Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [306]
Republican strategists in Washington were of similar opinion. Already thinking ahead to November’s congressional elections and the presidential campaign of 1920, they lured Roosevelt down late in the month for four days of policy talk. He took Edith with him, and Alice again made her town house available as a place where the Colonel could hold court, in the manner of a deposed king plotting a return to the throne. Father and daughter enjoyed the comings and goings of Party stalwarts who believed that Wilson’s current pride preceded a fall from public esteem. But for Edith, who had not seen the capital since she left it in 1909, the visit was painful. M Street was noisy and dirty now with automobile traffic. There were uniforms everywhere, and ugly wooden army buildings. She could not sit in Henry Adams’s parlor without seeing, across Lafayette Square, the radiant mansion where she had brought up Archie and Quentin, married Alice off, and entertained so many of the world’s best people. Its gates were shut to her, its servants obeyed another Edith. Adams was clearly dying, a little gray dormouse of a man. Henry Cabot Lodge had lost his wife’s reflected charm. Springy was gone from the British Embassy, a failed envoy, maligning his replacement, Lord Reading, with the single word Jew. Boozy Nick and brittle Alice went their separate ways.
“Mother found much sadness,” Roosevelt reported to Kermit after returning home. “Our old friends are for the most part dead or else of hoary age.” A quotation from Oscar Wilde occurred to him: The dust is dancing with the dust, the dead are whirling with the dead.
TWO MONTHS’ WORTH of snow lay thick around Sagamore Hill in early February, and still the iron cold persisted. On the morning of Tuesday the fifth, when the Colonel motored to Manhattan to work in his Metropolitan office, the thermometer dropped to seven degrees below zero.
For obvious reasons, he did not inform Josephine Stricker, his secretary, that he had a severe pain in the rectum. An abscess had formed there, brought on by an attack of fever. Since returning from Brazil, Roosevelt had noticed a correlation between these proclivities of his system. The abscess had been lanced less than twenty-four hours before in Oyster Bay, but he did not feel much relief. His habit was to ignore body signals, so he kept his morning appointments, lunched at the Harvard Club, and dictated through the afternoon to Miss Stricker.
Around four o’clock he felt his trousers filling with blood and fled to the Langdon Hotel, where he kept a suite of rooms. Miss Stricker followed, unsuspecting, and continued to take dictation until she noticed his face was white. She gave him a glass of whiskey that seemed to revive him, but then he staggered to the sofa and fainted, leaving a trail of blood across the carpet. By the time his city physician, Dr. Walton Martin, arrived to treat him, his temperature was 103°F and he sat in a red puddle. He had to be forced to go to bed. Edith found him there later, in care of three implacable nurses. “What a jack I am,” he said. “Did you ever see such a performance?”
His pain increased during the night, aggravated by an ominous throbbing in both ears. On Wednesday morning Dr. Martin and an otologist, Arthur B. Duel, agreed that he had to be taken to the Roosevelt Hospital on West Fifty-ninth Street, for examination and surgery under general anesthesia.
The name of the facility, deriving from a great-uncle who had founded it in 1871, was coincidental: it was known for its modern technology, and was rated as one of the finest hospitals in New York. Roosevelt declined an ambulance, and asked to be chauffeured in his own car. A distraught Ethel Derby visited him before he was wheeled to the operating theater. “Father looks terribly white and seems so sick,” she wrote her husband. “I can’t bear to have him suffering so.”
Roosevelt’s only complaint was to say that he was weary of malaria relapses, and would like “to be fixed up once and for all.” At 4:10 P.M. he was anesthetized. The rectal abscess proved not to have