The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [123]
On Monday 11 February the sheriff reluctantly yielded up his books for inspection. Beaming with delight, Roosevelt announced that the committee would stand adjourned for a week, while counsel audited these records.51
HE HAD ANOTHER, more private reason for declaring an adjournment. Alice’s baby was due at any moment. With luck, the child would be born on Thursday, 14 February—St. Valentine’s Day, and the fourth anniversary of the announcement of his engagement. The prospect of such a coincidence was apparently enough to reassure him that there was time for a quick trip to Albany, to see how “the Roosevelt Bill” was doing.
What Alice thought of this desertion on the eve of her first confinement is not recorded, but she could hardly have been pleased—particularly as Corinne was away, and Mittie was in bed with what seemed to be a heavy cold.52 That left only Bamie in the house to take care of both of them. But with the family doctor in attendance, Mr. and Mrs. Lee installed in the Brunswick, and Elliott only a few blocks away, her husband was not over-concerned. On Tuesday, 12 February, he caught an express train to the capital.
IT WAS A RELIEF for an asthmatic man to get out of New York that morning. For over a week the city had been shrouded in a chill, dense, dripping mist. No wonder Mittie had caught cold. Longshoremen were calling it the worst fog in twenty years.53 What little light seeped out of streetlamps and shop windows diffused into a universal gray that one reporter compared to the limbo before the Creation. With no sun or stars to pierce the fog (for the skies, too, were veiled) it was difficult to distinguish dawn from dusk, except through the blind comings and goings of half a million workers. Train service was reduced to an absolute minimum, and river traffic canceled but for a few ferries feeling their way past each other. Bridges were jammed with groping multitudes. The all-pervading vapor muffled New York’s customary noise to an uneasy murmur, broken only by the hoarse calls of fog-whistles, and the occasional shriek of a woman having her furs torn off by invisible hands. Every brick and metal surface was slimy to the touch; sticky mud covered the streets; the air smelled of dung and sodden ashes. Meteorologists predicted yet more “cloudy, threatening weather,”54 and a New York Times editor wrote despairingly, “It does not seem possible that the sun will ever shine again.”55
Roosevelt found the weather in Albany clearer, if equally humid, for the entire Eastern seaboard was dominated by a fixed low-pressure system. The Assembly’s magnificent fresco The Flight of Evil Before Good was beginning to blister, and occasional flakes fell off in the saturated air. Whether from damp rot, or some more fundamental fault, the vaulted ceiling of the chamber was showing ominous cracks, and nervous Assemblymen had taken to walking around, rather than under, its three-ton keystone.56
However it would take more than a low-pressure system to affect Roosevelt’s natural good humor that Tuesday. With 330 pages of testimony already taken by his Investigative Committee, and the prospect of sensational revelations in the weeks that lay ahead, he was again making front-page headlines. His bill was sure of passage, and (if Alice managed to hold out until Thursday) he would be able personally to guide it through the House on Wednesday afternoon. To speed it on its way through the Senate, a mass meeting of citizens had been called in New York’s Cooper Union on Thursday evening.57 The guest-list was to be a brilliant one: General U. S. Grant himself had agreed to serve as vice-president. All this could only enhance the stature of the Honorable Gentleman from the Twenty-first.
Things were certainly going