The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [214]
Tom Reed came again and again to the tiny house on Jefferson Place, usually with Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge on his arm. Lodge, in turn, escorted Roosevelt as frequently to Lafayette Square, where two small, rich, bearded men lived side by side in a pair of red Richardson mansions. John Hay and Henry Adams were both fifty-two, and both were completing massive works of American history. They were famous for the excellence of their connections, the brilliance of their conversation, and the quality of the guests they invited to dinner. To be entertained by either (or both, for they were virtually inseparable, and liked to call each other “Only Heart”) was to count among the intellectual and social elite of Washington.106 Roosevelt’s references gained him instant access to this charmed circle.
Hay, of course, was an old family friend. Two decades had passed since that windy September night when little Teedie Roosevelt first shook his hand; Hay had subsequently distinguished himself as a diplomat, editor, poet, and Assistant Secretary of State under President Hayes. Now he was parlaying his youthful experiences as secretary to Abraham Lincoln into a ten-volume biography clearly destined for classic status.107 Ill-born but well-married, John Hay was a spectacularly fortunate man.108 Ruddy with reflected glory, sleek with inherited wealth, he was enough of a personality in his own right to escape censure. No man, with the possible exception of Henry Adams, wrote better letters; not even Chauncey Depew could match his after-dinner wit; no chargé d’affaires bent more gracefully over a lady’s hand, or murmured endearments through such immaculate whiskers. If Hay’s hidden lips never quite touched flesh, if he winced when slapped on the back, few were offended, for he associated only with those who understood delicacy and nuance. The son of Mittie Roosevelt understood these things very well, and was therefore cordially received.
Henry Adams was rather more formidable. Flap-eared, balding, wizened, secretive, and shy, he looked not unlike one of his own Oriental monkey-carvings. There was also something simian about his behavior, which alternated between bursts of chattering effusiveness and sudden, cataleptic withdrawal. Yet even when sunk nerveless in the depths of a leather armchair, Adams was listening, watching out of the corner of his eye every flicker of activity in his vast drawing room.
It was, perhaps, the most privileged space in the United States, this book-lined chamber with its three huge windows overlooking Lafayette Square. Whichever window one stood at, the White House floated serenely in center frame, as if to remind one that the grandfather and great-grandfather of the little man in the chair had once lived there. Adams himself rarely bothered to glance at the view; he preferred to sit gazing at the marble slabs around his fireplace: “onyx of a sea-green translucency so exquisite as to make my soul yearn …”109 It would be lèse-majesté to suggest that he cross the square and pay his respects. Presidents, on the other hand, were welcome to visit him—assuming they could contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. If, like Rutherford B. Hayes, they could not, Adams merely ignored them until they went away.110
It was difficult not to be intimidated by Henry Adams. Not only was his blood the bluest in the land, his wisdom was so profound, and his education (a word he loved to use) so universal, that artists, geologists, poets, politicians, historians, and philosophers deferred to him in their respective fields. Roosevelt had only to glance at the proofs of his nine-volume History of the United