With George holding the reins we might carefully cross the busy Albany Post Road to explore the fantastic complex of buildings the Vanderbilts had erected for their horses and carriages and to store their hay. It was in disrepair even when I saw it as a young child in the late thirties, but, still, its block-square cobblestone courtyard, symmetrically arranged buildings on three sides, the huge barn at the end, and the grand well in the center of the courtyard made for an enviable scene. Then heading back across Route 9, we would return the few miles to the Big House by a different route, all at our same leisurely pace. Going home to her stall and a bag of oats, Natoma trotted easily the last half-mile.
Sometimes during our carriage rides a thunderstorm would appear in the sky and George would whip up Natoma to get home, before the rain came pouring down and the thunder cracked. There was always the possibility that this might have sent Natoma rearing and perhaps bolting. I saw it as much fun and excitement—if only the conjuring up of potential danger. But most often we trotted rapidly home without mishap, leaving Natoma barely sweating.
The organization within the Big House, as well as its atmosphere, was very Anglophilic, much like the other estates along the Hudson River. Even before Sara had married the widowed James Roosevelt, he had been nicknamed “the Squire” because of his “pork-chop” beard, then very stylish in England. The Roosevelts journeyed once a year to Europe, spending time in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Both my great-grandfather (whom I never knew) and my great-grandmother, “Granny,” were reasonably fluent in other languages, particularly French and German. But it was through their British friends that they took their cues for the lifestyle at their own estate in America.
But in no way did I feel England to be “the mother country.” I understood it simply to be the one where household standards were set. The butler, the cook, and the succession of nannies and tutors we had often were hired through London agencies. Granny normally had six or eight “inside” servants and six “outside” servants, supplemented by more when guests would arrive to stay or family would come to spend vacations.
Because travel in the nineteenth century was arduous and time consuming, guests typically stayed at Hyde Park for several days, even a couple of weeks. They expected to be looked after in the manner to which they were accustomed, so servants were very important on that scene, indeed essential. Without servants, not only the work but the whole social structure would have fallen apart. What would the “upstairs” be without the “downstairs”? And, of course there would have been no “downstairs” without an “upstairs” to serve. It was a lifestyle that doesn’t exist anymore because people are not willing to fit into it. Such a lifestyle flowed directly from an accepted class society and labor being cheap. No longer—not in affluent Western countries anyway. Even well into the twentieth century, going “into service” was often a step up for many people, but to succeed they had to quickly adopt the expected manners of the Big House.
Life changed substantially in the Big House when Granny departed for her annual summer month on the island of Campobello in New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy. The butler returned to England for his holiday. So did the cook. Jennings, Granny’s maid, went along with her. Except for Jennings, Granny always “made do” at Campo with a locally recruited staff put together by the resident housekeeper, Mrs. Calder.
Was my great-grandmother roughing it at Campobello? Well, yes, but back in New York, so were we! In the Big House we were left with only the number-two butler, someone local brought in to do the cooking, and no more than one person coming in during the day to clean. Mrs. Depew still did the laundry, which didn’t amount to much. And there was, of course, our nurse. The Big House seemed empty. The routine was the same—except that we might have tea on the back porch with the servants. But there was no Granny at the center of it all. We didn’t even go to church in the village except if Grandmère was visiting her place, Val-Kill, and took us with her.
To some extent, after Granny departed, Grandmère stepped in to supervise Sis and me. We went to Val-Kill at least once a day. After our morning spent riding we quite often went there for lunch. Being about two miles east from the Big House it took about fifteen minutes by car. The quickest way was on a small dirt road winding through the woods.
Things were more casual at Val-Kill. We might even have hamburgers or hot dogs grilled on Grandmère’s barbeque, which looked like a big fireplace set on the lawn. Everyone joined in—she always had guests—with the cooking and serving. My grandmother, of course, did not know how to cook, although she was quite willing to turn over a hamburger if someone told her when to do it. She had servants in the kitchen to prepare food, serve, and do the household chores. But, compared to the regime in the Big House, Grandmère’s household help were relaxed in their approach to their jobs. (Grandmère once hired the brother of Josh White, the well-known folk singer, to be her butler and chauffeur. Although William had never done anything like that before, he needed a job, Grandmère rationalized. Granny’s English butler would have been horrified watching William who, with his very long arms, removed a soiled plate from the left and served a clean one from the right all in one swift movement.)
Grandmère shared the swimming pool at Val-Kill with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. She had been close friends with them during the 1920s and early thirties. Whenever she had had a free day or two she came to Val-Kill and shared the house, known as the Stone Cottage, with Marion and Nancy. Eleanor considered it her home, a place to retreat from the Big House. Shortly after my grandmother became first lady, and began to play an influential role in American life across the country, others entered her life—like Lorena Hickok, or “Hick,” with whom she was close—people that Marion and Nancy didn’t like. Grandmère then decided to build her own house by putting together two of the Val-Kill furniture buildings nearby. (The Val-Kill furniture enterprise, begun in 1926, had gone, unfortunately, down the tubes, with my grandmother having to buy a good deal of the furniture.)
By 1937, when Sis and I returned to Hyde Park after living in Seattle for six months, the relationship among the three women had cooled. The tension was obvious. Our mother had briefed us on what to expect. We were not supposed to notice the estrangement, but we could see plainly that Grandmère now had a place to herself. We still referred to Grandmère’s friends as Aunt Marion and Aunt Nancy, and they were still invited to the Big House for a meal whenever FDR was visiting.
Grandmère’s own house at Val-Kill had only recently been finished. According to biographer Joseph Lash, she felt, she said, that for the first time in her life she really had a home of her own. The pine paneling throughout had a pleasant rustic feel, but the rooms were furnished just as my grandmother always furnished her houses, in a simple, homey good taste, with bookcases and pictures, mostly family and friends, covering the walls.
In recognition of Eleanor’s dependence upon Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, her resident secretary—who was on call at any hour of the day or evening that my grandmother might be want to work—Tommy had her own apartment, joining Grandmère’s house through a doorway. There she had her own living room with a large screened porch, a kitchen, her own bedroom, and guest room. Traditionally, family and guests always gathered in “Tommy’s room,” her living room and office, for cocktails, using her kitchen as a bar. Also, Grandmère freely filled Tommy’s guest room with her own guests, but only after dutifully checking that Tommy’s friend Henry Osthagen was not arriving for the weekend. And, probably most annoying to Tommy, we regularly passed through her sitting room and office, using it as the passageway into Grandmère’s house.
Actually, Tommy never seemed bothered by our regular intrusions of one sort or another into her space. Some of Grandmère’s guests annoyed her but her reaction to them had nothing to do with their trespassing. As for us kids, the few of us who spent a lot of time at Val-Kill, Tommy was our second grandmother, and it seemed more natural, and easier, to interrupt her rather
than to bother Grandmère.
The one exception to these interruptions was a daily occurrence when quiet was expected. Grandmère was “doing her column.” Eleanor would draw up a chair to Tommy’s desk and dictate her My Day column—which ran in newspapers across the country—directly to Tommy. As Tommy didn’t know shorthand, she took this dictation directly onto the typewriter. Having never been through a proper typing course, she typed with two or three fingers of each hand—very rapidly. Sometimes I felt Grandmère’s columns were excellent, especially when she felt particularly strongly about a subject. But they could also read as if she had written them right off the top of her head and hadn’t had very much to say that day.
A small staircase led to the second floor of Val-Kill. At the end of a narrow hallway was Grandmère’s modestly sized bedroom with its large screened sleeping porch attached. Right before this were two small guest rooms—only one was large enough for two beds, just barely. Other guest bedrooms were over Tommy’s apartment. Bathrooms in the house were small, very utilitarian.
While lacking any grandeur, the whole place had a character that reflected the warmth of my grandmother, as a person, as a hostess. While the house still showed the class background of her childhood, Val-Kill expressed Eleanor’s rebellion against the nineteenth-century atmosphere of Springwood and the class distinctions it reflected, ones that came so naturally to her mother-in-law.
Val-Kill was also my grandmother’s way of establishing her own style, one she felt was more in tune with the way the world was developing, in keeping with a more egalitarian society. But just as in the White House, or in her own apartment in New York, Grandmère maintained the old tradition of covering the walls with pictures of family and friends. Too, family silver defined her Val-Kill dining room. She kept teatime, with all the trimmings, serving everyone herself—just as she did in the White House. Val-Kill had a distinct atmosphere, casual and friendly, welcoming visitors with the look of cluttered living space fully occupied that my grandmother would have been accustomed to since childhood.
In the way that the Big House and the Hyde Park estate was centered on Sara, Val-Kill always revolved around Eleanor.
Eleanor Roosevelt enjoyed company; indeed, she didn’t like being alone. Every weekend she filled the house with guests, and, if she wasn’t traveling, she was never without company even during the week. Grandmère’s schedule kept her in New York City and on the road during the winter months, so she was rarely at Val-Kill for more than a few days at a time. But when spring moved into summer, she would try to be present more frequently. This was so especially if Sis and I were staying at the Big House—and Granny wasn’t around, either abroad or having gone to Campobello.
The screened porch off my grandmother’s bedroom was where she slept at Val-Kill during the warm and humid summer nights. Grandmère loved being “outside.” She had the largest daybed I’d ever seen. It had been made to order at Val-Kill for my six-foot-five-inch uncle, John Roosevelt, who never used it. So my grandmother took it back. I would take my afternoon naps on it, occupying about one-third of its length.
I often went swimming with Sis in the pool at Stone Cottage. I paddled about in the shallow end. Sis could swim pretty well and had just learned to dive off the side of the pool. My special delight was holding on to the pool’s edge where the water gushed out, keeping the pool water circulating. It was of such force that it nearly swept me off.
Some guests might also be swimming in the pool, but I was scared of the many offers I had to teach me how to swim “all the way to the deep end.” My grandmother’s former bodyguard, Earl Miller—a New York State trooper who’d become her good friend—was the only one able to give me confidence. By the end of the summer I could make it to the end of the pool, although still only dog paddling. My “coach” said the most important thing was for me to know that I could get to the other end of the pool. Later I learned it was he who had also given my grandmother the confidence to swim well, to start riding horseback again, and to recommence driving a car.
Sis and I had known Sergeant Miller ever since his assignment as my grandmother’s bodyguard. He had been one of the state troopers assigned to them when FDR was governor of New York State. In time he became part of the extended family that included Aunt Marion, Aunt Nancy, Hick, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, Tommy, Louis Howe, and Gus Gennerich, Papa’s bodyguard. They had their meals with us. Granny probably raised her eyebrows at having Earl and Gus “at table,” but that’s what Grandmère and Papa wanted, hence the two were included. My great-grandmother’s ambivalence was apparent to Sis and me. We didn’t really know how to address them; nobody encouraged us to call them “Uncle Earl” or Uncle Gus.”
Louis Howe was, of course, among those at the table. Although part of the extended family for long before either of us was born, he was always “Mr. Howe” to Sis and me. To this day I can smell the Sweet Caporal cigarettes he regularly smoked. They were pungent. The ashes from his cigarettes fell down the front of whatever he was wearing. Granny said he was “dirty.” And so he was, relatively speaking, but his overall effect was one I found distinctive, different from the others in our extended family. Indeed, Mr. Howe often smelled rather stale, but my grandfather never seemed to object. Louis Howe was his ally, without a doubt the most important person in helping FDR achieve his ambition of being president. I could sense his and my grandfather’s mutual rapport.
In the late afternoons at Val-Kill, Grandmère would walk over for her swim, a bathrobe worn over her suit. Her daily swim was a routine, a self-imposed discipline—for exercise, she said. And that was the way she approached it. Standing on the side of the pool, pumping her legs, she got off the edge with a low dive. It was always a belly flop. And if any of my uncles were around, hoots and derisive remarks—akin to schoolboy teasing—inevitably followed. Grandmère took two turns each length, one a breast stroke and the other a side stroke.2 Afterward, she got out and lay down by the side of the pool to sun herself for a few minutes.
Swimming might be followed by tea at the poolside. It was usually iced tea with fresh mint from the garden accompanied by cake and cookies. Although Val-Kill was informal, Sis and I never helped ourselves without permission. Manners were maintained, even if you were wearing only a bathing suit.
When we arrived at Hyde Park it always seemed an endless period stretching ahead. That we’d have to leave didn’t occur to me. But the time slipped past. Early in 1937, my mother, my sister, my mother’s second husband (John Boettiger), and I had moved out of the White House and across the country to Seattle. That summer Grandmère would announced that Sis and I would shortly have to leave for Seattle to resume our schools. We would, however, wait for Granny to return from Campobello, as she insisted upon seeing us again. But then it was the train for New York where we would meet Mademoiselle Deschamps, our governess. She would accompany us on the long train ride across the country.
I felt like a balloon with its air released, flattened. Duffie comforted me. She reminded me that I would soon be seeing my mother and stepfather. That did not bring relief. The thought of losing Duffie’s company mattered more. I felt at home in the Big House, and with Granny, and with everyone else at Hyde Park. I liked being at Val-Kill with Grandmère and Tommy. And now I was being sent back to a life away from all of this. The old feeling of being sent into exile from home returned.
In the summer holidays we returned at last to Hyde Park. Home again! I would be back in my old bed in the nursery, with Sis back in “her” room, our mother’s childhood room. Duffie was nearby, installed in one of the two rooms for the children’s nurses on the stairwell landing. Lying in my bed, the memories flooded back. My old crib rested on the other side of the room. Slowly the memory returned to me of Beebee when she had slept across from me, but she was gone now and I put it out of my mind. The same little table and matching chairs for my meals were in the middle of the room. When I was an infant I had taken all my meals there, before my table manners were thought s
ufficiently well developed to eat with my older sister in the dining room.
Now Sis and I usually ate our meals in the little alcove off the dining room, quite the best place with its bay window and view over the Hudson. Breakfasts at the Big House are a valued memory. My mother and uncles always waxed nostalgic when remembering them, especially the fresh butter, cream so thick, as they used to say, that you couldn’t even pour it, and milk unpasteurized—and yes, it does taste different than today’s homogenized milk. The honey and marmalade were special, I was told. There were bacon and eggs and brown toast to go with it.
Sis and I would talk of what we were going to do that day, although, when I think about it, the options were few. We were back in the old routine. The only change was that, now being a year older, I could stay up a little longer in the evening, maybe a half-hour. The day’s schedule was completely occupying, quite exhausting, and that was the way we expected it. The notion of having fun or not having fun didn’t occur to us. I couldn’t imagine, and still can’t, doing anything better than the day’s routine. Life was full, and fun.
At night there would be the usual sound of the train traveling alongside the Hudson River, pulling slowly up the grade on its way to Albany, and then on to the West. And the thunderstorms at night could be fierce, providing much to talk about at breakfast. But most of all, the feeling of coming home was the familiarity of people, the rooms in the Big House, their furniture and the smell of polish, the laundry room with its particular smell, the stable, carriage house, the greenhouse, the ice house, the lawn and big trees in the spacious grounds, the vegetable garden. All familiar. I belonged.
Upstairs at the Roosevelts' Page 2