Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [74]
One day, he reined in his horse and teased them with a mock bulletin. “I want you to know all the facts, so I shall give them to you at first hand. Teddy [Jr.] is now fishing for tadpoles, but really expects to land a whale. Archie shot three elephants this morning. Ethel at this moment is setting fire to the rear of the house; Kermit and the calico pony are having a wrestling match in the garret, and Quentin, four years old, is pulling down the windmill.”
Unamused, the reporters began to concoct their own fantasies of life at Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt took no notice until suggestive accounts of a picnic à deux with Edith appeared in several newspapers. The headlines were arch: “PRESIDENT AND MRS. ROOSEVELT STROLL IN ARCADY—Executive Realizes the Poet’s Dream—‘A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and Thou, Singing in the Wilderness.’ ” Worse still were patently sexual references to himself as “a gallant gentleman in knickerbockers,” bent on “pleasuring” his “lady,” and making “little sallies into the heart of nature.”
He traced the stories to the Oyster Bay correspondent of the New York Sun, and complained to the paper’s editor, Paul Dana:
It seems to me they are not proper stories to be told about a President or the members of his family.… I very much wish you would send instead of your present man at Oyster Bay someone who will tell the facts as they are, and will not try to make up for the fact that nothing is happening here by having recourse to invention. The plain truth of course is that I am living here with my wife and children just exactly as you are at your home; and there is no more material for a story in one case than in the other!
Dana withdrew his correspondent, and the press corps learned to respect the veil that the President drew across his family activities. Both he and Edith held to the Victorian concept of childhood as a state of grace that cameras, and coarse questions, could only profane.
For the younger Roosevelts, the long summer days certainly seemed appareled in celestial light. “It is avowedly the ambition of the President,” a visitor wrote, “to make Sagamore Hill ever remain in the eyes of his children, the one spot on earth which is different from every other.” The estate, with its forty acres of lawns, gardens, wheat fields, and woodland, its stable, barn, windmill, and well, its molehilly tennis court and turtle pond full of nice green scum, was about as near to Paradise as any child could wish. Best of all, perhaps, was its long stretch of private beach, beyond the heron pools in Cold Spring Harbor. There were two red bathing houses there, some battered boats, and miles of quiet water.
These haunts, Elysian as they were, needed the transforming touch of a Zeus to make them divine. Roosevelt did not disappoint. He gave off a godlike aura of radiance and vitality, and the children luxuriated in it, like bees in sun.
From early morning, when he drummed them downstairs for a prebreak-fast game of “bear,” until late evening, when he romped them up to bed, their days were spent largely in his company. His burly arms tickled them, swung them shrieking into the sea, steadied their gun barrels, and rowed them around the bay. He was slightly dangerous in his fun. His bulk half-smothered them—girls as well as boys—in wrestling contests. His playful cuffs rang in their ears, his myopia made him a lethal diver. At night in the woods, he enthralled them with harsh, yodeling ghost stories, climaxed with a flash of teeth, a roar, and a pounce, deliciously scary. Later, recovering round the campfire, they would revel in his infamous clams, fried in beef fat and garnished with