Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “Huhh … huhh…”

  The ground righted itself. The sky tumbled back into place. One by one, the jungle’s night sounds crept into hearing. Every creature celebrating its deliverance.

  And Kermit, too exhausted to celebrate, watched himself vanish down a long inky river.

  I’m to be … I’m to be married.…

  * * *

  HE SLEPT LIKE A dead man.

  7

  Once more sleep brought not dreams but memories. He found himself tumbling out of the tropics … out of the twentieth century … landing finally on an August afternoon in Sagamore. Here was his sister Ethel, transformed back into a girl, all pins and hems, breaking into his reverie.

  “Kermit! We’re playing hide-and-go-seek in the barn!”

  He was once again a boy—eyeing her like an old man. “Who else is playing?”

  “Just Ted and me. It’s silly to play without a third. You must come!”

  She knew enough to know this was the one game he would consent to play with them—because (and this she didn’t know) it was the one game that left him, for long intervals, as alone as he was the rest of the day.

  “It’s not the sardines kind of hide-and-seek?” (He had a disagreeable memory of being packed in a broom closet with four young relations, praying to be found.)

  “No,” said Ethel. “The regular kind.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  The reluctance was mostly a show, for in fact he had found the perfect hiding place. Not in the loft; that was too obvious. Nor in any of the tunnels the children had made in the hayricks—you could hide there for only so long before being found. In the course of his private explorations, Kermit had found beneath two loose floorboards a small earthen cavity, where, if a boy didn’t mind field mice for company, he might lie concealed for quite a while. Even better: If the day was sunny, he would have enough light streaming through the crevices to read, uninterrupted, for hours.

  Relishing that prospect, he strolled into the barn with a copy of The Prince and the Pauper. Ted began the count, and Kermit waited until his sister had ducked out of sight before easing himself into his burrow. He smiled as he heard Ethel scuttling … Ted thumping … the muffled shouts of discovery or near-discovery. A stray horsefly circled around his head. Kermit brushed it away, and as his hand settled back to earth, something answered his touch. A piece of paper, wedged like a forgotten playbill between two posts.

  Idly, he tugged the paper free, turned it over. It wasn’t a paper at all but a photograph. A picture of a man perhaps thirty or thirty-five years, wearing a top hat, a short-tailed black morning coat, and white peg-top trousers. A gentleman equestrian by the looks of him, but there was no horse in view and nothing in the picture that should have interested a ten-year-old boy. An hour later, though, he was still looking at it—or, rather, it was looking at him, revealing new congruencies. The mustache: Hadn’t he seen one like it somewhere else? The metal-rim spectacles: Yes, they were just like the ones Father used to wear. The face itself: This, too, like Father’s, only smoother and thinner, handsomer.

  Morning drifted into afternoon. Kermit clambered out of his hole, surprised to find the game long since abandoned and Ethel sitting crossly by the chicken coop.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  The photograph lay buttoned inside his shirt. He weighed the possibility of brandishing it like pirate booty, but he couldn’t imagine it interesting her—it was just a picture, after all—so he left it in place and removed it only that night when his nanny was taking him upstairs.

  “Mame,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  She was an old woman now, and it took her almost as long to stop climbing as to start. With a ragged wheeze, she snatched the photograph from him. Her mouth went ever so slightly slack, and he understood now that this was the response he had been hoping for all along; he was thrilled to have produced it. Mame was silent a good long while. Then, in a voice burred with fury, she said:

  “Well, there’s some as don’t want you to know, child, but that’s your uncle.”

  “I don’t have an uncle.”

  “And what do you know about it? You’ve got a cousin, don’t you? Your cousin Eleanor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s her father, so that makes him your uncle, Master Know-It-All.”

  Until this moment, Kermit had never considered the possibility of Eleanor having a father. Or a mother. He had assumed she’d come into the world exactly as she was now: tall, clumsy, unparented, a train of pity dragging after her.

  “Where is my uncle now?” he asked.

  “More questions. He’s gone to his reward, that’s where he is. There’s no help for him on this earth, which means you’re not to mention him to anybody, do you hear? Not your cousin, not anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself with that! You do as I ask.”

  “Father says I may speak to him anytime I want. About anything I like.”

  “No,” she snapped, leaning into him. “Least of all your father.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was his brother, child. Oh, sweet Jesus,” she hurried on, “you’ve made me say too much as it is. Listen, Kermit, you must promise me on this very spot never to speak of him again—to anybody, now.”

  “One more question, then.”

  “You’ll be the end of me. What?”

  “Tell me his name.”

  She looked at him. Then, in a voice of unusual softness, she said: “Elliott.”

  * * *

  ELLIOTT. A PLAIN NAME made extraordinary by the silence that shrouded it, by the fact that it could never be spoken. And how much more extraordinary that this great and forbidding and all-consuming mystery should be entrusted not to Ted, not to Ethel, not to little Archie—but to Kermit! He and he alone would be the one to solve it.

  Oh, but the trail was long, fogbound, twisting out of sight, and he had only two pieces of evidence: a name and a picture. It took him some time to grasp (in the manner of his beloved Holmes) that the very absence of clues was in itself a clue. For if Uncle Elliott’s memory had been banished so completely from Sagamore, then surely he had committed some great crime, something that had swept him from civilization’s embrace.

  If that were so, then there must be a record. Kermit began waking himself an hour early every morning to peruse his father’s newspapers and journals. (The Colonel was pleased at his son’s sophistication.) But though he forded through many thousands of column inches, he could find no trace of Elliott’s name.

  The larger world was no more forthcoming. If, by chance, a schoolmate of Kermit’s made a menacing allusion to Jack the Ripper or Lizzie Borden or John Wilkes Booth, Kermit might lean forward and, in a confidential whisper, say, “I suppose you’ve heard of my uncle Elliott,” and wait to see what answering chord it produced in his listeners’ brains. But their only reply was a crease of bafflement, which he then had to erase by pretending he’d been joking all along.

  One thing was growing clear: Elliott’s crime, whatever it had been, had not yet taken root in popular lore. Kermit would have to find its after-echoes in Elliott’s surviving relations.

  Was it any wonder that Cousin Eleanor became a creature of such fascination to him? During the infrequent times she came to stay at Sagamore, Kermit would study her with a clinical intent, as though at any moment some confession or affidavit might come flashing from her. So queerly did he peer that Eleanor, despite being his senior by five years, began quailing a little in his presence and did her best to avoid him.

  Clearly, he would find no help in that quarter—and wasn’t it possible, he considered, that Eleanor was just as ignorant as he was of her father’s infamy? She was only fifteen, after all, and young people were allowed to know so little in this world! Knowledge was the closely guarded treasure of adults, who would tell you things—important things—only if they thought you weren’t listening. The key, then, was to linger as lon
g as possible at the edges of their gatherings—their receptions and dinners and after-dinner smokes—to become a connoisseur of whispers, asides, blurts, and retractions. It would be exacting work, to be sure, but by staying patient and keeping his ears open, Kermit might begin to assemble a piecemeal biography.

  So he did, working over many months to dredge a whole life out of wistful croons (Poor Elliott … Such a charmer … What an end…) and dark mutters (Drank like a fish … Ladies not in his own rank…). There was one point on which all sides agreed: Elliott Roosevelt had been a golden child. Gallant, smart, generous, loyal, witty, polished. Loved by all who knew him. A fine shot, a fine dancer, equally at home in the wilderness and in the drawing room. More gifted by most accounts than his older brother, Theodore, but fatally lacking in Theodore’s focus and ambition, with the result that his talents tapered away into idleness, lark, mere recreation. He played polo (like a madman). He hunted tigers in Kashmir, elephants in Ceylon. He married a woman he dearly loved and then amused himself by chasing other women, many other women, the less suitable, the better.

  He drank. Wine and ale and milk punches and mint juleps and sherry and bitters. He drank whatever was in season or out. He drank to remember or else to forget what he had been.

  Oh, it was a sad tale, the saddest—and was there not something about this sadness that jibed with Kermit’s own nature? Melancholy had crawled into his pores while he was still in his bassinet and had dogged his steps ever since, had turned him into one of those odd children, palely loitering, shunning talk. “The boy with the white head and the black heart,” that’s what his own mother had called him, and he had accepted both judgments. He was, after all, the blondest of the Roosevelt children and the most darkened by his own thoughts. He would gladly spend hours in perfect silence, exploring the old stable or deploying his white guinea pigs in battle formations, but there were times, too—whole days, perhaps weeks—when even silence was a burden, when keeping himself free of others seemed like the greatest gift he could bestow on them. These were, predictably enough, the times in which his parents most despaired of him. One night he heard them in the library, talking in the strangled timbre he had come to recognize as his birthright.

  “God help me,” said the old man, “I don’t understand him. So damned moody—heavy in spirit. He reminds me of him, you know.”

  Kermit’s skin prickled with surprise. He was obviously the subject of that sentence, but who was the object?

  “You are not to suggest such a thing,” said his mother in an altogether different voice.

  “Oh, for the—it was an observation, Edith, not a prophesy.”

  “It is a terrifying observation. Kindly do not make it again.”

  Another mystery had risen up. Smaller in scope than the one that had consumed him all these months but linked to it in ways he grasped at once. Who else could they be speaking of but Elliott? Elliott: The One Who Could Never Be Named. The one who had come into the world, like Kermit, with a white head and a dark heart and had left behind … an example. The kind that made mothers tremble.

  By chance, Cousin Eleanor came to stay the very next weekend. To Kermit, she was no longer an object of clinical interest but a secret sharer. For the first time he could see that she was more like him than any of his siblings were: quiet, yes, almost comically solemn, averse to chatter, pained by group games. The experience of playing stagecoach with the Colonel so flummoxed her that she had to retire for an hour of solitude.

  Something else Kermit couldn’t help but notice: Eleanor was poor. Poorer, at any rate, than he was. Her handkerchief was gray with use, and her brown stockings were torn (Ethel tactfully offered new ones), and one of the bows had come off her kid-leather shoes. She came alone by train, without even a governess, in a carriage that had to be rented at the Oyster Bay station. The driver declined to help her with her bags, but the next day he showed up half an hour early to take her back. Peering through the front window, Kermit could see him reclining against the harness, smoking a cigarette. Hatless and indifferent, looking all in all so worldly that a seed of hope sprang up in Kermit. Leaving by the side door and taking the roundabout way by the windmill and the pet cemetery, he stole up behind the carriage and tugged lightly on the driver’s cloak.

  “Please…” Please, sir, he nearly said. “Do you know my cousin Eleanor very well?”

  “Well enough, I guess.”

  “Her family, too?”

  The driver looked at him. “I’ve heard tell of ’em.”

  “Can you tell me, then? What happened to her father?”

  One corner of the driver’s mouth rose with great deliberation. “Well, now. Who wants to know? And how does he plan to make it worth my while?”

  Kermit began to rummage through his pockets. “I could give you a dollar. And seventy-one cents. And a real, genuine Indian arrowhead. From Cooper’s Bluff.”

  “Arrowhead.” The man smiled. “A regular J. P. Morgan, ain’t you?”

  Kermit held out his treasure in both palms, but the man made no motion toward it.

  “I’d be glad to tell you,” he said, taking another drag of his cigarette. “All about your precious Mr. Elliott.”

  Here, at the pitch of discovery, Kermit flinched. None of the questions he had been hoarding would stand clear. The only thing that came from his mouth was:

  “He drank.…”

  “Oh, that he did,” agreed the driver. “Worse than any shanty mick, that’s what my dad told me.”

  “How did he die? Did he…”

  Did he drink the wrong thing? That was the only way Kermit could imagine a man drinking himself to death. Swallowing something bad without knowing it. Cyanide, strychnine.

  “He died no better ’n anyone else,” said the driver. “My brother used to see him—cripes, this was seven, eight years back—your precious Mr. Elliott; he was living up on West 102nd. Shacking up with some slut, under some made-up name or other. And his wife just barely in the grave. And his daughter…” Half grinning, the driver cocked a thumb toward the house. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

  Two things were dawning in Kermit’s brain. He disliked this man. And his dislike was actually feeding the man, drawing the words from his mouth.

  “Well, now, consider the sad case of your Mr. Elliott. All his fine friends have cut him. His money’s gone; his fine reputation, that’s gone. So what’s a gentleman like him to do? Why, he goes and jumps out a window, that’s what he does.” The driver stole a quick glance at the house. “Even then he couldn’t finish the job. Held on for a few more days before he kicked it. And what did he leave behind? An ugly daughter and a bastard son. Not a dime to his name. It never fails to amaze me, the doings of the civilized class.”

  With a light flick, the driver tossed his cigarette butt into the air. It described a high arc and landed just short of Kermit’s foot. The boy was about to draw his boot away when the driver grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him off the ground, drew him so close that Kermit’s eyes leaked from the tobacco fumes.

  “Go ahead,” the man snarled. “Tell ’em I told you. Then watch your throat, will you? I got friends everywhere.”

  The man set him on the ground, and Kermit backed away from the carriage. From behind, he heard the front door slam. Out came Eleanor, her crooked, almost elderly figure shuffling toward the carriage.

  “Good-bye,” she murmured.

  Kermit opened his mouth. To warn her, he thought, but the driver’s threat still rang in his ears. Even with a loosed tongue, what would he have said that she hadn’t already been told?

  He wandered in slow circles around the tennis court. Then, feigning illness, he took himself straight to bed and lay there for the rest of the afternoon, feeling the shadows lengthen across his counterpane. He was beginning to grasp why Uncle Elliott’s memory had been banished. It wasn’t because of how he’d lived his days but because of how he’d ended them. To a man like the Colonel, who worshipped so ardently at life’s a
ltar, this must have been the worst betrayal of all: to toss such a gift right back in the Maker’s face.

  Kermit closed his eyes; his lips traced a silent vow. He would not be Elliott. He would not be the man who jumped out the window. He would not be the photograph in the drawer, the shadowy figure of whom no one spoke. His life would be long, prosperous, crowned with love and success. This I swear.

  * * *

  IN FEBRUARY OF HIS fourteenth year, Kermit went alone to Laurel Hollow to hunt for squirrels. The snow lay hard and crusty on the ground, and his breath seemed to freeze and crumble the moment it left his lips. The woods were soundless.

  He came at length to the lip of a culvert, through which flowed a small stream, sluggish with ice. A crow started out of a hemlock tree, and Kermit spun toward the sound, then spun back. On the other side of the stream, a man stood watching.

  After a few seconds, Kermit realized he was pointing his 12-bore pinfire gun directly at the stranger. Embarrassed, he dropped it to his side, put out a hand in apology. The man put out his hand, too. A different sort of motion: a wave or greeting.

  Do I know you? Kermit wanted to ask. But of course he knew him: the mustache and metal-rim spectacles; the top hat and morning coat and old-fashioned trousers. An absurd costume for hunting, but, then, the man had no gun and no clear reason to be there other than to say hello.

  He didn’t look anything like a dead man should look. Truth be told, he looked in the pink, and Kermit felt no dread at recognizing him. It was more like spotting an old friend in a railway station: the surprise melting into anticipation. Only this wasn’t an old friend. And as the implications sank down, a cold rot seemed to rise up in reply.

  At last, Elliott gave a courtly nod and a tip of his hat, then turned and walked back up the opposing hill, pausing at the crest before vanishing.

  A few months later, Kermit was in the Groton library, half-dozing over his Latin declensions, when he looked up to find his uncle in the chair directly opposite. The same agreeable expression on his face—and, more, an air of politely restrained expectation, as if he were waiting for Kermit to do or say something. Once again, though, the words caught in the boy’s throat. He could only stare back and wait for Elliott to doff his hat, rise from his chair, and walk away.