Undiscovered Country

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  December 22–23, 1933

  Three o’clock came, then four, then five. For the second time that day, I sat alone at the table in the family dining room in the White House. A cuckoo clock acquired on some diplomatic mission of a past decade proclaimed the passing quarter hours. With each squawk, a servant appeared to refill my wineglass until I took the bottle out of his hand and set it in front of me to save him the trips.

  To pass the time, I took a long walk through the hallways, expecting to return to find Nora waiting for me. When she wasn’t there, I retraced my steps and, outside a closed door, I found a serving cart that held an empty coffeepot and a pile of discarded newspapers. In the dining room once more, I read them front to back. Finally, at six, Nora sent in an aide with a message—Trying to get free, I swear. Will explain all later.—and I set the scrap of paper down and kept on drinking.

  If only I’d had the sense then to call it a night. But I’d taken unusual care with my appearance, choosing a black crepe dress with velvet cuffs that I was actually quite fond of, and pearls—I’d even made up my face—and I didn’t want it all to go to waste.

  With an abundance of time on my hands, my mind wandered back to Louis’s memo and my worries about the fate of Arthurdale, and of Ruth. I wondered what would happen if the baby was sick, if it died, and I prayed the nonbeliever’s prayer that Ruth and the child would come through all right. They weren’t so far from Morgantown. If the homesteading project fell apart, I thought, maybe I could set the family up in an apartment there, help Ruth’s husband find a job, and send them some money each month. I made more than I needed. I thought of what Clarence had said, that he’d stick by those folks no matter what happened. I wanted to be good in that way; I wanted to do good.

  It was hard to believe that, just a year ago, I knew nothing of West Virginia or Kentucky or western Maine. Back then, I’d lived in blissful ignorance, a news hawk who stuck around a story just long enough to file eight paragraphs and move on to the next day’s news. Had I been better off back then? Did it matter, since the choice was never mine to make?

  When Nora finally came in at seven, I was fairly pickled and primed for a fight.

  “Hick, I am so sorry,” she said.

  When I saw her face, my anger shriveled and my desperation to have her attention took over. I tried to swallow my hurt. “It’s all right,” I said. “I understand.”

  Looking drained, she sank down into the chair across from me and glanced at the empty wine bottle. “I hope you ate without me.”

  “I didn’t, actually. I waited. I figure you must be starving.”

  The eyes and ears that surrounded us took this signal and delivered two plates that looked to have been reheated a few times over. London broil, just as Nora had promised on the phone a week ago. It was a marvel, the way she could orchestrate things exactly as she wanted them, down to every detail. Was that the power of the first lady, or just the power of Eleanor Roosevelt? I couldn’t be sure. And yet she had been unable to get herself to our planned date. Couldn’t she have moved mountains to be here if she had really wanted to?

  “You aren’t angry, are you?” Nora asked. “I have a gift for you.”

  “And I have one for you,” I said, “though it isn’t much.”

  I glanced at the servant who stood by the kitchen door. “After we finish eating,” I said carefully, “let’s go to my room so that we can talk.”

  She smiled but didn’t nod.

  “So,” Nora said, “there’s so much to talk about. Where do we begin?”

  I shrugged. I was bothered by the way I had so willingly waited for her, and waited and waited and waited—when had I lost my self-respect?

  “Now, please, Hick, let’s forget it. I know I was late. I did apologize.” Nora never did have much patience for my petulance.

  “And I forgave you,” I said, my voice terse.

  She swallowed. “Here’s one surprise I have for you. I’ve made an appointment for us with a real estate broker. She’s the best in Washington.”

  “What for?” I said.

  Nora dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Well, I imagine you won’t want to stay here too much longer. Aren’t you eager for a place of your own?”

  The cuckoo bashed through its little door again and startled us both. I set down my fork and stared at her.

  Nora put out her hand. “I mean, of course you are welcome to stay here as long as you like—you know I love to have you near—but eventually …”

  The realization unfolded slowly in my brain, and even as it did, I couldn’t be sure I had it right. I recalled my strange encounter with Louis in the east entrance, his surprise at seeing me. I thought back further to his memo about Arthurdale, his appeal that Nora “budge on the LH accommodation.” And now Nora wanted to help me find my own apartment.

  LH.

  Not ladies’ housing, but Lorena Hickok. Nora should consider asking Lorena Hickok to find another place to live because Louis or maybe the president was uncomfortable with her presence in the White House, and in order to hold the line on Arthurdale, Nora needed to keep his favor.

  “Oh, what a fool I’ve been,” I said. I set my napkin on the table and stood.

  “What are you talking about?”

  But I said nothing, just walked out of the dining room and down the hall to my makeshift bedroom, opened the closet, pulled my suitcase from the floor and splayed it on my bed.

  Nora flew into the room on my heels. “What are you doing?” she asked, putting her hand on my wrist to stop me. “What happened just now?”

  “I understand,” I said. My voice was strangely calm, as if the information had yet to reach my nerve center. It wasn’t even that the president wanted to get rid of me, though of course that brought its own brand of shame. It was that Nora would have done it. “You don’t have to conceal it from me. This is not working.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Do I make him uncomfortable? I do that to men sometimes. Because of how I look, and how I talk. Because they know what I might like to do with their wives.”

  “Hick,” she warned.

  “I saw the memo from Louis,” I said.

  She glanced over at her desk and then back at me, her eyes flaring. “You read through my papers?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I just saw it. I recognized the article on Arthurdale, and I’ve been worried about the feud with Ickes, but I couldn’t get time to talk about it with you—anyway, I saw it.”

  Nora cleared her throat. “First you forge a document, and now you’re reading my mail?” She could be cruel that way, my darling strategist, could change gears on a dime. She saw an opportunity for the moral upper hand, and she took it.

  “Yes,” I said, “and you lied to me.” I took a breath, felt the room sway and my goddamned tooth begin to throb once more. “I gave up everything for you,” I whispered so that I might not have to hear the words. “My job. My home. New York City. Prinz. My friends. Everything.”

  “Oh, Hick …” Nora’s arm went to her stomach, as if guarding against the blow.

  “The cottage you promised just one year ago that we’d have together someday. The life together. The porch swing—” My voice broke into a sob then. “It was never real, was it? You never really meant it.”

  It was so easy to dream up a vision of how things could be, so hard to build a bridge between the present moment and that place. It was the same with Arthurdale—she had made promises, raised hopes. It was cruel.

  Her forehead creased with pain. “Oh, Hick, I did mean it. If this were a different world, my dear heart …” She tried to pull me into her arms, but I wouldn’t let her. “A different life! If only I could live it over again, with you.”

  “Well,” I said, and slammed the suitcase closed, snapped the clasps, “you can’t.”

  “I have so many regrets.”

  I laughed. “Look around you, Nora. Look where you are standing. I don’t think you have
a thing to regret.”

  She fixed me with a hard look. “I have tried to help you understand. When Franklin became president, I knew I had only two options: either be swallowed whole or set aside my fears and the idea of the life I wanted to have so that I could do something that mattered. Don’t you see? This is bigger than us, Hick. Bigger than me. I have a duty to use these years to do all I can to help the people of this country. That doesn’t have to change things between us, but you do have to try to understand. My life is no longer my own.”

  I looked around the room at the expensive drapery chosen by some former first lady, each piece of furniture mired in history, none of it hers or mine, none of it personal. The place had never felt more like a museum, more like a dollhouse with its rooms on display.

  Nora had decided to embrace this life, but it was time for me to make some decisions of my own. “Of course it changes things between us, Nora. Your life is not your own,” I repeated. “Your love either.”

  I lifted the suitcase off the bed. There was my portable typewriter, my mail and papers scattered on the table I’d been using as a desk. I would have to send for them. “I can’t keep hanging on, hoping for a day that will never come.”

  This time she didn’t try to argue. “Where will you go?”

  “To New York. I’ll get a room at the Sutton, take some time. I have to go back. I have to try … to get back to who I was.”

  “But you can’t drive now. It’s dark, and you’ve had so much to drink—”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I pulled my coat from the hanger in the closet, shrugged into the sleeves, and thrust my hand into the pocket. I pulled out the crushed paper snowflake and put it in her hand. She stared at it.

  “Merry Christmas from the children of Arthurdale. I’m glad to go if I know it will help them. Just promise to keep looking out for Ruth.”

  Nora did not follow me into the hallway, and so she did not see the way I stumbled on the carpet and careened into the wall. Downstairs, an usher was waiting by the entrance, and when he saw my tense face concentrating so hard on putting one foot in front of the other, he opened his mouth to speak, alarmed.

  “Please bring my car,” I said. I knew my mascara was smeared down my cheeks.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just get it,” I barked.

  It had begun to rain. It was strangely warm for December and the falling water steamed as it washed over Bluette’s hood. They had polished her up, but when I slipped behind the wheel I saw that the burns in the upholstery remained. I was glad to see that something I’d made, even if it was the mess that came from carelessness, remained unchanged.

  I released the hand brake and shifted into gear to take the long winding drive onto the street. As I eased onto Fifteenth, a dozen cars zoomed around me and the glare of the lights forced me to pinch my eyes closed and then open them as I tried to regain my bearings. I knew I should not be driving. When the streets turned residential, I pulled off on one, switched off the ignition, and lay down across the seat. I half expected a Secret Service agent to knock on my window, sent by Nora to check on me. But no one came, and I fell asleep.

  The bright morning brought an ax blade of a headache between my eyes and down the side of my aching jaw. I started driving north in the holiday traffic. December twenty-third, the day before the day before the holiday. The cars crawled like potato bugs on a bumper crop, and I could almost hear them consoling themselves: O come, O come, Emanuel. Let’s get it over with.

  Somewhere around Edison, New Jersey, a sudden excruciating pain sent white sparks across my field of vision. I would have screamed, but I couldn’t take a breath. It took me a moment to realize where the pain was coming from—my molar—and another moment to realize that I was still driving a car in dense traffic.

  Malaise over love’s vicissitudes was replaced by the urgent need to get to a dentist, or, failing that, find someone on a street corner willing to hit me in the jaw with a hammer for any price he could name. If I had stayed one more day in Washington, I’d have been in the chair of the president’s dentist, getting the best care in the country. Instead, I was in the right lane of Route 1, crawling through Avenel, Linden, and Elizabeth with tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Passing through Newark, I saw a sign with the letters DDS and threw the wheel to the curb, set the brake, shifted, released the clutch, hoping against hope I was doing it all in the right order. I heaved myself out of the car and leaned on my elbows on the hot chrome grille for support. A bell tinkled when I opened the office door, and a woman in a crisp hygienist’s uniform said, “Good morning,” and then, when she took a look at me, “Oh, my heavens!”

  She pushed a call button for the dentist and rushed around the counter. Cradling my elbow in her arms, she led me to the first exam room and helped me into the chair. The dentist came in. While the hygienist prepared the novocaine injection, the dentist looked inside my mouth and furrowed his brow. My ears were ringing with pain and all I could do was whisper please. He nodded, and, before the nurse could even bring the anesthetic over, switched on his drill and pressed the bit into my tooth to release the pressure that had built up around the nerve.

  The relief was so astounding; it felt like euphoria. All I could do was weep.

  Only later would it occur to me that most things in this life that feel good only feel that way because they are the end of something awful: good food that ends hunger, good love that ends loneliness. But at that moment, analysis was beyond my capabilities.

  As the novocaine took hold and the dentist worked to repair my tooth, my mind drifted in numb bliss. I saw now why I’d had to leave Nora. My poor tooth had made it plain: mine was a case of neglect on every level. I had neglected my teeth and my health and my heart, all for the sake of winning Nora’s love. I had forgotten that I’d once been the star of my own opera, Le Journaliste Libre, and I had let myself become a subplot at best. My heart was broken, but I felt a strange relief that I did not have to wait anymore for Nora to tell me what my life would be. I could take the reins back. I could decide for myself.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Christmas Eve 1933

  Around ten in the morning, I called John’s desk at the AP from my room at the Sutton Hotel.

  “Bosco,” he said.

  “Yes, hello. I am calling to let you know that you have been enrolled in the Fish of the Month Club.”

  I heard the crackle of John’s lips pulling back from his teeth into a broad smile. “Is that right?”

  “Yes indeed, sir. For the next year, on the first of each month, a freshly caught whole fish will appear on your doorstep in a brown paper bag. January is catfish month.”

  He snickered. “Is that right?”

  I nodded. “Mm-hmm, yes, sir. Now with catfish, that comes from New Orleans. So we do tell folks north of Virginia to expect a slight odor. There is a man who brings them up from Louisiana on a bus, and it does take a little time …”

  “Where are you calling from, Hick?”

  “Fifty-Sixth and Second.”

  John’s chair creaked and I pictured him sitting up. “No kidding?”

  “Nope. I think I’ll be in the city for a little while at least.”

  “You haven’t gone and quit your job, have you?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Just … taking a little holiday. There’s nothing like the Big Apple at Christmas.”

  John hesitated for a moment and I could tell that he knew I’d had my heart broken, that this was no victory lap.

  “What are you working on?” I asked him, eager to steer him from pity.

  “Bullitt’s trip to Moscow. He’s wrapping up there. And once I file that, a piece about a truck full of presents someone delivered to the children’s ward at New York Prez. Bill gave me tomorrow off for good behavior. So if you think you might be thirsty later …”

  “Let me check my schedule.” I pretended to be flipping through the pages of my calendar. My mouth was sore and I wanted not
hing more than a drink, but I had vowed to stick to the dentist’s orders not to mix the pain medicine with booze. I’d have to choke down plain seltzer. Today was my new leaf. I was determined.

  “I think I can move some things around,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll see you and my catfish at five.”

  I hung up and lay back to rest my eyes for a moment. Hours later, I woke to a soft knock on the door of my room. A bellman handed me a telegram. I thanked him, closed the door, and braced myself, knowing good news hardly ever came this way.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the message in my lap. Nora and John were the only people who knew where I was. It could be an emergency at the AP, at the White House. Something could be wrong at Arthurdale. Ruth.

  I tore off the envelope.

  RUTH JOHNSON SAFELY DELIVERED HEALTHY BABY GIRL, GLORY JUNE, THIS A.M. FIRST THING SHE SAID WHEN BABE WAS IN ARMS WAS “PLEASE TELL MISS HICKOK SHE’S ALL RIGHT.”

  MERRY CHRISTMAS,

  CLARENCE

  I stared at the words in wonder.

  How marvelous it felt to be wrong about bad news! How marvelous to be wrong about the fate of the baby! I felt like my heart might stampede right out of my chest with joy. In my mind, I could see Ruth in her bed in the Arthur mansion, surrounded by her children and the other families, all of them smiling down at the baby. I wished I could be among them. Welcome to this big old hopeless case of a world, Glory June. We’ve done a shit job taking care of it so far. Maybe you will come up with some better answers.

  For a minute I considered picking up the phone to call Nora; she must have been the one to tell Clarence where to send the message, and it would have been nice to share my joy with someone who understood what it meant to me that Ruth was all right. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And, plus, I had plans.

  When I yanked open the heavy door and walked into the dim light of Dom’s, the smell of cigar smoke made me grin.

  “Hiya, Hick,” John called. When I turned toward his voice, I glimpsed tawny fur and a slobbering snout.