Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [268]
The President emerged, caught sight of Kermit first, and kissed him. Then he began to shake hands while Edith sat with Quentin beside her, wrapped in her private role as wife and mother.
She was not quite forty-five and not quite slender, a calm, contented woman who had gotten what she wanted by simply waiting for it—as she waited now for the only man she had ever loved. The fact that she was not the only person in his romantic history had long since ceased to hurt her, as far as anyone knew, but with Edith, “far” was not much. The averted gaze, the set mouth, the careful expressionlessness she gave to the world outside her world revealed little and invited nothing. To children other than her own, she appeared as “a remote goddess … as calm and imperturbable as a Buddha.” Born into the same wealthy haut-bourgeois circles as Theodore, and having become, at age four, his intimate friend, she had acquired a sense of privilege that never left her, even though her alcoholic father’s money had dissipated with such quickness that she remembered a childhood more shabby than genteel.
There had never been any question in her mind, as she grew up, that “Teedie” would marry her. When he chose someone prettier and richer, Edith had simply counted the days until fate would return him to her. She would have counted fifty years, if necessary. In the event, five were enough. Edith had reacted to Theodore’s aberrant liaison much as she had to her father’s drinking, by simply editing it out of her book of life. The name of Alice Hathaway Lee was not to be mentioned, even in the index; no illustrations of that sweet, blank face were necessary; a quick cut from 1880 to 1885 would speed the narrative nicely. There had remained the awkward subplot of a stepdaughter, but at last, thanks to Nick Longworth, it was part of another tale.
“A REMOTE GODDESS … CALM AND IMPERTURBABLE AS A BUDDHA.”
The President’s favorite photograph of Edith Kermit Roosevelt (photo credit 27.1)
Episcopalian, erudite, conservative, intensely private, and—when her serenity was threatened—a formidable adversary, Edith struck most strangers as snobbish. The impression was in part correct (Archie and Quentin had to research the antecedents of all their would-be friends) but caused mostly by her New England reserve. She did not consider herself superior, so much as separate from hoi polloi. In receiving lines, she let the President do the glad-handing, while she stood clutching a nosegay, smiling only slightly, her sapphire eyes cool. What they saw, they saw without mercy. Mediocrity bored her, as did class resentment. “If they had our brains,” she was wont to say of servants, “they’d have our place.”
Yet within a silken web of family, social, and political connections, almost all spun about her by Theodore, Edith was frank, warm, unassuming, and loyal. Henry Adams found her “sympathetic” and greatly preferred her company to that of the President. “She has bad taste, and that too is a comfort.” To Ray Stannard Baker, she was “a singularly attractive woman, of rare refinement and charm of manner.” Jules Jusserand informed his government that she was “certainly adorned with most precious and charming qualities”—adding, by way of explanation, that she was of French descent.
Edith was well-read enough to hold her own in conversation with Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge. “She is not only cultured, but scholarly,” Roosevelt boasted. Her intellectual interests were more sophisticated than his, inclining toward belles-lettres and aphoristic essays, and she loved the theater, to which he reacted as if caged. Whereas his idea of a sublime musical experience was “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” played by the full Marine band, hers was a recital in the East Room by Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Edith did not equate such occasions with fashion;