Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [296]
Quentin simultaneously graduated as a first lieutenant in the Flying Corps. He was assigned to the Ninety-fifth Aero Squadron, with orders to proceed overseas at once. Fanny Parsons watched him emerging khaki-clad from Christ Church after communion with his mother, and got a sick feeling they might never share the sacrament again. His departure was set for Monday, 23 July. He told Edith that he wanted to spend his last night with Flora, on the Whitney yacht. Helpless against the rush of events, she could hold him at Sagamore Hill only through Saturday.
Before going to bed that evening, she went to his bedroom and tucked him in.
FLORA WROTE QUENTIN a farewell letter to take with him.
Dearest …
With every breath I draw there will be a thought of you and a wish for your safety, success and good luck.…
All I do from now will be for you.… There is nothing in me that could make you care for me as much as I care for you—and you couldn’t anyway, because it’s absolute worship on my part.
And be careful and don’t take any unnecessary risks—or do anything solely for bravado—please, please, dear?
On Monday morning, Theodore and Edith went into Manhattan to see their youngest son off on the SS Olympia. Alice joined them at the Cunard dock. The Whitney family was there en masse. None of them knew Flora was engaged, but they were showing rare support for her and her soldier boyfriend.
The liner, war-painted troopship gray, was in no hurry to leave. Humid heat built up along the waterfront. Quentin seemed to want to do nothing but sit on a bale of hides holding hands with Flora. By lunchtime, his parents and sister could stand it no longer and said goodbye. They left the young couple in care of the Whitneys and drove home to Sagamore Hill. Alice sensed Roosevelt’s utter desolation.
She murmured to herself, The old Lion perisheth for lack of prey and the stout Lion’s whelps are scattered abroad.
* Ted was in fact twenty-nine.
CHAPTER 26
The House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
HAVING LITTLE RELIGION, Roosevelt was confessedly fatalistic. “I have always believed in the truth of the statement that ‘He who seeks his life shall lose it.’ ” Perhaps the same applied to seeking a soldier’s death. He was being punished for the fatal insolence of wanting to go gloriously.
Sagamore Hill had been a lonely place before, after his various political defeats and the marriages and resettlements of his children. But he had always been able to count on the politicians returning, and even when Ted and Kermit had tried to seek their lives, on the West Coast and in South America, somehow or other the same flame kept bringing them back. Alice, too. Although she was now a fixture of the Washington establishment, she was never happier than when she could leave Nick to his violin and his mistresses and revisit the home of her childhood.
But the diaspora of four sons to the war—not to mention Eleanor and Belle, hurrying to beat an imminent law against the wives of servicemen going overseas—plus an almost total transferal of press attention to what was happening “over there,” filled the old house with an emptiness that only extreme youth could assuage. Ethel brought her little boy and baby girl often, but not often enough for a wistful grandfather. And there was Flora Whitney, with a gulf of her own inside her. She visited the Roosevelts again and again, as if she were already their daughter-in-law.
Quentin had done what he could to create interdependence between her and them, leaving a farewell note to Flora in his father’s hands: “I love you, dearest, and always shall, far, far, more than you will ever know or believe.… Ah, sweetheart, war is a cruel master to us all.”
“FLORA CAME OVER for dinner with Mother and me,” Roosevelt wrote Quentin on 28 July. “So darling and so pretty.… I cannot overstate how fond I have grown of her, and how much I respect and admire her—so pretty and young and yet so good and really wise.”
His praise might have signified