The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  I was aware of the president’s penchant for boxing, wrestling, and jujitsu, but his swordsmanship was a new one on me. A hard shake of the head restored a glitter to Theodore’s blue-gray eyes. He slurped coffee from a mug. He said, “And I will tell you just how bully I feel. To-morrow, you and I shall spar. To-day, I mean.”

  “In your condition? I couldn’t.”

  “Of course you could. And you shall.”

  “You serious? You do have a few inches on me, I must say, and … a … uh, a few pounds.” More than a few. “Not to mention twenty years.”

  “Sounds like a fair fight to me,” Theodore said.

  * * *

  The roller-skating in the hallway woke me before dawn. Each boyish shriek brought a louder response. Amid flurries of footsteps, a ball bounced, bounced, bounced off a wall. My wall.

  I vaulted from my bed into the hallway. The littlest miscreant, the towheaded Quentin, gave me a frank look of disgust—me, the wrecker of his game, whatever his game happened to be at the moment. I resisted the urge to apologize, until I succumbed, and the four-year-old accepted with graciousness. I returned to bed and surprised myself when I burst into tears. I hadn’t done that in a while.

  It was about Del, of course, our older son. Fifteen months had passed—it seemed like fifteen years—since he died. Every word of praise for our dead boy made the grief worse. Twenty-four years old, a tragic death, an accident, everyone said, and I believed it. I had no reason not to. Other than how I had treated him. That wouldn’t have explained anything, even if there were something to explain, which there wasn’t. That long-ago Sunday in my library, the afternoon sunlight slanting in, after I read his schoolboy essay on the Roman Forum (he asked me to!) and I told him it was sluggish and heavy. Like you, I had blurted. Which he was. And wasn’t it my fatherly privilege, if not my duty, to say so? You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken.

  He was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and of course he took offense, and things were never quite the same between us. But I do have to say that it worked. He had shined at Yale, and President McKinley had just appointed him as his assistant private secretary, the same job I had held for Lincoln—and on Del’s own merits, not on mine. Del was six-foot-two, ridiculously taller than I am, able to hold his own in a fight or a council. He was the sort of good-natured fellow that everyone liked on sight. All of that promise, now dust and ashes. I was still learning how much grief a man could endure.

  I tried to make my mind go blank, and I must have succeeded, at least this once, for when I opened my eyes again the sunlight was streaming in and the noise—was I imagining it?—seemed farther away. It was a comforting room, despite the narrow bed scraggly with straw. The dark wood of the hearth and furnishings felt sturdy, and the wallpaper had enough pastels to quell a lunatic. My grandfather’s pocket watch, on the side table, showed ten minutes to eight. Tardy for country life, but not for Sagamore Hill. Breakfast in the dining room, I understood, was not served until half past eight.

  I was relieved to see the bathroom free of children. (The two older boys must be back at Groton.) I did what I needed to do, which took me a little longer than it used to, and put on a frock coat—mostly dry by now—and a baby blue cravat.

  When I got to the dining room, I saw my mistake: Theodore was wearing a flannel shirt and knickers, as if dressed for a hunt.

  “Morning, Hay,” he said. “I trust you slept well.”

  I lied, then added, “And you?”

  “Always,” he said. The high pitch of his quavering voice never failed to surprise, coming from the body of a bear. “The harder my day, the better I sleep.”

  I marveled at a man without guilt or apparent self-doubt. Or maybe he was merely oblivious. Or young—he was bursting with the impetuosity of youth. (The answer was always: all of the above.)

  The dining room at Sagamore Hill was a cozy place, with rose-colored wallpaper above the dark paneling, swirling with the aromas of coffee and bacon. The buffet was heaped with beefsteak, waffles, potatoes, blueberries, soft-boiled eggs. Theodore piled his plate high and seated himself at the head of the small oval table, waiting to eat as patiently as a dog would, funneling foodstuffs into his mouth

  A whoop brought a barefoot boy bursting past me and into the dining room like an Apache into battle. His impish face was streaked with black—coal dust, could it be?

  “Quenty-quee,” Theodore called. Quentin was the child who was most like the father, the daredevil nonchalant. I looked across at the president’s contorted face.

  Archie flew by in full pursuit, his countenance serious below his low blond bangs. The seven-year-old clutched a bow and a real arrow, with a sharp stone point. He was wedging the arrow into the bowstring when he tripped on the wrinkled rug. The arrow went flying past my shoulder and into the eggs. Archie’s eyes, searching mine, grew as wide as silver dollars. No reason not to laugh—it was funny—and when I did, Archie joined in, less in mirth than in relief.

  Quentin whooped again and thrust his hand into the blueberries, glancing sideways to see if his father was watching, which he was. The boy’s eyes never left his father’s as he popped a fistful of blueberries into his mouth. Theodore roared with laughter. No wonder Quentin was an undisciplined brat; he reminded me of Tad Lincoln minus the lisp.

  From the doorway came a trill that might have unnerved a coyote. “And are we having a good time yet?” I recognized the lilt before I looked to the doorway and saw Princess Alice. The president’s eldest stood haughtily, as was her custom, neck stretched, chin raised, eyes piercing to the point of menace, all beneath a wasp’s nest of hair. In self-possession, Alice Roosevelt was eighteen going on forty. Her face had a marble beauty, feature by feature, albeit crammed together and (for my taste) a little too sharp. “You haven’t told them yet, have you, Father?” she said.

  “Sister!” Theodore shouted.

  “Told me what?” Quentin and Archie said in unison.

  “Nothing!” the president said. “Eat your breakfast. You, too, Sister.”

  “Oh, but I’m not hungry,” Alice said. “I merely wished to shake hands with our distinguished guest here. And not with you, Q.”

  Quentin was licking clean his blue-stained hand.

  I knocked heads in pleasant reverie, but instead I bowed and kissed the back of her hand and said, “The pleasure is mine.” She laughed, an airy sound. I felt lucky she didn’t have a snake around her neck or a revolver in her pocket (though I was assuming the latter).

  The boys had filled their plates, and the president ordered Alice to take a seat—to my surprise, she obeyed—so he could recount the travails of their oldest brother. “They sicced the dogs on him,” Theodore said. “That’s what they did, out in Dakota. For shooting prairie chickens.”

  Quentin perked up. “Are they like real chickens?” he said.

  “Teddy is a prairie chicken,” Alice said. She and Teddy Jr., who was about to turn fifteen, were close.

  “Listen … to … this,” their father said. “‘Set … Dogs … on … President’s … Son’—that’s the headline.” He spoke in staccato. “And below that, ‘South Dakota Populists Treated the Youth Boorishly.’” He was reading from the Evening Star I had left with him the night before. “‘Because he is President Roosevelt’s son, a large number of populist farmers in the vicinity of Arlington, South Dakota, combined to prevent Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, from shooting prairie chickens in their stubblefields.’”

  “What’s a prairie chicken?” Quentin said.

  “The article goes on,” Theodore said. “‘Scarcely had the party arrived when the farmers’ telephone was brought into service, and the news was spread, and the entire prairie was alive with farmers patrolling the fields and posting notices forbidding trespass.’” Alice shrieked with laughter. “Listen to this!” the aggrieved father went on. “‘Because he was the son of the president’—now this quotes a railroad’s vice president in Teddy’s hunting party—‘these populis
ts, who … might … well … be … classed … as … anarchists…’ In the Dakotas; my beloved Dakotas!”

  Theodore’s two years as a rancher in North Dakota had shaped his sense of himself—and Americans’ sense of him.

  “Anarchists! Do you hear that? What the devil are they…?”

  Quentin said, “What are prairie chickens?”

  Theodore thumped his fist on the table, and the breakfast plates jumped.

  “Are they like real chickens?” Quentin said.

  Archie said, “Told me what?”

  * * *

  Everyone else had left the dining room when Roosevelt refilled his canyon-size coffee mug, stirred in seven lumps of sugar, and said, “It was no accident.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you have evidence?” I was enough of a lawyer to care, and maybe even enough of a detective.

  “I don’t need evidence. I know.” He smacked his right fist into his left palm.

  “But Theodore…” How do you argue with someone so sure of himself? Maybe I wasn’t being fair—how he loved to say On the other hand. The man knew what he didn’t know. Usually. “I would think that anyone investigating this…” I looked for a response and got none. “Would need evidence.”

  “I know who was behind this.”

  “Who, then?”

  “The motorman.”

  “Of the trolley?”

  “Yes, who else?”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I saw his face. That’s all the evidence I need.” Theodore turned in my direction but looked through me.

  “And what exactly did you see?”

  “I saw a man intent.”

  I waited, then said, “Intent on what?”

  “Intent on whatever he was doing, which was ramming into my carriage, broadside. He was standing at the wheel, at the front of the trolley, looking directly at me. I saw him. And when I confronted him after the crash, he had the gall, the gall”—in full falsetto—“to tell me that he had the right-of-way. A damn outrage!”

  I don’t remember ever hearing Theodore curse before. Was he mad at the collision or at the motorman’s defiance? Probably at both. “Why on earth would he want to do that?” I said.

  “How should I know? That’s your job.”

  “My job?”

  Roosevelt’s eyebrows lifted.

  I swore to myself. (I did not share Theodore’s compunction.) “I’ll try,” I said, despairingly enough that he might notice. He didn’t.

  “Actually, I do know,” he said. “Or suspect, as you might prefer, given your ladylike sensibilities.”

  I laughed. The man was so obvious. “By all means, please tell me your … suspicions.”

  “The anarchists, of course. They assassinated McKinley. Why not me?”

  I sighed, but he did have a point. “You’re saying the motorman is an anarchist?”

  “Not saying anything. That’s for you to find out. I do know that Emma Goldman was arrested in Omaha not ten days ago for hatching a plot to murder me. She was also arrested, you will recall, after Buffalo. That soft-headed Leon Czolgosz listened to one of her lectures.”

  “And she was released for lack of evidence.”

  “Which doesn’t mean she was innocent,” Theodore said.

  “Or guilty.”

  “Only because the evidence was never found, perhaps. Assassinating leaders is what anarchists do, my dear John. Finding the evidence is your job.”

  My stomach tightened. “Starting where, do you suppose?”

  “At the top, of course.”

  “The anarchists don’t have a top,” I said. “That’s why they’re anarchists. This isn’t the papists, with a hierarchy.”

  “Nonsense. Every human organization has a hierarchy. Every animal kingdom has a top and a bottom—every phylum, every species, every family of wolves in a den.” Theodore was a verifiable expert in nature as well as in naval history, American history, the American West and wilderness, and animal skulls of too many descriptions. “Even anarchists have leaders. You know this, Hay. You just don’t want to admit it. Too rough for you.”

  He was goading me, I knew that, to leave me no choice but to pursue his damn investigation and, not incidentally, to meet him in the ring. Amusement glinted in Theodore’s eyes. “Our Red Emma is back in New York, I understand,” he said. I was curious how he knew. “You should go see her. If an anarchist was involved, she will know.”

  “And she will be only too pleased to spill everything to someone she’s never met.”

  “You are a charming man, my dear John. You can open the door to China. You will get me my canal. You can talk a porcupine out of its quills. Surely you can persuade a woman to do what you ask.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “That is one thing I have never learned to do,” I said. “She is listed in the city directory, I imagine? Under Goldman comma Emma?”

  “I couldn’t say. No need to. Cortelyou has made the arrangements. You will meet with her to-morrow morning, at eleven.”

  * * *

  “Father, must we entertain that old fart?” Alice said. Her eyelashes quivered—with mischief, I supposed—and her ivory skin looked translucent, surely cool to the touch.

  “‘Young fart,’ if you please,” a Russian-inflected baritone boomed from the dining room doorway. Grand Duke Boris, a cousin of the tsar, was coming for lunch.

  “Please forgive my daughter, Your Excellency,” the president said, standing by the sideboard, examining the borscht. “And may I welcome you, in our rather informal fashion, to my home at Sagamore Hill.”

  Alice tilted her head and said, “Perhaps Mother will be along.”

  “Sister!” the president snapped. “Not another word.”

  I was well aware that Edith was off visiting Theodore’s aunt, to avoid meeting the tsar’s cousin, who had sipped champagne from a lady’s—well, a woman’s—slipper while in Chicago. Adee had wired me: “GRAND DUKE BORE-US NOT THE RECEPTACLE FOR CONFIDENCES.”

  “Meow, meow,” Alice said, obeying the letter of her father’s dictum.

  “You may leave now,” her father said, and with a tilt of her head and a switch of her tail, she complied.

  The Russian guffawed. “The high spirits of youth,” he said. Grand Duke Boris had an unlined, rouged face and a pompadour; his scarlet tunic was covered in medals and featured gold epaulets that would have sunk a shark. He was shorter than I, and when he reached up to tap my shoulder, I imagined a crocodile’s chomp. Theodore recoiled.

  “It is a pleasure, I must say,” Grand Duke Boris said, “to meet both of you gentlemen at once. The two grandest men in your government. An honor for myself, for Tsar Nicholas, and for my country.” His gaudy smile left cracks in his rouge. “But let me say, it is rare for the crown prince to be older than the monarch.”

  Rather gauche, I thought, in referring to our statutory line of succession. In the absence of a sitting vice president, rights to the throne coursed immediately through the cabinet, starting with the oldest department first. Mine. This was not news to me, I assure you. It was a fact of my life, to which I had grown inured, and which affected my life not at all. That must sound silly to anyone’s ear, but it was true. For the most part, anyway.

  “Ours is a young and vigorous nation, Your Excellency,” I replied. “It is right and proper for its ruler to be young and vigorous.” A perfect diplomatic response, I must say: sounds profound, says nothing, means less. “I should mention, sir, that my favorite color is gray. Matching my whiskers.”

  * * *

  The gun room, on the top floor, was clearly Theodore’s sanctum. Shotguns were propped up in the corners; books lined the shelves. The ceiling slanted in eaves, making a cave out of the dark decor. Archie was helping his father push the desk to the wall. I rushed over and kept the Tiffany lamp from toppling off. The Kodiak bear rug had been shoved aside. The woven rectangular rug remained. That, plus an oblong of floor, would
serve as the ring.

  No good could come of this. I felt certain.

  I hadn’t sparred in a couple of years. Because of the demands of the job, trying to keep a disorderly world in line—so I told myself. But the truth was a lack of desire. Not none, to be precise. I had never known anything quite as vivid—indeed, life-affirming—as climbing into a ring and whaling away at someone who was whaling away at me. Even saving China from Europe’s depredations was like a lager next to a whisky. I loved having sparred, mixing it up with a bloke, making ourselves vulnerable to each other, proving … what? Something fundamental. I had done it more times than I cared to count. I had never been knocked down; I had always stood my ground. Yet there was no ignoring the fact that climbing into the ring (or, here, stepping onto the rug) still scared the bejesus out of me. Can’t say why, exactly. Getting hit, even in the face, rarely hurts for long. But scare me it does, and less and less do I see the point in bashing somebody else’s head and having mine bashed in return. I had proved whatever I needed to prove—courage, I suppose. Besides, the prospect of sparring with my boss—in front of his children, no less—eased none of the apprehension.

  I wore a pair of Theodore’s old boxing trunks, requiring a rope as a belt to keep myself decent. Theodore had stripped to black trunks and a sleeveless, lemon-yellow shirt that showed a baboon’s shoulders and a buffalo’s belly. His right cheek was purple. His jowls were heavier and his face was lined more deeply than I had noticed before. His blue-gray eyes, naked without the pince-nez, looked clouded over.