We got the girls and Mother to bed. The uncles watched the dead. I lay down on the sofa in Father’s dressing room but not to sleep . . .
4
He was extolled from a half-dozen pulpits and by the editorial pages of nearly every newspaper in the city, by lifelong friends, fellow philanthropists, and political reformers during memorial tributes at the Union League and the State Charities Aid Association. He was praised for his “high moral purpose” (in the Tribune), his “singular public spirit” (Evening Mail), his “generous public spirit” (Telegram), his contributions to science and art (Evening Post), for “using great opportunity for the best end” and preserving the honor of a great family name (The New York Times).
George William Curtis, in what he wrote for Harper’s Weekly, called him “an American citizen of the best type—cheerful, hearty, sagacious, honest, hopeful, not to be swerved by abuse, by hostility or derision.” Godkin, in The Nation, said New York should take heart in such a life: “We believe, the mere fact that New York could even in these later evil years produce him, and hold his love and devotion, has been to hundreds of those who knew him and watched his career a reason for not despairing of the future of the city.”
His “sweet strong influence,” his “magnetic power in influencing others,” the “stirring summons” of his example, were all mentioned repeatedly. “What a glorious example!” a friend wrote to Bamie. And in the other sympathy notes that poured into the house most people seemed to be saying in one way or other that they felt better for having known him.
At the family’s request there were no flowers at the funeral. Eight pallbearers—William E. Dodge, Jr., and Howard Potter among them—carried the plain rosewood coffin out of the house after a brief family service in the front parlor. The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was filled to overflowing. There were two thousand people, perhaps more, within the huge nave as the coffin was borne down the sloping center aisle to the altar. Two preachers officiated, John Hall and the venerable William Adams, Theodore’s former pastor at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and now head of the Union Theological Seminary, whose voice broke several times in the course of his remarks. Burial was at Greenwood Cemetery, in the family plot, beside Mittie’s mother, the funeral procession crossing the East River in Brooklyn by ferry under a cold winter sky.
Secluded once more at 57th Street, the devastated family hardly knew which way to turn, let alone how to face what Conie called “the blank” of life without Father. Anna Gracie was staying on, to be near Mittie. Everyone drew nearer. Conie was to remember “something infinitely inspiring” about those days. Father had preached that one must live for the living, and so “[we] felt that our close family tie must be made stronger rather than weaker by the loss . . .”
What Mittie felt we cannot begin to know. A month later she would write to young Theodore simply, “It is so hard to have parted with him. I think of him daily and almost hourly . . . long to have him with us. It must be a comfort to you to know that you never gave your dearly loved and prized father anything but pleasure.”
Years later Bamie would say only that “Of course, after his death, we all had to work out our own salvation.”
Elliott, we know, was shattered. It was as if, in the convulsive grip of his father’s arms, he had had something crushed irreparably within. Theodore’s death was the ultimate disaster from which he would never quite recover.
To young Theodore it was all a “hideous dream.” His mother and sisters were suffering the worst, he wrote to Henry Minot, and “it was best that Fathers terrible sufferings should end.” But in his Private Diary he let go, pouring out pain and bewilderment and presently a torrent of longing and loneliness and angry self-judgment. He began within hours after the funeral, describing the suspense of his ride home on the night boat, the “bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me,” the sound of the first clod of earth striking the casket.
“He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him.”
His anguish spills across pages, for weeks, months. Back at Harvard, alone in his room, he wrote of little else:
Sunday, March 3
Have been thinking about Father all evening, have had a good square breakdown, and feel much better for it.
Wednesday, March 6
Every now and then there are very bitter moments; if I had very much time to think I believe I should go crazy . . .
Saturday, March 9
It is just one month since the blackest day of my life.
Sunday, March 10
. . . had another square breakdown.
Sundays, with all their memories, were the hardest for him. It had been a Sunday, “that terrible Sunday,” that he had “kissed the dear, dead face.”
In the margin of his Bible he writes “February 9,1878” beside a verse of the 69th Psalm: “I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.”
Twice, in different letters, he reaches out to Bamie. With Father gone, he says, she must help him. She must take Father’s place in his life. “I know only too well the dull, heavy pain you suffer,” he wrote, “and I know too that it . . . has been easier for me . . . for here I live in a different world . . . I am occupied busily all the time.” Still, she must stand by him. She must tell him what to do. “My own sweet sister, you will have to give me a great deal of advice and assistance, now that our dear father is gone, for in many ways you are more like him than any of the rest of the family.” Henry Minot, his closest friend at Harvard, has “left college!” he reports in dismay to her that spring. “His father has taken him away and put him in his office to study law.” To Henry himself he writes of how greatly he misses “someone to talk to about my favorite pursuits and future prospects.”
With Father gone, nothing seems to have any purpose. “Am working away pretty hard,” he reports in May; “but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was his pride in them.”
Other times he seems insistent that Father had not “gone.” “I almost feel as if he were present with me,” he tells his mother; and it is emphatically in the present tense that he writes, “Every event of my life is tied up with him.” Father’s words keep coming back with a vividness that is “really startling.” During a brief visit to Oyster Bay just before exams, he picks up the journal he kept during the winter on the Nile and finds that “every incident is connected with him.” He walks about the empty house and “every nook and corner . . . every piece of furniture . . . is in some manner connected with him.” “Oh, Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you,” he writes June 7, still at Oyster Bay. “All the family are wonderfully lovely to me,” reads the next entry, “but I wish Mother and Bamie would not quarrel among themselves.”
Then Sunday, June 9, in the dim light of the little Presbyterian church at Oyster Bay, he sees Father sitting beside him in the corner of the pew, “as distinctly as if he were alive.”
Father was the shining example of the life he must aspire to; Father was the perfect example of all he himself was not. Grief turned to shame and a sense of futility. He felt diminished by the memory of the man. “Looking back on his life it seems as if mine must be such a weak, useless one in comparison.” He was engulfed by self-doubt. Self-reproach bordered on self-contempt. How could such a wonderful man have had a son of so little worth, he asked. One especially difficult Sunday he brooded over “how little use I am, or ever shall be . . . I am so much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.” He had failed his father when his father had needed him most and for this, in the light of his own conscience, he stood condemned.
He did everything for me, and I nothing for him. I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a very weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms . . . and oh, how my heart pains me when I think I never was able to do anything for him during his
last illness!
“Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss,” he writes, “I feel as if I should go mad.”
Conie would recall sitting with him by moonlight on a high point called Cooper’s Bluff, overlooking Long Island Sound, and listening while he recited Swinburne in a high-pitched singsong voice:
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
But there were notable chinks in all this gloom, moments even in the diary when he was unable any longer to deny his own good cheer or outright exuberance. It was only a few weeks after Theodore’s death when he confided to Conie that he felt not nearly so sad as he had expected to. He is “astonished,” he says later in the diary, at how readily he goes about his daily life “as if nothing had happened.” And as summer begins he is feeling so very good at times, his spirits so high, that he can no longer hold back. “I could not be happier,” he writes, but then immediately feels obliged to justify this. It would be “wrong,” he says, for him to be anything other than cheerful; “. . . and besides, I am of a very buoyant temper, being a bit of an optimist. Had a glorious 20-mile ride on Lightfoot, cantering the whole time.”
It was a summer of tremendous highs and lows. At Harvard, the week before his final examinations, his asthma had returned. (It was for “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma,” he explains, that he did so poorly in French.) He had yearned as never before for the “wilds” of Oyster Bay, to be in the woods again, to be on horseback, to be out alone on the water in his rowboat. One day in July he rowed alone all the way across the Sound to Rye Beach and back again. Elliott was the sailor, as Conie explained, while “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back.” He “loved to row in the hottest sun, over the roughest water, in the smallest boat. . .”
He ran, he hiked, rain or shine; he blasted away with a new Sharps rifle at birds, bottles, almost anything in sight. On one “tramp” he went twenty-five miles “through awful places.”
Some days in the diary he seems about to burst with his joyous outdoor freedom. He turns to one of his father’s favorite passages in the Bible: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing . . .” “Oyster Bay is the perfection of a place for fellows,” he declares. “I wonder if anyone could have a happier time than I...” It is August 9, a date he has marked heavily in black, as it is now six months since Theodore’s death.
Yet one senses a darker undercurrent, a kind of desperate, underlying frenzy bespeaking anger and fear. The pace of his activities is punishing, sometimes cruel. It is as if he is striking back at something, taking it out on Lightfoot, his horse, taking it out on himself—do or die, literally. Annoyed by a neighbor’s dog on a morning ride, he shot and killed it, “rolling it over with my revolver very neatly as it ran alongside the horse,” he reports in the diary. The horse he rode so hard day after day that he all but ruined it.
From one or two comments he and others made long afterward, it appears there was also a romance that summer with Edith Carow, and that it too blew up in a fit of anger. The diary says nothing of any of this, but years later he would tell Bamie how close he and Edith had been, and that “we both of us had . . . tempers that were far from being of the best.”
By midsummer he was down with stomach troubles (his dreadful cholera morbus), then hit “pretty hard” by an attack of asthma in early September en route to the genuine wilds of Maine. He went with cousins West and Emlen and a doctor named Thompson. “Look out for Theodore,” the doctor is said to have advised their Maine guide. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”
His fathers fatal illness, it had been concluded among the family, stemmed from a hike he had taken in Maine the previous summer. Theodore had strained himself somehow mountain climbing, during the stay at Mount Desert with Bamie. Beyond that there seemed no possible explanation why someone of such vigor—such a “splendid mechanism”—could have been brought down. With his Maine guide, a large, bearded, kindly man named William Sewall, a man as large as Theodore had been, the boy now hiked twenty, thirty miles a day, all such feats being recorded in his diary, just as during another summer in the mountains of Switzerland when he was ten.
“I feel sorry for the country...” Theodore had told the boy in his last letter. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.” He would keep his fathers letters always, the boy vowed. They were to be his “talismans against evil.”
Death and political defeat had coincided in the life of “the one I loved dearest on earth.” It is not known for certain that he or others in the family made a direct connection between what had happened at the hands of Senator Conkling and the tragedy that befell Theodore and thus all of them so soon afterward. But it is almost inconceivable that they would not have made such a connection and have felt it deeply.
President Hayes, true to his word, had refused to concede defeat over the Customhouse. That same summer of 1878, with Congress in recess, he simply fired Chester Arthur and put Edwin Merritt in his place. The appointment was subsequently endorsed by the Senate (the Democrats had since gained a majority), the Conkling forces were rolled back. So had Theodore lived, he would have been made Collector after all, and his political fortunes thereafter might have been considerable. Instead, he had died a loser. If not exactly killed off by Conkling, he had been unhorsed, made to look foolish and impotent in a battle known to the entire country.
So what should a noble boy and namesake make of that? How should one respond to the downfall of Greatheart?
It is easy enough to speculate about all this, tempting to see an edge of vengeance in the career that was to follow. Allegedly, the family resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. But in fact we really do not know what was resolved, if anything. The future was very much on the young man’s mind; this we do know from the Private Diary. “I should like to be a scientist,” he declared only a few months after Theodore’s death. He felt he had aged since the tragedy. He tried to picture himself a man as head of a family of his own. “I so wonder who my wife will be! ‘A rare and radiant maiden,’ I hope; one who will be as sweet, pure, and innocent as she is wise. Thank heaven I am at least perfectly pure.”
“How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name,” he would write in the diary. For the moment, however, having had a private talk with James Alfred, he decided to think only of his remaining two years at Harvard, resolving to study hard and to conduct himself “like a brave Christian gentleman.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER NINE
Harvard
1
“YOU BELONGED TO HARVARD, and she to you.” The bond was everlasting, asserted William Roscoe Thayer, Harvard ’81, who was a biographer and historian and for twenty-three years editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, which lent certain weight to anything he said. Moreover, “she” in that day—Theodore’s day—had been a “crescent institution ... in the full vigor of growth” and this “crescent spirit,” Thayer said, had been of enormous benefit to all fortunate enough to have been there at the time, however insensitive some were to what was happening to them.
Theodore, recalling his Harvard years, would credit Harvard mainly with providing him an especially good time.
The growth and change had begun well before either he or Thayer arrived on the scene. In 1869 Charles W. Eliot had been named president at age thirty-five and after that Harvard was not the same. Eliot insisted that Harvard become a modern university, and, by stages, instituted what has become known as the elective system. He enlarged the faculty, overhauled the Law School and the Medical School, raised money as never before, and commenced the greatest building boom in Harvard’s long history
up to that time. A scientist by training, he held that science and the humanities were not incompatible; further, that to be educated in science was to be educated for the future. He believed, as he had said in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Natural History in New York, that science was “the firm foundation” for man’s faith in himself and in what he called “the present infinite Creator.”
Eliot wished the Harvard student to be treated like an adult, to flourish in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He got rid of petty disciplinary rules, so that by Theodore’s time the old rule book of nearly forty pages had been reduced to one of five. In back of his elective system was an unshakable faith in the instinctive capacity of free human beings to follow the path that was best for them. No one could master anything worthwhile “without a deal of drudgery,” but then with so much that was so urgent and difficult in school life—in any life—it seemed “superfluous to invent other disagreeableness, whether for children or for men.” “Do you think it is a wise parent who invents disagreeable tasks for his children, or enforces any observance simply because it is disagreeable?” He was a turning point for Harvard and for American education, and as an example of serene, Unitarian, Boston sagacity and rectitude none could match him. To those like William Roscoe Thayer who viewed the college as one big family, he was the supreme father whose influence—whose outlook and standards—touched all. He was large and straight, “with the back of an oarsman,” and unforgettable, since most of the right side of his face was covered by an ugly, liver-colored birthmark. He believed in public service and in duty. On a gate to the Yard he would have inscribed:
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