Chapter Sixteen
September 2–17, 1933
In the morning, I woke to find all of them gone. Nora’s schedule and mine had diverged once again. The Roosevelt family was off to the rustic luxury of a Cape Cod vacation, while the itinerary Harry Hopkins sent by telegram said I would be investigating upstate New York and New England’s shabbier byways—fishing towns in decline, counties that depended on quarries and dairy farms. Perhaps Harry would take pity on me, I thought, and reimburse me for two bus tickets so that I might buy the seat beside me and avoid any northbound nose pickers who tried to chat me up.
I had a vague memory of Nora’s lips sweeping my cheek as she said goodbye in the wee hours, but, like most of our encounters over the last few weeks, the moment felt ephemeral and I partly doubted whether it had happened at all. I dressed in my little converted bedroom and tidied my things so that the maids wouldn’t have to trouble over much. As soon as they heard me stirring, there was a knock at the door and one maid brought in a tray with a silver coffeepot and plate of rolls with butter and jam while another brought in a stack of freshly laundered clothes—mine, I realized, though I couldn’t think of when they had taken them out. The White House staff moved with a silent choreography that was a marvel. It made me uncomfortable; I didn’t like to think of anyone else but me having to rinse out my stockings at the end of the day.
The first maid came back once more, this time with a cryptic note for me in Nora’s hand. Go see Walt in the garage, darling, it said. You may not say no.
I looked at the maid in confusion.
“I can show you the way if you’d like, Miss Hickok.”
I followed her through the building’s hallowed halls, past portraits of founding fathers and paintings of ships and bucolic farms and other scenes meant to stoke the embers of patriotism. We exited a door that led to a series of outbuildings, and, inside a large garage, she introduced me to a graying man in olive drab coveralls.
“Miss Hickok.” He nodded as the maid disappeared, back to her covert tasks. “Mrs. Roosevelt has everything arranged. Please come on through.”
I followed him past several bays occupied by cars and trucks. The garage, noisy with whirring tools, was enveloped in the aroma of coffee and motor oil. We passed mechanics illuminated by caged bulbs as they worked beneath the hood and chassis of two White House vehicles under repair. At the back of the garage, pointed toward a wide door shoved up on its runners, was a gleaming blue Chevrolet.
I gaped at Walt.
“It’s not new,” he said, as if that made the gift any less extravagant. I walked slowly around the left side to the front, where the sun glinted off the bumper. It was a cabriolet model, with chrome headlights that stretched across the grille like a pair of eyeglasses, black fenders, and tires with unblemished white spokes. The top was down, folded back behind the seat.
“Why don’t you sit in it?” Walt said. “Get a feel for it.”
My chest tightened with disappointment. The car was such a grand gesture, but how could she have forgotten such an important detail? “Walt, it’s a beauty—but I don’t know how to drive!”
Walt wiped his hands on a greasy rag and tucked it back in his pocket. “I know. Mrs. Roosevelt hired a young man to take you on the first leg of your trip north. He’ll teach you the basics, until you’re ready to be on your own.”
I peeked at the dash, which was littered with dials and switches, and noted a three-foot-long stick crowned with a black knob that jutted out of the floor. “It’s a thousand-pound tin can of death,” I said.
Walt smiled. “Oh, two thousand pounds, at least. Maybe three.”
I let Walt get back to work and rushed up to my room to write to Nora to tell her that this plan was extremely harebrained. But before I could, I found another note from her waiting on the desk in my room:
Dear Hick,
Her name is Bluette. She will grow on you.
Love, Nora
On the twelfth of September, a stocky young man named Sam—Walt’s grandson, I later learned—loaded my bags into the trunk lashed to Bluette’s hindquarters and got behind the wheel. After a few tries he got the car—my car—started, and we headed around the winding drive out to Pennsylvania Avenue and Foggy Bottom and up through the campus of Georgetown on the road that hugged the Potomac.
From Washington we drove north through Pennsylvania, toward Corning, New York. After a couple of hours, with the Washington traffic long behind us, Sam pulled off at a filling station. The attendant shined the headlights with a rag and washed the dust from the windshield; then he filled the tank and checked the radiator and the oil. When he was finished, Sam drove across the street to a nearly empty parking lot beside a church. He opened my door and offered me a hand.
But I stayed in my seat, my fingernails gripping the leather. “I don’t think I’m ready,” I said.
Sam smiled and his doughy cheeks lifted. “No time like the present, Miss Hickok.”
I griped for a few more minutes but then gave in and crossed to the driver’s side. In a calm voice, Sam explained about the clutch and the hand brake, the big stick for shifting gears, the pedals— everything I needed to do to make the big boat move. I stomped on the pedals a few times before I succeeded at shifting into gear and releasing the hand brake, and we began to crawl across the blacktop. I gripped the steering wheel so tightly I could feel my pulse throb in my fingers.
“Now turn to the left,” Sam said.
Flustered, I cranked the wheel to the right instead and we jerked sideways.
“Or the right,” he said, and chuckled. “We can try left next.”
I turned to give him a withering look, thereby taking my eyes off the parking lot for a moment. When I turned back, a squirrel made a break for it across our path. “How do I stop again, goddamnit?” I yelled, swerving to miss the bushy tail that whipped out of sight.
“The pedal in the center,” Sam said, his voice gentle even as I rocked us to a halt by stomping on the brake. He patted my shoulder. “I think you’re doing just fine.”
I jerked on the handbrake, switched off the ignition, and stalked out of the car, leaving the door open behind me. My cheeks were hot and I felt helpless and out of control. I stood with one hand on the back of my hip and lit a cigarette, thought as I smoked it about how the squirrel could have been a child on a bike.
I was furious at Nora. I should have been grateful for her generous gift, but why wasn’t she here with me? Was she throwing money at my problems so that she could manage me from afar? So much had changed in a matter of months. There were no more taxis in my life; they’d gone the way of reporting, of evenings at the Met, of Nora passing notes to me in front of the fire in her sitting room. My life had become as unrecognizable to me as the dials on the dash of the car. But as John had told me that drunken night at Dom’s, we all pay the price to get what we get. What we want doesn’t always factor in, and there isn’t a damn thing a gal can do about that.
When the cigarette was spent, I flicked it away and walked back to the car. Sam got out of the passenger side to take the wheel, but I waved him back and got behind it myself. If Nora thought she could ply me with gifts, I supposed she was right; moping around would get old fast. “I’ll take it from here,” I said. When I turned onto the empty road, I pressed down hard on the gas.
The next few days passed in a blur of tours—glass factories that made thermometers and red and green lightbulbs for railroad signs; dairies where farmers were shooting their cows rather than continue to pay to feed them when they couldn’t get more than pennies for the milk. Lake Ontario blew autumnal breezes that made me glad for my sweater as I met with county officials eager to show off the public works programs they had established for men on relief. In Syracuse, men built a public pool, a museum, an athletic field; they dug up poplar trees whose roots ruptured the sewer pipes, and repaved the roads. Everywhere I went, I heard the same thing: men and women were itching to work, if only we could find enough for
them to do.
On the first day in New York, I tried calling Nora at the Cape Cod house to thank her for the car, but no one answered. I imagined them out for a sail. On the second day, satisfied that I could handle Bluette on my own, Sam took a bus back to Washington, which left me to pull into the porte cochere at the Hotel Syracuse alone. A valet took the car, and I sailed with relief across the plush carpet of the lobby. I knew Bluette would deliver me from the many indignities of traveling by bus, but I felt an awful lot more relaxed when she was parked in one place and I was parked in another, preferably with a fresh drink in my hand.
“Good evening,” said the manager when I approached the desk. He had dark eyebrows and a mustache as thick as a pelt. “Checking in?”
“Reservation for Hickok.” I propped my cheek on the heel of my hand as I waited.
He consulted the book and made a mark in one of the columns. Then he plucked a key on a silver ring from its hook. “Four-seventeen. Oh, and you’ve got a letter too,” he said, and pulled it from a cubby behind him. I glanced at the postmark. It was from Harry Hopkins’s office in Washington.
I took the elevator upstairs to the room, left my bags and the letter, and went back down to the lobby and around the corner to a pharmacy I had seen on the way in. What I wanted was a drink. Repeal was on its way; though spirits still were technically illegal, the president already had lifted the ban on beer. But beer had never appealed to me. It was about as effective for what I was after as trying to clean the Taj Mahal with a toothbrush. Fortunately, no one in the state of New York worried much about enforcing the all-but-dead law, and “medicinal” liquor could be found at the drugstore.
I paid for my staples—two packs of Pall Malls, a ham sandwich, and a bottle of bourbon—and returned to the room to open the letter. The outer envelope, from Harry’s secretary, contained another letter that had a Morgantown postmark. I opened that envelope and unfolded two pieces of paper. The first was from Clarence, explaining that he was trying to help the enclosed letter reach me and would write in another week to make sure it had come through. I flipped to the second page, a cheap piece of lined paper like the kind found in a child’s school notebook:
August 31
Dear Miss Hickok,
Bet you thawt I did not know how to rite well werent you wrong. I went to school as a girl and tho I caint say as I use it much I do know my letters and how to read the scripcher which Norbert says is all we need. I like to ask him how well thats done for us so far but that is not a bright idea.
I asked Mr. Pickett to get this letter to you because he tole me you used to rite for the newspaper and may be you can help me. Rumors been flying round this camp since you visited. Some say the first lady came back a few days later tho I werent round to see it for myself. What I need to know from you is what all have they got planned? People are saying the govment is going to build houses where some families can live. Some of these women round here are dum as a sack of hair so as one caint take nothing they say to serius.
But I got to say Miss Hickok if it is true can you help us? We just have to get in to one of them houses. I hate to beg but to be honest with you I am pert near the end of my rope with more little uns than I can say grace over and another one on the way that my husband got on me. Even tho I tole him enuf is enuf. He means to provide but what can he do when there aint a job to be found? All of us been sick with one thing after a nother and these little babys are all the time hungry. We got winter coming all over agin now and I just dont know how much more we all can take. Please help us if you can.
Yours truly,
Ruth Johnson
I stared at the uneven scrawl so painstakingly written I could feel the ridges the words made on the back side of the paper. I wondered how many drafts Mrs. Johnson had made and discarded before copying out this last one, and whether she had really believed it would reach me. When we met that first day back in Scotts Run and her little boy had piddled down the front of her dress, she had seemed so defeated, so far out of reach of anything like hope. And yet here she was writing this letter, going above her husband, to try to get her family out of that mess. Which just went to show that you can’t keep a good woman down.
I had half a mind to write her back immediately and give her my word that she would get one of those houses. I stopped myself, as I had been on the wrong end of a dubious promise and knew not to inflict that particular heartbreak. Secretary Ickes of Interior had yet to publicly announce the plans for Arthurdale, and, once he did, I was fairly sure the families who applied for consideration would have to endure enough red tape to wrap all the Christmas presents in America—not that there would be too many of them, based on the conditions I’d seen so far in my travels. Ruth Johnson needed help now.
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was past midnight, too late to try calling Nora at the Cape Cod house again, though I was certain she was still up toiling away in the dim light of a hokey seashell-shaped lamp, over a draft of a speech or an appeal for funds for the women’s trade union. Closing my eyes, I indulged in the thought that perhaps, instead, she was composing a letter to me. I was still rankled by the gift of the car, but a red ribbon of tenderness curled through even that unpleasantness and I felt a surge of love for her once more.
Love. Lord, what a pain in the ass it was.
I opened the drawer of the lacquered desk and pulled out a leaf of hotel stationery. With my pencil, I drew a line through the Hotel Syracuse address and, checking my itinerary from Harry’s office, wrote instead the name and address of the hotel in Maine where I would be staying in a week’s time.
My dear lady,
How’s the family? Are you up to your neck in oysters? Upstate is not so bad—fairly quiet, actually, now that I have run everyone off the road. (What can I say but thank you for this outlandish present?) Tomorrow I am off to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and if I go missing you can tell the authorities to follow the trail of dead birds and squirrels until they find the ditch that contains Bluette and me.
Now, I am enclosing a letter from Mrs. Ruth Johnson, the woman from Osage, West Virginia, whom I met on my first day there. Please read it. Please read it three times. This poor soul—another baby on the way. What can we do for her? Where do things stand with the homes? You told me when I left the AP that I could turn the page, take on a new role in which I could actually intervene to help people instead of just telling their tales in the newspaper. Well, darling, you may wish you could eat your words because I’m making it my mission to get this woman a house, even if I have to build it for her myself. This may not be what you and Harry Hopkins intended, but I feel that I have been sent out into the great American expanse like a sponge, to absorb miseries various and sundry, from Appalachian to Yankee, from the babies to the codgers. Who will wring me out—and when? These folks are permanent fixtures in my heart now, and Ruth is chief among them. We cannot let her down.
Yours,
Hick
In the morning I woke with an aching molar that worried me a bit, and the desk manager kindly rustled up some aspirin for me while the valet brought Bluette around to the front. Soon, I was distracted by my desire to stay on this side of the grave as I navigated the steep hills around Lake Champlain. At Rouses Point, I took the car ferry to Alburgh in Vermont and passed summer cottages closed up for the season, their shutters latched and their flagpoles bare. These were sleepy towns and, after brief meetings, I pressed on over the next few days to Burlington, then Montpelier, then through the Mount Washington Valley, into Maine.
Penobscot Bay’s open water and sky was a shock after so many days in the green woods, and I slowed Bluette as I sailed along the coastal Route 73 to take it in. Rockland smelled of the lobsters no fishermen seemed able to catch these days, according to information in my brief on the region from Hopkins’s office. Fishery experts claimed a lack of regulation had led to years of overfishing small lobsters too young to have reproduced, causing the population to plummet. That in turn
led to fishermen spending a great deal on boat fuel and bait with nothing to show for it at the end of the week. I counted thirty empty storefronts along Main Street and wrote the figure in my notes.
At ten in the morning, I pulled into the McConchie Quarry in Saint George and hustled, already late, to the office to meet the foreman.
“Greger Hedman,” he said without standing from his desk. He gave me a puzzled look as he attempted to size me up. “Your boss is outside?”
“My … ?” And then I understood; from sea to shining sea, America could be relied upon to underestimate its women. “I’m the one and only, I’m afraid,” I said.
He leaned in toward me. “You are the field reporter? You drove yourself here?”
I smiled and tried to tamp down my irritation. My day was packed with appointments and I didn’t feel like justifying my existence to a backwater oaf.
“Well, I’ve seen all of it now,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee and making no move to commence with our meeting.
“Yes,” I sighed, rather more prettily than he deserved, “it is shocking what women get up to these days—”
“Who had the bright idea to put a lady in this job?” “President Roosevelt, actually. So. If you don’t mind …”
We finally mended our cross purposes, and Greger showed me the quarry. He explained that when New York City halted all spending on street repairs, the granite paving-stone business of Saint George, Maine, had fallen into the dumps from lack of demand. All of it was connected.
From there, I drove north along the coast. In Machias, I saw blueberry barrens plucked of the smallest harvest in twenty years. In Eastport, I met fish processors who had been optimistic about the first healthy sardine population in an age only to find that, when the schools of fish entered the Bay of Fundy, five whales followed them in and ate them all.
Now just what in the hell was anybody supposed to do about that?
After the potato fields of Caribou and Fort Kent, I finally turned Bluette south and arrived a day later in Augusta. Same hotel lobby carpet, same armchairs, same dusty lamps, different town. In a haze, I checked in and asked after my mail. There was nothing from Nora— my questions about Arthurdale went unanswered and my worries about Ruth flourished—but Harry’s office had forwarded the itinerary for the next leg of my travels. After a few weeks off to recover, I would set out again to the towns listed in that envelope. Fall’s chill would be upon us by then; I dared to speculate that I might be assigned someplace exotic, at least to the likes of me. Palm trees and umbrella drinks in Fort Lauderdale? Étouffée and Sazeracs in the French Quarter?
Undiscovered Country Page 16