Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  * * *

  BY THE TIME THE Colonel was carried off the steamer at Manaus and bundled into a waiting ambulance, he had lost a quarter of his body weight.

  In the hospital, he ate sparsely, read nothing, never spoke above a whisper. He had ample leisure, however, to ponder the magnitude of his achievement. Over the course of two months, the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition had traveled more than one hundred eighty miles through the heart of the Brazilian wilderness. They had charted a river as long as the Ohio. They had put a lie to all existing maps. These were claims so bald, so exorbitant, the Colonel would later have to defend them before the National Geographic Society, but as he was carried onto the steamer to Pará, he could see no cloud on his horizon.

  “By God, Kermit … into the gazetteer we go.…”

  * * *

  FATHER AND SON PARTED on May 7. The Colonel was bound for New York, where he would be met by a cresting tide of well-wishers: newsboys, office workers, subway conductors, dockworkers, residents of every borough and station swarming around him, clamoring for a look, a word (some already whispering at his frailty, his shrunken body).

  Kermit, by contrast, would be leaving for Lisbon. He would travel alone. There would be no delegation to meet him.

  “Ah, well,” said the old man. “I hate good-byes, but no sense getting all womanish. I’ll see you in just a few weeks.”

  “Belle and I will look forward to it.”

  “Ha! Of all the countries for a Roosevelt to be married in. Spain! I hope they have no hard feelings about San Juan Hill.”

  “I’m sure they’re past it.”

  The old man met his eyes for a moment, then turned away a fraction.

  “I’m sorry Mother can’t make it. Some feminine ailment or other, I didn’t want to inquire too closely.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “But you know you can count on me, my boy.”

  “Of course.”

  They stood for some time on the gangway, watching the Colonel’s trunks pass in parade.

  “Kermit.”

  “Yes?”

  “You understand, of course—I mean, without you, we’d have…” He screwed his lips together. “I suppose I just wanted to thank you. For everything you did.”

  An hour later, the words were still reverberating in Kermit’s ear. Everything you did.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE SMOOTHEST Atlantic crossing he had ever known. Like skating across a pond, said all the first-class passengers. He dined every night at the captain’s table (going lightly on the wine). He played skat with a Rochester industrialist and his pinched, unhappy wife. He read Camões. Late at night he paced the upper decks, imagining that every step was bringing him closer to Belle.

  He reached Lisbon on the afternoon of May 20. He was offered accommodations at the YMCA, but he refused to stay another minute, and because none of the direct lines to Madrid were running, he caught a local train to Entroncamento. After a five-hour wait, he caught another to Cáceres. Evening melted into morning into afternoon. He slept ten or fifteen minutes at a time. He read as best he could—Lorca, Spanish phrase books—but his eyes stung from the dust and cigar smoke and the smell of raw milk.

  Late in the evening of May 21, his train pulled into the Atocha station in Madrid. The other passengers quickly dispersed, and he was left to wander with his porter through the wrought-iron plaza: an oddly tropical space dominated by gardens of towering ferns and palms. For a second or two, he thought he was back in the jungle. Then he stopped.

  By the departure board, next to a large woman in a black mantilla, stood a willowy figure—so tiny!—so poignantly American in her moiré coat and Billie Burke cap.

  Nearly two years had passed since last he’d seen her. It was natural, wasn’t it, perfectly natural, to take a moment? To reconcile the living face with the one he’d held in memory all this time? Only he couldn’t manage it, not at first. It was as if he had fallen in love with two women.

  “I have arrived,” he said. “As you see.”

  “But how brown you are!” she cried.

  He was glad he’d shaved.

  He could smell the powder on her face. He could see the feathering of rouge on her lips and ears.

  “Darling,” she said.

  With her gloved hands, she reached for him. They brushed lips, then drew apart. And as Belle looked him up and down, the blaze of her teeth subsided.

  “Are you all right, Kermit?”

  He was going to ask her the same question. For he was gazing right into the flawless china of her face—and a flaw had, against all odds, emerged. A tiny dark lesion in her brow, no greater in diameter than a mosquito bite. Within seconds, though, it began to deepen and metastasize, sweeping with bewildering speed across her forehead, down her face. He watched in helpless terror as the skin and tissue peeled away from her skull, leaving the barest of bones, snapping and flapping.

  “No,” he whispered.

  He buried his face in his hands, and as the destruction carried on out of view, he uttered a silent prayer. Take me. Don’t take her. Take me.

  Dimly, in the near distance, he could hear the tinkling of her voice.

  “Kermit … Kermit, look at me! Darling, look at me!”

  She had to pull his fingers from his face and pry open his lids before he would consent to look.

  And there she was! Just as she had been a minute earlier. Pristine, porcelain, intact.

  He fell into her arms, and in the middle of that cavernous train station, they held each other.

  “It’s all right,” she kept saying. “You just had a bad dream, darling. A bad dream, that’s all.”

  But her litany was already being drowned out by two declarative sentences, repeating themselves endlessly in his head.

  We didn’t kill it.… It’s still alive.…

  From deep inside came that unspeakably familiar chill, crawling out of his bones, coiling around every nerve and fiber, grasping at his heart.

  “Why, Kermit! You’re shivering.”

  27

  They were married in June.

  * * *

  THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE in a little chapel on the grounds of the English embassy and was followed by a formal breakfast and a Virginia reel, which the Colonel regretfully sat out. “Even an old bull moose needs to convalesce from time to time. Isn’t that so?”

  Kermit and Belle honeymooned in Toledo, but whenever they looked back on their time in Spain, every day had the aura of a honeymoon. They sat, holding hands, in El Greco’s garden. They went to church with the Infanta Beatriz. They ate with peasants; they lunched with the king and queen. They automobiled across the Sierra de Guadarrama. They attended teas, dress balls, a bullfight. They sniffed out the bookstores that time had forgot. They quizzed each other in Spanish inflections. They dozed, still holding hands, on stone benches.

  Every night, Kermit lay down beside the prettiest girl who had ever lived. Every morning, he awoke to her. If ever he had occasion to remember that troubling vision from the Madrid train station, he had only to recall its immediate aftermath: Belle, whole and unimpeached, folding him into her arms.

  How could he not rejoice in his great good fortune? Twice—twice!—he had been rescued from the Beast’s clutches. And what had saved him each time? Love. The love of a father, the love of a wife. As long as he held fast to them, what had he to fear?

  The future came rushing toward him. He and Belle, with the blessing of their families, moved to Buenos Aires. He became an assistant manager for National City Bank. It was a gentleman’s job, the kind that his brother Ted might have gravitated to, which may have explained why Kermit—even at the height of his blessings—grew so quickly to hate it, why every minute he spent in the company of functionaries and accountants became a canker on his soul, why he found himself at odd moments longing for the days of collapsing bridges in the Xingu Valley. Once, in an unguarded moment, he confessed as much to Belle.

  “Kermit.” She took h
is hands in hers. “That was young man’s work. You’re to be a father soon.”

  It was true. In short order, they had a boy. Another boy followed and then a girl and, later on, still another boy. Piece by piece, they were building the family he had always dreamed of, the life he had wanted. Who could want anything else? Yet he did, he passionately did.

  Salvation came in the form of war. A European war, to be sure—President Wilson would never rise to the Huns’ bait—but when had such a thing stopped a Roosevelt? The Colonel pulled some strings, and Kermit snagged a berth as staff officer to the British general in Mesopotamia. Within months, he had mastered Arabic. He rode through blinding heat across biblical landscapes in an armored LAM Rolls-Royce. Superiors marveled at his courage, which bordered on recklessness. Once, during the battle for Baghdad, Kermit kicked open the door of a house and found a heavily armed Turkish platoon on the other side—and himself with no revolver. In a stroke of improvisation, he pointed his swagger stick at the commander and secured total surrender. Well played! he could hear the old man saying. Well played, indeed!

  And when at last America entered the war, Kermit relinquished his British commission and joined the American Expeditionary Force in France. Ted was there, too. As were Archie and Quentin. All four of the Roosevelt boys, proudly positioned in harm’s way—exactly where the old man would have wished them.

  The only thing he wished more was to join them. But his health had never completely recovered from the Brazilian adventure, and when President Wilson turned down his request to organize a private regiment, the old man retreated to the sidelines with the least possible grace. He raged against the Germans, the Russians, the Wilson war cabinet. He raged against doves and mollycoddlers and thumbleriggers and puzzlewits and honeyfuglers.

  He raged against his own body. The malaria always came growling back; rheumatism flamed up in every joint; his heart failed him in ways he could no longer ignore. Even the simplest tasks were beyond him now, and in moments of pure prostration, when the delirium took hold, he would conjure up the ghosts from his past. Dead Alice, dead Elliott. And to their ranks he could now add dead Quentin—dear Quentin!—shot down in a field near Chamery.

  One afternoon, as his wife was plumping his pillows, the old man muttered another name. A name she’d never heard.

  “Thee-AW-go.”

  She lowered her face to his. “Who’s Thiago?”

  The old man fell silent, and his wife was about to leave the room when she heard him say: “We should have taken him … with us.…”

  Then, to his wife’s surprise, he added:

  “Tell Kermit he’s not to blame.… It wasn’t his fault.… Tell him that.”

  Years later, recounting the incident to her son, Edith would ask, “Do you have the foggiest notion what he was talking about?”

  “Not a clue,” said Kermit.

  * * *

  IN NOVEMBER, THE OLD man took to his bed for good.

  On January 6, 1919, a telegram came for Kermit in Coblenz, where he was stationed with the occupying forces. It was from Archie.

  THE OLD LION IS DEAD.

  Two sensations. First a peculiarly intense cold—unrelated to the weather—pouring straight from his marrow. Then the bottom dropping out of everything.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE TROUBLES with losing a famous father was that the world never stopped offering its condolences. Shoe shiners, barbers, nursemaids, shopkeepers, stevedores, ministers of every denomination—they never hesitated to stop Kermit in the street and tell him how sorry they were. The words rattled inside him like coins in a can. Indeed, the more distinguished the consoler, the more jarring the sound. Mayor Hylan was a trial; Governor Smith, an ordeal.

  Then there was Senator Lodge, who, just prior to addressing the Washington Naval Conference, put a hand on Kermit’s shoulder and said, “He knew how to live, your father. And he knew how to die.”

  It was just possible Kermit might have stammered a reply, but he couldn’t take his eyes away from the senator’s forehead, where a long serrated band of white skin was even now lifting to expose the raw tissue beneath. Before Kermit could intervene, another band of skin peeled off the senator’s aristocratic cheekbone. Then another and another—insult upon insult—until it seemed as if the senator’s entire head were dissolving, down to the last reddish-white hairs of his beard.

  It was the Madrid train station all over again. Like Belle, the senator never once grasped what was happening. On and on he talked, a perfect font of policy—obsolescent warships, disarmament, the restraining of Japanese capacity—and all Kermit could see were the bared bones of his jaw, flapping in the cavity of his head.

  “Are you quite all right?” the senator asked.

  Kermit closed his eyes, opened them again. In a trice, the senator’s face had reassembled itself. And yet the memory of what he had just seen hit Kermit with the force of a pathogen. His heart thrummed; his chest swelled.

  “Very sorry, Senator.… Feeling a bit…”

  He staggered outside, stood amidst the press of Constitution Avenue. The pounding of feet and the rumble of coupes and trolleys and milk wagons and the shrieks of children reverberated in his ear as the most dismal form of laughter.

  He was prepared to write off the whole episode as an isolated incident, but the same thing happened again a month later, and a week after that, and the day after that. There was no way of predicting it or preparing for it. At any moment he might be talking to a mechanic or the Romanian ambassador, remonstrating with the cook or the nanny or the secretary of defense, quizzing a Sherpa on the best route through the Vale of Kashmir, discussing linguistics with a professor of Aramaic. Whoever he was speaking to—young, old, male, female—would decompose in exactly the same way: strips of shredded flesh flying off in a great gale of decay, until the buried skull shone forth.

  And not a single one of them felt it happening! How extraordinary, how horrifying to see them talking—talking talking talking—as if nothing were taking place. All he could do after a while was wait for their faces to reassemble and then, with mumbled apologies, steal away.

  * * *

  ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF a stockbroker friend, he went to a doctor—an alienist (though they were calling themselves something else now). The midtown Manhattan lodgings, with their neo-Georgian exterior and wood accents, were not too removed in appearance from the Harvard Club, where Kermit had told his wife he was dining. The doctor himself was a Galician Jew with full cheeks and rather kindly eyes that retreated for safety behind wire-rim spectacles.

  “Tell me something of your history,” he said.

  “Surely we don’t need to go into all that. You know who my father was.”

  “Your father, yes.”

  Kermit waved his hand. “It’s the same thing. We’ve been in all the papers. We’re public domain, I tell you.”

  A smile peeped from under the doctor’s well-tended mustache. “The true components of human personality are rarely the stuff of newspapers or magazines.”

  “Perhaps that’s a good thing.”

  From somewhere in the adjoining room, a clock was coughing and rattling.

  “I see things,” said Kermit. “Certain things. If you must know.”

  After all these years, confessing was easier than he expected. He had only to imagine himself back in France, an artillery captain once more, getting drunk in some shell-cratered café with dirty marble tabletops and oak benches—bending the ears of any enlisted man in view. They would have to listen, wouldn’t they? Rank had its privileges.

  “Excellent, Mr. Roosevelt! I am decidedly intrigued! Now, then, I propose treating these ‘visions’ of yours as part of some larger tale—a mythos, if you like. Shall we begin the work of untangling?”

  So their sessions became, against all expectations, literary seminars—preceptorials on the subject of Kermit, with attention lavished on every act and utterance. Not even Dante, he thought, had received so thorough an exegesis. And
when he was moved at last to speak of the jungle—of Luz and Thiago and the Beast—the good doctor fairly shook with glee.

  “But this is fascinating!” he cried. “Do go on.”

  So they did: week after week, sifting through a great sandpit of clues. And the more they dug, the more Kermit felt himself floating free of the whole operation. One afternoon in October, he leaned forward in his leather armchair and said, “See here, Doctor. What if we were to stop thinking of all this as a story?”

  “How else are we to think of it?”

  Kermit stubbed out the end of his cigarette. “Suppose the things I see aren’t delusions at all. Or metaphors. Suppose they’re real.”

  “And if they are real, Mr. Roosevelt, what are we to conclude?”

  “We don’t have to conclude anything. We need only recognize them. Accept them.”

  “As what?”

  He was silent for a time. “If you must know, I used to think them a curse. Now they seem to me a kind of gift.”

  “Who has bestowed this gift upon you?”

  “The Beast,” he answered, surprised by the calmness in his voice. “Living there inside me, it’s able to … to show me how matters stand. I can see straight into the heart of things.”

  “And what do you see there?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing there, Doctor. Nothing. Nothing to pin a life on, anyway. Or a legacy. We’re all just…” He could feel the glitter of tears in his eyes. “We’re built over a pit, Doctor, and I’m one of those rare, rare, blessed mortals who knows it, who is permitted to see it, every minute of the day. That’s my gift, Doctor.”

  “If I were you, I should return this gift to the giver.”

  “There’s no returning it.”

  The doctor sat for a while, tapping a fountain pen against his wrist.

  “Let’s say, Mr. Roosevelt, that I comply with your wishes. Let’s say I believe everything that you tell me has actually happened. Men and women were devoured, yes, simply by your looking at them. Faces vanish before your eyes—on a weekly, sometimes a daily, basis. A beast, an actual beast, uses you as its vessel. Suppose I were to grant you all this. Would it free you?”