As he stood under a broken showerhead in a dry corner of the room, a large middle-aged man with frost-blue eyes and a dirty mop of salt-and-pepper hair skulked up to Henry. “You waiting for a shower, son?” The man smiled kindly.
“I like it when the water gets cold,” Henry smiled back. “It’s invigoratin’”
The man fixed his gaze on Henry’s face. His eyes stayed wide and never appeared to blink. “You need hot water to get really clean,” the man said, showing great concern about Henry’s hygiene.
“Maybe, but like I sez, it’s freezin’ water that gets my blood flowin’.”
“But you need to be clean.”
“Hey, thanks for your two cents, mister, but I’ll wait a few minutes.”
The large man smiled paternally, and then hissed, “No son, you need to be cleaned now.” He grabbed Henry’s thin arm and jerked him toward the water. Henry squirmed to get away. “Lots of soap, we’ll need lots of soap for you,” the man shouted, dragging Henry into the thick steamy mist.
“Pervert!” Henry yelled, though the rush of water drowned his voice out. The man smashed a vicious backhand across Henry’s face. A soft groan rose from Henry, his eyes floated upwards in his head. The man began eagerly rubbing a soap bar over Henry’s body.
“Stop,” Henry cried, but the man had no intention of stopping.
“Doesn’t it feel good to be clean?” the man said, scrubbing Henry under his arms. Henry tried to curl himself up, like an insect rolling into a ball when he knows he can be crushed in an instant. The man pressed forward. Henry could feel him becoming aroused. He began rubbing his hands over Henry’s thighs. “No,” yelled Henry.
“Yes,” the man insisted, moving his hands up between Henry’s legs.
“Let me wash you,” Henry shouted, squirming under the man’s insistent hands. “I can wash you really good!” Henry twisted his body and turned his head until he stared into the man’s eyes. They were deranged, wild blue circles of insanity filled with pure lust. “Com’on now mister, I can make you feel really good.” The man grunted, pushing himself into Henry. Henry took the soap from the man’s hand. He rubbed the rough bar down the man’s sides then slid it in a circle around his belly.
“Feels nice, don’t it?” Henry said. The man arched his head back and moaned with pleasure. In that instant Henry lashed his arm upwards and plunged the soap into the man’s mouth. The man’s eyes bugged out. He roared, throwing Henry against the shower wall. Henry’s chest collapsed from the force of the blow on the hard tiles. The man pressed forward, crushing himself into the boy’s small frame. He rammed his forehead into Henry’s chest. Henry wheezed and struggled to catch a breath. The man whipped his head back, readying himself for another assault when Henry shot both hands up and, using a move he learned brawling on the streets, clawed his fingers into the man’s eyes. A bloodcurdling scream erupted from deep inside the man and he collapsed to the floor. Henry threw himself onto the man and grabbed his throat. He was like a wild animal banging the man’s head against the wet tile floor.
Hearing the man’s agonized screams, guards came running through the steam. They saw angelic looking Henry atop the whimpering man whose skull was now red with blood. The guards tried to pry Henry off, which was near impossible – the boy’s grip was like an iron trap around the man’s throat. They finally grabbed Henry’s arms and twisted them behind his back. “The goddam pervert attacked me,” Henry shouted. “I expect to take a shower and not be attacked. Now let go of my arms!” The authority with which Henry spoke took the guards by surprise. They did what he ordered.
“Thanks, guys, and I wanna make sure this don’t happen again, okay?” Henry smiled his sweet, gap-tooth grin then kneeled besides the groaning man and whispered, “Don’t every fuck with me again, cuz the next time I don’t let go of your goddamn neck ‘til you stop breathin’.” Henry rose to his feet and marched out of the showers with the other prisoners looking on in amazement.
CHAPTER 36
Theodore Roosevelt spent the summer of 1911 denying he would be a candidate for President of the United States, all the while receiving a string of visitors at Sagamore Hill who were disillusioned with Taft. While Roosevelt still considered himself a loyal Republican, his political views had shifted dramatically in the two years he had been out of office. He began championing such causes as child labor laws, anti-lynching laws, environmental protections, women’s suffrage and workplace reform. In one speech he declared, “If on this continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing.” Roosevelt was growing increasingly progressive, even radical in his beliefs.
In August of 1911, Roosevelt appeared before the Stanley Committee. He was in top fighting form, declaring that Morgan did not dupe him in approving the TC&I deal. He proclaimed to the committee, “I would have been a timid and unworthy public servant if in that extraordinary crisis I had not acted as I did. But I fully understood and expected when there was no longer danger, when the fear had been forgotten, attack would be made upon me.”
After his Congressional testimony, the affair seemed behind Roosevelt. Then a bombshell hit. Taft’s Attorney General filed suit against Morgan’s U.S. Steel for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in the matter of the TC&I merger. A headline in the New York Times read, “Roosevelt Was Deceived.” The ex-President saw the government’s legal action as a complete betrayal. “Taft was a member of the cabinet,” Roosevelt fumed to a friend. “We went over the whole transaction afterwards in the cabinet and Mr. Taft was emphatic in his commendation.”
Roosevelt answered the attacks on him with a fierce eight-page defense of his actions in a New York weekly journal called The Outlook. His article talked of the need for corporate regulation, but it also cited the benefits of a principled business sector: “It would be mischievous and undesirable to try and break up all combinations merely because they are large and successful and to put the business of the country back into the middle of the eighteenth century….”
Roosevelt’s article turned the political world topsy-turvy. The supposed friend of business, Taft, was trustbusting while the great trustbuster, Roosevelt, was talking like a friend. Influential members of Wall Street began finding their way to Sagamore Hill to exchange ideas with the ex-President. This gave rise to more speculation about a new run for the Presidency.
If Taft was worried about a Roosevelt comeback before, he now became obsessed with it.
* * *
After attending the festivities celebrating the launching of the Titanic’s hull, J. Pierpont Morgan embarked on an art buying spree. One of his sojourns brought him to an English estate called Knole, whose mistress was a beautiful forty-nine year old named Lady Sackville. The Lady was selling several medieval tapestries to solve her tax problems. The old rugs did not dazzle Morgan. However, Lady Sackville’s charm did. Morgan ended up buying $325,000 worth of art, most of it sight unseen. This display of robust spending duly impressed the Lady Sackville and the two fell into a romance.
Being in love lifted Morgan’s spirit, though his problems on the home front continued to dog him. When Taft’s Attorney General filed suit against U.S. Steel, Morgan felt betrayed and was furious. He believed that after their last White House meeting, Taft had given him assurances the government would not interfere with business unless the offense was egregious. To add to Morgan’s concerns, labor unrest was growing at U.S. Steel. There was bitter resentment over the arrest of John J. McNamara for the bombing of the L.A. Times. Across the country, unions and labor leaders were blaming U.S. Steel and Morgan for orchestrating trumped up murder charges against McNamara in order to crush the workers movement.
Morgan felt squeezed on both ends, by labor and the government. He reacted as he always did: aggressively. His solution was to gain and wield more power than his adversaries. With that in mind, he sent a cable to George Vanderbilt in late summer. It simply read: REGARDING YOURS AND ASTOR’S PROJECT STOP LET US
PROCEED STOP BACK IN THE U.S. IN NOVEMBER STOP J. PIERPONT MORGAN.
* * *
Upon receiving the telegram, Vanderbilt hurried to New York. He arrived to find Astor completely panicked, in a tizzy about Madeleine. She had been overcome with “nervous exhaustion” and was bedridden at her father’s house. Since the announcement of their engagement, the press hounded Madeleine for a story or picture. It became a circus – everywhere she went reporters and photographers followed. When a photographer descended upon her and her elderly father at a jewelry store, the old man began swinging his cane to chase the photographer away. Madeleine collapsed. She was rushed to a doctor who prescribed bed rest.
“What if she should die?” Astor said to Vanderbilt in the tearoom of his mansion. “What would I do?”
Vanderbilt thought that if she died Astor would finally focus on business. “She’s going to be fine, Jack. Maybe you need to take your mind away from all this for a while.”
“I just can’t. I have to do something. I can’t sit around. I’m a man of action, you know.”
“Good. Let’s swing into action. Morgan wants to meet with us when he gets back from Europe. Everything needs to be set so we can get his funding and start to build.”
“Oh course,” Astor said absently, then looked at his watch. “I really should go see her. Why don’t you come back in two days when she’s regained her health and my mind will be better able to focus?”
“We can’t waste time, Jack,” Vanderbilt reiterated.
Astor got up and offered Vanderbilt his hand. “I know that, George. We shall not waste time. We will attend to business in a couple of days. Good seeing you.”
Astor shook Vanderbilt’s hand and scurried from the room.
Vanderbilt telephoned Astor’s Fifth Avenue mansion two days later. He was told that Mr. Astor had left that morning and gave no indication of where he was going. As it turned out, he was going to fetch Madeleine so they might get married. They set sail that afternoon for Newport, Rhode Island, arriving at two in the morning. Astor had secured three clergymen – one to perform a wedding and two backups in case something went wrong. At 9 a.m., September 9, the couple was smuggled into two limousines to get a speeding start away from the press. They quickly got their marriage license then raced off to Beechwood. The wedding ceremony began soon after the couple arrived. Only four people beside the nuptials were present: the parents of the bride, the bridesmaid (Madeleine’s sister) and the best man (Astor’s son, Vincent). The ceremony took place in front of the immense white marble fireplace in the ballroom. A calm came over Astor as he walked the length of the polished wood floor to his waiting bride. He had an overwhelming sensation that the spirit of his mother was with him. Astor glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows toward the roiling sea and thought he caught the image of the Mrs. Astor smiling approvingly. Tears welled in his eyes. The guests assumed they were for Madeleine.
Reverend Dr. Joseph Lambert began the ceremony. Astor suddenly dropped to his knees and clasped Madeleine around the waist, drawing her close. The rest of the brief ceremony was performed with the couple in that odd tableau. When Astor finally rose to slip the wedding ring on her finger, he began weeping. He hugged Madeleine desperately and pressed his soggy cheek to hers when they were pronounced “man and wife.”
The newlyweds went out a back door and were rushed back to his yacht, where they set sail for Astor’s secluded estate of Ferncliff on the Hudson River. Vanderbilt found out about the wedding the next day in the New York Times. He tried to contact Astor by phone and telegram but never received an answer. He returned to Biltmore the following Monday after sending a cable to Morgan saying he and Astor were eager to push the project quickly forward.
CHAPTER 37
The humidity and heat of late summer fostered an explosion among the insect population at Sing Sing. Cockroaches were everywhere – crawling in the cells, scuttling in the yards, floating in the soups. “I gotta get outta here,” Henry said to Franco. They were lying on their bunks, trying to stay cool in their sweltering cell.
“It’s – how you say? – a hellhole, no?” Franco said.
Henry pulled a cockroach that was making a dash across his chest and squashed it against the wall with the palm of his hand. The bug’s hard shell exploded with a dull pop. “Hellhole, yeah, that’s the word. So what d’ya say we make a break for it?”
Franco sat up in his top bunk and whispered, “You mean escape?”
“You got it, Franco,” Henry said. “Don’t that sound better than rottin’ away with bugs and rats?”
“Oh, yes, my friend,” Franco said, getting excited. “I can go home. Hey, you can meet my mama. Stay a few days, we fatten you up.”
“Yeah, sure, Franco, I’ll meet your mama. So you’re on board?”
“Yes, of course my friend, Franco is on board!”
“Great!” said Henry, jumping off his bunk and turning over his thin mattress. Henry slid his hand through a separated seam and pulled out a small, serrated bread knife. “I smuggled it out of the kitchen.” He moved to the cell’s barred window then slid the small knife into a deeply cut groove at the lower end of one bar. “Just a little more work and the bar goes and we can wiggle out.”
Reaching into the mattress again, Henry pulled out a bundle of ripped kitchen towels he had braided together to make a rope. “I made somethin’ like this when I broke outta the orphanage. Dropped it out the window and climbed down. Worked like a charm.”
“You are, how you say, a busy bumble bee, my friend.”
“I figure we leave tonight.”
“Tonight?!”
“Yeah, just after the midnight check. Perfect time to make a break for it.”
“Tonight’s a little soon,” Franco said anxiously.
“You got anything better happenin’? It’s gonna be easy. We pull the bar out, zip-zap, and we’re out the window. The wall on the far side of the yard is near the railroad tracks. We go over with the second rope I made and slide down to the tracks. We’re outta here so fast no one’s gonna notice we’re gone till mornin’. And by that time we’ve havin’ breakfast with your mama on Mulberry Street.”
“Breakfast with mama…” Franco said wistfully.
“So, you wanna go?”
Franco drew a long breath. “I dunno. It is very dangerous.”
“What’s dangerous is rottin’ away here. You wanna stay, fine. But I’m gone tonight, with you or not. I jus’ figured it would be the right thing to invite you to come and taste your mama’s pancakes instead of waitin’ eight years till you’re paroled.”
Franco looked through the bars of their small cell window. The sun had just set and the summer’s light was still glowing over the horizon. “Okay, yes, Henry my friend, I go with you.” Franco slapped his mattress, regaining his enthusiasm.
Midnight, and Henry and Franco were under their covers. After the prison guard checked their cell and walked on, Henry leapt from his bed and quickly sawed through the last sliver of the bar. He pulled it out then knotted the end of the towel rope to a sturdy bar. Slipping through the narrow opening, Henry shimmied down twenty feet to the ground. He looked up, waiting for Franco to follow. But Franco didn’t appear. “I can’t wait here forever, Franco,” Henry whispered.
Franco finally poked his head through the gap in the bars. Henry waved, beckoning him down. Franco crossed himself then swung one leg out the window while awkwardly holding the braided towels. “Just fall back,” Henry said. But Franco didn’t move. “I’m stuck,” he said in panic. “I’m too big.”
Time was wasting. Henry was ready to dash across the prison yard when Franco popped through the bars. His momentum swung him out from the limestone walls like a pendulum.
“Slide down,” Henry said.
“I can’t,” Franco whimpered, clinging to the towel-rope in complete terror. The faces of other prisoners began peering out from the windows of other cells. They watched Franco let go of the rope and fall into the yard. He gro
aned as he hit the dirt.
Henry rushed to him. “Let’s go. We gotta go.”
“Yeah, let’s go,” Franco replied, but didn’t move. Henry grabbed him around his waist and jerked up.
“Owww…my foot,” Franco groaned. “It is in pain, Henry.”
“I’m goin’ across the yard. Follow me if you can. But I can’t wait,” Henry said emphatically, then took off over the sparse grass of prison yard, sprinting toward the high prison wall.
“I’m coming, my friend,” Franco called, limping after Henry.
Running full out, Henry remembered that Franco was in jail because he was an absolutely lousy thief. Now, to his dismay, Henry understood why. Reaching the wall, Henry looked back. Franco was in the middle of the yard, grunting with each labored step. Henry pressed himself onto the wall and dug his fingers into a seam between the bricks. He had examined this wall numerous times during recreation periods, noting the crevices and knobs he might get a toehold onto. He balanced his weight forward, inching up, twisting his small hands into the narrowest of cracks, sliding his feet into scant fissures, until, inch-by-inch, like a meticulous spider, he made his way to the top.
There were three long strands of barbed wire that ran along the top of the wall, anchored by steel poles every ten feet. Henry was nimble enough not to be ensnared in the wire. He tied his second towel-rope to one of the poles and threw it back into the prison yard for Franco, who was just reaching the wall.
“Pull yourself up,” Henry whispered to Franco.
The Titanic Plan Page 23
