“I do it for Mother.” Martha would never be beautiful, Caroline decided, but she might yet cease to be plain.
The clocks were carefully checked, and it was agreed that the three ladies share the same carriage to get them across the perilous wintry waste of Pennsylvania Avenue, a matter of so many icy yards.
Adams rose and showed them to the door of his study; he kissed each on the cheek.
“I hope Cabot won’t be there,” said Lizzie. “I have a permanent grudge against him, since John died.”
“Be forgiving, Dona.” Adams smiled his secret smile. “Life is far too long to hold a grudge.”
The Lodges were not present; the dinner was relatively small; and there was no theme, which Caroline enjoyed. Of the Cabinet, only Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, was present. He and Caroline gravitated toward each other in the Red Room, where the company was gathered before dinner. The Roosevelts never made their regal entrance until everyone was present.
“What is your brother doing?” was Root’s less than ceremonious greeting.
“He is travelling through New York State, enjoying the scenery.”
“I am alarmed. We’re all alarmed. You know, Hearst was really elected mayor of New York. Then Tammany destroyed the ballots.”
“Then why are you alarmed? When he’s elected governor, Tammany will just burn the ballots all over again. Fraud is the principal check-or is it balance?-of your-sorry, our-Constitution.”
Root’s mock alarm was replaced by, if not real alarm, unease. “We can’t rely on our most ancient check this time. Hearst has made a deal. He’s going to be Tammany’s candidate.”
“Is this possible?” Caroline was startled.
“Everything’s possible with those terrible people. Warn your brother away.”
As Caroline was explaining why Blaise accepted no warnings from her, Alice Roosevelt and her new husband, Nicholas Long-worth, made their entrance. Root looked at his watch. “Amazing! She’s arriving before her father. Nick’s influence, obviously.”
Alice looked, if not blooming, as in a rose, bronze, as in a chrysanthemum, while her husband’s bald head was scarlet from sunburn. They had been married in mid-February, with great pomp, in the East Room; then they had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon. This was their first White House function, as man and wife. Alice joined Root and Caroline. “Well, I’ve been to the top of San Juan Hill, and it’s absolutely nothing. I looked for the jungle-remember the famous jungle? where Father stood among the flying bullets, ricocheting off trees, and parrots and flamingos-I always added them to every description-sailed about? Well, the place couldn’t be duller. The hill’s a bump, and there is no jungle. All that fuss about so little. But they gave us something called a daiquiri, made with rum. After that, I remember nothing.”
The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt were announced, rather as if they were the Second Coming, and Theodore conducted himself rather as if he were God, surveying, with quiet satisfaction, His Creation. Edith Roosevelt looked tired, as befitted God’s conscientious consort.
The President greeted Caroline with his usual amiability, usual because the Tribune usually supported him. As a reward, he would occasionally ask her to the White House, where he would give her a story-usually minor-that no one else had yet printed. He was even stouter and redder this season, she noted; apparently, the vigorous, strenuous life he advocated for others and practiced himself was not, of itself, thinning. “You must come to lunch, and tell me about France. I envy you last summer. If I ever get away from here…”
“Come to us, Mr. President.”
“Delighted!”
“What, if I may cease to be a lady at court for an instant, is going to happen to the Hepburn Bill?” This was a commanding work of legislation which the House of Representatives had passed the previous year. The regulation of railroad rates was, somehow, at the center of the national psyche. The progressive saw it as a necessary means of controlling the buccaneer railroad operators, while the conservative courts and Senate saw it as the first fine cutting edge of socialism, the one thing that all Americans were taught from birth to abhor. Characteristically, Roosevelt was vacillating. When he had needed money for his presidential campaign he had asked the railway magnate E. H. Harriman to dinner at the White House; no one knew what promises were exchanged. Yet Caroline had taken heed of one of Adams’s truisms which was so true as to be ungraspable by minds shaped from birth by an American education: “He who can make prices for necessaries commands the whole wealth of all the nation, precisely as he who can tax.” That said it all. But the ownership of the country controlled both Supreme Court and Senate, and so they need not give up anything, ever. “I shall stand fast, of course. I always do. To Principle. I’m sure I can bring Senator Aldrich around. One thing I won’t accept will be an amended bill.”
“How curious to see you allied with the populists, like Tillman…”
“Terrible man! But when the end is just, grievances are forgotten. We must make do. If we don’t, Brooks fears a revolution on the left or a coup d’état on the right. I tell him we are stronger-fibered than that. Even so…”
An aide, roped in gold, moved the President through the room to greet the other guests. “It was in this very room, on election night,” observed Root, “that Theodore told the press that he would not run for a second term of his own.”
“He must have been-temporarily-deranged,” observed Caroline, admiring Edith Roosevelt’s inevitable look of interest in the presence of even the most ruthless bore.
“I think he got the mad notion from mad Brooks, whom he was just quoting. In order to be profoundly helpful, Brooks went through several million unpublished Adams papers and found that both of the Adams presidents had thought that one term was quite enough, and despised what they called ‘the second-term business.’ ”
“On the sensible ground that since each had been defeated for a second term, the principle was despicable.”
“Exactly. Anyway, Theodore, in a vainglorious mood, said that there would be no second election for him.”
The fat little President was now showing off a new ju-jitsu hold to the German Ambassador, while Edith’s lips moved to form the three dread syllables “Thee-oh-dore.” “He’ll be bored. But then he will keep on governing through his successor-you, Mr. Root.”
“Never, Mrs. Sanford. First, I’d not allow it. Second, I won’t be his successor.” Root’s dark eyes glittered. “I’m not presidential. But if I was, I’d tell my predecessor to go home to Oyster Bay, and write a book. You do this job alone, or not at all. Anyway, he can bask in glory. He loved war, and gave us the canal. He loved peace, and got the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He will be, forever-which in politics is four years-known as Theodore the Great.”
“Great,” murmured Caroline, “what?”
“Politician,” said Root. “It’s a craft, if not an art.”
“Like acting.”
“Or newspaper publishing.”
“No, Mr. Root. We create, like the true artist. News is what we invent…”
“But you must describe the principal actors…”
“We do, but only as we see you…”
“You make me feel,” said Root, “like Little Nell.”
“I feel,” said Caroline, “like the author of Freckles.”
On the way in to dinner, Alice told her of the great advantage of matronhood. “You can have your own motor car, and Father has nothing more to say.”
“This means that you’re a socialist.”
For once Alice was stopped in her own flow. “A socialist, why?”