American Scoundrel (17 page)

In Willard’s splendid ballroom, with its moldings and ceiling and chandeliers worthy of the Astor House in New York, young Octavia Ridgeley saw Teresa meet up with Philip Barton Key. Though he was an expert dancing partner, Barton did not dance with Teresa that night. Couples engaged in the gallops, the lancers, the germans, but throughout, Teresa and Philip Barton Key were locked in absorbed conversation. They did not have much time. Indeed, as soon as Congressman Sickles entered the room, Barton rose and abruptly left Teresa’s side.

Scanning the ballroom for Teresa, Dan saw nothing strange and was still in the final hours of his contentment. As he was leaving his house, he had received from a messenger boy a letter in a yellow envelope, which he thrust, unopened, into his pocket, meaning to read it on his return home. It sat in his pocket throughout the rest of the evening

After dancing for more than three hours, the Sickleses and Octavia Ridgeley went outside, bestirred their carriage driver, John Cooney, and rolled home, back to the Stockton Mansion. It was two o’clock when they entered the door, and Teresa Sickles and Octavia Ridgeley began to prepare for bed. But Dan wanted to deal with the day’s correspondence, so he went to his study, the small room near the front door, one flight up from the basement and at the front of the house. Among other items he opened was the yellow envelope he had just received.
⁷

In an elegant and, many would believe, feminine hand, it read:

The idea that his viperous friend Key had presumed to possess his treasure, his sublime Teresa, penetrated Dan like physical agony. His pain took no account of his own sexual behavior. Teresa was his, and he sheltered her as best he could from the viciousness of the larger world. Had she, of her own will and without his knowledge, embraced the parlous, venal world of Washington in the form of a supposed Maryland aristocrat named Key?

The R.P.G. note must have been the first letter he read, for he quickly emerged briefly from the study. Octavia Ridgeley saw him and was aware of a new distance in Dan’s demeanor, of what she would call a wild and distracted look.
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The next morning Dan was up early and dressed and shaved in his usual exacting manner. He was not yet frenzied—he remembered the crazed things said out of malice about Teresa and Barton Key in the past. But that Friday Dan was distressed enough to try to gather his allies around him. Manny Hart, the former congressman who had been rewarded at Sickles’s urging with the post of surveyor of the Port of New York, was sent a wire: would he come to Washington as soon as he could? Hart was considered a reliable friend by Teresa and Dan both.

Sickles then walked a few blocks north, reached Fifteenth Street, and began to talk to residents between K and L. Though so close to Lafayette Square, this was a nondescript neighborhood, filled with the
families of white craftsmen and slightly better-off liberated slaves. The letter had not named an address, but the people he questioned, asking whether they had observed a tall man with a blond mustache and a young woman visiting a house around here, pointed with instant conviction to a modest two-story house, Number 383.

Dan withdrew. He had reason not to want to be remembered as the chief inquirer into this matter. It was a demeaning role for a husband, and he had agents who could fill it for him. He caught a carriage eastward to the Capitol, where he sought out his young friend John J. McElhone, reporter for the
Congressional Globe
. This was the journal that gave a complete record of proceedings in the House and the Senate, and McElhone was on the floor of the chamber delivering proofs of the previous day’s speeches to the men who had made them and might want to correct errors. Dan, who had an extraordinary capacity to attract the loyalty of young, ambitious men, signaled the reporter over. He asked McElhone to visit the offices of two Washington newspapers, the
Daily States
and the
Evening Star
, and insert the following notice:

Dan was slated that day to speak in the House on the navy yard appropriations bill, particularly about the Brooklyn and Philadelphia navy yards. As the case of Dan’s friend Charles K. Graham had proved, all posts at the Brooklyn navy yard, from chief engineer and navy agents down to the lowliest shipyard laborer, were in Tammany’s keeping. The Democratic machine in Philadelphia possessed the same power over its navy yard. The Democrats believed, for various reasons—above all, the frequent interference of the British Royal Navy with American shipping—in a strong United States Navy. Besides that, Dan, as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, had an interest in such matters. Thus, patriotism and political expedience intersected at the navy yards.
But the R.P.G. note distracted Congressman Sickles, and he sent for another friend, the House clerk George Wooldridge, who was now working in the Capitol map room.

When summoned by the distinguished Dan Sickles, Wooldridge came immediately on his crutches to a small anteroom behind the Speaker’s chair in the House. Dan sat Wooldridge down on a sofa, told him that he must speak to him about a painful matter, and handed him the letter he had received the night before. But before Wooldridge could scan it, Dan took it back and read it to Wooldridge. Wooldridge knew enough by now of Dan’s ardent temperament—which could swing from calm reserve to turbulence in an instant—not to be surprised when Dan burst into tears and passed the letter back to the clerk. As Wooldridge finished reading it, Dan regained his composure. He told George Wooldridge that he had always had a policy of throwing out unsigned and anonymous letters. But this was a matter that could be easily proved true or false. He had gone up to Fifteenth Street that morning, he explained, and had been told that a man and woman seemed to be using Number 383 for assignations. The house had been, according to the neighbors, rented by a tall gentleman from a Negro man named Gray, as the letter claimed. Dan explained to Wooldridge that he hoped further investigation would prove that the woman the neighbors had seen was not Teresa, but then he asked or instructed Wooldridge, “As my friend, you will go there, and see whether it is or not.”

Still seated on the sofa in the anteroom, Dan began to sob again, his head in his hands. Then he gathered himself, jumped up, and rushed to another anteroom, where a number of congressmen were waiting to see him on the bill before the House. Wooldridge followed on his crutches. Before entering the other room, however, Dan turned to him and ordered him to get a carriage. “We’ll go,” said Dan, “and I’ll show you the house.” And, the navy yards appropriations bill forgotten, they left the Capitol, the agile Wooldridge preceding Dan down the long outer stairs and hailing them a hack, which traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House and Lafayette Square, and turned left into the neighborhood in question. At Fifteenth Street, Dan pointed out Number
383, and, before turning to go back to the Capitol, let Wooldridge out of the carriage to continue the investigation.
¹¹

Pursuing his task, Wooldridge knocked on some of the doors across the street from Number 383. Sometime during that cold afternoon, after the gaslamps in the street were lit, he spoke to a woman named Mrs. Baylis, and to her son, Crittenden Baylis. Crittenden had lighter skin than his mother and so expressed in his features the ironic fact that the national capital, a city rather Southern in character, where slave markets still operated and in which freed black Americans were at best tolerated and patronized, nonetheless harbored instances of secret congress between black and white. Crittenden had certainly seen the man and woman coming to Number 383. He knew who the man was, too; it was the esteemed Mr. Key, the DA. The woman, said Mrs. Baylis, often wore a black raglan cloak and a black shawl fringed with bugles. When had they last seen the man and woman? Both Mrs. Baylis and Crittenden said it was the afternoon before, Thursday. If that was so, George Wooldridge knew it might make cheery news for Dan Sickles, for Teresa would have been engaged that afternoon in preparing for her regular Thursday-evening dinner party.

Wooldridge then asked Mrs. Baylis whether he could rent a room from her, from which he could observe Number 383. Mrs. Baylis agreed, so Wooldridge was further emboldened to ask whether Crittenden would accompany him to the Capitol. He obviously intended to give Dan Sickles a chance to question Crittenden in person. Again, Mrs. Baylis consented. Snow clouds hung over Washington, and a keen wind was at work as Wooldridge crouched into a carriage and asked Crittenden aboard.

At the Capitol, Dan, just after six o’clock, had moved that the House adjourn. He had to sit at his desk in the House, in uncertainty of soul, as the Speaker ordered the sergeant-at-arms to gather up absentee members for a vote on an adjournment, and an argument went on for two more hours about who would be excused from the debate. As Wooldridge led Crittenden up the steps of the Capitol at about eight-thirty, the members were briskly deciding to adjourn after all and get home
before ice made the pavements dangerous. Wooldridge left Crittenden in the entrance hall and went to signal his presence to Dan. On seeing him, Dan immediately abandoned his seat and again met with him in one of the anterooms, but he did not want to talk to Crittenden—it might involve too intense an exposure of his vulnerability, and to a mulatto boy. Just the same, he was vastly relieved when Wooldridge told him that both Crittenden and his mother had insisted that the man and woman had met at Number 383 the afternoon before.

Wooldridge would later remember that, grasping him joyously by the shoulder, Dan had exclaimed, “Then it can’t be Teresa! She was at home all yesterday afternoon preparing for the dinner party; he’s got some other woman on the string.” He knew, too, that during Thursday afternoon, as Cooney the coachman could tell him, Teresa had visited the afternoon receptions of a number of friends, including Mrs. Brown, wife of the Postmaster General, Mrs. Thompson, wife of the Secretary of the Interior, and the lively Rose Greenhow.
¹²

Nonetheless, Dan took home with him a certain solemnity and doubt that Friday night. Even the servants felt that the air in the Stockton Mansion had turned glacial as a skirling wind combed the city and ice settled on trees.

The next morning, without risking an acrimonious scene with Teresa, Dan spoke to his new coachman, John Cooney, who had been working for the Sickleses a mere few weeks. He seemed reliable and confirmed that he had taken Mrs. Sickles to all her social rounds on Thursday afternoon. Fluctuating between suspecting Teresa and the fear that he suspected her unjustly, Dan wrote an urgent note to Wooldridge, telling him not to use Teresa’s name in his investigations, “as suspicion, if not proven or not true, is worse than the dreadful reality.” He also told Wooldridge that he had made his inquiries of his coachman and found that it could not have been his wife who was at Number 383 on Thursday.

That Saturday morning, attending to his duty as a legislator, Dan turned toward the Capitol, catching an omnibus along a Pennsylvania Avenue whose pavements were marked by snow and whose linden trees
were blighted by ice. As Dan went to his desk, Daniel Dougherty, a guest at the Sickleses’ house the previous Thursday night, had just left Marshal Jonah Hoover’s house and was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Lafayette Square to say goodbye to Teresa. He met up with Barton Key, who should have been at his desk in City Hall at this time, and they strolled on toward the White House and the square. Dougherty presumed that Key was also visiting the Sickleses, but he peeled away in an awkward manner, Dougherty would remember, to the Clubhouse on the other side of the square. He had, after all, received a few days past a letter in a not too difficult code warning him that Washington knew of his passion for Teresa and that he should be careful. Obsession nonetheless dragged him to Lafayette Square as if it contained the only air he could breathe.
¹³

In the House, debate continued on a number of appropriation bills. Dan voted on a post office bill and was listed to speak in a continuation of debate on the navy yards appropriations bill and the claims of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He hoped that by late afternoon he would hear from R.P.G., for the appeal for R.P.G. to get in touch had been published in that morning’s
Daily States
. Meanwhile, Wooldridge was keeping watch in his rented room in Mrs. Baylis’s house across from Number 383. He waited there through the forenoon, but saw no one approach the assignation house. He was pleased when the boy, Crittenden, shortly after three, came upstairs and relieved the ennui of surveillance by beginning to chat. Crittenden described the woman again; it was a description that, Wooldridge noticed, fitted Teresa. More crucially, the boy let slip that his mother and he had been wrong about the man and woman having visited Number 383 on Thursday. It was in fact Wednesday afternoon that they had turned up!