Salter, in his book, had written on the strange “periodicity” of asthma among some patients, noting that a weekly cycle was not uncommon. His example was of a small boy whose attacks came every Monday morning, a pattern that appeared to be an effort to avoid school but that Salter attributed to the family routine of a large Sunday meal.
In Teedie’s case the answer may lie in the nature of Sunday itself, which in the Victorian era was still the Lord’s Day, the sanctified day of rest and the one day of the week when the head of the household was home from work and thus also available to his children. Among such properly devout families as the Roosevelts it was a day of rigidly prescribed dress and behavior, of formal family gatherings, of little or no play, of church, Bible readings, family prayers, evening hymn singing in the parlor. The Roosevelts “kept” the Sabbath. It was a day for letter writing, a quiet walk perhaps, and for Theodore, his weekly turn at the Newsboys’ Lodging House (with other children outside the home). Teedie, in his mature years, would remember it as a day “we children did not enjoy—chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean clothes and keep neat.” The single redeeming feature was the chance to gather in the front parlor, a room of “splendor” with its cut-glass chandelier.
On the expedition across Europe, Sunday invariably meant church, wherever the Protestant variety could be found, and a day off from touring. The few Sundays when they did not attend church the children were required to remain quiet—to draw a church or memorize several verses from the Bible. It was permissible to look at things as the day went on, but not to do much. At Pisa one Sunday, the family went to see the tower, but not until the following day did they climb it.
As a very small child Teedie had also experienced a peculiar and memorable fear of church. It was a small incident that, in later years, made an amusing anecdote of the kind every Roosevelt loved to tell. But for him at the time it was no joke and should not be discounted.
Mittie had found he was so afraid of the Madison Square Church that he refused to set foot inside of it alone and so she pressed him to tell her why. He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the “zeal.” It was crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about it from the Bible.
Using a concordance, she read him those passages containing the word “zeal” until suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop. The line was from the Book of John, chapter 2, verse 17: “And his disciples remember that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”
The Sundays he was sick in Europe he was seldom obliged to go to church. That certainly, the diaries show, was among the immediate, obvious consequences of a “bad night” or of merely being “a little sick,” even those Sundays when he was not whisked off to the country. During the first stay in Paris, for instance, he missed church three consecutive Sundays. (”I was sick and did not go out at all except for my Russian bath.”) In Rome, Saturday, January 8, 1870, he is “a little sick.” Sunday, January 9, he “did not go to church at all.” In Florence, Sunday, February 27: “As I was sick with a headache I and Ellie went out to the garden and made roads with stones. . . . No Sunday school.”
But the outstanding examples, of course, are the Sundays afield, out of London, Vienna, Munich, Paris, immeasurably wonderful times in the blessed open air, the best being those spent alone with Papa. The Sunday at Hastings was “the happiest day I have ever spent.” He did attend church in this instance, but Sunday school was conducted beside a castle wall, in view of the sea. The Sunday at Bad Voslau was again like Hastings, “viz, there were only the 2 of us,” and “we had Sunday school out. . .” “Papa and I went a long way through the wood and had Sunday school in them.” The Sunday away from Munich with Ellie also along was “splendid” and of the two escapades outside Paris he writes as follows:
Saturday, April 16, 1870
I had such a bad night that we went to Fontainebleau. We children went first. We played in the garden and woods. We had a nice time but in the night I was sick.
Easter Sunday, April 17, 1870
Today was the happiest Easter I ever spent. After breakfast and a walk in the woods alone, Mama, Papa, and all we children went out in the woods to hunt for violets. . . . We played . . . and then had Sunday school in the woods and picked cowslip and heard the cuckoo sing.
After dinner we all drove out through the woods to the rocks. We then walked all round the rocks and over crevasses. We saw a tree 1,400 years old and [an]other 300 years old. We saw a stream of pure and cold water. We had such a happy time.
Saturday, April 23, 1870
We went to Fontainbleau in the cars with Bamie. I had a bad time till two o’clock, when after dinner we went to the rocks and there we made such a scramble and went in dark caves and over big cracks, and up steep places and all over.
Sunday, April 24, 1870
We went in the park where on a sand bank we made tunnels 10 paces long. After dinner we went to the rocks where we jumped over crevasses and ran in them and had such fun. . . . In one of our rambles we saw very fresh traces of a deer.
All the stifling formality and constricted horizons of Sunday were at once transformed by the space and excitement of the natural world—by a tree 1,400 years old, streams of pure water, dark caves, and fresh deer traces. “If Raphael had only painted landscapes instead of church things,” he laments in the diary after a visit to the Vatican. To be with Papa, to have Papa’s undivided attention, to be off and away on an adventure together, was the ultimate joy. Any opportunity to be with Papa, then, later, made him feel better. (”Well, well, said Mr. Greatheart, let them that are most afraid, keep close to me.”)
Their day at Bad Voslau was nearly ruined by a chance encounter with a few of “Papas friends (or as I thought of them, enemies).” With their unexpected appearance, it became a “miserable time,” he writes, adding quickly, “but it was not Papa’s fault.”
Neither Mittie nor Theodore, nor any of the family, appears to have been aware of the timing of the attacks. Nor, apparently, was Teedie. Twice, however, he reports testily that Conie tries to get attention by faking she is sick. She complained she was too weak to walk, “and then went bouncing down the stairs . . . until she saw Mama, when she suddenly became very sick again (sarcastic).” Another time, “Conie was sick but her sickness always decreased when Mama was out of the room and she could not be petted.”
Both of these performances occurred on weekends, the first on a Saturday, the second on a Sunday, and at neither time did Teedie himself become ill. He was struck instead, in the first instance, by a siege of abject homesickness; in their hotel suite at Dresden he lay on the floor in the light of the fire pining away for “times at home in the country.” Of the morning of Conie’s own Sunday “sickness,” he further reports, “Papa, Bamie, Ellie, and I went to church but I did not like it.” Conie’s condition required that Mama stay behind.
Mama’s love and attention were magic. His physical need for her, the intense attachment he felt, are expressed with striking candor and frequency. In Paris they went together to the Russian baths six days in a row, to be subjected to clouds of steam and switches of fir boughs. She was with him through his headaches and stomach cramps. To pull him out of his doleful spells, she told him stories and looked at pictures with him. One evening in Paris she showed him a photograph of little Edith Carow and the effect was devastating. Her face, he noted in an air of grand tragedy, only “stirred up in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, alack never.”
Whereas Papa made him drink black coffee or smoke a cigar or swallow ipecac (with “dreadful effects”), Mama soothed, petted, “rubbed me with her delicate fingers.” After a day of unremitting rain at Nice, when he was up late alone, “Mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and n
early cried because they were feverish. We had a fine sociable time. . . .” Papa took him to the doctor (in Vienna and Paris), and on the train from Berlin, it was Papa who made him get out for air at every station stop, despite the cold and the falling snow.
Why it was Papa nearly always who rushed him off to Hastings and the other places is an interesting point, since Mittie could have managed it as well, or she could have gone along with them to make a day of it. Or the whole thing could have been turned over to Bamie or a servant. Doubtless Theodore knew how large he loomed in the child’s eyes, how desperately the boy needed him. Almost certainly he wanted to give Mittie some relief, to get him away from her, for her benefit.
Another likely possibility, of course, is that Theodore himself, for all his piety and adherence to convention, enjoyed being off and away; he wanted a day of freedom every bit as much as did his small companion. If so, then the asthma was serving both their needs—it was doubly “convenient,” to use Dr. Salter’s word—and Teedie, conceivably, would have sensed as much. In some way for which there were no words he could have understood perfectly what those days meant to his father and this too would have figured in whatever troubling, complex combination of feelings lay at the heart of his troubles.
3
As different—as very different—as is every case of asthma from another, much of the impact of the disease is commonly shared by severely asthmatic children. Many of the same feelings and fears are engendered, many of the same perceptions of the world, and there is no reason to believe Teedie was an exception. For a child as acutely sensitive and intelligent as he, the impact of asthma could not have been anything but profound, affecting personality, outlook, self-regard, the whole course of his young life, in marked fashion. The asthmatic child knows he is an oddity; that somehow, for some reason no one can explain, he is a defective, different. But he knows also that his particular abnormality lends a kind of power. He knows, in ways a normal child can scarcely imagine, what it is to be the absolute center of attention. His attacks, horrible as they are, dreaded as they may be, are riveting to all who are present, his hold on his audience is total. Nothing can go on as usual, no one can remain indifferent to him, in the presence of an attack, and it is for no mere fleeting moment that he commands center stage. “A beheading is over in seconds,” observes one of the few chronic asthmatics who are willing to talk candidly. “A hanging—how long does that take? Three, four minutes, possibly five at the most. But an attack of asthma!”
The inclination, as time goes on, is to demand more and more attention—if not through asthma, then some other means.
Inevitably, as part of his way of coping with the world, the asthmatic also acquires a highly sensitized feeling for his surroundings. Of necessity he becomes acutely cognizant of the size and shape of rooms, the nearness of people and their comparative size, the whole look and feel and smell of spaces small and large, of fresh air, of skies and winds.
Ailments other than asthma, any of the inevitable knocks and scrapes of childhood, or of later life, are often taken with notable stoicism. It is as if having experienced asthma, he finds other pains and discomforts mild by comparison.
He has learned at an early age what a precarious, unpredictable thing life is—and how very vulnerable he is. He must be prepared always for the worst.
But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle. And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, “extremely tenacious of life.”
Oftentimes it is a question of which parent is chosen to identify with and emulate.
In the history of asthma, among the most celebrated cases is that of the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), who thought his asthma, like his homosexuality, was rooted in the unconscious and was part of a price he had to pay for his creative gifts. “We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things,” Proust wrote, “but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy.... Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”
Some aspects of Proust’s case have a familiar ring. His mother, like Mittie Roosevelt, was a cultivated, sensitive woman. Being a Jew set her off from her Catholic husband and his background much as Mittie’s southern origins set her off from Theodore and the rest of the Roosevelts. Proust, like Teedie, had a younger brother, close in age, who was the stronger, more robust of the two. His father, however, unlike Theodore, was a distant and indifferent figure. As a child, Proust, also, had been considered too weak to live. His devotion to his mother was intense, overwhelming. Indeed, among those specialists who see asthma as a suppressed cry for the mother, Proust’s case is the classic example. “You demolish everything until I am ill again,” he once accused his mother, while on another occasion, he told her, “I’d rather have asthma and please you.”
Proust never saw himself as anything but a victim, Proust, sealed off in his cork-lined writing room, is the quintessential recluse. Following his mother’s death, he remained a semi-invalid, dying ultimately of respiratory complications.
Just as no two cases of asthma are ever exactly alike, so the response to the disease varies infinitely. In the end, it seems to depend on the individual. Many children “grow out” of it. For others it is a life sentence. Henry Hyde Salter’s prognosis was hardly encouraging. The asthmatic, he wrote, “knows that a certain percentage of his future life must be dedicated to suffering . . . and from many of the occupations of life he is cut off. . . his usefulness is crippled, his life marred. . . . The asthmatic is generally looked upon as an asthmatic for life.”
For Teedie, in some powerful way, father and the out of doors meant salvation, and Theodore, in his efforts to bring the shy child out of himself—in all the ways he encouraged confidence, gave diversion, companionship, set an example of strength—was, consciously or not, taking the best possible approach, given the circumstances. The goal, according to a treatise written a century later, is to make the child “a participant, not a spectator in his own care.” “I am to do everything for myself,” Teedie wrote proudly at the close of one of those days alone with his father.
As interesting perhaps as any line in the journal, in what it foreshadows, is one written at Nice, in which he reflects on a joyous day’s hiking. “It was,” he writes, “the first time I had walked up a hill of decent size for a long time and I felt quite refreshed.”
Walking—even a day of “severe walking”—was strongly recommended by Salter and other authorities, and horseback riding was considered the most beneficial exercise of all for asthmatics. Get action, Theodore had long preached. His beloved Bamie had been saved by the “movement cure” and by a doctor who believed in treating the patient as a whole being in mind and body.
“Organs are made for action . . .” Salter wrote; “they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well.”
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.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 287