on his forehead. I waved my black slouch hat.
“Ya-ha-haw!”
Then Alice did a somersault; diamond-shaped sequins had been sewn into her costume by little Eleanor, Alice’s tailoress; the diamonds shimmered in the tent’s darkening light. I went round and round with my Winchester, shooting bobbins out of the air—the bobbins exploded into little feathers of wood. Then Edith stood on a platform, wearing her fireman’s leather coat. I shot off the clasps, the pockets, the metal tips of her collar, until the coat looked like a relic from a rag shop. I’d grazed her arm, and a splotch of blood appeared in the leather like an inkblot. Poor Edie was mummified with bandages from all my misfires. But that’s what drew the crowds—the sense of danger that Cody himself couldn’t provide. Alice dangling on the high wire without a net while Quentin drummed below and Kermit tooted on his tin trumpet, Ethel danced like Salome in a tutu and Archie watched with his mouth agape.
Then the bleat of the train broke through the Wild West like a grim warning, and a reminder of where I was, and we arrived at Exchange Street, with its barnlike roof. There were folks outside my window, men and women with wonder—and fright—on their faces, as if they were looking into the blue eyes of immortality. The soldiers and the bodyguards assembled—a phalanx formed like the funnel that couldn’t seem to protect McKinley at the world’s fair. I stepped out of the carriage with that toothy Roosevelt grin.
People jostled against that funnel of soldiers. Bayonets were drawn. I didn’t want a riot in the middle of the station. “There could be blood,” the young captain whispered in my ear. But I didn’t see any anarchist angels with blond curls. I stepped into that roaring crowd of greeters—that was the Roosevelt way.
“Mr. President, Mr. President.”
Men and women were itching to touch my sleeve. Soldiers crept between us, shoving whoever they could. I had to keep a lad from falling. “Stop that!” I shouted.
Babies were thrust at me. I wanted to rock them in my arms, reassure a mother or two, but I didn’t dare in a field of bayonets that reminded me of monstrous porcupine quills. I could feel my freedom slip away with a sudden pull, like the silent shrug of a straitjacket. I didn’t require bayonets, not at all. Deep within my throat, I let out the Rough Rider rip.
YA-HA-HAWWW