The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [24]
A certain wistfulness, combined with increasing fragility and indolence, had begun to affect this exquisite woman since the end of the Civil War. It was as if Sherman’s looting of her ancestral home, and the simultaneous death of her mother, not to mention the banishment overseas of her two Secessionist brothers,67 had cut the Southern lifelines that hitherto sustained her. Gradually she sank into a kind of gentle invalidism which was something not unlike a second childhood. Always helpless and fluttery, she grew incapable of running the house, and was treated by her children as one of its prettier ornaments—a doll in the parlor, whom they could pet when they chose. “Sweet little china Dresden mother,” Elliott used to call her affectionately. Coaches summoned to take her for her three o’clock drive would creak up and down Twentieth Street for hours while Mittie made flustered attempts to get ready. Often as not she would never emerge at all.68 Although she remained beautiful, charming, and witty, Theodore Senior was saddened to see yet another blossom wilt upon his boughs.
When Mittie herself suggested in the winter of 1868–69 that a trip to Europe might do the whole family good, he welcomed the idea. His business was prospering, and after the hard grind of his war work, a Grand Tour of Europe sounded like a welcome diversion. It would be of immense educational value to the children, none of whom had yet received outside schooling. With characteristic enthusiasm, Theodore Senior sat down and drafted an itinerary that must have given his wife pause, for it covered nine countries and a whole year of traveling time. The children reacted with even more dismay. They had been hoping to return to the Hudson Valley that summer. Theodore Senior turned a deaf ear to their pleas, and went ahead with the bookings. On 12 May 1869, he escorted his tearful brood aboard the paddle-steamer Scotia, bound for Liverpool.69
Although Teedie later declared that he “cordially hated” the Roosevelt Grand Tour, he recorded it at great length in his diaries. During all the 377 days he was away from home, he did not miss a single entry, with the exception of one stormy week on the return crossing. The spelling, in these cheap, battered notebooks, is that of a child, but the density of remembered detail would be extraordinary even in an adult. Some entries read like miniature museum catalogs. Evidently the cornucopia of Europe awakened his faculty of near-total recall.
The diaries begin on an enigmatic note. “It was verry hard parting from our friend,” Teedie writes, confessing that he “cried a great deal.” This mysterious person was almost certainly a seven-year-old girl named Edith Carow. For as far back as he could remember, quiet, steady-eyed little “Edie” had been his most intimate acquaintance outside the family circle. Indeed, it seemed at times that she lived within it, for her father’s house was on Union Square, only a few blocks away from 28 East Twentieth Street, and she had come to regard the latter as her second home. Edith and Corinne had been born within weeks of each other, and were wheeled side by side in their baby carriages. When Aunt Annie began giving lessons to the younger Roosevelts, it was natural that Edith should be included. Although she was, in these early years, more attached to Corinne than anyone else, it was plain that a special relationship was developing between herself and Teedie. He was permitted to play “house” with her, whereas Elliott was not. They shared a passionate interest in books, and their characters complemented each other. Where he was ardent and impulsive, feverish in his enthusiasms, she was sensitive and cautious, a cooling breeze across his sometimes overheated landscape.70
Seasickness and homesickness were added to Teedie’s normal quota of ills, as the Scotia thrashed her way slowly across the Atlantic. He remained aloof from the deck-games of