VALENTINE’S DAY 1880 was wonderful. Teddy and Alice announced their engagement. She was eighteen, he was 21. In his diary he wrote: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose.” They got married that fall, on his birthday. She had large, gray-blue eyes and was the daughter of a banker. He was the scion of one of the oldest and elitest American families, the Roosevelts from the Dutch island of Tholen and from Alkmaar. To anyone who would listen he exclaimed that he was the happiest man in the world. The following summer, he took her to Europe on their honeymoon. They saw Holland from the Rhine.
Thee, as he called himself, was, let’s say, different. During the honeymoon, he left Alice behind so he could climb the Matterhorn. And when she told him two summers later that she was pregnant, right away he asked his friends Jan van Eeghen and the Huidekoper brothers from Drenthe if they would like to spend a few months together in the Wild West. He bought cattle in North Dakota. In between, he ran for the New York state parliament. He was elected.
THE BABY, he predicted with conviction, would be born on Valentine’s Day 1884. He was two days off. On the evening of February 12, he received a telegram at the Albany state House. He had become the father of a healthy daughter. Roosevelt hurried on horseback and by train to New York, 150 miles away, where Alice had temporarily moved in with his mother. By the time he arrived the next day, Alice, on the third floor, was already semi comatose. She had caught an acute kidney infection during childbirth.
Mother lay two floors down, felled by typhus. Theodore sat alternately at his delirious mom’s side, then at Alice’s, cradling her head in his arms. Mother died early in the morning of Valentine’s Day. That afternoon Alice also passed away. Roosevelt grabbed his journal and drew a thick black cross on the February 14, 1884 page. Below it, he wrote “The light has gone out of my life.”
HE NAMED the baby Alice Lee, after her mother. He then handed her over to his sister and immediately set out for the North Dakota Badlands where his Dutch friends were. There he stayed for three years, until a cow disease decimated his herd. He traveled back to New York, picked up a childhood friend from elementary school, sailed with her to England, and remarried there. Together with the second Mrs. Roosevelt, he started a new family. They had five children, plus Alice from his first marriage.
He never spoke of her mother again, to anyone, including her own daughter. Theodore Roosevelt spent the rest of his life pretending that Alice Hathaway Lee had never existed. He wrote his autobiography and didn’t mention his first marriage, unable to reconcile that dark Valentine’s Day. He rose to great heights professionally, became US president and a Nobel peace prize laureate. He was generally affable, popular and powerful. But whoever started talking about emotions with him hit a brick wall. One diary entry that he penned during those three years of self-imposed exile in the wilderness explained why.
“She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”
