American Scoundrel (14 page)

In reality it was probable that the besotted and tipsy Beekman broached the subject that was dearest to his heart. He said that he had been in an inn in Bladensburg, Maryland, northeast of the city, when a storm came on, and Mrs. Sickles and Mr. Key tumbled into the tavern in their drenched riding habits. Mr. Key took a room in which Mrs. Sickles could warm and dry herself until the storm passed, and until her
clothes, hung by the fire downstairs, could be put on again. Key pretended that he had stayed in the kitchen, his clothes steaming, but Beekman believed that to be a mere subterfuge, and that Key spent most of the time at the Bladensburg tavern in the same room as Mrs. Sickles.

Beekman’s tale was a prime item of scandalous material, and the next morning Bacon relayed it to Dan’s devoted friend the House clerk George Wooldridge. Naturally, he swore Wooldridge to silence, but Wooldridge was much more than a friend to Dan during those early months of 1858—he was also a private secretary, going to the Stockton Mansion three days a week to deal with Dan’s considerable correspondence. So he took Dan aside the next day in the Capitol and warned him of what was being said about Key and Teresa.

At once, Dan sent a note to Beekman, summoning him to the Stockton Mansion at seven o’clock that night. When Beekman arrived and was shown into the parlor, he was met by Teresa’s mother, in Washington visiting Teresa and Laura, and by a friend of Dan’s, John J. McElhone, a reporter for the
Congressional Globe
and another Sickles acolyte. Mrs. Bagioli knew why Beekman had been called there; clearly, Dan had confided in her. It was an astonishing aspect of Dan’s character that he always dealt with his most intimate problems by enlisting advice, by assembling friends, by summoning in sympathetic opinion. After all, this was the Tammany way of doing business. Mrs. Maria Bagioli had already warned her daughter strongly of the consequences of any folly. Now she informed Beekman of the rumors Dan had heard, supposedly emanating from him.

Dan made his appearance while his mother-in-law was present, and Beekman, challenged by Dan, admitted only that Bacon had made certain unworthy remarks, he himself having unluckily dropped “several trifling jokes about the female sex in general,” and only by implication about Teresa. He was guilty of nothing but these trifling remarks, he insisted, having uttered “no charges, no facts, no inferences even, injurious of Mrs. Sickles, but merely generalities without the slightest design of menace.” Dan told him that Wooldridge’s informant, Bacon, had heard
Beekman speak far more specific calumnies. “Excited and enraged beyond control, I told Mr. Sickles, on the impulse of the moment, that what I had said I had said, and was personally responsible for, and left the house, which I never entered afterwards.”

It was merely the beginning of Beekman’s embarrassment. Sickles—in what could nearly be called naiveté—organized a meeting with Key and told him of the gossip attributed to Beekman. Despite his own notable sins, he knew that gentlemanly honor would forbid him to seduce the wife of a man who had done him the sort of notable favors he had done Key! Dan was thus gratified to see that, according to the best tradition of his haughty, gentrified family and class, Key was outraged for his own sake and Dan’s. He told Dan, “This is the highest affront that can be offered to me, and whoever asserts it must meet me at the point of a pistol.” He was immensely more at home than Beekman with the idea of a contest of honor, for about the time of his marriage Key had been willing to fight a duel with a Colonel May, one of the other suitors of his betrothed, Ellen Swann. His older brother, Midshipman Daniel Key, had been killed at the Bladensburg dueling grounds over twenty years before, and now Bladensburg had again risen to impute the honor of a Key.

Key assured Dan that he would be in touch directly with the three young men involved—Wooldridge, Beekman, Bacon. He used his old friend and coadjutor Marshal Jonah Hoover as his messenger. In answer to a request for information on the content of the rumors, George Wooldridge was quite forthcoming in what he had heard from Bacon: “that they stopped at a house on the road towards Bladensburg, and that Mrs. Sickles had a room there and remained one hour and a half; also that she took off her habit, and that he had no doubt there was an intimacy between Mr. Key and Mrs. Sickles.” Another alleged remark of Beekman’s conveyed to Key, and taken exception to, was that Key had boasted that he asked only thirty-six hours with any woman to make her do whatever he pleased.

The heat was back on Beekman. He “disavowed” that he was the
author of the imputations. He denied that the statements of Mr. Bacon came from him. Philip Barton Key put all the replies—Beekman’s, Bacon’s, Wooldridge’s—in an envelope and sent them by way of Jonah Hoover to Dan Sickles. “My Dear Sir, I send by Jonah Hoover a copy of the correspondence had today, and you will perceive any attempt to fix the ridiculous and disgusting slander on me as the party concerned was unsuccessful.”

Key had taken a great deal of trouble to lie to Dan, and it seemed that Dan was willing to attribute the accusations against Teresa and Key to boyish cowardice or malice on Beekman’s part. Marshal Jonah Hoover would later remember that Dan said to him, “I like Key. This thing shocked me when I first heard about it, and I am glad to have the scurrilous business cleared up.” Key himself went again to Congressman Haskin and declared, “I regard her almost as a child. It is ridiculous to suppose I could have anything but honorable intentions towards her.” He asked Haskin please to pass on to Dan what he had said.
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A wiser man than Key, or perhaps a man who was merely toying with Teresa Sickles, would from then on have kept his distance from her. It was not as if Key lacked for other female company. There were a number of women he had paid occasional court to, some of whom had ambitions to marry him. He must surely have realized that if one of Teresa’s admirers had embarrassed him this time, one of his own might embarrass him next. He and Teresa possibly both engaged in a temporary resolve to end the affair. If so, a more powerful mutual obsession, combined with Teresa’s need of intimacy and affection from a mature male, quickly reestablished their relationship as it had been.

This season of Key’s temporary embarrassment and renewed passion for Teresa was not marked by any fresh surge of brotherhood between North and South in the legislature. But as much as fraternity had been eroded on the floor of the House, it was still observed in society, and the rich Gwinns of California decided to stage a massive fancy-dress ball, in part to restore amity in the capital. Senator Gwinn, as host, claimed the right not to wear a costume. The President was also unlikely
to be a costume wearer. But most of Washington engaged enthusiastically in hunting for fancy apparel.

The night of the ball, April 8, 1858, was a mere week after the House had refused by eight votes to admit Kansas as a slave state. Dan had been in New York on business for a few days, and had brought a buccaneer costume back with him for the ball. But he was ill with flu on the night of the event, so Teresa took the carriage, alone except for the driver, John Thompson, and the footman, McDonald, to the Gwinn house. At that moment she may have wished that she had spent more care on her own costume—she was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and ran the risk that there might be other Riding Hoods at such a huge ball. She had, however, gone to the trouble of equipping herself with a basketful of good things to distribute among the guests.

The Gwinn mansion, at Nineteenth and I Streets, some three blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, sported a ballroom of prodigious scale, comparable with the huge East Room of the White House or the ballroom at Willard’s. The evening was so lustrous that one of the guests, Major John von Sonntag de Havilland, wrote a long narrative poem about it, which would be published in book form and serve better as a snapshot of the Washington community than as literature. Both Key and Teresa were mentioned in widely separated sections of the work, but they were soon together on the large dance floor, talking and engaging in polkas, schottisches, germans, and gallops.

“To that gay Capital, they congregate,” wrote Major de Havilland in lines not entirely without resonance for either later events or for modern Washington,

There were two other Little Red Riding Hoods on the floor—a Mrs. Hughes of Virginia and Mrs. John Floyd, whose husband was Buchanan’s Secretary of War and a future Confederate general. It was Teresa, however, who attracted the poet’s attention.

The key to de Havilland’s long poem shows that other women also duplicated costumes. There were five Peasant Girls, and Barton Key had chosen the same costume as two other men. Long after, Mrs. Clay would remember handsome Barton “as an English hunter, clad in white satin breeches, cherry-velvet jacket and jaunty cap, with lemon-colored hightop boots, and a silver bugle (upon which he blew from time to time) hung across his breast . . . a conspicuous figure in that splendid, happy assemblage.” There is something poignant in the image of Key, the widower, the transparent lover, the recklessly innocent liar, the hypochondriac, the Maryland aristocrat, so exuberantly blowing his hunting horn.

“Here, ‘English hunters’ run their prey to earth,” as de Havilland wrote, “And strike the ‘Key’ note of their jovial mirth.”

Like all the men here, like the laid-up Dan, Key wore his hair elegantly uncropped but well groomed and had a full mustache. His sandy
hair suited his strong features. Mrs. Clay said that when she had first come to Washington with her husband six years before, mustaches had not been seen on fashionable men—they were decorations for Tennessee hog drivers and brigands. But this was the way fashion had recently shifted.

Key’s sister, Mrs. Pendleton, expressed the transsectarian spirit of the evening by appearing as the Star-Spangled Banner, thus honoring her father’s memory, and Major de Havilland also celebrated the political spaciousness of the evening.

Virginia Clay, dressed as fictional Mrs. Partington, “the loquacious malapropos dame of American theatre,” had taken the trouble to engage the son of a senator to accompany her and impersonate Mrs. Partington’s simple-witted son. Mrs. Clay had also learned by heart the theatrical lines of Mrs. Partington and intended to amuse the President with them when he arrived. Already she was the hit of the ball, “and was followed everywhere by a crowd of eager listeners, drinking in her instant repartee.”

At last the aged, embattled, stooping, owllike chief executive entered, dressed plainly in a dark suit.

Years later, witnesses would remind Mrs. Clay “how you vexed and tortured dear old President Buchanan at Doctor and Mrs. Gwinn’s famous fancy party!”

The evening was, in its way, an extraordinary encapsulation of the time. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, who would one day be First Lady of the Rebel states, appeared as Madame de Staël. Mrs. Stephen Douglas was Aurora, and Mrs. Bayor of Louisiana impersonated a whittling Yankee. Mr. Mathew Brady, who would photograph the battlefields of the coming conflict, appeared appropriately as the painter Van Dyck, and James Gordon Bennett came down from his newspaper in New York and cannily made do for fancy dress with his kilts. Rose Greenhow, Confederate spy-in-waiting, appeared plainly as a housekeeper whose beauty contradicted the dustiness of her clothing. Senator William H. Seward, Republican and abolitionist, managed, like many of the older men in high office, to retain his dignity by wearing a suit, but was seen chatting with Virginia Clay, even though she had once said that “not even to save the nation could I be induced to . . . speak with him.”
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A number of people noticed Key and Teresa leave together about two in the morning. Some were titillated by the sight; others more gravely assessed the peril to the girl and the district attorney.

Before she entered the carriage with Key, Teresa told Thompson, the coachman, to drive for a while around the streets of Washington. As he drove, he had no doubt that Mrs. Sickles and Mr. Key enjoyed a fumbling, semi-intoxicated sexual episode on the upholstered seat within. After a time, Thompson heard a voice within the carriage tell him to drive to the National Hotel, and there he waited a considerable time until the English huntsman got down with his hunting horn and disappeared inside.

For whatever reason, Teresa did not see this love affair as tragic and dangerous. She lived within it as in a secret fantasy, as in a virtual and time-consuming experience that lacked any power to inflict damage on other areas of her life. Both she and Barton thought they were taking more care, and being less observed by people, than they were. It was as if, despite his outrage at any imputation of bad behavior, Barton unconsciously courted a certain visibility for his love of Teresa. Teresa may have similarly and ill-advisedly enjoyed the flaunting side of the relationship, the idea that it must come to Dan’s attention eventually, and
that he would thereby be chastened and rendered repentant for his previous neglect.