American Scoundrel (19 page)

Butterworth arrived about noon, while Dan was again upstairs. Wooldridge briefed him in the study, because he knew that any recital of the situation by Dan himself would bring on further bouts of tears. Wooldridge had permission to show Teresa’s confession, now on Dan’s desk, to Butterworth. In Dan’s world, a shame shared with a reliable brother was a shame halved. A desolated Teresa no doubt felt otherwise. When Butterworth had finished reading the confession and mounted the steps to the bedroom, he found Dan facedown on his pillow. Having followed on his crutches, Wooldridge witnessed the conversation. “I am a dishonored and ruined man,” Dan told his friend, “and cannot look you in the face!”

That combination of adjectives—“dishonored” and “ruined”— showed that Dan had ceased to think exclusively of what he saw as the wrong done him and had also begun to contemplate what the affair of Key and Teresa might do to him as a public man and as a man of honor.
Despite what we would consider his melodramatic line, the fact was that Dan’s friends were profoundly touched by the depth of his feeling, and were convinced that he needed to be saved from a severe derangement of his senses; from lunacy, that is. Sam Butterworth at last persuaded him to come down to the study for a calmer conversation. Dan held an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth as they descended. Butter-worth advised him to send his wife to her mother’s house in New York. Such a departure was close enough to the end of the session not to excite any remark. Then, “for the honor of his little daughter,” when the season ended and before Congress convened the following December, Dan should take a trip to Europe, distancing himself from a frequently vicious New York press, and his lawyers could arrange a separation in the meantime. This was the advice of Butterworth the lawyer, and it was good counsel.

Dan told him, “My friend, I would gladly pursue this course, but so abandoned, so reckless have Key and my wife been, that all the Negroes in that neighborhood, and I dare not say how many other persons, know all about the circumstances.”
¹⁷

He had, in the language of the time, been cuckolded in an era when only those radical women known as Bloomers believed marriages to be equal partnerships, when men, even in splendid and contented marriages, were considered to own wives, when marriage was spoken of by most respectable men and women in terms of the husband’s proprietorship and governance of his wife, while women were seen to have been redeemed from degradation by possession of a husband. So Dan’s rights and his kindliness—of which there were many examples—had been violated in a most visible manner. It seemed, too, that Teresa Bagioli Sickles represented for him a zone of luscious, Italianate inviolability, an innocence to which he could return from his political wars, even from his sins. That sanctuary had now been multiply plundered. It was characteristic of Dan that he did not mind Butterworth’s and Wooldridge’s knowing; he would tell them anything, for they were his men. But the knowledge of men not bound to him in Democratic fraternity appalled him. To a greater or lesser extent, Washington knew about the
Teresa–Key affair. Even the President must suspect. The Republicans knew! That public shame compounded Dan’s intimate sense of betrayal. In the Congress, he had loyally defended the world for which Barton Key stood, the world of Southern good sense and
noblesse oblige
. Barton had done much to prove that world an opportunistic stunt, a set of rehearsed manners hiding viciousness at the heart.

Dan did not yet know that Barton Key was that afternoon within a short distance of the place where he sought Butterworth’s counsel. During his affair with Teresa, Key had fluctuated between despair, fatalism, neurosis, and exaltation. But he was dependent on the sight of her, and that bright morning, with the streets turning to a morass from the melt of last night’s storm, and the temperature heading above a pleasant fifty degrees Fahrenheit, Key meant to spend in anticipatory joy of a signal from Teresa, and of a meeting that might be arranged and even achieved by midafternoon. He had come in to Willard’s Hotel from the Pendletons’ house in Georgetown. He must have taken the omnibus or a carriage, since his gray mount, Lucifer, was not to be seen in town that day. A mile or so across the town from Willard’s, in K Street near the courts, his four children—Alice, James, Mary, Lizzie—lived in the house he had once shared with them and their mother. Today, he had no apparent desire to visit them. Nor did any fear of imminent sickness, which had sometimes delayed him in attending to his duties as district attorney, and had sent him last summer to the spas of Saratoga Springs and, before that, on a recuperative journey to Cuba, influence him today.

Key arrived at Willard’s relatively early and in the hotel barbershop had a shave and a hair trim. Then he walked up the hill to Pennsylvania, past the unfinished classic facade of the Treasury, and into Lafayette Square. He was dressed well, though not flamboyantly, in a gray-striped vest and trousers and a jacket of brown tweed and, since it was still cold this early, a brown overcoat. In his pocket, along with other things, he carried two brass keys, both of them crafted for the front door of 383 Fifteenth Street. In the side pocket of his jacket, he had a pair of opera glasses. He had also a coded anonymous letter he had received a few
days ago, warning him that people knew about Mrs. Sickles and him. It was not enough to keep him away from Lafayette Square.

Given the existence of this letter, it is a wonder that, even with the sense of invincibility he derived from his love, he was not carrying a pistol in his pocket, for many gentlemen went armed in a city that was both politically and socially turbulent. Within a few days, a New York newspaper would comment, “Washington has for years been a bear-garden, in which most travelers have ventured armed.”
¹⁸

Outside the barbershop at Willard’s, Key ran into two acquaintances, Washington’s mayor, James G. Berret, and a fellow lawyer, Southey Parker, who was also a friend of the Sickleses. Key showed yet again that he was not an accomplished manager of affairs with married women. He went so far as to joke that he might be killed by Mr. Sickles. Berret had himself heard rumors about Key and Mrs. Sickles, but he believed that Mr. Key’s remark was hyperbole.

Bridget Duffy returned about now from the Catholic church some blocks north. Going into the Stockton Mansion and taking off her shawl, she found her master still given to sobs, “calling on God to witness his troubles.” She went to her upstairs room to put away her hat and shawl, and from the window saw Barton Key walking on Pennsylvania Avenue, seemingly headed toward Georgetown, though she suspected that was just a feint. Downstairs, in the study, Wooldridge also saw Key and watched him cross Pennsylvania Avenue. One of the Reverend Smith Pyne’s homeward-bound parishioners saw Barton stop on the edge of the pavement and look toward the Sickleses’ house. On top of that, a Treasury Department architect walking in the square saw Key, too. And twenty minutes later, from the kitchen window, Bridget saw him yet again, as he crossed the park toward the Clubhouse.

This building, until recently operating as the National Club, still housed a restaurant and bar and rooms for rent. It had at one time been the home of Chief Justice Roger Brook Taney, Key’s frail, venerable pro-Southern uncle. Obviously Key thought that the position of the Clubhouse, where he was not unknown, gave some credibility to his loitering in the square, yet, hungry for Teresa, he was no better than a schoolboy
at hiding his real purpose. So by the time Butterworth was counseling Dan Sickles, Key had been sighted at least eight times in the Sickleses’ neighborhood, including twice by Bridget Duffy and once by Mayor Berret.

Having given his advice and partially soothed Dan, Butterworth, keeping an arranged appointment, went to meet a friend at the Clubhouse and drink a glass of ale with him. While Butterworth was gone, Barton appeared again in Lafayette Square; among those who saw him were the coachman John Cooney and the groom McDonald. A lawyer from Buffalo, New York, who knew him, spotted him as he walked back and forth near the statue of Andrew Jackson, a memorial made from the metal of British guns captured at the Battle of New Orleans. The man approached him, “passed the time of day with him,” and went off to eat his Sunday dinner at Willard’s, as Barton left the square by its southwest gate, “whirling a handkerchief as he went along.”

These sightings suggested that Barton Key may have been desperate for a glimpse of Teresa in an upper window or a reciprocating signal from her. He had been reconnoitering the house and prowling into the square, retreating occasionally to the Clubhouse, for well over two hours and had not received any sign. Was she ill? Had her husband given her warnings? An exasperated and yet grimly gratified Bridget observed him a third time. He had run into a young couple he knew, who were crossing the square on their way from an unspecified church. By now Barton was depressed, and he told the young woman, when she asked him how he was, “I am despondent about my health and very desperate. Indeed, I have half a mind to go out on the prairie and try buffalo hunting. The excursion would either cure me or kill me, and, really, I don’t care much which.”

Now the Sickleses’ dog, an Italian greyhound named Dandy, spotted Barton and ran out into the street to greet him, or, as Bridget Duffy said, “to fawn on him.” As if playing with the dog, Barton again extracted his white handkerchief and whirled it three or four times. Though he may have seen himself as a heroic lover, he had become a figure
of bathos. He continued to wave the handkerchief in “a slow, rotary motion,” even after the dog had given up and departed. From the study by the front door, above the kitchen, Wooldridge also saw Barton with the young couple, waving his handkerchief while averting his eyes from his friends and hoping for a signal from Mrs. Sickles.
¹⁹

Teresa’s feelings and movements that day would always remain less scrupulously examined by others than those of Sickles and Key. She would not ever be asked, for example, “Did you wish to go to the window and warn Barton away by gesture? Or did you, even this early, curse him as the source of your present misery? Did Octavia Ridgeley urge you not to make any signal, assuring you that Key would in the end go away?” The sad case was that the subtler mixture of feelings of a shamed woman like Teresa would not be considered relevant, and she would never be consulted on them.

Dan was upstairs again as Butterworth strolled back to the Sickleses’ house from the Clubhouse. Somehow he missed seeing Barton Key in the square, but when he went up the outer stairs and through the front door and into the study, Wooldridge told him in a lowered voice that Key had been backward and forward a number of times. Wooldridge then turned in distress to a set of stereoscopic views with which he had been relieving the pressure and lost himself in three-dimensional images of the White House, the Capitol, the Treasury building, the Washington Memorial.

About then, Dan Sickles, glancing from his window upstairs, also happened to see Key. It was preposterous that the man who had sullied Teresa while denying he was doing so should be so provocative as to present himself openly in Lafayette Square. In a frenzy, Dan rushed downstairs into the library. “That villain has just passed my house,” he cried. “My God, this is horrible!”

Both Butterworth and Wooldridge knew from the look of Dan’s enraged face, his blood-engorged blue eyes, that he was at his most dangerous. Sam Butterworth said, “Mr. Sickles, you must be calm, and look this matter square in the face. If there be a possibility of keeping a
certain knowledge of this crime from the public, you must do nothing to destroy that possibility. You may be mistaken in your belief that it is known to the whole city.”

But Dan reiterated, “It’s the town talk. The whole world knows it.”

Butterworth declared that if it was the town talk, “there is but one course left to you as a man of honor. You need no advice.” Sam was proposing a duel between Sickles and Barton Key.

On the edge of reacting, Dan fell into a dark reflectiveness. He said he was sure that Key had been in the habit of using a room at the Clubhouse from which to signal Teresa. But Teresa had denied it, and he wondered why, since she’d admitted so much else. Without trying to resolve this puzzle, Dan now walked into the hallway. There, according to Butterworth, he suggested that they go to the room of a mutual friend, Stuart, at the Clubhouse, to ask him whether Key had a room there. A little implausibly, Butterworth claimed that he then walked out of the Stockton Mansion, down its sweep of iron stairs, and off toward the Clubhouse, thinking that Sickles was following him.

In view of coming events, Sam Butterworth had every reason to claim that when he left Dan in the hall he was satisfied that the congressman had no weapons on his person, and that he was without his overcoat. Finding himself alone on the pavement, Sam, instead of returning to the house, claimed to have walked slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue on the south side, the side on which the White House stood, and then crossed to encounter Barton Key from the flank by the railings of the park. His movements would to many bespeak a man partaking in an ambush, for according to his own account, he walked 120 yards or more wrongly thinking Sickles was with or just behind him.

Since Butterworth was the type of New York Democrat who had strong associations in the capital and with its Southern gentry, Key recognized him as he approached, and greeted him by name. “What a fine day we have!” said Key.

Butterworth asked in reply whether Key had come from the Clubhouse, and Key said he had. Butterfield then asked whether his friend Mr. Stuart was in his room.

“Yes; and he is quite well.”

Butterworth said he was on his way to see Stuart and bade Key goodbye, but now saw Sickles, wearing an overcoat despite the warmth of the day, coming rapidly toward them around the square and down Madison Place to cut off Key’s line of retreat to the Clubhouse. Dan must have ultimately left his house by the basement door, for the stereo-scopically engaged Wooldridge did not see him leave by the front door. Now, even at this extremity of feeling, Dan took his lines from contemporary drama. He called, “Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my house—you must die!”