Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [276]
Quentin was on a pass from Plattsburg, and in no hurry to return. He admitted, even to his father, that he did not enjoy himself there. Ted loved it. So did Archie, who had just graduated from Harvard. Kermit was at least no gloomier there than anywhere else. Quentin found camp life a bore. He was not lazy, nor did he lack courage. But parade-ground drill bothered his back, agonizingly sometimes. His ironic sense of humor, unshared by any of his siblings except Alice, made it difficult for him to take military life seriously.
He was the same age as Flora—or would be in the fall—and he shared her eager appetite for fun. There was plenty of that available at Newport, and on the other Whitney estates in upstate New York, South Carolina, and Old Westbury, Long Island. Slick-haired, fast-driving boys like himself zoomed in on these places, their autos crammed with girls daringly dressed in the latest modes from Paris—none more daring than Flora, who was arty, if not a teensy bit affected, in her love of “modern” jewelry and fabrics that only she could mix and carry off. She smoked straw-tipped Benson & Hedges cigarettes, which she kept in a red-beaded case. Her spiffy Scripps-Booth torpedo roadster had wire wheels and a silver radiator shell. Since her mother was the famous sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a hint of la bohème was to be expected of her. Flora dreamed of being a designer one day. Her small chiseled face was more unusual than pretty, with long-lashed hazel eyes and gull’s-wing brows that made her look fiercer than she was.
“FLORA DREAMED OF BEING A DESIGNER ONE DAY.”
Flora Payne Whitney. (photo credit i24.1)
Quentin had been friendly with her for almost a year. Before going up to Harvard, he had gotten into the habit of driving out to Westbury and enjoying the society of people more entertaining than the dour Brahmins forever visiting his parents. He was not the only Roosevelt attracted to Flora. Archie had briefly paid court, and although he was a handsome youth, blond and skinny as a whippet, she had made clear her preference for his younger brother. So far, Quentin had no stronger feelings for her than affection and a mutual interest in poetry. This was just as well, from the point of view of Flora’s parents: he was just the sort of name-but-no-money college boy they wanted to protect her from. Now that she was “introduced to society,” there would be many scions of the Four Hundred seeking to add a Whitney to their portfolios.
Nevertheless, Quentin’s claims on her—should he choose to exercise them—could not be discounted. He was the son of a former President of the United States. He had his father’s charm, but none of the obsessive need to cajole and convert that was making the Colonel so difficult to take these days. Growing up in the White House had given Quentin a sense of self-worth that had little in it of vanity. He did not need to work at impressing people, being used to their deference. At Harvard he had fitted right in with the best sort. “You get a speaking acquaintance with a lot of others,” he reported to Kermit, “but you don’t know them any more than the little Yids I sit next to in class.”
Flora could have found someone better looking to squire her on the night she “came out.” With his lofty forehead, Rooseveltian teeth, and furrowed brows, Quentin was not likely to improve with age. But he was tall and powerfully built and to her, adorable.
ROOSEVELT’S ARTICLE ABOUT American volunteer pilots in France (“We are all of us indebted to these young men of generous soul … proudly willing to die for their convictions”) reflected a growing popular awareness that war was no longer constrained by gravity. One “aeroplane” dispatched across no-man’s-land with a camera could survey more battleground in half an hour than a reconnaissance patrol in a month. For days before the German attack