Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [71]
Roosevelt was more healthy in mind and body, although he had trouble shaking his travel fatigue. He claimed to be reconciled to life on the sidelines, and wrote Eleanor, now settled with Ted in San Francisco:
What I now most want is just what is forced on me: to stay here in my own home with your mother-in-law, to walk and ride with her, and in the evening sit with her before the great wood fire in the north room and hear the wind shrieking outside; to chop trees and read books, and feel that I am justified in not working. I don’t want to be in Africa, or on the ranch, or in the army, or in the White House; I like to think of them all, now and then, but the place I wish to be is just where I am.
* In 1910, the word publicity was understood to mean exposure of something generally hidden.
CHAPTER 6
Not a Word, Gentlemen
And that’s over. Here you are,
Battered by the past,
Time will have his little scar,
But the wound won’t last.
SAGAMORE HILL WAS A BLEAK PLACE in January 1911, with no windbreak except leafless, lower woods to cut gusts sweeping up from the ice sheet of Oyster Bay. On still afternoons, Roosevelt could hear the ha’-ha’-wee, ha’-ha’-wee of long-tailed ducks lying under the lee of the shore. It was a harsh, not unmusical clangor that had enchanted him as a boy, and prompted his first attempt at autobiographical writing. But to older ears, the calls spoke of temps perdu. Here was yesterday’s “Teedie” in his fifty-third year, trying to adjust to the fact that the American people had gotten tired of him.
So it seemed, judging from the quietness of his driveway. Cabs from the station no longer disgorged groups of politicians. The few who came offered little in the way of cheer. Lloyd Griscom visited once. Henry Stimson, a close neighbor, stopped by occasionally, but could not help bringing with him, like wisps of fog, cold reminders of defeat. Roosevelt’s Harvard classmate, Congressman Charles G. Washburn—defeated too—came one day to commiserate.
“You are now enduring the supreme test,” Washburn said. He looked around the house. It had the used, not to say abused look of a home that had seen many children grow up and go their various ways, while also functioning for a quarter of a century as the country headquarters of a public man. Never elegant—it was too darkly paneled, too cluttered, with horns protruding from the walls and flattened animals snarling underfoot—it had gone through its comfortable and luxurious phases and begun to be shabby. Between faded oriental rugs, the hall floorboards were pitted from the pounding of hobnail boots. Foundation cracks ran around the frieze of the hall mantel. Years of creosote deposits had darkened the cannonballs that lay like testicles at the base of two penile, brass-sleeved shell cartridges serving as andirons in the hearth. The great North Room, built for presidential receptions, now functioned mainly as a gallery for the display of mementos (Wilhelm II’s indiscreetly captioned photographs prominent among them). Roosevelt’s library, with its excess of ill-matched chairs, dangling pelts, and shelfloads of battered books, was cozier, warmed by a large fire. A stuffed badger lurked in one corner, and a hollowed-out elephant’s foot near the desk served as a wastepaper basket. Edith’s parlor was the only feminine room in the house, light-filled and vaguely French. Through her muslin-draped windows could be seen a poignant symbol of power passé: a stretch of veranda with the balustrade removed. On countless occasions, the President of the United States had stood on that ledge and shouted at crowds stretching down the hillside. Today it projected only over snow.