Colonel Roosevelt (119 page)

Flora Whitney was nowhere to be seen.

IT TURNED OUT
that Flora had also received a cable from Eleanor—
EVERY REASON BELIEVE REPORT QUENTIN ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE
—and was clutching to it like an oar in a storm.
Newspapers got hold of the story, and a new uncertainty built up through Saturday morning.

The Colonel, clutching himself at every “duty” that would keep him from breaking down, went ahead with a prearranged reception for some Japanese Red Cross officials. They were brought to Sagamore Hill by Henry P. Davison, chairman of the American Red Cross war council, and his son Trubee. The young man watched fascinated as Roosevelt took his guests on a trophy tour of the North Room, then delivered a speech of welcome, which he had evidently composed earlier in the week.

After the Japanese bowed their way out, bearing copies of the
speech exquisitely
calligraphed on rice paper, Trubee Davison took Roosevelt aside and asked, “
What hope have you for Quentin?”

Roosevelt reached into his pocket. “Trubee, just twenty minutes before you arrived, I received this telegram from President Wilson.”

The telegram confirmed that Quentin had been killed in action. His death had been certified by German military authorities and broadcast by the Wolfe press agency in Berlin. A handwritten translation of the dispatch was brought to the Roosevelts later in the day:

WHEN AMERICAN FORCES ADVANCED
through the tiny village of Chamery, in the Marne province of France, they came upon a cross-shaped fragment of a Nieuport fighter sticking out of a field just east of the road to Coulonges. Some German soldier had taken a knife and scratched on it the word
ROOSEVELT
. It marked Quentin’s grave, and a few yards away the rest of his plane lay wrecked. By the time the last troops passed on toward Reims, nothing was left except the cross. All other bits of the Nieuport had been reverently stolen.

The autopsy performed by the Germans before Quentin’s burial indicated that he had been killed before he crashed. Two bullets had passed through his brain. He had been thrown out on impact, and photographed where he fell.

WOODROW WILSON’S TELEGRAM
of Saturday, 20 July 1918 (“Am greatly distressed that your son’s death is confirmed. I had hoped for other news”), was not the last blow to strike the Roosevelts that weekend. It was followed within
hours by a cable from Eleanor stating that Ted had been hurt in action. She said his wound was not serious. But she had also been reassuring about Quentin.

Ted was a casualty of the counteroffensive headlined in forty-two-point type across the top of Sunday morning’s front page of
The New York Times:
ALL GERMANS PUSHED BACK OVER THE MARNE; ALLIES GAIN THREE MILES SOUTH OF SOISSONS; NOW HOLD 20,000 PRISONERS AND 400 GUNS
. Under such a banner, the story about him (“Oldest Roosevelt Son Is Wounded: News of Theodore’s Injury Comes on Heels of Confirmation of Quentin’s Death”) drew the eye much more than another given exactly the same columnar weight: “
Ex-Tsar of Russia Killed by Order of Ural Soviet.”

Theodore and Edith therefore had an added reason to attend early mass and adjust, or try to adjust, to the enormity of the void that had opened so suddenly in their landscape. But they had to brace for a special order of service.
That Sunday happened to be the third of the month, when the names of all parish members serving the country were read out. Quentin’s was not included. He was the first citizen of Oyster Bay to be killed in the war.

They returned home in luxurious sunshine to receive what promised to be an unendurable number of condolence calls. One, late in the afternoon, was from Flora. She was, in Ethel’s words, “perfectly wonderful … calm and controlled.” A less sentimental person might have perceived that the girl was in a state of near catatonia, so stiff with shock that she could neither think nor feel. Flora wanted to be alone, but irrationally wanted to share her solitude with those equally bereft—the Colonel above all. As he received mourners and endured their attempts at comfort, he gave no sign of desolation, emanating only what Corinne called an “ineffable gentleness.”

Quentin had died so young, without building an adult life away from home, that Sagamore Hill was still infused with his personality. Edith, better equipped to handle the catastrophe than her husband, saw that what was needed for them all was to get away from the house. She said to Ethel, “
Why not come to Islesboro to see you?” Theodore had never visited that part of Maine, where the Derby family had summered for decades. Its strangeness alone would be a distraction. Little Richard and tiny “Edie” would be there to administer innocent therapy, and Flora could come too, if she felt like it.

Ethel went north at once to prepare to receive them. Behind her she left details of the itinerary they were to follow on Thursday. They must take an overnight Pullman from New York to Rockland, then transfer to a small steamer that would deposit them on the south end of Islesboro, at a place called Dark Harbor.

THE LANDING DID NOT
at first sight justify its depressing name, being an inlet full of morning light. But the gray and
brown-shingled “cottages” of
New England patriarchs looming through stands of pine, hump-roofed and dormered above their rubblestone terraces, did their best to uglify the shoreline and camouflage the fortunes that secluded Dark Harbor from poorer parts of Islesboro. If Ethel had hesitated to marry, she had at least married well. This year she was staying not in the big Derby house, with its black timbers and prisonlike Norman tower, but in a smaller cottage owned by a Wall Street accountant. It surveyed Penobscot Bay from the top of a knoll and had the virtue of a breezy piazza sheltered from the afternoon sun. Importantly for Roosevelt, who liked to keep mobile even when reading, there was a rocking chair on the porch, and a rowboat at the foot of some granite steps cut down to the sea.

He and Edith arrived on Friday unannounced, but an islander at the dock recognized them and called out, “Three cheers for the man who ought to be in France.” Ethel was waiting to greet her parents. As they rode off in a buggy—Islesboro permitted no automobiles—the Colonel was seen to be already deep in conversation with Richard and Edie.

“
In time of trouble, the unconsciousness of children is often a great comfort,” he wrote Belle later.

That was even more so for Edith than for himself. Although she had to be, in her own expression, the central card upon which the rest of the Roosevelt pack leaned, her pain was unassuageable. She could not indulge, as Theodore did, in conventional pieties about Quentin dying “as the heroes of old died, as brave and fearless men must die when a great cause calls”—words that betrayed his inability, so far, to grasp his own responsibility in the matter. For Archie, born to fight and be wounded and fight again, Edith was capable of smashing a triumphal glass to the floor; for Quentin, constituted differently, she made a gesture more womanly than melodramatic. She said she would not wear black for him. White summer linen better expressed his obliteration.

There was blackness enough, in and around Dark Harbor, to reflect her husband’s grief and guilt over the next two weeks. He often rowed out alone, past coal-black rocks and pebble beaches blackening as the tide washed in. Great piles of blue-black clamshells along the shore memorialized the island’s vanished Indians. Black-headed loons yodeled. He wrote Kermit that from out in the bay, “
I can see the moose, caribou and black bear in the glades or by the pools—ghosts all!”

Nevertheless, the place was purifying, with its salt- and balsam-scented breezes and lack of mainland noise. Pious Ethel conducted household prayers every night. Except for a patriotic address that Roosevelt felt he had to give one Sunday at the Islesboro Inn, he and Edith were left undisturbed. An almost mute Flora came north on 6 August to be with them for their last four days. She confided to Ethel that she seemed incapable of feeling anything “except occasionally a great overpowering hurt.”

“
It is no use pretending that Quentin’s death is not very terrible,” Roosevelt wrote Belle on the eve of their departure from the island. “There is nothing to comfort Flora at the moment; but she is young.… As for Mother, her heart will ache for Quentin until she dies.”