Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Author:David McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

3

That winter in New York was the busiest and possibly the happiest time Theodore had ever known. Even the most frenetic days at Harvard had never been quite so full. For Alice, after the pace of life at Chestnut Hill, the change must have been overwhelming.

Theodore at once took up the part of his father, presiding at the head of the family table, presiding Sunday evenings in his father’s old place at the newsboys’ dinner, beginning their first Sunday in New York. He was elected a trustee of the Orthopedic Hospital and the New York Infant Asylum. And for the Roosevelt women now, at least figuratively in his charge, he became the main source of news from “downtown,” the perfect escort to the theater and the opera, the whip hand on sleigh rides through the park or along Riverside Drive. Reading aloud to them from Mark Twain’s latest, A Tramp Abroad, he would laugh so uproariously that he could hardly go on, turning “literally purple,” as Corinne said.

At meetings of the St. Andrews Society he chatted with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune and with others who had known his father. He joined a Free Trade Club, organized a whist club, started to work seriously on the naval history he had more or less toyed with the year before. By mid-February Corinne could also report in a letter to Douglas Robinson that “he has been going to Republican meetings steadily this week, and gives us most absurd accounts of them.”

And all of this, meantime, was only tangential to the new career in the law.

From 57th Street to the Columbia Law School, then located in the battered, old Schermerhorn house on Great Jones Street, was a distance of about three miles—fifty-four blocks down Fifth Avenue—and he walked it regularly every morning, leaving the house around 7:45, arriving in time for an 8:30 class. Classes over, he sometimes stopped in at the Astor Library, across Lafayette Place, to do research for the book, then walked home again. The six-mile round trip, he remarked apologetically, was the only regular exercise he was able to work into his day, given all he had to do.

“The law work is very interesting,” he said in his diary; and again, “I like the law school work very much.” Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert, who was back in the news again as one of the new reform trustees of the Brooklyn Bridge, now in its eleventh year of construction and still unfinished.

Before dark, if there was snow, he would bundle Alice into the sleigh and strike off to the north, through the park or crosstown to the Hudson. “I love to take my sweet little wife up the Riverside Park,” he wrote shortly before Christmas; “it is a beautiful drive now, with the snowy palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, as with the dark waters of the Hudson, covered with ice, at their feet.

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