by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
“Faraday,” I said, “I’ve lived with this cat, nursed her through a bellyache and a fat fever, and it looks to me as if she’s dying right in this room.”
“It’s more than possible,” muttered the head zookeeper.
“And what can mend her?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Perhaps a different locale. We’re not Rough Riders.”
And then another surgeon intervened. He was the youngest of the lot, a recent graduate of Harvard’s veterinary college, who was considered the most brilliant animal doctor in the Bronx, I had been told by my brothers at Boone & Crockett. He had very thin nostrils and a high forehead. Unlike every other surgeon in the room, he did not fear me at all. He introduced himself as Dr. Lionel Trell.
“She’s a lovelorn cat, TR. I have seen other such attachments. And they are pernicious. They do not end well—it’s partly my fault. I thought we could retrain her.”
“Lionel has worked miracles with other cats,” Dr. Faraday said.
Trell mused a bit. “It was my own pride that failed me. There’s not another animal in the world quite like a regimental cat. No matter how well we treat her, how hard we juggle and groom—and I’ve tried—we will always be strangers to her.”
Trell let me have the zoo’s own ambulance and driver. I lifted Jo in my arms, and all that redness went out of her eyes, as I carried her to the ambulance. Her breathing was less labored. My cat seemed calmer, while I was near to lunacy. Nan rode with us.
“I mean to take her to Sagamore Hill.”
Nan could sense that wildness in me, that desperation. She rubbed Josephine’s muzzle. “Governor, Jo might not survive that trip.”
“I’ll have to risk it—I don’t have another plan.”
We rode all the way downtown, while I fed Josephine water out of a nursing bottle. I hired a barge. The captain recognized our regimental lion and wouldn’t take a nickel from me.
He had his foghorn bleat once—and every bit of barge and ferry traffic swerved out of our way, even the burial runs to Hart Island. I could see the little shops and stands on the Brooklyn shoreline, the half-sunk fishing schooners, and old, leathery fishermen on their little makeshift bridges.
I cradled Jo, listened to her heartbeat, trying to breathe to my cat’s irregular rhythms. I sang her a Dutch nursery rhyme that Brave Heart’s own father—Grandpa Cornelius, the family tycoon—had taught me.
Trippel trippel toonjes.
Kippen in de boontjes . . .
I couldn’t have told you what the words meant, not then, not now. But they soothed Josephine—she didn’t wheeze as much.
I could see all the shoppers on the Grand Street ferry, in their long stylish skirts and magnificent chapeaux that resembled an admiral’s tricorn with feathers and bows—that must have been high fashion in 1899, a seafarer’s hat and cape. I’d been like an ostrich at the Capitol, oblivious to fashion, high and low.
“Teddy, Teddy,” they shouted, their handkerchiefs in the wind.
It was Nan who nodded for me.
A fireboat came near us, with its cavalcade of water cannons—captain and crew were curious to see a big cat in my arms, one paw dangling around my neck.
“Governor, can we help?”
I could not hear Jo’s heart in that squall of water, and it was as if I had stopped breathing, too.
“Governor,” Nan whispered, “she’s gone.”
We sat there, two mourners in a splintered barge, minding a cat with claws that had come so sudden and haphazard into our lives, giving us such gaiety for a little while, with one paw still dangling around my neck.
THE TRUMPETER FROM TROOP l had traveled all the way from Illinois. Fifty other troopers arrived—sixty, I’d say, with several Buffalo Soldiers and my former body-servant, Bellows, who’d frolicked on the sands of Montauk with Jo. Our bunnies had prepared pieces of cake. We had cups of apple cider, fermented right on the farm. Several of my brothers from Boone & Crockett were also there. We buried Josephine near the rabbit hutch, since she loved to chase rabbits so. Edie kept nudging me, with a silk rag against her nose.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have hectored you. Josephine had a home on Eagle Street.”
“Darling,” I said, “we couldn’t keep her locked up in a mansion. She would have gnawed every bit of woodwork—she’s wild.”
“Mrs. Theodore,” Nan said, “she was a soldier who lost her place—like any other casualty of war.”
And then Buffalo Bill arrived out of the blue with his long white hair. I hadn’t invited the showman. He tipped his wide-brimmed hat to Edith.
“Forgive the intrusion, ma’am. I know it’s a private ceremony. But I couldn’t resist.” Bill didn’t berate me for not selling Josephine to him.
“TR,” he said, “she was an astonishing gal.”
“But you didn’t meet her once.”
“I heard about her from half a dozen people,” Cody said. “Colonel, I think we ought to dance. . . . Abel Martinson, do you have your mouth harp?”
I’d bought Abel’s freedom from Cody’s circus. He didn’t have to answer Buffalo Bill.
“I do, sir,” Abel said.
“Well, son, why don’t you play—”
“‘The Devil’s Dream’” I shouted. It’s was Father’s favorite ballad.
Forty days and forty nights
The Devil was a-dreaming
Around the bark, old Noah’s Ark
The rain it was a-streaming . . .
He’d learnt that ballad as a boy; perhaps it was his lone act of rebellion, a lad who was apprenticed to his father, old Cornelius, before he was eleven, brought into the Roosevelts’ shop of plate glass, and never really left. Papa would sing this ballad on our sleigh rides, sing it with a wicked pleasure.
Abel plucked out his dented silver mouth harp that he had picked up for pennies at a market square in San Antone and began to play Papa’s ballad, accenting the rhythm with one of his bootheels. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. Josephine had had her own infernal temper at times, just like Papa. And we all clutched hands and performed a jig around Josephine’s grave site, like cavaliers hopping near a fire at the end of a roundup.
I was startled to see Dr. Lionel Trell, the zoo’s master surgeon, at Josephine’s wake.
“Governor, I fear I let you down—badly. I’m supposed to be a scientist. Yet nothing in my arsenal could cure her.”
I touched his sleeve. I didn’t bear Dr. Lionel any ill will. “But you were right. She suffered the fate of a regimental lion—and my neglect.”
“Our neglect, sir.”
And he joined the cotillion of dancers. . . .
Cody held on to Nan, and whirled her about with all the swagger of the Wild West. She laughed for the first time since both of us had accompanied my cat, alive and dead, to Sagamore Hill.
Suddenly I couldn’t hold on to the beat of Abel’s mouth harp. I was lost for a moment. It was like that crowded hour on the climb up Kettle Hill, with the polka dots fluttering at the back of my head, a flag at half mast, and me without my specs—a man caught in the hugger-mugger, a colonel no less, leading a charge without any knowledge of where to go. And here was Sergeant Bellows again, Bellows, who had brought me out of that morass with another pair of my own specs.
“She was a sweetheart, Colonel. I’ll miss her sore.”
“So will I, Sergeant, so will I.”
Every damn day of my life.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER 15
THE COWBOY CANDIDATE
1900
EDITH AND I STAYED AT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY CASTLE in Philadelphia, the Hotel Walton, with its roof of caplets and copper domes, like dour witches’ hats. The Honorable Mark Hanna, lord and master of the convention, had done his own witchery, turning delegates toward his little tide of candidates. But Cabot broke through Hanna’s malignant design. Delegates went from floor to floor of the castle, dressed as wounded Minutemen with bandaged skulls while they carried drums and fife
s and shouted, “We want the Cowboy, Yah! Yah! Yah!”
That bedlam was hard to resist. And Cabot, with his white hair and hazel eyes, accompanied these delegates with a drum of his own, as one more wounded Minuteman prepared for battle; and battle it was, as they encountered some of Hanna’s clique in the hallway and attacked with fife and drum. There had never been so many torn collars and split lips at Republican Party headquarters. House detectives had to be called in; Hanna’s lads retreated to a lower floor. “Cabot’s as cracked as Ted,” their leader rasped. “Turned loony—overnight.”
He was my oldest ally in politics. I trusted Cabot’s instincts. Heir to a shipping fortune, he was a fellow Porcellian, who had supported my attack on the Indian Bureau when I was Civil Service Commissioner and had rallied Congress against rogue Indian agents. The two of us seemed woven out of the same sturdy cloth, without a single rip-line. Neither of us philandered—we adored our wives. Neither of us feared the tycoons and their influence. We were buccaneers of the Republican Party, at least I was, and Cabot was about to become one. He had a slow, deliberate majesty, and that’s why Hanna’s lackeys were bewildered. The Hamlet of Beacon Hill was Hotspur all of a sudden. They had never seen such truculence in Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was willing to take on the President and his Party chairman, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, at the Party’s own castle on Locust Street.
“Children, we have to separate him from Ted.”
Hanna had dubbed me a deputy sheriff with a saber who had charged up an obscure hill with a regiment of cowboy ruffians and basked in the glory of my own insane enterprise. I did not contradict him. He worshipped his “Major,” as McKinley was often called. The President had been a supply sergeant during most of the Civil War, and was promoted to major at war’s end. His wife was ill. Ida was subject to sudden seizures. And the Major was devoted to her. He did not abandon Ida to some closet in the White House. She sat next to him and crocheted in the midst of cabinet meetings. The Major was much too beholden to Republican bosses and entrepreneurs like his chubby counselor, Mark Hanna, the coal and iron baron who was many times a millionaire and had given up iron and coal to settle into a mansion across the road from the White House and become chair of this convention and the Republican National Committee. He was, he loved to say, the maker of kings. “But I have only one—the Major.”
I happened to bump into Mark Hanna on the sun deck at the Walton, a pudgy little man with a cherubic face that belied his perpetual sneer. He had tiny fists and tinier feet.
“TR, you could have stayed in Albany. No one asked you to be a delegate—we certainly didn’t.”
“Ah, but I’ve had a miserable season, fighting Republican barons like yourself. And I wanted to catch a bit of your magic tricks.”
“I have no tricks. I’m here to serve the President. And if you get in my way, TR, I’ll crush you. This isn’t Cuba, where you can dance with a sword.”
He was about to boil over, and boil over he did, with hot froth on his tongue. “Cabot was always reliable. But you have led him astray. He runs around with his little band of Minutemen, beleaguering delegates, bullying them. He’s become a Mugwump, like you, disloyal to his own Party.” Hanna dabbed at the spittle with one of his cuffs. “Cabot has betrayed our king!”
I grabbed the President’s little monkey by his silken lapels. “You are mistaken, Mr. Chairman. The Major is your king, not mine.”
I released him, and off he went, that pudgy little man, with a handful of lieutenants.
I WAS SUMMONED TO PLATT’S suite in the hotel’s highest tower. The Easy Boss lay abed with a broken rib. His complexion was as gray as ever. He’d caucused with his barons. And he delivered his edict with an air of finality. “Governor, you will accept the convention’s call.”
“What call? Cabot has his Minutemen whooping in the corridors. But Fat Marcus has the convention locked up. He considers me a maniac who might harm the country.”
Platt pursed his lips. “Fat Marcus happens to be correct.”
And there he lay in his infernal tower, with a pillow under his arse. “Then why did you summon me, sir?”
“Because,” he said.
“That’s not much of an answer, Senator Tom.”
He could not sit up correctly. The brace he wore hindered his movements. “You are a menace to the Republican cause. But you’re popular, far too popular. And you’ll help the ticket—as McKinley’s Vice President.”
I did not like his reasoning. “You could have found a much simpler way to get rid of me.”
“Governor, there is no simple way. If we hurl you out of Albany you’ll only come back at us with a hammer blow.”
“Senator Tom,” I said, “you can never seem to make up your mind. You tried to bury me once in Washington and now you want to bury me again.”
There was a twinge in his back, and he couldn’t speak without a sip of water. “Bury you? You insinuated yourself right into the war.”
“I volunteered.”
“Yes, you ran the Navy and then abandoned your own desk—to fight alongside a bunch of renegade cowboys. Well, you can campaign with them, as McKinley’s Cowboy Candidate.”
“Madness and all,” I muttered. “And you’ll counter Fat Marcus, I suppose—your usual war with a knife. You always went for the gullet.”
He smiled with his own murderous silk. “That won’t be necessary. Mark Hanna is more isolated than you think. . . . I’m leaving this afternoon. I can’t direct my soldiers from a bed.”
His tactics were always curious to me. “Then you won’t be at the convention for the big battle.”
He looked away from me. “Governor, the battle’s already won.”
And his sycophants led me to the door. He was counting on me to chase Jennings Bryan. Bryan had the barrel chest and the basso of an opera singer. He was much younger than the Major, and was still considered the best orator of his era—I considered him an eloquent jackanapes who benefited from the collapse of silver. “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,” he chanted to Democrats four years ago at their national convention, and bolted out of obscurity to become the youngest presidential candidate ever, at thirty-six. And he’d captured the Party again. “Cross of Gold,” was his battle cry. The Easy Boss understood that I alone could match Bryan’s vigor—with my much scratchier voice. I was the battler who could be buried at the same time.
THE EASY BOSS VANISHED from the hotel in a wheelchair. A private ambulance, owned by Pierpont Morgan, would carry him to Manhattan. But his presence clung to the Walton like a pungent perfume. . . .
I arrived at Exposition Hall with my wife on the final morning of the convention. The galleries were packed. Edith had her own pale beauty that couldn’t have gone unnoticed. She wore a black hat and a black skirt that heightened her fierce alabaster look, like a lady gaucho. “Darling,” she whispered, “don’t be swayed by these straw men. They don’t have your welfare at heart. They will use you and send you into exile.” And she climbed upstairs to the women’s gallery.
She shared a box with Cabot’s glorious wife. Nannie had purple eyes and the chiseled profile of a princess. She ruled Washington society, and Edith happened to be a member of her court, whenever she wasn’t in Albany or at Sagamore Hill. Both women would constantly conspire over some bewildering book. Cabot and I were helpless in their wake, since they were the royalty of our respective clans. How could a Republican convention compete with Nannie’s purple eyes?
There was a curious aroma in the great hall, like a whiff of cough medicine—perhaps it was the mingling of so much human flesh with all the banners and balloons. I was wearing a black slouch hat. While I went to join New York’s other delegates, there was a constant roar throughout the hall—“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy!” Cabot had met with delegation after delegation, my cunning Hamlet with his hazel eyes, whispering my name as McKinley’s Vice Presidential candidate.
“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy!”
I wondered if Buffalo Bill was hiding behin
d a stanchion somewhere with his silver chin beard. This arena didn’t have show Indians and Hebrew Cossacks, but it had much of the same hullabaloo—trick horses, jugglers, men on stilts, and cowgirls carrying signboards that featured my ferocious grin.
“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy!”
Mark Hanna was at the podium. He couldn’t curtail that roar and the constant stamping of feet. “Silence,” he said, brandishing his gavel like a war club.
Streamers floated down from the galleries. For a moment Hanna was lost in a blinding glare of paper. It seemed like a conjurer’s trick, as if the Easy Boss had arranged it all from his ambulance. But the convention itself was in a maddening haze. No one was really in charge, not the Major, who sat on his porch in Canton, Ohio, with his invalid of a wife, and not Mark Hanna, who couldn’t stop the streamers and the repeated roar.
“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy!”
I wasn’t blinded at all. I built a spyglass with my fingers and could catch the frozen pallor on Edith’s face in her gallery box. She was mourning our future. She could manage our finances from that stolid mansion on Eagle Street, near the State Capitol. She’d gotten used to the icy winters. But we would become paupers in Washington, paupers without a proper home. Alice had to have a governess to control her wildness and her whims—and it was costly.
“Theodore,” she had bemoaned, “we’ll have to beg in the streets.”
But it didn’t seem to matter now, amid all the maddening fury—the pricked balloons and the stamping of feet. And neither of us could escape the chanting.
“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy!”
Fat Marcus had given up. He stopped pounding with his gavel. He stood there on the podium like a petulant child. He’d lost his chance to pick McKinley’s running mate, to broker the convention. He was chairman, yes, chairman of cowgirls and balloons. The Major had given him no instructions. The Major had not expressed his will. “Silence,” Hanna squealed one last time. But no one listened, no one heeded his call.
