Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel Read online

  But, to Kermit’s surprise, the Colonel had found a small breach. Nothing like a true path, but an opening. With a few blows from their rifle butts, this opening, by some fluke, expanded. Enough, at least, to whet their appetites, so that before long they were driving into the forest. Kermit could hear the old man’s asthmatic wheeze, he could feel his own sweat like rust against his skin, and, with a private shock, he realized he was happy, supremely happy.

  Something else he realized: They were standing. Unobstructed. In a small clearing.

  The sun had finally dropped from the sky, and the darkness of the jungle closed around them.

  Expedition members were instructed to never stray too far from camp, but here they were, a hundred yards off, and it might as well have been a thousand miles. Later Kermit would think that this was the moment on which everything hinged. Because they might have found their way back. It would have taken them no more than a few minutes, and everything would have followed its usual course.

  But, in that same moment, the spider monkey’s whinny came funneling down to them. It vibrated along their spines. In the torchlight, Kermit could see his father wiping the fog from his spectacles. Motioning for silence. Raising his rifle higher … higher …

  “Wait,” whispered Kermit, putting his hand against the barrel. “We don’t have a sight on him.”

  “He’s up there.”

  “Where? You can’t possibly land him.”

  “I don’t mean to land him, I mean to roust him. Look, now, you wait till I fire. As soon as you hear the rustle, you follow it, and you fire right into it, do you hear me?”

  He’s mad, thought Kermit.

  Yet he understood that the Colonel, being myopic, had always hunted through some triangulation of senses: sound and smell filling the gaps in vision. He gave the nod, and the old man once more lifted the barrel of his gun. A second … two seconds … and then the forest seemed to explode with the rifle’s report. Only to contract in the very next instant.

  Kermit tilted his ear up to the canopy. Waited for a cry or a rustle, but there was none.

  Once more the Colonel fired, and once more the forest caught the sound and held it. Everything else shrank into silence, and the Colonel was raising his rifle for the third shot when they heard a faint whistle and, from the blackness above, something began working its way toward them.

  Kermit nearly laughed. A Brazil nut.

  But no Brazil nut, no coconut in his experience had ever made such a commotion on its way to earth. This was a thing of weight, of moment, and it was coming to them tier by tier, and the breath froze in Kermit’s chest as he waited.…

  Just when he had resigned himself to waiting forever, a great black bundle dropped from the canopy and pooled on the forest floor.

  Kermit’s torchlight was already picking out the splay of black limbs. The surreally long tail. A spider monkey, as sure as night, prostrate at their feet.

  Even so, Kermit held back. It was the Colonel who stood over the carcass and, in a voice of unmistakable satisfaction, said:

  “We shall have a grand feast with this one.”

  Kermit knelt now before the carcass. Studied the eyes, which had passed beyond cloudiness into white agates. Something was wrong.

  There was no blood.

  No blood on the head. On the feet. In the abdomen.

  He pushed the monkey onto its back—and was astonished to see it split open. Wide open.

  A monkey rug, he thought wildly. But something had to have climbed that tree. Made that sound …

  Then a new sound broke on his ears: a tremulous, high-pitched bark. Trigueiro, galloping toward them. The mutt had followed their scent, and his fawn-colored flanks were pumping, and he was longing with every particle of his soul to be where they were.

  Only he never made it.

  A stifled yelp. A hiss. Then silence.

  Trigueiro’s front paws were sprawled before him. Projecting from his back was a single arrow, so freakishly long it might have been one of Jove’s thunderbolts, pinning him to the forest floor.

  “Trigueiro…”

  Then the tree shivered open once more, and a black shape dropped from the branches—straight for the Colonel.

  The old man flailed for his gun, but it was kicked away. He raised his fists like a pugilist, but the thing wrapped round him and squeezed. It was like watching a man wrestle with his own shadow—and lose.

  With a shout, Kermit sprang at the shape, but he was already too late, he knew that. Knew it even before he felt the blow on his own shoulder and saw his torch flying into the dark.

  The second blow caught him on the chest. He reeled … and then sank, with supreme awkwardness, to the forest floor. He watched his own torch descending on him—a blaze of heat and weight.

  “Father,” he cried. And fell out of the light.

  4

  “You’re awfully shy.”

  He was dreaming of Belle. Belle, as he’d first seen her two years ago.

  “Shy for a Roosevelt, I mean.”

  If any other woman had said that, he would have stammered … well, something about never speaking too quickly for fear of speaking amiss, this being the course approved by Lord Acton and … and Dryden … oh, on and on, defending himself, and it would have been worse than saying nothing. He didn’t even have the courage of his own quiet.

  But beneath the glitter of Belle’s cornflower-blue eyes, there lay a kind of watchful patience. She would wait for him. It would be worth the wait. And, with that, he realized the words were already there.

  “They also serve who only stand and grunt.”

  In the next instant, he had his reward. She laughed. A gleaming plenitude of teeth.

  “Well, now,” she said, stretching her vowels as far as they could go. “Do you also walk and grunt?” She curled her white hand around his elbow. “At least as far as the punch bowl?”

  When he hesitated, she added, “You may ask anyone who knows me, Mr. Roosevelt. I don’t bite.”

  “Nor do I, Miss Willard. I assure you.”

  “Then we may proceed in safety.”

  * * *

  HIS SISTER ETHEL WAS the one who’d invited her to Sagamore. “Now, you will be sociable, won’t you, Kermit? She’s a Democrat, of course, so we can’t talk too much in that line, and you must forgive the fact that she comes from scads of money, because she’s really tremendous fun. Her father owns a chain of hotels, so hospitality runs in her veins. Oh, don’t smile like that, you know what I mean.”

  He’d had little occasion to speak with Ethel’s friend on the first two days, but he did notice how well she took to a horse. She was a little thing, but her carriage was erect and springy—charged—as though any second she might leap off and chase the quarry on foot. She was a sure shot, too, knew her way around Winchesters, even helped to dress the deer she shot. She propelled a skiff like a champion crewman. Beneath that nest of blond ringlets, he suspected, lay a barely rehabilitated tomboy—the kind he might have seen playing hockey, in winters past, on Duck Pond.

  But it was summer now, and as the days and nights passed in hikes and rowing and lunches among the wild plum bushes and afternoon teas on the veranda and parlor games and midnight bonfires, he could see how far she had left the pond (and him) behind. Through training, through inclination, she had become everything he was not: facile, vivacious, nakedly curious, a talker, a laugher, a dancer. When she laughed, she had a way of tilting her head back as if she were imbibing the joke from a great stein. Her hands tilted up, and her long white neck glowed like coral.

  “It’s easy for her, isn’t it?”

  “What is?” Ethel asked.

  Living, he wanted to say. There wasn’t a slough of despond that Belle Wyatt Willard couldn’t skate right over—with a sly backward wink as if to say, That wasn’t so hard, was it?

  But it is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.

  That’s what he had always told himself—although if he were to look at his father, spr
inging out of bed every morning and flinging himself at the waiting day, he could see how very easy it was for an elect few. To their company must now be admitted this young woman, who handled every second of her allotted time as a gift. Treated even him as a gift.

  * * *

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE Belle left Sagamore, they stood alone on the piazza overlooking the Sound, watching the lights of the Fall River steamers, listening to the green warblers and the purple finches and the bobolinks. From the beach came a pipe scent of rosemary.

  “I’m going to South America,” he said.

  He had taken a job with the Brazil Railway Company. He was going to carve railroads and bridges out of the Brazilian jungle. The pay would be minimal at first, and the danger considerable. More than one of the company engineers had been killed by Indian arrows; many more had died of malaria. Yet it was the closest thing to a calling he could discern: to be so far from civilization’s grasp. He still savored the memory of the year he had spent with Father in the wilds of Africa, and in South America he would find a place even more remote, more mysterious, a continent with a great black hole at its heart, waiting to be filled with light—not the light of salvation but the light of knowledge, yes, of human understanding.

  He spoke in a great hurry, his eyes cast down. He understood now that this moment was a test and that, so long as he avoided her eyes, the test need neither be passed nor failed but held in a permanent suspension.

  “But that’s on my list,” she said.

  He raised his eyes. “Sorry?”

  “My list of adventures. Sailing down the Amazon comes in right at number four, directly after visiting the Pyramids. Oh, but I would happily bump it to the top!”

  By the time they had parted, she was already laying her plans. “Father will jump at the chance to join me. Why, it’s South America, after all; who could say no? And I know I can persuade Ethel to go, too. Don’t you think it would be good for her? You just leave it all to me.” On impulse—or was it the result of long premeditation?—she pressed his long bony fingers lightly between hers. “You’ll write, won’t you, Kermit? I should be so pleased.”

  * * *

  ON BOARD THE OLYMPIC, he dashed off a pair of letters and mailed them as soon as he landed in Bahia (along with the two volumes of Edwin Arlington Robinson he’d brought with him).

  Her reply came a few weeks later, postmarked from Hot Springs. It has been too lonely here this past week, she said. Of course, I won’t let the family forget about South America and am now trying to persuade them that the trip will be most beneficial to Elizabeth [this was Belle’s sister]—I’m sure Mother won’t go without her. I have thought of two other things I want to do. Wolf hunting in Russia … and tiger shooting from elephants’ backs in India!

  He could only smile at her handwriting: a wide indolent childish sprawl that consumed reams of hotel stationery—so different from his own sparrow tracks. She wrote with the confidence that fresh paper would always be found.

  It’s too wonderful, she wrote him in December. Apparently we are sailing for S.A. on Jan. 25. I can hardly believe it true, and of course many things may happen between now and then.

  Something did happen. Belle’s father was called up by President Wilson to serve as ambassador to Spain. The plans for South America were quietly scrapped, but Belle’s letters carried on: from Paris, from London and finally Madrid. The flutterings and flickerings of a social butterfly, borne aloft from dress fittings to dinners to weddings to balls. We have had so many many things to do that after each more & more hectic day I go to bed more & more exhausted & wake up equally so.

  Yet she had time to ask after his health (What are you doing with fever so constantly?) and to tuck in news clippings, postcards, a photograph of a Brancusi sculpture from the Armory Show. And names—these she was sure to drop in. Mr. Percy MacKaye was here yesterday.… I gleaned quite a lot of information from a Mr. Nodge, who was here to dinner last night.… Mr. Page’s secretary is an attractive boy named Harrold Fowler—I wonder if you have ever heard of him? He has hunted a lot in China, India, East Africa etc and found some new specimen of sheep which are in the Smithsonian.

  Kermit had never heard of Harrold Fowler and could only hope he would be stampeded by his own sheep. It was presumptuous, he knew, to be jealous. He and Belle had plighted no troth. They had never trembled in each other’s company. They had merely … got along. But surely it was Belle’s intention to give him these glimpses of other suitors, other paths she might follow. With a sinking feeling, he realized that his own paths were converging down to one—one woman, one heart.

  * * *

  THE WORK OF BUILDING bridges through the wilderness was hard, hot, exhausting: eleven hours a day, seven days a week. (He had counted on having Sundays off.) At night, he went to sleep with French poetry: Villon’s ballads, Ronsard’s sonnets. He was adopted by a dog that he found one evening sleeping in his open suitcase; he named the mongrel Trigueiro.

  In August, he was riding a heavy steel joist to the top of a new bridge when the derrick that held the joist broke. There was no time to jump to safety—only time to drop. He fell a good thirty or thirty-five feet, by his own calm reckoning, and as he tumbled down the ravine, bouncing from rock to rock, he was amazed by how quiet he was in mind even as his body registered each new insult. At last, when he could fall no farther, he rolled onto his back and saw the steel joist coming straight for him. He closed his eyes and waited to die.

  Against all expectations, the ballast of steel caromed off an outcropping and sailed right over him. As they hauled him out of the ravine, his first thought was: Wait till she hears of this.

  Writing to her from the Hospital Samaritano in São Paulo, he was careful to play down his injuries: two broken ribs, some water on the knee. A great deal of scarring on the head and hands, which looks bad and means nothing. He was really lucky to get out at all, but he was hopeful (and here is where truth gave way to bluff) that, in a few days, he might be able to join a hunting party at one of the local faziendas.

  Her reply came a month later on Hotel Astoria stationery and carried just the note of gentle chiding he had hoped for. I had visions of you spending long weeks of suffering flat on your back, she wrote, instead of which you’ve apparently been having glorious sport, hunting & riding, etc. So much sympathy wasted!

  There followed some softening. I wish you could be here to browse in old book stores with me. I can’t go without a maid, and they are such a nuisance. Besides I don’t know what is good and what’s trash—I’ve begun Spanish but haven’t gotten that far. Some of the old bindings are musty and I long to know what’s inside.

  Then the old twist of the knife: I have gleaned so much interesting information about Spain from a wonderful man Archer Huntington.…

  * * *

  IN THE MIDST OF his recovery, one bright light remained on his horizon: Mother and Father were coming.

  They had embarked, improbably enough, on a goodwill tour of South America, and who better to shepherd them through Brazil than their son, with his hard-won knowledge of the native terrain? By the time he boarded the SS Voltaire for Bahia, Kermit was walking without a limp. Only his heart was hobbled. He stayed on deck for most of the voyage, watching the foam furrowing out from the steamer’s prow, and his thoughts flew to the other side of the Atlantic. To Belle, glittering like a plumed bird in the Spanish sun, smiling at princes and embassy secretaries and penniless Madrid poets. Waiting for them to stake their claims.

  The test, he realized, had just begun on the piazza at Sagamore. The critical moment was now.

  He went down to his cabin. Lit the lantern and read her letter once more. Then he carefully refolded it and set it on the nightstand. He blew out the lantern and sat for some time in the darkness. He could no longer consent to imagine the Archer Huntingtons of the world. To imagine Belle as their wife.

  And yet how could she possibly choose him over them? What did he have to offer beyond a name?

&
nbsp; The long days of tropical labor had given him, it was true, a casing of sinew and muscle, but nothing had changed the fact that he was a quiet, moody cuss, given to gray spells and black silence. “Byronic brooding,” his sister had once teased him, “without the poetry.” He shrank from the public eye; he tossed his hat in no ring. He was, in everything that mattered, a second son.

  He thought of his brother Ted, living a squire’s life in Manhattan with his wife and daughter and pipe, selling bonds on Wall Street, playing squash with his old Porcellian Club pals. Was that the only life that counted? Kermit could just as soon make a wage and raise a family in São Paulo or Buenos Aires as New York. And when South America paled—when too many of the blank spaces had been filled in—he would find somewhere even more remote. He would live a life of the body and a life of the mind, too, mastering new languages, corresponding with literary lights, holding forth at salons. He would be respected—lionized, even—by the small society that cohered around him. And standing at his side, bathing him in the effulgence of her devotion, would be a woman. One woman.

  * * *

  HE DINED THAT NIGHT at the captain’s table but excused himself early and carried a cordial of cognac down to his cabin. He closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the trestle of his hands. Then he drew out a sheet of the ship’s stationery and began to write.

  Dear Belle, I’ve been thinking about this letter for a very long time.…

  Right out of the gate, he felt it: the inadequacy of mere words. Where was Camões when he needed him? Where were all the Portuguese balladeers he’d been committing to heart? Here, at the brink of immolation, they abandoned him.

  I couldn’t go on writing you and not tell you for I do love you so very much, and tho’ I know how very unworthy I am of you, I can’t help writing you this.… I would do anything in the world for you Belle, leave anything, or go anywhere if I felt you wanted me to do that; for I must try to prove myself in some way worthy of you, no matter in how small a way. But oh Belle if we were …

  Were what?