Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [330]
In a letter recounting his visit, the porter wrote: “She had a crying smile on her, I’m sorry I haven’t the power to describe that devine face.… Her heart was torn out of her roots.”
A perpetual drone in the sky over Cove Neck puzzled residents on neighboring parts of the North Shore. It came from military airplanes, ordered by the army aviation directorate to patrol the house where Quentin Roosevelt’s father lay dead. Pilots dropped wreaths of laurel on the lawn, buzzing so low that the wind from their propellers shook the bare trees around. The aerial watch continued through Monday night and all the next day, with alternate flights of five planes operating out of Mineola. For most of the time they kept high and circled far, but their noise became steadily more oppressive, like the throb of an organ pedal beneath a fugue that needed to resolve. Only in the predawn hours of Wednesday, as snow began to fall, did silence return to Sagamore Hill.
“THE WIND FROM THEIR PROPELLERS SHOOK THE BARE TREES.”
The Air Corps maintains a vigil over Sagamore Hill after TR’s death. (photo credit e.1)
THE SNOW TAPERED OFF around noon, when Edith and Archie, wearing his captain’s dress uniform and French war medal, received relatives and close friends at home for a valedictory service in the North Room. The Colonel’s silver-handled oak coffin was set up in front of the fireplace. Before its lid was screwed down, Ethel went through for a last glimpse of her father. “He looked as if he were asleep—and weary,” she recorded. “But not stern.”
She had become used to the grimness that had settled increasingly upon him during the last ten months. The coffin rested on one of his lion skins, and was covered with the Stars and Stripes, with a pair of Rough Rider flags crossed at the foot. Edith had requested no floral decorations, but raised no objection to a wreath of soft yellow mimosa blossoms, contributed at great expense by some veterans of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Yellow was the regimental color, and Roosevelt had grown to love the scent of mimosa in Brazil.
At 12:30, six undertakers wearing black skullcaps transferred the coffin to a motor hearse waiting under the porte cochère. Edith did not venture outside. In the austere tradition of Puritan widows, she retired to her bedroom alone while the rest of the house party climbed into automobiles and followed the hearse down the hill. There was no military escort. A squad of mounted policemen had ridden all the way from New York to march ahead of their former commissioner. But Archie, citing Roosevelt’s disdain for pompe funèbre, had asked them to wait at the church.
The cortege made slow going, carving tracks in the snowy shore road. As it approached Oyster Bay village, the cloud cover broke. A shaft of sunshine irradiated Christ Church and several thousand bystanders cordoned off by the police. Shortly before one o’clock, the hearse reached the church door.
Already a silence unrelated to the weather prevailed in most cities and large towns in the northeastern, central, and western states. Not just New York’s federal buildings, but schools, courts, firehouses, exchanges, and movie palaces closed in a show of reverence for the dead Colonel. Streetcars and subway trains ground to a halt. Factory wheels stopped spinning. The downtown financial district, so long a target of his righteous wrath, was deserted. Bell ringers in Trinity Church, St. Paul’s, and City Hall waited for 2 P.M., the presumed hour of internment of the only president born in Manhattan.
The hush was even more profound inside his parish church. Melted snow could be heard dripping from the roof. Roosevelt had requested no