Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [72]
The little community turned out in force to welcome its returning squire. Steam whistles shrilled the President’s arrival, and thunder and lightning added extra dramatic effects. A new depot, not quite finished, sheltered Roosevelt as he descended from the train. Kermit, Ethel, and Archie, representing the family, flung themselves upon him, while his Secret Service escort made a wedge through the crowd. Grinning at the shouted familiarities of old-timers—here he was unavoidably “Teddy”—he climbed into an open surrey. Kermit joined the coachman, while the two younger children snuggled close to their father. He threw a protective oilcloth over them. Then, with a final wave at the crowd, he took what cover he could under his rapidly collapsing Panama hat.
The surrey splashed east along Audrey Avenue, past the Oyster Bay Bank building, of which the first-floor office suite—two melancholy brown-painted rooms—had been reserved through September by George Cortelyou. Roosevelt had no desire to visit these headquarters. He intended to put as much distance as possible between himself and White House staff. His destination lay three miles farther on, beyond Christ Episcopal Church and Youngs Cemetery, around the bend of Oyster Bay Cove. As the village fell away, Shore Road became an avenue of moss-hung locust trees winding past the resorts of the rich—white-pillared “cottages” of twenty or forty rooms, lawns sloping to sea level, beached rowboats bearing old names that spoke of power, breeding, and interbreeding: Tiffany, Beekman, Gracie, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
Turning north, the surrey left the mainland and followed the line of Cove Neck as it jutted, rising, into the bay. Reeds waved to the left of the road, and saltwater slapped close to the horse’s hooves, while on the other side the landscape became more rural, and fields and woods spaced out the mansions of Roosevelt’s immediate neighbors. Ahead rose the crown of the peninsula. Its highest house was invisible for trees—trees he had planted himself, in early manhood. Qui plantavit curabit.
A private driveway led steeply up the slope, and Sagamore Hill disclosed itself at last, glowing dull red through the rain. Red brick below, red wood above; brown and yellow awnings over the west piazza; streaming shingles the color of old mustard. Roosevelt’s eyes, rejoicing in the house’s ugliness, noticed only one unfamiliar note: a telephone pole trailing wires back the way he had come. Evidently Cortelyou was determined to keep him in touch with affairs of state.
RAIN GAVE WAY to sun in the days that followed. The hilltop breezes sweetened as catalpa and locust bloomed below, and the birds of Roosevelt’s youth saluted his acute ear with remembered calls. Exulting in their clamor, he began to compose his first piece of presidential nature-writing:
Among Long Island singers the wood-thrushes are the sweetest; they nest right around our house, and also in the most open woods of oak, hickory, and chestnut, where their serene, leisurely songs ring through the leafy arches all day long.… Chickadees wander everywhere; the wood-pewees, red-eyed vireos, and black-and-white creepers keep to the tall timber, where the wary, thievish jays chatter, and the great-crested flycatchers flit and scream. In the early spring, when the woods are still bare, when the hen-hawks cry as they soar high in the upper air, and the flickers call and drum on the dead trees, the strong, plaintive