The Lunatic Fringe: A Novel Wherein Theodore Roosevelt Meets the Pink Angel

by William L. DeAndrea

  When she pushed the door open, the landlady immediately uttered a short, choking scream; Muldoon could only gasp. It seemed to him like total madness.

  On this hot August night, Mr. Harvey was sitting, Indian-style, before a bright fire that burned on the hearth. Seemingly mindless of the flames and the way they scorched his hands, he was trying to pull something from the fire. He was crying; in between sobs, he spoke.

  “Why couldn’t you have at least left me that? Why couldn’t you stay? My love, if you had to go, why couldn’t you have left me that to remember you by? Why?”

  He buried his face in his blackened hands. Mrs. Sturdevant went to see to him. Muldoon was stupefied; he leaned against the door frame. He jumped at the sound of a voice.

  “Hah!” said Mr. Roosevelt. “I expected as much!”

  Muldoon looked at him.

  “Don’t just stand there, Officer,” Roosevelt told him. “Help me get this poor man to a hospital.”

  IX.

  The small figure in the houndstooth jacket was apprehensive as she looked behind the portrait of George Washington on the papered wall of the Devereaux Hotel. She prayed that the extra key would be there. She trembled with relief when she found it.

  She opened the door across from the portrait and entered. As she closed it behind her, she said, “Thank heaven!” It was relief to be able to talk. She’d been afraid to say a word since she left the old man’s room. She’d been afraid to come straight here—she’d walked the streets for hours. She smiled at the irony. She’d never been one who’d had to walk the streets.

  That cab would come by just as she’d decided it was safe to leave. And the passenger would have to be the only man who had seen her and could recognize her. Along with some barrel-chested figure, but she didn’t think he mattered.

  She had to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d walked downtown as far as Sixth Street, then walked up Broadway to Tenth, where she joined the bread line at Fleishmann’s Vienna Bakery. For some reason, they’d started their famous charity a little earlier than midnight—she’d even received her one-third loaf of bread along with the rest of the homeless and destitute.

  But she was home now. The suite was hers, at least until September first—the rent had been paid till then. She had no idea what would happen after that. At the moment she didn’t care. She tore off Mr. Harvey’s hat, and shook free her long, black hair. She called for her maid, but got no reply.

  “Vangie, you lazy thing, wake up!” she called, with the same result.

  She went to the maid’s quarters, her anger growing. Vangie wasn’t there, but there was a note pinned to the pillow. There was trouble, apparently, in Coontown, up in the Seventies around Tenth Avenue, among members of Vangie’s enormous and complicated family, that only Vangie could straighten out.

  The woman sighed, and went to draw her own bath. While the water ran, she went to the boudoir to undress, as she always did, in front of the tall French mirror. Her feet slipped easily out of the too-large men’s shoes. She shed that impossibly loud jacket and the soiled, collarless shirt. She leaned close to the mirror, giving her neck, her shoulders, her more intimate parts a close but businesslike examination. No permanent harm done, she decided. Even now, the red marks from the ropes were fading.

  She yawned, then unbuttoned the trousers. They fell to the floor with a heavy thud. She jumped; she’d become used to the weight of it and forgotten it was there. She bent, removed the officer’s revolver from the pocket, then kicked the pants away with a flick of a shapely limb. She put the gun in a vanity drawer, then covered her nakedness with a frilly white robe.

  She went to her bath, and settled slowly into the tub. The warm water felt good. She rubbed herself lazily with the sponge, then touched the strange birthmark on her thigh. How fascinating the young policeman had found it.

  Men had always found it fascinating. Why should the policeman be any different?

  And yet, different he was. So shy, and still so gallant, like a character out of Dumas. She’d used him badly. But then, that was the nature of things. Men used women; an intelligent woman could only use them right back.

  But she felt strangely guilty all the same. He seemed nice. She hoped a new gun wouldn’t be expensive for him to buy. She smiled. If they ever should meet again, she would make it up to him.

  She smiled again, leaned back, and closed her eyes, musing about the handsome officer. Why, she’d make him forget she’d ever taken the gun.

  The door to the bathroom opened, and the draft of cold air it let in startled her. A man, formally attired, stood in the doorway.

  Despite his dress, there was something about the way he held his lanky body that said he was no gentleman. And the way he pointed the policeman’s gun at her said the same.

  “I believe I’ve let you soak long enough, Miss Cleo. Come with me, now.”

  Cleo looked at the man’s face—it terrified her. The features were perfect, taken one by one, but the woman had the fancy that each had been intended for a different face. The whole impression of strangeness was reinforced by his ears. They were almost perfectly round, and they had no wrinkles in them.

  “How do you know my name?” Cleo demanded.

  “The fact that I know it is enough for now. Are you coming, or do I have to—”

  The man’s words seemed to be swallowed up in anger. He stepped rapidly toward the tub. Cleo wanted to scream, but before she could the man’s big hand forced her head below the surface of the water.

  SUNDAY

  the twenty-third of August, 1896

  I.

  HIS SISTER WOKE HIM by pinching his nose. One of Dennis Muldoon’s earliest memories was his resentment of Katie’s waking him that way. Restless sleep had gummed Muldoon’s right eye closed, but with an effort, he managed to pry the left one open. He closed it again immediately. The morning sun came slantwise through the parlor window of the Muldoons’ Sixteenth Street tenement, bathing the cot where Dennis slept with a warm yellow light. It gave him a slightly nauseous sensation of being covered in melted butter.

  Muldoon pulled the pillow over his face and counted chimes. “Lord save us, Katie,” he said when they finished. “It’s only seven o’clock.”

  “Those bells are from the Italian church on Twelfth, as you are well aware, brother darlin’.”

  “Katie, think what you like about Italians, but they do know how to tell the time.” He groaned again. “And I hate to be tellin’ you what time I come in last night.”

  She knew what time he’d come in last night. She’d been worrying about him, though of course it wouldn’t do to say so. Dennis was the Muldoon, now, the man of the house, and a good man he was, at that. All the same, he was her little brother, and all her life she’d been used to minding him and wiping his nose for him, and it was a hard habit to break.

  Kathleen Theresa Marie Muldoon had a sure sense of family responsibility, and it was all the more important to her because she realized this was all the family she was ever likely to have.

  She pinched her brother’s nose again. “I’ll be havin’ no more excuses from you,” she said. “We’re goin’ to the eight o’clock mass at Saint Mary’s, so you’d best be bustlin’.”

  Muldoon sighed. “You know, Katie, I’m sure Ma is lookin’ down from Heaven and smilin’. I’ll wager she made you promise before she passed on you’d follow in her footsteps and never let me get a minute’s rest.”

  “Up with you!” Katie said, in her I-shall-brook-no-nonsense tone. “Brigid and Maureen are up already, and they’ll be wantin’ to come through the parlor on the way to the privy. It won’t do for you to be lyin’ here like one of them other Saturday Night Irishmen we left behind in Mackerelville.”

  Mackerelville started at Fourteenth Street and ran southward, so the Muldoons had left it all of two blocks behind them, on Avenue C. Dennis told his sister he resented the word “other,” but she ignored him.

  “Besides, they’ll be wantin’ to use
the big lookin’ glass—I told them they could wear the pretty bonnets you bought for them Eastertime.”

  “And will you be wearin’ yours?”

  Katie sniffed. “I’m too old by several years to be wearin’ frills the likes of that. I’ve told you more than once buyin’ me that bonnet was a foolish extravagance.”

  “Sure, you’ve one foot and three toes of the other in the grave. Listen, Katie me darlin’, this isn’t Ireland, where a girl who isn’t three times a mother by the age of twenty just ain’t tryin’. You’re a handsome woman, and a good one, but you’re givin’ up too much of yourself to the family. What are you, all of thirty-one, for cryin’ out—”

  “I’ll not hear another word of it!” Katie snapped. Muldoon shook his head and shut up.

  “Will you be takin’ Holy Communion today?” Katie asked.

  Muldoon examined his conscience. Between holding naked women in his arms, finding dead bodies, and being thought daft by all and sundry, he was sure he must have sinned in thought and word, if not in deed.

  “No,” he said,” I don’t expect I will be.”

  “You’ll be wantin’ your breakfast then,” said his sister, and went off to fix it.

  She grumbled as she stirred the porridge. Dennis was always going on about her staying home all the time, and never seeing anybody whose name wasn’t Muldoon. But that was her place, wasn’t it? It was where she wanted to be, making a home for the family.

  But how long would the family stay together? Katie tried angrily to put the thought by in the instant it came to her, but it stayed in her mind and insisted on an answer.

  One of these days, one of Dennis’s women would reel him in, and neither of the girls was destined to stay single long. Brigid was seventeen, Maureen fifteen, both small and dimpled and dark haired the way Ma had been, not big and fair and loud like Da and Dennis and herself.

  It might be happening already. Just last week, Dennis had had a talk with Brigid’s beau in the parlor with the door closed. Just a matter of time. And when the rest of the family were all out on their own, what would become of Katie?

  Some steam came off the porridge and clouded Katie’s eyes. She wiped her face on her apron, and called her brother in to breakfast.

  After mass, Muldoon brought the family home, announcing he had to go to the precinct for a little while. Maureen protested. She was a budding young woman now, but she still showed displeasure with a baby’s pout. “You promised you’d help me with my reading,” she said. Of all the Muldoons, Maureen alone had lost her brogue.

  “I’ll be comin’ back in no time,” he promised. “Besides, can’t Brigid be helpin’ you? I’m not the only one in this family with an education, am I?”

  “I’m goin’ to be workin’ this afternoon, Dennis.” Brigid Muldoon had a beautiful, sweet voice, which she used all the time except when she was at work, where they made her speak in a terrible whine.

  “I thought,” her brother said, “I’d made it clear I don’t like for you to be workin’ Sundays. Mr. Alexander Graham Bell may be a heathen Scotchman, but you ain’t.”

  “I’m doin’ a favor for a girl,” Brigid said. She didn’t tell him she wanted to go to work to have a chance to see her fellow, a cracker-jack telephone maintenance man, but he suspected it all the same.

  “Well, all right today, but don’t go makin’ a habit of it.” He turned to his youngest sister. “I’ll help you as soon as I get home, Little One. What is it you’re readin’?”

  “Shakespeare,” said Maureen. She was always reading one play or another, but she had some trouble with the hard words.

  “Ah, Shakespeare,” Muldoon echoed. “A genius. An immortal. I go so far as to say there aren’t ten men in New York the equal of Shakespeare. What’s the play?”

  “Macbeth?

  Muldoon smiled. “Another heathen Scotchman, eh? Well, we’ll deal with him. I’ve just a trivial bit of straightenin’ up to do at the police station first.”

  II.

  At the precinct, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt was conversing with Captain Herkimer.

  “I—ah—I wasn’t aware you had taken an interest in this case, Mr. Roosevelt,” the captain said. Herkimer twisted a finger in his beard. He was trying to figure the Commissioner’s angle in this. He didn’t like Roosevelt; Roosevelt didn’t like him. Still, one drunken patrolman wasn’t enough to get the President of the Police Board to come to the precinct Sunday morning. Herkimer would play it cautiously—the promotion hearings were coming up.

  “I take an interest in anything that concerns the Department,” Roosevelt replied. He glared at the captain for even daring to ask the question.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that, sir—”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. Now, let’s make certain we have understood each other. What are your plans concerning this Muldoon. You plan to suspend him from duty?”

  “To have him dismissed, sir.”

  Roosevelt cleared his throat and hissed.

  “Is anything the matter, Mr. Roosevelt?” the captain asked. “Can I get you some water?”

  “No, Herkimer, blast it, everything is fine. To avoid delay, I will make the order dismissing Muldoon now, if you wish.”

  “I’d be grateful if you would, sir,” Herkimer said. Damnation, he thought, what is Roosevelt’s game?

  The Commissioner looked up from his writing and asked if he might have another piece of paper and an envelope. He wrote for a few more seconds, then folded the paper in half, covering the writing.

  “Would you be so kind as to witness my signature, Captain?” He signed, and Herkimer signed as witness. Then Roosevelt sealed the document in the envelope and put it in his breast pocket.

  Just then, the sergeant poked his head into Herkimer’s office. “Officer Muldoon to see you, Captain.”

  “Wait a moment,” said the Commissioner. “Now, Herkimer, I must leave. I’ll use the other door. The sight of the man—well, I would find it unsettling. Now, you know the sort of story he can tell, so don’t listen to him. Is that understood?”

  Captain Herkimer said it was, and the Commissioner took his leave. Muldoon was allowed to enter the captain’s office.

  III.

  Cleo awoke with a roaring in her ears. She was still underwater, still drowning. She sobbed, and came to her senses when she heard herself. She couldn’t have sobbed underwater.

  She opened her eyes to see the sunlight streaming through a small window high up on the wall. She was in a bed, a perfectly comfortable bed, in a small but well appointed room. There were curtains on the windows. There was a wooden door. She ran to the door and tried it. As she somehow knew it would be, it was locked. She was imprisoned again, and she didn’t like it.

  She was naked again, but at the foot of the bed she could see her very own calfskin grip. At any rate, her captors were getting more considerate.

  She had a terrible headache. That seemed, to be sure, a natural result of being nearly drowned, but how had she not been drowned? She had been brought here (wherever that was) unconscious, but not, she was sure, from being underwater. Who could tell how long one person or another could withstand being immersed? If he’d kept her under somehow while he’d packed her grip, she would certainly have died.

  The sunlight was very strong, and Cleo wasn’t about to let it mar the pink clarity of her skin. Carefully, she dressed herself (the man who’d nearly drowned her had brought a hat as well) before she looked out the window.

  She was, she observed, in a gabled room of a huge four- or five-story house in the country. No, in the suburbs, rather, because over the trees, she could see the roofs of similar buildings not far away.

  Then, looking south along the house, she saw the corner of a massive stone structure. And as soon as she did, she knew where she was. That was the Croton Reservoir, the source of the city’s drinking water, the one they were going to tear down soon to build the new public library. So the house and its land were on Forty-second Street, between Fifth and Sixth
avenues.

  If it had been possible for Cleo’s face to show ugliness, it would have been ugly now, contorted as it was by anger and hatred. She knew who lived here, and she would stand for no more nonsense.

  She became aware again of the roaring that had awakened her. It was getting louder. Down below, she saw a strange vehicle rolling up the private drive toward the rear of the house. It was a horseless carriage, or, what was that other word? An auto mobile. She knew he owned one, but catch him giving her a ride in it, no matter how much she begged.

  As the auto mobile drew closer to the house, Cleo could see the two men in it, both wearing dustcoats, caps, and goggles. She had no idea who the gaunt gentleman with the white beard was, but she recognized the dapper figure gripping the tiller. She knew the cap covered a bald spot, and that his money belt never contained less than three thousand dollars. His name was T. Avery Hand, the financier all the newspapers called “The Boy Whiz of Wall Street” or “Lone Hand.” He was the man who paid the rent on Cleo’s suite at the Devereaux; the man who had bought the calfskin grip and everything Cleo might ever put in it. And he was also the man who six weeks ago had sold her into the perverted slavery of the late Mr. Evan Crandall.

  All her young life, Cleo had lived by her wits as well as by her beauty, but those wits deserted her now. Leaning dangerously out the gable window, she shook her fists at the men below, screaming threats and imprecations with such passion they could scarcely be understood.

  She screamed so loudly, she never heard the lock. She never heard the footsteps behind her, until she was pulled from the window. The tall man in formal attire stifled her screams with the same hand that had held her underwater just hours ago.

  IV.

  T. Avery Hand brought the auto mobile to a stop at the rear entrance of his home. “Here we are, Reverend,” he said. “I’ll have Baxter put it in the carriage house later.”

  Soft spoken and small boned, T. Avery Hand was often mistaken for a minor clerk among his own board of directors. He’d never intended to be one of the ‘ruthless financial manipulators of the Nation’s economy,’ and didn’t especially enjoy being one. It was just the way Fate had decided to deal with him. Fifteen years ago, when he was quite a young man, he was thinking about steam engines, when he happened upon an idea for a valve that could cut the cost of running a locomotive by some 30 percent. With the price the coal industry was obliged to pay him to suppress his invention, he was able to lay the foundation of what was now a truly impressive fortune.