I tried John next, but the newsroom secretary—a new one, a voice I didn’t recognize—said he wasn’t at his desk. Did I want to leave a message? Sure. Just tell him it’s Lorena Hickok calling from the middle of nowhere. Tell him I was elated a heartbeat ago, but now I’m lonely and full of regret, though I can’t tell him why. Could you ask him to call me when he gets in?
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll try him tomorrow.”
In my room, I poured a drink and tried to reclaim the victorious feeling from the afternoon. Even if I had to celebrate alone, finding freedom from Bowdle at last was something to celebrate. So I poured another drink, and then another.
As I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come, I listened to the mice moving in the tunnels they’d chewed through the hotel walls; what arduous work it must have been for them, forging their destinies one mouthful at a time.
Part Three
Everything went into Eleanor and Hick’s daily letters: the weather, their schedules, their sleep, their dreams. “And now I’m going to bed—to try to dream about you,” Hick wrote from Texas. “I never do, but I always have hopes.”
—Susan Quinn,
Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady
Chapter Eighteen
December 1933
Ruth herself was the one to enlighten me on the status of Arthurdale when a letter from her caught up with me at my hotel in Minneapolis in mid-December:
Dear Miss Hickok,
I guess you are prolly sick of me by now but I am pert near the end of my rope with the knot about to break off in my hand. Mr. Pickett dont know what is going on and the men in charge of these homes do not or at least will not tell me nothing. So here is your old friend Ruth asking for help agin.
The good news is they got some of us out of the tents. Me and mine and abowt a hunred others are packed in to the old Arthur manshin like hillbillys in a shaft elevater. But it is dry here and we have water and heat and my babys are sleeping, thank the lord. The wives got a skedgel going and we take turns cooking and washing up and all the folks eat in the big dining room.
The bad news is I am like to kill these fool women if I have to live with them much longer. And people are saying they don’t got enuf houses for erybody becaus the ones that came off the trucks didnt fit the foundashuns. Some folks is going back to the tents. I don’t know if that is a rumor but I caint risk it. So you see what I mean. I caint stay here but I caint go back. I come so far Miss Hickok. I got the baby coming at Christmas. Will you please help me?
Ruth
I looked at the postmark and saw that the letter was a month old. Four more weeks after the day she had written this, Ruth had spent wondering about her fate—or perhaps she knew it by now. There was no telling. In those same four weeks, I had received just two letters from Nora in which she spoke in vague terms about the frustrations of Arthurdale. Louis had prevailed in his parsimonious suggestion of the prefabricated cottages, despite Nora’s warnings, and when the homes arrived at the building site on enormous trucks, the workers realized the specs provided by the company were incorrect. The foundations were the wrong size. Nora stepped in and directed that everything be sent back to the company. Then she found an architect to build proper framed homes, with plumbing and electricity, just as she’d originally planned. But the havoc had doubled the budget, and some within the administration were starting to speak out publicly against the project.
Nora and I had not talked by telephone; I’d given up on getting through. In my reply to Nora’s first letter, I’d asked after Ruth in particular, but she had offered no details on her case. Of course, she wrote, in a perfect world, every single one of those families would be living in a warm and tidy house by now, but as you well know we fall far short of perfection. The process is slow and we can make no guarantees for individuals—but the thing to think of is the big picture, the long-term outcome. We must get the houses right so that in twenty years, in fifty, they will still be standing. When these children are grown, when their children are grown, that’s when we will see the fruits of our labor.
Tell that to poor Ruth, I thought. Nora’s high-minded reassurance that short-term sacrifice would be worth it in the end reminded me just a little too much of the current status of our entanglement—barely speaking but hanging on in the hopes that someday, when someone else was president, when all her other ambitions had been fulfilled, we’d have that little cottage in Hyde Park at last.
I was starting to wonder if it was horseshit.
After more than a month on the road, exhaustion was bearing down hard and I had to take more aspirin than was wise to keep the ache in my molar at bay. I was fed up with being a good little soldier—my hurt was hardening into anger. The big picture was one thing, but here’s what I knew for sure: somebody was going to be first to get one of the finished houses, and I was going to make sure it was Ruth Johnson.
“Office of the Secretary of the Interior.”
“Hello, this is Lorena Hickok. I’m calling to speak to the head administrator on the Arthurdale project in West Virginia.”
“Yes, miss,” the girl on the phone said, “and on whose behalf are you calling?”
I cleared my throat for courage. “The first lady,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. Right away,” she said.
The line clicked and hummed. I sat at the ornate desk in my hotel room; with its damask bedspread and plush ivory carpet, it was a vast improvement over some of the glorified boardinghouses in which I had laid my head over the past few weeks. I had elected to stay here the entire time I was in Minnesota and make day trips out to my various meetings rather than endure hopping from one bed to the next each night. And the Leamington Hotel was far from unfamiliar to me. A lifetime ago, my old flame Ellie and I had lived here together for seven years, until she caved to her family’s pressure and moved to San Francisco to marry Bill. When I saw the hotel on the itinerary from Harry Hopkins’s office, I did the only thing one can do when the past keeps coming back around, like a carousel from hell. I laughed.
“Office of Mr. Samuels,” said the next assistant. I wondered if Washington was built atop a never-ending stack of women with tidy hair and smart dresses, answering phones and taking messages. Maybe the whole operation was just secretaries all the way down.
“Yes, is he in?” I asked. “I’m calling on behalf of the first lady with an urgent matter related to the Arthurdale project.” Telling the lie a second time gave me a chance to refine it. I waited while she put me through.
“Zig Samuels.”
“Good morning, Mr. Samuels. My name is Lorena Hickok, and I am a field investigator in Harry Hopkins’s office—”
“Miss Hickok, of course. I’ve read your reports. You’re a bit of a legend around here to us paper pushers, I must say. Out in the world with real people, making things happen. Your reports make fine reading—I hope you won’t mind if I say that. Damn fine.”
“Oh, well,” I said, surprised and shameless when I saw his praise presented me with an opportunity. “Thank you. Listen, Mrs. Roosevelt has … asked me to take a special interest in the Arthurdale project and particularly to inquire about the status of the selection process for families.”
“All right,” Samuels said. “What can I help you with?”
“Well, first—who will be overseeing the process of moving the families out of the mansion and into the houses once they are complete? Are you staggering them by groups to make things run more smoothly?”
“It’s a concern, certainly, but we’ve deferred to the Quaker relief people and the Arthurdale folks themselves to decide how they want to organize it all.” He hesitated, and when he spoke next it was with trepidation, as if he were explaining something quite obvious and didn’t want to insult me. “The idea, of course, is we get more buy-in if they make their own decisions.”
I summoned up now what courage I had. I went to touch my necklace, but realized it wasn’t there anymore. And then I forced
out the words: “Well, Mrs. Roosevelt wants to be sure that the Johnson family—Norbert and Ruth and their children—are placed in the first completed home. So if you could let your people know …”
Samuels didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he ventured, “Oh, boy, I hope I’m not talking out of school here—but doesn’t this go somewhat against the policy we set at the outset? Not to interfere with the decisions they are making locally? Even Mrs. Roosevelt herself has said—”
I cleared my throat and put on the particular impatience of a woman who was in the know and didn’t have time to explain things to the lessers. “I am quite sure Mrs. Roosevelt has her reasons, and she is insisting on the Johnsons. Would it be helpful for me to speak with someone above you on this project?”
“There isn’t anyone—” he began to scoff but then got hold of himself. He had been about to claim that no one stood above him on the project, but of course we were all serving at the pleasure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and anyone who had been in Washington more than a day understood that Nora wielded nearly as much power as her husband.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you for letting me know, Miss Hickok.”
“I know Mrs. Roosevelt appreciates your attention to this matter.”
“If I could just have it in writing, please,” he said. “To assuage any confusion about the change in policy.”
My stomach seemed to fold in on itself then. I was pretty far out on a limb to begin with; was I now really contemplating adding forgery to my list of crimes? And yet when I thought of Ruth, I told myself that one little document couldn’t matter much. Nora must have been sending twenty memos per day making various requests. Who would notice one more?
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll speak with her and we’ll send it over today.”
I set down the phone and closed my eyes for a moment. Then, before I could think too much about it, I moved my portable to the center of the desk and rolled in a fresh leaf of the White House letterhead I had been too shy to use. Dear Mr. Samuels, I typed, Regarding the Arthurdale selection process, I hope you will honor my request that special attention be paid in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Norbert Johnson … I tried to emulate Nora’s crisp writing style and ended the memo as she often did, by typing only her initials with no closing.
Back in the lobby, I laid the memo on the polished wood of the front desk.
“Good evening, Miss Hickok,” said the desk manager. He had a mustache so thin it looked drawn on by a woman’s eye pencil.
“I need to send this, please.”
“Very good, Miss Hickok,” he said. As he slid the document to his side of the desk and took note of the header, he glanced up at me.
“I thank you for your discretion,” I said. Now I had a second witness to my crime. “This is privileged communication.”
“Of course.”
“Please send the confirmation of receipt up to my room.”
I tried to tell myself that I couldn’t lose. Either Samuels would take the memo on its face and give Ruth a house, or Nora would find out and tear into me. But in order to do that she would finally have to pick up the telephone and call me.
That evening, I climbed onto the stool in the hotel lounge like a shipwreck victim onto a raft, and ordered a double bourbon. Repeal was only a week old, but establishments across the country had already changed their menus and stocked up with miraculous speed. Even if all of FDR’s relief programs went to hell, I thought, he would still be remembered for making it legal to order a drink in a bar like a civilized human being again. Only the prim church ladies opposed him—and the gangster bootleggers he’d put out of work. Perhaps the New Deal would have to come up with a program to bail them out too. The thought of Johnny Torrio planting sugar maple saplings in some Jersey ditch made me smile. A tough guy on the dole.
The bar, crowded with businessmen, was situated in the middle of a large room and ringed by tables where guests sat eating dinner. The one at the back of the lounge, close to the swinging doors to the kitchen, had been Ellie’s and mine. If I squinted, I could see her sitting there, holding her jade cigarette holder and sipping her brandy, looking down her long nose at me with laughing eyes. Ellie was a friendly ghost, and it did not pain me to remember our years together. I hoped her marriage had made her happy—though it was hard to imagine happiness was possible for a girl like her in a bed shared with a man named Bill.
I felt the air in the room change a little and looked to my right to see a woman take a stool a few down from mine. She was about thirty, with smooth, tan skin and dark hair cut to her shoulders. She wore it loose, tucked behind her ears, and a simple silk dress that was at once unfashionable and interesting. While every other woman in the room wore a variation of the dress of the moment, this frock looked like a piece of abstract art, an intense pink column that draped her petite silhouette, with fine details that were clearly the work of a deft seamstress. On her wrist was a thick bracelet of carved bone.
The bartender brought her a glass of water with lemon, though I hadn’t heard her ask for it. As she sipped from the glass, she looked around the bar and seemed to take note of each man sitting there. One at a time, she waited to see if the man would make eye contact with her; if he did, she looked away and smoothed her hair or raised her wrist as if she were checking the time, though the bracelet was not a watch.
We were the only two unaccompanied women in the room. Just as I realized I had been watching her for longer than was polite, she turned to me and smiled.
I nodded. “Evening.”
She wasn’t smoking, but I was, and like usual I was grateful it gave me something to do.
“Freshen your drink?” the bartender asked. He was friendly enough—he knew my money spent just like everyone else’s—but there was a tinge of pity in the way he looked at me. A woman alone. A woman alone who was smoking in public—commonplace in New York, unseemly in Minneapolis. A woman alone who was not pretty, who wore no ring, who had no lilt in her voice, who was plump and aging. He was trying to figure out what I was for, since he couldn’t think how someone like me could be of any use to him.
Buddy, I felt like saying, there are more kinds of women in heaven and earth than your dim-witted philosophy can dream of …
“I’m Mae,” the woman said suddenly.
I turned back to her in surprise. “Hick.”
She squinted. “Not really.”
“It’s a nickname.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said, with a charm that made me chuckle. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“No. I travel a lot for work. I don’t think I know a soul in this town, though I used to.”
Mae’s eyebrows tipped in toward each other. “Oh. That’s a shame. Well. Now you know one.”
She lifted her glass of water toward me before she took a sip, her eyes on mine, and I felt a lightbulb flare in my brain as I realized what might be her intention. I sat up the slightest bit straighter, wishing I had stopped to reapply my lipstick before I’d come in. Again I thought of Ellie and wondered if perhaps she was sending me a gift.
It’s bad luck to toast with water is what I should have said to her. But instead I asked, “What about you? Are you meeting someone?”
She laughed. “I’d say probably not—and I’ve gotten pretty good at reading this room. I come here almost every night, after all.”
I must have given her a funny look because she held up her hand. “Not that! I’m not … a working girl or something.”
“Oh, my, I wasn’t—”
We both laughed then, and she put her elbow on the bar, rested her cheek on her hand. “I’m an artist,” she said. “My studio is around the corner from here. But I’m broke, of course—that’s part of the job. So most nights I come in here to see what I can see, and maybe if I meet a nice man he buys me dinner. How else am I going to keep myself in steak and potatoes?”
She was so trim, I couldn’t imagine she ate more than the odd salad. But still, she had the
age-old problem of women who preferred women: the only people who had money were men. “Sounds like an enterprising plan to me.”
“It’s hard out there these days for a gal on her own.”
“Yes, it is.” How I knew it! There probably wasn’t another woman in this country who had seen the scope and the scale of ruin that I had seen over these few months. The knowledge of it was like a stone in my heart’s pocket.
“But maybe not for every gal. Maybe not for you. What is it that you do?”
“Just a paper pusher,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to be sad right now. “What kind of artist—do you paint?”
She nodded. “Large-scale canvases—which was a fool move, in retrospect. They take too much space. If I had chosen miniatures, I could have kept on living in my father’s apartment for free.”
I looked at her unusual dress again. “You don’t seem like the type to make something small.” I had not intended that comment to be anything other than an honest assessment, but her eyes flicked to mine again, and I could see how she might read it. Reporters always knew how to put on like they belonged anywhere, but this kind of thing never happened to me—flirtation, smooth talking. I was already in over my head.
I took a long drag on my cigarette, and thought of Nora, the look that came into her eyes just before she started to laugh at something I’d said, how I’d prided myself on being able to amuse her, able to take her by surprise. Then I pushed the thought away.
I raised my hand to get the bartender’s attention. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”
Mae hesitated, maybe trying to size me up one more time, and then said, “No, thanks. I think I am going to head out.”
Relief mixed with disappointment in my chest like a bloom of oil in water. “But you never got dinner. We could order something.” I didn’t want her to go. This was the first conversation I’d had outside work in weeks and I was just plain eager for any kind of company.
Undiscovered Country Page 18