The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (23 page)

Theodore’s diaries do not dwell on the nineteen-year-old Elliott’s more obvious superiorities, such as good looks, charm, and sexual attractiveness. That fatally flawed Apollo was still, in the summer of 1879, unaware of the demon that would one day destroy him. An adolescent tendency toward epilepsy had been cured—seemingly—
by the Rooseveltian remedy for all ills, travel. After a trip to Europe and two long stays in Texas he had returned, vigorous and healthy, to take his place as a young banker in New York society.
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Instantly friends of both sexes flocked to him, as others had done, years before, to Theodore Senior. “Nell” had all of Bamie’s poise and none of her severity. He was untouched by Theodore’s aggressive egotism. Like Corinne he tended to gush, but his warmth was more genuine. Kindly, open, decent, generous, he indeed was his father’s son—were it not for a helpless inability to concentrate on anything but pleasure.

As far as girls were concerned, these faults merely added to his appeal. Even Fanny Smith, a lifelong worshiper of his brother, had to admit that “Elliott as a young man was a much more fascinating person than Theodore Roosevelt.”
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O
N 16
A
UGUST
T
HEODORE’S EXCELLENT
results arrived from Harvard. He was pleased to note that “in zoology and political economy I lead everybody.”
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This double achievement, in two such diametrically opposed subjects, was enough to reawaken his career dilemma of the previous winter. He had rejected Professor Laughlin’s advice to make government, not science, his career. But now, perhaps because Alice had included the effluvia of the laboratory among her reasons for rejecting
him
, he began to wonder if Laughlin had not been right. Actually he had already, as he later confirmed, “abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist.”
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From now on politics, not zoology, would preoccupy those parts of his mind not given over to Alice Lee.

For thirty-six precious hours, in late August, Theodore was able to worship his beloved in body as well as spirit. En route to yet another vacation in Maine, he stopped off in Boston and spent a couple of nights at Chestnut Hill. Alice accompanied him to a beach party, walked with him through the woods, showed off her graceful prowess on the tennis court, and was his partner at a barn dance. She was “so bewitchingly pretty” he could continue north “only by heroic self-denial.”
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Had Island Falls not been beyond the reach of any telegram, Theodore would have undoubtedly canceled his
booking with Bill Sewall, and remained at Chestnut Hill to eat lotus fruit with the Lees.
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H
ARSHER PLEASURES AWAITED HIM
in Aroostook County, where the first chill of fall was already in the air. Since his first trip to Island Falls in 1878, Theodore had been longing to climb Mount Katahdin, whose silhouette massively dominated the western windows of Sewall’s cabin.
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Forty miles away and 5,268 feet high, Katahdin was the highest mountain in Maine, and was surrounded by some of the most intractable forest in the Northeast. Now the young underclassman felt sufficiently tough and “forest-wise” to answer the challenge on the horizon. Arthur Cutler and his cousin Emlen Roosevelt, who were also vacationing at Island Falls, agreed to join him. After only two days of preparation they helped Sewall and Dow to load up a wagon, and set off southwest into a dank, dripping wilderness.
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If nothing else, the events of the next eight days made Cutler withdraw his old doubts about Theodore’s stamina. Although conditions were wet and slippery, the young man effortlessly toted a forty-five-pound pack up the ever-steepening mountain. Losing a shoe in a stream, he padded on in moccasins, which protected his feet “about as effectually as kid gloves.” Yet despite the pain of tramping over miles of rain-slicked stones, he triumphantly reached the top with Sewall and Dow. Cutler and Emlen remained far below, in a state of collapse.
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That night, as the rain beat their tents and bedding into a sodden mess, Theodore noted in his diary: “I can endure fatigue and hardship pretty nearly as well as these lumbermen.”
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His fellow New Yorkers could not. As soon as the party got back to Island Falls on 2 September they left exhausted for home.

Having thus, as it were, flexed his muscles, Theodore set off with Bill Sewall on a second expedition, to the Munsungen Lakes, compared to which “our trip to Katahdin was absolute luxury.” It included a fifty-mile, six-day voyage up the Aroostook River in a pirogue, or heavy dugout canoe. Fully half the time they had to drag or push the boat through torrential rapids, pausing occasionally to hack their way through beaver dams and log drifts. They
spent ten hours a day up to their hips in icy water, stumbling constantly on sharp, slimy stones. “But, oh how we slept at night! And how we enjoyed the salt pork, hardtack and tea which constituted our food!”
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By way of relaxing after this bruising expedition, Theodore persuaded Sewall and Dow to take a third jaunt, during which they drove or marched over a hundred miles in three days. Rain fell unceasingly, but Theodore continued to delight in his “superb health” and ability to walk, wrestle, and shoot on near-equal terms with backwoodsmen. When Sewall and Dow finally put him on the Boston train on 24 September, he declared he felt “strong as a bull.”
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The two big men, watching his skinny arm wave them goodbye, may have had their doubts about that—Sewall for years afterward continued to think of him as “frail”—but they could not fail to be awed by his vitality.
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He had taken them on in their own environment, and proved himself as good as they.

O
N THE MORNING AFTER
his return to Cambridge, Theodore emerged from breakfast at the Porc and found his new dog-cart outside the door, lamps and lacquerwork gleaming. Lightfoot waited patiently between its curving poles, long since resigned to the indignity of haulage. The staff of Pike’s Stable had done a good job: Theodore could see that both horse and cart were in fine condition. His whip stood ready in its sprocket. Neatly folded under the seat lay a rug just large enough to wrap two pairs of touching legs. Climbing up carefully (for the dog-cart had a notoriously erratic center of gravity) he shook the reins and was soon rolling down Mount Auburn Street in the direction of Chestnut Hill.
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To his delight, the rig went beautifully, Lightfoot breaking only at the occasional roar of a locomotive. Theodore was conscious of the stares of passersby, and presumed that he was cutting a fine figure: “I really think that I have as swell a turnout as any man.”
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If by
any man
he meant his fellow students, he understated the case; for this was the first dog-cart ever seen at Harvard, and remained the only one throughout his senior year. With such stylish equipage, he could hardly escape the amused notice of his classmates. Hitherto, he had
managed to keep his visits to Chestnut Hill fairly secret, but now rumors began to fly.
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The amorous Don Quixote, spurring Rocinante across the plain of La Mancha, was no more comic a courtier than Theodore, as he wobbled on tall wheels over the Charles River Bridge. In the words of his classmate Richard Welling:

History does not record what Alice Lee thought of this apparition as it creaked to a halt outside the Saltonstalls’ house. Presumably she was not as dazzled as Theodore had hoped, for he studiously avoids mentioning her in his diary entry for the day, 26 September 1879: “… they were all so heartily glad to see me that I felt as if I had come home.” On the next page Theodore writes: “Dr. and Mrs. Saltonstall are just too sweet for anything, and the girls are as lovely as ever.”

Something is obviously wrong. For the rest of September, all of October, and most of November, he shows a strange reluctance to refer to Alice, even obliquely. Her name appears but once, in a list of his guests at an opera party on 16 October. Two pages are ripped out just prior to that date. There is also a reduction in the flow of Theodore’s perpetual cheerfulness. Yet the evidence is that he
continued to drive over to Chestnut Hill, and his relationship with the rest of that sociable community remained as warm as ever. Only Alice, apparently, was cool.

If he was not happy during these first months of his senior year, Theodore was too busy to be depressed. “I have my hands altogether too full of society work,” he mildly complained, “being Librarian of the Porcellian, Secretary of the Pudding, Treasurer of the O.K., Vice President of the Natural History Soc., and President of the A.D.Q.; Editor of the
Advocate.”
His diary makes frequent reference to theater parties and suppers—“I find I don’t get to bed too early.”
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Although he had purposely arranged a light study schedule (only five courses, as opposed to nine in his junior year), he worked at it six to eight hours a day.
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He was determined to keep up his three-year average of 82, and in mid-October proudly informed the Roosevelts: “I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows. Only one gentleman,” Theodore added, with a fine regard for social distinction, “stands ahead of me.”
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He was still, for all the influence of Bill Sewall, an unabashed snob. His idea of a good time, during this period of estrangement from Alice, was to pile six fashionable young men into a four-in-hand, “and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls &c.”
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Alice was not at Theodore’s side when he turned twenty-one on 27 October 1879. But his adoring family was, and he saw no reason to be despondent. He would get his girl—he knew it. If still not altogether certain about his career, he at least knew roughly what he would like to do, and his achievements to date, whether social, physical, or intellectual, had not dishonored the memory of his father. For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.”
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