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Church on Fifty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. All the leading philanthropists and politicians in the city—including the Astors and Harrimans—arrived to pay their last respects to the deceased Roosevelt women.71 The New York Times and New York Sun covered the double funeral as if it were an important event.72 After an opening prayer, the old hymn “Rock of Ages” was sung by a chorus of mourners paying their respects. On top of the two rosewood coffins were wreaths of roses and green vines. Following the benedictions, Roosevelt’s mother and wife were buried at Greenwood Cemetery next to his father. During these painful days of February, Roosevelt returned to keeping his diaries. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote, and his words were accompanied by a huge cross on the page. A couple of days later he added, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”73

Nobody will ever know the depths of the private pain that Roosevelt felt as winter changed into spring. For months afterward, everybody used kid gloves when dealing with him. His former tutor Arthur Cutler wrote to Bill Sewall in Maine that Theodore was stuck in a “dazed, stunned state.” Roosevelt himself put on a stoic veneer when writing to Sewall: “It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.”74

During sleepless nights that spring, Roosevelt would sit in a rocking chair, silent as smoke, and read natural history books. The world seemed quite diabolical. He wondered whether the Badlands—where even the half-clad buttes had an unstable equilibrium—might be the best place to heal and hatched a plan to light out for the Dakota Territory following the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Perhaps solace could be found in a ranch house with undraped windows surrounded by roping corrals and branching chutes. A saddle horse would probably be his best companion, his true equal and friend.

People always devise their own ways of coping with loss. Roosevelt took the route of bottling up his emotions, seldom mentioning his wife by name, submerging her memory, and never reminiscing about her legacy to his daughter Alice. Oddly, he didn’t even invoke her name in his own An Autobiography. It was as if Roosevelt believed he could best respect his beloved wife in silence. Nevertheless, upon a return visit to North Dakota, he holed up in the Maltese Cross cabin and edited a volume of memorials about Alice; he had it privately printed by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. “She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died,” he wrote in the introduction. “Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness.” 75

Despite his grief Roosevelt that spring nevertheless engaged in politics at Albany with full fervor. Even though he loved the notion of General William T. Sherman as the Republican nominee for president, he reluctantly settled on the more pedestrian James G. Blaine. More and more his political coach was Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Although Lodge didn’t share Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the wilderness he was keenly interested in organized fox hunts. A trusting Roosevelt used Lodge as a confidant and sounding board. Unlike Roosevelt, Lodge was terse, calculating, and unemotional. But he was also deeply honest, loyal, and a gentleman. Both shared a bedrock belief in the virtues of American exceptionalism. Both were dogged in their pursuit of western expansion. That spring Roosevelt and Lodge traveled together by train to Chicago for the smoky bedlam of the Republican National Convention. (Roosevelt left his infant daughter, whom he’d soon nickname Mouseskeins, in the care of his sister Bamie.) Although Lodge knew that Roosevelt had developed a reputation as a reformer, he was surprised at what a folk hero his New York friend had become