Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  It took everyone, including me, a moment to understand what she was after, but soon the bejeweled pocketbooks began to click open. A laugh rose in my chest, and I pressed my hand over my mouth to contain it. She wouldn’t let them sit comfortably beneath the crystal chandelier, these people who held all the power over the weak and out of luck—the people who had held such power over her. While I had been swept away in the love story, she had been plotting to shake down the audience.

  As ushers rushed to collect the donations in time for the second act to begin, Nora walked back up the aisle to our seats in that gait that apologized for itself, her shoulders hunched to mask her height. The anger had gone out of her.

  “You were right, Hick,” she said as she sat back down. “We cannot act as if society does not exist. I was thinking only of myself, of us. But if we could run away tomorrow and live as we pleased, what would happen to the work we’ve spent our lives on?”

  “Who cares?” I said, and mugged to make her laugh. But if she had asked me to run away right then, I would have left with nothing but the clothes on my back, apologies to Prinz.

  She tilted her head like a school marm. “There is more at stake than just our own happiness.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you,” I said. “There are very few people who have both access to high society and the gall to hit them up for cash.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t I, when the need is so great? What good am I to this country if I do not make use of every possibility to help people?” I was starting to understand that this was classic Nora: she denied herself a thing she wanted until desire bubbled up, uncontrollable. And then she tamped it down with shame at her selfishness and made herself atone.

  As the lights dimmed in advance of act three, I was left somewhat unsettled by Nora’s stunt. I couldn’t help but notice that the possibility of my own ruination—the very real chance that I might be fired and lose everything that mattered to me—had failed to move her to action. I supposed the specter of my loss was insignificant in the face of the widespread suffering of the poor women forced to do their laundry in Central Park. But aren’t we all the heroes of our own little operas? Didn’t I have the right to live inside my particular tale?

  I shifted my attention forcefully back to the stage, where the new act opened on the eve of Radamès’s wedding to a woman he is forced to marry in order to form a political alliance; he and Aida make a secret vow to run away together. I longed to take Nora’s hand in the dark but could not, and so, instead, imagined invisible wires linking us and tried to telegraph my affection.

  “Do you remember that night on the train from Potsdam?” she whispered close to my ear, “when you said I should reimagine what the first lady could be?”

  The White House was the last thing on my mind, and I couldn’t help but think that at the moment we were being galvanized by two very different forces. But I remembered everything from the night on the train as if I had transcribed it line by line into my notebook. I nodded. “You said they would fight you at every turn.”

  “Well,” Nora said, her breath warm on my skin, “I am ready for a fight.”

  LATE December 18

  My dear heart,

  I want to tell you of matters that concern me greatly at present, both to give a sense of what this country faces and to hold myself accountable. If I write here that I will take action, then I must keep my vow. Or you will not be able to put it in the book someday!

  I am working up an initiative for the Junior League and other women’s clubs; maybe we will call it “Spare a Room.” Those who run in our set tend to have space to spare in their country houses and even in the city—more rooms than people— and I’d like to propose that they fix up an extra room as an efficiency and take in someone who is down on his luck. A kind of temporary shelter initiative but dispersed across households instead of institutionalized. Certainly it is warmer and more cheerful to be in a real home, with good food and company. The members will howl, I know, and maybe it sounds ridiculous— what do you think?

  Housing is on my mind constantly. Seeing those women in the park was an admonishment that we must not rest until we have people sleeping safely indoors. Good gracious, in this richest country on earth, you would not think this should be a radical statement. I think of how hard it must be for people in the city, how rural life offers a more peaceful and economical option. Why aren’t we building homes, building towns? With jobs and schools and big gardens that will yield food inexpensively? Back to the land we must go, to teach out-of-work people how to grow their own food and depend upon themselves instead of factory jobs, and raise up whole towns full of children who have what they need to become productive citizens. It is such a trial to be patient with committees and policy briefs when daring action is required.

  Tonight is Scrambled Eggs and Brains, when we invite all manner of policy makers over to the town house for supper to discuss the issues of the day, and I mean to bring this up, these subsistence towns, though the first step is getting reports from the field. But I must take care not to bring it up until all are served because at the last session I went on a tear about trade unions and burned the eggs.

  Now, let me apologize for my stunt at the opera. We will take care and guard what is ours and I promise to behave much better if you will promise to be patient with my restless nature. Will you take me this week to the Armenian restaurant you mentioned once on the phone? I have looked up the names of the dishes and am practicing how to say them—dzhash, dolmas, lavash—so that I may order my own supper.

  All my love, darling, in all the ways I am learning to give it and long to give it, and only to you,

  Nora

  Chapter Five

  December 19, 1932

  On Monday I walked into the newsroom to find John Bosco standing in front of his desk with one hand on his hip and the other over his eyes, laughing. Eight hundred-pound sacks of feed corn were stacked on his desk and the surrounding floor. A corner of one of the sacks had torn, and the yellow grain pooled on the carpet below.

  He looked up when he saw me come in. “Oh, are you ever in for it.”

  “Whatever do you mean, sir?” I said, fluttering my lashes like an innocent doe.

  Just then, our editor, Bill, strode through the room with his eyes glued to his steno pad. He was a firecracker of a guy, compact and combustible. “Bosco. Hick,” he said, wishing us good morning without looking up. He crossed the room to the coffeepot, poured, and stalked back in our direction. John sat down on the piled sacks.

  Bill sipped his coffee and flipped a page. “Bosco, you’re on the seaport fire. The marshal is saying arson. Hick, I want ten inches on—” He looked up when he heard us snickering. Bill blinked for a moment at John’s desk. “Bosco, what the hell?”

  “Don’t ask me,” John said. “Ask this hayseed what she’s up to. Eleanor Roosevelt is turning her into some kind of do-gooder.”

  I gave John a sideways glance, wondering what he meant by that and whether it should worry me. “It was just a prank,” I rushed to say.

  Bill looked thoughtful. He had a habit of adjusting his tie and then pulling on his collar with his index finger—a tick of a man constantly on the lookout for disaster. “Hick, let’s talk in my office,” he said. Then he pointed at John. “Bosco, I hope you have a plan for getting that out of here that does not involve a flock of chickens.”

  I hustled over to my desk to call the classified department to get them to remove the ad.

  “This is great stuff, Hick,” Bill said as he waved the previous day’s issue of the Times. He smoothed his black hair. “This thing about blisters from her sensible shoes? I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  I sat down across from him at his desk. “If Mrs. Roosevelt’s shoes aren’t breaking news, I don’t know what is.”

  Over the previous few weeks, I had written about Nora’s penchant for those ten-dollar dresses and cheap hats and the way she walked everywhere to save on cab fare. Hand to God,
she packed her own lunch most days, and I had seen her mend a torn glove rather than buy a new one. Perhaps I’d been laying it on a little thick. It was only that I wanted people to see she was just a regular person like them, that she didn’t live as an heiress. But I was not breaking any big stories. Day after day in our time together, I watched scoops sail by—the things she told me!—but I did nothing with the intel, having promised her it was all off the record, that she could see my pieces before I filed them. I felt like someone I hardly recognized.

  “Well, they’re eating it up.” Bill sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. “We’ve gotten a dozen letters about this piece. You make her seem so warm, comfortable around you. Does she ever confide more than her spending habits?”

  I froze for a second, on high alert to discern his implication. “We talk,” I said. “She tells me things for background.”

  Bill nodded and seemed to accept my lie. “Well, I don’t have to tell you that we can’t underestimate her reach. She’s going to have her fingerprints on every political appointment. She’s probably got lists of candidates on her desk right now.”

  In fact, she did. I had seen her working on them, though for my own sanity I had begged her not to divulge any more names—she’d already mentioned Frances Perkins in her first dispatch—until all was said and done. I didn’t want to know how carefully her husband was considering her suggestions. See no evil, print no evil. Some other reporter would find out eventually and speculate in print. And that would be one more scoop dead and gone. But at least I wouldn’t have betrayed her.

  Bill was still looking at me. I shrugged, as if to say, When would a peon like me have the chance to see her desk?

  “Well, I think it’s brilliant, the way you’re ingratiating yourself,” he said. “If she trusts you, you’ll have unfettered access to anything the president-elect tells her.”

  “You know this job is my life, Bill,” I said, answering a different question than the one he had asked me. “I’ll bring you anything I can get.”

  He eyed me with care, and I saw there was duplicity in his praise. He tapped yesterday’s paper again. The headline was the dame has dignity; the piece contained zero actual news. At this point, I had nearly run out of uncontroversial things to say about her.

  “I hope you’re right about that, Hick. Because I’m sure you know I’m going to need more meat on the bone going forward. Readers are all over this stuff about her because he hasn’t taken office yet. They know he can’t do anything yet. But once he can, they are going to turn on you if you can’t deliver the goods. After all, it is your job.”

  I gave him a weak smile. Suddenly my blouse felt tight across my shoulders, the room too warm. Threats called up my old recklessness from my girlhood days on the farm, when I’d sometimes provoke my father to anger just to get the lashing over with, just to keep him from being able to take me by surprise. I bit down on my urge to tell Bill to go to hell. Keeping him happy, I reminded myself, was the main thing that kept me in New York and kept Bowdle a distant memory.

  But Bill wasn’t going to let it drop. “In the meantime, why don’t you get me something on the daughter’s affair.” It was a statement more than a question. Nora had told me she was helping Anna expedite the divorce, though the president had urged her to wait and see if her marriage would improve. Life is too short to be miserable, Nora had said, though of course I wouldn’t print that for all the bourbon in Kentucky.

  “What’s the news peg?” I asked Bill, trying to turn his own demands back on him. “It’s just dirty laundry, rumors.”

  Bill counted the potential angles on his pudgy fingers. “Embarrassment for the president-elect? Stress on the family? Her children running wild while she is distracted with her causes? While Anna’s off having her affair, I hear Elliott has left his wife to run off to be a cowboy in Texas.”

  I gaped at him, though he wasn’t wrong. Elliott Roosevelt had lost his mind and bought a cattle ranch, abandoned his wife and child. The Roosevelt children could not be said to have the clean reputations most people expected of members of the first family, and yet I did not see what this had to do with Nora. “Anna is a twenty-six-year-old woman, not a child. What in the world do you think her mother could do about her love life? And what do you propose she should do about Elliott—ride out to his ranch on a horse and drag him home? It wouldn’t be fair to write about those things, Bill. It would be very hurtful to Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “Well, then,” Bill said, “it’s a good thing you work for me instead of her.”

  John went out for a while and came back just as I was getting ready to leave the office for the day. He sat down at his desk with his unbuttoned coat still on; it splayed out on either side of the chair, revealing the torn blue lining. His demeanor was totally changed, his face ashen.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  He nodded once. “Just found out I lost some money.”

  “Some?”

  “A lot. A hell of a lot.” He scratched the whiskers on his neck. “Damn. I just finally got out of the last hole.”

  I took a bottle out of my desk and poured us each a drink. “Have you been to see Marina?” Another nod. He took the glass I offered. “What does she say?”

  He threw his thumb over his shoulder like an umpire. “I’m out. She says this is the last straw.”

  John’s girlfriend had said it before, but it seemed this time was different. And even though I was fond of John, I found myself thinking, Good for her. Marina was smart—smart enough to know John’s problems would make her life miserable if she married him. I’d met her at a few AP functions over the years and always thought John was punching above his weight. She was a dark Italian beauty, devout but with a rebellious streak, the kind whose murmured confession was known to make the priest drop his Bible. But wild colts made the best horses and she was trustworthy, steadfast. John, on the other hand …

  “You’re thinking she’s right,” he said, and gave me a miserable smile.

  I shook my head. What I was actually thinking was that I was a lot more like John than I was like Marina. At the moment, I was fairly on the wagon as I defined it—abstention before 10:00 a.m.—but my drinking came and went like the weather, and I knew it was only a matter of time. It takes one problem child to know another—what might change, what probably never would. John and I each had our vices, and the problem with quitting was that our vices were, for us, both causes and effects—the disease and the cure. We clung to them, despite the wreckage they caused.

  “How are you fixed for cash?” I asked.

  He held up a finger. “Don’t.” Then he laughed. “As if you have anything to give me.”

  “I could come up with a little, if you’re really in a jam.”

  “Don’t,” he said again. “Because I’ll say yes and then I’ll feel like shit.”

  I shrugged. “But it’s Christmas.”

  He considered this and his misery seemed to deepen. “Marina’s cooking for her family, and I am now officially uninvited. Hal Richards in sports is having some stragglers over—I guess that’s what I’ll do. I’m not exactly on stellar terms with my father at the moment either.”

  I drained my glass. Since I had taken up with Nora, a funny thing had happened to me: I could finally look at myself in the mirror. For the first time in I couldn’t think how long, I didn’t mind what I saw. There was the dark brown hair streaked with gray, the glower I’d retained from childhood on, but the red lips too—remembering how Nora had praised them gave me a jolt—and the laughing eyes. Behind them, my brain like a windup toy, and in my chest a gypsy heart that had roamed from the plains to the prairie to the island of Manhattan. I was hardly a sight for sore eyes, but love was giving me aspirations. I wanted to do better. I wanted John to see that he could too.

  “John,” I said and took a breath. “The gambling … I think … I think you need some help.” Someone had to say it.

  He pursed his lips and, st
anding up, shrugged out of his coat and flung it on the chair. Next to his typewriter was a cup full of pencils the secretaries sharpened each morning. He selected one with great care and slid it over his ear. “I’ll get right on that, my dear,” he said, turning to me with a smirk and pointing to my empty glass. “Soon as you quit drinking.”

  “Hoo,” I said, stung. “You can be a mean son of a bitch when you’re cornered.”

  He tilted his head and fixed me with a curious look. “You know, you went to an awful lot of trouble with this feed-corn gag,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The feed corn. The ad.”

  I smirked. “It was worth it for the laugh.”

  “But you did all that just because of what I said about Mrs. Roosevelt?” He searched my eyes like he was still waiting for the punch line. “Why do you care so much what I think of her?”

  “I don’t.” I laughed, trying to appear casual though my mind was spongy with fear. Did everyone around me know? Did Bill? Did John? I pulled up my cuff and held my bare wrist up to my eyes. The whereabouts of my watch were anyone’s guess—another casualty of my inebriated ways. “Well, would you look at the time. I need a drink.”

  “And I need to call my bookie,” he said, misery in his voice once more. “I’ll meet you there.”

  December 21— late late late

  My darling Hick,

  It has been a devil of a day and I cannot sleep.

  I am still thinking about those homeless families in the park and how we have failed them and what it means to lose one’s home. I imagine that when most people hear the name Roosevelt they think of a life of privilege, and of course they would be right, though I hope that my family has balanced its advantages with service to this nation. It might surprise some to learn, however, that I myself have never had a home of my own. As a girl, I was whisked away to my grandmother’s house when my parents died. Then off to boarding school, then marriage, after which I lived in my mother-in-law’s house (and under her thumb, which you are welcome to print once she has passed away). When Franklin entered public service we lived in a rented house in Washington, and later the governor’s mansion in Albany. And now it is off to the White House. Some would call that the best address in the land, but I might take issue with that claim.