Dead Wake by Erik Larson Read Free Book Online Page A

“Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of asingle submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.”
    No one had any illusions. Mistakes would happen. One of Kaiser Wilhelm’s orders included an acknowledgment of the risk: “If in spite of the exercise of great care mistakes should be made, the commander will not be made responsible.”
    W ILSON ’ S GRIEF and loneliness persisted into the new year, but in March 1915 a chance encounter caused that curtain of gray to part.
    His cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, lived in the White House, where she served as a proxy First Lady. Often, she went walking with a good friend, Edith Bolling Galt, forty-three years old, who happened also to be a friend of Wilson’s physician, Dr. Grayson. At five feet nine inches tall, with a full and shapely figure and a taste for fine clothes, including those designed in the Paris fashion house of Charles Frederick Worth, she was a striking woman, with a complexion and manner said to gleam, and eyes of a violet blue. One day while riding in a limousine with Wilson, Dr. Grayson spotted Galt and bowed toward her, at which point the president exclaimed, “Who is that beautiful lady?”
    Born in October 1872 as the seventh of eleven siblings, Edith claimed family roots that dated back to Pocahontas and Capt. John Rolfe. She grew up in a small Virginia town, Wytheville, in a landscape still warm with residual passions of the Civil War. While a teenager, she began making periodic visits to Washington, D.C., to visit her eldest sister, who had married into a family that owned one of Washington’s finest jewelry stores, Galt & Bro. Jewelers, situated near the White House. (The store was repairing Abraham Lincoln’s watch at the time the Civil War began.) On one visit, when Edith was in her twenties, she met Norman Galt—a cousin of her sister’s husband—who shared management of the store with other members of the family. They married in 1896.
    Eventually Norman bought out his relatives to become sole owner of the business. Edith bore a son in 1903, but the baby diedwithin days. Five years later, Norman died as well, suddenly, leaving substantial debts from his acquisition of the store. It was a difficult time, Edith wrote. “I had no experience in business affairs and hardly knew an asset from a liability.” She placed the store’s day-to-day operations in the care of a seasoned employee, and with his help the business began again to prosper so that Edith, while retaining ownership, was able to withdraw from daily management. She became a skilled golfer and was the first woman in Washington to acquire a driver’s license. She tooled around the city in an electric car.
    Her walks with Helen Bones usually began with Edith driving herself and Helen to Rock Creek Park in her car. Afterward, they invariably returned to Edith’s house in Dupont Circle for tea. But one afternoon in March 1915, Helen arrived at Edith’s home in a White House car, which took them to the park. At the end of the walk, Helen suggested that this time they have tea at her place, the White House.
    Edith resisted. The walk had been a messy one. Her shoes were muddy, and she did not want to be seen by the president of the United States in this condition. As she told Helen, she feared being “taken for a tramp.” In fact, shoes aside, she looked pretty good, as she herself later noted, with “a smart black tailored suit which Worth had made for me in Paris, and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very-good-looking ensemble.”
    Helen insisted.“There is not a soul there,” she told Edith. “Cousin Woodrow is playing golf with Dr. Grayson and we will go right upstairs in the elevator and you shall see no one.”
    They rode to the second floor. As they emerged, they ran headlong into the president and Grayson, both of whom were in their golf clothes. Grayson and Wilson joined the women for tea.
    Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting