American Princess Read online

  “Father’s going to be president,” I said slowly, staring out the window as my mind raced ahead to what this meant for us. I’d always resented the fact that Father had been shoved unwillingly into the token position that was the vice presidency, but had never really considered that he might one day be president.

  That I might be the president’s daughter.

  * * *

  • • •

  President McKinley died at two fifteen the following morning, plunging America into a shocked grief and rousing us remaining Roosevelts from our sleepless beds to begin the long trek by buckboard and train to the nation’s capital.

  I gaped when the carriage finally turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and allowed me my first glimpse of the Executive Mansion’s stately white pillars, its curved portico shrouded in deep autumn shadows, and the dark velvet curtains in all the windows drawn as if the entire building was asleep and waiting for us.

  “Which room do you think will be ours?” Ethel murmured from beside me, but I didn’t answer, struck speechless for perhaps the first time in my life.

  This was our new home.

  My father was now president of the United States of America.

  And that meant I was now First Daughter.

  Chapter 2

  WASHINGTON, DC

  OCTOBER 1901

  A girl was given only two opportunities in life to really shine: her debut and her wedding. With the way things were looking, my funeral was going to be livelier than my debut.

  “Mother, it will be a terrible sockdolager to host a debut without champagne and cotillion favors.” I did my best to keep my voice level while I paced the musty-smelling Red Room. Above me on the burgundy silk walls hung an implacable portrait of George Washington with his arm outstretched, as if urging me to charge forward into battle. “It simply isn’t done.”

  Mother scarcely glanced up from her inspection of my debut gown, still creased from its wooden delivery crate. The dress had arrived today from New Jersey—not from Paris’s House of Worth as I’d hoped—and been delivered to the parlor for Mother’s approval, not mine. I’d have draped myself in black just for the sensation it would cause, but Mother had insisted on a singularly repulsive number with its cascades of white taffeta and silk rosebuds.

  “Cotillion favors are too expensive,” she repeated for the third time that afternoon. “And we’ll offend the teetotalers if we serve champagne. Every move we make reflects upon your father now, Alice. You must remember that.”

  As if I could ever forget.

  I flopped back on a threadbare crimson settee in a huff, ignoring the loose pieces of horsehair while trying to convince myself that the gossip rags might still swoon rapturously over my debut’s flat lemon punch and austere lack of favors. These were only the latest in an ever-lengthening list of problems with my debut.

  I grimaced at George Washington and switched tactics. “I still don’t think I should come out with all my cousins,” I said. That was a bit of an exaggeration, as prim cousin Eleanor was still at her English boarding school. One less cousin to worry about, I supposed. “It’s provincial to share a debut with four other girls. And more young people could attend if the debut came after New Year’s. Otherwise I’ll be lucky to dance with anyone other than Feather Duster.”

  Mother tsked under her breath. “Alice, I told you not to call your cousin that name.”

  “It’s not my fault Franklin prances and flutters just like a duster.” In fact, he was the sort to sail a boat instead of sweatingly rowing it in the hottest weather as Father would have insisted on doing. “I thought the whole purpose of a debut is to attract eligible young bachelors.”

  “It is.” Mother pursed her lips, whether because she was displeased with me or my gown or the shabby state of the hideous dark parlor, I couldn’t guess. Probably all three.

  “You never know,” I said, rising to give her a peck on the cheek. “Maybe I’ll fall madly in love with some dasher after my first quadrille, make an early marriage, and be out of your hair forever.”

  It was a tack I’d tried more than once, only Mother didn’t realize that I had no intention of marrying for a little while. I’d give myself plenty of time to dance at balls, vacation at Newport, and read my name in the society columns before I settled down with a husband and the children that would inevitably follow. I wasn’t sure how I’d reconcile all that with Mother’s interminable list of old-fashioned dos and do nots that all well-bred young ladies must follow, but where there was a will, there was bound to be a way.

  After all, I was a Roosevelt, and as Father always said, a Roosevelt could do anything he put his mind to.

  Or in this case, anything she put her mind to.

  Mother was saved from having to reply as Archie and Quentin pounded down the hallway on stilts, shrieking while our menagerie of dogs yapped after them. She gave a deep sigh, yet I’d have sworn her brown eyes sparkled with some sort of secret laughter. “Ask your father about all the debut business during his usual four o’clock appointment with you children. He has the final say in this.”

  I couldn’t wait hours for Father’s standing appointment that would inevitably devolve into a pillow fight with my siblings, not to mention that I might also have to compete for his attention with the official dignitaries he sometimes invited along. So I burst into the presidential study just a few minutes later, breathless with anticipation and holding our terrier Skip squirming in my arms, whom I’d rescued from a near trampling by stilts in the corridor. “Father.” I interrupted midsentence the conversation with Owen Wister, his longtime friend from the Dakota Badlands. “Mother says I should talk to you about my debut. Right now.”

  Wister’s pointed mustache twitched with annoyance, yet I ignored him.

  “Hello to you, too, Alice.” Father removed his round spectacles to polish them with a kerchief from his vest pocket. “Owen here was just informing me that he’s dedicating his next book to me.”

  His chest puffed out a little as he spoke, and I had a sneaking suspicion this wouldn’t be the last thing named after him now that he was president. “That’s lovely,” I said, even as I mused distractedly that perhaps I might finagle having something dedicated to me too. Maybe a book, a song, or even a hairstyle . . . I wasn’t picky.

  “But, Father,” I said. “My debut? Mother really was quite insistent that the details be decided. Today.”

  “Was she now?” Father asked as he crossed the frayed taupe carpet. He wasn’t an overly tall man, but he filled every room with the sheer magnitude of his presence. In his dapper suit he seemed entirely out of place in the Executive Mansion, whose interior seemed to have come straight from a hundred-year-old Victorian novel, one that was dog-eared and creased around the edges. “Then I suppose you don’t know that your mother and I discussed your debut over breakfast while a certain lazybones was still abed.”

  I cursed myself for sleeping in and missing my chance to make my case for why the president’s daughter needed a spectacular debut. With bated breath, I set down Skip, who made a beeline for my father. “And?”

  Father tucked Skip under his arm and idly scratched behind his floppy ears. “Your debut will be in January, after your mother’s New Year’s reception.”

  I shrieked in delight. “January? Not December with the rest of my Roosevelt cousins?”

  “January,” my father repeated. “And you shall be the only girl dressed in debut white.”

  “And where will it be?” I asked, breathless with anticipation.

  “Here in the Executive Mansion, of course.”

  I flung my arms around him—and Skip—with a squeal, but Father only offered me an awkward pat with his free hand. His wooden response recalled the many train station embraces from my childhood, him still smelling of the leather, horses, and the wide-open plains of the Dakotas. My real mother—Alice Hathaway Lee—had di
ed of Bright’s disease on the same day that Father’s mother had died, leaving him so grief-stricken that he’d abandoned me, an infant of only a few days, to be raised by his sister until I was four. Today he smelled of tallow from his Williams’ shaving soap, but his hug was as stilted as ever.

  “Thank you, Father,” I said, trying to recover my jubilee as I made a show of smoothing my skirt.

  “You may thank Mother,” he said. “She seems to believe more young men can attend the festivities after their college exams and Christmas.”

  I smiled, for Mother had picked up the trail of bread crumbs I’d sprinkled about for days, hints of more eligible bachelors being available after the holidays, all in the hope that I might have my own debut. And yet she’d sent me to Father so I might hear the good news from him instead.

  Don’t ask questions. Just accept the gift.

  Father tugged the bottom of his vest, his attention already shifting from me. “Now, Alice, if you don’t mind, I’m going to finish my conversation with Owen. We shall continue discussing your debutante ball another time.”

  “All right,” I said, recognizing that I’d finally worn out my welcome.

  Anyway, my debut would be the perfect opportunity to impress him with my newfound poise and maturity. Yet not everyone seemed to view me that way.

  “Your daughter Alice seems a bit wild,” Wister said a bit too loudly as I departed, halting my jaunty steps. “Perhaps you could rein her in somewhat?”

  I pivoted on my heel to glower at him, but he and Father had already turned to peruse a dusty pile of maps.

  “My dear friend,” I heard my father say, his voice laced with exasperation. “I can either run the country or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

  I closed the door silently behind me, my euphoria draining like air from a rubber balloon pierced by a needle. Why, oh why, couldn’t Father just be proud of me?

  I straightened my shoulders, deciding there was only one thing left to do.

  Just as Father had taken first New York and then all of America by storm, I’d become the talk of Washington by becoming the most successful, witty, and lively debutante of the season. I’d prove that this apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  Then maybe, just maybe, Father would look at me the way he did all my other siblings, grinning that toothy grin while his ice-blue eyes warmed with pride.

  And love.

  * * *

  • • •

  After two months of quibbling over details, I pulled a sour face at the mirror before going down to greet my six hundred guests, half surprised at the girl—no, woman—who mimicked me. Mother had been occupied with the debut preparations since dawn so Auntie Bye—my father’s eldest sister Anna, although no one ever called her that—had helped prod, cinch, and stuff me into my traditional white taffeta gown.

  “Why, Alice, I’ve never seen a more perfect debutante, not even when your mother came out,” she said now, drawing me into a hug that smelled of the bread she loved to bake. I returned the fierce embrace before she released me with an awkward shuffle, a result of her permanently hunched spine after a bout of infant paralysis. “Your only job tonight is to enjoy yourself; do you understand?”

  I bit my lip, adjusting my white elbow gloves as I worried the tiny diamond pendant at my neck, a gift from Father and Mother earlier that night. It was Auntie Bye who had taught me to walk and tie my shoes when Father was in the Badlands and had given me my first diary while Mother was busy birthing and caring for all my half siblings: first Ted, followed in quick succession by Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, each of whom arrived on schedule almost every two years. In fact, it was my aunt who had finally told me that I had a different mother than my siblings.

  “Your father won’t speak of Alice Lee,” Auntie Bye had said while she cuddled me one night as Mother recuperated from a long delivery with one of my brothers—Archie, I think. I’d snuggled closer, tucking my feet into the warmth under her legs. “But your mother was more lovely than Gloriana the Faerie Queene, too beautiful for this world, I fear.”

  I had no memory of Alice Hathaway Lee—she’d died only two days after my birth—but I learned from Bye’s scrapbooks that she’d been a beautiful socialite who shared my blue-gray eyes. I’d begged my aunt to tell me more, and she had, that Alice Lee had been as charming and frivolous as child bride Dora from Dickens’s David Copperfield, which she’d then set about reading to me. Because Aunt Bye firmly believed that the answers to most of life’s questions could be found in books.

  Yet no amount of reading had ever convinced me that Father could truly love me, not when my existence was a painful reminder of the love he’d lost.

  Perhaps there truly is no hope for me.

  Auntie Bye’s praise tonight soothed my ragged nerves, but there was one last thing I needed. I grasped Bye’s wrist as she turned to leave. “Do you think Alice Lee would be proud? If she could see me tonight, I mean?”

  “Oh, Alice.” Auntie Bye reached up to touch my cheek with her gloved hand. “Don’t you know? Your mother would be near to bursting if she were here.”

  I’d never been a namby-pamby and I wasn’t about to start snuffling now, but I had to blink hard to keep my vision from blurring. “Thank you, Bye,” I whispered.

  “I’ll see you in the receiving line, my blue-eyed girl.”

  I took a long moment to collect myself, for it wouldn’t do to have a blotchy face for my own debut. When the door creaked I expected to see Mother ready with an admonition against my lingering, but instead Ethel stood in the corridor in her pink satin nightgown and her hair in papers so she might have passed for a child version of Medusa. Her eyes widened and her mouth turned to a perfect O of surprise. “You look like a princess,” she breathed.

  I laughed and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Would you like to carry my train to the stairs?”

  She gave an eager nod and so I heaved a final breath—as much as my Edwardian corset would allow—and walked out the bedroom door to the staircase, measuring my pace just as Mother had instructed. I hesitated on the top step until the United States Marine Band picked up the notes of one of Beethoven’s violin concertos to announce my arrival. In a moment Father would see me, and he’d beam with pride before introducing me to Washington’s elite.

  This is the moment I’ve waited for my entire life. This is when my life begins.

  All eyes swiveled toward me as I descended slowly into the assembled crowd, taking the time over my pounding heart to enjoy the polite applause mingled with excited murmurs. This was the first time in my life I could recall being the absolute center of attention, and I was surprised to discover that the weight of everyone’s gazes made me feel powerful, as if my very skin crackled with excitement. The surge of energy and pride made me tilt my chin a little higher. Was this how Father felt when he addressed a crowd of thousands, so wonderfully alive that his blood sang? I hesitated only to glance back to where Ethel was still watching. She ducked behind the banister and I smiled, continuing my descent until I reached the receiving line in the Blue Room and, beyond that, the East Room’s makeshift ballroom.

  “You look lovely, Sissy,” Mother whispered as I took my place in the receiving line. It was high praise from my stepmother, but I only stood on tiptoes to find my father, spotting him with head bent in conversation with portly William Howard Taft, his new secretary of war. All of Taft’s three hundred plus pounds had been stuffed into a tuxedo whose white vest threatened to pop its ivory buttons at any moment, but my father was dressed fashionably in a black tailcoat and white silk tie. I yearned for him to bellow across the room how lovely I looked now that I was all grown up, and felt a surge of disappointment when he only smiled and nodded at me from his vantage near the ballroom doors. His tiny nod of approval would have to be enough.

  For now, at least.

  Aunt Bye’s admonition to
enjoy myself was easier said than accomplished. I’d thought my debut would mean simply outshining all the other guests while I feasted and whirled about like a dervish; I hadn’t counted on all the social niceties.

  I loathed social niceties.

  “Alice, the satin rosebuds on your gown are just delicious,” enthused one Astor matron who smelled like she’d rolled in a decaying rose garden.

  “You’re too kind.” The smile I’d been wearing for the past hour nearly cracked my face.

  “Chin up,” Auntie Bye murmured when she made it through the line. “The torture is almost over and then the fun can really begin.”

  “I hope you’re right.” My whisper was a bit too loud as I glanced around at the flawless tailoring of the men’s peaked lapel dinner jackets and the bouffant hairstyles that pegged the women as members of the Four Hundred, the group that included New York’s richest and most fashionable families. “Because from what I’ve seen tonight, most of the Four Hundred are awful stiffs. Ugh!”

  That prompted Mother to level a glare at me that might have frozen the Potomac in July. “Alice . . .”

  Now I’m really in for it.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said hastily, realizing from the way everyone—including Father—was staring at me, that this wasn’t the best way to become the season’s most successful debutante. “My mistake.”

  For I was a connoisseur of mistakes, everything from riding bikes with boys back home in New York to causing my mother’s death when I was born. Yet, surely I could subvert my natural liveliness for this one evening, for my parents’ sake, if not for my own.

  So I continued curtsying to society dames whose mothballed lace made my nose twitch and greeting their stiff-lipped politician husbands who yawned as much as I wanted to. Gouging my eyes out might have been more enjoyable.