American Scoundrel (18 page)

At three o’clock, a hungry and depressed Wooldridge got up, took his crutches, and returned on foot through icy streets to his boardinghouse on Twelfth Street for a meal. He clearly thought that in what was left of this bitter day no assignation was likely to occur in unlit and un-warmed Number 383, but he did not look forward to telling Dan that it was Wednesday afternoon, not Thursday, when the Fifteenth Street
lovers had last met at Number 383. At some stage that day, Wooldridge went to Lafayette Square and spoke to the Sickleses’ servants, and may have attracted Teresa’s vague suspicion by doing so. Teresa did not like Wooldridge as much as Dan did, and considered him something of a busybody. But he did not want too lightly to pass on to Dan the correction the Baylis mother and son had made. He learned by questioning the coachman Cooney, the footman McDonald, and the maid Duffy that they had often seen Mr. Key across the square, signaling with a white handkerchief from the direction of the Clubhouse. So at last Wooldridge had no choice but to catch an omnibus to the Capitol and face Dan.

He stood on his crutches in the hall outside the House of Representatives and sent a message in to Sickles, who had just finished arguing in favor of an expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, The
Congressional Globe
proofs of his speech were strewn on his desk on the floor of the House, where he willingly left them to go to Wooldridge. The clerk would later say that at that moment Dan seemed different from the way he had the day before—more like himself, less haunted. But Wooldridge had the sorry task of telling him that Thursday had been a mistake; Wednesday was the day. He described the clothing the woman had worn that day and said that the Baylises had kept track of the assignations and asserted the meetings took place two or three times a week. The man, Mr. Key, would arrive first, go into the house, leave the door ajar, and place a ribbon or towel or anything white in the shutters of the upstairs window as a signal.

The news consumed Dan. This friend! This wife! So much for Dan’s admiration of stylish Southerners! His political calm was swept away, and he wept freely and without apology. His tears were copious enough that Wooldridge went with him to a “retiring” room, where Dan took a considerable time to compose himself to a degree that Wooldridge felt it safe to leave him.

Dan did not have the patience or peace of mind to wait for a hack at the Capitol; he strode homeward in the early darkness. Francis Mohun, a building contractor and Washington alderman who lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, saw him pass, “in a very excited condition. . .. His
whole appearance, though I cannot exactly describe how it affected me, did affect me very seriously at the time.”
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In the Sickles household, both the maid, Bridget Duffy, and the guest, Octavia Ridgeley, could tell that this would be an uncomfortable night. Mr. Sickles’s gloom and suppressed anger seemed of a more distressful order tonight. He did not want to speak to Teresa, did not want to eat downstairs. He asked Bridget Duffy to bring him a tray of food in his bedroom upstairs, and she noticed tears when she delivered it to him. Octavia Ridgeley’s mother was out of town, so she was stuck at the Stockton Mansion, with some terrible domestic explosion likely to occur at any minute. Finding her normally lively friend Teresa pale and distracted, Octavia settled in the downstairs parlor and tried to entertain herself. Like Dan, Teresa wished Manny Hart, from New York, had been there, but he had sent a telegram saying he could not get away from the city. So Teresa inevitably went up to the bedroom at the front of the house to talk to Dan. Along the corridor, the convalescent child, Laura, was playing in the nursery room that she shared with Bridget, and when Bridget went up to see the child, she found the Sickleses’ bedroom door ajar. She heard loud conversation, and listened a moment, for even though she came from the stringently regulated sexual atmosphere of rural Ireland, she could have told Congressman Sickles a thing or two about Key and Teresa.

Dan was giving it to her now! She had begun by denying all but had then broken down and seemed to be fainting. Bridget moved on but came back twenty minutes later and knocked on the door to take Dan’s tray away. As she described it, there was “some unhappy feeling between Mr. and Mrs. Sickles.” Octavia Ridgeley could also hear the conflict. Dan’s noises of grief were, in her opinion, fearful; his groans seemed to come from his very feet.
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The evening ached away on this grim and freezing Saturday night. Some time after eight-thirty, Sickles emerged and called to both Octavia and Bridget to join him and his wife in the front bedroom. If today such a scene of domestic confusion would borrow its tone and even its lines from cinema, in the Victorian era it was a combination of the Bible,
Shakespeare, and contemporary theater that influenced the speech and gestures of such crises of love, marriage, infidelity as were to be played here. Dan took into this confrontation with his wife the vivid memory of Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Othello the Moor, and Othello’s torment at the idea of Desdemona’s infidelity. Though Dan was certainly desolated by all aspects of this business, it was simply not within the code either of the time or of a man like Dan Sickles to be rendered more sad than angry at his wife’s sins. Sadly for Teresa, he was required both by culture and by temperament to rage inordinately, to howl with reproach. At a time like this, as the two summoned women, the guest and the servant, entered, he was required by the conventions of the day to be ruthlessly severe.

Octavia and Bridget, on entering the room, saw a pallid Teresa, with tear-stained, lowered eyes, sitting at her desk in the process of writing or adding to a letter. Bridget was appropriately left standing while Dan pointed Octavia to a sofa by the window. There was silence in the room and a pregnant air of outrage. Teresa finished writing a little before nine, and Dan took the pages from her, scanned them, and laid them down with all but the bottom of the last page covered. He asked the two women to sign as witnesses the last, partly exposed page of the document. They had little idea of its contents, although Bridget knew better than Octavia that this was probably a form of confession of adultery.

Both women signed at once, anxious to be dismissed from the charged air of this bedroom. Dan thanked them and said they could go. What they had put their names to, a document in Teresa’s handwriting, which tonight had been rendered irregular by the pressures of guilt and recrimination, read as follows:

Teresa went on to admit that she and Key would arrange assignations when they met in the street and at parties. “Never would speak to him when Mr. Sickles was at home, because I knew he [Sickles] did not like me to speak to him [Key].” Indeed, she said, she had not seen Mr. Key for some days after arriving in the city for the winter session of Congress. But when Key approached her and said he had rented the house, she agreed to meet him there. They did not eat and drink in the house, she declared, obviously in response to a question from Dan. The room was warmed by a wood fire. Key would go first, though sometimes they walked there together—“four times—I do not think more.” She had gone on her own the Wednesday before, between two and three, to meet Key, who was inside.

A detail that would in some eyes make Teresa appear more culpable was that Laura, recently ill but in perfectly renewed health, had been minded at the house of a friend, Mrs. Hoover, wife of the recently retired federal marshal, while Teresa was with Key. Teresa admitted—a detail that rankled with Dan—that it was Mr. Key who had dropped Laura off there, “at my request.” After Barton left Laura at the Hoovers’, he went to meet Teresa at a reception at the house of Senator Stephen Douglas, where Teresa had been communing with Mrs. Douglas and others while waiting for Barton. From this apparently chance meeting, Teresa and Key left separately. Key went first to light the fire in the house on Fifteenth Street, and Teresa followed. “Went in by the back gate. Went in the same bedroom, and there an improper interview was had. I undressed myself. Mr. Key undressed also. This occurred on Wednesday, 23rd February, 1859.”

What Dan had elicited from her were the sort of appalling details that no woman of Teresa’s class would voluntarily surrender except
when overwhelmed by the savage disappointment of a wronged husband. And obviously she did not intend that this document should become public, though it might end up in the hands of a divorce lawyer. Even that prospect left her stupefied with humiliation.

One question Dan must have asked was something like “Did anything happen here, in Lafayette Square?” Teresa admitted Key had been in the Stockton Mansion not merely as Dan’s friend, but for erotic purposes. “Mr. Key has kissed me in this house a number of times. I do not deny that we have had connection in this house, last spring, a year ago, in the parlor, on the sofa. Mr. Sickles was sometimes out of town, and sometimes in.” But Teresa said she had not thought it right to go on meeting there, “because there are servants who might suspect something.” Then, under further pressure, she confessed that the affair had started long before the beginning of this congressional session. “I think the intimacy commenced in April or May, 1858.”

Generally, for her meetings at the house in Fifteenth Street, she further admitted, she had worn a black-and-white woolen plaid dress and a beaver hat trimmed with black velvet. But then she remembered that she had also worn a black silk dress, also a plaid silk dress, a black velvet cloak trimmed with lace, and a black velvet shawl trimmed, as the Baylises of Fifteenth Street had said, with a fringe.

Had Key ridden in the Sickleses’ carriage? Dan asked. Yes, he had, the written confession admitted. Had he called at the house recently, without my knowledge? asked remorseless Dan. Yes, said Teresa. “And after my being told not to invite him to do so, and against Mr. Sickles’ repeated requests.”

This part of the document, like other sections of the confession, was signed “Teresa Bagioli,” not “Teresa Sickles.”

For there were two postscripts to the main body of the document. The lawyer in Dan foresaw that in the case of a divorce, which in his present state he believed to be the sole course open to him, a lawyer for Teresa might say the confession had been forced from her. Thus, she had appended, at Dan’s demand, the assertion: “This is a true statement, written by myself, without any inducement held out by Mr. Sickles of
forgiveness or reward, and without any menace from him. This I have written with my bed-room door open, and my maid and child in the adjoining room, at half past eight in the evening. Miss Ridgeley is in the house, within call.”

Again, she signed herself Teresa Bagioli, but there was still a last scatter of questions that had occurred to Dan. Yes, agreed Teresa, Key’s sister, wife of Representative Pendleton of Ohio, had dined in the Sickleses’ house “two weeks ago last Thursday with a large party. Mr. Key was also here . . . and at my suggestion he was invited, because he lived in the same house, and also because he’d invited Mr. Sickles to dine with him.”
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That night Dan tried to find sleep in the bedroom, in the bed he considered shamefully dishonored by Key. Teresa shared Octavia’s room, and, in the spirit of Catholic penitence, insisted on sleeping on the floor, her head resting on a stool. Whenever Bridget Duffy woke during the hours of dark, in the same room as young Laura, she heard “exclamations and sobbing” from both Dan’s room and Octavia’s room. Little Laura, bewildered by her parents’ sobs, had at last gone to her father’s room and spent the rest of the night with him. And so a night of polar cold gave way to the temperate morning so praised by the Reverend Smith Pyne’s Sabbath parishioners.

Octavia ate breakfast downstairs with Laura. Even when moving tentatively about the house, she could hear Dan’s grief wherever she was. His groans were unearthly. They would not have astounded his father. Had George Sickles been in Washington, he might have settled his son down. At the same time, Dan, knowing he needed a range of advice, turned, according to his long-held custom, to Tammany friends. He had heard that Sam Butterworth, a lawyer and supporter of his from New York and Tammany, who had worked with Sickles to help James Buchanan win the crucial state of New York, was visiting Washington that weekend, staying at the house of Senator Gwinn. Butterworth, taller than Dan and floridly good-looking, had as a reward for his work on the 1856 ballot been appointed head of the federal subtreasury in New York. He was a hardheaded opportunist and, unlike Manny Hart,
was not well respected by Teresa. Nonetheless, Dan sent a message by servant to him: “Dear B. Come to me right away!” Butterworth showed the note to Gwinn, who knew Sickles well, and then to another guest in the house, Robert J. Walker, who had been for a time appointed governor of Kansas by Old Buck. “Sickles wants to see me immediately,” Butterworth told Walker. “What can this mean?”

Dan had also summoned Wooldridge to provide the comfort of familiar companionship and to be on hand for sensitive errands. But to use a term of a later century, it was Butterworth who was to act as his “spin doctor.” Wooldridge was the first to arrive, tired after having been out till midnight. He saw that Dan, in the study at the front of the house, was not himself in a good state. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was pacing up and down in acute distress. He could not even stay in the room for long. He would go upstairs, return down to the study, talk to Wooldridge, drift out again, and go upstairs. Every time he came back into the study, said Wooldridge, “he pressed his hands to his temples and would go over to the secretary and sob,” using the desk to prop himself upright. Because Dan was obviously in need of relief, Wooldridge told him to give vent to his tears.