American Scoundrel (15 page)

In a time when servants were considered invisible, when a coachman could not speak in a frank manner to the congressman who employed him, Thompson was acquiring a lot of information his master did not possess on the relationship between Key and Teresa. His servant’s honor forestalled him from selling the news to the press or betraying anything to people of Teresa’s caste. Thompson was a good, earthy Scots Presbyterian, and his attitude to the lovers was one of slightly salacious but definite disapproval. In the end, it would take a subpoena to make him talk, and with that authority, he would talk copiously.

The other servant who knew more than she was yet saying was Bridget Duffy, Teresa’s competent maid, who spent considerable time attending to Laura and slept near the child’s nursery. The majority of American maids, ninety-two out of every hundred, were, like Bridget, Irish. Though depicted by the anti-Irish Know-Nothing lodges as brutish and suffused with superstition, they often picked up the routines of fine houses in quick order and, for $4 to $7 a month plus board, proved energetic and loyal. When it was taken into account—as it rarely was—that many came from Europe’s rawest hovels in the west of Ireland, their adaptability was astonishing. Their habits were normally what was called “regular,” because most loyally remitted much of their earnings back home to post-Famine Ireland, for the support of parents or to enable their siblings to leave the hopeless Irish countryside, buy steamer tickets, and join them in America. But in some instances their mores differed from those of the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant majority. Raised in the gossipiness of small Irish villages and clachans, they were unabashed about listening in to what they accidentally overheard, and sometimes they passed on news of domestic scandals to one another.

About lunchtime on most days, having given Bridget instructions for the afternoon and leaving Laura in her care, Teresa would set out by carriage to visit eminent Washington hostesses. She gave Thompson a “lie-bill” of the houses she wanted to visit, and Thompson would choose
the order in which she did so. There was hardly a day, said Thompson, when Key did not meet them, joining Mrs. Sickles either at the destination or, more commonly, beforehand. “He met us at the President’s, Mr. McDonalds’s, Mr. Gwinn’s, and Mr. Slidell’s. Sometimes he would get into the carriage and tell us to drive through back streets.” At other times Key would encounter the carriage in the street near Lafayette Square, where he saluted Mrs. Sickles and called her madam. Sometimes he would remain on horseback and accompany the carriage; sometimes he would dismount and enter it, leaving his mount to be tethered to the back of the carriage. He never got in at the Sickleses’ door, and always but once got out before they returned to the house, generally at the Clubhouse across the square. On only one occasion, when Dan was away from Washington, did he enter the house directly from the carriage. But that did not mean he was not frequently there by other means. On his visits during Mr. Sickles’s absences, said Thompson, Key and Mrs. Sickles would go into the study. “The door was shut while they were there. There was a sofa in that room with its right foot at the door.”

Thompson had known Key to be in the house one night till one o’clock—this was while Dan was out of town in May 1858. Thompson was going to bed when he thought he heard the front doorbell ring, and he met Bridget Duffy emerging from her room in her nightclothes, under the same impression of having heard the doorbell. Perhaps a young clerk on the way home had mischievously rung it. Perhaps one of Teresa’s young admirers, fueled with liquor in the Clubhouse and knowing what was happening in the Stockton Mansion, was playing a little trick on the lovers. From above, Duffy and Thompson saw Mr. Key and Teresa come into the hall, unlock the inner front door, and look out through the front window to see whether anyone was outside on the step. They obviously saw nobody, and locked up again, reentered the study, shut the door into the hall and locked it, and locked as well the door that led from the study to the parlor.

“I stood a little while and heard them making this noise on the sofa for about two or three minutes,” the coachman said. He remarked to
Bridget that they were making a mysterious noise, and Bridget ran away. “She would not hearken to me—as it was not language suitable for her to hear. I heard them for about two or three minutes. I then went to bed; I knew they wasn’t at no good work.”

Sometimes Thompson drove Teresa to the old congressional cemetery on the eastern fringe of the city. Mr. Barton Key either joined the carriage on the way or was waiting on his horse among the trees of the graveyard. He would dismount and greet Teresa, and the two of them would vanish for an hour or an hour and a half. They also met a number of times in the Georgetown cemetery.

On one of those visits to the congressional burying ground, Thompson saw Barton elegantly emerge from the trees on his horse, Lucifer, dismount, tie the horse to a railing, help Mrs. Sickles out of the carriage, and walk away with her “down the burying ground.” Another day only Mr. Key’s tethered horse was visible, and a colored man appeared and handed Mrs. Sickles a note. She took it and walked away among the graves, and Mr. Key arrived afterward in a carriage and told the man to take the same carriage home. Then he followed Teresa’s tracks down through the burial monuments toward a supposedly joyous meeting.
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At least the burial ground meetings were discreet to a certain degree, and the afternoon meetings at polite homes had a reasonable seemliness to them, but in combination with the meetings in the Sickleses’ home, they formed a pattern of recklessness, as if Key and Teresa felt they were pursuing a literary or theatrical version of hopeless yet admirable love. We do not know if Teresa saw Key as a potential partner for life or had fantasies of fleeing with him to California, Cuba, or Central America. There is no evidence. But Key must have been a wonderful lover, with his excellent physique, with—behind his actions—all the energy of his somber temperament, of his desperate, neurotic soul, of his hypochondriacal fear of death and his frenzy to be confirmed as one of the living.

As the affair became habitual, Dan was operating as one of the more effective Buchanan supporters on the floor of the House. In June he had
made what his side considered an able speech in defense of the President’s stand against a recent stint of British “visitation and search” activities against American ships in the Gulf of Mexico. He was pleased that the Secretary of the Navy had sent a fleet into the Gulf strong enough to drive the British squadron from those waters. Dan’s outrage, however, was not as purely republican as it might first have seemed; the British excuse was that the Royal Navy was trying to intercept American ships engaged illegally in the slave trade.

The Sickleses closed up their Washington house and left for New York on July 1. Key saw Teresa and Dan off and promised to visit them during the summer. Dan would lack Barton’s degree of leisure, because he had a hard reelection contest ahead of him. Fernando Wood had formed his own Democratic machine, called Mozart Hall, and would put up a candidate against Dan. So would the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, more effective on a local level than ever they were on the national scale.

That summer, while Dan campaigned, Philip Barton Key arrived from Washington to visit the Sickleses at their residence on the Hudson. Barton was on his way to the great watering place at Saratoga Springs, where he intended for the sake of his health to imbibe the waters from the local springs and to enjoy the languorous rest the fine white hotels of Saratoga offered. He saw Dan and Teresa before he left and on his return trip. In fact, he was back in Manhattan at an exciting time. On September 1, the successful laying of the telegraph cable between New York and London was greeted with popular enthusiasm as the wedding of Europe and America. Broadway was alive with people, and Daniel Dougherty of Philadelphia, a friend of Dan’s who was in town for the celebration of the event, saw Teresa Sickles sitting in a carriage that had been stopped by traffic. He asked her to give him a lift to the Metropolitan Hotel, where he knew that Dan had gone for a better view of the celebratory procession. Dougherty found Dan and Barton Key in one of the reception rooms of the Metropolitan, from whose window they had a prime view of the parade. The cable would break within three days, but of course no one knew that at the moment, and Dan was one of the
laudatory speakers at a banquet to greet the phenomenon. Dougherty would meet Key again as a guest at Bloomingdale.
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Barton was already making plans for the fall when Teresa would return to Washington, but for the present, he and Teresa managed to have assignations in New York. The people of the hotel where Key stayed noticed that “he left . . . at exactly the same time every day, as if for an appointment.” It was later “conjectured what his regular appointment was.” But though his movements and intentions were so obvious, his vanity permitted him to see himself as an accomplished and worldly lover. He told a friend, “French intrigue! A fig for common license! French intrigue and romance, with a good spice of danger in it.”
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Dan’s reelection headquarters were in Gardner’s Hotel. Here, during a busy summer, he received intelligence that Fernando Wood’s Democratic wing had met at Room 49 in the Astor House with Republicans, including Horace Greeley, and with Know-Nothing General Walbridge, to devise ways to beat Dan Sickles. When, on election day, he triumphed, with the help of Tammany’s Captain Wiley and his electoral cohorts, his supporters celebrated by sending up a balloon from whose passenger basket hung effigies of Mr. Fernando Wood and General Walbridge in a most precarious position, “one depending from it by his arms and the other by his legs.” A satin banner, decorated with gold fringe and tassels, hung from the balloon and bore the inscription “The Honorable D. E. Sickles—triumphant over a base combination of moral and political depravity and corruption. . ..”
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By the time this exuberant celebration took place, Dan and Teresa had organized the return of their household to the Stockton Mansion. A new set of congressmen were impressed by the way Dan was able to live. One of the Sickleses’ friends, the North Carolina representative and future Confederate general Lawrence O’Brien Branch, could not afford anything like Lafayette Square, so he rented rooms in a not entirely comfortable boardinghouse. “Board is bad,” he wrote, “but the House sits nearly all day and I make my dinner on ham and tongue at the Capitol.” When he did return to his room, he was kept awake by the endless conversation of “two old maids” who occupied the room next door.
Thus, he was delighted to attend a dinner at the Sickleses’ house that winter, a party of about twenty ladies and gentlemen, and to accompany Mrs. Sickles, “young, pretty, and very stylish,” to the table. The aristocratic Branch was astounded that Dan lived “in great style keeping one of the finest carriages etc. etc. in the city.”
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After one dinner, Teresa wrote to her friend Florence that, in the pattern of the social life of the previous congressional session, the entire dinner group went off to a party at Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown’s, where they danced the lancers till three in the morning. “Tomorrow at Mrs. Douglas’ party will be a perfect crush,” but a breathing space was afforded, because a dinner at the Gwinns’ was postponed because of the illness of the Gwinn daughter. All Teresa’s letters to friends spoke with naive excitement about the social pace of Washington, but none of them mentioned or hinted at the existence of a lover. It was Key’s asides to friends, and his boyish carelessness even when he thought he was being cautious, that would most attract the attention of bystanders to the existence of the affair.
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In October, Barton had ridden up Fifteenth Street in his usual white riding cap, which, oddly, he sometimes wore even to social events, dismounted, and stepped onto the porch of a house that belonged to a White House gardener named Thomas Brown and his wife, Nancy. Key asked Nancy Brown whether the house two doors along the street, Number 383, was occupied. Mrs. Brown said it wasn’t. Key asked whether she knew to whom it belonged. A colored man named John Gray, she told him, who lived somewhere on Capitol Hill. The colored people around there, she said, could give him all the information about Gray.

Mrs. Brown saw him again about three weeks later. He tied his horse, the gray, to her tree and knocked on her door. Mrs. Brown, a forthright woman, asked whether he was aware that it was against the law to tie horses to people’s trees in Washington. Key obligingly said he would no longer tie it there, and told her that he had rented Number 383 for a friend, implying that the friend was a member of the Senate. He then untied his horse and rode away. John Gray would later say that he
rented the house to Mr. Key on November 25, 1858, for occupation by a gentleman from Massachusetts named Wright.

Mrs. Brown did not see all the arrivals and departures of Key and Teresa, but she observed a number of them. Indeed, an increasingly excited group of both white and black people in the neighborhood observed the parties to the affair. Key would often turn up first, let himself in through the front door, and reappear in the yard at the back of the house to get armfuls of wood. The thread of smoke from the chimney would unleash knowing and risqué comments from the observant neighbors. Sometimes Teresa would enter the house by the back way, down the alley and through the muddy yard. Perhaps an hour later, Key would let her out the front door, though occasionally she would both arrive and leave via the back door and the muddy side lane to the street.

For one of the assignations, said Mrs. Brown, the woman she would come to learn was Teresa Sickles wore a little plaid silk dress, a black raglan cloak fringed with bugles, and a black velvet shawl with lace. On another occasion she wore a brown robe, like a traveling dress. She was always well cloaked and shawled. Her observations of Teresa accorded with those of a freed colored woman named Mrs. Baylis and her son, Crittenden, from across the street. Once, passing Mrs. Brown’s house, Mrs. Sickles, the congressman’s wife, looked with darksome unease at the gardener’s wife. Mrs. Brown noticed that generally Mr. Key would hang a ribbon or string from one of the upstairs shutters as a signal to his lover that he was there and that it was safe for her to come on. One day, however, as Mr. Key and Mrs. Sickles arrived simultaneously, they saw two policemen speaking together on the corner of K and Fifteenth Streets, and were so inhibited by the police presence that they walked right past the house and continued up the street, as if on their way to somewhere else.