Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (7 page)

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.”

*   *   *

O
N BOARD THE
O
LYMPIC,
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.

*   *   *

T
HE 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.…

*   *   *

I
N 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?

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.

*   *   *

H
E 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?

…
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.