Spotlight & Giveaway: If a Poem Could Live and Breathe by Mary Calvi

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Mary Calvi’s new release:If a Poem Could Live and Breathe  

A fact-based romantic speculative novel about Teddy Roosevelt’s first love, by Mary Calvi, author of Dear George, Dear Mary.

 
Studded with the real love letters between a young Theodore Roosevelt and Boston beauty Alice Lee—many of them never before published—If a Poem Could Live and Breathe makes vivid what many historians believe to be the pivotal years that made the future president into the man of action that defined his political life, and cemented his legacy.

Cambridge, 1878. The era of the Gilded Age. Alice Lee sets out to break from the norms of her mother’s generation. Women are fighting for educational opportunities and exploring a new sense of intellectual and personal freedom. Native New Yorker, Harvard student Teddy Roosevelt, is on his own journey of discovery, and when they meet, unrelenting currents of love change the trajectory of his life forever.

If a Poem Could Live and Breathe is an indelible portrait of the authenticity of first love, the heartache of loss, and how overcoming the worst of life’s obstacles can push one to greatness never imagined.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from If a Poem Could Live and Breathe: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt’s First Love 

From If a Poem Could Live and Breathe by Mary Calvi. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Chapter Two
Pretty Alice Lee

SALTONSTALL ESTATE, CHESTNUT HILL, MASSACHUSETTS
OCTOBER 18, 1878
THE PAST

Born into a class considered elite in any circle, Alice knew to sit as a Boston Brahmin should: politely. Mindful of her manners, she folded her white-gloved hands in her lap atop a billowing indigo tea dress frilled with flounces. The prim belle, nine months shy of an eighteenth birthday, wore her light brown hair in an updo with finger waves styled in tight fashion. She kept an erect posture while seated on the east-facing veranda in a high-spindled, substantially carved rocker, yet the demure presentation ruffled due to the chair’s erratic creaking forth, back, stop, back, stop, and forth.
“Nothing more than a questionable experiment,” argued her cousin Richard Saltonstall with harsh inflection.
This spurt of utter nonsense vexed her, along with the ones from his classmate Hodges Chate. Both of the fellows were seated in front of her. Alice had read the news article printed in The Cambridge Tribune, to which they referred, on the proposal to allow women admission to Harvard College, not on the same campus, but an off-site, women-only annex.
“I fail to understand the reason for such an exercise in foolishness,” came from tight-jawed Hodges who had a most unattractive nasal voice.
Craning her neck to the right, Alice tried to distract herself by watching an oddly colored bird land on the branch of a hemlock. If not for the cherry-red head, the feathered darling might be challenging to spot as only black and white feathers covered the rest of it. From its big chisel-like bill emerged a rolling churr sound.
“Clearly ludicrous” came, gravelly, from Richard after a noticeable breath.
Becoming increasingly agitated, Alice attempted to maintain a staid disposition, knowing she came from an impeccable pedigree with her Coast aristocrat ancestors hailing from Lincolnshire, home to the likes of Sir Isaac Newton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
She focused on the wings stretched wide. Whether the bird was male or female, she could not tell. Maybe an ornithologist could, she imagined. In some genuses, she had heard males sport bolder colors to compete for females’ affection, while the females blend into the surroundings to protect their nests. This flying charmer flaunted a perfect combination of the two, a back of black feathers with white ones patched about and the unique, crimson-colored head.
“Absurd!” The balderdash continued from the non-blood who specifically targeted one of the possible female candidates who had excelled in private instruction from Harvard professors. “I say again with certainty, she’ll turn into an old maid.”
Alice bit her bottom lip to hold back the vocables about to release in a splenetic outburst. Not even the scent of her lavender perfume, usually so calming, could ease her tension. Her chair halted its pendulation in the shade. Patience wore thin. Teeth clenched. Eyelids shut tight. A simple, stinging question escaped from her mouth: “Why, gentlemen, do you never speak of an old bachelor?”
The backs of the men straightened as straight as their rigid-back chairs.
Alice verbalized the argument in an affable tone, realizing she may have come across a smidgen too forceful. “You converse about one and not the other.”
Each angled toward her. They wore matching navy morning coats and tan trousers, with hair parted in the middle, trim beards, and quizzical looks.
“Old bachelor?” asked Richard.
“Old maid.” She used the sweetest inflection she could muster. “Old bachelor.”
Her cousin’s forehead furrowed. He huffed. She stared directly at him. “Are they not one and the same?”
“An old bachelor chooses to live the single life,” insisted Richard.
Alice felt heat rise to her face. “And an old maid does not?”
“An old maid is an old maid!” exclaimed Hodges, chortling after his comment with more than a hint of disputatiousness.
Alice unfolded her hands and took hold of the chair’s arms. Her lace-up boots stayed firm on the ground as she rocked.
Hodges scanned her body up and down. “An old bachelor may ask to marry whomever he desires.”
“Ancient prejudice!” She blurted this out and was glad of it.
Hodges’s eyes on his long, narrow face widened to where the whites showed.
“Ancient prejudice must be dug out root by root.” These words could not be stopped from spewing from her mouth.
“I see you are in better health, Alice.” This came from Richard with a smirk.
Yes, after two weeks in bed, she was, but that had nothing to do with the fact that their bias was insulting. “Is it not significant enough that women outnumbered men in the last census?” They did not answer her question. She continued, “By 888,000!”
Swift, short footsteps interrupted. Out rushed Richard’s sister; Cousin Rose displayed a jolly appearance with a rounded chin, full neck, big brown wandering eyes, and a nervous smile. Her black hair sat in a high bun with finger waves clinging to her head. Rose seated herself in the empty rocker to the left of Alice, landed a hand on Alice’s tight grip, and practically sang out, “I know of an old bachelor whom no belle of sane mind would have.” Rose brightly asked: “What about that creepy one in the musty shop in town?”
Alice knew exactly of whom she was speaking: a taxidermist whose grim studio had stuffed specimens in the window.
Rose angled into the male row. “Even an old maid would give that spongy geezer the mitten.”
The male lot reacted with snickers.
“That man is a drunken ol’ loon.” Richard took a quick inhale. “However, the truth is the truth, Alice.”
“This student, Miss Abigail Leach, is already twenty-three from what I know.” Hodges’s jaw muscles clenched, thickening his air of persiflage. “This would put her at twenty-seven upon graduation, that is if she is even able to achieve a college”—Hodges held up his fingers, gesturing quotation marks as he delivered the next word—‘degree.’ The lady will not be able to marry. I repeat, old maid.”

From If a Poem Could Live and Breathe by Mary Calvi. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Excerpt. ©Mary Calvi. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

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Meet the Author:

MARY CALVI is a 12-time New York Emmy award-winning journalist and national anchor. Her in-depth research for her debut book, DEAR GEORGE, DEAR MARY: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love, is the basis of a Smithsonian Channel documentary. Calvi lives in Yonkers, New York.

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