You fool. She had had these fantasies when she was thirteen. They hardly suited her at twenty-eight. Aloud, she said, “Remember — you’re a representative of Britain!” That was what Arthur had said to her as they had come down the gangway from the ship. Arthur could be rather stuffy sometimes, was the truth of it, although she’d never say so to anyone else. She said, “Remember you’re British!” and laughed and took her hands away and walked with deliberate slowness to the steamer trunk and selected a flannel Jaeger dressing gown and put it on with the same slow grace. Then she looked around the room and even waved (at nothing), as if to show that she had risen above the moment.
When Arthur came in, she was lying in bed, the robe exchanged for a sensible nightgown because of course she couldn’t go to bed naked. (“What would people say?” her mother would have shrieked.) Arthur’s cheeks were red, his pince-nez fogged, but he was grinning. “New York is a hurly-burly!” he shouted. “Are you asleep?”
She was laughing. “How could I be?”
“I walked to Broadway. I walked up Broadway. I walked over to Fifth Avenue and I walked down to Washington Square! It is all quite magnificent in a somewhat active way. I’ve never thought of this before. London is magnificent for its static things — buildings and statues and places where great things happened: the Monument! Westminster! New York is magnificent for what is happening — the people, the traffic, an electrical feeling. Perhaps it’s money being made. Are you tired?”
“Why would I be tired?”
“Remember that you’ve been unwell, Touie. You mustn’t overexcite yourself. And it’s been an exhausting day. Getting us and our goods and chattels off the ship and into a hackney carriage; getting here — all that. You must be tired.”
“You’re having an idea, Arthur.”
“Oh, well — I only thought — it’s an hour until we have to dress for dinner — perhaps a bit of a lie-down…”
“Well — lie down.”
That went well, and they both dozed a bit, and then she lay on his chest and told him how silly she’d been in fearing she’d been watched.
“Nonsense, little one.” He stroked her hair. “Do you know that the walls of this hotel are two feet thick? And do you know why? It’s what makes the hotel so quiet: They put up two brick walls separated by twenty inches of air and then filled that space with volcanic stone! Yes, hundreds of tons of porous, and therefore quite light, stone between the rooms! I read the pamphlet the little man at Reception gave me — wretchedly written thing — and it’s quite remarkable, quite remarkable. Nothing like it in London. It’s very…mmm…New York.”
“It is quiet, isn’t it?”
“So nobody could possibly have seen you. What you were feeling were my spirit emanations.”
“You mean you were watching me.”
“From a distance, and only in spirit, my dear.”
“And then you came in, in the flesh.” She snuggled against him. “How nice.”
At seven, they dressed for a very early dinner (really more a workingman’s tea, she thought) with Henry Irving, who’d left a card and an invitation to join him, but who had to be at the theater at what she thought of as the dinner hour. Louisa and Arthur managed, in a practiced but never-mentioned ballet, to avoid dressing in front of each other. Louisa needed the help of Ethel, anyway, and it would hardly have been proper for Arthur to be there when Ethel was and Louisa was less than fully dressed. Arthur, therefore, dressed first while she stayed in the bed. He smoked a cigarette, put on trousers and shirt and announced that he was now decent by walking around to her side of the bed as he talked.
“Perhaps I should take up smoking,” she said.
“Ladies don’t smoke.”
“You make it look so nice.”
“Only fast women smoke.” He was trying to tie a white butterfly in his cravat. “Drat! Why did Masters have to make himself sick!”
“I don’t think he made himself. I think he caught something.”
“Because he’s undersized and pale as a ghost and unhealthy — typical London lower class. I should never have taken him on.”
She smiled. “What you need, Arthur, is some sinister Indian. A dacoit or a dervish — something from one of your stories.”
“Damn my stories. Drat! I can’t get this tie right!”
She got into her robe in the shelter of the bedcovers and went to him. He had lit a new cigarette, had it jutting from his mouth as he raised his chin for her to tie the bow. She took the cigarette from his mouth, puffed, and put it back. He cried, “Louisa!”
“Hush or I can’t tie your tie.”
“You must never do that again. Promise me.”
He was using his serious voice, when he sounded like her father. She finished the tie and said, “I promise,” but ended the promise with a silent never to take a cigarette from your mouth again.
“I shall be in the sitting room. Shall I ring for Ethel?”
She began going through her dresses. She had put only three evening dresses in this trunk. All were conservative, matronly, “nice,” the sort of thing that the retiring wife of an eminent man should wear. She had picked out the bronze with the gunmetal stripes and the pavé over the breasts when Ethel came in. She had been out for a walk. It had been quite exciting! Louisa was left unsure why it was that Ethel could go for a walk alone but she couldn’t. The difference was some nuance of propriety, she knew that, but she supposed the real difference was Arthur.
A little after eleven that night, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt was walking — it might more accurately have been said marching—up Sixth Avenue. He had been a commissioner for more than a year, the entire time devoted to what in military terms was called a “forward strategy.” In police terms, this meant reorganization, the ripping out of dead wood, and the tearing up by the roots of corruption and graft from what had been (and, he feared, still was, thanks to his three fellow commissioners and a wickedly immoral Democratic Party) the most corrupt police force in the country. Soon, he promised himself, he would go on to better things, leaving, he hoped, a legacy — or at least the reputation of a legacy.
Part of his project of reform was this nightly walk, every night a different part of the city, to check on the beat policemen: Were they on their beats? Were they on time? Were they sober? Terrible Teddy might appear anywhere, any time from nine to midnight, and now and then at three in the morning. He had found sleeping cops, drunken cops, cops sitting over fires in trash cans getting warm, cops getting their ashes hauled by prostitutes, cops doing everything that cops shouldn’t. The broken careers of cops littered the paths of Teddy’s walks; the ghosts of fired cops haunted them as the fallen haunt a battlefield.
Roosevelt in fact thought in military terms — thought, too, that he’d make a damned good general, if only he could find a war. And of course he’d be a general, not a private or a sergeant or even a captain: his career, having started at least halfway up the ladder because he was a child of privilege, was of course headed for the top. And he had to reach the summit of whatever mountain he chose to climb; it was no good enjoying the view from even a few feet down. He had to achieve—but he also had to be seen to achieve. At that moment, he was thinking that his next step should be to run for governor of New York State. And to be elected, of course. He’d already run for mayor of New York City but lost — finished a humiliating third, in fact — and he’d been appointed to the Civil Service Commission and to this job as a commissioner of police, but what could a man do as one of several members of a commission? Where was the glory in it? Where was the fame?