Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [317]
Quentin had died so young, without building an adult life away from home, that Sagamore Hill was still infused with his personality. Edith, better equipped to handle the catastrophe than her husband, saw that what was needed for them all was to get away from the house. She said to Ethel, “Why not come to Islesboro to see you?” Theodore had never visited that part of Maine, where the Derby family had summered for decades. Its strangeness alone would be a distraction. Little Richard and tiny “Edie” would be there to administer innocent therapy, and Flora could come too, if she felt like it.
Ethel went north at once to prepare to receive them. Behind her she left details of the itinerary they were to follow on Thursday. They must take an overnight Pullman from New York to Rockland, then transfer to a small steamer that would deposit them on the south end of Islesboro, at a place called Dark Harbor.
THE LANDING DID NOT at first sight justify its depressing name, being an inlet full of morning light. But the gray and brown-shingled “cottages” of New England patriarchs looming through stands of pine, hump-roofed and dormered above their rubblestone terraces, did their best to uglify the shoreline and camouflage the fortunes that secluded Dark Harbor from poorer parts of Islesboro. If Ethel had hesitated to marry, she had at least married well. This year she was staying not in the big Derby house, with its black timbers and prisonlike Norman tower, but in a smaller cottage owned by a Wall Street accountant. It surveyed Penobscot Bay from the top of a knoll and had the virtue of a breezy piazza sheltered from the afternoon sun. Importantly for Roosevelt, who liked to keep mobile even when reading, there was a rocking chair on the porch, and a rowboat at the foot of some granite steps cut down to the sea.
He and Edith arrived on Friday unannounced, but an islander at the dock recognized them and called out, “Three cheers for the man who ought to be in France.” Ethel was waiting to greet her parents. As they rode off in a buggy—Islesboro permitted no automobiles—the Colonel was seen to be already deep in conversation with Richard and Edie.
“In time of trouble, the unconsciousness of children is often a great comfort,” he wrote Belle later.
That was even more so for Edith than for himself. Although she had to be, in her own expression, the central card upon which the rest of the Roosevelt pack leaned, her pain was unassuageable. She could not indulge, as Theodore did, in conventional pieties about Quentin dying “as the heroes of old died, as brave and fearless men must die when a great cause calls”—words that betrayed his inability, so far, to grasp his own responsibility in the matter. For Archie, born to fight and be wounded and fight again, Edith was capable of smashing a triumphal glass to the floor; for Quentin, constituted differently, she made a gesture more womanly than melodramatic. She said she would not wear black for him. White summer linen better expressed his obliteration.
There was blackness enough, in and around Dark Harbor, to reflect her husband’s grief and guilt over the next two weeks. He often rowed out alone, past coal-black rocks and pebble beaches blackening as the tide washed in. Great piles of blue-black clamshells along the shore memorialized the island’s vanished Indians. Black-headed loons yodeled. He wrote Kermit that from out in the bay, “I can see the moose, caribou and black bear in the glades or by the pools—ghosts all!”
Nevertheless, the place was purifying, with its salt- and balsam-scented breezes and lack of mainland noise. Pious Ethel conducted household prayers every night. Except for a patriotic address that Roosevelt felt he had to give one Sunday at the Islesboro Inn, he and Edith were left undisturbed. An almost mute Flora came north on 6 August to be with them for their last four days. She confided to Ethel that she seemed incapable of feeling anything “except occasionally a great overpowering hurt.”
“It is no use pretending