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words and soothing gestures coax her near again. She found him by no means a romantic attraction. The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses; the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance-floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs—these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. Yet Alice could not help being intrigued by him, and flattered by his adoration. How different he was from those boring young Boston Brahmins—and, so far as she knew, from everybody else in the human race. How sidesplitting he could be, when he told jokes in that curious falsetto of his! Her quick mind rejoiced in his intelligence, and her body, when they skated together, to the masculine hardness of his arms. Even as she sprang away from him, she took care not to spring too far; not that there was any risk of him abandoning the chase. Theodore, like his father before him, “almost always got what he wanted.”7

NO SOONER HAD the lovesick junior returned to Winthrop Street after Thanksgiving than he formally entered in his diary the vow that he would marry Alice Lee.8 To make it doubly formal, he arranged a “tintype spree,” or trip to the photographer’s, so that he might pose beside his beloved at the very onset of their courtship. Clearly it would be improper to suggest that Alice come to the studio alone, so Rose Saltonstall was roped in as a convenient third party. There is more than a hint of nervousness in Theodore’s first letter to Alice, reminding her of their rendezvous. Even at this stage he seems afraid that his doe might wander.

“Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls.”

Alice Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Rose Saltonstall, 1878. (Illustration 4.2)

PORCELLIAN CLUB

December 6, 1878

Dear Alice, I have been anxiously expecting a letter from you and Rose for the last two or three days; but none has come. You must not forget our tintype spree; I have been dextrously avoiding forming any engagements for Saturday … Tell Rose that I never passed a pleasanter Thanksgiving than at her house.

Judging from the accounts I have received the new dress for the party at New Bedford must have been a complete success.

YOUR FELLOW-CONSPIRATOR9

Alice did not forget, and the group portrait, so momentous to Theodore, survives. Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls, carefully clutching his hat and cane. Alice, seated lower, leans toward him, almost touching his right thigh. Her skirts droop sexily over his shoe. She wears a lace-fronted dress and high feathered hat. Her gray eyes gaze dreamily into the camera: she seems unaware of the giant resolve looming next to her.10

By now Alice Lee was occupying Theodore’s thoughts through every waking hour, and would continue to do so, according to his own testimony, for the next year and a quarter. At times her girlish waywardness would drive him to despair; in one particular moment of frustration he ripped the pages containing the Thanksgiving vow bodily out of his diary.11 There is a suggestion of sexual torment in Theodore’s entry for 11 December 1878, when he asks God’s help in staying virtuous, as his father would have wished, “and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very …” Here the eager researcher turns the page, only to find a huge blot of ink. Somehow its very blackness and monstrous shape convey more of Theodore’s misery than whatever words he had scribbled beneath it.12

Such fits of depression were, however, rare in the early days of his courtship. “Teddy” continued to be welcome at Chestnut Hill, and Alice was quick to atone, with a soft word or look, for any bruise she may have inflicted