The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [53]
CHAPTER 4
The Swell in the Dog-Cart
A little bird in the air
Is singing of Thyri the fair,
The sister of Svend, the Dane;
And the song of the garrulous bird
In the streets of the town is heard,
And repeated again and again.
Hoist up your sails of silk,
And flee away from each other.
ALICE HATHAWAY LEE was just seventeen when Theodore first saw her on 18 October 1878. “As long as I live,” he wrote afterward, “I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.”1 With his photographic memory, he no doubt carried that first vision of her pristine to the grave. Alice blushing must indeed have been an unforgettable sight, and not only to eyes as worshipful as Theodore’s. Contemporary testimonials to her beauty are as unanimous as those in praise of her charm. She was “an enchanting creature” of “singular loveliness”; of “quick intelligence,” “endearing character,” and “unfailing sunny temperament”; she was “gay,” “exceptionally bright,” and “the life of the party.”2 Images of sunshine and light recur so often in descriptions of her that one can understand how quickly she bedazzled Theodore, as indeed she bedazzled everybody.
“She seems like a star of heaven … my pearl, my pure flower.”
Alice Hathaway Lee when Theodore Roosevelt first met her. (Illustration 4.1)
The imagination, stimulated by such universal praise, delights to picture Alice Lee coming through that garden gate more than a century ago: an exquisite, willowy blonde, smiling shyly, moving with the “long, firm step” of a natural athlete. She wears a dress of white brocade that glows in the late-afternoon light.3 Through Theodore’s spectacles, as it were, we see, as she draws nearer, that she is tall—five foot seven, only two inches shorter than he—yet holds herself proudly erect. Her hair, drawn up to expose a graceful neck, is honey-colored, but when the sun strikes the water-curls that cling to her temples, or the thick ropes piled high on her head, unexpected highlights of gold shimmer in it. Her eyes are similarly chromatic: at times they seem a very pale blue, at others a pearly gray. Heavy lashes, when she glances down demurely, brush cheeks whose pinkness, blending into a soft pocket of shadow in the corner of her mouth, make her irresistibly kissable. She is, in short, as ravishing a beauty as ever walked across a Boston lawn, or through the pages of any Victorian novel. Theodore, drinking her in at every pore, fell in love with her there and then. Just two more meetings were enough to convince him “that win her I would, if it were possible,” and to affirm that “I had never before cared … a snap of my finger for any girl.”4
So much for Edith Carow. Theodore, when he wrote those words, was in such rapture over Alice that he probably exaggerated his indifference to other women. But whatever spark Edith had kindled in his heart was obliterated by the firestorm of passion which now consumed him. After only one weekend at Chestnut Hill he could afford to be sarcastic about his childhood sweetheart: “… give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humour; otherwise my respectful regards.” The suspicion grows that his last interview with that strong-willed young lady, in the summer-house at Oyster Bay, had been a stormy one. “If she seems particularly good-tempered,” Theodore went on, “tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”5 With that he cast her from his mind, and dedicated himself to the “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”6
GIVEN HER EXTREME YOUTH, and the protective aura of wealth and privilege that had always surrounded her, Alice not surprisingly proved to be as elusive a prize as Theodore had ever hunted. His ardor was so violent—in courtship as in everything else—that he periodically frightened her away, like a nervous doe; then he would have to restrain himself, and with soft