What is a home, really, but a warm, dry place with a comfortable chair, and a table filled with the ones you love? That—the freedom and privacy of that place—is something I have not known. I hope it won’t sound to you as though I am complaining. All over this land as I write there are people suffering in ways I cannot imagine: hunger, sickness, and despair. It can bring me to my knees if I let it. But what I do think I have a little knowledge of is the forlorn heart of one who has no place of refuge that is all her own, however humble it might appear. I hope when I am gone someone might say of me that I tried to make of that displaced feeling some good action that changed things for the better, that put more solid roofs over the heads of my fellow citizens. I see now how my work is just beginning, and I am getting all kinds of notions about the programs and things I’d like to do. That I intend to do. And watch out or I will recruit you for the effort.
Though for now I am content, my darling, to make my home in the crook of your elbow, in the soft shelter of your chin. How I miss you every minute we’re apart.
Nora
Chapter Six
Christmas Eve 1932
Most years, the holidays meant little to me. Ruby and Julian and I might get together for supper at a diner near their apartment. My quilting-circle neighbor, Mrs. Jansen, would cross-stich me a pillow and leave it wrapped in tissue paper in front of my door. In turn, I’d give her a box of stationery from Terrapin—a sort of nudge that she might consider another mode of communication to reduce the endless hours she spent yammering on the hallway telephone.
But this year was going to be different. Nora and I had made plans—real plans—to celebrate Christmas Eve together at my place, just the two of us. The president-elect was stuck in Albany finishing up his gubernatorial duties, and his mother had joined him there. The children wouldn’t be back in Manhattan until Christmas Day. Surely over at the town house the servants were breaking their backs to hang garlands of holly on that endless banister, but Nora said she planned to send them home to their families at five.
We picked out a tree together, and I decorated it in anticipation of her arrival. On the way home from work, I detoured to Macy’s to splurge on a box of ornaments, pink and green and blue bubbled glass blown into the shape of bells. They looked a little showy alongside the popcorn garland and paper snowflakes I’d made—I hadn’t cut paper snowflakes since my one-room schoolhouse days—but I didn’t care. In the oven, a meatloaf was baking. On the stove was a pot of mashed parsnips drowning in butter, and a chocolate cake waited in its bakery box. The door buzzed and I threw back what was left in my glass, rinsed it and put it in the drain board so that she wouldn’t know I had already been drinking.
“Merry Christmas!” Nora said when I opened the door. She wore a dark coat with a mink collar and on the lapel was a sparkling pin shaped like a poinsettia. Marcus stood behind her. Prinz greeted them with a woof, and Nora rubbed his ears.
“Merry Christmas, madam,” I said, careful not to be too familiar. “And to you, Marcus.”
He nodded without smiling, never breaking form. “Thank you, Miss Hickok.” Nora moved out of the doorway to let him pass, and he took a couple steps into the apartment and gave a cursory glance around. While he was occupied, her eyes found mine and we shared one of our bird-brained grins of infatuation. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a small wrapped gift, about the size of a book. My heart plunged and I felt my nerves start to jangle like a bunch of old keys. Shouldn’t I have known that the gift I planned to give her was too much, too extravagant? And now it would seem so all the more in comparison with a mere book.
I chewed the inside of my bottom lip. I could pretend I hadn’t gotten her anything—that was one solution. I could take the book and be overjoyed, and then act embarrassed at my oversight. Or I could tell her that I had bought us tickets to something, that they would be waiting at will call. I racked my brain trying to remember the rest of the operas on the season’s schedule.
“Now, listen to me, Marcus,” Nora was saying as she slipped the gift back into her pocket. “It’s Christmas Eve, and my husband and I are not going to hear of your working. Do you understand?”
“Well, I—”
“I can’t stand the thought of you out there in the cold car, and your wife sitting home alone.”
“Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, “it’s my job.”
“But I am fine—can’t you see?”
Though his face remained blank I spied a new tension in his jaw. “Mrs. Roosevelt, with all respect: I understand your frustration, but I answer to your husband and Mr. Howe. We can take no threat lightly. I will stay out of your way, downstairs. Please enjoy your dinner. And Merry Christmas, Miss Hickok.”
He went away down the hall and I closed the door. “What was that all about?” Prinz tapped across the room, back to his bed.
Nora shook her head. “It’s nothing. They are alarmists.” I raised my eyebrows, waiting for more, and she sighed. “We receive an awful lot of mail these days and there are … factions that hate the government no matter who is running it.”
“All right,” I said, uneasy. It was her way to underplay things, but Marcus seemed to be on high alert.
“Sometimes they make the president’s family the target of a threat.”
My mind filled with violent images—a man bursting in with a gun, someone waiting for her outside the elevator door. The reporter in me went to work. “Is it credible?”
“No,” she said, unperturbed. “Maniacs write things just to waste our time.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute; then I went into the kitchen and poured myself another bourbon. Nora glanced at the tumbler when I came back to the living room. She had a certain expression that I was sure her husband had been on the wrong end of a time or two. Her extreme self-discipline made it impossible for her to understand how some people really could come to rely on a crutch. She would have made a marvelous Puritan, I thought.
“You’re making me anxious,” I said. I was afraid for her and afraid for myself. If something happened to her, I would be devastated and I would never be able to tell anyone why.
“Don’t think about it anymore,” she said. “I wish he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Over dinner, she calmed my nerves with idle talk. After that we ate our cake at the coffee table, listening to carols on the radio. I found my missing watch in the ice cube tray and we both had a good laugh. Again I wondered what to do about our exchange of gifts, but in the end I decided to go ahead with what I had planned. Even if she hadn’t brought me anything at all, I still would have handed over the little silk pouch cinched at the top with grosgrain ribbon. I’d been walking around with it in my pocket all day.
“This is for you,” I said as I dropped it in her hand.
“Oh,” she said with glee. “Is it time for gifts?” She set the pouch on the coffee table unopened and went to the closet where I had hung her coat. She came back with her package and set it next to my crumb-speckled plate. “You go first. It has been such a trial keeping this a secret!”
I glanced uneasily at her gift and drained my drink. “Nora, I just want to tell you that nothing you could give me now could mean more than what you have already given me.” My voice sounded hoarse and I realized with horror that I might cry. “These last weeks…” I felt as though we’d crammed a lifelong relationship into them, marching past the typical fits and starts of new love. And for good reason. We both knew the clock was ticking until the inauguration.
She shook her head, her eyes kind. “You don’t have to say anything, Hick. I know. I feel it too.”
The moment I picked up the wrapped gift, I realized that it couldn’t be a book. The contents of the package were flexible, soft. I gave her a questioning look and she clapped her hands. “Go on,” she said.
I pulled away the paper to find five folded squares of fabric in various patterns—sheer silk and linen and one bouclé—tied together with ribbon.
“
Swatches!” Nora said. “If you hate any of them, you can tell me. We’ve got plenty of time to keep looking and make our plan.”
“You’re having a pillow made for me?” I asked, struggling to keep the disappointment out of my voice. This was worse than a book. Between Mrs. Jansen and Nora, I was going to have pillows coming out my ears—and, in about five minutes, enough embarrassment to last me the rest of my days.
She laughed. “Well sure, if you want one. But I was thinking of a sofa, curtains …” She raised her eyebrows, waiting to see if I understood.
“You’re going to redecorate my apartment?”
Again she laughed. “Well, this is rather fun.” She tapped her chin with her index finger. “I wonder if I should just keep you in the dark a while longer.”
“Nora!”
Finally she put me out of my misery. “We have a lot of property at Hyde Park, as you know,” she said. “There’s the big house, where Franklin grew up and where his mother lives when she is there.” I nodded. “And, a few miles away, Val-Kill, my cottage with the furniture workshop. But when all of this is over”—and by all of this I gathered she meant the presidency, her public life—“I am going to build a new house, a little cottage. And you and I will live there together.”
I stared at her, stunned. “I don’t understand.”
“A home of our own, Hick. A real home. A life that is just ours.”
The emotion I’d been trying to restrain a moment before rushed up and my eyes spilled over.
“Nora,” I said. I couldn’t string together any other words.
“You see what I want to tell you, don’t you, Hick?” She put her hand on my arm. “You are the one I want to be with. You are the one I love.”
This really wasn’t just a lark, an infatuation. That was why it seemed I’d already forgotten what my life had been like before. This was love. And hearing her say it was like an incantation. I let my mind drift over what could be—a quiet life in the country, cups of coffee in the mornings. I saw our dogs running together in the woods, nipping and wrestling in a patch of sunny meadow. I saw a porch swing, and, in the winter, a wood stove fragrant with cedar. Nora had talked in her last dispatch about the forlorn heart of the homeless, and I wondered if she knew she was talking about me too. My years as a girl were a horror to me, and home then was a prison; in the decades since I’d left South Dakota I had doubted I would ever lay my head somewhere that would finally let me breathe easy.
And doubt had made me skeptical. The scene I imagined was nearly painful, because the images were so sweet and so unlikely. I wondered whether she really believed we could have that life. And, even if we could, how many long years would we have to wait for it? I wanted it now, today.
But to her the plans were as good as under way. “We’ll have all the furniture custom-made at the workshop and choose everything together. It really will belong to both of us.”
She took care not to mention, of course, that the cottage would be on Roosevelt land, with her lawful husband just a short drive away. Still, it was a beautiful thing to imagine, and I took solace in the fact that my gift to her no longer seemed extravagant. “You make me so happy. Nora,” I said, and nudged the silk pouch closer to her. She untied the ribbon and turned it over. The ring fell into her hand and its sapphire caught the light from the kitchen.
She looked at me with wide eyes. “Hick, it’s too much.”
“It’s not enough. Nothing could be.” I held out my palm and she placed her right hand on top of mine. When I looked at her, she nodded—she wanted me to slip it on her finger.
“With this ring,” I joked, trying to cheer myself out of a sudden darkness that had engulfed me. How torn I was—to love her as I did, to know in my bones that she loved me in return. But she wasn’t really free to give me that love. Every expression we made of our feelings had a bassline of sorrow, love at once uttered and negated. For now we lived in the same city, but soon she would move three hours and a universe away. It was terrible, and the only way I could bear it was to lie to myself in the way that boozers can—to make this night an island, untouched by yesterday or tomorrow, and believe there would be no consequences for the promises we made now.
“I thee wed,” she finished, her eyes still on mine, her face free of guile, and that was it: we were joined by a vow to love fully and secretly, and I felt as protected as I ever could be. We had created a world of our own in which we could be our true selves, invincible.
In the privacy of my apartment, we felt free and unafraid. Time slipped as we listened to one record after another and drank a bottle of wine, and it was into this scene of relaxed abandon that, hours later, Marcus burst, the door banging against the wall in his wake.
Nora and I leaped apart. I stood frozen, my hand clutching the open placket of my blouse. She quickly fixed her dress. Marcus stared not at us but at the blanket that, just a moment ago, had covered us. Now, it draped from the couch to the floor. I could see his thoughts race from shock to confusion. And then his face filled with disgust.
Panic bloomed in my chest as Marcus turned to face the open door to give us a moment to collect ourselves.
“I thought you said you would be waiting in the car,” Nora spat. As if righteousness could save us. She shoved pins into her hair, and I saw at once that we had lost our cover. There was no explaining that what Marcus had seen was friends merely sharing affection. We were no longer hiding in plain sight. And it was the disgust on his face that woke me to how much trouble we were in—how could I have let us be so careless? How could I have forgotten that the world would twist the love we shared into something ugly, perverted?
Marcus cleared his throat. “I was in the car, ma’am, but you said your evening would be finished by midnight and it is twelve forty-five. I knocked, but … there was no answer. With the recent threats, I became concerned.”
I realized he was shouting to be heard over the music, and I crossed the room to turn off the record player, swallowing the urge to vomit. In the bathroom, Prinz was barking his head off and I didn’t dare let him out for fear he would attack the Secret Service man. Lord, what had we brought down on our heads? What would Marcus do? Nora would have to ride home to the town house in the car with him. I cringed imagining how awkward it would be for them both.
I looked at her, hoping to see some reassurance—Marcus still had his back to us—but her features were slack. She too was nearly frantic and seemed to hear the question I was all but shouting: What should we do?
She shook her head as if to say she would handle it—if it could be handled, that is.
My fingers worried the pendant at my neck as I shuffled through the possibilities. Marcus might go to Louis with it, if he was afraid Nora would try to have him fired. Louis might go to Bill. Of course, Louis could never let the tale reflect poorly on Nora. He would tell an altered story, say that I had fallen into an obsession with Mrs. Roosevelt and forgotten my place, that I should be removed. I would be ruined.
Marcus went into the hall while she slipped on her coat. I saw the flash of the blue sapphire when her hand emerged from her cuff and thought that there was nothing crueler than to finally have the thing you had longed for. Because the world always takes it away—always. For those few hours, we had lived as if we were free, and now we would pay the price. We did not embrace as they left, only shared a final glance before she followed Marcus out. I stood with my back against the wall, listening to her footsteps and the click of the elevator door as it sealed her inside.
Chapter Seven
New Year’s
It snowed on Christmas Day, and I holed up in my apartment, combing notes and recent papers to generate ideas for stories on things other than the Roosevelts. I had once covered crime and the courts, and I could do it again if I had to. I wanted to be ready to change gears and prove my worth if Bill confronted me—or when he did. I couldn’t stop imagining how it might unfold and called in sick with the flu so I didn’t have to face him.
&
nbsp; As the days passed, I slowly consumed all the food in my refrigerator, too afraid I’d miss Nora’s phone call if I went down the block to the market. But the phone did not ring, and as the last day of the year approached, I received no mail other than bills. Left to its own devices, my mind worked up a few awful possibilities: That Nora would throw me off as if there were nothing between us. Or that she was taking the blame for it all, trying to protect me. I couldn’t decide which was worse. The precious time we had left together in New York before she moved to Washington and the White House was leaking away.
Finally, it was the need for more bourbon that ejected me, like a pilot from a plane that was going down in flames.
“Ice or no ice?”
That was the only choice with which one was faced at Dom’s, a speakeasy accessed by a steel door covered in peeling brown paint that was hidden by a garbage bin in an alley off Forty-Seventh Street. John and I often found ourselves sitting across from each other at a wobbly table in the dank warehouse that still smelled of the pickles that had once been canned there. We liked it because it was close to our office and made no pretense of glamour, romance, or even heat in the winter. Dom kept a fifty-year-old wood stove next to the bar, which vented through a leaking collection of makeshift pipes that ran up to the street. Everybody kept their coats on until they had drunk enough to warm up.
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