The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (20 page)

Perhaps the best of these “best friends,” now that Harry Minot had dropped out of Harvard to study law, was Dick Saltonstall,
whose family mansion on Chestnut Hill became a second home to Theodore in the fall and winter of 1878. The first invitation to this bastion of Boston society came on Friday, 18 October. The two young men drove out of Cambridge in Saltonstall’s buggy, crossed the river, and headed west into a brilliant fall landscape.
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Chestnut Hill lay six miles away. As the buggy creaked toward it, through increasingly luxuriant woods, Theodore could sense the waves of peace and security which flow around the enclaves of the very rich. A private lane curved up the hillside to where Leverett Saltonstall’s house lay, huge and rambling, backed by chestnut trees, and fronting on an immense sweep of lawn. The lawn was shared by another, equally imposing mansion, the home of George Cabot Lee; a mere twenty yards of grass, and a token garden gate, separated the one property from the other.
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Dick had doubtless already explained to Theodore that the Lees and Saltonstalls were more than mere neighbors. Mr. Lee was his uncle by marriage, and seventeen-year-old Alice Lee was the inseparable companion of his sister, Rose Saltonstall.
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Theodore met both girls that evening. In his diary he described them with his usual vague adjectives, “sweet,” “pretty,” and “pleasant”—the last being reserved for Rose, who was decidedly the more homely of the two.

He greatly enjoyed himself that weekend, walking through the woods with Alice and Rose, attending church with both families on Sunday morning, and “chestnutting” alone with Alice in the afternoon.
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As always, his soul responded to people of his own class, conversation on his own level, manners whose every nuance was familiar to him. Only a month ago Bill Sewall had convinced him that “the nobles of the earth” were “men of toil”—and probably would convince him again, as he intended to return to Island Falls one day. But in the meantime, the Lees and Saltonstalls were aristocracy enough for Theodore Roosevelt.

O
N 27
O
CTOBER, AS HIS
second decade came to an end, the young man’s thoughts turned to the past, and his grief for his father surged up afresh. To distract himself he took a ramble through the woods with his gun. His diary entry for that night proves, with
unconscious humor, that his heart had at last healed: “Oh Father, sometimes I feel as though I would give half my life to see you but for a moment! Oh, what loving memories I have of you! 2 grey squirrel.”

O
N 2
N
OVEMBER 1878
, Theodore was initiated into the Porcellian.
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It seems the honor rather went to his head. “Was ‘higher’ with wine than ever before—or will be again,” he wrote. “Still, I could wind up my watch.” Then, in a revealing afterword: “Wine makes me awfully fighty.”
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A throbbing hangover confirmed his lifelong resolve never to get drunk again, and the evidence is he never did. He continued to enjoy “sprees” at the Porc, including the traditional suppers of partridge and burgundy, and champagne breakfasts on Sundays; but he remained severely teetotal on most of these occasions, and abstemious on the others. As for smoking, he had promised his father to abstain from that manly practice until he was twenty-one, with the result that when the time came he had lost all interest in it. The third vice that appeals to most undergraduates was beneath his contemplation: he remained “perfectly pure” throughout his bachelor years.
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His second visit to Chestnut Hill occurred on 11 November, when he drove over to take tea with the Saltonstalls and their ubiquitous visitor from next door, who was “as sweet and pretty as ever.” So, of course, was practically every girl that Theodore met. But Alice Lee seems to have merited his praise rather more than any other. When he saw her again, he was a houseguest for Thanksgiving, and already so much a part of the Chestnut Hill circle that she allowed him to call her “Alice.”
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As her own first “Teddy” lingered softly in his ears, he vowed, with all the strength of his passionate nature, that he would marry her.
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A
LICE
H
ATHAWAY
L
EE
was just seventeen when Theodore first saw her on 18 October 1878. “As long as I live,” he wrote afterward, “I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.”
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With his photographic memory, he no doubt carried that first vision of her pristine to the grave. Alice blushing must indeed have been an unforgettable sight, and not only to eyes as worshipful as Theodore’s. Contemporary testimonials to her beauty are as unanimous as those in praise of her charm. She was “an enchanting creature” of “singular loveliness”; of “quick intelligence,” “endearing character,” and “unfailing sunny temperament”; she was “gay,” “exceptionally bright,” and “the life of the
party.”
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Images of sunshine and light recur so often in descriptions of her that one can understand how quickly she bedazzled Theodore, as indeed she bedazzled everybody.

“She seems like a star of heaven … my pearl, my pure flower.”
Alice Hathaway Lee when Theodore Roosevelt first met her
. (
Illustration 4.1
)

The imagination, stimulated by such universal praise, delights to picture Alice Lee coming through that garden gate more than a century ago: an exquisite, willowy blonde, smiling shyly, moving with the “long, firm step” of a natural athlete. She wears a dress of white brocade that glows in the late-afternoon light.
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Through Theodore’s spectacles, as it were, we see, as she draws nearer, that she is tall—five foot seven, only two inches shorter than he—yet holds herself proudly erect. Her hair, drawn up to expose a graceful neck, is honey-colored, but when the sun strikes the water-curls that cling to her temples, or the thick ropes piled high on her head, unexpected highlights of gold shimmer in it. Her eyes are similarly chromatic: at times they seem a very pale blue, at others a pearly gray. Heavy lashes, when she glances down demurely, brush cheeks whose pinkness, blending into a soft pocket of shadow in the corner of her mouth, make her irresistibly kissable. She is, in short, as ravishing a beauty as ever walked across a Boston lawn, or through the pages of any Victorian novel. Theodore, drinking her in at every pore, fell in love with her there and then. Just two more meetings were enough to convince him “that win her I would, if it were possible,” and to affirm that “I had never before cared … a snap of my finger for any girl.”
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So much for Edith Carow. Theodore, when he wrote those words, was in such rapture over Alice that he probably exaggerated his indifference to other women. But whatever spark Edith had kindled in his heart was obliterated by the firestorm of passion which now consumed him. After only one weekend at Chestnut Hill he could afford to be sarcastic about his childhood sweetheart: “… give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humour; otherwise my respectful regards.” The suspicion grows that his last interview with that strong-willed young lady, in the summer-house at Oyster Bay, had been a stormy one. “If she seems particularly good-tempered,” Theodore went on, “tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”
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With that he cast her from his mind, and
dedicated himself to the “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”
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G
IVEN HER EXTREME YOUTH
, and the protective aura of wealth and privilege that had always surrounded her, Alice not surprisingly proved to be as elusive a prize as Theodore had ever hunted. His ardor was so violent—in courtship as in everything else—that he periodically frightened her away, like a nervous doe; then he would have to restrain himself, and with soft words and soothing gestures coax her near again. She found him by no means a romantic attraction. The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses; the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance-floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs—these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. Yet Alice could not help being intrigued by him, and flattered by his adoration. How different he was from those boring young Boston Brahmins—and, so far as she knew, from everybody else in the human race. How sidesplitting he could be, when he told jokes in that curious falsetto of his! Her quick mind rejoiced in his intelligence, and her body, when they skated together, to the masculine hardness of his arms. Even as she sprang away from him, she took care not to spring too far; not that there was any risk of him abandoning the chase. Theodore, like his father before him, “almost always got what he wanted.”
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