The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [72]
Yet somehow he had managed to do all that—whether successfully or not, the reviewers would have to decide. In the meantime, with his 42 “dry” pages behind him, he could move on to 450 more full of the spray and salt and smoke of real battle.
Despite the enthusiasm with which he took up this work, Theodore was determined not to let his imagination run away with him. He made full use of the research facilities of the Astor Library in an effort to document every sentence of his manuscript. He consulted naval histories published on both sides of the Atlantic, including several French works which he quoted in his own translation. He burrowed through the lives and memoirs of participating admirals. Determined to be scrupulously fair, he consulted such British sources as the Naval Records, Nile’s Register, and the London Naval Chronicle. He sent to Washington for carloads of official captains’ letters, logbooks, and shipyard contracts previously untouched by any scholar. He compiled his own construction plans, tactical diagrams, and “tables of comparative force and loss.”22 With these spread out around him, he could ponder such questions as the relationship between a ship armed with long 12s and another presenting 32-pound carronades. Which one would prevail in battle? “At long range the first, and at short range the second,” concluded Theodore, who dearly loved a balanced statement. But then the booming of guns in his ears would be interrupted by the library clock chiming three. It was time to march back uptown and take Alice out for her afternoon drive.23
Apart from his daily six-mile walk, sleigh-driving was Theodore’s only exercise that winter. He went about it with his usual energy, speeding around Manhattan in huge loops, up to thirty miles at a time, while the rest of society sedately circled Central Park. With his “sweet Baby” warmly wrapped in buffalo robes beside him, and Lightfoot’s hooves drumming up an exhilarating spray of snow, he would zigzag through the farms and shanties of the Upper West Side until the dark, ice-clogged waters of the Hudson opened out on their left. Spinning north along Riverside Drive, they would admire the snowy Palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, before curving east across the white fields of Harlem, and south past the great estates of the East River into the pine-forested freshness of Jones’ Woods.24 Emerging at Sixty-eighth Street, they would zigzag toward the mansions of midtown, massed like an interrupted avalanche along the southern fringe of Central Park.
SHOULD THEY PASS Mrs. William Astor’s carriage in Grand Army Plaza, Theodore could touch the brim of his beaver with his whip, and know that the gesture would be acknowledged, for the Roosevelt family was eminent enough to be included among the few hundred that majestic lady deigned to recognize. Mrs. Astor’s dominance over New York’s drawing-rooms was so complete that her word was social law. She was a guest, along with Vanderbilts, Dodges, Harrimans, and Iselins, at Corinne Roosevelt’s coming-out party on 8 December.25 Although the grande dame was so stiff with diamonds she could barely turn from one guest to another, she liked what she saw of Theodore and Alice, and invited them to dinner at her austere brownstone on Thirty-fourth Street, whose boards the nouveaux riches Vanderbilts were not permitted to tread. As a double seal of her approval, she asked the young couple to her January Ball, the traditional climax of the social season.26 At this event, and at the scarcely less glittering Patriarch’s Ball, and at banquets with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and parties at Delmonico’s, and Monday nights at the opera,