Free Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

halfway across the world—into a war zone—for an extended visit. Pamela then lived with him when he returned to Washington as depot quartermaster and joined him in Cuba when he was posted there in 1905. Even years after her death Archie thought of his mother daily, surrounded by photographs and mementoes of her.
    On the first day of May 1911, Archie wrote that a certain woman “has been camping on my trail for many months now” but then notes that he will not marry her because he is sure he could not love her and “I don’t think that my mother would have liked her at all.” He then describes the only two women he ever really loved. The first was a girl who had been fond of him when he was in his early twenties but her “cat of a mother” was determined that she should marry a rich man. The second was Mathilde Townsend, the now-married daughter of one of Washington’s leading hostesses, who, as he notes, “never really cared for me, not in the way of love.” Yet when Mathilde had told Archie in early April of 1910 that she was engaged to someone else, he wrote to Clara that it was “a terrific blow to me … and [I] woke this morning as if someone had died in the night.”
    Archie’s distress over losing Mathilde seems a trifle overdramatized given that she had done nothing to encourage his interest. After sitting out a ball with her several weeks before, Archie had recorded that “it was the same old story at the end. An evening wasted in beating my hands against an iceberg.” Mathilde, aged twenty-four, had clearly found it awkward that dear old Archie (he was twenty years her senior) was suddenly trying to woo her. Archie also knew that Mathilde’s redoubtable mother, Mary Scott Townsend, widow to a railroad baron, had set her eye on “a coronet” [a British dukedom] for her daughter, and that an army quartermaster, his current lofty post notwithstanding, was not in the running. He sympathized with Mathilde’s resistance to becoming yet another “dollar princess”—yet his own social ambition is evident when he writes: “I shall not mention her again, save only as one who has passed out of my life into that world of New York and Newport into which I have peeped but will never enjoy ” [italics mine].
    He does mention Mathilde again, however, since on May 26, 1910, he attended her wedding at the vast Townsend mansion on Massachusetts Avenue to see the lovely bride pass down an aisle of lilies in a white satin Worth gown with a three-yard train. By December, Archie is reporting that he had recently had “such fun doing the shops” with Mathilde, now Mrs. Peter Gerry, followed by lunch at the Plaza. Men who are fun to go shopping with are rarely the marrying kind, yet if Archie was indeed homosexual he was likely not effeminate, since no one with any less-than-manly traits could have succeeded in the testosterone-fueled atmosphere that surrounded Theodore Roosevelt. Archie had kept up with Roosevelt in all his physical stunts, from rock climbing and fording icy streams in Rock Cliff Park to makinga strenuous one-day, ninety-eight-mile gallop to Warrenton, Virginia, and back through sleet and snow. Roosevelt was quite sensitive regarding effeminacy—he had been dubbed “Oscar Wilde” as a young New York State assemblyman after wearing a purple suit and delivering a speech in a high-pitched voice. As president, he would never allow himself to be photographed in tennis whites—even though his inner circle was dubbed his “tennis cabinet”—preferring to release pictures in which he was posed in buckskin or on horseback.
    At the end of March 1910, just before Archie received the news of Mathilde’s engagement, he wrote that Frank Millet had taken up residence at his home and that “he is such a good housekeeper that I think I will turn the housekeeping over to him.” Frank gave English lessons to the Filipino houseboys before breakfast and, in Archie’s absence, wallpapered the second floor