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and obligatory fasts imposed upon all citizens by the President’s new food czar, Herbert Hoover. Flora no longer offered youthful cheer. Quentin had inexplicably stopped writing to her, and she exuded misery. Her visits became fewer, and in early December stopped altogether. Just before Christmas, subzero temperatures gripped Oyster Bay. Theodore and Edith found themselves so alone and cold that they closed off most of Sagamore Hill and tried to keep warm in just two or three west-facing rooms with wood-burning fireplaces. In blustery weather, the flag with four stars flapped loudly enough to disturb their sleep. Often they repeated to each other the lines of Edwin Arlington Robinson that most addressed their situation: There is ruin and decay / In the House on the Hill: / They are all gone away, / There is nothing more to say.

* Irene M. Given-Wilson, a Red Cross official close to Quentin Roosevelt. The Harrahs are unidentified.

CHAPTER 27

The Dead Are Whirling with the Dead

The beauty, shattered by the laws

That have creation in their keeping,

No longer trembles at applause,

Or over children that are sleeping;

And we who delve in beauty’s lore

Know all that we have known before

Of what inexorable cause

Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH, who could be relied upon to be au centre of the gayest, most fashionable crowd on New Year’s Eve, was partying with the Ned McLeans at their annual dance in Washington when the lights doused, signaling the approach of midnight. As the hour struck, a huge electric sign at the end of the ballroom blazed out in red, white, and blue: GOOD LUCK TO THE ALLIES IN 1918.

Her parents, at the same time, were trying to keep warm in one of the last big houses on Long Island that still relied on gaslight after dark. The northeastern weather that January was so arctic—colder than any ever recorded—that they decided to make their third great concession to modern times, after buying an automobile and paving the driveway. The Colonel agreed to pay an electrical contractor something over $1,500 to wire his mansion. Unfortunately, the system promised only light, not warmth. But he would no longer have to strain his one good eye when he read, and the freezing hallways and bathrooms would at least look more welcoming.

Comforts, real or imagined, had to be seized upon in a season that offered little in the way of good news. Quentin’s long silence was disturbing. Even allowing for the irregularity of military mail (with as much as four or five weeks needed for an exchange of letters), something had to be wrong with him. It was likely not serious, or his commanding officer—or Ted, or Archie, or Eleanor—would have cabled. Edith was so exasperated at his failure to reply to her letters that she refused to write any more until he became ashamed of himself.

Roosevelt felt Flora’s desolation enough to have sent Quentin a stern reproof: “If you wish to lose her, continue to be an infrequent correspondent. If however you wish to keep her, write her letters—interesting letters, and love letters—at least three times a week. Write no matter how tired you are … write if you’re smashed up in a hospital; write when you are doing your most dangerous stunts; write when your work is most irksome and disheartening; write all the time!” He signed himself, “Affectionately, a hardened and wary old father.”

The strange thing was that Quentin was the most epistolary of his children, quick to pour out jokes, stray observations, confessions, even poems on paper. Not that the others were slack correspondents. Ted and Dick Derby sent long letters through Eleanor, whose house in Paris functioned as a Rooseveltian hostel and information center. Kermit’s mail from Mesopotamia took many weeks to come, but could otherwise be relied on. Even taciturn Archie (due to become a father in six or seven weeks’ time) kept Grace fully briefed in Boston. His latest proud news was that he had been promoted to captain. Neither he nor Ted had much to say about Quentin, but being at the Front, that