The Anarchist (19 page)

MOMENTS after Hyde left the café, Norris looked toward the counter. A young man in a gray suit named Jack Feeney got up
and didn’t look in Norris’s direction, though he briefly touched the brim of his hat as he went to the front door. He paused a moment out on the sidewalk, and then followed Hyde down the street. Norris pushed his plate aside and took out his cigar case.

THE regular medical bulletins issued from the front steps of the Milburn house were so reassuring that some government officials left Buffalo on Tuesday and returned to Washington. The vice president also made plans to rejoin his family in the Adirondacks.

Rixey remained in McKinley’s room for hours at a time. He was exhausted, but he found his nerves were even more frayed when he wasn’t near his patient. McKinley’s pulse held steady, between 112 and 122, and his temperature hovered around 100 degrees. His urinary output was low, but the doctors agreed that wasn’t a great cause for concern under the circumstances. He received nutritional enemas three or four times a day, and was given small sips of beef broth.

The president received guests for short durations. The doctors and nursing staff rotated into the room with military precision. Mrs. McKinley came often, but the first lady was so overwrought that she had to spend most of the time in bed in a room down the hall. McKinley’s brother had come out from Ohio and was a great comfort to the first lady. The son of Abraham Lincoln, Robert, who was the president of the Pullman Company, traveled to Buffalo aboard his private railway car and paid a brief visit to the president.

Tuesday night Rixey could not sleep. It was after three a.m. and he sat in the chair by the window, gazing at the president, who lay on his back under the bedsheets. He heard the creak of floorboards out in the hall and went to the door. Opening it, he found Cortelyou in his bathrobe. Without speaking, Rixey returned to
his chair by the window. Cortelyou came into the room and stood at the end of the bed; after several minutes he took the chair from the writing desk, placed it next to Rixey’s, and sat down.

“The other doctors are all sleeping through the night, Presley,” he said quietly. “Some are talking about leaving Buffalo.”

“I keep thinking about President Garfield. When he was shot in the back at that train station in Baltimore, it took seventy-nine days for him to die. From what I understand, he suffered from an abundance of physicians, too. But they could not agree on treatment and essentially he died as a result of neglect.”

“That’s certainly not the case here,” Cortelyou said. “This procedure this afternoon—does it have any significance?”

“I don’t think so. When we removed some of the sutures around the external wound, we found that a slight infection has developed there. We will continue to wash the skin with a solution of iodine and hydrogen peroxide. If the infection worsens, we’ll open the wound a little more and we may have to remove some of the skin.”

“Should this be mentioned in the bulletins?”

“The consensus among the doctors is that this is a typical reaction. Overall, they believe he’s headed for a full recovery.”

“But what do you think?” Cortelyou asked.

Rixey stroked his mustache with his fingers. “I think we should see how he is by, say, tomorrow afternoon before we say anything about this in a bulletin. Some of the doctors are even talking about giving him solid food soon. And the president seems to be very comfortable—he’s not mentioned experiencing any significant pain.”

“Then you should be sleeping like a baby.”

“So should you, George.”

“But here we are, Doctor.”

Women nurses could not be asked to perform enemas on the president, so three male nurses had been brought from the nearby
marine hospital. Wednesday morning they came to Cortelyou’s room while he and Rixey were preparing the next press release.

“We wish to speak to Dr. Rixey in private,” Palmer Eliot said.

“Mr. Cortelyou should hear whatever you have to say,” Rixey said.

“All right,” Eliot said.

“Come in, please,” Cortelyou said.

He sat at the desk and Rixey remained standing, while the three men sat on the daybed. Eliot was a hospital steward and had clearly been designated to speak for the other two; he sat between Vallmeyer and Hodgins, who were both privates. All three men wore white tunics and had identical close-cropped haircuts.

“Is there a change?” Rixey asked.

“The enemas, sir,” Eliot said. “The president’s rejecting them.” He gazed at Rixey, seeming hopeful that he wouldn’t have to continue. “Things were going well at first. But now …” He shook his head.

“Which kind?” Rixey asked. Cortelyou turned to him. “George, we’ve given him Epsom salts and glycerin to help clear his bowels, and that’s been successful. And three or four times a day we give a nutritive enema. With a stomach wound it’s the best way to provide some nourishment.”

“What’s it consist of?” Cortelyou asked.

“Egg, water, and a little whiskey,” Rixey said.

“Interesting,” Cortelyou said.

“That’s the one that we just gave him, sir,” Vallmeyer said. “It just won’t stay in him. It’s doing him no good now.”

Rixey said, “All right. Try again in two hours and report to me.”

They all sat still.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Cortelyou said softly.

Almost gratefully, the three men got up from the daybed and filed out of the room. Rixey looked out the window at the groups of men gathered on the sidewalk and in the street: Secret Service,
Pinkerton agents, soldiers, and the ubiquitous members of the press. They smoked, they talked, they appeared bored.

“We haven’t mentioned enemas in any of the press releases,” Cortelyou said. “I want to give the public sufficient information, but it seems only prudent to not mention such procedures. I’m not going to change that policy, not now.” He held up the sheet of paper. “This release is already written. I think we should deliver it downstairs and wait and see what happens in the next few hours.”

Rixey nodded. “I don’t envy you, George, always having to gauge these things.”

Cortelyou got up from his desk. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to issue a public announcement about the state of the president’s rectum.” He went to the door and, before opening it, he said, “I could use a good stiff whiskey myself.”

“No egg?”

“And no water,” Cortelyou said. He smiled briefly, though it seemed to require considerable effort. “And I’d prefer to have it administered in a more traditional manner.”

They went out into the hall and down the main stairs. The front door was open and through the screen door they could see that a crowd of reporters had already assembled on the lawn in anticipation of the next press release.

That night the weather changed and a high wind buffeted the Milburn house, rustling its ivy-covered brick walls. Rixey dozed on and off in the chair by the window while McKinley slept peacefully. That afternoon the surgical team had removed more infected skin from around the superficial bullet wound. It was decided that this, too, should not be mentioned in the press bulletins. Instead, Cortelyou announced that the president had been allowed to eat a small piece of toast, and he was taking larger quantities of beef broth. Many of the physicians who had been hovering about the Milburn house since last Friday had now left. They believed that the president’s condition had progressed beyond the point where peritonitis might develop. As a
navy surgeon, Rixey had seen his share of gunshot wounds. After the initial critical period, recovery was always slow but steady. To some degree, he was relieved to see the doctors disperse. What the president needed was solitude and rest.

CZOLGOSZ was under constant surveillance by at least two guards who remained outside his cell door. It was clear that this was privileged duty, something to tell grandchildren about, and the men were changed frequently, every few hours. But when he was moved from his cell, he was usually accompanied by Geary and Solomon, and they became quite friendly.

By midweek he was allowed to read newspapers. The president was alive and recovering from his wounds. The stories about Czolgosz often included the proper pronunciation of his name:
Shol-gosh
. Some papers claimed to have discovered evidence of elaborate plots developed by the anarchist group known as Free Society. These conspiracies involved secret meetings and coded communications between anarchist leaders throughout America. Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, the publisher of
Free Society
, were always at the center of these groups.

The press took great interest in Nowak’s Hotel, where Czolgosz had rented a room. A man named Sturtz, who lived down the hall, had been arrested. Czolgosz had met him, but it was soon determined that he had nothing to do with shooting the president. Every day the papers reported that new informants had come forward and claimed that they had seen Czolgosz with various people. In one such instance, he had been seen walking through the exposition with two other men the night before the shooting. There were front-page articles about a Buffalo elementary-school teacher, a Mrs. Helen Petrowski, who had been arrested when it was learned that she had distributed
anarchist literature to her students. It was a game. The police, the district attorney, the Pinkertons, the Secret Service, the newspaper reporters: they all wanted to “unravel” the plot behind the assassination attempt.

Some articles said that the Cleveland police were trying to link members of the Czolgosz family, particularly Leon’s brother Waldeck, to the shooting. Across the country anarchists were being jailed or driven out of their homes and communities. There were several attempted lynchings. An effigy of Czolgosz was paraded through the streets of downtown Chicago and burned.

Most disturbing was the way he was portrayed in the newspapers. By some accounts he was “arrogant,” “defiant,” “cocky,” and, the worst, “dainty.” According to the guards, he made outrageous demands concerning food and cigars. One headline read:
CZOLGOSZ EATS MUCH AND SMOKES STOGIES.
The article said that he complained that the ice cream did not come in a variety of flavors, and that he insisted on cantaloupe, which he didn’t even like. But other reports described him as “cooperative,” “polite,” and “courteous.” He was a “cleanly young man.” He asked the guards about these reports, and they all said they had been ordered not to divulge any information to reporters whatsoever. They believed that the reporters just made such stories up.

The newspapers were obsessed with Emma Goldman as much as they were with the shooting of President McKinley. Apparently she had gone into hiding, and despite a nationwide search she could not be found, until Tuesday, when the Chicago police had raided an apartment, where they found a woman taking a bath. According to the papers, she wrapped herself in a kimono and at first claimed that she was a Swedish servant and spoke little English. The police believed her and even showed her a photograph of Emma Goldman. As they were about to leave, they found a pen with the name “Emma Goldman” on it, but still they failed to recognize the woman in the kimono. At that point she told them that she was in fact Emma Goldman, and had planned
on giving herself up anyway because many of her friends and colleagues were already being detained for no legitimate reason.

Some newspaper artists portrayed Goldman as a whip-wielding seductress, while others gave her the horns of Satan. Much was made of the fact that she admitted to being in Buffalo in the middle of August, at the same time that Czolgosz had been there—but there was no evidence that they had met. District Attorney Penney’s attempts to get her extradited to Buffalo had been inexplicably thwarted by the Chicago police. Czolgosz was most distressed by the thought of Emma Goldman alone in a Chicago prison. She was being held in an unusual cell, a large, open space, surrounded by iron bars, almost as though she were a circus animal on display. She was quoted as saying that she was an experienced nurse and would like to care for both the president and “the boy.” Despite the fact that she was only a few years his senior, Czolgosz liked the fact that she thought of him as “the boy.”