Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [318]
THEY WERE ALL BRACING for the delivery of a trunk of personal effects that Ham Coolidge had promised Quentin he would send to Sagamore Hill, in the event of it becoming surplus equipment.
It arrived, packed by Ham but also reflecting, in the orderliness of its contents (such as a sheaf of Flora’s letters, neatly numbered and tied) Quentin’s integrated personality. The mechanic in him had enjoyed fitting things together, in sequences that made for power or taut structure. Even his poems were balanced, their meter meticulous, their rhyme schemes sometimes complex—abcccb, adcccd—but logical.
As Edith and Flora undertook the task of going through these leavings of a life, Roosevelt and Miss Stricker tried to extract, from an inpouring of condolence letters and newspaper tributes, some sense of the man Quentin had become during the year he had spent in France. The most informative testimony came from fellow aviators, who wrote that he was a reincarnation of his father—specifically, the young “Teedie” who had so enlivened the Harvard class of 1880. Emerging from their reminiscences was a jovial, toothy, myopic, often wildly exuberant youth, garrulous and gregarious, courtly toward women, with a habit of bursting into rooms and attracting instant attention.
There was little evidence, however, of the personal momentum that had always characterized the Colonel. Quentin’s energy had been explosive rather than propulsive. And often he had suffered the drag of depression—a “black gloom” that he could not hide from Ham Coolidge, and freely confessed to Flora. It was more chronic than the rare attacks of melancholy that Roosevelt had no trouble surmounting. As Edith had long ago remarked, Quentin was “a complex sort of person,” with a tendency to “smoulder.”
Only in two respects had he ever approached fulfillment: as a boy born to fly, and as Flora’s lover. Test-piloting a French Spad, he wrote that he had felt “part of the machine,” as if it were an extension of his own body. “It asks you for what it wants.… If it gets a puff under a wing and wants an aileron to take care of it, you can feel it in the pressure of the stick.… Same with the flippers.” His last 120 h.p. Nieuport had been just as responsive: “You can climb at the most astonishing rate,—& do perfectly wicked chandelles.”*
So Quentin had written Flora, confident she would share his delight, even if she wondered what candles had to do with it. As he was part of his plane, she was part of him. “The months that have gone, instead of blurring, have etched you deeper and deeper into my heart.”
The most consolation she could give herself was to say, numbly, “His back will never hurt him now.”
IN HIS OXFORD LECTURE on biological analogies in history, Roosevelt had spoken of the tertiary period, wherein “form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death.” He was now in his own such transition, moving into a precipitous decline that was as much disillusionment as grief. Only twice before had he suffered as much—at nineteen, when his father died, and at twenty-four, when the loss of his first wife and mother, in the same house on the same night, had almost unhinged him. But then he had been young and full of growth. Neither catastrophe had taught him anything about himself except that he was strong enough to survive.
The death of Quentin, in contrast, hit him after a spring in which he had himself nearly died, and toward the end of a decade that he had always said would be his last. Archie’s narrow escape and Ted’s gassing had prepared him for worse news from the Front, but the tension inherent in such anticipation had, paradoxically, weakened him, the longer he braced himself. Roosevelt had little physical resilience any more. Cuban and Amazonian pathogens