Saturday morning, accompanied by Dick and one of his sisters, she and Theodore walked in the woods together. In the afternoon they all drove to Milton, to the Ellerton Whitney estate, for dinner and tea. “We spent the evening dancing and singing, driving back about 11 o’clock,” he reports in his diary. Sunday, after church, just the two of them went “chestnutting” and three weeks later he was back again for another Sunday, to see the Saltonstalls ostensibly.
Invited for Thanksgiving, he could write proudly at the day’s end, “They call me by my first name now.”
As time passed they were to cover countless miles in country walks together, she more than keeping up with him with her “long, firm step.” They played tennis, at which she was quite good; they went to dances, dinners, and endured what appears to have been an unending quantity of tea and talk and always in the best company.
“Snowed heavily all day long,” reads one Saturday entry in the diary. “But in spite of the weather I took a long walk with pretty Alice . . . spent most of the remainder of the day teaching the girls the five step and a new dance, the Knickerbocker. In the evening we played whist and read ghost stories.” He had a rug made for her from the lynx he trapped in Maine. She made him a pair of slippers (to replace Mittie’s presumably); and it was that spring that he had his horse shipped on to Cambridge so he could ride to Chestnut Hill on his own whenever he chose. (”It was the best stroke I ever made getting him on here.”)
To judge by what he said in his letters home, he was having a “capital time” with any number of Boston girls—Jennie Hooper, Nana Rotch, Lulu Lane, Bessie Whitney—and when he mentioned Alice, even in the supposed privacy of the diary, it was usually in the same breath with Rose Saltonstall, as if there were no difference in their appeal to him. Nor did he neglect to include periodic references to others from his “past.” “Remember me to Annie and Fanny, and give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humor,” he wrote to Corinne; “otherwise my respectful regards. If she seems particularly good-tempered tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”
Once he ventured to declare in the diary, “The more I see of Rose Saltonstall and Alice Lee the more I like them, especially pretty Alice.” By spring he felt up to saying the same thing (and in almost identical words) to Bamie, adding quickly, “All the family are just lovely to me.”
“I want you particularly to know some of my girl friends now,” he wrote to Corinne, expecting that she, Mittie, Bamie, and Aunt Anna might show up for Class Day. “They are a very sweet set of girls,” he assured her.
Through that summer, until he left for Maine (and to see Alice en route), he appeared to have little or nothing on his mind, exactly as if Alice Lee did not exist. Her name never appears in the diary rendition of his days at Oyster Bay. He writes instead of “the same active, out-of-door life that I always enjoy so much.” He is thinking mainly about “getting into beautiful condition,” spending “the whole time out in the open air; and at night am always tired enough to sleep like a top. Naturally I am in magnificent health and spirits.” A “pretty little Miss Hale” from Philadelphia turns up as a guest of Uncle James Alfred and family. “I take her out rowing quite often.” Another of “the prettiest girls in Oyster Bay” is a Miss Emily Swan, with whom he has had “several very pleasant rows and rides.” He walks with Bamie and “Pussie,” he walks with Mittie, who is “just too sweet and pretty for anything.” On August 11 he reports, “I am teaching pretty Miss Emily Swan to play lawn tennis.”
But it was all an elaborate deception, according to what he revealed later. In truth he had already proposed to Alice. He had made up his mind to marry her as early as that Thanksgiving at Chestnut Hill. He had even recorded the decision in the diary at that time, but then, thinking better of it, carefully removed the page with a straight razor. The proposal came sometime in June, to judge by things he said later, and from the diary, one gets the impression it was on the evening of the twentieth, Class Day, for which none of the Roosevelts had made an appearance. There were parties most of the day—an afternoon tea dance at the new gym, a dinner at the Hasty Pudding Club—and after dark, from about eight o’clock until ten, he and Alice sat together in a window at Hollis Hall “looking at the Yard beautifully lighted and listening to the Glee Club.” He had “never seen her look so lovely,” he wrote. “We then went and danced at Memorial [Hall].”
But whatever the time or setting, she turned him down, or at least put him off.
As he wrote later to Henry Minot, he had “made everything subordinate to winning her.” His entire last two years at Harvard, as he saw them, were in “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”
“See that girl?” Mrs. Robert Bacon would remember him saying at a Hasty Pudding function. “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her!”
The showy little dog cart was acquired as his senior year got under way and it was now that the expenditures on clothes took their biggest jump. His campaign was rolling. He enlisted all the help he could get. Early in November, he arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Alice, and her sister Rose to visit Mittie at 57th Street. Two weeks later Bamie and Corinne made their appearance at Chestnut Hill, where they were given dinners at both the Lee and Saltonstall houses. On November 22 he put on a lunch in their honor at the Porcellian, complete with wine and flowers, the table set for thirty-four guests, including Alice and her mother.
He escorted Rosy Lee to a tennis party and had “lovely fun” dancing with her at a Harvard Assembly. He took “dear and honest” (and very homely) Rose Saltonstall driving in his “swell” dog cart. He talked poetry and theology with the rather august Leverett Saltonstall most of one long evening.
Other young men, meantime, circled about Alice as moths to a flame (in the words of another of her cousins), and with the return of winter Theodore was beside himself. He is described wandering sleepless through the woods near Cambridge “night after night.” Obsessed with the idea that somebody else would run off with her, he sent abroad for a set of French dueling pistols, which it is said he actually succeeded in getting through the Customhouse “after great difficulty.” One winter night when he was off on another of his wanderings in the woods, somebody telegraphed New York and Cousin West, now a medical student, had to come on immediately to see what could be done for him.
Then, over the Christmas holidays, the course of the romance took an abrupt turn. Alice came back to New York for a second visit, accompanied by Rosy and Dick and Rose Saltonstall. It becomes “an uproariously jolly time.” There is a theater evening. Parties are given in Alices honor by Aunt Anna and Aunt Lizzie next door. New Year’s Day Elliott stages a lunch and a dance at Jerome Park. It is a sparkling winter day with fresh snow on the ground and everyone rides to and from the party in three big sleighs.
On Sunday, January 25,1880, again at Cambridge, he could announce unequivocally in his diary, “At last everything is settled . . .”
I drove over to the Lees’ determined to make an end of things . . . and after much pleading my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife. Oh, how bewitchingly pretty she looked! If loving her with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy; a year ago last Thanksgiving I made a vow that win her I would if it were possible; and now I have done so, the aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy, and to shield her and guard her from every trial. . .
He was off at once on a flying visit to New York to “tell the family,” all of whom were “very much surprised,” according to his impression. By February 2, he had bought her a diamond ring.
Feb. 3 Snowing heavily, but I drove over in my sleigh to Chestnut Hill, the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife. My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty. I have
never done anything to deserve such good fortune. Coming home I was upset in a great drift, and dragged about 300 yards holding on to the reins, before I could stop the horse . . .
Feb. 4 Superb sleighing, took Dick out for a long drive. The engagement is not to come out till a week from Monday; it is awfully hard to keep away from her.
Feb. 13. . . I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never (even when hunting) gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her; and I doubt if an hour has passed that I have not thought of her. And now I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose.
He began sending advance notices to a few select friends, to Hal Minot, to Edith Carow and Fanny Smith. To Mittie, who seems to have been greatly distressed, he wrote, “Really you mustn’t feel melancholy, sweet Motherling; I shall only love you all the more.”
The formal announcement was made February 14. When Mittie, Bamie, Elliott, and Corinne arrived three days later, he drove them to a “great family dinner at the Lees’.” Later, at the Hasty Pudding Club, too excited to sleep, he played billiards until dawn.
“Alice,” said Mrs. Robert Bacon long afterward, “. . . did not want to marry him, but she did.”
Alice, in her own words, felt as if in a dream, to have “such a noble man’s love.” She loved Theodore deeply, she wrote to Mittie, in answer to a letter welcoming her into the Roosevelt fold, “and it will be my aim both to endear myself to those so dear to him and retain his love. How happy I am I can’t begin to tell you, it seems almost like a dream.”
A date for the wedding was a subject no one had broached as yet, and when she told Theodore she wanted to be married the following autumn, he anticipated a “battle royal” with her father, who apparently thought she was too young to be in any rush and would have welcomed a long engagement. “I most sincerely wish I had you here to assist me,” Theodore wrote Bamie. But then Mittie proposed that he bring Alice home to live at 57th Street, once they were married, and it was thus that he “carried the day” when the confrontation took place. “Indeed,” he told Corinne, “I don’t think Mr. Lee would have consented to our marriage so soon on other terms.”
To Mittie he now announced, “I wish to send invitations to all my friends and acquaintances in New York; so couldn’t you send me on a visiting list of all the people I know or ought to know? I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”
2
6 West 57th Street
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,
Will you take a cup of tea with me on Monday next, the 12th, at 4 o’clock.
I wish to present to you Miss Alice Lee of Boston who with her mother will be visiting us then.
Miss Lee is a very lovely young girl of eighteen and is just engaged to my oldest son, Theodore, who does not graduate from Harvard until June.
I think I can rely upon your interest, my dear Mrs. Ward, in my son’s engagement and I am anxious to welcome you to my home among a few of my friends. . . .
Hoping to welcome you then, my dear friend, on April 12th. I am faithfully yours—
M. B. ROOSEVELT
April 5, 1880
The note was one of the many Mittie sent off in her own hand on her monogrammed cream-colored stationery that spring of 1880 and there were to be a very great many more, several hundred at least, before the year ended. It was as if time and circumstances and all those rites of passage expected by proper society had conspired to put her at center stage as she had not been since her own engagement. And with so much expected of her—her particular grace and “example” often critical to the success of an occasion—she appears to have played her part with nothing but pleasure, and flawlessly. One New York paper was to write of her “brilliant prowess” as a hostess. “All the entertainments that she gave . . . were stamped with the spirit of good cheer, high breeding, and elevating conversation. Few houses have entertained so many guests and none has made of guests so many friends.”
Her small tea of April 12 had been preceded by a family reception for Alice on April 8 and was followed by a large evening affair on April 13 at which she and Alice made a striking picture receiving their guests in front of the ornate mantelpiece in the dining room at 57th Street. In December she would stand in the same spot, Corinne on her right this time, Alice on her left, at Corinne’s coming-out party, hothouse flowers banked on all sides, rooms so full of people it was difficult to move about.
Between these two occasions, in about seven months’ time, she would give perhaps twenty dinner parties and an equal number of teas; she would see the 57th Street house closed for the summer—silver packed, furniture shrouded with slipcovers—and move to Oyster Bay (on May 29). She would attend Theodores graduation at Cambridge (June 30); entertain a steady stream of guests at Tranquillity through the summer; settle issues among her servants; fret over Theodore’s health; see Theodore and Elliott off to the West for a hunting trip; have Tranquillity put in order for Theodore’s honeymoon; reopen the 57th Street house and arrange an “apartment” for Theodore and Alice on the third floor; attend the wedding at Chestnut Hill; plan Corinne’s party; issue the invitations for Corinne’s party; and adjust to the idea that Elliott was going off to hunt big game in India.
Theodore’s romance, moreover, was but one of several with which she must play a part.
It was at one of her April dinner parties at 57th Street, a week or so after the reception for Alice, that Bamie’s friend Sara Delano first met James Roosevelt of Hyde Park, a dignified member of the Hudson River “branch,” who was twice Sara Delano’s age and a widower. “He talked to her the whole time,” Mittie remarked to Bamie when the evening was over. “Why, he never took his eyes off her!” Sara, like Bamie, had resigned herself to the probability of lifelong spinsterhood and would credit Mittie ever after for the way things turned out. On May 7, following up on an invitation from “Squire James,” Mittie took Bamie and Sara for a visit to Hyde Park, a day Sara was to remember as among the most important in her life. “If I had not come then,” she would tell her son years later, “I should now be ’old Miss Delano’ after a rather sad life!”
Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were married at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, that October, a few weeks before Theodore and Alice were married. In November Sara and James sailed for a European honeymoon, taking the Germanic. On the same ship was Elliott, who was en route to India by way of London.
Cousin West was in love with Fanny Smith (she turned him down when he proposed), and Corinne, too, was being actively courted by a large, demonstrative, florid young Scot, a friend of Elliott’s named Douglas Robinson, heir to a real-estate fortune, who, like Alice, spent part of that summer with the family at Oyster Bay, his booming voice adding a new note—like that of a calliope, Theodore thought—to the usual sounds of summer.
Corinne was thought “clever” (Fanny Smith said she had “genuine intellectual power”) and though no beauty she had, at eighteen, a certain vitality and natural femininity that appealed to men and women. Beside Alice or Mittie, Corinne looked rather plain, but between her and Bamie, she was much the more attractive to the eye and her two brothers and her male cousins made a great fuss over her. She was a little taller than Mittie, with tiny hands and delicate features. For her summer reading this year she had undertaken Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
The same big porch rockers tilted back and forth at Tranquillity as in years past. The blue bay and sunshine were no different from other summers, or any less a tonic. The familiar, noisy games went on in timeless fashion and in the midst of it all Mittie herself often seemed a timeless summer note, “the mother in white . . . seated in state on the lawn,” a book usually in hand, or talking on in her easy, unchanged Georgia way to Sister Anna or Lucy Elliott. Only the strong-willed Bamie seems to h
ave lost patience with her on occasion.
Nothing could ruffle Mittie. Corinne, who treasured especially her mothers warmth and spontaneity, saw in her also a steady enduring strength—of a kind different from Bamie s, but strength all the same. A “perfect readiness to meet all situations,” Corinne called it.
Mittie approved of Douglas Robinson, it appears; and having accepted Theodore’s decision, she had taken Alice to her heart quite literally as one of her own. Elliott may have become a worry by now; it is impossible to know for certain.
Elliott had begun working for Uncle James Gracie at a bank downtown and in summer commuted to and from Oyster Bay. As some writers have said, Elliott may also have begun already to drink more than was good for him, and so the trip west in August could have been as much for his benefit as for Theodores. Returning to Chicago after a week’s hunt in Iowa, Theodore would write to Corinne of their brother’s joy in “the change to civilization.”
As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandygaff.
But the letter is so plainly Theodore’s idea of humor—tall-tale humor out of the Wild West—that it suggests there was no “problem” as yet. That he would treat a subject of such seriousness in so open and bantering a vein would seem a sign that neither he nor Elliott nor any of them was very concerned.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 301