Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  “Reluctant First Lady,” he said, squinting at me through the haze of his cigarette smoke. “Reluctant?”

  “Reluctant,” I said. “It undercuts the way the right-wing papers are portraying her.”

  In fact, the anti-Roosevelt press had been having a field day over the past few months, reporting that Eleanor (they always called her by her first name) had set her heart on the White House the day her Uncle Teddy left it. According to them, becoming First Lady was her dream, her life’s driving ambition. I had read that she wore the pants in the Roosevelt family, that FDR was subject to her “petticoat rule,” and that she was secretly masterminding his presidential campaign. Of course, there was always a great deal of criticism of any woman who attempted to play a public role in politics or business. Male writers liked to argue that the world would be better off if women stayed home, kept house, and had babies, and any woman who ventured out into the world was bound to come into their line of fire. Louis was a savvy strategist, so I didn’t think I needed to spell out my notion that the theme of “reluctant First Lady” might deflect some of the anti-Eleanor criticism.

  I watched as, eyes closed, hands clasped across his ash-spotted vest, Louis went through all this in his head. Then he opened his eyes. “It’s good, Hick. It’ll get attention—although, of course, that depends on how you write it.”

  I gave him a straight look. “That depends on access, too, don’t you think? I’ve noticed that Ruby Black, the new hire over at United Press, has gotten a special invitation to several of Mrs. Roosevelt’s recent events.” Ruby was good, and Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to feel that she should divide her attention between the two wire services. Like most journalists, I was eager for an exclusive.

  Louis considered. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “When you’ve done a piece along those lines, let me see what you’ve written. I’ll fact-check it for you.” He gave me one of his inscrutable smiles. “You can leave Ruby Black to me.”

  The next day, I got my exclusive. Mrs. Roosevelt invited me to go with her to visit her sons at Groton. On the train coming back, she talked about raising her children, about what a mistake it had been to hire nurses and nannies to take care of them. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have any servants those first few years,” she said. “My children would have had far happier childhoods if their mother had been more often with them.” The sympathetic story I wrote featured a mother looking back, candidly wishing she’d done things differently. It was appealing, especially to people who thought that women ought to stay home with their kids. It made her (as Louis Howe said when he read it) more middle class, less like a Roosevelt.

  Had I crossed the line? By the standards of today, yes. That kind of quid pro quo would be an ethical problem for a reporter now. Back then, things weren’t quite so clear-cut. News and opinion were blurred together. Many newspapers—like Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune for the Republicans and William Randolph Hearst’s thirty-newspaper chain on the Democratic side—filtered the news through strong editorial opinions and wrapped their stories around the candidates they backed. Political candidates needed reporters to get their stories out, and reporters were encouraged to aggressively seek and cultivate access and use what they got to strengthen their reporting. Editors sometimes cautioned us against going too far, but nobody really knew what “too far” meant, so the warning didn’t cut much ice.

  My AP editor, Bill Chapin, was pleased when I filed stories that were rich in on-the-spot detail about Mrs. Roosevelt’s activities and studded with direct quotations, which are like pure gold to a reporter. He occasionally reminded me to remember “the usual AP restraint”—corporate code words for objectivity. Keep your distance. Don’t get involved. Stay out of the story. But Bill understood as well as I did what played on the wire. And he could count the rising number of newspapers that were running my stories about the candidate’s wife.

  “Good job, Hick,” Bill said when he handed back the Groton copy. “And I’m glad to see that you’re getting more coverage from Mrs. R than that new girl over at UP.” Later that week, I got a raise.

  And then… and then everything changed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Orbit

  A week before the election, Missy LeHand’s mother died, and FDR asked his wife to represent the family at the funeral in Potsdam, in upstate New York.

  Odd, I thought, given what was being said about the relationship between Missy and FDR. But I was reminded of FDR smiling jovially beside Earl Miller and his bride while the photographer snapped away and thought that sending his wife might be his way of deflecting attention. Anyway, Mrs. R’s sympathies were with Missy at this difficult time, and if she was affronted by her husband’s request, she didn’t let it show. I was invited to go along, too, since after the funeral, Mrs. R was scheduled to take a look at a new hydroelectric plant on the St. Lawrence River. The reporter covering the candidate’s wife touring the power plant.

  It was a gray, misty afternoon, the sky weeping softly over the late autumn trees, and after we left the plant and returned to Potsdam, Mrs. R was pensive. We went to a quiet café for supper, where she talked about personal things she’d never spoken of before, about the way she and the children, and Missy too, had ordered their lives around FDR.

  “Like little moons,” she said soberly, “all orbiting around a giant planet.” She sighed. “Some of us might escape into outer space if we could. We might like to be somebody else, but we can’t. The pull is too great.” She paused. “Even poor, sweet Missy. She’s tried to leave him a time or two, you know, to escape. But she can’t. She has no more choice than I do.”

  I held my breath. She hadn’t said, “Off the record, Hick,” because she wasn’t thinking of me as a reporter who might use her words. She was speaking to me as a woman, as a friend, as someone who understood, and I thought, quite suddenly, that I did—more than she might guess, perhaps.

  “Who would you be, if you could?” I asked quietly.

  There was a moment’s silence. “Just… myself,” she said, “although I don’t think I know what that means.” Her little laugh was self-conscious. “I suppose I would be just Eleanor Roosevelt. That was my name before I married Franklin, you know. If I were not Mrs. Roosevelt, of the Hyde Park Roosevelts, I would still be Eleanor Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts.” She raised a hand, let it fall, and her face darkened. “There. You see? I can’t escape, either.”

  Yes, I thought, the name hanging on her like an albatross, a millstone, a curse. I rephrased my question. “What would Eleanor Roosevelt do?”

  She was unhesitating. “Oh, that’s easy. I would live very quietly. Read, write letters, garden. Learn to cook, enjoy a few friends. Travel. But no politics at all, ever.”

  Was that a truthful answer? I think it was, then, or at least a wistful, wishful answer, one that might have been given by the young Eleanor, before she fell into her Uncle Teddy’s orbit, or her husband’s, or both.

  She turned to me. “And you? Who would you be, if you could, Hick? What would you do?”

  It was if she had opened a door and invited me inside. Her blue eyes were intent on mine, and a new thing somewhere inside me seemed to open up, to lean forward, toward her. I tried to speak, couldn’t, and tried again.

  “I’m not sure,” I said finally, feeling breathless. In all my life no one, not even Ellie, had ever asked me those questions. Who would I be, if I could? What would I do?

  “I… I love my work,” I managed, still held by her gaze, as if in an embrace. “I would always want to do that.”

  She turned away. “That’s the difference between us. You have important work, work that matters. You do it very well, and you’re rewarded for it. I don’t do… anything of consequence, except perhaps for teaching, which only matters to a few girls.” Her voice flattened. “When Franklin goes to the White House, I won’t even be able to do that. I will put on a gown and white gloves and stand in a receiving line and smile and say frivolous th
ings to silly people. And the next night, I will do it all over again, and the next and the next. That’s what I will do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.

  She gave me a regretful smile. “So am I. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  Our conversation grew lighter over dessert and coffee. But we lingered so long at the table that we had to rush to catch our train back to New York. The night had turned foggy, and when the trainmaster told us that the usual ten-hour trip was expected to take much longer, Mrs. R booked a drawing room so we could get some sleep. Then, when we reached our car, she embarrassed me by insisting that I take the lower berth. She would sleep on the narrow sofa. I protested, but I had to agree when she said, “I am longer top to toe than you are, Hick, and not quite so… well, broad.”

  I laughed. “Well, if you put it that way, Mrs. Roosevelt, I suppose I’ll have to say yes.”

  “I’ve called you Hick.” Her eyes were on mine again. “Won’t you call me Eleanor? My friends do, you know.”

  And there, again, the door, opening. “I wish I could,” I said. This was something I had already dared to think about. I might call her Eleanor in my private thoughts, and I sometimes did, but the word simply refused to form itself on my lips. Later, I would find that I could write about her as Eleanor, but for now: “I might call you Madam, if you don’t object.”

  And I told her why. I had a husky contralto and, as a girl, loved to sing. Later, living with Ellie, I learned to love opera. At the Minneapolis Tribune, I had written an admiring story about Madam Ernestine Schumann-Heink, an operatic contralto who was giving concerts across the country on behalf of the war effort. We became friends while she was in the city, and one evening she took a gorgeous sapphire and diamond ring from her finger and pressed it on me. I tried to protest, but she wouldn’t have it.

  “Shut up, Hick,” she said, in her thick German accent. “I love you, I give you my ring. You be a good girl and take it.” That made me laugh and that was all there was to it. I had worn her ring proudly the year before, when I went to the Met to hear her sing Erda in The Ring of the Nibelung. Madam was past seventy by then, but her voice was still rich and strong, and I thrilled to it just as I had fifteen years before.

  “Madam is perfect,” Mrs. R said, smiling a little at my story. “I’m honored, Hick.”

  We changed into our nightclothes: my usual striped pajamas and an ankle-length pink nightgown for Madam, both flannel, because trains in those days were never very warm. But we didn’t go to sleep for a very long time. Instead, she asked me to tell her about my childhood.

  “It’s so much easier to understand someone when you know how they grew up,” she said softly. “Understand them deeply, I mean, in all their contradictions.”

  And there was the door again, but this time, it opened into a darker place, into my heart. I told her what I had told only Ellie and no one else. About my childhood in a small town on the Dakota prairie; my mother’s acquiescence in my father’s drunken beatings; my bullying stepmother. About my stint as a hired girl in one wretched household after another—a long spiral of despair—until Mrs. O’Malley, the rouged and ancient wife of the village saloon-keeper, dispatched me to an aunt, who dispatched me to another, where I was washed and brushed and shod and sent to school while I paid for my bed and board with household help. About my failures as a student, my successes as a newspaper reporter, and then my life with Ellie. As the night slipped past the train windows, Madam heard me with an intent concern on her face, a concern for me, as a woman, as a friend, as a fellow human being who has lived with pain. Not even dear Ellie had heard me with such intensity, or with such an open heart.

  Then it was my turn to listen. I was mesmerized by the story of her childhood, a story of cruel grief and loss and poverty of a different sort, an emotional poverty that had starved away feeling. Her extraordinarily beautiful mother, Anna, only twenty when her daughter was born, had made fun of her little girl, calling her “Granny” because she was so solemn, so old-fashioned.

  “And so homely,” Mrs. R added in a matter-of-fact tone. “I could see my reflection in my mother’s eyes. She thought me a very unpretty child, so she rarely hugged or held me. Quite naturally, I suppose, I saw myself as homely. I knew I was doomed to failure in a society where success was based on beauty—and where social success was the whole world.”

  The little girl was just eight when her mother died, quite suddenly, of diphtheria. At first, she hoped she would be sent to live with her beloved father, a charming but deeply troubled man. But Elliott Roosevelt abandoned her, too, dying of alcoholism when she was ten and ripping open a hole in her heart that was not yet healed. The deaths of both her parents sentenced her to the bleak strictures of her Grandmother Hall’s Victorian household, to the cruel harassments of a nurse, and to the judgment of her pretty aunts that she was an “ugly duckling” who would never have any beaux. At fifteen, she was sent to boarding school in England, a glorious release into an exciting world of ideas. Travel, too, for she and her headmistress, Madam Souvestre, went all over Europe, just the two of them, together. At eighteen, she was back in America, where society’s rituals demanded that she make her debut. And then… and then she’d been pulled into Franklin’s orbit, into a Roosevelt marriage, dominated by her mother-in-law and her children and her husband’s political life, until finally she had managed to pull away enough to carve out a private life for herself. And now, her husband’s election and the White House threatened to obliterate it.

  The night rushed like a storm past the windows as each of us listened the other into speech, until our shared confidences brought tears and the tears brought comforting embraces. We held one another in the gently swaying dark, carried along by the rhythmic pulse of the train through an uncaring world. Much was left unsaid, and I was glad, very glad, for already it seemed to me overwhelming—too much to be told, too much to be heard, too much to be felt. We fell silent and then fell asleep at last, and when the pale morning light flickered into our drawing room and across Madam’s face and the soft gold-brown hair loose on her pillow, I watched her with a tenderness that seemed to soften my bones.

  Later, I would imagine that night on the train as a metaphor for our relationship: two lonely people hurtling through the dark toward an unreachable destination, each clinging to the other as if they were the last survivors on a moon swept out of orbit by a force too powerful to be opposed. That the metaphor didn’t quite fit would not be clear to me until much later, and then it would be too late. That night, I only knew that the course of my life had suddenly altered, that all the shattered and scattered pieces of my broken self had reassembled themselves around a captivating new center. I understood that this was risky and foolish, and I heard that wry, mocking hired girl’s voice telling me that it made no sense to love this woman. She didn’t love me. She couldn’t love me. She wasn’t going to know that I loved her, ever. But in that moment, nothing else mattered: not her husband nor her children nor her station in life. That I loved her—the woman, the person, Madam—was enough.

  I couldn’t say any of that to her, of course, any more than I could say her name. All I could do, when we were both dressed and properly combed, was to clear my throat and ask tentatively if I might use some of what she had told me about her childhood in my newspaper stories.

  She gave me a direct look, long and searching. “Can I trust you, Hick?”

  With your life, I wanted to say, loving the sound of my name on her lips. But I only nodded.

  “Well, then,” she said quietly, “use what you think is right.” She put out her hand and touched my cheek. “I wish I could tell you what last night means to me. To know you a little, to learn what you’ve been through in your life, to feel that you want to share it with me—” She shook her head, and I saw that her eyes, those quite remarkable blue eyes, were misted with tears. “I can’t explain it, my dear, but this feels very… important to me. I hope you feel that way, too.”

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nbsp; I caught her hand and held it, feeling that I had stepped through the door, hearing it close behind me. “I do,” I said.

  It was a pledge, as if I were responding to Do you take… “Oh, yes, I do.” Until death I do, although I had no idea, then, what those words might mean. I didn’t know that I, like Tommy and Missy and Louis and the children, had been pulled into a Roosevelt orbit. It simply didn’t occur to me that I might never be able to pull away, that I would go on circling her for as long as I lived, nearer and farther and nearer again, forever.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Intimacies

  We were back in New York, with the election only days away. FDR was in the city, staying at the Sixty-Fifth Street townhouse and, ever cheerful and confident, giving a final series of pre-election speeches. Madam was whirled into the vortex of his campaign events, and for the next two days, I was tugged along in her wake, reporter’s notebook in hand. She was at the front of the room or on a stage, and I was at the back, taking notes. Or she was striding ahead, tall, erect, and I was hurrying to catch up to her—and just as I reached her, she would be engulfed by a wave of people.

  But somehow we had stepped into the next improbable chapter of our story. On that first day, our glances caught often and held long enough—over heads, across crowded rooms, through the soft blue haze of cigarette smoke—to make me believe that she was remembering our time on the train. As for me, each glance seemed to stop my heart, and in that instant, I replayed the hours we had spent together, hearing our whispers in the swaying dark, sharing the private places of our hearts, clasping each other against the indifferent world rushing past the windows.

  Madam, I wrote on the page in my notebook and then circled it, and then again and again. Orbit. Orbit.