The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [67]
“Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.”
Having spat the wormwood out, Theodore refused to acknowledge that he had ever tasted it. His diary for that night does not even mention the interview, although it is confirmed by Harvard records. Not even Alice Lee, to whom he had promised to tell “everything,”114 was permitted to know what ailed her future husband. Right through Commencement, Theodore continued to protest his health, happiness, and good fortune. On the following day he could write, with such conviction that every word was heavily underscored, “My career at college has been happier and more successful than that of any man I have ever known.”115
ALICE JOINED THEODORE at Oyster Bay for the first ten days of July. As he proudly escorted her through the landscapes of his boyhood, he vowed “she shall always be mistress over all that I have.”116 Perhaps this was when the idea of building her a great house overlooking the bay first entered his head. One hill in particular—King Olaf would have called it a holm, with its sandy bottom, wooded slopes, and grass-covered crown—he loved above all others. As a teenage ornithologist, he had spent countless hours crouched in its coverts, notating the songs of birds in his own peculiar phonetics—cheech-ir’r’r’, fl’p-fl’p-trkeee, prrrrll-ch’k ch’k … As a Longfellow addict, he had no doubt spent as much time sitting in that hot grass, and seen sails of silk creep over the horizon. Soon he would build a manor on that hill, and live, as Olaf had done, surrounded by his own fields and looking down upon his own ships—well, a rowboat at least. The house would be called Leeholm, after his Queen; and there they would live out their days.117
Theodore could indulge such fantasies, in this final summer of boyish irresponsibility, without worrying about such trivia as proprietary rights, mortgages, and deeds of sale. Time enough for them when he took up the duties of a husband and taxpayer. In the meantime, he wished to have fun, and fun meant violent exercise. He would spend three months of such frenetic activity that his heart would simply have to correct itself—or give out in the attempt.
Although Theodore did not state this alarming ambition in so many words, his list of activities for the period makes it quite plain that he intended to keep his promise to Dr. Sargeant. I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. For the first few weeks at Oyster Bay he swam, rowed, hiked, and played tennis. On 20 July he accompanied Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall to Bar Harbor, Maine, and promptly began to scale mountains, play tennis, bowl, and go for long hikes through the “perfectly magnificent scenery.”118
Within three days his body began to give off signals of distress, and he fell victim to an attack of cholera morbus. “Very embarrassing for a lover, isn’t it?” he complained to Corinne. “So unromantic, you know; suggestive of too much unripe fruit.”119 But he was up again next morning, and added dancing to his exercise schedule. Alice’s nineteenth birthday, on 29 July, worked him into such a paroxysm of adoration that he collapsed afterward, and the cholera morbus struck again. This time Theodore was unable to get up for two days, but Alice nursed him so tenderly he decided he rather liked being sick.120
ONE MORE ADVENTURE remained to him as a bachelor: a marathon hunting trip in the West, which he had long been planning with Elliott. “I think it will build me up,” he told Mittie, in tacit admission his health was not what it might be.121 The two young men left New York for Chicago on the night train of 16 August.
Within twenty-four hours, Theodore was gazing through the windows at a horizon wider, and a sky