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By Root 2994 0

Street must be sold. The Roosevelt mansion had become increasingly expensive to maintain over the years. Mittie’s lavish soirées, receptions, banquets, and balls, complete with orchestras and liveried footmen, had considerably eroded the family fortune.3 Bamie, in her new capacity as surrogate mother, no longer had the time nor the money to keep open house for Astors and Vanderbilts. She agreed to look for a smaller, but equally fashionable home on Madison Avenue, within baby-carriage distance of Central Park. The mansion was put on the market, and in less than a week it was sold. The family was given until the end of April to move out.4

Roosevelt simultaneously divested himself of the brownstone on West Forty-fifth Street, the only house he and his wife had ever owned. He could not bear to return there, even to close it up. Bamie was left with the sad task of “dividing everything.” Yet on 1 March, just two weeks after Alice’s death, Roosevelt signed a contract for the construction of Leeholm, at a total cost, including outbuildings, of $22,135.5 Construction began immediately, although the weather was so cold Oyster Bay was frozen in ripples. He wanted his manor finished by the summer; why was unclear, since he had no plans to move in. Bamie, ever-resourceful, indefatigable Bamie, would take care of it for him.

“I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow,” he wrote Bill Sewall. “Nor does it lighten the pain to cease from working.”6 He did not care where he lived, for he intended to spend an absolute minimum of time eating and sleeping. Even in happier days, he had been insomniac and febrile; now his only instinct was to sleep less and labor more. The pain in his heart might be dulled by sheer fatigue, if nothing else. “Indeed I think I should go mad if I were not employed.”7

And so, on 18 February, the Assemblyman returned to Albany.

HIS ACTIVITIES, through the remainder of the session of 1884, were so prodigious that one gropes, as so often with Theodore Roosevelt, for an inhuman simile. Like a factory ship in the whaling season, he combined the principles of maximum production and perpetual motion. The naked cliffs of the Hudson Valley must have grown drearily familiar to him, for he commuted constantly in his dual capacity as Assemblyman (on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays) and chairman of the City Investigating Committee (on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays). Often as not he got his only sleep on the overnight train. The House was now sitting in the evenings as well as daytime, while the committee’s hearings began at ten in the morning and lasted until six.8

Thus we find him, on, say, Monday, 25 February, interrogating a New York corrections officer on illegal charges for the transport of prisoners; on Tuesday 26 rising in the Assembly to urge passage of his Municipal Indebtedness Bill; on Wednesday 27 amending a Bill for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, and reporting four bills out of his regular Cities Committee. On Thursday 28 he brings out seven more bills, whose subjects range from security to sewers; on Friday 29 he is back at the New York investigating table, demanding information on clerking procedures in the Surrogate’s Court, political patronage in the Bureau of Citations, and research fees in the Bureau of Arrears; next day, Saturday, 1 March, after an exhausting spell of testimony on drunkenness and sex in city jails, he agonizes over, and finally signs, the Leeholm contract. That night he tries to rest, but without much success (“He feels the awful loneliness more and more,” Corinne tells Elliott, “and I fear he sleeps little, for he walks a great deal in the night, and his eyes have that strained red look”).9 At 10:00 A.M. on Monday he gavels another investigative session to order; twenty-four hours later, he is in Albany, moving some banking legislation to the third reading, and making a major speech on behalf of his Liquor License Bill; on Wednesday afternoon he reports twelve new bills out of the Cities Committee, and on Thursday night a further seven; in New York