CHAPTER FIVE

Metamorphosis

1

May 25, 1870

This morning we saw land of America and, swiftly coming on, passed Sandy Hook and went into the bay. New York!!! Hip! Hurrah! What a bustle we had getting off.

They were on home ground at last, back to aunts, uncles, cousins, servants (”all our friends”), and pink-faced, important Grandpa; back to the perpetual life and hubbub of the biggest, best city in the best country in the whole wide world; to traffic clogged to a standstill and the familiar New York smell of coal smoke and cooking and horses and hay and horse manure—with a damp, salt-air touch of the East River. The house on East 20th Street was found to be exactly as remembered. Life picked up with amazing ease, at about where it had left off—afternoon calls, teas, tutors, lessons, books, Father’s morning paper, Father’s office week, and those rectitudinous Roosevelt Sundays. There was talk of business, which was good, and of Grandfathers new summer house at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Over the back wall Mr. Goelet’s garden was in its springtime glory.

One bright day, Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, came riding down Fifth Avenue in an open carriage, a real-life warrior from the Dakota prairies wearing a stovepipe hat. There was a clamor in the papers for an eight-hour day and talk of “the engineering wonder of the age,” the East River Bridge, which was finally under construction. One of its two colossal towers was to rise at the foot of Roosevelt Street.

A new experimental passenger tube, the first subway, had been opened downtown and the building boom uptown was thought to be “marvelous.” Change was the order of the day, as always in New York, and a year was a long time to have been absent.

Some of what had transpired in the interval was not so marvelous, to be sure. The panic in September had sent shock waves among the established, old families. Bad enough that a couple of conniving parvenus like Fisk and Gould could have caused it all, but must they remain outrageously vulgar, flaunting their money and political pull? What did it portend if such men could attain the pinnacles of financial power? The Gould-Fisk scheme to corner the gold market had nearly worked, and their crony Tweed, the new Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, the most conspicuously corrupt politician in anyone’s memory, was riding higher than ever. He owned the mayor, judges, editors, even some Republicans, as was noted sadly at the Union League. No decent man could enter public life any longer “without imminent danger of losing caste.”

So surely it was with sinking hearts that Theodore, brothers Cornelius and James Alfred, and their father received word that brother Rob would shortly announce for Congress on the Tammany ticket.

But only with the onset of summer did life seem suddenly to bear down heavily on Theodore and Mittie. July brought a murderous heat wave, among the worst on record, and from France, where they had left Bamie, came news of the calamitous war with Prussia, which was declared July 15. No actual fighting took place for several weeks and Bamie herself happened to be hugely enjoying the excitement—she would tell in later years how French troops went marching past her school windows singing—but for her father especially it was a time of exceeding tension and worry, a condition felt by the entire household and one not greatly helped by his own fathers insistence that he do something about the child’s safety before it was too late.

Further, in combination with all this—or possibly as a consequence—Teedie, who had been “peculiarly well” since the return from Europe, went into a sharp decline. His attacks resumed, coming so often now that Theodore and Mittie had to take turns rushing him off to some country place or watering spot—to Saratoga or Oyster Bay, a rented house at Spuyten Duyvil, a summer hotel at Richfield Springs. Theodore began to wear thin. “I am away with Teedie again much to my regret,” he told Bamie in an undated letter written from his father’s place on Long Island. “He had another attack, woke me up at night and last night to make a break, I took him to Oyster Bay. It used me up entirely to have another attack come so soon after the last. I know and appreciate all the mercies for which I should be thankful but at the moment it seems hard to bear.”

To drop everything and leave with the boy at any emergency was becoming very difficult for him, he told her in another letter. He had much too much to do.

On August 10 Mittie wrote to Bamie, “Teedie had an attack of asthma on last Sunday night and Papa took him to Oyster Bay where he passed Monday night and Tuesday night. Of course, Teedie was in ecstasies of delight...”

By the time the fighting broke out in France and the vaunted armies of Napoleon III began their spectacular collapse, Bamie was across the Channel safe in the care of Uncle Jimmie Bulloch, her exodus having been arranged by Theodore through American friends in Paris named Lamson. It had gone smoothly according to plan. “Do not let them spoil you in Liverpool,” he chided her; he had troubles enough as it was. Her mother and Teedie were off to “take the waters” at Richfield Springs, for the second or third time, accompanied now by Uncle Hilborne.

“Your mother came back . . .” Theodore reported two weeks later, “Teedie still suffering... and they returned leaving me once more a bachelor.”

Two days later at Richfield Springs, on a Sunday, Teedie had another attack. “The spasm yielded,” Mittie reported, “. . . but [he] passed a wheezy miserable night and I have concluded to leave . . . for New York tomorrow, with the feeling that this last week Teedie has lost all he gained . . . and the sulfur baths and water proved no good.”

“I have just received bad news from your mother,” Theodore wrote to Bamie. “She returns with Teedie asthmatic again. His attacks have been more frequent. . . . All say that Denver City would be just the air for Teedie, but until he is older this seems impossible.”

That was on September 6, when his patience was all but gone. How soon afterward he and Teedie had their talk is not known, but probably it was soon. As Mittie later recounted the scene, he called the boy to him and addressed him as Theodore.

“Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.” He must build himself up by his own effort. “You must make your body.” It was a summons and the offer of a counterpoise, a way, the one way, to right his own balance.

“It is hard drudgery to make one’s body,” the father said, “but I know you will do it.”

And with that, allegedly, the sorry little specimen threw back his head and declared he would do it.

Instead of Denver City he got Wood’s Gymnasium, Mittie accompanying him—and Elliott as well—for daily workouts under the direction of Mr. John Wood, whose young protégés included Sloanes and Goelets and Vanderbilts and whose tutelage was claimed to be as beneficial to character as to physique. She never missed a session and a more unlikely presence in a gymnasium is hard to picture. She sat alone patiently on a large settee against one wall, intent on every part of the program. Standing in front of a weight machine, body forward, head and chest up, arms out, Teedie pulled and hauled, hoisted the weights up from the floor, then let them ride slowly back down again, time after time. He and Ellie hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, spent hours straining at the horizontal bars. After about three months of this, Mittie had John Wood equip their own back piazza with all the required apparatus and it was thus, under her direction (as Wood later acknowledged), that the famous family gymnasium came into being.

As the weeks and months rolled by—as winter came and Bamie returned from Liverpool, as Uncle Rob went off to his newly won seat in Congress, as a besieged and starving Paris at last surrendered to the Germans—Teedie plugged away at his dreary regimen. His sisters would later write that among the most vivid of all childhood memories was the sight of him out on the piazza struggling between the horizontal bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”

Long years afterward, reflecting on what had been on his mind at this critical juncture, he would tell a friend of certain lines from the Browning poem “The Flight of the Duchess” that had brought him up short. The passage described the overbred son of a noble line—”. . . the pertest little ape I That ever affronted human shape.”

So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; . . .
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled,
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;. . .

Suddenly, as he told the friend, he saw himself for what he was—an affront to human shape, boneless, all speed, no strength: a pretender. It was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshiped if he made no effort to be like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else.

The sting of the poem was something quite different from and beyond a command to “make” a body. Now shame entered in. He felt “discovered.”

Yet for all he put himself through as time passed, lifting and hauling on weights, his progress was pathetic. He remained embarrassingly undersized and underweight, a scrawny frame with stick arms and stick legs. If he dared venture beyond the family circle, he counted on Ellie to be his protector in case of trouble. Two years later, traveling to Maine for his asthma, but alone, he would be humiliated by a couple of boys of about his own age who, to pass the time during a ride in a stagecoach, decided to make life miserable for him. When at length he tried to fight back, he found either one could handle him with easy contempt, to use his own words, “. . . handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet... prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”

In overall health, he does appear to have improved somewhat, enough at least to lend encouragement. How much direct encouragement he was getting from Theodore, he never said. He did once remark later on, however, that his father “used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell me something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me.”

The attention Theodore devoted to Bamie, meantime—now that she was back in his “possession”—was striking.

Saturday became their special day together. Nothing was allowed to interfere with “our Saturdays,” she remembered. They would spend the morning on horseback in Central Park, usually dropping in at the Museum of Natural History, which was then temporarily located in the old arsenal just inside the park at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue. Or they might stop at one of his Children’s Aid Society schools. “We would get home for lunch very late,” she wrote, “and as a rule would find whoever was most interesting at the moment in New York lunching with us.” In the afternoon they would go for a drive or visit a hospital. He was exhausting, she said proudly. At the day’s end she was a “complete wreck—deeply attached to my father, but worn to a shred.”

In Mittie’s absences, Bamie ran the house for him. “Order it [dinner] at prompt quarter before seven,” reads a note he left her. He was expecting guests.

Menu as usual—raw oysters if small, soup, oyster coquilles, saddle of venison if in the house, or turkey, croquettes, quail, lobster salad, cheese and crackers, candied fruit, ice cream of course. Give John [the new butler] the wines and tell him and Mary [Ann] that I wish everything nice.

Her life was increasingly determined by such directives, and to her very great satisfaction. Nothing pleased her—nothing pleased any of them—so much as pleasing him. And he appears to have resolved that if she was to have none of her mothers beauty, not a trace of that porcelain delicacy deemed so essential by fashion and that he himself prized so in Mittie, if she was to be homely and handicapped and still have any kind of life, then she must make up for it in other ways. She would know how to manage, to take charge, and be everlastingly useful.

The story among Roosevelts of later generations was that she actually took over from her mother and ran the household from the time she was about fifteen, but this simply was not so. It was only that she seemed to be running everything, she was so capable and eager to cope. Spinsterhood seemed her certain destiny, but one could also be a force in this world, like Theodore’s fellow toiler in philanthropy, Louisa Schuyler, who, as was said, had the willpower of a captain of industry.

2

Alone of the family the boy had his alternative world, his own dark continent to explore.

Once, as a very small child, he had seen the face of a fox in a book and declared it was the face of God. Father, he said, had the head of a lion. He drew endless numbers of mice and birds, filled notebooks with written descriptions of ants, spiders, beetles, dragonflies, all such entries being “gained by observation.”

Nor was he ever anything but serious about his “career” in science, as he called it, the beginnings of which could be traced, he later said, to a dead seal he had seen laid out on a plank in a market on Broadway. He seems to have been about seven or eight at the time, which, interestingly, would correspond with his anguish over the “zeal” in the Madison Square Church.

“That seal,” he later wrote, “filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure.” He asked where it had been killed and was told in the harbor. He kept coming back to see it, day after day as long as it was there. He brought a pocket rule and measured it. He wanted to buy it for his “museum,” but wound up getting the skull only—a memorable incident, since it was one of the few times in his life when he had not gotten what he wanted.

Dozens of books had passed through his hands, beginning with David Livingstone’s mammoth Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, discovered when he was too young to read and barely big enough to lift it, but could gaze by the hour at the pictures. He liked the second part of Robinson Crusoe for its account of wolves, and then with the books of Captain Mayne Reid he was borne off spellbound to the Great West.

Captain Reid was among the most popular authors of the day and especially with boys. (Other contemporary devotees included young Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.) An Irishman, Reid had exchanged the life of a tutor for that of trapper and trader on the American frontier and his books—The Boy Hunters, Hunter’s Feast, The Scalp Hunters—were rollicking adventures, full of action, violence, and grand-scale visions of the out of doors. God was in nature—a force—and nowhere so plainly as beyond the Mississippi.

Unroll the worlds map [begins The Scalp Hunters], and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild West—away towards the setting sun—away beyond many a far meridian. . . . You are looking upon a land . . . still bearing the marks of the Almighty mold, as upon the morning of creation. A region, whose every object wears the impress of God’s magic. His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers. A region redolent of romance—rich in the reality of adventure.

Reid’s world was all that the boy longed for, one of great manly quests and boundless inspiriting freedom. In such settings, with such a life, one could be reborn, made brave, made strong. He read “enthralled,” curled in a chair or standing on one leg, “like a pelican in the wilderness,” the other leg raised and propped, foot on thigh, to make a bookrest.

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch fires [says one hero] I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life.... My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied my eyes reached to a more distant vision.

Along with his rollicking yarns Reid regularly provided descriptions of birds, animals, plant life, quantities of geology, geography—most of it quite accurate. A story suddenly stops so a Darwinian “chain of Destruction” may be dramatized. (A tarantula is killed by a hummingbird, which is eaten by a chameleon, which is done in by a scorpion lizard, which is swallowed by a snake, which falls prey to a kite; then the kite is the victim of an eagle and the eagle is shot by the boy-hero who is the “last link.”) Even proper zoological names may appear in the midst of a story, as though the reader will of course wish to know such things.

About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (Artemisia tridentata), a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (Tetrao urophasi), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.

On the heels of Reid’s books came those of J. G. Wood, an entertaining English writer who specialized in natural history, and by age ten or so, even before the trip to Europe, he was led by Uncle Hilborne, “my father in Science,” to On the Origin of Species.Later, staying with the Wests in Philadelphia, he would report to Theodore, “I go to the Academy every spare moment and am allowed to have the run of all the 38,000 books in its library. They have got quite a number of specimens, also.” Mittie, writing from a summer house at Dobbs Ferry, tells how Hilborne “talked science and natural history and medicine, etc., with Teedie, who craves knowledge.”

Summers now—those of ’71 and ’72, when Theodore rented a succession of country houses in the hills along the Hudson—were very near to paradise for the boy. No letup in lessons was permitted. (”I study English, French, German, and Latin now,” he wrote to Aunt Annie.) It was also a rule that at the dinner table they speak only French. But the drudgery of weights and parallel bars could be replaced with riding, swimming, running barefoot; and nothing, not even French, could offset the ecstasy of open fields and living things. As a family they all adored the country. Summers, Conie wrote, were “the special delight of our lives.” But Teedie led “a life apart,” his love of nature becoming a passion and one which they all had to learn to live with. There were snapping turtles tied to laundry tubs, a litter of newborn squirrels, their eyes still closed, that needed feeding with a syringe three times daily. A tree frog positioned beside the lamp on the parlor table “proved a remarkable fly catcher,” and when Mittie found he was storing dead mice in the icebox and ordered that they be thrown in the garbage, he despaired over “the loss to science.”

His reading became steadily more ambitious. He moved on to the works of Audubon and those of Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost American naturalist of the day (Catalogue of North American Birds, Review of American Birds, North American Reptiles, Catalogue of North American Mammals).

The first encounter with actual wilderness came the summer of ’71, in August, when Theodore initiated an expedition to the Adirondacks. Their destination was Paul Smith’s, on Lake St. Regis, a favorite summer hostel among well-to-do sportsmen and their families.

They all went—in true Roosevelt fashion, in a swarm—Theodore, Mittie, and the four children, Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Laura, Uncle Hilborne, Aunt Susy, and Cousin West. Theodore packed a copy of The Last of the Mohicans to read by the campfire after dark and he, Teedie, Ellie, Uncle Hilborne, and Cousin West, separating from the others (who happily remained at Paul Smith’s), spent three days roughing it “in the bush.” So at long last Teedie could write from personal experience of “those grand and desolate wilds,” write pages in his own journal that might have been penned by Captain Reid himself.

We wandered about and I picked up a salamander (Diemictylus irridescens). I saw a mouse here which from its looks I should judge to be a hamster mouse (Hesperomys myoides). We saw a bald-headed eagle (Halietus leucocephalus) sailing over the lake.

From the Adirondacks they went to the White Mountains, where the three boys climbed Mount Lafayette, and at no point in the journal for all the month of August is there even one mention of asthma.

That fall, at the American Museum of Natural History, it was officially recorded that the year’s acquisitions (in addition to a human hand bestowed by Mr. P. T. Barnum) included one bat, twelve mice, a turtle, the skull of a red squirrel, and four birds’ eggs presented by Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

A year later he was receiving lessons in taxidermy from a striking old man who had been the great Audubon’s own “stuffer.” John G. Bell, who kept a musty little taxidermy shop on Broadway, had been to Dakota Territory with Audubon and to the upper reaches of the Yellowstone. It was for him that Audubon named the Vireo belli. Once on the Yellowstone he had actually saved Audubon’s life by grabbing a rifle and shooting a wounded bull buffalo that was within feet of trampling Audubon to death. The boy would remember Bell for the rest of his life as a tall, white-haired figure in a black frock coat, “straight as an Indian,” who had done “very valuable work for science.”

Then, at a stroke, the summer of 1872, he was given a gun and a large pair of spectacles and nothing had prepared him for the shock, for the infinite difference in his entire perception of the world about him or his place in it.

The gun was a gift from Papa—a 12-gauge, double-barreled Frenchmade (Lefaucheux) shotgun with a lot of kick and of such simple, rugged design that it could be hammered open with a brick if need be, the ideal gun for an awkward, frequently absent-minded thirteen-year-old. But blasting away with it in the woods near Dobbs Ferry he found he had trouble hitting anything. More puzzling, his friends were constantly shooting at things he never even saw. This and the fact that they could also read words on billboards that he could barely see, he reported to his father, and it was thus, at summer’s end, that the spectacles were obtained.

They transformed everything. They “literally opened an entirely new world to me,” he wrote years afterward, remembering the moment. His range of vision until then had been about thirty feet, perhaps less. Everything beyond was a blur. Yet neither he nor the family had sensed how handicapped he was. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was . . . I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.”

How such a condition could possibly have gone undetected for so long is something of a mystery, but once discovered it did much to explain his awkwardness and the characteristic detached look he had, those large blue eyes “not looking at anything present.”

3

It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes, now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.

Normally, with summer ended and city life resumed, he would have had to wait until spring to return to the woods, but that same fall, in October 1872, the family set off for a second sojourn abroad, an even longer tour than the last, beginning with a winter on the Nile. So by mid-December, with gun and spectacles, he was tramping the shores of the “great and mysterious river,” knocking birds from the sky as rapidly as he knew how, happy as he had ever been.

The birdlife of the Nile is extraordinary. The river is a flyway and a winter haven for thousands upon thousands of birds. The air is thick with them—larks, doves, herons, kingfishers, and tremendous flocks of snow-white cattle egrets, which are called ibises locally, or “the farmers’ friends”; wild ducks of a dozen different varieties, geese and vultures and hawks, and magnificent black-and-yellow kites that sail like hawks against the sky, their wings golden in the sunshine. And he could see it all—”quite well through my spectacles.” At sundown once, outside Cairo, he watched for nearly two hours as tens, then hundreds of “ibises” came in to roost in the treetops of a distant island in the river, until the trees were “whitened with immense multitudes.” In an hour’s time another day he counted fifteen different species of birds.

But seldom was he content merely to look. As a serious scientist, he must collect, and from the day the family expedition set forth, heading “up south” on the river, the collecting—the killing—commenced in earnest. He downed his first specimen, a warbler, thefirst bird he had ever killed, December 13, the first morning on the Nile, a few miles above Cairo. He next very proudly “blew a chat to pieces” and in the days following, combing the riverbanks, wandering through groves of date palms, he fired away at just about anything in sight, killed a wagtail, a pelican, hawks, larks, doves, then an ibis. Christmas morning he was given another shotgun with which he found he could bring down five starlings with a single shot.

Theodore allowed he, too, had caught the spirit, so intense was the boy’s pleasure. Theodore seems to have shown no prior enthusiasm for killing anything. He was the sort of father who, at breakfast, would rescue a yellow jacket from the honeypot, cup it in his hands and carry it out the door to freedom. But now it was “Father and I” who “sallied out with our guns,” day after day, leaving the rest of the family on board the great Nile houseboat, or dahabeah, which Theodore had chartered for the trip. “Father and I went out shooting and procured eighteen birds,” reads one entry. On another foray he “procured” a grosbeak, a sand lark, four chats, a crested lark, a ringed plover, and a dove. Writing to sister Anna, Mittie described how at Thebes Teedie came to her with “eyes sparkling with delight”—a dead crane in his arms. It was, he noted, the biggest thing he had as yet killed.

No one appears to have objected to any of this. To him it was all “splendid sport.” Egypt was like another long summer of freedom, of brilliant skies and open space. Lessons in French and English taught by Bamie occupied only a few hours a day. Father was a steady companion.

Again his asthma vanished. He had never known such a winter, he wrote. To look over the desert gave one the same feeling as looking over the Great Prairies of America, said the boy who had never been west of Philadelphia but who knew his Cooper and Captain Mayne Reid. He was Natty Bumppo on the Nile. Or Rube Rawlings, Captain Reid’s version of Natty. He was Humboldt on the Orinoco, seeing new worlds with the eyes of science. Or John James Audubon, who in his time may have killed more varieties of birds than any man who ever lived.

Sky and river and birds became his element. Work, his “serious work,” was what gave the journey its “chief zest.” Only on Sundays was he required to put up his gun and abstain from the assault.

And in all there was something faintly comic about him. He had, as would be said, a kind of headlong, harum-scarum quality that was more Don Quixote than Humboldt. Bamie, remembering the big spectacles and the great gun slung over one shoulder, described how he would charge off astride a small donkey, “ruthlessly” in chase of “whatever object he had in view.” Appearing suddenly in the midst of other mounted tourists, his donkey out of control, he could be “distinctly dangerous,” as he and his gun bounced every which way.

Theodore wrote of plunging after him through a bog (both were on foot in this instance), doing his all to keep up” at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours . . . I felt I must keep up with Teedie.”

The advent of gun and spectacles, moreover, had coincided with marked physical changes. He was rapidly growing out of his clothes. He was suddenly all wrists and anklebones, unkempt and shaggy, wearing his hair “à-la-mop,” as he said. River mud clung to shoes and trousers. “The sporting is injurious to my trousers,” he explained in mock annoyance.

The return to the dahabeah at the end of each day’s hunt, game bag full, was his chance to shine. He performed right on deck, in the still, hot afternoons, his taxidermy kit—knives, scissors, arsenic, tweezers, needle, thread, cotton padding, an old toothbrush—spread before him. He worked in the shade of a long, sun-bleached canopy, skinning the day’s kill, surrounded usually by odd members of the family, guests, or some of the boat’s crew.

The procedure was the same for each bird, large or small. It was placed on its back on a clean towel or sheet of paper. He opened the beak, put in a bit of cotton padding, then bound the beak tight with thread. The anus also was packed with a bit of cotton, to keep it from excreting blood and excrement and soiling the feathers. Then he parted the feathers from the hollow of the breast to the anus and with his knife made an incision, being extremely careful not to bear down any more than necessary. With his fingers he then began slowly to peel the skin away from the body, again working with the greatest care, so as not to tear the skin. The legs had next to be cut away, at the first joint, then the end of the spine had to be severed, again very carefully, leaving all tail feathers intact. If he became too hurried, if he tore the skin or flooded the feathers with blood, the job would be ruined.

The wings were cut with scissors near the body. Then the skin from the skull had to be peeled back with utmost caution and particularly around the eyes, the skin being pulled away up to the beak, at which point he would cut the neck at the base of the skull. This done he could clean out the brain, tongue, and palate, then pull the skin back over the skull. And once all that was accomplished he had only to skin the legs, wings, and tail, each in itself a ticklish process requiring equal care and patience.

It was, plainly, work neither for the squeamish nor for anyone accustomed to tossing things off in half-hearted fashion. Many adults might find it beyond them, even as spectators.

Once, dissecting a kestrel, he discovered in its crop (to his utter delight) the remains of a lark, a lizard, and several beetles.

Neither the game bag nor the taxidermy kit nor he himself smelled any too good apparently. It was, remembered Bamie, “to the discomfort of everyone connected with him” that he carried forth with his new passion.

4

“The traveler is a perfect king in his boat,” explained Lloyd’s guidebook to the Nile, and large, bearded Theodore Roosevelt might have served as the model. When not off with Teedie chasing after birds, he liked to sit on deck smoking his cigar or reading aloud to the assembled group from a heavy volume of Egyptian history. It was he who organized picnics ashore and planned their outings to the great monuments. Sundays he served as pastor to his fold, preaching on deck. Watching the shoreline slide by, he found that “everything carries me back to old Bible times.” Like countless other travelers on the river, he seems to have been filled with a sense of the everlastingness of life. These were the people who had held the Jews in bondage, he said, and they looked no different, he imagined, from what they had then. “We have even seen the magicians with their snakes in the public streets,” he wrote to Anna Gracie, “taking quietly scorpions and cobras out of their shirt bosoms, and the old bricks that gave the Jews so much worry are still made of mud and straw now lying on the bank as I look up.”

Once, in Cairo, Teedie had noted how “a beautiful Circassian lady, inmate of a rich man’s harem, was looking (with veil dropped) out of a window above us . . . and appeared to have no objection to being openly admired by Father.”

Mittie, from what she and others wrote of the journey, may be pictured rising early each day to get the morning air, a slim, youthful woman in white, lovely as the morning, and tiny beneath the sweep of canopy. Temperatures by midday were in the high seventies, mornings and evenings were more like October, and though her dyspepsia caused her to feel “pretty bad” at times, her spirits were high. The heavenly air and sunshine, the slow lulling rhythm of their progress on the river, stirred a sensual joy in the elements and in her own being. She relished the privacy and comfort of the boat, the “open air life with nothing to do,” “the splendid sun.” Theodore questioned how such advanced people as those of the ancient kingdoms could have worshiped birds and wolves.Mittie wrote, “In such a climate as this, I do not wonder that they became sun worshippers.”

As a way to travel there was really nothing like it. Henry Adams, who was also “doing” the Nile that winter in a dahabeah, said he had never known until then what luxury was. To Mittie it was the ultimate departure from life as usual. She was the Roosevelt who knew how to relax; the hours of peace and quiet, the service on board, suited her exactly. “The children have gone to bed,” she begins a letter about ten one evening. “I am seated in the little salon of our dahabeah. The door is open which leads to our deck, and by the lamp which is on the table there I can see Ibrahim, our waiter, ironing some of our linen. . . . Some of his front teeth are gone, but I love him still.”

The boat, the Aboul Irdan (Ibis in English), had a crew of thirteen, not counting the captain and steersman, a “first-class cook” and his assistant, plus two servants. As specified in the contract, it was well supplied with “everything (excepting wines and liquors) necessary for the comfort of the passengers.” Teedie describe it as “the nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place you ever saw.” Three meals daily were served in a paneled dining salon. There were staterooms for everyone, bath, divans on deck.

In total, in two months’ time, they traveled nearly twelve hundred miles on the river, from Cairo to the First Cataract at Aswan and back again, and along with climate and scenery and monumental ruins, they enjoyed a very social time, since they were actually traveling in a small convoy with two other parties. Four young Harvard men—Nathaniel Thayer, Augustus Jay, Francis Merriam, and Harry Godey—were aboard the dahabeah Rachel. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Clift of New York, with their daughters Edith and Elizabeth, were on the Gazelle.

Because of Egypt’s prevailing northerly winds, progress southbound, upriver on the Nile, was good most of the time. With sufficient wind they were under sail day and night. (It was also specified in the contract that day and night “one of the crew shall at all times of sailing hold the rope or sheet that is attached to each sail.”) Those times when the wind suddenly dropped, the river would take hold. “Sometimes we sail head foremost,” wrote Conie to her friend Edie Carow, “and sometimes the current turns us all the way around . . .” On days when there was no wind at all, the choices were to wait at anchor near shore, accept a tow from a steam tug, or start “tracking,” the immemorial system whereby the crew went wading ashore to drag the boat forward.

Initially, it had been suggested that a steam tug be hired at Cairo to tow the whole convoy of Americans to Aswan, but the Roosevelts declined, “as we go for the entirely different life,” Mittie explained. On the return trip they could ride with the current.

To the children, for the rest of their lives it would always be “that wonderful winter” on the Nile. “Our life on board I cannot describe,” wrote Ellie; “it is lazy I know and yet I have not a minute to spare.” Conie recalled “an absolute sense of well being”; Bamie, the “golden sunshine with never a moment’s rain.”

They were all three years older than they had been the first time abroad. It was not Teedie alone who was changing; they all were. Bamie, who at Vienna in another few months would make the first of her several debuts, turned eighteen at Aswan, an event celebrated with a family expedition by moonlight to the island of Philae. It had been discovered that she too was painfully nearsighted and like Teedie she was fitted with spectacles, but so great was her fathers power over her that when he said—in jest presumably—that he had no wish to present a daughter to society who wore such things, she put them away and refused ever to wear them.

She sits with him in a studio portrait made at about this point in her life, the only photograph we know for which he posed with any one child. It is in the classic Victorian father-daughter mode. There are yards of damask drapery, a tasseled bell cord, a pedestal, a painted backdrop of a garden wall. She has a footstool and sits hands in lap. Her feathered hat and tailored jacket, the large bow at her neck, are the height of fashion, and her small figure, for all that conceals it, is plainly that of a young woman. He studies her from behind, one elbow on the pedestal, only his head and upper torso revealed, which is what makes the picture so interesting. Father is seen quite literally on a pedestal, his pensive, adoring gaze fixed forever on the focal point of the arrangement, her plain, pale, but somehow very determined little face.

She was interested, very interested, in the Harvard foursome who came aboard to visit time after time, but then she realized all at once that it was Mittie they came to see; it was her “darling little mother” who so fascinated them, just as later in Europe Mittie would be taken for her sister, her younger sister.

“Still, we all became devoted friends,” she would recall by way of dismissing the incident, yet for her to have harbored no resentment, no jealously toward her mother would have been nearly inhuman, and one day her own son would confirm that she was in fact quite jealous of Mittie through much of her youth.

Her duties as tutor to the younger three were assumed without complaint. It was an effort, she said, that “taught me more than I had ever learned before . . . it did make us work, and that was what Father wished. . . .”

Elliott, still the larger, more robust of the two brothers, was an ingratiating youngster, as naturally sociable, open-faced, and now as carefully combed and particular about his appearance as Teedie was the opposite. He seemed to have little of Teedie’s hunger for attention. Conversation, friends, came easily. He loved to sing and to write nonsense verse and was good at both:

There was an old fellow named Teedie,
Whose clothes at best looked so seedy
That his friends in dismay
Hollered out, “Oh! I say!”
At this dirty old fellow named Teedie.

His gift from Papa at Christmas was a rowboat, by which he put off from the dahabeah to wander alone over the river at will, disturbing neither man nor beast so far as we know.

Possibly the most changed of all the children was Corinne, who at eleven was an infant no more, but a pert, unmistakably female little presence, quick to learn, quick to laugh or cry over not very much, yet sufficiently mature to be moved both by the majesty of Karnak and the “mystic” face of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson too was on the Nile that same season, and when, at Rhoda, he and his daughter anchored close by the Roosevelts, Theodore at once took his four to meet him. Later Emerson and his daughter, Ellen, returned the visit and Ellen in a letter has left us one of the rare observations on the children written by somebody outside the family. “Enchanting children,” she called them, “healthy, natural well-brought-up, and with beautiful manners.”

New Year’s Eve Theodore organized a party on deck that the children remembered as the high point of the trip. They were anchored at Minya, four dahabeahs tied up in the dark, another boat, Waterlily, with some people named Waitman, having joined the flotilla. With the newcomers, the Clift family, the Harvard men, and the Roosevelts there were fifteen to twenty people by the time everybody assembled. Theodore and Bamie made eggnog and young Francis Merriam started off the singing with something called “She’s Naughty but So Nice.” They did “Paddy, Come Over the Hill” and “Clochette, Clochette, She Was a Sad Coquette” and “Old Folks at Home”:

All up and down the whole creation,
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for the old plantation,
And for the old folks at home.

Champagne was uncorked at midnight and space was cleared for a Virginia reel. “Mamma joined,” wrote Conie, “and Father danced with Mr. Clift, he, ‘Papa,’ acting as a lady—’rather a large one, was he not?’”

But nearing Cairo on the return voyage, Theodore became downcast and sentimental. The boat must soon be turned over to other travelers who would neither know nor care anything about the times they had passed there. The boat was “not to be our home but only one more step on our journey of life.”

The picture is of a family strangely and most contentedly adrift, riding the timeless river, as in some dreamy romantic nineteenth-century painting, an incongruous Stars and Stripes luffing above a huge brown sail. It was a time of transition, as they all appreciated. Their life as a family was about to change dramatically; everything was to be different henceforth, something Theodore felt most acutely.

His own father was dead. Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, “merchant of the old school” (as said The New York Times), had “passed from the scene” July 17,1871. The loss to the family, their grief, had been profound. The old man had seemed inviolable, an institution unto himself, as a neighbor wrote. But with the estate settled, Theodore had been made a very rich man. Though the total left by his father has never been determined for certain, it appears to have been somewhere between $3 million and $7 million, which means Theodore’s share would not have been less than $1 million ($10 million or more in present-day dollars).

A fortune had come into his hands at what was the height of the postwar boom and this Egyptian winter was only among the immediate, more obvious consequences. (Such travel was “horribly expensive,” as Henry Adams had discovered. In two months Theodore spent something over $2,000, or about five times what the average American family had to live on for a year.) Of far greater consequence had been a decision to give up the house on East 20th Street and build anew uptown. Theodore and his brother James Alfred had bought adjoining lots on the south side of 57th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, which would put them two blocks from Central Park, in the heart of what was becoming “the” section of town. Theodore was brimming with enthusiasm for the project. He and James Alfred had decided on adjoining houses. Their architect was Russell Sturgis, whose Gothic country estates were all the rage. Plans were drawn, approved, construction begun. It was to be no mere brownstone this time. Indeed, little would be spared in the way of expense. All the principal woodwork and furniture, for example, were being custom made in Philadelphia, after designs by still another fashionable architect, Frank Furness.

To uproot everyone from East 20th Street after so many years was no light decision, obviously, but probably a move somewhere would have been forced upon them in any event—with or without their new fortune—for the uptown tide was running strong.

Everything near 20th Street was turning commercial. Union Square was being overrun by the needle trades. The stately old Roosevelt house on Union Square had already been torn down to make way for a sewing-machine factory. Lord & Taylor was moving to new quarters at Broadway and 20th Street, less than a block from Theodore’s front door.

It was because the new house would not be ready until summer that Theodore had planned such an extended stay abroad. After Egypt, the family would tour the Holy Land, then stop in Vienna. By May they were to reach Dresden, where the youngest three were to be placed in the care of a German family, to be tutored in German for a few months. Mittie and Bamie would go on to Paris and Carlsbad, meantime, and he would return to New York to see to business and the final stages of the new house. Lucy Sorrel Elliott and her children—cousins Johnny and Maud—were living in Dresden temporarily, so such an arrangement seemed eminently sensible.

“If one allowed himself to dwell upon the moral to be drawn from all our surroundings here,” Theodore wrote near the end of their time on the Nile, “it would not be enlivening. Our gayest parties are made up to visit tombs .. . of those who have passed away centuries ago and whose names even are now unknown. . . . It is more painful to reflect upon the people gone than even the relics of their greatness.”

His father had died at the age of seventy-seven. He was now fortyone. His fathers dream of a permanent tribal enclave in the vicinity of Union Square and 20th Street had lasted all of twenty years. ”One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.”

But what chance he had for extended reverie seems open to question, given the activities of his older son the nearer they drew to Cairo and journeys end. The “collecting” reached a fever pitch during their last weeks on the river—sixteen pigeons one day, a peeweet, a zick-zack, two snipes, and eleven pigeons on another, never a day but Sunday when the gun ceased blasting. It must have seemed at times as if there were a war raging amid the palms, for the boy was a poor shot, missing many more times than he hit. Some days he hit nothing at all.

The grand total of birds killed during the two months came to something between a hundred and two hundred. He really did not know for certain. He had lost count.