Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [155]
Much of his inhibition derived from that traditional mute on the autobiographical trumpet, the over-protective wife. Still headachy and frail after her near-fatal riding accident of fourteen months before, Edith did not see why hundreds of thousands of readers should be privy to the sort of personal things kept for family letters, or better still, not put on paper at all: matters of health and bereavement and money and sex. It was out of the question that he should write about her, let alone the dead young woman whose face and name she had so assiduously erased from his Harvard photograph album. (But a lock of honey-colored hair survived, in a secret envelope inscribed in his own hand.)
The company of Archie and Quentin over the Christmas holidays, along with Ethel, Ted, Eleanor, and little Gracie, cheered both parents up. Stuffed stockings and dense snow insulating the house added the right Dickensian touches. Edith began to look “distinctly better,” Roosevelt wrote her sister. He thanked Emily for sending him two volumes of Italian short stories. “I shall read them both of course; probably the Fogazzaro first.”
He was intrigued to see how fast Quentin was developing in body and mind, and described him to Kermit as a “huge, wise philosopher.” Actually the boy was intelligent rather than intellectual. His instincts were tactile. Roosevelt, dictating, talked about the machinery of government; Quentin talked simply of machinery. He played the piano with ease, understanding it to be an intricate system of levers. He wrote well too, although flights of imagination seemed to engage him less than the delightful task of setting them as slugs of type, slathering them with greasy ink, and hearing them crank out during all-night sessions in the school print shop.
Ted, settled now in a Manhattan town house, with his pipe, his books, his wife and daughter, and a well-paying job, was bourgeois enough to bore a bank president—which he in fact repeatedly did, in his capacity as a bond salesman on Wall Street. Archie was what Archie would always be: faithful, dogged, inflexible.
Kermit claimed to be content in his subequatorial solitude. He was overworked and underpaid, but too proud to ask for help. Single or spliced, Edith’s beloved “one with the white head and the black heart” had the mark of a loner. “I’m afraid Mother thinks I’m hopeless,” he wrote Ethel, “what they call down here a vagabondo, which means a peculiarly useless sort of tramp.” His father tried to make him feel he was still an integral member of the family. “As president of the American Historical Association, I am to deliver an address which I hope you will like.… I shall send it to you when it is delivered.”
More excitingly to Kermit, Roosevelt mentioned that the Historical and Geographical Society of Brazil had invited him to deliver a series of lectures in Rio and São Paulo during the spring and early summer of 1913. That would be too soon for him, with his three books to finish; but both father and son felt that some sort of seed had been sown.
AT SYMPHONY HALL in Boston on Saturday, 27 December, Roosevelt had the novel experience of speaking to a capacity audience for nearly two hours without mentioning Progressivism. His listeners included not only the American Historical Association, but five other professional societies holding conventions in the city that weekend—sociologists, statisticians, economists, labor lawyers, and political scientists. He could not have asked for a forum more to his purpose, which was to offend as deeply as possible the data-drunk bores who, in his opinion, were leaching all the color and romance