Taft 2012 (5 page)

“Bill, check this out,” Kowalczyk said as he took off his jacket. He opened the box and began scattering its contents across the carpet.

“Wonderful,” said Taft, mug in hand. “That looks like thirsty work. Would you like some coffee?”

“Not right now, thanks.” He was wiring some kind of machine to the television set. Then, with a look of triumph on his face, he pulled out two white sticks from the box. “Look, Bill. You ready for a few holes?”

Taft stared. The white sticks looked like golf clubs. Kowalczyk laid them on the sofa and picked up a device Taft had learned was called a remote control—a miraculous time-saver, even though the loud, maddening chaos of the television gave him a headache if he watched it for more than ten minutes at a sitting.

Kowalczyk punched a couple buttons, and a picture was summoned to the screen. It was far from maddening. Just the opposite.

It was a golf course.

Taft almost dropped his coffee. “Well,” he said under his breath, “what have we here.”

Kowalczyk beamed at him. “Come on! Take a club. Give it a try.” The agent didn’t wait for him. He’d already moved the coffee table aside and readied himself to tee off. On the screen, an animated little man mimicked Kowalczyk’s movements perfectly.

“Agent Kowalczyk,” said Taft, with awe in his voice, “you golf?”

“No, Bill.
We
golf. Here.”

Taft put down his mug and took the proffered club. It felt odd. Lightweight and crafted of plastic, its grip and heft were a far cry from a solid one-wood or three-iron. Still, the feel of the lance in his hand immediately calmed him. He remembered how much he’d been ridiculed in the press—hell, even by his own staff, party,
and family—about his near-daily trips to the links. Golf, after all, was the leisure activity of the aristocrat. But it was his way of exercising, his way of clearing his head. And, most important, it was the line he drew between the demands of being the most powerful man in America and being simply an honest, plain fellow who needed green grass under his feet, fresh air in his lungs, and a blue sky overhead.

He assumed his address, aligned his club and body. Then he took a tentative test swing. The little man on the screen moved accordingly, like some kind of marionette connected to him by invisible strings. Taft couldn’t help but giggle. “This is quite remarkable, Kowalczyk. Quite remarkable.”

He readied himself again and then took a swing. He duffed.

“Damnation!” he howled in frustration. He tried again. This time, he took a deep breath and let his worries drain out of his head, down his spine, out his feet. True, there was no smell of shrubbery or tweeting of birds to lull him into a meditative state, as was often the case when he was on the course. But it was close enough; soon his breathing had slowed to a steady rhythm. Even his mind, which had been in such a half-drugged stupor over the past few weeks, had sharpened and focused on the shot at hand.

“Fore,” he whispered. He let fly. The ball arced high into the air, above the trees. He watched it soar, the landscape whizzing by the ball on the screen as if by magic.

Then it landed. It bounced. It rolled.

Right into the cup.

“Bully! Kowalczyk, did you see that?” Taft thrust his half-club into the air. “Incredible. My first drive in a hundred years, and by golly it’s a hole in one.”

“Ready for the next one, Mr. President?”

Taft squared his body and stared into the magical glowing green. There’d be time to go outside after lunch. Or tomorrow.

I
f it weren’t for the street signs, Taft would have already been lost. Even in his own day, the city had been a labyrinth, at least compared to Cincinnati. Granted, Cincinnati was a far larger city. But Cincinnati had been a
home
. A genial city, an honest city. Washington, however, was run by a perverse logic as confounding as the city’s layout. Taft’s mind, sharp as it was, had always knotted itself into a pretzel trying to figure it out, just as his calves knotted now as he ambled in the general direction of Union Station and the Supreme Court.

“What I wouldn’t give for a stiff rubdown with some witch hazel,” he muttered, smiling as he did so at an elderly woman passing him on the sidewalk. She scowled at him as if he he’d wagged his tongue at her. “And that’s another difference between Washington and Cincinnati,” he added as soon as she was out of earshot.

Oh, but it felt good to stretch his legs and see people, no matter how surly they might be, no matter what ridiculous clothes he had to wear or how many plainclothes agents were in a ten-foot radius. His head felt clearer than it had in a long, long time. Even before his
hibernation—he snorted at the word’s ursine connotation; surely some venomous journalist had already applied it to him—things had been tumultuous. The election had been a disastrous affair all around, a humiliation inexorably unfolding around him day by day for a solid half-year as Teddy—his friend, his mentor, the very man who’d encouraged him to run for president in the first place—stepped back into the limelight to denigrate Taft’s performance with ever more colorful language, ever more vehement invective.

And yet, the electorate had loved that about Teddy, hadn’t they? They loved his safari-hunting, warmongering, hot-air-spouting passion. By the time November rolled around, even Taft had been resigned to the situation. Wilson seemed a solid enough fellow. Let
him
spend every night losing sleep over the world’s endless, bloody conflicts! And, in all honesty, Taft had felt a massive weight leave his shoulders the instant Wilson and his wife stepped into the White House that morning in March of 1913. Already Taft had been looking forward to returning to Cincinnati, finding work, perhaps even going on a real diet. He’d tried to manage his weight while in office, but then, out of the limelight, he hoped to peel off the extraneous seventy pounds he’d put on since being sworn in four years prior.

Of course, he’d never had the chance. As he rounded a corner onto D Street, he tried to focus his newly sharpened thoughts on the day he’d disappeared. All he could remember was taking a walk in the rain—then waking up with Butt chasing him across the South Lawn—

Wait. Butt? He’d meant Kowalczyk, of course. How odd.

Then it all came back to him. Butt. His aide-de-camp. His dearest friend. He had died—but not
after
Taft’s disappearance. Butt had died in April 1912, along with his traveling companion on the
Titanic
, Francis Millet. That’s why Taft had built the Millet–Butt
Memorial Fountain, just across the way from the South Lawn Fountain. That’s why Taft had, in his oafishness, blundered toward the fountains after waking. It was one of the few things his exhumed brain had been able to remember.

Taft shuddered. It was only just past noon, but a chill had crept into his bones. He pulled his coat tighter about him. His stomach grumbled.

“I hear you, old friend,” he said, changing course abruptly and crossing the street, incurring the wrath of a honking and altogether too fast automobile. So much was new in Washington; a hundred years, after all, was a hundred years. But surely there were some things from the old days that remained. “Yes, I hear you.”

THE COUNTER OF WALDEMANN’S DELI hadn’t changed. Taft had to restrain himself from rubbing his eyes. The televisions in the corners of the room never used to be there, of course. And people surely never used to sit at the tables while speaking on their telephones. These telephones—so tiny, and no cables!—should have surprised Taft, but oddly they did not. In fact, he was more surprised when Susan had told him wireless telephones had come into vogue only a few years earlier. In his time, Marconi’s telegraphy had successfully transmitted Morse code between ships on open water. For some reason, he’d assumed they’d all have wireless telephones in his own lifetime.

That was to say, his natural lifetime.

But the rest of it looked the same. The gleaming counters. The checkered-tile floors. Even—yes!—the framed photograph of Taft and Butt hanging on the wall, although it had faded and collected dust to the point of being almost unrecognizable. He started to call Kowalczyk in from the door, where he stood guard, to show him the memento, before he remembered that incognito
was the order of the day.

“You gonna order?” The gruff voice came from behind the counter, but all Taft could see was the top of a bald head with a paper hat perched askew there on it.

Taft froze. That voice. He knew it.

“Mr. Waldemann?”

The short man peered up at him from behind the counter. He wielded a cleaver in one hand and a bottle of mustard in the other. “No, it’s the Meat Fairy. Come on, I ain’t got all day. What’s your order?”

Taft couldn’t believe it. Surely Mr. Waldemann, the proprietor of Waldemann’s Deli, had been dead for decades. Yet here stood his spitting image.

Of course. Waldemann’s had always been a family business. Three generations of Waldemanns had worked behind the same counter together when Taft and Butt had come here every Thursday for lunch. It was one of their rituals; each week, under the pretext of a round of golf, the two of them would sneak out, evade the Secret Service, and stroll down to Waldemann’s for a brisket sandwich. He felt for all the world like a boy playing hooky again; he and Butt would laugh and gossip about the White House staff while gorging themselves on sandwiches as tall and as wide as their hats.

And this little man? Why, he must be Waldemann’s descendent. His voice, his temperament, his lack of height: all Waldemann.

“Yes, sir. My apologies. I’d like a double brisket sandwich on rye, if you please. And an egg cream.”

“On rye, eh? As opposed to …?” He lowered his head, grumbled, and began slapping at the side of an electric meat-shaving contraption. Once the rickety machine reached a sufficiently high pitch, he began feeding a skull-sized chunk of beef into it.

The smell engulfed Taft. Oh, how he’d loved these sandwiches.
He’d always had a hard time explaining just how comforted food made him feel. When the world was at his door and the dogs were barking at his heels, eating was the best way to take his mind off it all. The orderliness with which he ate his food, the fastidious way he’d mop up each morsel.… He knew that, in many ways, he spent so much time eating simply as a means of procrastination. He’d always had that problem, even as an athletic and relatively well built young man. But what was one to do when facing the enormity of all the world’s problems? Especially when, without fail, they all wound up on his desk?

“Order up!” yelled Waldemann, who then rang a bell on the counter. The same bell the Waldemanns had always rung. The sound made Taft’s mouth burst into salivation. At the end of the counter sat a monumental sandwich and what may well have been a halfgallon of egg cream in a tall, frosty glass.

Taft had to keep himself from running to the cash register. Once there, he pulled out the wallet Kowalczyk had given him. “Here, good sir. How much will it be?”

“Nine seventy-five.”

Taft gaped. He looked at the cash register to make sure he’d heard right. A sawbuck? For a lone man’s lunch? What had
happened
to this country? He’d have to look into the state of the economy. As soon, of course, as he’d finished this marvelous-looking sandwich. As Waldemann stared at him, Taft flipped through the wallet’s contents, pulling out and then pocketing a series of what appeared to be colorful, rigid business cards. Finally he found the (odd-looking!) currency. He handed a $10 bill to Waldemann, who squinted at him.