The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [26]
The moon changed to “silver” over Lake Lugano, and Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore, was “the most beautiful creation of mans, with lemons cactuses camphor trees lemons bamboos sugar cane in sight of snow white alps.” Here a particularly vicious attack of asthma struck. “It came to a point,” wrote Mittie to her sister, “where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After taking a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept … Had the coffee not taken effect he would have gone on struggling through the night, and been a complete wreck the next morning, in which condition you have so often seen him.”74
Teedie’s dormant literary talents were stimulated afresh by Venice. “We saw the moonlight on the water and I contrasted it with the black gondola’s darting about like water goblins.” Although the weather here was clear and dry, he became so “dreadfully ill” that on 20 September he collapsed in total exhaustion.
During the next two weeks his attacks of diarrhea and asthma were incessant. One night on the Austrian border, “I sat up for 4 successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar.” This unorthodox remedy seems to have had temporary effect, for the following day he climbed the Adelsberg for two hours “in the broiling sun.” But the long train trip to Vienna laid him low yet again. Theodore Senior, whose compassion for his son was tempered by an aggressive attitude to illness, refused to mollycoddle him. After only a day in bed Teedie was whisked off to the Treasury to see “the crowns of Charlamang and Roudolph the 2d rudly carved jewels and pearls yellow with age contrasting strangly with the polished pearls and sparkling gems of moddern times. Then Father and I went to a Natural history museum. It is a most interesting place, but I was hurried.”
Throughout Teedie’s diaries the masterful, all-capable figure of Theodore Senior strides with giant steps, tirelessly encouraging, comforting, supervising, and protecting his family. Handsome and resplendent in evening dress, he escorts Mittie and Bamie to the Vienna Opera. He leaps like a tiger upon a monk who shoves Teedie aside, and hurls him bodily into the crowd. Determined to picnic in an attractive orange grove, he overcomes the hostility of peasants and proprietor, and ends up gaily entertaining all comers to chicken, champagne, and honey. Only once, in the entire twelvemonth tour, does he lose patience with his children, and angrily call them “bothers.” Even this mild imprecation is enough to make Teedie miserable for a whole evening.
As autumn settled over the Alps, the frequency of Teedie’s asthma attacks increased until they were rarely more than three days apart.75 His diaries become poignant reading. In Salzburg, “I had a nightmare dreaming that the devil was carrying me away and have collerer morbos.” In Munich, “I was verry sick … Mama was so kind telling me storrys and rubing me with her delicate fingers.” In Dresden somebody more vigorous massaged his chest until “the blood came out.” Yet the touring and sightseeing relentlessly continued. Teedie calculated that the Roosevelt Grand Tour was not yet half over, and he was overcome by a paroxysm of homesickness.
October 17th Sunday [Dresden] I am by the fire with not another light but it … It is now after 5. All was dark excep the fire. I lay by it and listened to the wind and thought of the times at home in the country when I lay by the fire with some hickory nuts until like the slave who
Again he is king by the banks of the niger
Again he can hear the wild roar of the tiger
Again I was lying by the roaring fire (with the cold October wind shrieking outside) in the cheerful lighted room and I turned around half expecting to see it all