Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [327]
A coal fire burned in the corner hearth. Servants kept it going around the clock. Propped up in a mahogany sleigh bed, Roosevelt saw faded blue curtains, a blue plush armchair, a tufted sofa, a chest of drawers with swing mirror, a lift-top desk, and an Italian walnut nightstand, a souvenir of his second honeymoon. No bearskin rugs snarled on the carpeted floor, but there were carved heads and masks on the wall to comfort him.
Every morning he breakfasted in bed, then got up and painfully dressed himself. Shaving, however, was impossible, so a barber came daily to freshen him up. Later he would limp downstairs to his study, where there was a log fire and a chaise longue. He could recline there, reading or dictating. Anemia enfeebled him. His inflammation traveled mysteriously from joint to joint, ending up on the last day of the month in just one finger. At the same time his temperature shot up to 103°F. It may have been precipitated by a surge of mixed emotions: an envelope from France had come, enclosing Marshal Pétain’s posthumous citation of Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt for a Croix de Guerre.
Compared to such news, foreign dispatches reporting that Woodrow Wilson had been welcomed in London as rapturously as in Paris, and was now en route to Rome by royal train, were but the rattling of distant drums.
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1919, rheumatism flared afresh in Roosevelt’s right wrist. He gave up dressing and kept to the sofa in his bedroom, weakly trying to acknowledge at least some of the letters that still came up the hill in sacks, six days a week. Looking back over the past two years, he calculated that he had answered twenty-five thousand of them, and rejected well over two thousand speaking invitations. Now there was talk of him being president again, the sacks were sure to bulk larger.
Despite worsening pain, he dictated a Kansas City Star editorial on Friday, 3 January. The article—his thirteenth for that paper since the Armistice—was a final statement of his views on the League of Nations issue, before the Paris Peace Conference opened in the middle of the month.
“We all of us desire such a league,” Roosevelt said, “only we wish to be sure that it will help and not hinder the cause of world peace and justice.” Speaking as “an old man who has seen those dear to him fight,” he said that Americans did not wish to send any more of their sons to die in wars provoked by obscure foreign quarrels.
He also dictated a new article for the Metropolitan, putting himself on record in favor of a constitutional amendment awarding equal voting rights to women. In a letter sent that same day to Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, he said it was “a misfortune” that his old friend Henry Cabot Lodge and some other New England senators were “so very bitter about woman suffrage.” He begged Moses not to oppose the amendment. “It is coming anyhow, and it ought to come.”
The effort of this literary work exhausted him, and he told Edith that he felt as miserable as at any time during his hospitalization. Alarmed, she summoned Dr. Faller, who could do little but prescribe a course of arsenic injections to reduce the swelling in his patient’s wrist.
Roosevelt suffered so much general pain overnight that on Saturday morning Edith engaged a full-time nurse. Since none of their children were around for extra help (Alice, Ethel, and Archie had gone their various ways after the holidays), she placed a desperate call to James Amos. The Colonel’s former valet was now working for the William J. Burns International Detective Agency in New York, but he agreed to come back temporarily