Colonel Roosevelt (123 page)

“
Well, anyway, no matter what comes, I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was twenty-one.”

“What promise, Theodore?”

“I promised myself that I would work
up to the hilt
until I was sixty, and I have done it.”

Vertigo assailed him on Christmas morning as the hospital elevator dropped to the ground floor. Dr. Richards reached to steady him, but he flinched.

“
Don’t do that, doctor. I am not sick and it will give the wrong impression.”

Bracing himself when the door opened, he walked firmly down the corridor to his waiting car.

ALICE, ETHEL, ARCHIE, AND GRACE
were waiting at Sagamore Hill when Edith brought him home. Lunch was going to be late, and the grandchildren were napping upstairs. Roosevelt looked white and battered, but clearly happy, after seven weeks away, to be back among his books and trophies. He gazed with rapture at the snow-whitened landscape around the house.

There was a great turkey on the table, and mince pie and plum pudding and ice cream. The Colonel’s frailty, however, cast a pall upon the feast. He reveled in the excitement of the boys and girls as they opened their presents, heaped around the tree in the North Room. Before going to bed early, he noticed sympathetically that little Richard Derby had asthma, like himself as a child.

ROOSEVELT LAY NOT
in the bedroom he and his wife customarily shared, but in an adjacent chamber with corner windows facing south and west.
It had been Ethel’s bedroom prior to her marriage, and back in days that Alice could scarcely remember, a gated nursery. It was said to be “the warmest room in the house” (so far as the phrase had any meaning at Sagamore Hill), because of its high, sunny exposure on winter afternoons. Edith wanted him there for that reason, and also because she could have quick access to him during the night.

A coal fire burned in the corner hearth. Servants kept it going around the clock.
Propped up in a mahogany sleigh bed, Roosevelt saw faded blue curtains,
a blue plush armchair, a tufted sofa, a chest of drawers with swing mirror, a lift-top desk, and an Italian walnut nightstand, a souvenir of his second honeymoon. No bearskin rugs snarled on the carpeted floor, but there were carved heads and masks on the wall to comfort him.

Every morning he breakfasted in bed, then got up and painfully dressed himself. Shaving, however, was impossible, so a barber came daily to freshen him up. Later he would limp downstairs to his study, where there was a log fire and a chaise longue. He could recline there, reading or dictating. Anemia enfeebled him. His inflammation traveled mysteriously from joint to joint, ending up on the last day of the month in just one finger. At the same time his temperature shot up to 103°F.
It may have been precipitated by a surge of mixed emotions: an envelope from France had come, enclosing Marshal Pétain’s posthumous citation of Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt for a Croix de Guerre.

Compared to such news, foreign dispatches reporting that Woodrow Wilson had been welcomed in London as rapturously as in Paris, and was now en route to Rome by royal train, were but the rattling of distant drums.

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
, 1919, rheumatism flared afresh in Roosevelt’s right wrist. He gave up dressing and kept to the sofa in his bedroom, weakly trying to acknowledge at least some of the letters that still came up the hill in sacks, six days a week. Looking back over the past two years, he calculated that he had answered twenty-five thousand of them, and rejected well over two thousand speaking invitations. Now there was talk of him being president again, the sacks were sure to bulk larger.

Despite worsening pain, he dictated a
Kansas City Star
editorial on Friday, 3 January. The article—his thirteenth for that paper since the Armistice—was a final statement of his views on the League of Nations issue, before the Paris Peace Conference opened in the middle of the month.

“
We all of us desire such a league,” Roosevelt said, “only we wish to be sure that it will help and not hinder the cause of world peace and justice.” Speaking as “an old man who has seen those dear to him fight,” he said that Americans did not wish to send any more of their sons to die in wars provoked by obscure foreign quarrels.

He also dictated a new article for the
Metropolitan
, putting himself on record in favor of a constitutional amendment awarding equal voting rights to women.
In a letter sent that same day to Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, he said it was “a misfortune” that his old friend Henry Cabot Lodge and some other New England senators were “so very bitter about woman suffrage.” He begged Moses not to oppose the amendment. “It is coming anyhow, and it ought to come.”

The effort of this literary work exhausted him, and he told Edith that he
felt as miserable as at any time during his hospitalization. Alarmed, she summoned Dr. Faller, who could do little but prescribe a course of arsenic injections to reduce the swelling in his patient’s wrist.

Roosevelt suffered so much general pain overnight that on Saturday morning Edith engaged a full-time nurse.
Since none of their children were around for extra help (Alice, Ethel, and Archie had gone their various ways after the holidays), she placed a desperate call to James Amos. The Colonel’s former valet was now working for the William J. Burns International Detective Agency in New York, but he agreed to come back temporarily into the family service.

When Amos arrived that afternoon, he was shocked to see how ravaged Roosevelt looked. He bathed him with extreme care and coaxed him into a fresh pair of pajamas. “By George,” Roosevelt said gratefully, “you never hurt me a bit.” Amos turned his armchair so he could sit looking out over Oyster Bay, then put him to bed and monitored him through the night.

Roosevelt was in too much discomfort to sleep well, but when Dr. Faller stopped by on Sunday morning, he seemed somewhat better. He stayed in his room all day, dictating
two or three letters to Edith, and
correcting the typescript of his
Metropolitan
article. She was touched by his exceptionally gentle mood, and whenever she passed the sofa she
could not help kissing him and stroking his short, little-boy’s hair. “
As it got dusk,” she wrote Ted later, “he watched the dancing flames and spoke of the happiness of being home, and made little plans for me. I think he had made up his mind he would have to suffer for some time & with his high courage had adjusted himself to bear it.”

They were still together when, at around ten o’clock, he asked her to help him sit up. He said he felt as if his lungs or heart were about to give in. “I know it is not going to happen, but it is such a strange feeling.” She gave him a sniff of sal volatile and sent at once for Dr. Faller, who found Roosevelt’s bronchi clear and his pulse beating steadily and calmly.

Leaving the nurse in charge, Edith accompanied Faller downstairs for a discreet conversation in the library. She said that her husband was insomniac, and asked permission to give him morphine.
Faller assented, saying that he himself would rest easier if he knew the Colonel was comfortable.

Edith watched while the nurse administered the shot shortly before midnight. James Amos took over, and the two women retired to their bedrooms. Roosevelt lay on the sofa for a while, saying little. Amos noticed a look of great weariness on his face.

“
James, don’t you think I might go to bed now?”
He had to be half-lifted onto the mattress, then asked to be turned on his side. For a while he lay staring at the fire.

Then he said, “
James, will you please put out the light?”

A SMALL LAMP
on the dresser filled the room with a dim yellow glow. Amos switched it off and sat where he could see Roosevelt, or at least hear him breathing in the darkness. It was a calm, moonless night, and the big house was still. Edith came in at twelve-thirty to check on her husband. She found him sleeping peacefully, and did not kiss him for fear of waking him. When she visited again at two o’clock, he was still asleep. Amos had moved closer to what was left of the fire.

About an hour later the valet was startled by a new note in Roosevelt’s respiration—“
roughling” was the only word he could think of. He touched his master’s forehead. It felt dry and warm. Then Roosevelt began to breathe irregularly, with intermittent periods of silence.
Each time he started again, his respiration sounded weaker. Eventually Amos had to lean close to hear any sound at all.

AT FOUR O’CLOCK
, Edith woke to find the nurse standing over her. She hurried through and called, “Theodore, darling!” But there was no response from the sleigh bed.