Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [14]
“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,