Italy last summer, and before him, what’s her name?”
“Elizabeth,” said Caroline, “empress of Austria. They also-whoever they are-killed the prime minister of Spain and the president of France… She was so beautiful.” Caroline had always been told that her mother had been very like the Kaiserin, whose death from a knife through the heart, as she was getting aboard a ship, had appalled the world. It was, somehow, unnatural that a woman as beautiful as the Empress should be so gratuitously murdered.
“Funny thing,” said Cameron. “Hanna’s been worrying for more than a year now. ‘I want more guards,’ he kept telling the Secret Service. Then they find that list of those wops over in New Jersey, with the names of all the rulers they meant to kill, and Hanna was fit to be tied, because there was the Major’s name but the Major wasn’t interested; very fatalistic, the Major.”
“Very lucky, the Major,” added Lizzie, reclaiming the faithless Kiki from Martha’s arms. Martha now sat, cross- legged, on Caroline’s shawl. The four of them then proceeded to contemplate history.
A few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon of September 6, 1901, in the Temple of Music of the Pan- American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, President McKinley stood before a large American flag, with potted plants to his left and right. An organ played Bach. The day was hot. The presidential collar had twice been changed. Mrs. McKinley was, as usual, ill; and bedded down in the International Hotel. The President was attended only by Cortelyou, and three agents of the Secret Service. Exposition police were also on hand, but when the President gave the order to throw open the doors, so that the people could come shake his hand, there was more than the usual confusion. For one thing, the line was not orderly and rapid, the way the President preferred: one citizen’s hand succeeded rapidly by another, one pair of eyes deeply, if briefly, transfixed by the President’s luminous stare. Instead, the citizens of the republic advanced slowly, hesitantly, singly, in couples, even in groups. There was no sorting them out. A young, slight man approached the President with a bandaged right hand. Face to face, there was a moment of confusion. As McKinley’s right arm outstretched automatically, he was presented with a problem. Did one shake a bandaged hand? or would its owner offer him his left hand? The young man solved the problem. He darted forward, pushing to one side the President’s arm while, simultaneously, firing twice a pistol that he had been holding in the bandaged hand. The stunned President remained standing while guards threw the man to the floor; then, as they dragged him from the hall, a chair was brought for the President, who sat down and, dazedly, felt his waistcoat, where blood was oozing. But he seemed more interested in the assailant than in his wound, and he said to Cortelyou, most calmly, “Don’t let them hurt him.” Then, when he saw the blood on his fingers, he said, “Be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell my wife.”
Eleven minutes later, the President was on the operating table of the Exposition’s emergency hospital. One bullet had grazed his chest; the other had entered the vast paunch, and gone through the stomach. The surgeons were able to repair the points of entry and of exit; the bullet, however, was not found. Then the President was sewed up. No vital organs had been harmed; on the other hand, the wound was not drained, and there remained the possibility of infection, not to mention shock to a system that might not prove to be as strong as it appeared.
During the next few days, Vice-President, Cabinet, and Mark Hanna, as well as McKinley’s sisters and brother, came to Buffalo. But after a feverish weekend, the President’s temperature returned to normal; and he was pronounced out of danger. The Vice-President vanished into the Adirondacks, while the Cabinet dispersed. Meanwhile, Leon Czolgosz was closely questioned. When he confessed to an admiration for a leading anarchist named Emma Goldman, she was immediately arrested in Chicago; and declared the originator of the plot to kill the President.
But at Beverly Farms, news was slow in coming. Don Cameron relied on visitors to bring him day-old newspapers. As there was neither telephone nor telegraph office nearby, Caroline wondered if she should go back to Washington, to her command post at the
Kiki began to bark; visitors had appeared on the piazza of the house. Brooks Adams and his wife, Daisy, waved to the group on the lawn. Then Brooks shouted, “Teddy!”
“Teddy what?” responded Cameron, getting first to his knees; then, laboriously, onto his feet.
“Teddy Roosevelt,” roared Brooks, as his wife, frowning, put her hands over her ears, “is president of the United States.”
“Oh, God,” murmured Cameron.
Caroline crossed herself. The poor good McKinley was now as vanished from the story as Del. Then to Kiki’s delight, everyone ran toward the house.
“When-how?” asked Lizzie.
“Yesterday evening. Friday the thirteenth. Gangrene set in. At two-fifteen this morning, he died. Teddy was off in the woods, somewhere. But he should be in Buffalo by now, being sworn in. The Cabinet’s all there except for Hay, who’s in Washington, holding together the government. No one knows the extent of the conspiracy. The Spanish-Cubans are thought to be behind it, out of revenge, for what McKinley did-and did not do-in Cuba.” Brooks spoke rapidly, without a pause for breath. Then, like a child, he began to jump up and down on the porch; and Kiki jumped alongside him. “Teddy’s got it all now! Do you realize that he occupies a place greater than Trajan’s at the high noon of the Roman empire?” Brooks, like his brother, never spoke when he could lecture. “There has never been so much power given a man at so propitious a time in history! He will have the opportunity-and the means-to subjugate all Asia, and so give America the hegemony of the earth, which is our destiny, written in stars! Also,” Brooks came to earth with a crash, “today is a day of great importance to Daisy and me. It is our wedding anniversary.”
“History does seem to have us by the throat,” said Lizzie mildly. “Come inside.”
“Champagne,” said Cameron, brightening. “For your anniversary…”
“And for Theodore the Great, whose reign has, at last, begun.”
“No period of mourning for Mr. McKinley?“ asked Caroline, who felt, suddenly, an intense grief for Del, the Major and, not least, herself, bereft.
“The King is dead.” Brooks was cold. “Long live the King.”
2
IN THE BRIGHTLY ILLUMINATED reception room of the Pennsylvania Station, John Hay sat in a gilded armchair. Adee stood beside him, while a half-dozen Secret Service men prowled about the small, ornate, musty room reserved for dignitaries. The train from Buffalo was due to arrive at eight-thirty; aboard was the new president, and the body of his predecessor. Hay had arranged for the White House ushers to escort Mrs. McKinley and Cortelyou to the mansion, where McKinley would lie in state, while his family helped Mrs. McKinley to pack her belongings, a melancholy task that Hay had twice before witnessed when the widows of Lincoln and Garfield had each been obliged to deal with a life’s end in the most humiliating and public way.
Once again, to Hay’s amazement, as there would be no vice-president for another four years, he was constitutional heir to the President. If only for this reason, he was confident that Roosevelt would replace him as secretary of state. The President-the youngest in history at forty-two-must not have as his potential successor a sixty-two-year-old wreck, which is how Hay thought of himself, literally a wreck in body-mind, too. The death of Del had shaken him; the death of McKinley had sunk him into a melancholy of a sort that he had never before experienced. “I am a harbinger of death,” he would say aloud, dramatically, when alone: he had yet to find the person with whom he could share his desolate vision of himself. In the nation’s history, only three presidents had been murdered in office, and each had been a close friend of John Hay. It was curious, too, how essentially benign the three murdered men had been; it was not as if they had been tyrants, tempting the gods. Although, and Hay began to redefine “tyrant,” many Filipinos and Spanish-Cubans did view McKinley as a tyrant. But, thus far, the Secret Service had been unable to link Czolgosz’s anarchists to those Spanish-Cubans who were supposedly eager to avenge wrongs done them by McKinley.
Although Roosevelt had announced in Buffalo that, as he was simply a continuation of McKinley, he would keep the Cabinet intact, Hay expected, after a decent interval, to be let go. On Sunday morning Hay had written Roosevelt a letter of commiseration and congratulation, all couched in a valetudinarian style: “My official life is at an
