There was for me, as well, enormous security with Granny. It was her place, the Big House and the surrounding estate. I identified with it, and with her. I felt at home with Granny. I did not doubt her authority—and she could be quite formidable. But that didn’t matter, as I felt her unreserved love.
When lunching with Granny at Hyde Park, particularly after a long morning of horseback riding, it was essential that Duffie clean us up and make us presentable. If Granny had a guest, it was usually a family member. Lunch at the big table was served by both butlers. The guest was served first, then Granny, then Sis, and then me. We began with a soup served from a tureen and ladled by the butler into my bowl. The large spoon on the right-hand side of the place setting was quite heavy—using it required close attention if I wasn’t to spill any soup.
Next came a meat course. Again, the flatware was large. By this era I was being expected to cut my own meat, and do it smartly. The vegetables might be a separate course, especially if it was corn on the cob. That could be eaten in one’s fingers. (But don’t gobble!) Then salad followed.
Before dessert the butler set down in front of you a finger bowl with your dessert plate underneath. I learned to dip just so much of my fingers into the bowl—“not to take a bath”—before carefully picking up the bowl, and its doily underneath, and removing them up and to the left, where my bread plate had been before it had been removed. It seemed to me an unnecessary addition to eating a meal, yet it added a formality, a distinction, which I associated with being an adult.
Finally dessert was served. Granny liked the sweet and heavy variety, but quite often we had ice cream, made that morning in our kitchen. Delicious! I was then ready for my nap. Sis and I chimed, “May we be excused, please?” “You may get down,” Granny always said.
Returning to my home, Hyde Park, that first summer after moving to Seattle, Granny considered my manners needed a good deal of sprucing up. Lunch with her was educational. It wasn’t only manners but rather a cultural background she conveyed. “Our background,” as she might say. I was taught how to serve myself from a platter held by the butler (and to always say thank you), how to use my knife and fork with some style, when to use the butter knife—and when not to—how to drink from my water and milk glasses. And not to spill anything. But no sense lingers of her instructions or admonitions having been a burden. Even when she corrected my pronunciation or pointedly frowned when I used a questionable expression learned from my public school classmates, I was not put off. I wanted to belong. I wanted to belong with Granny.3
I know my mother felt lovingly about her grandmother—in spite of what she would write to her mother, Grandmère, to gain approval—and spoke nostalgically about life at the Big House. Neither of us liked the habit displayed by so many writers of comparing Eleanor with her mother-in-law, Sara, yet that writing of it went a long way toward making such comparisons standard practice.
And I, too, am doing it. To put it simply—considering only one aspect of two complicated personalities—Sara gave of herself freely. Eleanor was always measured, with her internal fear of not doing “the right thing” permeating her relationships with her children. These concerns of Eleanor’s surfaced with the appearance of her first child, my mother, Anna. Both Sara and the baby’s nurse tried to show Eleanor how an infant should be cared for, easily and without anxiety. But the fears prevailed. “Eleanor was a reluctant and anxious pupil.”4 How to look after babies seemed obvious to both the nanny and Granny. Eleanor’s lack of confidence, her unwillingness to try developing a physical rapport with her newborn, must have seemed puzzling to both women. But Eleanor was content to leave it to the nurse. She was afraid even to bathe her own child, explaining that she “didn’t know how.” In contrast Sara had bathed baby Franklin regularly. She hadn’t needed instruction.
3
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt
Perhaps the two most important people in my life, certainly the most influential, were my grandparents. As a child I intuited both the closeness and the distance between them after thirty years of marriage, and their relationship so much influenced by my grandfather being president of the United States and my grandmother not just being first lady but an important national figure in her own right. Eleanor Roosevelt was known across America as “Mrs. Roosevelt” just as much as Franklin Roosevelt was FDR. How they arrived at this juncture in their life together is an intriguing story.
When Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became engaged, there was not much to mark it as unusual. Within New York’s upper class, she was, as Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, somewhat better known than he. Perhaps their only distinction—outside of their shared social background—was that they both were Roosevelts, she from the better-known Oyster Bay branch of the family and he from the much smaller Hudson River, Hyde Park family. They were fifth cousins, once removed. While they had met briefly as children, they had seen little of each other until Eleanor’s debut in society when she was eighteen. She was tall, nearly six feet, with an elegant figure. He too was tall, just over six feet, and handsome.
Their letters to each other showed the usual longing of engaged couples to be together. They couldn’t wait to be married. Each saw the other through the rosy lenses that accompany infatuation. When married in 1905, in New York City, their union was blessed by no less than the president of the United States, the bride’s uncle. “Let’s keep the name in the family,” Theodore Roosevelt quipped to Franklin as he gave the bride away.
Both Eleanor and FDR were serious, thoughtful people, full of idealism. They harbored high expectations of each other when they were betrothed. And this can be said to be true of many couples looking forward to a life together of happiness and compatibility. The young Roosevelts’ expectations of each other were much shaped by their upbringing.
Relaxed intimacy of any kind did not come easily for those with Eleanor and FDR’s Victorian background. Nor was it supposed to. Within their social circle chaperones were always required to accompany a young lady, and to be without one raised suspicions. As a result young couples had very little opportunity to be alone. If a pair was thought to be “serious,” it produced worried expressions. Eleanor describes these constraints in her autobiography: “You never allowed a man to give you a present except flowers or candy or possibly a book. To receive a piece of jewelry from a man to whom you were engaged was a sign of being a fast woman, and the idea that you could permit a man to kiss you before you were engaged to him never even crossed my mind.”
A certain romantic intimacy demonstrated by a couple was smiled at and viewed with indulgence, but it was not considered to be a good basis for a successful marriage. Social background—coming from “a good family”—and financial stability were seen as far more important in that regard.1
It was more than just social norms, however, that restrained Franklin and Eleanor as newlyweds. They both had had exceptional childhood experiences that left them with an idealized and simplistic view of love and marriage.
But if marriage was referred to in romantic terms, any sex associated with this romance was for the purpose of procreation, for having babies and raising a family. Otherwise the subject was not mentioned. Letter writing, however, was a notable exception wherein longing, even erotic passion, could be expressed.
The bride was normally kept in ignorance until the marriage bed. A mother wouldn’t have known what advice to give to her daughter except “Do your duty, dear”—which is exactly what my grandmother said to my mother. For a woman to find sex pleasurable was morally questionable, and certainly not a suitable response for a lady properly reared.
When it came to my grandmother, one could feel her reserve with any physical contact. Even when I was a child and my grandmother was middle aged, I knew I should avoid spontaneously reaching out to her. Later I noted her reticence about participating in competitive sports, even tennis, learning that only recently had she felt confident enough to go swimming and ride horseback.
> My grandmother had endured a strict upbringing, a typical late nineteenth-century background that was full of “dos and don’ts”—so guilt-inducing!—but these also helped instill in her the lifelong values she exhibited. She remembered little or no intimacy in her childhood except with her father, an intimacy he encouraged that was romantic, totally unrealistic and really quite neurotic. Still, she clung to it feeling that it was all she had.
As a child Eleanor was rarely invited to join her parents in their life. Her mother, Anna Hall Roosevelt, presented an aloof attitude that intimidated her, and I suspect she knew to be very careful when her desire for contact led her to want to touch her mother.
Eleanor and her younger brother were orphaned when she was only nine, and they went to live with their mother’s parents. Even then, she reported no sense of affection with either grandparent. Her grandfather had engaged a clergyman to live in their house; hence there was a lot of reading from Scripture. Discipline and proper behavior were expected.
Oddly enough, for a person of her background, my grandmother never wrote about nor mentioned being attached to a nanny or a nurse, although this was quite normal for children whose parents often spent very little time with them. Nurses and governesses were purposely placed between children and parents. They were there to provide daily attention, to carry out the routines and the dirty work entailed in childcare, and to keep the children properly occupied. Indeed these women brought up the children more than the parents did. Under those circumstances it was quite common for a close relationship to develop between a nurse or governess and a child. But apparently this was not so for Eleanor.
Ferreting out Eleanor’s expectations of her new husband is difficult, but I surmise what seems obvious, which is that she desperately wanted someone to fill the gap left by the somewhat unsatisfying love between herself and her father. Such expectations were obviously unrealistic. Franklin, who was barely twenty-one years old, could not possibly be a father figure for her. FDR himself wanted a companion—in many ways like his mother was for him—a supporting person requiring a maturity that was quite beyond Eleanor’s reach.
Most historians write of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “difficult childhood,” and my grandmother, when recalling her childhood, reinforced this impression. But looked at realistically I can also see that the “neglect” from which she suffered was not uncommon among children from that milieu. Parents handed their offspring over to nurses and governesses with relief. Eleanor was less an exception than she may have thought.
But the “poor Eleanor” image persists. My grandmother constantly implied that she had had a difficult time because her peevish mother held her at arm’s length. In contrast, she never revealed anything less than devotion toward her father, Elliott Roosevelt. In conversation, she might allow that she had been aware of “his limitations,” but when acknowledging his weaknesses—alcoholism and drugs—her remarks were always made with sad but affectionate indulgence.
Her closeness to her headmistress at Allenswood School in England, when she was sixteen, provided probably the nearest thing to maternal affection and approval that Eleanor ever experienced. Marie Souvestre was a freethinker but highly disciplined, demanding that her students apply their minds. Eleanor responded well to this rigorous approach—I feel she welcomed it and enjoyed being challenged. She was recognized at last.
My grandmother delighted in regaling us with stories of vacation periods with her headmistress. It is well recorded that Mlle. Souvestre adored Eleanor, who became her favorite, although this was not an introduction to lesbianism as other authors may imply. For my grandmother it was a new and wonderful experience to have an adult person acknowledge that she had a good mind and also for her to be encouraged to use that mind.
Indeed, Mademoiselle insisted on this. Being given special recognition within that teacher-student relationship was a real bonus. Eleanor was very pleased with her life at Allenswood, and hence was most distraught when her Grandmother Hall ignored her pleas and insisted that she return home after only two years abroad. She was to “come out” in society, an experience Eleanor dreaded.
The supporting relationship Eleanor had had with Mlle. Souvestre was an exceptional one. But, upon returning to America, my grandmother retreated back to the childhood experience of life with its familiar built-in loneliness. She reverted to being unable easily to express personal affection except by demonstrating her caring through action—to do for others—and through these demonstrations she would feel she was being responsive. This was typical of her class, of her social contemporaries, and not just one of my grandmother’s own behavior patterns. It was part of the pattern of behavior for many of her generation and class of women. It was their accepted style, as well as a rationalization for avoiding real intimacy.
Good form was practiced through charity. Many women of Eleanor’s background limited themselves to expressing care for their spouse and children by planning and organizing the household, reviewing with the nurse what was on the day’s schedule for the children, and by other concerns such as seeing that the children were properly dressed, had a haircut or a new pair of shoes, and it was of great importance that meals were prepared and served properly for their husbands.
I suppose it was safer not to put more than your foot or your toe into the pool of love and affection. And by so doing you remained in control—or assumed you did.
Not even later on in life, when she had children of her own, could my grandmother really give of herself and provide the normal maternal intimacy children always hope for. My mother told me the way she and her brothers had shared their sense of neglect by exchanging “amusing” stories. At the same time, however, she always noted how their mother did truly care for them, was attentive to their physical needs, only by her nature unable to hold them close. I remember hearing my mother and uncles in the White House joking together about their mother’s close engagement with people across America, her capacity to so freely give of herself to others. They concluded that the farther away a person was, the easier it was for their mother to open up. But behind this humor, I felt their ongoing sense of deprivation.
On entering her marriage, Eleanor had been reticent but proud, indeed quick to take offense at criticism. This led to an avoidance of ever feeling vulnerable, of being afraid where it might lead. For her, vulnerability meant loss of control, and that was the primary concern. No doubt she was in love with Franklin, but her instinctive reserve dominated her personality, and was always a barrier between them.
Her shyness went deep, and as a result, she rarely showed or shared emotion except as an underpinning for an intellectual statement. Indeed she had strong feelings, especially when her principles were at stake, but most often, when young, these were kept within her. Letters to close friends were an outlet wherein Eleanor felt greater freedom to express both her love and her frustrations.
She wrote about her sense of inadequacy in her autobiography: “I had painfully high ideals and a tremendous sense of duty entirely unrelieved by any sense of humor or any appreciation of the weaknesses of human nature. Things were either right or wrong to me, and I had had too little experience to know how fallible human judgments are.” Later, when she was more than fifty years old, my grandmother acknowledged to her friend Lorena Hickok, “Something seems to be locked up inside me.” Before she died, possibly as an apology, she acknowledged the same to my mother.
In my observation, only during her very last years did my grandmother begin to let down her guard and give of herself, as she did with my younger cousin Nina, sympathetically counseling her on how to best cope with her two alcoholic parents.
Like Eleanor, Franklin was generally shy, not the figure exuding supreme confidence we remember as president of the United States. As a young man he was not “one of the boys,” yet he presented himself very differently. Up front he was gregarious, the life of the party, always engaged in making a good impression. He wanted to belong—which he wasn’t always successful in doing
, as is shown through his rejection by Harvard’s prestigious Porcellian Club. (My own guess here is that he was judged to be trying too hard.)
Unlike his wife, Franklin was an only child, and very close to both his parents, particularly to his mother. His father and mother were exceptionally attentive to him. The pictures of James taking a very young Franklin riding when he did the rounds of his estate properties show an example of this. But Sara’s caring attentions, while loving, could be a bit too abundant. Indeed, some of FDR’s biographers have labeled him a mama’s boy.
At about the age of ten Franklin was invited to share in some of the adult aspects of his parents’ life. This was unusual intimacy for a time when maintaining strict differences between generations was the norm. He accompanied them sightseeing when traveling abroad, and joined them at cards at the end of the day. James, Sara, and Franklin were often a threesome.
The ebullient FDR quickly made friends wherever he went, but I expect it only went just so far. The James Roosevelt family was a tight little island, quite exclusive, and his unusual closeness to his parents required young Franklin to play a particular role. Being elevated to the position of their companion, and invited to participate in his parents’ activities, forced him to be a little adult. Somewhere along the line he must have acquired the habit of watching his step, which inevitably led to his limiting any show of more normal youthful feelings. It is impossible to guess at how much he found it necessary to keep personal emotions and exuberance hidden, or how ingrained that habit became. In Robert Sherwood’s biography, Roosevelt and Hopkins, Sherwood refers to FDR’s mind as “an impenetrable forest,” but I judge that a bit over the top. There are broader explanations.
Upstairs at the Roosevelts' Page 3