Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [138]
By the time everybody was settled there was nowhere for me but a small space between the basket of clams and the demijohn of water in the flat-bottomed boat manned by Ted and his cousin George.
Under the blazing sun we rowed and rowed. There was no breeze. The Sound was as calm as glass.… Two hours later we landed on a beach precisely like the one we had started from except that it was farther from home. The boats were drawn up on the sand, and we settled ourselves at the water’s edge, unable to go near the trees because of poison ivy. The provisions were spread out and a kettle filled to make tea. The thought of hot tea was depressing enough, but it was worse to see the roaring fire built over the clams. When they were judged ready Colonel Roosevelt selected one, opened it, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and handed it to me. It was large, with a long black neck. I managed to get it all in my mouth, burning myself quite badly. Although gritty with sand, it was delicious at first, but that soon wore off and it became a piece of old rubber hose.… Finally I slipped it under a log, but not deftly enough to escape Colonel Roosevelt’s eye.
“You aren’t as persistent as Archie,” he observed. “The first time he was old enough to eat a clam on a picnic he chewed for a time, then ate three sandwiches, some cookies, and an orange. Later he asked what he should do with the poor little dead clam. It was still in his mouth!”
Because of headwinds, it took twice as long for the party to row home. After a few weeks of Rooseveltian hospitality, Eleanor found that she had lost twenty-six pounds.
One night after dinner the Colonel sat on the piazza with Ted, Archie, Nicholas, and George. Rocking in his chair, he said he was “dumbfounded” by the fervor he had aroused at the Progressive convention.
George remarked that whereas he had once been a radical among conservatives, he must now be the reverse. Roosevelt accepted the suggestion enthusiastically. “Yes, yes! That’s it! I have to hold them in check all the time. I’ve got to restrain them.”
A more agitated rocker on the porch that August was Alice, talking politics, as Edith complained to Ethel, “like molasses blobbing out of a bottle.” She and Nick were spending the summer apart, their marriage on the verge of collapse. It was 1910 all over again, except that Nick’s divided loyalties were even more strained, now that his father-in-law was directly challenging the President. Nick’s whole instinct was to remain in the mainstream of the Republican Party. But the moment was near when he was going to have to define himself publicly in campaigning for reelection. Edith was unsympathetic. “I wish to goodness that Nick would come out flat footed and work for Taft, or do something! It is hard on everyone!”
Contrary to her private, bookish nature, Edith had become politicized by the two Chicago conventions. Madame Defarge, sternly knitting her husband’s doom in June, had been unable to resist the sight of thousands of Progressives turning toward her box, on the day of his “Confession of Faith,” and roaring for her to stand up and show herself. She knew as well as Theodore did that he was headed for defeat, but she was happy that he was happy in his new guise as a social reformer.
BY THE END OF the month, all three candidates—or four, if Eugene V. Debs was to be counted as a presidential possibility—had launched