Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel Read online

  … we could go anywhere and succeed, I know that.

  Only he didn’t know it. He knew nothing. This letter, which was to be the purest expression of his love, was just the map of his chaos. With a keening groan, he rushed to his conclusion.

  Please, please forgive me if this is all wrong to you, and I should never have spoken, but it was more than I could do not to write for I love you so, that all the time that you were so far away just seems so much time when I’m not living but perhaps might be.… I’ve wished and prayed so much that you might you love me, and perhaps you might …

  And, once again, he backed away.

  … tho’ I can’t seem to believe that you could.

  A single gritty tear was scorching its way down his cheek.

  Good night, Belle, and please forgive me if I’m doing wrongly.

  It was the most equivocal proposal a man had ever written, but he hadn’t the strength for a second draft. He mailed it as soon as the ship landed. It would take two weeks to get to Madrid, another two weeks to get her reply. A month, at minimum, before he would know.

  He was fortunate that his father’s presence was so coveted. Every day brought a whirligig of formal luncheons and dinners, men with gold teeth pumping the Colonel’s hand and girls bringing sprays of corsage orchids and grandmamas offering him their cigars and German padres sounding out his theology and officers’ wives pouring him cups of yerba maté.

  Even though plans were afoot for some sort of jungle voyage, Kermit was only too happy to leave his father and his coconspirators to their plans and dig into the shelves of the English Library or catch the trolley to Corcovado. One morning, he took a hike from Tijuca. He followed the Jesuits’ old moss-grown aqueduct and saw on one side the sea and on the other the rolling carpet of mountain shade. Was this on Belle’s list, he wondered?

  Coming back down the Rua Aqueduto, he was hailed by a messenger boy.

  “Uma carta, Senhor.”

  A letter, addressed to him. He recognized the handwriting at once and stuffed the envelope into his pocket. For another day, it seemed to pulse there, breathing out its secret contents. All those fragments of regret—he could just imagine them. You can’t know how honored I am … I only wish … Hope you’ll understand … Dear fellow …

  He was a coward not to open it. Why should the words of a young debutante hold such terror for a man of promise? The next afternoon, he strolled over to the Rotisserie Américain. He sat outside and ordered a tumbler of cachaça, and, by the daggerlike light of the Brazilian sun, he read:

  Dear Kermit, I’m very glad you did send the letter, because I do love you, and will marry you. I don’t know how, or why you should love me—perhaps because I too have prayed,—& been unhappy—and now you love me and my heart is very full—What have I done that God should choose me out of all the world for you to love—but as He has done this, so perhaps He will make me a little worthy of your love. May He keep you safe for me! I love you, Kermit, I love you.

  He left without paying for his drink. He found the old man in a rattan chair in the hotel lobby, scissoring away at another speech.

  “What’s wrong?” the Colonel asked. But all he had to do was look at the letter still clutched in Kermit’s hand. “Well, now! I believe congratulations are in order. Oh, but you’ve chosen wisely, Kermit. She’s a dear girl.”

  A dear girl, yes. He was going to marry the dearest girl in the world. The girl who had read War and Peace just for his sake and had “enjoyed it all thoroughly” (though she didn’t “agree with Tolstoy’s theories”), and had she really read it, and did it really matter?

  “Of course, you’ll have to tell Mother right away. You don’t want her reading it in the papers, for heaven’s sake. Remember, please, how women are when it comes to their sons’ weddings. They do like to stick their oars in, so be prepared. Just smile and nod and get the hell out of the room, can you manage that?”

  That’s exactly what Kermit was prepared to do when he knocked on his mother’s door. Smile, nod, get out.

  She was standing by the window, looking down at the Avenida Beira Mar. She didn’t turn when he walked in, but she must have known who it was, because her very next words were:

  “I need you to go with your father.”

  “Go with him?” Kermit closed the door behind him. “Where?”

  “Into the jungle. The old fool is bound and determined to go, and God help us all when he does.”

  The edge in her voice was enough to stop any reply in his throat. And then her blue-gray eyes found his.

  “You must go with him, Kermit.”

  “Why?”

  She took his hand between hers. “Father is not so young as he used to be, you know that. He needs someone to look out for him. You can be certain he won’t.”

  “But my work…”

  “Oh, you can ask for a leave of absence, can’t you?”

  “I already have. Just to come here. It’s—it’s not that simple, Mother; I’m an employee now.”

  “I think it is that simple,” she answered with a placid smile. “You need only tell them who your traveling companions are. Rondon’s name alone should suffice. And if you need further incentive, tell them about all the contacts you’ll be making along the way. All the land you’ll be surveying. Why, it’s nothing more than a business trip.”

  She had thought it out, of course.

  “Mother, you don’t understand. I’m getting my leg up. I have men depending on me … a great deal of work to be done.”

  “It will still be there when you get back.”

  She spoke with an air of finality, as though she were shutting all his objections into a casket. But when he made no reply, the edge of asperity stole back into her voice.

  “You went with him to Africa, you know. Without a second thought.”

  “That was different, Mother. That was sport.”

  “And just think what sport you’ll have in the jungle! You and Father will be hunting creatures nobody’s ever seen before!”

  “Mother, it’s not—I can’t—”

  He pulled his hand free from hers. Jammed it into his pocket, felt the answering touch of Belle’s letter. The silence piled on top of them.

  “I’m to be married,” he said at last.

  There was the lightest of pauses.

  “I supposed as much,” she said.

  A sag in her voice. The same sag in her mouth. There was no use being surprised; Mother had never really taken to Belle. “The Fair One with Golden Locks,” she’d called her in an unguarded moment.

  If Kermit hadn’t felt so cornered, he might have found some way to explain to his mother why she was wrong—wrong! He had just persuaded the prettiest girl in the world to choose him as her husband. He would be a married man and, in due time, a father. Here at last, at the ripe age of twenty-four, his life was moving forward. In the same way that the Brazilian rail line was moving forward—against nature’s own dictates, through sheer inhuman dogged persistence.

  “We would like to be married in June,” he said. “In Madrid.”

  “I see. June.”

  She folded her head down, then raised it again.

  “Well, then. That still leaves you plenty of time for your trip.”

  “Mother, please. You should know better than anyone, there are … preparations—”

  Though at this moment he was hard-pressed to say what they were. The ring, of course. Clothes—a great deal of clothes. Invitations—dear God, how many people would they have to invite? Should Cousin Philip be best man?

  “Father needs you,” she said.

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Kermit.” Her voice began to shag over with weariness. “Don’t you understand how this family works by now? Father needs his scope. And we are the ones who give it to him.”

  * * *

  IN THAT MOMENT, KERMIT could only recall the message his brother had cabled him last year on election night. Ted had been stationed the whole evening
at Progressive Party headquarters in New York, poring over returns. Alone among his father’s advisers, he could see where the votes were heading—away from Roosevelt, away from Taft, straight to Wilson—and by evening’s end there was only one question remaining in Ted’s mind, and that was the question he fired off to Kermit in São Paulo.

  WHAT WILL OLD LION DO?

  Kermit had misinterpreted at first. Father would do what any gentleman does in such a situation. He would send a congratulatory note to Wilson. He would accept the results with good humor and contentment. He would call for a united front as America faced its foes and rallied its strength, et cetera, et cetera.

  It was only later, under the glow of two caipirinhas, that Kermit grasped the real tenor of Ted’s question. What would the old man do with the remainder of his days? How would he keep the adventure alive?

  In the months that followed the election, the Colonel professed himself busy, content. He saw old friends, fraternized with Rough Riders. He planned lecture tours, a scholarly talk on History as Literature, a scientific study of African game animals. He had the queer notion of writing his autobiography. His letters to Kermit were full of the usual bluster and cheer.

  But the letters from Mother spoke of how quiet it was at Sagamore. No telegraphers or typewriters. No delegations of potentates. No reporters clamoring for the great man’s last word. No shouts ringing up and downstairs. None of that steady current of well-wishers at the front door, bringing their offerings—their pies, their knitted scarves and mittens, their babies waiting to be sanctified. A man may lose many things, but he may not lose a people’s love without some cost.

  What was the old man going to do?

  This was not a disinterested inquiry, as Kermit grasped even then. Whatever course the Colonel decided on, the family would have to close ranks around it. It was what they had always done; it was what they were put on earth to do. To give an old man his proper scope.

  And what of my scope? thought Kermit. Am I to be nothing more than a satellite for the rest of my life?

  It was an irony that had long vexed him, more for never having uttered it out loud—that in becoming more of a man, he must be less of a Roosevelt, and in becoming more of a Roosevelt, he must be less of a man.

  And what of Belle? How much further her pale specter receded from him with each passing second. Oh, Mother was really asking too much of him! Damn it, she was! To sacrifice not just himself but the woman he loved. The thought of it was like oil of vitriol leaking through every pore, and what made it even more scalding was the realization that he was already losing—giving way, as he always had, before a superior will.

  “Very well,” he said, in a small dead voice.

  Smiling, his mother took him once more by the hand.

  “I knew I could count on you.…”

  * * *

  THAT VERY AFTERNOON, HE sent a cable to Brazil Railway. And another to Belle. DON’T WORRY. WEDDING STILL ON.

  He was now officially a member of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, and no one seemed more surprised than the old man himself.

  “See here, my boy, are you quite sure? I’d feel rotten taking you from your work. You’ve only just got on your feet.”

  Ah, yes, thought Kermit. But you need your scope, don’t you?

  “It won’t be too long,” he heard himself say.

  * * *

  I’M TO BE MARRIED in June … married in June …

  * * *

  KERMIT AWOKE TO BLACKNESS.

  Utter blackness, swallowing his hand the moment he tried to penetrate it.

  Carefully, he canvassed his other senses. Touch: He could feel his own leg, yes. Smell: His nostrils picked out must and earth and something like straw. Hearing: He could hear his own breath, in ragged pulses. Taste: Yes. He could taste the bitterness rising up inside him—coming out of his mouth in a hot heavy gruel. As he wiped his mouth clean, a single outline startled from the darkness. And then another and another. All vanishing as quickly as they appeared.

  Then, from the nothingness, a petal of light budded forth. It swelled and, to Kermit’s astonishment, began to divide. Into an arm. A shoulder. The curve of a jaw.

  Someone’s there.

  5

  It was a woman. A young woman.

  Not Belle; no, that would have been too much to hope for. This was a woman he had never seen before. She was holding the lit branch of a tree. (My torch, he remembered, with a rush of sadness.) The light whittled her into such a confusion of shadow and non-shadow that it took him some time to grasp that her bare arm led to a bare shoulder, and this shoulder sloped to a bare breast.…

  For a moment he thought he had slipped back in time—just a little—back to his days in the Xingu Valley. Naked women had been something of a staple. Who could blame a fellow, after a long week of laying railway ties and raising up bridges, if he wanted a few minutes in a darkened room? The girl didn’t even have to be smiling. (She almost never was.) She had only to stand there, in a state of complicity. Saying …

  Como vai vocé? How are you?

  The same question this young woman was asking him now.

  “Como vai vocé?”

  “Bem,” he managed to mutter. “Obrigado.”

  (Even under duress, the old courtesies.)

  “Pardon,” he went on in Portuguese. “What day is it?”

  “I could not tell you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It is night.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Here.”

  Here.

  “No,” he protested. “I was … Where are my comrades? Meus amigos?”

  “Oh, your friends. They are far away now.”

  How far away? A mile? Two? Ten? There was no way of knowing.

  “You are here with us,” she added encouragingly. “Na nossa aldeia.”

  In our village.

  He raised himself up on his elbows, felt another wave of nausea. Squinting into the emptiness, he began to dredge up the last fragments of memory.

  The jungle at twilight. That strange whinny. The monkey that wasn’t a monkey. Those shapes dropping from the canopy.

  Father.

  With a rumbling groan, he rolled to his knees and swept his hands across the ground. Amazed to find the darkness springing away at his touch—until he realized the woman was standing over him, following him with her torch.

  The Colonel lay no more than five feet away. Heavy and crumpled. White as cream.

  “Father…”

  The old man’s spectacles, still intact, dangled from his left ear. His mouth had swung ajar, and his hand had curled into a half talon. But the only thing Kermit could see in that moment was the cockroach that had climbed onto the old man’s face. Four inches long, translucently pale, with softly thrumming wings. Crawling through the gray underbrush of the old man’s mustache.

  Shuddering, Kermit knocked the insect away. He lowered his ear to the old man’s lips, then to his chest, then back to his lips. Waited, in a madness of suspense, for a sign of life. And heard at last the stream of breath, rasping but steady.

  Tears stabbed his eyes. He heard the woman say:

  “He will be well.”

  “No,” he answered, smearing a forearm across his face. “He will not be well.”

  “I am speaking truly. The … the physician—” She was stopped by the squelch of her own laughter. “You will forgive me. You must forgive me. I haven’t spoken Portuguese in so long. It sounds funny now. What I would like to say is, the physician has looked at him.”

  “Physician,” Kermit repeated. “You mean some … some feiticeiro with feathers and beads shook a rattle over him and declared him well. Is that what you mean?”

  She said nothing.

  “My father is not well. He has not been well for some time. He will need a great deal more than rattles.”

  And what wouldn’t he have given, in that moment, to be proven wrong? To see the Colonel come roaring to his feet. Filli
ng the air with words. Rot! Bunk! Flubdub!

  Kermit staggered to his own feet—and felt his head slam against a thick, rough thatching.

  “You are very tall,” said the young woman.

  “Yes,” he said, clutching his skull.

  “What is your name?”

  He looked at her for a long minute.

  “Kermit,” he said.

  “Kurr … meet.”

  “I am this man’s son. I have … I have enjoyed very friendly relations with the Indians of Brazil.”

  Wincing at his own phrase: friendly relations.

  “Indians,” she said.

  “Yes, like…”

  Like you, he wanted to propose. Only he was beginning to see she was a bit of an anomaly, too. Yes, her dark hair was parted down the middle in the native fashion, but her nose was long and full, her eyes—for these he could see clearly—a lightly flecked hazel. For the first time, he began to feel a trickle of hope.

  “Well, now,” he said. “You have the advantage of me, Senhorita. You know my name, and I don’t yet know yours.”

  “My name.” For some time, she was silent. “Luz. Except that nobody calls me this anymore.”

  “That’s a very pretty name. May I ask you something, Luz? Do you think you might help us?”

  “I don’t see how.” Her brows crowded down. “Oh, wait! I can help you talk to them. How do you say that? The person who does such a thing.”

  “Intérprete.”

  “In-tér-prete.”

  “Luz, I don’t mean helping us that way. I mean: Can you help us leave this place?”

  “Oh, decidedly not.”

  Such a prissy formulation that, in different circumstances, he might have laughed.

  “You speak our language,” he pressed on. “One of our languages. You understand better than anyone that a great crime has occurred. My father and I, we have been kidnapped. Taken against our will.”

  She nodded absently.

  “And where there is crime,” he went on, “there must be punishment, is that not so? Any minute, I assure you, our comrades will come for us. There will be much bloodshed, do you understand that? For your people. I would not want this fate to fall on you. I can … I can give you my word as a gentleman that if you take us back to our friends—back to the river—you might—”