CHAPTER TEN
1
THEY MET THE FIRST TIME on October 18,1878, which is to say they met early that same heady autumn of Theodore’s junior year when suddenly everything seemed to be going so right for him. He had his “burst of popularity” and found the girl of his dreams, his “‘rare and radiant maiden,’” all within about ten days.
The eighteenth was a Friday. Classes were over for the week and in the afternoon Dick Saltonstall had driven him out to Chestnut Hill in a buggy to meet his family and spend the weekend. It was a ride of only six miles, but through open country most of the way, hills brilliant with fall color, and Theodore’s first impression, almost from the hour they arrived, was of coming home.
The two great neighboring homesteads of the Saltonstalls and the Lees might have been Oyster Bay mansions and the two large, active families into which he was at once gathered might have been Roosevelts.
The houses were within calling distance of each other, about fifty yards distant, with hayfields and orchards and woodland falling away down the hillside. A connecting path ran from the Saltonstall back door on a gradual uphill slope to the Lee place, past the Saltonstall barn. The Saltonstalls faced east, the Lees south; but the houses were of the same vintage and much the same in scale and appearance—huge and Victorian, with clapboard siding and an endless number of windows, high porches, high, peaked gables, tremendous red-brick chimneys, and long kitchen wings. The kitchen alone at the Saltonstalls’ was as big as a barn (quite large enough to serve as an additional Saltonstall dwelling, years later, when it was cut off and removed from the main house). And the Lee house was larger even than the Saltonstalls’.
Leverett Saltonstall, Dick’s father, and George Cabot Lee, the father of Theodore’s heart’s desire, were two wealthy, important, middle-aged Bostonians, dignified, good friends, brothers-in-law, and as steeped in Harvard as one could possibly be. (Leverett had been in the Class of 1848; George, in the Class of 1850.) Leverett, an attorney, had given up his regular practice to dabble in one thing and another, including politics; George was a Lee of Lee, Higginson and Company, the Boston banking and investment firm. Indeed, there was no more exemplary figure of good, old, Boston financial stability than George Lee, he being the keeper of the famous vaults at Lee, Higginson. Another of the firm, Colonel Henry Lee, some fifteen years before had hit upon the idea of a safe-deposit vault beneath the State Street headquarters, the first such vault in the country, but George had become its manager. A small, compact man with a high forehead, high color, and a white mustache, he was known to be “prudent, assiduous, a lover of detail,” a little gruff in manner but kindly withal, and totally reliable. To have your money securely invested, in the Boston vernacular of that day, was to be “as safe as Lee’s vaults.”
They were men certainly of whom the elder Theodore would have approved. The one notable difference in their outlook and his was political, since both were Democrats, and Saltonstall, in particular, harbored bitter enmity toward almost all Republicans as a consequence of the 1876 election. Sent by the National Democratic Committee to witness the tally of disputed votes in Florida, he had seen the presidency being stolen before his eyes and refused ever to forget it.
Saltonstall’s wife was George Lee’s sister, Harriett Rose, which made the Saltonstall and Lee children first cousins. Dick was the oldest of five Saltonstall children, followed by Rose, Mary, Phillip, and eight-year-old Endicott. Alice—Alice Hathaway—was the second of six Lee children, five girls and one boy. Rose, or Rosy, Lee was her older sister. Then followed Harriett, Caroline, Isabella, and George, who was nine. Their mother was Caroline Haskell Lee.
So together the two households comprised what amounted to one very large family of fifteen, and with five or six full-time servants for each house, with horses to ride, surrounding countryside to explore, fireplaces in every room for chill October nights, this was everything Theodore could have wished for, the whole atmosphere being “so homelike,” as he said.
Alice was seventeen. Theodore was nineteen, the same age his father had been when he first reached Roswell and found his Princess from Afar in another large country house on a hill. What Alice was wearing when he first saw her, whether they were at the Saltonstalls’ or the Lees’ house, or somewhere along the path between, we do not know; but as he told her later, she affected him in a way he had never experienced before. The feeling was instantaneous. He loved her, he later wrote, as soon as he saw her. And she was “my first love, too.”
She was, by every surviving account, extraordinarily attractive, slender, graceful in her movements, and “rather tall” for a girl of that era, five feet seven, which meant that with shoes on she was as tall as he. Her hair was a honey-blond and done in fashionable “water-curls” about her temples, in “the Josephine look.” Her eyes were extremely blue, her nose just slightly tilted. She is described repeatedly as “radiant,” “bright,” “cheerful,” “sunny,” “high-spirited,” “enchanting,” “full of life,” the same words one finds in descriptions of Mittie Bulloch at that age. She loved games, as Mittie did; she wore white; she was full of humor and flirtatious (”bewitching,” Theodore said); her birthday was in July, as Mittie’s was.
Saturday morning, accompanied by Dick and one of his sisters, she and Theodore walked in the woods together. In the afternoon they all drove to Milton, to the Ellerton Whitney estate, for dinner and tea. “We spent the evening dancing and singing, driving back about 11 o’clock,” he reports in his diary. Sunday, after church, just the two of them went “chestnutting” and three weeks later he was back again for another Sunday, to see the Saltonstalls ostensibly.
Invited for Thanksgiving, he could write proudly at the day’s end, “They call me by my first name now.”
As time passed they were to cover countless miles in country walks together, she more than keeping up with him with her “long, firm step.” They played tennis, at which she was quite good; they went to dances, dinners, and endured what appears to have been an unending quantity of tea and talk and always in the best company.
“Snowed heavily all day long,” reads one Saturday entry in the diary. “But in spite of the weather I took a long walk with pretty Alice . . . spent most of the remainder of the day teaching the girls the five step and a new dance, the Knickerbocker. In the evening we played whist and read ghost stories.” He had a rug made for her from the lynx he trapped in Maine. She made him a pair of slippers (to replace Mittie’s presumably); and it was that spring that he had his horse shipped on to Cambridge so he could ride to Chestnut Hill on his own whenever he chose. (”It was the best stroke I ever made getting him on here.”)
To judge by what he said in his letters home, he was having a “capital time” with any number of Boston girls—Jennie Hooper, Nana Rotch, Lulu Lane, Bessie Whitney—and when he mentioned Alice, even in the supposed privacy of the diary, it was usually in the same breath with Rose Saltonstall, as if there were no difference in their appeal to him. Nor did he neglect to include periodic references to others from his “past.” “Remember me to Annie and Fanny, and give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humor,” he wrote to Corinne; “otherwise my respectful regards. If she seems particularly good-tempered 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.”
Once he ventured to declare in the diary, “The more I see of Rose Saltonstall and Alice Lee the more I like them, especially pretty Alice.” By spring he felt up to saying the same thing (and in almost identical words) to Bamie, adding quickly, “All the family are just lovely to me.”
“I want you particularly to know some of my girl friends now,” he wrote to Corinne, expecting that she, Mittie, Bamie, and Aunt Anna might show up for Class Day. “They are a very sweet set of girls,” he assured her.
Through that summer, until he left for Maine (and to see Alice en route), he appeared to have little or nothing on his mind, exactly as if Alice Lee did not exist. Her name never appears in the diary rendition of his days at Oyster Bay. He writes instead of “the same active, out-of-door life that I always enjoy so much.” He is thinking mainly about “getting into beautiful condition,” spending “the whole time out in the open air; and at night am always tired enough to sleep like a top. Naturally I am in magnificent health and spirits.” A “pretty little Miss Hale” from Philadelphia turns up as a guest of Uncle James Alfred and family. “I take her out rowing quite often.” Another of “the prettiest girls in Oyster Bay” is a Miss Emily Swan, with whom he has had “several very pleasant rows and rides.” He walks with Bamie and “Pussie,” he walks with Mittie, who is “just too sweet and pretty for anything.” On August 11 he reports, “I am teaching pretty Miss Emily Swan to play lawn tennis.”
But it was all an elaborate deception, according to what he revealed later. In truth he had already proposed to Alice. He had made up his mind to marry her as early as that Thanksgiving at Chestnut Hill. He had even recorded the decision in the diary at that time, but then, thinking better of it, carefully removed the page with a straight razor. The proposal came sometime in June, to judge by things he said later, and from the diary, one gets the impression it was on the evening of the twentieth, Class Day, for which none of the Roosevelts had made an appearance. There were parties most of the day—an afternoon tea dance at the new gym, a dinner at the Hasty Pudding Club—and after dark, from about eight o’clock until ten, he and Alice sat together in a window at Hollis Hall “looking at the Yard beautifully lighted and listening to the Glee Club.” He had “never seen her look so lovely,” he wrote. “We then went and danced at Memorial [Hall].”
But whatever the time or setting, she turned him down, or at least put him off.
As he wrote later to Henry Minot, he had “made everything subordinate to winning her.” His entire last two years at Harvard, as he saw them, were in “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”
“See that girl?” Mrs. Robert Bacon would remember him saying at a Hasty Pudding function. “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her!”
The showy little dog cart was acquired as his senior year got under way and it was now that the expenditures on clothes took their biggest jump. His campaign was rolling. He enlisted all the help he could get. Early in November, he arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Alice, and her sister Rose to visit Mittie at 57th Street. Two weeks later Bamie and Corinne made their appearance at Chestnut Hill, where they were given dinners at both the Lee and Saltonstall houses. On November 22 he put on a lunch in their honor at the Porcellian, complete with wine and flowers, the table set for thirty-four guests, including Alice and her mother.
He escorted Rosy Lee to a tennis party and had “lovely fun” dancing with her at a Harvard Assembly. He took “dear and honest” (and very homely) Rose Saltonstall driving in his “swell” dog cart. He talked poetry and theology with the rather august Leverett Saltonstall most of one long evening.
Other young men, meantime, circled about Alice as moths to a flame (in the words of another of her cousins), and with the return of winter Theodore was beside himself. He is described wandering sleepless through the woods near Cambridge “night after night.” Obsessed with the idea that somebody else would run off with her, he sent abroad for a set of French dueling pistols, which it is said he actually succeeded in getting through the Customhouse “after great difficulty.” One winter night when he was off on another of his wanderings in the woods, somebody telegraphed New York and Cousin West, now a medical student, had to come on immediately to see what could be done for him.
Then, over the Christmas holidays, the course of the romance took an abrupt turn. Alice came back to New York for a second visit, accompanied by Rosy and Dick and Rose Saltonstall. It becomes “an uproariously jolly time.” There is a theater evening. Parties are given in Alices honor by Aunt Anna and Aunt Lizzie next door. New Year’s Day Elliott stages a lunch and a dance at Jerome Park. It is a sparkling winter day with fresh snow on the ground and everyone rides to and from the party in three big sleighs.
On Sunday, January 25,1880, again at Cambridge, he could announce unequivocally in his diary, “At last everything is settled . . .”
I drove over to the Lees’ determined to make an end of things . . . and after much pleading my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife. Oh, how bewitchingly pretty she looked! If loving her with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy; a year ago last Thanksgiving I made a vow that win her I would if it were possible; and now I have done so, the aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy, and to shield her and guard her from every trial. . .
He was off at once on a flying visit to New York to “tell the family,” all of whom were “very much surprised,” according to his impression. By February 2, he had bought her a diamond ring.
Feb. 3 Snowing heavily, but I drove over in my sleigh to Chestnut Hill, the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife. My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune. Coming home I was upset in a great drift, and dragged about 300 yards holding on to the reins, before I could stop the horse . . .
Feb. 4 Superb sleighing, took Dick out for a long drive. The engagement is not to come out till a week from Monday; it is awfully hard to keep away from her.
Feb. 13. . . I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never (even when hunting) gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her; and I doubt if an hour has passed that I have not thought of her. And now I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose.
He began sending advance notices to a few select friends, to Hal Minot, to Edith Carow and Fanny Smith. To Mittie, who seems to have been greatly distressed, he wrote, “Really you mustn’t feel melancholy, sweet Motherling; I shall only love you all the more.”
The formal announcement was made February 14. When Mittie, Bamie, Elliott, and Corinne arrived three days later, he drove them to a “great family dinner at the Lees’.” Later, at the Hasty Pudding Club, too excited to sleep, he played billiards until dawn.
“Alice,” said Mrs. Robert Bacon long afterward, “. . . did not want to marry him, but she did.”
Alice, in her own words, felt as if in a dream, to have “such a noble man’s love.” She loved Theodore deeply, she wrote to Mittie, in answer to a letter welcoming her into the Roosevelt fold, “and it will be my aim both to endear myself to those so dear to him and retain his love. How happy I am I can’t begin to tell you, it seems almost like a dream.”
A date for the wedding was a subject no one had broached as yet, and when she told Theodore she wanted to be married the following autumn, he anticipated a “battle royal” with her father, who apparently thought she was too young to be in any rush and would have welcomed a long engagement. “I most sincerely wish I had you here to assist me,” Theodore wrote Bamie. But then Mittie proposed that he bring Alice home to live at 57th Street, once they were married, and it was thus that he “carried the day” when the confrontation took place. “Indeed,” he told Corinne, “I don’t think Mr. Lee would have consented to our marriage so soon on other terms.”
To Mittie he now announced, “I wish to send invitations to all my friends and acquaintances in New York; so couldn’t you send me on a visiting list of all the people I know or ought to know? I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”
2
6 West 57th Street
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,
Will you take a cup of tea with me on Monday next, the 12th, at 4 o’clock.
I wish to present to you Miss Alice Lee of Boston who with her mother will be visiting us then.
Miss Lee is a very lovely young girl of eighteen and is just engaged to my oldest son, Theodore, who does not graduate from Harvard until June.
I think I can rely upon your interest, my dear Mrs. Ward, in my son’s engagement and I am anxious to welcome you to my home among a few of my friends. . . .
Hoping to welcome you then, my dear friend, on April 12th. I am faithfully yours—
M. B. ROOSEVELT
April 5, 1880
The note was one of the many Mittie sent off in her own hand on her monogrammed cream-colored stationery that spring of 1880 and there were to be a very great many more, several hundred at least, before the year ended. It was as if time and circumstances and all those rites of passage expected by proper society had conspired to put her at center stage as she had not been since her own engagement. And with so much expected of her—her particular grace and “example” often critical to the success of an occasion—she appears to have played her part with nothing but pleasure, and flawlessly. One New York paper was to write of her “brilliant prowess” as a hostess. “All the entertainments that she gave . . . were stamped with the spirit of good cheer, high breeding, and elevating conversation. Few houses have entertained so many guests and none has made of guests so many friends.”
Her small tea of April 12 had been preceded by a family reception for Alice on April 8 and was followed by a large evening affair on April 13 at which she and Alice made a striking picture receiving their guests in front of the ornate mantelpiece in the dining room at 57th Street. In December she would stand in the same spot, Corinne on her right this time, Alice on her left, at Corinne’s coming-out party, hothouse flowers banked on all sides, rooms so full of people it was difficult to move about.
Between these two occasions, in about seven months’ time, she would give perhaps twenty dinner parties and an equal number of teas; she would see the 57th Street house closed for the summer—silver packed, furniture shrouded with slipcovers—and move to Oyster Bay (on May 29). She would attend Theodores graduation at Cambridge (June 30); entertain a steady stream of guests at Tranquillity through the summer; settle issues among her servants; fret over Theodore’s health; see Theodore and Elliott off to the West for a hunting trip; have Tranquillity put in order for Theodore’s honeymoon; reopen the 57th Street house and arrange an “apartment” for Theodore and Alice on the third floor; attend the wedding at Chestnut Hill; plan Corinne’s party; issue the invitations for Corinne’s party; and adjust to the idea that Elliott was going off to hunt big game in India.
Theodore’s romance, moreover, was but one of several with which she must play a part.
It was at one of her April dinner parties at 57th Street, a week or so after the reception for Alice, that Bamie’s friend Sara Delano first met James Roosevelt of Hyde Park, a dignified member of the Hudson River “branch,” who was twice Sara Delano’s age and a widower. “He talked to her the whole time,” Mittie remarked to Bamie when the evening was over. “Why, he never took his eyes off her!” Sara, like Bamie, had resigned herself to the probability of lifelong spinsterhood and would credit Mittie ever after for the way things turned out. On May 7, following up on an invitation from “Squire James,” Mittie took Bamie and Sara for a visit to Hyde Park, a day Sara was to remember as among the most important in her life. “If I had not come then,” she would tell her son years later, “I should now be ’old Miss Delano’ after a rather sad life!”
Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were married at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, that October, a few weeks before Theodore and Alice were married. In November Sara and James sailed for a European honeymoon, taking the Germanic. On the same ship was Elliott, who was en route to India by way of London.
Cousin West was in love with Fanny Smith (she turned him down when he proposed), and Corinne, too, was being actively courted by a large, demonstrative, florid young Scot, a friend of Elliott’s named Douglas Robinson, heir to a real-estate fortune, who, like Alice, spent part of that summer with the family at Oyster Bay, his booming voice adding a new note—like that of a calliope, Theodore thought—to the usual sounds of summer.
Corinne was thought “clever” (Fanny Smith said she had “genuine intellectual power”) and though no beauty she had, at eighteen, a certain vitality and natural femininity that appealed to men and women. Beside Alice or Mittie, Corinne looked rather plain, but between her and Bamie, she was much the more attractive to the eye and her two brothers and her male cousins made a great fuss over her. She was a little taller than Mittie, with tiny hands and delicate features. For her summer reading this year she had undertaken Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
The same big porch rockers tilted back and forth at Tranquillity as in years past. The blue bay and sunshine were no different from other summers, or any less a tonic. The familiar, noisy games went on in timeless fashion and in the midst of it all Mittie herself often seemed a timeless summer note, “the mother in white . . . seated in state on the lawn,” a book usually in hand, or talking on in her easy, unchanged Georgia way to Sister Anna or Lucy Elliott. Only the strong-willed Bamie seems to have lost patience with her on occasion.
Nothing could ruffle Mittie. Corinne, who treasured especially her mothers warmth and spontaneity, saw in her also a steady enduring strength—of a kind different from Bamie s, but strength all the same. A “perfect readiness to meet all situations,” Corinne called it.
Mittie approved of Douglas Robinson, it appears; and having accepted Theodore’s decision, she had taken Alice to her heart quite literally as one of her own. Elliott may have become a worry by now; it is impossible to know for certain.
Elliott had begun working for Uncle James Gracie at a bank downtown and in summer commuted to and from Oyster Bay. As some writers have said, Elliott may also have begun already to drink more than was good for him, and so the trip west in August could have been as much for his benefit as for Theodores. Returning to Chicago after a week’s hunt in Iowa, Theodore would write to Corinne of their brother’s joy in “the change to civilization.”
As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandygaff.
But the letter is so plainly Theodore’s idea of humor—tall-tale humor out of the Wild West—that it suggests there was no “problem” as yet. That he would treat a subject of such seriousness in so open and bantering a vein would seem a sign that neither he nor Elliott nor any of them was very concerned.
As Elliott and Theodore proceeded on their western expedition, it was Elliott who got on most readily with the people encountered—male and female—some of whom, according to Theodore, were “pretty rough.” Elliott’s natural, easy way with people cut across barriers of class or background, an attribute Theodore could only admire, and doubtless Elliott’s past experiences in Texas gave him confidence of a kind Theodore lacked.
“Last Sunday night we got this motley crew together to sing hymns,” Mittie read in one of Theodore’s letters, this dated August 25,1880, from a farm in Illinois; “thanks to Elliott it was a great success. It was all I could do to keep a sober face when I saw him singing from the same book with the much-flattered Mrs. Rudolf and Miss Costigan.”
The trip had been badly planned. With no clear idea where to go, they kept trying different spots, first in Illinois, then Iowa and Minnesota, taking time out in Chicago between each foray to recuperate and figure their next move. The flies were dreadful in Illinois and on a lake in Iowa they both nearly drowned when their rowboat capsized. But they saw it as their last chance for an adventure together, entirely on their own, which probably would have been reason enough for going in the first place, quite aside from Theodore’s health. “I enjoy being with the old boy so much,” Theodore said. “I am so glad ... we two brothers have been able at last to be together,” wrote Elliott. “All the happier we are solely dependent on each other for companionship. . .”
Theodore had become violently ill during a midsummer visit to Bar Harbor with Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall. He had weathered his final examinations at Harvard, Class Day, graduation, the excitement of having Alice as a guest at Oyster Bay, all with no ill effect, only to be struck down in embarrassing fashion in far-off Maine. He was hit by violent diarrhea, his old cholera morbus (”very embarrassing for a lover,” as he told Corinne), and to Mittie he declared a trip west would be just the thing to put him back on his feet and build him up.
What he did not tell her—or Alice or Elliott, so far as we know—was that he had also received some extremely disquieting news from the college physician as far back as March. He had gone for a routine physical examination, at the conclusion of which Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant told him he had “heart trouble.” Of what variety, or whether that was even discussed, we do not know and it was only years later that Theodore ever talked about the incident. But apparently he was warned he must live a quiet life, choose a relatively sedentary occupation. He was to avoid strenuous physical exertion—he was not to run up stairs, for example. He responded at once and defiantly, telling the doctor he could never live that way, that he would do exactly the opposite.
He was sick again in Minnesota, at the Red River bordering on Dakota Territory, their farthest point west. An attack of asthma had him gasping so that he spent the night sitting up in order to breathe. The day after he was in such pain with colic he could hardly walk. Yet only a few days before, writing from Chicago, Elliott had described him as looking like a new man, “as brown and well as can be,” the picture of health. “I think he misses Alice, poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something all the time and certainly he looks a hundred percent better than when he came out.”
For all the grouse, geese, snipes, sharp-tailed plovers, ducks, and grebes they managed to kill—in excess of four hundred birds—the shooting was “not as good as expected.” They had hunted on foot, not horseback. There had been no whirlwind rides over the prairie as in a Mayne Reid adventure. They had never reached the “real West,” the “Far West,” as Theodore called it. The whole episode had been very tame and colorless in contrast to what Elliott had experienced in Texas or what he could expect in the wilds of India.
As once Theodore had stayed safely at home with his studies while Elliott went off to Fort McKavett, so now he would settle in with his “little pink wife” while Elliott circled the world. But plainly there was an element of escape to Elliott’s forthcoming adventure. He was getting out before Theodore returned, abdicating his place as man of the house, and to “a far better man,” he assured Bamie in another letter from the western trip.
Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory, but fail to put in practice.
Theodore wanted Elliott to be his best man at the wedding and declared further that if, because of his India plans, Elliott was unable to be there, then he wanted no best man—all of which pleased Mittie greatly.
“Theodore is in the city now . . . wild with happiness and excitement,” wrote Fanny Smith in her diary on October 15. “I went with him to see the wedding presents he is going to give Alice. I hope she is very fond of him.”
He had spent several thousand dollars on a sapphire ring, other jewelry and more gifts for her. He would begin saving, he vowed, once they were married. Two days ahead of the others, he departed for Boston.
They were married on a perfect New England fall day, the height of Indian summer, Wednesday, October 27,1880, Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, at noon in the Unitarian Church at Brookline. Mittie had invited Fanny Smith and Edith Carow to come on to Boston with the family and so they were both in the pew beside her, along with Bamie and the Gracies. Corinne was a bridesmaid. Elliott stood beside his brother with the ring and Theodore, when it came time for his vows, responded, as Fanny Smith said, “in the most determined and Theodorelike tones.”
One of the servants in the Lee household, Alice’s nurse from childhood (recorded only as Christina), ran the two miles from the house to the church, having missed the last carriage when it departed, and arrived just in time for the ceremony.
Alice made a stunning bride. Some weeks before, on a flying visit to Boston after his western trip, Theodore had found her “the same as ever and yet with a certain added charm” he was unable to describe. “I cannot take my eyes off her,” he wrote in his diary; “she is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”
The reception was in the grand tradition—at home, with music, food, dancing, servants with trays of champagne, the bride the center of everyone’s attention, the big house where she had grown up bright with sunshine streaming through long windows.
On their wedding night the couple stayed in Springfield, at the Massasoit House, and from there the following day went directly to Oyster Bay for a honeymoon of two weeks. A proper European honeymoon had been postponed until summer, Theodore having since decided, at the urging of Uncle Robert) to enter the Columbia Law School.
Early the first week of November, a few days before Elliott sailed, Mittie received word that they were “living in a perfect dream of delight” at Tranquillity, waited on hand and foot by two faithful Roosevelt servants—the ever reliable Mary Ann, the groom Davis—and by a local woman named Kate, who did all the meals. “The house is just perfection,” Theodore told her; “Kate cooks deliciously, and Mary Ann is exactly the servant for us; and Davis does his part beautifully too, always sending in his respects in the morning to ’the good lady’ as he styles Alice.”
Breakfast was at ten, dinner at two, tea at seven. Except for the servants and a big black-and-white collie named Dare, they had the place to themselves. The summer “crowd” had long since departed. The big summer houses stood silent in the golden autumn light.
They played more tennis, went on more walks and for long drives over the hills in the family buggy. At night they read aloud from Keats and Sir Walter Scott before a log fire. Their one contact with the outside world was the morning paper. Once, on November 2, Theodore had Davis drive him over to East Norwich so he could cast his first vote in a presidential election, for the Republican, James A. Garfield, and his running mate, none other than Chester Arthur.
“There is hardly an hour of the twenty-four that we are not together,” he wrote in his diary a few days later. “I am living in a dream land; how I wish it could last forever.”
Saturday, November 13, Mittie welcomed them home at 6 West 57th Street.
3
That winter in New York was the busiest and possibly the happiest time Theodore had ever known. Even the most frenetic days at Harvard had never been quite so full. For Alice, after the pace of life at Chestnut Hill, the change must have been overwhelming.
Theodore at once took up the part of his father, presiding at the head of the family table, presiding Sunday evenings in his father’s old place at the newsboys’ dinner, beginning their first Sunday in New York. He was elected a trustee of the Orthopedic Hospital and the New York Infant Asylum. And for the Roosevelt women now, at least figuratively in his charge, he became the main source of news from “downtown,” the perfect escort to the theater and the opera, the whip hand on sleigh rides through the park or along Riverside Drive. Reading aloud to them from Mark Twain’s latest, A Tramp Abroad, he would laugh so uproariously that he could hardly go on, turning “literally purple,” as Corinne said.
At meetings of the St. Andrews Society he chatted with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune and with others who had known his father. He joined a Free Trade Club, organized a whist club, started to work seriously on the naval history he had more or less toyed with the year before. By mid-February Corinne could also report in a letter to Douglas Robinson that “he has been going to Republican meetings steadily this week, and gives us most absurd accounts of them.”
And all of this, meantime, was only tangential to the new career in the law.
From 57th Street to the Columbia Law School, then located in the battered, old Schermerhorn house on Great Jones Street, was a distance of about three miles—fifty-four blocks down Fifth Avenue—and he walked it regularly every morning, leaving the house around 7:45, arriving in time for an 8:30 class. Classes over, he sometimes stopped in at the Astor Library, across Lafayette Place, to do research for the book, then walked home again. The six-mile round trip, he remarked apologetically, was the only regular exercise he was able to work into his day, given all he had to do.
“The law work is very interesting,” he said in his diary; and again, “I like the law school work very much.” Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert, who was back in the news again as one of the new reform trustees of the Brooklyn Bridge, now in its eleventh year of construction and still unfinished.
Before dark, if there was snow, he would bundle Alice into the sleigh and strike off to the north, through the park or crosstown to the Hudson. “I love to take my sweet little wife up the Riverside Park,” he wrote shortly before Christmas; “it is a beautiful drive now, with the snowy palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, as with the dark waters of the Hudson, covered with ice, at their feet.”
Once, on a sleighing party along the Hudson, the elder Theodore and Mittie had gone as far as one of their summer “cottages,” at Riverdale, where Mittie insisted on getting out to inspect the place. The snow was deep and Theodore had picked her up and carried her in his arms, only to step in a hole and over they had gone. “She enjoyed it like a child,” he happily told the family afterward. “Your Uncle Jimmie and Mrs. Dodge looked shocked.”
“When my sweetest little wife can’t go,” reads another of the diary entries, “I always take dear little Mother. It is lovely to live as we are now.”
But the quantities of energy expended on his studies and sleigh rides, the historical research, the daily constitutionals in every kind of weather, or his clubs and meetings and charities, seem almost secondary to what went into “the season,” the New York social whirl that dominated the winter and took front rank in the running diary account he maintained so conscientiously. From the night of Corinne’s debut, December 8—the “great ball at our house” when Alice wore her wedding dress and white flowers in her hair—there was something going on, some reception, dinner, musical, or spectacular society ball, nearly every night of the week. He and “pretty Alice” were an immediate triumph as part of the ultra-fashionable “young married” set, “taken up” and fussed over by what Edith Wharton called “the little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.”
There was a “jolly little dinner” at the lselins’, a “very pleasant little party” at Aunt Annies, dinners at the Leavitts’, the Griswolds’, the Weekeses’, the Keans’, the Morans’, the Tuckermans’, the Stuyvesant Fishes’, a musical at the Betts’, a dinner for twenty-four at home, and several large dinners given by Mrs. William B. Astor, Jr.—the Mrs. Astor—who was homely and without charm and so laden with chains of diamonds as to be immobile, but who, with her social counselor. Ward McAllister, reigned over New York society. The Roosevelts and the Astors were “family” now, after a fashion, since Mrs. Astors daughter Helen had married young James Roosevelt Roosevelt—”Rosy” Roosevelt—who was the son of Sara Delano’s James by his first marriage.
There were theater parties and “small suppers” afterward, a box at the opera Monday nights, the Mendelssohn Concert series. There were private dances by candlelight at Delmonico’s that often lasted until three in the morning, the Patriarchs’ Ball and the Family Circle Dancing Class (the F.C.D.C.), these latter two the inspiration of Ward McAllister and already regarded as time-honored social institutions.
“Dinner at Delanos’,” reads the diary entry for Monday, January 11, 1881, at the start of a new week on the social calendar; “sat between Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Drayton.” The night following came a “very jolly theater party and supper at Tuckermans’;” the night after that, a “great ball” at the Astors’. On Friday, January 14, Theodore, Alice, and some thirteen others, including Bamie, Corinne, and Douglas Robinson, went off to Niagara Falls by private railroad car.
Saturday, January 15 Ideal day; perpetual spree. Saw falls, rapids, and whirlpool; took long sleigh rides, ended trip with every kind of dance in evening. Took hotel by storm. Everybody so jolly and congenial.
Sunday, January 16 Sleighed to church. Went under Falls; grand sight. Took night train for N.Y. Ghost stories and songs. Trip is the success of the season.
Monday, January 17 Went to Patriarch Ball.
It was “the greatest kind of fun.” He knew how to pace himself, he said. “I never stay more than two minutes with any girl and so don’t get talked out.” Corinne, he claimed, was a “great belle” of the season, while Alice grew ever more dazzling. With her on his arm he could not help being the center of attention. “Alice is universally and greatly admired; and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day . . . and oh, how happy she has made me!” The attentions showered on her at every party seem only to have pleased and flattered him. The old wild jealousy, any thoughts of dueling pistols, were all in the past apparently.
For her own part, meantime, Alice had also joined a tennis club and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (”now we are one in everything,” said Theodore emotionally), and formed a bond with her new mother-in-law that, from the evidence we have, must have been extraordinary. If one chose to marry a Roosevelt, Douglas Robinson was to remark, one ran the risk of being “bullied or ignored or hung on the family like a tail to a kite,” but Alice is not known to have shared or ever to have expressed any such feelings and the love she and Mittie had for each other would be talked about for years.
There was no friction between them and it was not as though Alice was an unfelt presence. Practicing at the piano in the corner of the parlor, she played loud enough to be heard through the wall of the adjoining Roosevelt house. She entered into conversation—Mittie found her “so companionable”—and for all her sunny spirit appears to have had no fear of expressing exasperation or impatience with some of her husband’s ways. (In another of Owen Wister’s vignettes involving the spilling of Roosevelt blood, Theodore is described working away at his War of 1812 studies, alone in the library, standing on one leg, checking through a book on navigation while making little sketches, his desk a sliding panel that pulled out from the bookcase. Alice bursts in on him and exclaims, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships,” whereupon “Teddy” charges to the third floor, cuts himself shaving, and is at once attended by the adoring wife and other resident female Roosevelts who “take measures” to save his collar from being stained.)
At times, too, she questioned the need for such everlasting activity in their lives. While Theodore and Bamie thrived on the tightly packed schedule—“Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!” Theodore once hailed his adored sister—Alice seems to have felt something alien in the pellmell rush of New York life, just as Mittie had when she first came to the city as a bride. Racing down the street with Corinne to catch a horsecar one morning, Alice had panted out, “Do you always have to run to catch anything in New York?” And Corinne, writing reflectively to Elliott later in the day, had agreed it was true, they were indeed constantly rushing to catch something or other. “Sometimes we succeed,” she said, “and sometimes we do not, and it is not particularly satisfactory either way.” Only within the home walls was life “intensely satisfactory.”
During the flurry of excitement surrounding Corinne’s engagement to Douglas Robinson later that winter, Alice seems to have remained largely in the background. The engagement was a peculiar business—eagerly supported by Theodore and Bamie and looked upon by Corinne as a great mistake from the moment she agreed to it. She had no wish to be married. She had a horror of marriage, as she told her ardent Douglas in a variety of ways, one letter after another, he having departed from New York almost immediately after the announcement to check over some landholdings in West Virginia.
She had interests other than marriage, she insisted, interests she knew he regarded as “unwomanly.” Her favorite nights at home were those when Theodore came bursting in from one of his political meetings “full of it all.” Douglas was her “dear old fellow,” to be sure, but she was utterly unable to say she loved him and would not until she did. But following an afternoon ride with Theodore up Riverside Drive, she wrote, “Such a lovely long talk as we had ... He is very fond of you, Douglas, and said there was not a single other man he knew except you that he would like me to marry.” “Sometimes,” she wrote later, “I think if I could have one talk with my father it would be all right.”
Alice and Corinne became close companions, shopping together, making social calls, reading aloud to each other. With Bamie, Alice seems to have acted with a certain restraint, that same edge of respect, even deference shown by others toward Bamie since childhood. If at a party she found herself caught in conversation with some formidable someone whose mind ranged beyond her own, she wished always, Alice said, that Bamie could be there to take her place. One rainy evening toward spring, when Mittie was not feeling well, the three young women—Alice, Corinne, and Bamie—sat with Mittie in her room talking at length of their own lives and ambitions. Bamie would have preferred to live in more stirring times, she said, and to have taken a prominent part. “What a splendid queen she would have made,” wrote Corinne to Douglas. “With you and Teddy as prime ministers and Elliott as master of ceremonies, you might have ruled the world!!”
The one false note in the picture was the inclusion of Douglas Robinson—a gesture of kindness on Corinne’s part—for there could never be but one prime minister to Queen Bamie; no one could possibly be regarded on a par with Theodore in the eyes of his two sisters, then or ever. Their love for him was a force, a presence precluding, as it would turn out, any feelings of comparable intensity for any other man—as Corinne herself had all but said already to her long-suffering, distant suitor.
And possibly, everything considered, it was Alice’s acute awareness of this, her seemingly instinctive understanding of how very much Theodore meant to the other Roosevelt women and her pleasure in their presence in her married life, that speaks most for her character. As Corinne herself observed long afterward, Alice was wholly unselfish about sharing Theodore with his adoring, now entirely female family. It was this that endeared her most to them and made her at once one of them.