The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [23]
Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. Houseguests at No. 28 learned to sit on sofas warily, and to check their water-pitchers for snakes before pouring. When Mittie, in great disgust, threw out a litter of field-mice, her son loudly bemoaned “the loss to Science—the loss to Science.”63
From time to time, members of the domestic staff threatened to give notice. A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?” Finally, when a noxious odor permeated the entire house, even the good-natured cook issued her ultimatum: “Either I leave or the woodchuck does.” Teedie had killed a fine specimen for anatomical study and ordered her to boil the animal, fur and all, for twenty-four hours.64
ON 28 APRIL 1868, Teedie wrote a letter to Mittie, who was paying a visit to Savannah along with Theodore Senior and Corinne. It is the earliest of his 150,000 letters to survive, yet there glitters, in virtually every sentence, a facet of his mature personality.
My Dear Mamma I have just received your letter! What an excitement. What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them. My mouth opened wide with astonish when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you. I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mocking-bird, get some of its feathers if you can. Thank Johnny for the feathers of the soldier’s cap, give him my love also. We cried when you wrote about Grand-Mamma. Give my love to the good-natured (to use your own expresion) handsome lion, Conie, Johnny, Maud and Aunt Lucy. I am sorry the trees have been cut down. Aunt Annie, Edith, and Ellie send their love to you and all I sent mine to … In the letter you write me tell me how many curiosities and living things you have got for me. I miss Conie very much. I wish I were with you and Johnny for I could hunt for myself … Yours loveingly.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
P.S. I liked your peas so much that I ate half of them.65
Promptness, excitability, warmth, histrionics, love of plants and animals, physical vitality, “dee-light,” sensitivity to birdsong, fascination with military display, humor, family closeness, the conservationist, the natural historian, the hunter—all are here. Teedie mentions, passim, the name of his future wife, and there is a hint of the two-hundred-pound President in the embarrassed postscript. Even the large, childish handwriting is touchingly similar to that of the dying Colonel Roosevelt, scrawling his last memorandum half a century later.
DURING THE SUMMER of 1868, about the same time he was completing his “Natural History on Insects,” Teedie began to keep a diary.66 The Roosevelts were then living in their new country place at Barrytown-on-Hudson, New York, and the little volume is full of the joys of bird-nesting, swimming, hiking, and long rides through grass “up to the ponys head.” Apart from one reference to “an attack of the Asmer” on 10 August, the diary reads like that of any normal nine-year-old. Yet Teedie’s health was as bad as ever: he was never well for more than ten days at a time. So accustomed was he, by now, to recurrences of illness that he rarely bothered to record them.
Theodore Senior grew seriously worried as the summer went by, and Teedie, for all his hyperactivity, remained pasty-faced and skeletal. The other children were blooming in comparison—but only with their brother. Bamie’s crippled spine, Elliott’s tendency to rushes of blood in