Taft 2012 (3 page)

A
s Chief Executive and commander-in-chief of the United States of America, William Howard Taft had been privy to many secrets. Some were trivial. Others were earthshaking. Many, he cringed to recall, still pressed heavily on his soul.

But as he sat in an unnaturally comfortable chair in one of the West Wing meeting rooms—which was now, he marveled, equipped with an incomprehensibly begadgeted conference table—there was one secret above all that he wished he knew: how in thunderation did they get the meringue inside of these little yellow cakes?

“What manner of witch
is
this Hostess?” he mumbled, putting down the plastic wrapper and peering at the creamy end of one of the half-eaten pastries. These so-called Twinkie cakes were the cap to the fine, sprawling meals the White House kitchen had been serving him the last two days. A couple of his favorite recipes had proven to be somewhat archaic, just as that Secret Service fellow, Kowalczyk, had warned him. But in the end the intrepid chefs had persevered by consulting an unseen scholar the agent had called
Goggle or Google or something to that effect. God bless this encyclopedic Mr. Google, whoever he was.

With his stomach near to bursting, Taft’s mood had likewise resumed its full capacity. His mind, though, was still quite a bit hazy—no doubt thanks to the pills the White House physician had been giving him since removing the bullet from his leg. But he’d warily palmed the last two tablets and slipped them into his pocket, and he’d begun at last to clear the cobwebs and gather the rudiments of his memory.

All he could put together were bits and pieces. Flashes of Cincinnati. Fragments of the Philippines. The stout, sober face of his aide-de-camp and best friend, Major Archibald Butt. The wooden grimace and bad teeth of his victor in the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson. He remembered the man’s Inauguration Day, barely. His own last day in the White House. With his head in a cloud of melancholy thicker than the thunderheads that had suddenly marred the bright day, he had wandered into the rain to escape the pomp and circumstance of the coming ceremony. The storm had seemed to descend from the sky and enfold him, calm and warm, like having the eye of a hurricane all to oneself. Suddenly exhausted, he’d lain down in a soft, warm, wet spot, some garden or another on the Ellipse. Content at last to let go of the pressures and stresses and relentless scrutiny of his office, he slept.

And then he’d woken up. Here. Now.

It was all so incredulous. Still, he was a rational man. Perhaps it was merely a suggestible demeanor brought on by the pills he’d been given, but there was no doubt in his mind that he must indeed be in the future. This was too elaborate to be a hoax pulled off in the White House. And the taciturn Woodrow Wilson was hardly the joking type.

But it was neither Wilson nor Butt whose memory gnawed at the very core of Taft’s spirit. There was something or someone else—a soul so intimately tied to his own as to be invisible in its pervasiveness—that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. At first he recalled a touch, so brittle yet so strong. And then a gaze, gray and infinite. And then that scent again, the sweet, faint, tantalizing tang of cherry blossoms—

His reverie was interrupted by his new bodyguard, Agent Kowalczyk, clearing of the throat. “Sir, you okay over there? You look a little out of it.”

“Hmm? Out of
what
, exactly?”

“Out of … ah, never mind.” Kowalczyk folded his shiny black device—it looked like a tin of lozenges—and slid it into his pocket. “Just making sure you’re feeling okay. After—you know—I, um, shot you.”

“Again I say, don’t fret over it. I’m embarrassed to have collapsed from such a glancing scratch. A bullet is naught but a glorified pebble. Why, a worthy opponent of mine once delivered a campaign speech just moments after being shot by some lunatic in Milwaukee.
He
didn’t let himself be stopped by some paltry slug.” Taft frowned. “Now, why for the life of me can’t I remember who that was …”

Just as quickly as he had regained his good cheer, he’d become troubled once more. But it wasn’t because of the agent’s handwringing. A swift and spine-tingling chill lanced through Taft’s body. “Kowalczyk, tell me,” he said with a rippling shudder. “What room are we in exactly? I should know, but I don’t.”

“What room? Oh, right. Things have probably been rearranged in the White House since you lived here. This is the Roosevelt Room. He built the West Wing, didn’t he? But it didn’t get named that until the ’60s, I think.”

Roosevelt
. The name flashed like lightning inside his skull. Theodore Roosevelt. His predecessor. His mentor. His friend. His greatest supporter, and then, later, his most terrible adversary. A man whose smaller yet somehow grander frame had always cast a shadow over Taft.

But Roosevelt, he knew, must be long dead now. Dead like Woodrow Wilson. Dead like his children.

Dead.

Like Nellie.

Taft dropped his snack cake as he felt a tightening in his chest. No, not a tightening. A clenching, as if the centuries themselves sought to rip his heart from his breast and send it hurtling back to its rightful place, its rightful time.

Its rightful owner.

Through a halo of pain and anguish, Taft heard Kowalczyk yell for the doctor. But Taft was already halfway out the door. Like an enraged beast—the kind Teddy used to make headlines shooting while on safari—he threw open the door of the Roosevelt Room and charged into the hallway, seeking only escape.

Then he crashed into some other body and went down in a tangle of limbs.

Hands pushed him. Arms pulled him. He unleashed a howl from the pit of his being. Like a tortoise rolled onto its shell, he found himself suddenly on his back.

Next to him on the floor lay his wife.

“Nellie! My dear, oh, my dear.” His tears came in torrents. “I thought you were gone, too. Oh, my Nellie. I thought you were gone.”

As he pawed at his eyes, though, his vision came back into focus. This woman he’d collided with was small and slim like Nellie. She had the same serious look on her face, a fetching expression of
certain, quiet determination.

But she wasn’t his beloved. She wasn’t his wife.

She wasn’t his Nellie.

“President Taft,” the woman said awkwardly. “Ah … there now. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

Taft, his head buried in his chest and his sobs coming in gasps, felt thin, cool arms around him.

“Mr. Taft, please. Take a breath. Deep breaths, okay? Good. Are you all right now? My name is Susan. Susan Weschler. It’s an honor to meet you, sir.” Then the arms gripped him tighter. “Oh, you poor man.”

T
he view from the Penthouse Balcony was so bright it hurt Taft’s eyes. Electric lights glittered across the city like a manmade firmament. Airplanes that must be the size of railcars roared overhead. He stood there gripping the handrail, the night air sighing across his bare and uncombed head, bringing with it the sounds of society and machinery he couldn’t imagine. This, he knew, was only the beginning of the wonders this new century had to offer him.

The only wonder he wanted, though, was Nellie.

Taft had run the Philippines as governor-general, stood up to the robber barons at U.S. Steel, faced down hecklers on stages and train platforms from sea to shining sea. Along the way, people had called him a dullard; they’d called him a traitor to both the Republican Party and the progressive cause; they’d called him prejudiced. Every sharp word had cut him to the quick. And yet he’d weathered such storms with as much fortitude as he’d been able to muster while in the White House. Let them call him a bad president, a spineless one. It was better to have them think he was
weak than to have them know the truth: that it was, more than anything else, an acute case of heartbreak that had all but assassinated the twenty-seventh president of the United States.

He remembered the day he’d first lost his wife. He’d been in office only two months; he and Nellie had been aboard the presidential yacht on a getaway to Mount Vernon. Nellie fainted. Ice was put to her temples and a brandy poured down her throat. By the time they’d made landfall, though, it was clear this was no bout of seasickness.

The stroke laid Nellie low, left her unable to speak. More than that, though, it was a cruel trick of fate that left a woman of such great life force infirm and isolated—a child learning to use her body again—just as she’d finally achieved her lifelong dream of becoming first lady.

She was still alive, and she fought hard to regain her faculties, thank the Lord for that. But the engine that drove Taft died that day in 1909, leaving him to finish out the rest of his long term just as hobbled as Nellie was. He’d downplayed it, of course, with his booming laugh and his beaming smile and his promises of national pride and equity. All that eroded quickly, of course. Taft was first deflated and then defeated.

And now, he’d lost Nellie a second time. A final time. He had nothing left. Washington, D.C., was laid out below him, but it may as well have been Bangkok.