The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [49]
This, of course, was not his fault—early news of Theodore Senior’s relapse had actually been withheld from him so as not to affect his studies—but it did not stop him reproaching himself, often in tones of bitter self-contempt. “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father should have had a son of so little worth as I am.… How little use I am, or ever shall be in the world … I realize more and more every day that I am as much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.”54
After the terror and the nostalgia, it was desire that eventually healed him. Longing for the man who had been his best friend in life was translated into an even more desperate longing to be worthy of him in death. “How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name!”55 In this ambition he would succeed so well that the name of Theodore Roosevelt would one day become the most famous in the world; ironically its very luster would obliterate the memory of its original bearer. But the large, kindly spirit of Theodore Senior hovered always over the shoulder of his son.
“Years afterward,” Corinne recalled, “when the college boy of 1878 was entering upon his duties as President of the United States, he told me frequently that he never took any serious step or made any vital decision for his country without thinking first what position his father would have taken on the question.”56
ON 23 FEBRUARY 1878, his first night back at Harvard after the funeral, Theodore noted casually: “I am left about $8000 a year: comfortable though not rich.” No doubt, as he penned these words, his mind harked back to the conversation he had had with Theodore Senior the previous summer, when he had been promised enough money to subsidize his career as a natural historian. Now here it was. It had arrived shockingly soon, but his duty was clear. Grief or no grief, he must balance the numerator of independence with the denominator of work. With remarkable self-discipline, given the hysteria of his private emotions, he at once resumed his studies, and within a week had scored 90 percent in two semiannual examinations. Invitations poured in from sympathetic friends in Boston, but he would accept none until May, and kept “grinding like a Trojan” for the rest of his sophomore year. At the same time he continued faithfully to exercise and teach in Sunday school, obedient to a precept of his father’s, which he had never forgotten: “Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.”57
The excellence of his results in the annual examinations was achieved at much physical cost to himself. He was “unwell and feverish” during the latter part of May, and blamed his poor showing in French on “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma.”58 The ordeal was over at last on 5 June. Theodore caught the afternoon express to New York, and next morning began what he hoped would be a summer of “nude happiness … among the wilds of Oyster Bay.”59
NUDE THE SUMMER certainly was—at least in the restricted Victorian sense of the term. Theodore was soon “mahogany from the waist up, thanks to hours of bare-chested rowing.” But happiness was long kept at bay by unavoidable associations between Tranquillity and Theodore Senior. In every idle moment the skinny student might see the big, bearded man laughing, praying, snoozing in the shade, jumping into his trap at the station and driving off at a rattling pace, his white linen duster bagging behind him like a balloon. “Oh Father, how bitterly I miss you and long for you!”60
Just as he had distracted himself in college with work, Theodore now whipped himself into a frenzy of physical activity. Throughout July he rowed and portaged such exhausting distances, over such dreary wastes of water and mud-flats, that just to read his diary is to tire. On one occasion he rowed clear across Long Island Sound to Rye Beach, a total of over twenty-five miles in a single day. Rowing, as opposed to the more leisurely sport of sailing, was deeply satisfying to him. As Corinne remarked, “Theodore craved