“Hick, I’m calling to see if you are free for dinner tomorrow.”
I squinted, trying to call up the editorial calendar tacked up over my desk in the newsroom. I couldn’t remember what I had booked for the following day, but I could probably get out of it. Was she always this bad at delegating work? I wondered. The scheduling seemed like a matter for her secretary.
“Thank you for letting me know, Mrs. Roosevelt. Where will you and the president-elect be dining? We can keep it candid and light— just a piece about how you are celebrating his victory.”
She laughed. “Oh, no. It’s just me. I am teaching in the morning, you see, and I hate coming all the way from Albany without at least seeing a friend.”
It took my addled brain a moment to understand that by “friend” she meant me. “Well … sure,” I said. “I’d be honored.”
“Oh, don’t talk that way—please, you must promise.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Well, where shall we go?” My mind spiraled. Dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt, just the two of us. I could only imagine what she would think of my typical haunts, chosen for their cheap food in large portions and bootleg booze only slightly less caustic than paint thinner. She’d probably never eaten a meal that didn’t involve white tablecloths, tuxedoed waiters with silver trays. I tried to think on my feet. “Do you like Armenian? There’s a great little place in my neighborhood.”
“Oh,” she said. “That sounds … interesting.”
A misstep. What was I thinking? People of her class disdained garlic as if it were a contagious disease. “Or not,” I said. “We can go wherever you like.”
She hesitated. “In the past few months, it has gotten … more difficult for me to go about my routine without reporters following me around—the green ones, I mean. Not you. They ride in the same car with me on the train and then follow ten steps behind on the sidewalk. Last week, a young woman waited outside Todhunter for me all day. I watched her from the window of my classroom, sitting on the curb with her handbag in her lap. They don’t let me alone!”
I laughed. “Well, forgive me, but I think you have to look at things from their point of view. They have a job to do, after all. They have editors breathing down their necks.” I sat back down beside the telephone table and rested my steno pad on my knees.
Mrs. Roosevelt sighed. “I don’t see why anything I say or do would interest anyone.” Then she brightened. “What about this—do you know how to cook?”
“I do,” I sputtered. Was I understanding what she was asking? Did she want to come to my apartment?
“Would that be a terrible intrusion, if I were to invite myself over for dinner?”
“Not at all!” I tried to sound casual. “It will be a lark.” I tried to picture this heiress sitting at my flea market dining table, eating off one of my chipped plates. The balloon that had been expanding in my chest deflated into a listless rind. We would be alone together, as we had been on the train. The image of her cheek resting on her elbow flashed through my mind and I felt a spark of confused hope.
“Ten Mitchell Place,” I managed to squawk when she asked for my address.
I set the telephone down and walked slowly back into my apartment. Just two days ago, I had been standing in the parlor of her town house, where they employed a person whose entire job it was to dust things. Her butlers probably had butlers. I took a deep breath and reassured myself that it was small-minded to assume she would judge my apartment beneath her standards. Maybe it would be an adventure for her, like camping.
Back when Ellie and I were together, we lived for seven years in the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis, so neither of us had ever really gone to housekeeping. Since our split, I had lived on my own, and, as I looked at my living room, I could see now that I had let things go quite to hell. I picked up an empty coffee cup and a glass sticky with the remnants of yesterday’s bourbon and carried them into the kitchen. Over the narrow sink was a window with a small shelf mounted on it, and, miracle of miracles, my African violets seemed to thrive there despite the soot and grime the alley coughed up. New Yorkers complained about how dirty the city was, but I knew better. Bowdle, South Dakota—now that was a filthy place. Out there the dust had nothing to cling to and so it gathered in roving clouds that would burst through a kitchen window at a moment’s notice. My mother had once laid the most beautiful—if humble—supper on the table when one of those clouds coughed in and coated every last piece of food with red dirt. She hadn’t even cried; she had been beyond crying by then. Oh, how I hated thinking about those years. The blessing of New York was its anonymity, its pastlessness. When the AP hired me—a dirt-poor nobody with the lineage of an alley rat and a college degree it took me four tries to get—I had learned that you could erase your whole story and start again. The city had wiped me clean, and reporting had saved me. It was the bone running down my back.
All I could be was what I was, so I got to work. I did the dishes and peeled off the daybed cover; I attacked all four corners and the ceiling cobwebs with a broom, scooping the dust and dog hair into the dustpan. Prinz padded over and looked from me to all his old hair in a heap. He seemed a little hurt when he saw me tip the dustpan into the pail, but I just said to him, “Look, bub, the past is dead and gone.”
I polished the scuffed surface of the dining table and ironed a linen tablecloth I had found at a rummage sale the previous spring. Then I hauled the daybed cover and my dusty drapes to the launderette.
“Aren’t I virtuous?” I asked Prinz when I took him out for his evening stroll. He was stoic, but I knew he was impressed. If I got hit by a bus now, I thought, everyone would marvel at what a fastidious housekeeper I’d been.
In the morning, I woke gasping out of a dream of curdled hollandaise and too-rare lamb, as if I had a clue how to prepare either. Steaks, I thought, steaks in the oven. Then I combed the apartment—cookie jar, summer pocketbooks, junk drawer—in search of funds. At the office, I filed the last part of my profile, wondering if Mrs. Roosevelt had read the installment that had run in the morning edition.
By six o’clock, I had the steaks slathered in ketchup and baking in the oven. I put on the first act of La Traviata, and, while I set the table, I amused myself imagining what Wagner would say about Verdi’s masterpiece. Too beautiful; too satisfying. Better to make the audience long for resolution but never give it to them. Better to torture them with dissonant chords that kept relief just out of reach. I aspired, in opera as in life, to the Italian way, but Wagner had his thumb on my heart, I knew. I was doomed to unrequited longing.
I opened a bottle of Chianti but drank down a bourbon first, lit a cigarette, and stood in the middle of the kitchen to smoke it. I clutched the wooden pendant on my necklace with my left hand as if it were a rosary with a single bead and the prayer was Don’t screw this up.
The door buzzed.
I opened it and there she stood, with a dark-suited man behind her.
I tried to breathe. “Hello there.”
“Hello, Hick!” she said, and glanced down. “And who’s this?” She knelt and put out her hand. I introduced Prinz and, gentleman that he was, he offered his paw. She rubbed his ears and then gestured to the man standing in the hallway. “This is Marcus, who is here to protect me from you or anyone hiding in your apartment who means me harm. Franklin insists, but he will lose this argument eventually.”
Poor Marcus, I thought. I shook his hand.
He didn’t smile—perhaps he wasn’t allowed—but his kind brown eyes were full of patience. “Would you like to take a look around?” I asked.
“Just quickly,” he said, “and then I will be out of your way.”
Marcus stepped inside and poked his head into the kitchen. He peeked in the small pantry and cased the living room, glancing under the overhanging tablecloth and in the alcove where I slept. The whole thing took about ten seconds.
“All clear,” he said.
“Thank heavens,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, and took o
ff her gloves.
“Enjoy your supper, ladies.” He went out the door and closed it behind him.
“Let’s start over,” she said. “Thank you for having me, Hick.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure, Mrs. Roosevelt. May I take your coat?”
“We need to talk about that.”
“About your coat?” I asked as she slipped it off and handed it to me. It was navy cashmere with silver buttons, and I hung it in the front closet. The first lady’s coat, just hanging in my closet.
“No, about my name. Won’t you please call me Eleanor?”
I cleared my throat and tried to say it, but I couldn’t get my gums around it. “I don’t think so,” I said.
She made a dismissive cluck with her tongue. “Did you know that Marcus is going to sit downstairs in the car and wait until we are finished with our supper? And then I am going to have to argue with him about letting me take the train back to Albany instead of riding with him?”
“Well, he has his orders.” She seemed not to understand the gravity of what had happened to her, that her husband had just been elected to the highest office in the land.
“And I probably should let him drive me, because when I get to Grand Central, that woman reporter is going to be waiting for me on the platform. She followed me all the way here and, when I walked out to Forty-Second Street, would you believe she had the gall to ask me where I was going? She wanted an address!”
I laughed, but I actually felt myself getting my back up over it a little. “Marcus there, that lady reporter—you know, they aren’t setting out to annoy you. They have jobs. They have bills to pay. If they don’t do the work they’ve been assigned, they’ll be fired. Lord knows there will be a line of people waiting out the door to take their jobs. We don’t all live like Roosevelts.”
Suddenly it was very quiet in my apartment. I had blurted many idiotic things in my time, but that was one of the more harrowing. My throat started closing up, and I fumbled to apologize but failed. Her face cycled through a few emotions—surprise, irritation, and then amusement. It gave me a little zing to speak to her frankly and get away with it.
“Hick, I am being an absolute bore. Let’s talk about something else.” She glanced around the living room. “Your apartment is wonderful. How long have you been here?”
“About four years.”
“And it’s all yours?”
“All three leaky faucets and a radiator loud enough to rattle your teeth. Lucky me.” But I did love it, my little kitchen, my violets, listening to my opera records as loudly as I pleased. When I was with Ellie, we had lived in the Leamington Hotel as if we were on vacation, everything temporary and subject to change. And change it did when she announced she would marry to please her family, leaving me in the lurch. I had lugged my broken heart to Manhattan then and found this grand Tudor building in Turtle Bay, an oddity among the laundries and slaughterhouses that churned out soot. I loved its herringbone brickwork, its enormous fireplace in the lobby. It was the closest I’d ever come to making a real home, a refuge from the world’s strife. The only hitch was that I’d had to do it alone.
“Lucky indeed,” she said. “What’s for supper?”
“Steaks.” I stepped into the kitchen and peeked into the oven. “Would you like some wine?”
“Half a glass. I don’t really drink, but when in Rome …”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Don’t follow my example, or you’ll really be in trouble.”
“You don’t drink that much, do you?” she said with a soft laugh.
If she only knew, I thought.
Then she sat down and I handed her the wine to pour while I fixed our plates and carried them to the table. She seemed very relaxed and, all of a sudden, I felt silly for having worried so much about what she would think of my humble abode. Of course, to someone who can have anything she wants, any piece of jewelry or furniture, any fine hotel suite, lobster for breakfast, no indulgence holds much interest. Solitude and autonomy were the only luxuries she could not obtain, and I had them in spades. I couldn’t believe it, but she envied me.
“I love it here,” she said. “May I move in?”
I unfolded my napkin and draped it in my lap. “Yes, if you will chip in for groceries.”
Prinz trotted over to us and lay down beneath the table, placing one paw on the top of my stockinged foot as he liked to do. After a while, I noticed that her glass was empty. “Would you like some more wine, Mrs. Roosevelt?”
Her mouth drooped. “Eleanor! Just say it!”
“I want to,” I said as I poured for her. “I really do. But I just can’t.”
“You have a very nice nickname. I’ve never even heard anyone call you Lorena. Why can’t I have one?”
I laughed. “You are about to become the first lady of the United States of America,” I said. “I am fairly sure you can have anything you want.” I thought about it a moment, trying to come up with a solution. “And no one ever called you anything else when you were a girl?”
She shook her head. “My father did call me Little Nell, after the character from Dickens. But that name reminds me of him, and, well—”
I nodded so that she didn’t feel she had to explain. My eyes went to the triple strand of pearls at her throat. Had they belonged to her mother before her, her grandmother before that? I wondered how heavy they were with the weight of the past. “I know all about those kinds of memories,” I said. “The ones that dog you.”
“You do?”
“My father’s only nickname for me was You Little Bitch.” I felt my face color and laughed a hard, awkward laugh, trying to shrug off my candor. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”
She held my gaze and pushed her wineglass aside so that she could put her elbow on the table and rest her chin on her palm. Her long forearm extended beyond her cuff like the pale branch of a birch tree. “There is nothing more cowardly than a man who would be cruel to a child.”
I laughed that same laugh, uneasy that I had brought the conversation anywhere near this topic. “Well.” I blinked. My eyes had started to fill. “It’s all decades behind me now.”
“And he has passed away?” she asked.
I nodded. “Several years ago.”
“Well, then. You are free.”
Beneath the table, Prinz changed position, and when he settled, he moved his paw from my foot to hers. I felt dizzy. I never talked about these things with anyone, so I didn’t have much experience with a person standing up for my side of things. Even my mother hadn’t intervened to save me. Then she died and my father remarried, and my stepmother was no better. When I was a child, I had had a kitten named Tweezer, on account of her legs being so skinny. She had a beautiful face and fur like feathers. And one night when I was seven, my father dashed her brains out on the side of the barn for no reason at all. I saw her lying in the weeds, all bloodied, as I walked to school the next day and had to wait until I got home to bury her. And no one in my house ever said a thing. Mrs. Roosevelt would have been sixteen that year, already taller than everyone in my one-room schoolhouse. What if I had known her then? Would she have stood up to him?
Now her hand rested on the table, the long graceful fingers free of scars and the knobs left by broken bones, her nails painted a pale pink. I wanted very badly to touch her hand, but that was out of the question. Instead, I slid my wineglass closer to hers until the rims touched with a soft clink.
“I hope I haven’t upset you,” she said.
“I brought it up. And anyway, don’t we all have wounds like these and try like the devil to pretend them away?”
“Yes, indeed.”
I looked at her expectantly.
She laughed. “Oh, I see. You’ve shared your tale of difficult times, and you’d like me to respond in kind.”
I grinned. “It seems only fair. It doesn’t have to be on the record.”
“I can see why everyone says you’re such a good reporter. Now
you have me wondering whether those things you said about your father are even true.”
“If only they weren’t.”
She didn’t say anything for so long that I wondered whether she was going to stand up and leave. Then, finally, she started talking. “I guess it was about ten years ago—in ’18, so that would make it a few more than ten—when Franklin’s mother and I received a telegram at Hyde Park that we should come to the city and summon an ambulance to meet Franklin’s ship, which was just returning from Europe. He had pneumonia in both lungs, they told me, plus a case of influenza that concerned them even more.”
“I can see why,” I said. “An awful lot of people were dying from it around then.” I wondered where the story was going. Would she tell me that this brush with death helped strengthen her marriage for the unknown challenges that lurked in years to come, like his polio, his political scandals, the grueling campaigns? The idea of so tidy a narrative disappointed me. I wanted to bypass the public image, yearned to get at her secret truths the way a hand wants to find its way inside a blouse.
She continued. “So his mother and I rushed to the port and got him home under a doctor’s care. While I let him rest, I began to unpack his bags, sorting out what papers required attention, which dispatches should be filed—that sort of thing. And that’s when I found the letters.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“There were so many of them. The bundle must have been three inches thick, and it was tied together with red string. He had only been gone for two months. So she must have sent at least one every day.”
“Did you know her?” I was trying not to tip my hand—I wasn’t completely shocked by this story, as plenty of rumors swirled about FDR’s dalliances. And as assistant secretary of the navy and then governor, he would have had access to plenty of adoring women, in addition to well-appointed offices in which to meet with them.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “It was Lucy Mercer, my secretary.”
“Your secretary!”
“Apparently his own secretary was too busy with actual work to make herself available.”
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