Theodore Rex (30 page)

A private driveway led steeply up the slope, and Sagamore Hill disclosed itself at last, glowing dull red through the rain. Red brick below, red wood above; brown and yellow awnings over the west piazza; streaming shingles the color of old mustard. Roosevelt’s eyes, rejoicing in the house’s ugliness, noticed only one unfamiliar note: a telephone pole trailing wires back the way he had come. Evidently Cortelyou was determined to keep him in touch with affairs of state.

RAIN GAVE WAY
to sun in the days that followed. The hilltop breezes sweetened as catalpa and locust bloomed below, and the birds of Roosevelt’s youth saluted his acute ear with remembered calls. Exulting in their clamor, he began to compose his first piece of presidential nature-writing:

Ovenbirds fluted too, in the heat, but more frequently after dark, when the whippoorwills were calling. Roosevelt spent many moonlit evenings on the piazza in his rocking chair, with Edith beside him, listening to this “night-singing in the air.” Despite his mature preoccupation with politics, he was still susceptible to poetic impressions. Musing on the behavior of screech owls, he produced one extraordinary, if ungrammatical, image:

To the west, beyond Hell Gate, he could see the nimbus of New York City, and, northeast across the Sound, the twinkling lights of Connecticut. At regular intervals, Fall River Line steamers en route to Massachusetts drew chains of gold across the water.

No matter how beautiful the night, the President could never relax entirely, knowing that William “Big Bill” Craig, his bodyguard, lurked in some nearby bush, while other large men prowled the lawns and driveway. Secret Service protection had become a full-time nuisance since McKinley’s assassination. Roosevelt disliked it, but the agents were inexorable. They checked their watches when he went upstairs, stared at his window while he slept, and hung yawning around the kitchen at breakfast time. They webbed the estate with trip wires, and treated all visitors as potential anarchists, even a party of dowagers from the Oyster Bay Needlework Guild. On afternoons off, they wandered around town looking for “cranks,” their knobby pockets and patent-leather shoes infallibly identifying them as plainclothesmen.

Roosevelt gave up protesting that he could adequately defend himself. (The sight of
a gun butt protruding from the presidential trouser-seat caused some consternation in Christ Episcopal Church.)
Instead, he used his familiarity
with the landscape to shake off his escort as often as possible. One day he managed to escape Big Bill Craig for two hours by galloping Bleistein into the woods. Another of his tricks was to lead unwary officers to Cooper’s Bluff, the almost vertical, 150-foot sand cliff at the end of Cove Neck. Talking casually, Roosevelt would arrive at the brink, then drop out of sight like a plummet. The Secret Service men would instinctively follow, and, losing their footing, somersault to the bottom in a choking avalanche. Meanwhile, the President, striding off unscathed, could enjoy a few moments of peace.

Yet had it not been for the cordon that Craig threw about Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt would have enjoyed no peace at all. Every train from “York,” as Oyster Bay natives called the metropolis, brought delegations of politicians, office-seekers, and sycophants bent on disturbing his leisure. “I never seed the like of it,” said Si Josslyn, veteran clam digger of Cove Neck, “and it ain’t no wonder the President has to stan’ most of ’em off.” Only pilgrims on urgent public business, with a pass signed by Cortelyou, were permitted up the private road.

Cabinet officers and Congressmen found that strange rules of protocol applied in the President’s house:

Rough Riders, accustomed to instant access to their Colonel, found Sagamore Hill harder to take than the heights of San Juan. They joined the crowds of other rejectees in town, gazing in frustration at the big house and windmill across the bay.

Most disappointed of all were members of the press, who could not reconcile Roosevelt’s availability in the White House with his refusal to receive them at home. Starved of news, they mooched unhappily in the village, waylaying every returning visitor for bits of information.
About once a week, the President would trot down East Main Street, followed by a procession of children (at least ten Roosevelt cousins lived on Cove Neck, in addition to his own brood). Little Archie, clad in a Rough Rider suit, always brought up the rear. Reporters would run alongside in the dust, bawling questions to which the President was benignly deaf.

One day, he reined in his horse and teased them with a mock bulletin. “I want you to know all the facts, so I shall give them to you at first hand. Teddy [Jr.] is now fishing for tadpoles, but really expects to land a whale. Archie shot three elephants this morning. Ethel at this moment is setting fire to the rear of the house; Kermit and the calico pony are having a wrestling match in the garret, and Quentin, four years old, is pulling down the windmill.”

Unamused, the reporters began to concoct their own fantasies of life at Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt took no notice until suggestive accounts of a picnic
à deux
with Edith appeared in several newspapers. The headlines were arch:
“PRESIDENT AND MRS. ROOSEVELT STROLL IN ARCADY—
Executive Realizes the Poet’s Dream—‘A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and Thou, Singing in the Wilderness.’ ” Worse still were patently sexual references to himself as “a gallant gentleman in knickerbockers,” bent on “pleasuring” his “lady,” and making “little sallies into the heart of nature.”

He traced the stories to the Oyster Bay correspondent of the New York
Sun
, and complained to the paper’s editor, Paul Dana:

Dana withdrew his correspondent, and the press corps learned to respect the veil that the President drew across his family activities. Both he and Edith held to the Victorian concept of childhood as a state of grace that cameras, and coarse questions, could only profane.

For the younger Roosevelts, the long summer days certainly seemed appareled in celestial light. “It is avowedly the ambition of the President,” a visitor wrote, “to make Sagamore Hill ever remain in the eyes of his children, the one spot on earth which is different from every other.”
The estate, with its forty acres of lawns, gardens, wheat fields, and woodland, its stable, barn, windmill, and well, its molehilly tennis court and turtle pond full of nice green scum, was about as near to Paradise as any child could wish. Best of all, perhaps, was its long stretch of private beach, beyond the heron pools in Cold Spring Harbor. There were two red bathing houses there, some battered boats, and miles of quiet water.

These haunts, Elysian as they were, needed the transforming touch of a Zeus to make them divine. Roosevelt did not disappoint. He gave off a godlike aura of radiance and vitality, and the children luxuriated in it, like bees in sun.

From early morning, when he drummed them downstairs for a prebreak-fast game of “bear,” until late evening, when he romped them up to bed, their days were spent largely in his company. His burly arms tickled them, swung them shrieking into the sea, steadied their gun barrels, and rowed them around the bay. He was slightly dangerous in his fun. His bulk half-smothered them—girls as well as boys—in wrestling contests. His playful
cuffs rang in their ears, his myopia made him a lethal diver. At night in the woods, he enthralled them with harsh, yodeling ghost stories, climaxed with a flash of teeth, a roar, and a pounce, deliciously scary. Later, recovering round the campfire, they would revel in his infamous clams, fried in beef fat and garnished with equal parts pepper and sand.

“CHILDHOOD AS A STATE OF GRACE.”
Quentin Roosevelt in the daisy field at Sagamore Hill
(photo credit 8.1)

Only when he climbed wearily into his sleeping bag did their adoration turn to protectiveness, and for as long as possible they would stay awake, guarding the President of the United States as he slept.

NO MATTER WHERE
Roosevelt spent the night, his presence was required in the library of Sagamore Hill every weekday at 8:30
A.M.
Secretary Cortelyou, oily and purposeful as an otter, would come up the drive with a leather bag full of mail, and for the next few hours “typing machines” would click, and a Morse transmitter rattle, as he and the President dispatched affairs of state. Since the government was in recess, their business was neither copious nor demanding. Cortelyou was usually on his way by noon, and Roosevelt, looking like a large plump urchin in negligee shirt, linen knickers, and canvas shoes, would play a set of tennis before lunch.

With the sun glowing on his awnings, and the table piled with the products of his farm—roast chickens, asparagus, potatoes, corn, fresh rye bread
and butter, gooseberries, grapes, peaches swimming in cream—he was tempted to forget that summer must end, that the fecund ripeness of the nation’s economy would be susceptible, sooner or later, to cold winds.
A new magazine, ironically entitled
World’s Work
, reported that more Americans were on vacation, and spending more money, than ever before. After a century of struggle, of wars and assassination and depression and empire-building, the United States felt entitled to bask at last in peace and prosperity. A musical paean to mindlessness lilted round the country. Holidaymakers sang the song on yachts in Bar Harbor, on the roller coasters of Coney Island, on horseback in Colorado, and on streetcars in San Francisco. They bellowed it in chorus from vaudeville boats in the Hudson, and heard it echoing back at them from the Palisades: