Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  “And you don’t get back to visit?” she asked.

  “Never,” I said. “Nothing could make me go back there.”

  She examined my face and something unspooled across her eyes, as if what she’d thought of me—if she thought anything at all—was changing. I wondered if it was pity, which would get under my skin, or worse—some kind of admiration for all that I had “overcome.” Though my hackles were up, I had to remind myself I’d hardly revealed a thing. But somehow she had wrested this interview from me.

  “That lipstick is a lovely shade of red,” she said slowly. “It really brings out your eyes.”

  So the thing that had changed between us was something different still. I looked at her in surprise and felt the kind of jolt you get touching a metal doorknob on a dry winter day. My gaze slipped to her lips for a moment, dropped to the starched collar of her blouse. But I knew I had to be misreading the temperature of the room. It was only a cunning attempt to dodge a reporter’s questions, nothing more.

  “You really don’t like being interviewed, do you?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer right away but finally smirked. “No. And Franklin told me to watch out for you especially. He knows your work. He thinks you’re smarter than all the other reporters combined.”

  The future president was wary of me—now that was a compliment I could feel down to the arches of my feet. “Well, if I am that good at my job,” I said wryly, “your resistance will be pointless in the end.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt laughed and tipped her head back to rest against the cushioned seat. The fabric pulled at the small hairs along the nape of her neck. She looked tired but a little more relaxed. “All right, all right, I give up, Hick. Ask away.”

  As the train chugged south, I got her to give up the biographical goods, most of which I already knew. But I needed the quotes. She told me about what it had meant to her to become a mother, how she learned through trial and error to take care of her six babies, including the first Franklin Jr., the one who had died.

  “At seven months and fourteen days old,” she said, and I could see she knew down to the hour too, down to the minute.

  Through those years, she had been content to embrace a quiet family life, but eventually she got restless and began to stick her toe in the water of politics—both her husband’s campaigns and her own work on women’s rights, labor unions, better health care, housing, public parks.

  When she began to talk fondly of her boarding school in England, I squared that with what I knew of her childhood and understood why she had wanted to escape New York. Her father, Elliott—Teddy’s brother—had been quite the boozer, and his benders were the stuff of society legend: pie-eyed joyrides in hansom cabs around Central Park, whores and mistresses, a bastard son with a servant. Back in his day, Eleanor’s father had kept reporters scribbling, and it couldn’t have been easy for her to hold her head high when those stories ran in the papers.

  She had loved boarding school so much, she said, that she’d founded one of her own, Todhunter, on the Upper East Side. “Just think of it, Hick. The unused potential in half the human race!” She jabbed the air with her knitting needle, and I grinned. “Think of what women know, just by nature of being women, and what they could do with that knowledge. What if the cures for diseases reside within those brains? The path to peace and justice and true democracy?”

  I glanced up from my steno pad, my pencil racing, and nodded to encourage her. I could use it all. But it still sounded a little canned. I had yet to break through.

  “It’s not about me,” she went on. “It’s about making a way for those young women to contribute. Nothing could be more urgent.” Then she yawned, and we both laughed. So much for urgency. She balled up the knitting. “I can hardly keep my eyes open. Do you mind if I stretch out?”

  “Of course,” I said, looking at my watch. “I lost track of time—I apologize. Please get some rest.” I stood and tucked my notebook in my bag. My hand was on the door, and I was just about to bid her good night when she touched my shoulder.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you needed to go,” she said. “There isn’t another open seat on this train. Please stay. You won’t get a minute of sleep otherwise.”

  Again I felt that strange crackle in the small room; again I reminded myself that I would have to be out of my goddamned mind to think she was trying to send me a signal. But then it had been a little like that with my old flame Ellie at first, telling myself it was all in my head. Of course, Ellie had not been American royalty. The consequences of guessing wrong, in this place, with this person, were not for the lily-livered. Right then, I wanted a drink so bad I could have wailed.

  I stood paralyzed with indecision. “Well … if you’re sure …”

  “Of course,” she said, and handed me a pillow.

  She took the couch and I took the berth, which she claimed she was too tall for.

  “Well,” I said, “good night, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “Yes, good night.”

  The train swayed; I heard the baby begin to wail again, and then, in the distance, a man laughing. I glanced at her without turning my head, petrified of saying or doing the wrong thing. I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be able to fall asleep.

  She took off her jacket and spread it over her like a blanket. Embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to do it immediately, I tried to hand her the blanket that came with my berth, but she waved it away. “So how did you become a reporter?” she asked.

  I watched the clothes hangers that hung on straps from the ceiling sway back and forth above me. I thought about that for a minute. “The hard way,” I finally replied. “I had a hundred jobs after I ran away from home. Servant in a rooming house. Cook on a farm. In that one, they gave me a little portable kitchen I had to wheel out into the fields every day at noon to make potatoes for the hands. And then my last job before I found reporting was in a saloon in town—Mrs. O’Malley’s.”

  “Ran away? How old were you?”

  “About fourteen. There were some tough years in there, but also some extraordinary kindnesses. Mrs. O’Malley made me suits with trimmings,” I said, remembering that fact for the first time in decades as I said the words, “so I had something to wear to school. And she made sure I went. If it hadn’t been for her, I never would have made it out of Bowdle, South Dakota, or become a reporter. Never would be riding on this train.”

  “Hm,” she said, a knowing laugh. “Now, I should let you get some rest.”

  “Yes. Well. Good night again.”

  The train chugged on. Thoughts of my childhood always left me unsettled. Awareness of the many accidents on which my fortune had depended could give me a haunted feeling—haunted and hunted both. I knew I had gotten out of South Dakota by the skin of my teeth, though I tried not to think about it too much. But now my mind was whirring. Go to sleep, Hick, I told myself.

  Mrs. Roosevelt turned on her side and made a pillow of her elbow. “I just want to say, God bless the Mrs. O’Malleys of the world. I for one am glad she was there so that you can be here now.”

  It was as if she’d read my mournful thoughts. I shivered and tried to cover with a joke. “Now you have more dirt on me than I have on you,” I griped. This seemed to delight her. I could see her smile in the dark.

  “Good night, Hick.”

  Here I was, with all the access I could wish for, and I was taking my eye off the ball. I decided to try one more time to get a good quote for my story. “You really don’t want to be first lady?” I asked. “There’s got to be more to the job than watercress sandwiches and tea parties.”

  “I do not,” she said, rolling onto her back once more with a sigh. “It doesn’t interest me in the slightest.”

  “But what if—” I blurted. Then I stopped myself. The first-ladyto-be had not asked for my advice.

  “What if what?” Mrs. Roosevelt said. Her voice revealed curiosity and wariness in equal measure.

  The motion of the swaying car and the d
arkness of the night had me too relaxed for my own good. I didn’t want to let her friendliness lead me to the false conclusion that she saw me as her equal.

  “What?” she said, more softly this time, and turned on her side again.

  “What if you set out to change the job itself?” I said. “What if you ignore the trappings—let someone else worry about the parties and the china. The office of first lady is one of the most visible posts in the country. You could use it as your platform, for whatever you want to do.” As I spoke, the stodgy job seemed suddenly full of possibility if she were the one who would hold it.

  She was quiet for so long I wondered if I had overstepped.

  “And have them fight me every minute? I dread it,” she said. “Just between you and me, I would be glad if he lost.”

  And there it was, the scoop of the decade. Eleanor Roosevelt would have liked her husband to lose the election. Who knows—she might even have been planning to vote for Hoover. Any reporter worth her salt would have asked her that, point-blank, but did I? Did I set my mind to hustle from Grand Central to the AP office and file that story at 4:00 a.m., my fingers tearing like hell across the typewriter keys?

  I did not. I did not think of what I would do in two hours, or ten minutes. Instead, I watched the curve of her cheek where it rested on her elbow, the closed lids of her eyes, delicate as eggshells. She was pulling me in. I was fascinated by her, longed to help her—and longed, I realized with fear, to reach across the train car and touch her.

  Chapter Two

  November 8, 1932

  On the night of the election, a little more than a week later, the Roosevelts invited a troop of family and friends as well as all the reporters assigned to the campaign trail over to their town house on Sixty-Fifth Street for a buffet supper. FDR was heavily favored, of course; the only suspense was over the margin of victory. Just how severe a drubbing would Hoover take? We reporters had been traveling the country for months, ostensibly to cover the campaign, but, as a free gift with purchase, we got an eyeful of just what was going on in America in 1932, and, my, was it bleak. Bedraggled men and women were building towns out of garbage—flattened tin cans and squares of cardboard and stained canvas sacks lashed together with cord—and they were naming those towns after the current president of the United States. We thought Hoover deserved whatever he was going to get.

  It was already getting dark when I took Prinz, my German shepherd, out one last time. Then I walked him back into the apartment and closed him in the bathroom. My poor boy had a tendency to destroy every object in sight when I was not around, and this way he could lounge in the bathtub, as befitted a royal, until I came home. I changed into a fresh blouse and then smoothed my hair and slipped my notebook into my coat pocket. On the way to the door, I switched off the record player and the anvils of Wagner’s Das Rheingold clanged their last. I caught a cab uptown.

  The Roosevelts’ town house was lit up like it was Christmas Eve, a lamp in every window and a red, white, and blue paper garland hanging over the doorway. A campaign poster on the door featured FDR’s picture with the caption here is the man we have been waiting for. Just like that—so solemn you’d have thought he was a prophet. I could hear someone inside giving a toast as I tapped the iron knocker hanging from the lion’s mouth on the door.

  A servant in a black uniform answered and whisked my coat away while I switched my notebook and pencil to the pocket of my skirt and went into the parlor. About fifty people were crowded into the room, draped over couches or standing in clusters of two or three, the taller men with their elbows resting on the mantel. Anna, Mrs. Roosevelt’s daughter, was there with her sulking stockbroker husband, Curtis Dall. It was an open secret that she was involved with John Boettiger, a reporter from Chicago, and intended to seek a divorce, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her two-timed husband, dull as he seemed. Anna’s younger brothers, Franklin Jr. and John, were home from Groton School for the week. James Roosevelt—the favored, eldest son—was at his father’s elbow, and problem-child Elliott was just as reliably at the bar.

  In the back of the dining room was a table heaped with chafing dishes, where servants doled out plates of ham, sliced beef, potatoes, and vegetables. A bartender mixed drinks in the corner. Prohibition may still have been the law of the land, but few people let that stand in the way of their God-given right to imbibe. I was headed the bartender’s way when I saw her.

  She was swathed in a regal chiffon dress, a far cry from the tweeds she’d worn that night on the train, and the color was high in her cheeks from the room’s heat. I tried to catch her eye, but she either didn’t see me or pretended not to. I felt my chest constrict with the thought that I was wrong about whatever I imagined had passed between us on the train, and I glimpsed the humiliation I could have brought down on myself had I acted on it. I felt as though I had stepped off the curb and back up just in time to avoid being mowed down by a taxi.

  I didn’t recognize the man ahead of me in line for the bar. His jacket was too well-made for a member of the fourth estate. He had to be a Roosevelt, or Roosevelt-adjacent. “All the news is good, eh?” I saw Tommy across the room and gave her a wave.

  He nodded at me and munched a cracker. “They are saying turnout is very high. In South Carolina, the polls couldn’t find one man on the street who said he voted for Hoover.”

  Women can vote too now, you know, I felt like saying, but didn’t.

  The good news indeed was that Manhattan shared South Carolina’s opinion, at least as far as I could tell from speaking to people leaving my own polling place that morning. Unlike his ghoulish predecessor, FDR could charm the stink off an onion. Of course, his supporters weren’t exactly sure what he planned to do when he got elected—he was too good a politician to make any concrete promises—but we had faith he would do something. Three years of inaction had plunged the country into the worst depression it had seen in anyone’s lifetime. The choice couldn’t be simpler: something had to be better than nothing.

  Louis Howe approached Mrs. Roosevelt on the other side of the room. A bent little man in a wretched brown suit, he was the governor’s campaign manager, adviser, and fixer. He looked like an undertaker, with his gaunt face and bulging eyes, and he smoked about a hundred cigarettes a day, sometimes two at a time, but he was a gifted political strategist, the engine of the Roosevelt machine. He got his start as a reporter himself and was a genius at coaxing favorable stories out of the New York papers. Even though the governor seemed to have clinched the race, there would be no rest tonight for poor Louis. He and Mrs. Roosevelt were putting their heads together over by the window—quite a feat as she had to stoop by about a foot to do it. I turned around to check the status of the bar line and nearly plowed into John Bosco.

  “Easy!” he said. He was a hayseed like me, from Ohio, and kept his hair cut too short for his giant ears. “I was just bringing you this.”

  I took the cocktail, something fizzy with a curl of lemon peel floating on top. “Thanks,” I said, and took a sip, waited for the kick that didn’t come. I peered into the glass. “Did you put the bourbon in with an eyedropper?”

  “Blame the bartender,” John said, and took a swig from his own glass. “You coming to the Biltmore after this to wait on the returns?”

  “You bet.” I looked back at the window, but Mrs. Roosevelt had disappeared. I wondered if I would even talk to her at all that night. It now seemed entirely insane that I’d gotten my brain so scrambled over those unguarded moments on the train.

  FDR was seated at the dining room table, receiving well-wishers and talking with reporters. It went without saying among the press that we wouldn’t dwell on his physical condition unless it was to mention his various strengths—arms like a prizefighter’s and beautiful posture, as well as that winning smile. A photographer who dared to snap a picture of him rolling into the room on the wheeled dining chair would have been asked to surrender his film and leave the party. Louis Howe in particular had devot
ed his life to ensuring that this man he admired was never seen as a cripple or an invalid. Most of America thought Governor Roosevelt’s polio had been merely a mild case from which he had almost completely recovered. When you heard him on the radio, you felt like you would follow him into battle. You never thought about how he’d have to be wheeled to the front.

  I felt the whisper of fingertips at my elbow, and Mrs. Roosevelt was there. My heart sprang up like a grasshopper.

  “Hick, how lovely to see you.”

  “Likewise,” I said, trying to sound calm. I couldn’t help searching her face; she wouldn’t quite look at me. With so many guests to attend to, she could have passed me by. Did it mean anything that she’d come to say hello? Probably not. I had told myself a little story about her, but it was all in my imagination.

  “Franklin will want to say hello,” she said, gesturing to the table.

  I looked at John. “Want to meet him?” His eyebrows jumped. Though John had been on the trail for about a month, he griped to me every day that FDR never once called on him at the daily press conferences.

  When we approached, Mrs. Roosevelt put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Darling, you remember Lorena Hickok from the Associated Press?” John and I sat in the chairs to his right, and Mrs. Roosevelt sat to the left. It felt rude to stand while he was seated.

  The governor fixed me with his laughing eyes, and his ivory cigarette holder smoldered in the ashtray in front of him. “Of course! Hello, Hick!” He shook my hand heartily. “You’ve had a busy summer— your pieces on convention politics are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Well done.”

  Hoo. I knew I’d be trotting that praise out later on when I needed a pick-me-up. “Thank you, sir. This is my colleague John Bosco.” The men shook hands, and I could feel John trying to keep his cool, though his pinkening ears gave him away. In the presence of greatness, physiology can go haywire.