The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [36]
During their free evenings and weekends, the young Roosevelts happily explored the parks and shops of Dresden, and attended frequent performances of Shakespeare at the German Theater. By coincidence, their cousins John and Maud Elliott were also living in the city,44 and the five little Americans soon became a gang, meeting every Sunday afternoon. Lest Theodore Senior frown upon this socializing in English, they affected a cultural veneer, calling themselves the Dresden Literary American Club. Corinne spelled out their various creative roles: “I … keep up the poetry part, Elliott and Johnny the tragical, and Teedie the funny.” Evidently the last was beginning to fancy himself as a wit: his contributions to the club’s copybooks, which have been preserved, strive mightily to imitate Dickens and Lewis Carroll, but the best that can be said of them is that they are long.45
His letters of the same period, written with the promptness and regularity that would always characterize him as a correspondent, are full of adolescent drollery, and since they are more spontaneous than his formal efforts, can still be read with pleasure. One of them, addressed to his mother, describes himself suffering from a familiar boyhood ailment:
Picture to yourself an antiquated woodchuck with his cheeks filled with nuts, his face well-oiled, his voice hoarse from gargling and a cloth resembling in texture and cleanliness a second-hand dustman’s castoff stocking around his head; picture to yourself that, I say, and you will have a good like likeness of your hopeful offspring while suffering from an attack of the mumps.46
Mittie may have been amused by that, but references in the same letter to recurring asthma and violent headaches were not so funny. She informed her husband that she would visit Dresden in August, and “if I find Teedie still with asthmatic feelings, I think I shall take him with me to Salzburg.”47 Theodore Senior was reluctant to interrupt the boy’s studies, but he had just received a “humorous” letter himself, and it made poignant reading.
I am at present suffering under a very slight attack of Asthma; however it is but a small attack and except for the fact that I cannot speak, without blowing up like an abridged edition of a hippopotamus, it does not inconvenience me much. We are now studying hard … (Excuse my writing; the asthma has made my hand tremble awfully).48
When Mittie arrived in Dresden she found he was sitting up to sleep again, just as he had as a child; his wheeze was perpetual and his color was not good.49 She promptly bundled him off to a resort in the Swiss mountains, where his breathing cleared, only to be replaced by an ugly cough. It took three weeks in the pine-scented air of the Alps before he was well enough to return to his studies.
He compensated for time lost to ill health by asking Fräulein Anna to speed up his lessons. “Of course I could not be left behind,” Elliott reported, “so we are working harder than ever in our lives.” Teedie was already showing the determination, and inspirational qualities, of a born leader. The Minkwitzes, who had gotten over their misgivings about him, openly admired his ability to concentrate on his books and his specimens to the exclusion of physical suffering. “I wonder what will become of my Teedie,” pondered Mittie, as she prepared to depart again for England. “You need not be anxious about him,” replied Fräulein Anna. “He will surely one day be a great professor, or who knows, he may become even President of