Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [29]
Nervous tension still afflicted him at unguarded moments. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he roared at a boy who tried to photograph him leaving church. Later, on a twilight stroll with Lincoln Steffens, his fantasy about being attacked recurred. He demonstrated just what he would do with his fists, feet, and teeth if another Czolgosz came out of the shadows. “What I sensed,” Steffens recalled, “was the passionate thrill the President was finding in the assassination of the assassin.”
By Monday morning, Roosevelt had calmed down enough to perform his duties with dignity and dispatch. “Here is the task,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is about it. I believe,” he added, with the naïveté that had always endeared him to his friend, “you will approve of what I have done and the way I have handled myself so far.”
The presidential suite was now ready for occupancy. Reluctant to spend his first night there alone, he sent a telegram to his younger sister, Corinne, inviting her and her husband, Douglas Robinson, to be his guests. They came down by express train from New Jersey, and Commander and Mrs. Cowles joined them for dinner en famille. Roosevelt was in a nostalgic mood. His thoughts kept reverting to Theodore Senior. “What would I not give if only he could have lived to see me here in the White House!”
Later, when decorations from the table were distributed as boutonnieres, the President received a saffronia rose. His face flushed. “Is it not strange! This is the rose we all connect with my father.” For a moment “Teedie,” “Bamie,” and “Pussie” were children again, clustering around the broad bright man who had always worn a yellow flower in his buttonhole. “I think,” said Roosevelt, “there is a blessing connected with this.”
TWO EVENINGS LATER, a carriage drew up outside the White House. The moon had not yet risen. Not until a boy and a girl tumbled into the light of the portico did reporters in Lafayette Square realize that Edith Roosevelt had arrived. True to her reticent fashion, she came under cloak of darkness. There was a moment of hesitation before she emerged, a comely figure draped in black. Her exquisite profile, usually cast modestly downward, tilted as she followed Kermit and Ethel up the steps. She brought no other children. Little Archie and Quentin were coming with their nurse, Ted had gone straight to Groton, and Alice, the eldest and most independent, would find her own way to the capital.
Kermit and Ethel vanished into the vestibule, and reappeared clinging to their father. Careless of watching eyes, he threw his arms around Edith, then escorted her inside for supper.
Over the next few days of official mourning, Washington correspondents were starved of substantive news, and covered Kermit and Ethel as if they were visiting royalty. The latter’s negotiations with ground staff on the subject of white rabbits was treated by The Washington Post as a diplomatic dispatch. “It is understood that the high contracting parties are about to reach an agreement, the only point of difference being that of the assignment of territory to the rabbits.… A protocol is likely to be signed tomorrow.”
Official Washington smiled as more children and more animals joined the Roosevelt menagerie. The White House police were particularly disarmed, allowing Archie and Quentin to march in their morning parades, and looking the other way as Kermit carved huge slices out of the lawn on his bicycle.
Alice, naughtily hiding out in Connecticut, kept everybody guessing.