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I knelt down and kissed her, then her sister, and gathered them both for a big daddy-hug.
“Where have you two been causing trouble today?”
In a ridiculously loud stage whisper Alice said: “We’re not allowed to say… but we were hiding in church.”
Meg called again, with the business end of her voice: “Girls!”
“Mama says you’re in trouble,” Amelia reported. “She says you’re in the doghouse.”
“And we don’t even have a dog!” Alice crowed with laughter.
“Girls!” That voice brooked no nonsense.
They ran from my arms.
Chapter 11
I WILL NEVER FORGET the rest of that evening, not a moment of it. Not a detail has been lost on me.
“You and I are living in two different marriages, Ben. It’s the truth, a sad truth. I’ll admit it,” said Meg.
I was flabbergasted by this a
“Two different marriages? That’s a tough statement, Meg.”
“I meant it to be, Ben. When I was at Radcliffe and you were at Harvard I used to look at you and think, Now, this is the man I could always be with. I honestly believed that. So I waited for you while you went to law school. All the time you were at Columbia, in New York, I was wasting away at my father’s house. Then I waited some more, while you went to Cuba and fought in that war that none of us understood.”
“Meg, I’m sorry. It was a war.”
“But I’m still waiting!” She twirled around, her arms outstretched. And in that one gesture, in those few seconds, I realized the complete truth of what she was saying. Our house was not the one on Dupont Circle that Meg deserved, but a small frame bungalow on the wrong side of Capitol Hill. Cracks were visible in our plaster walls. The piano had broken keys. The roof leaked.
Through soft sobs Meg continued, “I’m not a selfish woman. I admire the cases you take, really I do. I want the poor people and the colored people to be helped. But I also want something for my girls and me. Is that so wrong?”
She wasn’t wrong. Maybe I had let her down by worrying too much about my own conscience, not thinking enough about her expectations and the life she believed she was getting when she married me.
“I love you, Meg. You know I adore you.” I reached and touched her face. Her dark hair fell across my fingers. We could have been back in Harvard Yard or walking in the moonlight along the Charles.
A sudden knock, and Mazie entered the room. “’Scuse me, Mr. Ben. They’s a man at the door. Says it’s urgent.”
“Who is it, Mazie?” said Meg.
“He say his name Nate, and…” She paused, reluctant to finish the sentence.
“Is he a colored man, Mazie?” I asked.
Meg said, “Of course he is, Ben. He’s here to see you, isn’t he?”
A pause.
“Please show the man in,” I said.
Chapter 12
RIGHT THEN AND THERE, everything changed in our lives, certainly in mine. Meg looked at me with those big eyes of hers, as much in sorrow as in anger. I reached to touch her again, but she pulled away. She shook her head as if I were a child whose behavior had disappointed her. “You know this one by name?”
“I only know one man named Nate, and that’s Nate Pryor. He was Tenth Cavalry. We rode together at San Juan Hill.”
Nate appeared at the door just in time to hear Meg say, “The hell with you, Ben.”
She walked past Nate and out of the room without so much as looking at him. Her passing set up the first decent breeze I’d felt all day.
“You can introduce us some other time,” Nate said. His voice was deep, his enunciation precise. I shook his hand warmly and clapped his shoulder.
“I don’t know what elixir you’re drinking, Nate, but you look younger than you did the day Colonel Roosevelt drove us up old San Juan Hill.”
“The only medicine I take is good old-fashioned hard work. The kind the Lord intended a man to make with his days. Maybe a little taste of ’shine once in a while, for a chaser.”
I nodded, but then I looked into his eyes. “What brings you here, Nate? What’s so urgent?”
“I’m here with a serious proposition. I wouldn’t bother you, but it’s something I believe only you can do.”
Whatever the favor he was about to ask of me, I was fast losing the desire to hear about it. A sad tale, surely-hard times, ill health, someone’s poor relative left pe
I tried to keep my voice gentle. “I’ve taken on about all the cases I can handle for a while.”
“Oh, this is not a law case.” He flashed a particularly charming smile. “Perhaps I should have mentioned that I came here today directly from the White House. This isn’t my proposition. This is a request from the president.”
I was astonished. “ Roosevelt sent you here? To my home?”
“The man himself.”
Chapter 13
THE FIRST TIME I EVER LAID eyes on Theodore Roosevelt-God, how he hated the nickname “Teddy”-I was surprised by how much he resembled the cartoons and caricatures with which the papers regularly mocked him. And now, on this fine summer day in the White House, I saw that the thick spectacles pinching his nose, the wide solid waist, and the prominent potbelly had only become more pronounced since he took up residence on Pe
Roosevelt jumped up from his desk and charged across the room toward me before his assistant, Jackson Hensen, could finish his introduction.
“Captain Corbett, a pleasure to see you again. It’s been too long.”
“The pleasure is entirely mine, Colonel… uhm, Mr. President.”
“No, no, no. I’ll always prefer Colonel!”
The president waved me over to a green silk sofa near his desk. I sat, trying to contain my excitement at being in the Oval Office, a room that was airy and beautifully appointed but a good deal smaller than I would have imagined.
A door to the left of the president’s desk glided open. In came a tall Negro valet bearing a tea tray, which he placed on a side table. “Shall I pour, sir?”
“Thank you, Harold, I’ll do my own pouring.”
The valet left the room. Roosevelt went to a cabinet behind his desk and took out a crystal decanter. “Except I’ll be pouring this. What’ll it be, Captain, whiskey or wine? I’m having claret myself. I never touch spirituous liquors.”
That is how I wound up sitting beside TR on the green sofa, sipping fine Kentucky bourbon from a china teacup embossed with the presidential seal.
“I presume our old friend Nate Pryor has given you some idea why I wanted to see you,” he said.
I placed my cup on the saucer. “He actually didn’t say much, to be honest. Only that it was to do with the South, some kind of mission. A problem with the colored people? Danger, perhaps.”
“I’ve been doing a little checking on you, Ben. It just so happens that the place you were born and raised is the perfect place to send you. Assuming you agree to this assignment.”
“ Mississippi?”
“Specifically your hometown. Eudora, isn’t it?”
“Sir? I’m not sure I understand. Something urgent in Eudora?”
He walked to his desk and returned with a blue leather portfolio stamped with the presidential seal in gold.
“You are aware that the crime of lynching has been increasing at an alarming rate in the South?” he said.
“I’ve read newspaper stories.”
“It’s not enough that some people have managed to reverse every forward step the Negro race has managed since the war. Now they’ve taken to mob rule. They run about killing i