The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [59]
Words, whispered perhaps, passed between Alice and Theodore. At ten o’clock, when the singing ended, they walked over to Memorial Hall and danced till nearly midnight. Then it was time for Alice to go home. Theodore decided, as her carriage-wheels clattered away, that the night was too young for him to go to bed. Accordingly he went to the Porc, and spent a couple of contemplative hours over the billiard-table. He had much to ponder. Alice had rejected him—but in such a way he could not be wholly despondent. She would, he knew, remember him fondly at least through summer, and he had a tacit invitation to resume his suit in the fall.
IF LIGHTFOOT, LIMPING DOWN the gangplank of the Boston–New York freighter, looked forward to a lazy summer on Long Island, he was soon disillusioned. No sooner had Theodore arrived back in Oyster Bay than the horse was put into harness, and trained to trot and go.46 Mittie Roosevelt, used to her son’s sudden enthusiasms, assumed he was merely having fun; it did not occur to her that deadly serious motives lay behind this interest in elegant locomotion. Even his purchase, in August, of a “dog-cart,” or tilbury—whose seat was just large enough for two slim people—failed to arouse her suspicions. After all, his twenty-first birthday was approaching, and it was time he learned to drive.
Theodore spent much of the summer trying to imitate his father’s prowess with reins and whip—not altogether successfully, for graceful, balanced movements never came easily to him. But he was not discouraged. “I am leading the most delightful life a fellow well could,” he wrote, exulting in his “magnificent health and spirits.”47 As usual he passed every spare minute in the open air, rowing, swimming, sailing, shooting (mostly at inanimate targets, out of deference to Alice), and constantly challenging Elliott to physical contests. “As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, &c, &c.”48
Theodore’s diaries do not dwell on the nineteen-year-old Elliott’s more obvious superiorities, such as good looks, charm, and sexual attractiveness. That fatally flawed Apollo was still, in the summer of 1879, unaware of the demon that would one day destroy him. An adolescent tendency toward epilepsy had been cured—seemingly—by the Rooseveltian remedy for all ills, travel. After a trip to Europe and two long stays in Texas he had returned, vigorous and healthy, to take his place as a young banker in New York society.49 Instantly friends of both sexes flocked to him, as others had done, years before, to Theodore Senior. “Nell” had all of Bamie’s poise and none of her severity. He was untouched by Theodore’s aggressive egotism. Like Corinne he tended to gush, but his warmth was more genuine. Kindly, open, decent, generous, he indeed was his father’s son—were it not for a helpless inability to concentrate on anything but pleasure.
As far as girls were concerned, these faults merely added to his appeal. Even Fanny Smith, a lifelong worshiper of his brother, had to admit that “Elliott as a young man was a much more fascinating person than Theodore Roosevelt.”50
ON 16 AUGUST THEODORE’S EXCELLENT results arrived from Harvard. He was pleased to note that “in zoology and political economy I lead everybody.”51 This double achievement, in two such diametrically opposed subjects, was enough to reawaken his career dilemma of the previous winter. He had rejected Professor Laughlin’s advice to make government, not science, his career. But now, perhaps because Alice had included the effluvia of the laboratory among her reasons for rejecting him, he began to wonder if Laughlin had not been right. Actually he had already, as he later confirmed, “abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist.