CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
Some years afterward, reflecting on the personality of Theodore Roosevelt, a friend and fellow politician by the name of John S. Wise wrote that it would be mistaken to picture Theodore as resembling his father. He had never known the father, Wise acknowledged. “But from all accounts of him he was one of the gentlest, most lovable, public-spirited and popular men that ever lived in New York City.” Theodore, however, had not inherited “the gentler traits” of the father. “In his sturdiness and love of life’s battles and enterprises, he much more resembled his uncle, Mr. Robert Roosevelt, who had been my friend and associate these many years.”
Then Wise spoke of the Roosevelt he liked best, about whom the general public knew little or nothing, Elliott, “the most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew.”
He was one of my earliest acquaintances in New York and our attachment grew from the moment of our first meeting until his death. Perhaps he was nothing like so aggressive or so forceful a man as Theodore, but if personal popularity could have bestowed public honors on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.
Little that counted for “home news,” the news he hungered for, was lost on Elliott during his time away, so thoroughly, so conscientiously was he posted by Mittie, Bamie, Theodore, Corinne, and by the ever sympathetic Aunt Annie, whose affection for him surpassed even what she felt for the other three of her sisters children. “At present I have thirty-two! letters to answer,” he declared at one point in his travels. Aunt Annie alone, we know, wrote him a total of sixty-one times.
He was apprised of the ups and downs of Corinne’s romance and from four or five different perspectives. Word of her engagement left him “flabbergasted.” (“Is Bamie showing any signs of the same thing?” he asked Theodore excitedly from Hyderabad.) He was posted on the departure of “the two innocents” (Alice and Theodore) for their summer abroad. He heard how Theodore had climbed the Matterhorn.
“I have tried to make Corinne understand she’s not to marry unless she is sure,” Mittie was still writing in August.
Theodore’s reunion with Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool had been a huge success . . . Theodore and Alice were home again. (”Teddy brought out from London with his dress suits two or three satin waistcoats—purple, pale yellow, and blue, and one rich black silk one,” wrote Mittie. “. . . Emlen has been quite contemptuous about them, and you should hear Douglas standing up for Teddy”) Theodore was “going in” for politics, as a candidate for the State Assembly. . . . Theodore was elected by a margin of fifteen hundred votes.... Uncle Jim’s new house at Oyster Bay was up to the second story.... Father’s old friend Theodore Bronson had died in Paris. . . . Edith Carow had given Theodore and Alice a party and Theodore led an impromptu cotillion. . . . Theodore’s book was finished and delivered to the publisher.
“Has not our dear Thee done well,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir.
Their letters took anywhere from two to three months to catch up with him, once he got to India, and there was no little frustration in hearing things so long after the fact, and particularly since other news often reached him astonishingly fast. When James A. Garfield was shot in Washington in July, much of the world knew about it in a matter of days. Word of Garfield’s death in September—and of the ascension, incredibly, of Chester A. Arthur to the presidency—reached Elliott in Delhi not much after it did Theodore in Liverpool.
Of his own adventures he could hardly say enough. His travels became ultimately a trip around the world.
Through social contacts in London made possible by the James Roosevelts and with the help of a letter he carried from Secretary of State Evarts, introducing him as the son of the eminent Theodore Roosevelt of New York, he had no trouble making himself welcome among Her Majesty’s forces in India. Arriving at Bombay in mid-January he was put up at the Byculla Club and provided with a full-time servant who slept outside his door. There were lunches (”tiffins”) in his honor, a round of elaborate dinners.
“I would not trust myself to live here,” he wrote Mittie. “There is no temptation to do anything but what you please . . .
“At seven Aya brings me my coffee and cigarette,” he went on, describing a typical day, “and I sit on the veranda lazily taking in all the beauties of the early morning—
At my feet directly under me is the race track and the horses are being taken round for a morning spin. Some of them, beautiful Arabs, bounding by with that long easy stride so sure an indication of the dash and go of the breed. Over the field, beyond the belt of green waving trees yonder, stretches the ocean; as the mist slowly rises, see the boats lazily drift along. To sit and read and think for an hour here is perfect happiness. But the bath is ready by eight, I am dressed for nine o’clock breakfast with Mr. Clark of the Bombay Club, where I go in a buggy or gig, the “hansom” of the city. “Stewed sole—egg toast—prawn curry and beer cup” does not make a bad beginning for the day. A little business, a good deal of sporty talk, and the papers bring a fellow very quickly to M. Vouillon’s two o’clock tiffin in my honor. I cannot describe it, it was all too Arabian night-like. The rich peacock feather hand punka, the delicious perfume, the delicate dishes and still more delicate wines, the quiet service—no sound of boots for the boys go without them, and the clothes make no noise. They are certainly wonderful servants. The afternoon, a call on the Governor of Bombay—and a visit to the Apollo Bunder [a popular rendezvous for fashionable Bombay]—to pay my respects to Mme. Vouillon, who drives in a handsome C-spring landau, two Sikhs, a coachman in scarlet and gold and she herself a beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, looks particularly well, as she is set off by the odd contrast—though there are many other as perfect turnouts and pretty women. Kittredge drives me to the Club, I dress and sit on his right at a dinner he gives me. A fairly fitting ending to the eastern day, a dinner of six, each man his own servant to wait on him and a boy to keep him cool. Then bed—almost in the open air. . . .
To his hosts he was a refreshing novelty—an American sportsman of impeccable taste and manners, a good shot, handsome, high-spirited, a born gentleman. The hard-drinking, polo-playing officers wished only “to give me the best of times.”
En route to Kashmir, as the guest of Sir Salar Jung, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he was escorted to an evening banquet through lines of black men holding flaming torches, dined in the open court of a palace beside a fountain filled with floating candles. He was shown a room made entirely of china, furniture as well. On another day, in company of his British host, Colonel Hastings Fraser, he was received by Sir Salar as though he were a visiting prince—the colonel in full uniform, Elliott in black coat and top hat. “Just fancy your young brother talking, aye, and advising with two of the most celebrated men in these parts,” he wrote Bamie.
On a tiger hunt south of Hyderabad, arranged by Sir Salar, he traveled by horse, by elephant, and by palanquin, a large, covered litter carried on poles by sixteen men. Camp gear was transported by forty camels and there were horses enough to mount the full party of about two hundred men. It was “roughing it” of a rather different kind, he wrote. The usual evening meal “in camp” consisted of soup, salmon, various chicken or veal cutlets, broiled chicken, tongue, wild duck, “gulow” and rice, six or seven different curries, then possible snipe or Welsh rarebit, cheese, and coffee. “And a big pitcher of cooled beer and soda water, which has been in a wet blanket and fanned all day. Each one of us has his pitcher and it is good. The heat gives one an awful thirst...”
The tiger he shot was one of the largest ever seen locally and he was at once a great hero. “Three hours after the blood had been running she weighed 280 lbs.,” he wrote Theodore in a state of utter euphoria. “Her length was 9 feet 1 1/2 inches, height, 3 ft., 7 in.” The “brute” had been “glorious” in her final agony as she made her last charge and he “finished her... with a spare shot from the Bone Crusher—by George, what a hole that gun makes.”
If only his “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother” could have been with him. Here was “sporting work worthy of the Roosevelt name.”
“It is the life, old man. Our kind. The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement. . . . How everything here would have pleased your fondness for the unusual and the dangerous.”
In the parlor at 6 West 57th Street, watching her husband’s reaction to such letters, Alice worried he might at any moment drop everything and leave for India himself. “Poor dear Teddy... longs to be with you and walks up and down the room,” wrote Mittie, “. . . when Alice appealed to him, he smothered her with kisses.”
“This is your last hunt,” Theodore advised solemnly, “so stay as long as you wish . . .”
Dora, Mary Ann, Daniel the butler, were thrilled by his letters, Mittie told him, and so pleased to be remembered by him. Alone of all the family, he regularly inquired for the servants in his letters.
The claws of the tiger would be made up for her as a necklace, Mittie was told. Skin and head were being shipped to London, where Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter,” would see that a proper rug was prepared. In other letters came word that three crates of skins, heads, and horns were on the way, two crates of painted woodwork from Kashmir, another of silver and gold works, tea sets.
But a siege of fever at Srinagar had also left him feeling and looking like a “perfect bag of bones.” And he was upset terribly by the human wretchedness to be seen everywhere. How could beings created in the image of God be brought so low? “And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?”
In Europe, at virtually the same moment, traveling by boat with Alice on the Rhine, Theodore puzzled over the numbers of castles on shore. The Age of Chivalry, he speculated, must have been lovely for the knights, but gloomy indeed for those who had to provide the daily bread.
On hearing that Theodore and Alice had purchased land at Oyster Bay on which to build their dream house, Elliott told Theodore wistfully that he too might build something there one day. “We will all live there happily as in old times . . .”
“It delights me beyond bounds to see the way you have ’gone in’ for everything as a son of the dear old father should,” he went on, “and I will come back ready and eager to put my shoulder by yours at the wheel, Thee.”
“How proud of you [I am], Thee, in your life so useful and so actively led at home,” he wrote another time. “Will it be any help to have me one of these days go round with you to back you in your fights, old man?”
Do take care of yourself now for everybody’s sake, the little wife’s (to whom give my best love), the family’s, and mine. I tell you, Thee, I shall need you often in your good old strong way to give a chap a lift or for that matter if I am on the wrong road a blow to knock me back again.
For the sheer pleasure of living, he said in another letter, this to Bamie, he had never known anything to equal his time in India. But a life lived solely for pleasure was not in the cards; it was not “‘our way,’ for that means life for an end.”
In Ceylon he brought down two elephants, killing the second only after it had chased him through the jungle for two and a half hours, Elliott running as fast as he could the whole time. He had hit it in one eye with his first shot, but that had not slowed the animal in the slightest: “. . .it was only after I had put sixteen bullets into him that his great, crushing weight fell down in the bamboos.”
From Ceylon he went to Singapore and from there to Saigon, in the teeth of a typhoon. Saigon had “the quaint air of old France . . . much shipping and an air of thrift and quiet comfort that reminded one more than anything else of a prosperous southern city in the old days, say in Louisiana.” At Hong Kong he took a side trip to Canton, riding an “ordinary American river steamboat” up the Pearl River, “really into China proper.”
That was late in December 1881, or about the time Theodore was making ready to leave for his first session in the Albany legislature. In January, from the neat, curtained privacy of Aunt Anna Gracie’s house on West 36th Street, Aunt Ella Bulloch, in New York for a brief visit, wrote Elliott of the long conversation she and “Teddy” had just had, “mostly about you, darling.”
“The dear old fellow is back from Albany on a short leave and spent an hour with me . . . and we gloried in you together, Teddy exclaiming, ’What a fellow that is!’”
I was so glad to find that Teddy too thinks so highly of your power of influence with others. He spoke of the differences between you in this respect with such noble generous warmth and said that where he would naturally wish to surpass other men, he could never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward you. Then we talked of his book and his political interests. Thee thinks these will only help in giving him some fame, but neither he says will be of practical value, or giving him advancement, but says he must begin again at the beginning.... So that you will both in point of fact start your career together, he having gained this intermediate experience while you gain yours in a different way during your travels. Thee is a dear “grand” old fellow in very truth. . . . Sometimes he reminds me so much of you . . .
Then the morning of March 11, 1882, having been gone a year and four months, Elliott walked through the front door at 6 West 57th Street and a week or so after that, having dined privately with him, having listened to his stories, Aunt Annie, we know from her diary, was in church, head bowed, praying to God “to cure him”—but of what, whether of some mysterious Oriental fever or of his old “nervous” seizures or of drinking, is not known. “Ellie is very ill” is all she says in another entry.
Whatever the problem, it does not seem to have held him back. He was asked by the James Roosevelts to be a godfather for their infant son, Franklin Delano, an honor that touched him deeply, as he wrote in reply, and one he would have declined had not “mydear mother . . . persuaded me that I should accept.” (The small ceremony took place at Hyde Park’s St. James Chapel on March 20, just nine days after his return.) And when Corinne was at last married that April, he performed his supporting part admirably, convinced like everyone else—everyone but Corinne—that Douglas Robinson was the ideal match, “a good fellow . . . worthy of our bright, innocent little girl.” Theodore gave her away before a flower-banked altar at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; the reception followed at 6 West 57th Street; Corinne, it is said, spent the better part of the day weeping.
“My little heart,” Elliott had written her from India, “if I could only take you in my arms and kiss you this evening, pet you and love you. . . . Ah! My little love ... I smile to myself now as I recall the old dreams about you, Baby Sister, now a big woman going to be married . . .”
“Why if you don’t take him [Douglas Robinson],” reads another letter, “you and Old Nell will keep house in some cozy country corner all by ourselves . . .”
“Dear Elliott has been such a loving, tender brother to me,” Corinne once told Douglas. Elliott was so much more sensitive than other men, so much more understanding and considerate of her feelings and of her shortcomings, never dogmatic or judgmental. “How different people are,” she mused; “there is Teddy, for instance, he is devoted to me too, but if I were to do something that he thought very weak or wrong, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin, would forgive the sinner . . .”
“If you were my brother or cousin,” she explained to Douglas, “how freely I could say I love you dearly. That kind of love I give absolutely. . .”
In time Elliott joined with Theodore and Douglas, Poultney Bigelow, and Cleveland Dodge (the son of William, Jr.) to start a New York Reform Club, the first meeting being held in the library at 57th Street. (”The respectable, educated, refined young men of this city should have more weight in public matters,” Theodore told a reporter somewhat pompously.) Elliott also joined Douglas and Archibald Russell in the real-estate business downtown at 106 Broadway. The firm was renamed Robinson, Russell, and Roosevelt, new stationery printed. So at twenty-two, Elliott appeared to be on his way in the world of serious affairs, his adventuring over.
He lived at home, meantime. Indeed, having faced the beasts of the jungle, having seen and doubtless experienced more of the “big world” than any at home—or that they could have even imagined, one expects—he now found himself quartered at Mittie’s insistence in a small room just off hers, exactly as though he were a small boy in need of watching and mothering.
She called him her “comfort child.” He was the son who had given her greatest solace and who, until his travels, had stayed closest to her. She adored him, openly, happily. She spoiled him. And he as openly welcomed her love and attention. “My special charge,” he called her, since his father sometime in his final agony had charged him to look after her.
“Ah! Dear one, if you love me, your son, does he not love you?” he had written her from Madras. “I tell you yes, little Motherling, and so tenderly.” She was never to worry over a thing. “Tell me all, I have broad shoulders and am amply strong. When I come back, dear, I come to see you alone. Not to leave you again . . .” And another time: “Remember Father left me particularly to care for you and at any time you want me no other mortal thing shall keep me from being with you. Trust Nell.”
Among the reasons he liked Douglas Robinson as much as he did was Robinson’s fondness for Mittie, who of late, Elliott conceded privately, was showing a “slight unevenness.” A few of her long-standing peculiarities—her chronic tardiness, her need for order and cleanliness—had become considerably more pronounced. To judge by some accounts she was becoming really quite odd. In an exchange that took place many years later, a recorded conversation between a daughter of Corinne’s, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, Jr., and Bamie’s son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., the situation was portrayed as follows:
MRS. ALSOP: Then, she [Mittie] had an absolute passion for cleanliness. Well, it was a phobia.... Mother would, with peals of laughter, tell me things she would do, and it would sound to me exactly as though she were talking about a crazy person. Not to be able ever to be on time.... Then she had a library closet where she tied and untied bundles of different kinds. She and the maid worked all the time in the library closet. . . . She had a white chenille net that she wore on her hair to keep the dust out. She always took two baths—one for the soap, and then she got out and it was run again by the maid and she got in again, so as to wash the soap off. Then when anybody came to see her if she was in bed a large sheet was put down, particularly if the doctor came. And when she said her prayers a sheet was put down so that she wouldn’t touch the floor.
MR. COWLES: She was crazy!
MRS. ALSOP: Oh, yes, of course, she was; but crazy, according to my mother, in a perfectly delightful, charming and companionable way. . . . The whole thing is very fascinating.
But what makes it still more “fascinating” is the very contrary impression Mittie made on so many others at the time who found her anything but odd or laughable. Most notably there was Sara Roosevelt, Cousin Sally, a woman of strong mind and will who was never known to suffer fools. She thought the world of Mittie, invited Mittie to visit her at Hyde Park, where Mittie sometimes stayed for as long as a week, Cousin Sally obviously preferring her company to that of almost anyone else of that generation. “I was very proud when she came and stayed with me,” Cousin Sally would recall. (Her diary entry from the time reads, “I love having her. We have read together, admired Baby, driven with James, tea’d at Mother’s.”)
Theodore, too, was proud to bring his political friends to the house, sure of the impression she and Alice both would make. To Elliott she remained “the beautiful center of our home worship.” If she babied him, he accepted that with good grace and with what Fanny Smith called a “caressing” kind of humor. Describing his new sleeping arrangement, he would say, “Now when my little mother feels cold at night, she comes in and puts an extra blanket on me, so that I wake up perfectly roasted, and when she is warm, she comes in and takes the covers off me so that I wake up frozen.”
The great tiger-skin rug was stretched before the parlor fireplace, where it dominated the entire room. The front hall now was lined with the heads of other animals Elliott had shot. Once, as he was about to leave India, Mittie had written, “I am very jealous that you gave some of your trophies away in Bombay, when I value even a tail of a mouse that is my darling Elliott’s trophy!” Her interest in every detail of his letters describing the tiger hunt had been, as she said, quite as intense as that of Theodore.
Those nights when he came in late from parties, or not at all, she left little penciled notes. “My darling son, I have missed you all evening. Sleep well, darling, and call Mother if you wish her.”
2
While Theodore went churning back and forth to Albany, making speeches, railing against corruption in high places, getting his name in the papers day after day, Elliott was preoccupied principally with becoming a man-about-town. He was drinking more than he should—but then so did many others of his set and there is nothing to suggest that anyone found him offensive.
In appearance, he was a taller—by two inches—and only somewhat handsomer version of his brother, not the Apollo-like figure portrayed in some later accounts. He and Theodore had each grown a mustache by this time—Elliott’s being the thicker, more successful effort—both were parting their hair in the middle, or nearly so, and Elliott, too, now wore metal-rimmed spectacles. Seen from a distance, in riding attire, say, or waving from a sailboat out on the Sound, either could easily be taken for the other. Appearing at the Newsboys’ Lodging House for the first time, immediately after his honeymoon at Oyster Bay, Theodore had been amazed when the boys started stamping and cheering. “As soon as they saw me, they mistook me for you,” he had explained to Elliott. “I thought it pretty nice of them; they were evidently very fond of you.”
It was Elliotts effortless charm, his generosity and humor, his way of talking to people—as if he had never found anything quite so fascinating as what the other person had to say—that made him so very attractive. He was glamorous in much the way his father had been—and as Theodore most obviously was not—and this, with the aura of his recent adventures, plus a certain bravura and suggestion of decadence, made him enormously appealing to women especially. He had none of the self-righteousness which in his brother put some people off; and little or none of Theodore’s combativeness or bombast. Isaac Hunt, a friend of Theodore’s in the legislature, described Elliott as “a smooth, quiet [compared to Theodore], nice fellow.” Unlike Theodore he had not an enemy in the world.
Reading through surviving reminiscences, one senses that Elliott was very like some of his Bulloch forebears, that he would have been quite at home with the young bloods at the Savannah Club in days past. And it was not simply the women in the family who fawned and fussed over him, or melted before his attentions. “If he noticed me at all,” wrote Fanny Smith, “I had received an accolade and if on rare occasions he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible.”
(“He drank like a fish and ran after the ladies” was Edith Carow’s less charitable summation, years later. “I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”)
As befitting a gentleman and a Roosevelt, he gave time to the Orthopedic Hospital, took an occasional turn Sunday evenings at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He was also understood to be “working up” his travel notes, compiling his letters and journal entries, with the thought of doing a book on big-game hunting. Few Americans had been to India, or experienced all he had, and since he did write well, the possibilities in the idea were genuinely promising. But somehow nothing ever came of this. He seemed incapable of pulling things into focus, or of seeing a piece of work through to completion, as his brother could. To write his Naval War of 1812, Theodore had forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews. He had started out knowing no more about his subject than anyone else and with no experience or training in historical research. At times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me,” he had written Bamie from The Hague, where, in the midst of his European honeymoon, he was still hammering away at the book. And had he not been able to spend several weeks soon after that soaking up “advice and sympathy” from the “blessed” Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool, he might not have brought it off. But persist he would, and though the end result, his first published opus, was often dry and tedious in the extreme—much of it virtually unreadable to anyone without a prior interest in the subject or in the author (one can only sympathize with poor Alice or Mittie trying to make headway in such a book)—it was also scrupulously thorough, accurate, fair, and would remain a definitive study.
“‘It’s dogged as does it,’” Theodore liked to say, quoting a line from Trollope. He admired “staying power” in anyone. It was a hunter’s virtue, he said. Yet the most celebrated hunter of the moment seemed not to have it, as he himself recognized. He was lacking, said Elliott, “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.”
Long afterward, when Elliott did at last try his hand at serious writing, it was in fiction, a well-handled, revealing short story that was never published. It is about a New York society figure living abroad—a woman he calls Sophie Vedder—who is described as having “so many friends, so many good and lovable qualities,” but who is also plainly bound for a tragic end. “Live and let live” is her motto. “Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter at what cost, and when the end comes, well, take it cheerfully.” There will be no dirges played at her funeral, she boasts, only Strauss. “My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it.... I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler.” “Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you are,” he has her say to herself at the last, as she is about to pull the trigger in front of her mirror. “Still, you never did anyone any harm but yourself. . .”
When Elliott began spending time with a society belle named Anna Hall, the whole family took heart. The Halls were Hudson River gentry, with Ludlows and Livingstons in their background. Anna, the oldest of four Hall sisters, had been raised at Tivoli-on-the-Hudson, twenty miles above Hyde Park, where she was schooled by a painfully pious, self-absorbed father who never worked and who for years, before an early death, required that she walk up and down the lawn with a stick pressed against the small of her back to instill the “carriage” of a lady. She was tall, golden-haired, like Alice Lee, but unlike Alice, prim and cool, and where Alice was lovely-looking, fresh, radiant, Anna was something more. She was stunning, regal, with a magnificent figure and large, haunting blue eyes. She was “made for an atmosphere of approval,” as a friend said. In London a few years later, the poet Robert Browning became so infatuated with her beauty that he asked if he might just sit and gaze while she had her portrait painted.
Elliott was dazzled. A courtship proceeded. Letters were exchanged, his addressed to “My dear Miss Hall,” hers to “My dear Mr. Roosevelt.” He sent flowers, took her driving in the park.
They were seen at parties. They knew the same people; their families, of course, knew one another and all about one another. One Sunday evening she went with him to meet his newsboys, and according to Fanny Smith, it was at a house party at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, over Memorial Day in 1883, that he asked her to marry him. Apparently she accepted, though no one was told for another several weeks.
“I am honestly delighted,” wrote Theodore to Corinne from Richfield Springs, where he was convalescing, taking the waters as he had as a child. Alice had announced she was pregnant and Theodore had been hit by an attack of asthma as bad as any in years, in addition to a siege of cholera morbus worse even than that of the summer before their marriage. But Ellie’s news was something they could all be glad about. It would do “the dear old boy” great good, said Theodore, “to have something to work for,” “to marry and settle down with a definite purpose in life.” In measured brotherly fashion, Elliott was told it was “no light thing to take the irrevocable step,” while Aunt Annie reminded him, “You must be very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna.”
When, at summer’s end, Theodore picked up and went west again for his health and some shooting, to Dakota Territory this time, for two weeks in the “real West,” he went alone, Elliott being preoccupied. Anna, not Mittie, now wore the tiger-claw necklace. Elliott was riding to hounds at Hempstead, on Long Island, playing polo at Meadow Brook. At Tivoli one weekend he suffered some kind of relapse or seizure—”My old Indian trouble,” he explained to Anna—and had a difficult time getting back to New York on the train. He was injured at polo several times. He played extremely well, but with an ardor bordering on recklessness. Some nights, nursing a sprain or a “beastly leg,” he would sit alone brooding and smoking in his room at 57th Street, and Anna worried that he was keeping something from her. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” he wrote, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”
Theodore and Alice had moved into a house of their own, on West 45th Street, next door to Corinne and Douglas, who in April had become the parents of a son, Theodore Douglas Robinson, the first of the new generation. Theodore by now had also purchased more than a hundred acres of prime land at Oyster Bay, on Cooper’s Bluff, then sold parcels to Bamie and Aunt Annie, so they could build beside him. His stable was already going up on the ninety-five acres he had kept for himself.
Theodore had any number of irons in the fire. He had taken a flier in cattle in Wyoming, investing $10,000 in a ranch run by a Harvard classmate. Theodore had put another $20,000 into G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the publisher of his Naval War, in order to make himself a limited partner. And though he had gone to the Dakota Bad Lands ostensibly to shoot a buffalo while there were still a few left to shoot, he returned to announce he had launched a cattle venture of his own. He talked proudly now of “my ranch in Dakota.”
As a politician, Theodore was already seen as a phenomenon, often abused or made a laughingstock by the opposition papers, but a somebody nonetheless and a bright, rising star in the eyes of the men his father had set such store by. Theodore, as everyone said, was on his way, his life had taken hold, while Elliott had only Anna Hall.
Their wedding, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season,” took place at Calvary Church downtown, in the neighborhood of the old house on East 20th Street, on December 1, 1883. Theodore was best man and it was the last such occasion at which the whole family was present.