THREE DAYS LATER I stepped off the train in Washington. My soles squeaked on the station’s marble floors when I walked across them, and I once again admired the acres of gold leaf and ranks of granite arches like victory gates. A man entering Washington through this portal was glorified and enlightened by the passage.
But one man, Ben Corbett, coming home after all these months, felt as lowly and insignificant as a cockroach scurrying along an outhouse floor.
My mind was a jumble, a clutter of worries. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had passed, and all the terrible things that might yet happen.
Meg had never answered my letters. I thought it likely that I would return to an empty house, shuttered and forlorn, my wife and children having gone off to live with her father in Rhode Island.
I could imagine the walls empty of pictures, white sheets covering the furniture, our modest lawn overgrown with foot-high grass and weeds.
These were my dark thoughts as I made my way through happy families on holiday, returning businessmen, flocks of government workers, Negro porters in red coats, and bellboys in blue caps.
“Mr. Corbett, sir,” a voice rang out down the platform. “Mr. Corbett! Mr. Corbett!”
I stopped, searching the oncoming faces for the source of the greeting—if indeed it was a greeting.
“Mr. Corbett. Right here. I’m so glad I found you.”
He was a young man, short and slight, with wire-rimmed glasses and an intensely nervous stare. I had seen him somewhere before.
“Mr. Corbett, I’m Jackson Hensen. The White House?”
“Ah, Mr. Hensen,” I said. “What a surprise to see you here.”
He smiled hesitantly, as if not quite sure whether I’d made a joke. “Will you come with me, sir?”
“I’m sorry?” I looked down at his hand cupped on my elbow.
“The president would like to see you immediately.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course,” I said. “And I would like to see him. But first I thought I would see my family.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Corbett. The president is at the White House right now. He’s waiting for you.”
So I followed Hensen outside to a splendid carriage drawn by the handsomest quartet of chestnuts I’d ever seen. All the way to the White House I kept thinking, Dear God, please see to it that Teddy Roosevelt isn’t the only person in Washington who wants to see me.