As Elliott and Theodore proceeded on their western expedition, it was Elliott who got on most readily with the people encountered—male and female—some of whom, according to Theodore, were “pretty rough.” Elliott’s natural, easy way with people cut across barriers of class or background, an attribute Theodore could only admire, and doubtless Elliott’s past experiences in Texas gave him confidence of a kind Theodore lacked.
“Last Sunday night we got this motley crew together to sing hymns,” Mittie read in one of Theodore’s letters, this dated August 25,1880, from a farm in Illinois; “thanks to Elliott it was a great success. It was all I could do to keep a sober face when I saw him singing from the same book with the much-flattered Mrs. Rudolf and Miss Costigan.”
The trip had been badly planned. With no clear idea where to go, they kept trying different spots, first in Illinois, then Iowa and Minnesota, taking time out in Chicago between each foray to recuperate and figure their next move. The flies were dreadful in Illinois and on a lake in Iowa they both nearly drowned when their rowboat capsized. But they saw it as their last chance for an adventure together, entirely on their own, which probably would have been reason enough for going in the first place, quite aside from Theodore’s health. “I enjoy being with the old boy so much,” Theodore said. “I am so glad ... we two brothers have been able at last to be together,” wrote Elliott. “All the happier we are solely dependent on each other for companionship. . .”
Theodore had become violently ill during a midsummer visit to Bar Harbor with Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall. He had weathered his final examinations at Harvard, Class Day, graduation, the excitement of having Alice as a guest at Oyster Bay, all with no ill effect, only to be struck down in embarrassing fashion in far-off Maine. He was hit by violent diarrhea, his old cholera morbus (”very embarrassing for a lover,” as he told Corinne), and to Mittie he declared a trip west would be just the thing to put him back on his feet and build him up.
What he did not tell her—or Alice or Elliott, so far as we know—was that he had also received some extremely disquieting news from the college physician as far back as March. He had gone for a routine physical examination, at the conclusion of which Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant told him he had “heart trouble.” Of what variety, or whether that was even discussed, we do not know and it was only years later that Theodore ever talked about the incident. But apparently he was warned he must live a quiet life, choose a relatively sedentary occupation. He was to avoid strenuous physical exertion—he was not to run up stairs, for example. He responded at once and defiantly, telling the doctor he could never live that way, that he would do exactly the opposite.
He was sick again in Minnesota, at the Red River bordering on Dakota Territory, their farthest point west. An attack of asthma had him gasping so that he spent the night sitting up in order to breathe. The day after he was in such pain with colic he could hardly walk. Yet only a few days before, writing from Chicago, Elliott had described him as looking like a new man, “as brown and well as can be,” the picture of health. “I think he misses Alice, poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something all the time and certainly he looks a hundred percent better than when he came out.”
For all the grouse, geese, snipes, sharp-tailed plovers, ducks, and grebes they managed to kill—in excess of four hundred birds—the shooting was “not as good as expected.” They had hunted on foot, not horseback. There had been no whirlwind rides over the prairie as in a Mayne Reid adventure. They had never reached the “real West,” the “Far West,” as Theodore called it. The whole episode had been very tame and colorless in contrast to what Elliott had experienced in Texas or what he could expect in the wilds of India.
As once Theodore had stayed safely at home with his studies while Elliott went off to Fort McKavett, so now he would settle in with his “little pink wife” while Elliott circled the world. But plainly there was an element of escape to Elliott’s forthcoming adventure. He was getting out before Theodore returned, abdicating his place as man of the house, and to “a far better man,” he assured Bamie in another letter from the western trip.
Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory, but fail to put in practice.
Theodore wanted Elliott to be his best man at the wedding and declared further that if, because of his India plans, Elliott was unable to be there, then he wanted no best man—all of which pleased Mittie greatly.
“Theodore is in the city now . . . wild with happiness and excitement,” wrote Fanny Smith in her diary on October 15. “I went with him to see the wedding presents he is going to give Alice. I hope she is very fond of him.”
He had spent several thousand dollars on a sapphire ring, other jewelry and more gifts for her. He would begin saving, he vowed, once they were married. Two days ahead of the others, he departed for Boston.
They were married on a perfect New England fall day, the height of Indian summer, Wednesday, October 27,1880, Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, at noon in the Unitarian Church at Brookline. Mittie had invited Fanny Smith and Edith Carow to come on to Boston with the family and so they were both in the pew beside her, along with Bamie and the Gracies. Corinne was a bridesmaid. Elliott stood beside his brother with the ring and Theodore, when it came time for his vows, responded, as Fanny Smith said, “in the most determined and Theodorelike tones.”
One of the servants in the Lee household, Alice’s nurse from childhood (recorded only as Christina), ran the two miles from the house to the church, having missed the last carriage when it departed, and arrived just in time for the ceremony.
Alice made a stunning bride. Some weeks before, on a flying visit to Boston after his western trip, Theodore had found her “the same as ever and yet with a certain added charm” he was unable to describe. “I cannot take my eyes off her,” he wrote in his diary; “she is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”
The reception was in the grand tradition—at home, with music, food, dancing, servants with trays of champagne, the bride the center of everyone’s attention, the big house where she had grown up bright with sunshine streaming through long windows.
On their wedding night the couple stayed in Springfield, at the Massasoit House, and from there the following day went directly to Oyster Bay for a honeymoon of two weeks. A proper European honeymoon had been postponed until summer, Theodore having since decided, at the urging of Uncle Robert) to enter the Columbia Law School.
Early the first week of November, a few days before Elliott sailed, Mittie received word that they were “living in a perfect dream of delight” at Tranquillity, waited on hand and foot by two faithful Roosevelt servants—the ever reliable Mary Ann, the groom Davis—and by a local woman named Kate, who did all the meals. “The house is just perfection,” Theodore told her; “Kate cooks deliciously, and Mary Ann is exactly the servant for us; and Davis does his part beautifully too, always sending in his respects in the morning to ’the good lady’ as he styles Alice.”
Breakfast was at ten, dinner at two, tea at seven. Except for the servants and a big black-and-white collie named Dare, they had the place to themselves. The summer “crowd” had long since departed. The big summer houses stood silent in the golden autumn light.
They played more tennis, went on more walks and for long drives over the hills in the family buggy. At night they read aloud from Keats and Sir Walter Scott before a log fire. Their one contact with the outside world was the morning paper. Once, on November 2, Theodore had Davis drive him over to East Norwich so he could cast his first vote in a presidential election, for the Republican, James A. Garfield, and his running mate, none other than Chester Arthur.
“There is har
dly an hour of the twenty-four that we are not together,” he wrote in his diary a few days later. “I am living in a dream land; how I wish it could last forever.”
Saturday, November 13, Mittie welcomed them home at 6 West 57th Street.
3
That winter in New York was the busiest and possibly the happiest time Theodore had ever known. Even the most frenetic days at Harvard had never been quite so full. For Alice, after the pace of life at Chestnut Hill, the change must have been overwhelming.
Theodore at once took up the part of his father, presiding at the head of the family table, presiding Sunday evenings in his father’s old place at the newsboys’ dinner, beginning their first Sunday in New York. He was elected a trustee of the Orthopedic Hospital and the New York Infant Asylum. And for the Roosevelt women now, at least figuratively in his charge, he became the main source of news from “downtown,” the perfect escort to the theater and the opera, the whip hand on sleigh rides through the park or along Riverside Drive. Reading aloud to them from Mark Twain’s latest, A Tramp Abroad, he would laugh so uproariously that he could hardly go on, turning “literally purple,” as Corinne said.
At meetings of the St. Andrews Society he chatted with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune and with others who had known his father. He joined a Free Trade Club, organized a whist club, started to work seriously on the naval history he had more or less toyed with the year before. By mid-February Corinne could also report in a letter to Douglas Robinson that “he has been going to Republican meetings steadily this week, and gives us most absurd accounts of them.”
And all of this, meantime, was only tangential to the new career in the law.
From 57th Street to the Columbia Law School, then located in the battered, old Schermerhorn house on Great Jones Street, was a distance of about three miles—fifty-four blocks down Fifth Avenue—and he walked it regularly every morning, leaving the house around 7:45, arriving in time for an 8:30 class. Classes over, he sometimes stopped in at the Astor Library, across Lafayette Place, to do research for the book, then walked home again. The six-mile round trip, he remarked apologetically, was the only regular exercise he was able to work into his day, given all he had to do.
“The law work is very interesting,” he said in his diary; and again, “I like the law school work very much.” Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert, who was back in the news again as one of the new reform trustees of the Brooklyn Bridge, now in its eleventh year of construction and still unfinished.
Before dark, if there was snow, he would bundle Alice into the sleigh and strike off to the north, through the park or crosstown to the Hudson. “I love to take my sweet little wife up the Riverside Park,” he wrote shortly before Christmas; “it is a beautiful drive now, with the snowy palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, as with the dark waters of the Hudson, covered with ice, at their feet.”
Once, on a sleighing party along the Hudson, the elder Theodore and Mittie had gone as far as one of their summer “cottages,” at Riverdale, where Mittie insisted on getting out to inspect the place. The snow was deep and Theodore had picked her up and carried her in his arms, only to step in a hole and over they had gone. “She enjoyed it like a child,” he happily told the family afterward. “Your Uncle Jimmie and Mrs. Dodge looked shocked.”
“When my sweetest little wife can’t go,” reads another of the diary entries, “I always take dear little Mother. It is lovely to live as we are now.”
But the quantities of energy expended on his studies and sleigh rides, the historical research, the daily constitutionals in every kind of weather, or his clubs and meetings and charities, seem almost secondary to what went into “the season,” the New York social whirl that dominated the winter and took front rank in the running diary account he maintained so conscientiously. From the night of Corinne’s debut, December 8—the “great ball at our house” when Alice wore her wedding dress and white flowers in her hair—there was something going on, some reception, dinner, musical, or spectacular society ball, nearly every night of the week. He and “pretty Alice” were an immediate triumph as part of the ultra-fashionable “young married” set, “taken up” and fussed over by what Edith Wharton called “the little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.”
There was a “jolly little dinner” at the lselins’, a “very pleasant little party” at Aunt Annies, dinners at the Leavitts’, the Griswolds’, the Weekeses’, the Keans’, the Morans’, the Tuckermans’, the Stuyvesant Fishes’, a musical at the Betts’, a dinner for twenty-four at home, and several large dinners given by Mrs. William B. Astor, Jr.—the Mrs. Astor—who was homely and without charm and so laden with chains of diamonds as to be immobile, but who, with her social counselor. Ward McAllister, reigned over New York society. The Roosevelts and the Astors were “family” now, after a fashion, since Mrs. Astors daughter Helen had married young James Roosevelt Roosevelt—”Rosy” Roosevelt—who was the son of Sara Delano’s James by his first marriage.
There were theater parties and “small suppers” afterward, a box at the opera Monday nights, the Mendelssohn Concert series. There were private dances by candlelight at Delmonico’s that often lasted until three in the morning, the Patriarchs’ Ball and the Family Circle Dancing Class (the F.C.D.C.), these latter two the inspiration of Ward McAllister and already regarded as time-honored social institutions.
“Dinner at Delanos’,” reads the diary entry for Monday, January 11, 1881, at the start of a new week on the social calendar; “sat between Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Drayton.” The night following came a “very jolly theater party and supper at Tuckermans’;” the night after that, a “great ball” at the Astors’. On Friday, January 14, Theodore, Alice, and some thirteen others, including Bamie, Corinne, and Douglas Robinson, went off to Niagara Falls by private railroad car.
Saturday, January 15 Ideal day; perpetual spree. Saw falls, rapids, and whirlpool; took long sleigh rides, ended trip with every kind of dance in evening. Took hotel by storm. Everybody so jolly and congenial.
Sunday, January 16 Sleighed to church. Went under Falls; grand sight. Took night train for N.Y. Ghost stories and songs. Trip is the success of the season.
Monday, January 17 Went to Patriarch Ball.
It was “the greatest kind of fun.” He knew how to pace himself, he said. “I never stay more than two minutes with any girl and so don’t get talked out.” Corinne, he claimed, was a “great belle” of the season, while Alice grew ever more dazzling. With her on his arm he could not help being the center of attention. “Alice is universally and greatly admired; and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day . . . and oh, how happy she has made me!” The attentions showered on her at every party seem only to have pleased and flattered him. The old wild jealousy, any thoughts of dueling pistols, were all in the past apparently.
For her own part, meantime, Alice had also joined a tennis club and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (”now we are one in everything,” said Theodore emotionally), and formed a bond with her new mother-in-law that, from the evidence we have, must have been extraordinary. If one chose to marry a Roosevelt, Douglas Robinson was to remark, one ran the risk of being “bullied or ignored or hung on the family like a tail to a kite,” but Alice is not known to have shared or ever to have expressed any such feelings and the love she and Mittie had for each other would be talked about for years.
There was no friction between them and it was not as though Alice was an unfelt presence. Practicing at the piano in the corner of the parlor, she played loud enough to be heard through the wall of the adjoining Roosevelt house. She entered into conversation—Mittie found her “so companionable”—and for all her sunny spirit appears to have had no fear of expressing exasperation or impatience with some of her husband’s ways. (In another of Owen Wister’s vignettes involving the spilling of Ro
osevelt blood, Theodore is described working away at his War of 1812 studies, alone in the library, standing on one leg, checking through a book on navigation while making little sketches, his desk a sliding panel that pulled out from the bookcase. Alice bursts in on him and exclaims, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships,” whereupon “Teddy” charges to the third floor, cuts himself shaving, and is at once attended by the adoring wife and other resident female Roosevelts who “take measures” to save his collar from being stained.)
At times, too, she questioned the need for such everlasting activity in their lives. While Theodore and Bamie thrived on the tightly packed schedule—“Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!” Theodore once hailed his adored sister—Alice seems to have felt something alien in the pellmell rush of New York life, just as Mittie had when she first came to the city as a bride. Racing down the street with Corinne to catch a horsecar one morning, Alice had panted out, “Do you always have to run to catch anything in New York?” And Corinne, writing reflectively to Elliott later in the day, had agreed it was true, they were indeed constantly rushing to catch something or other. “Sometimes we succeed,” she said, “and sometimes we do not, and it is not particularly satisfactory either way.” Only within the home walls was life “intensely satisfactory.”
During the flurry of excitement surrounding Corinne’s engagement to Douglas Robinson later that winter, Alice seems to have remained largely in the background. The engagement was a peculiar business—eagerly supported by Theodore and Bamie and looked upon by Corinne as a great mistake from the moment she agreed to it. She had no wish to be married. She had a horror of marriage, as she told her ardent Douglas in a variety of ways, one letter after another, he having departed from New York almost immediately after the announcement to check over some landholdings in West Virginia.
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