Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  The second field trip finished, I went back to Washington to brief Hopkins and his staff on the situation in the Northeast. I stayed at the White House for ten days, and the First Lady managed to clear enough of her schedule so we could spend a few hours of every day together. Anna still had my room, so I once again took the daybed in Eleanor’s suite. The hours of intimacy encouraged me to dream of a future when the two of us would have all the time in the world, just for one another. But the days passed all too swiftly, and when I left again, Anna (who needed a car) kept Bluette. This trip would take me to the upper Midwest in winter—I wouldn’t be back until almost Christmas—and it seemed smarter to travel by train.

  Wherever I traveled, I did my best to minimize my connection to Washington, and especially to the First Lady. This was harder than it might seem, for her letters, like a flock of birds, followed me everywhere I went. Eleanor wrote every day, and her gold-embossed White House stationery was bound to attract the attention of curious hotel clerks, especially when two or three letters arrived on the same day, each addressed to me in her extravagant script. With discretion in mind, I had given her a box of plain blue writing paper and envelopes printed with the address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. I learned to wait until the day I left a town to send her a Western Union wire listing my next one or two stops, so she would know where to write. Telegraph clerks were just as nosy as hotel clerks and most of them had a direct line to the desk of the nearest newspaper editor. I would occasionally be met at the next train station by an eager-beaver reporter who could only have gotten the word from a buddy at the telegraph key.

  Given my efforts at professional and personal anonymity, I think I can be forgiven for being annoyed when the Literary Digest—a widely read general-interest weekly magazine published by Funk & Wagnall—published a story about me in their November 8, 1933, issue. The writer called me Harry Hopkins’s “chief investigator,” charged with keeping public relief money out of private pockets. There was a photo, too, captioned “Gets Facts for White House.” Anybody who saw it could recognize me. So much for working undercover.

  I was irritated. This kind of media attention only made it more difficult to do my investigative work. Worse, some might use it to connect me to the First Lady. I complained to her about it, and especially about the mention of the White House. Her response was a little off the mark but comforting nonetheless. Darling, I know they bother you to death because you are my friend, but we’ll forget it and think only that someday I’ll be back in obscurity again and no one will care except ourselves.

  I was comforted by her remark about returning to obscurity. That was the important thing for me in those difficult, lonely days: believing that her stay in the White House was—in the nature of things—temporary. There would be a time—perhaps not far distant—when she would be out of the public eye and we would be together and able to shape our own lives. I shake my head at this hope now, for it seems so naïve, given the way her interests and her work expanded. But that belief buoyed me up and kept me going on even the bleakest days.

  Madam might tell me to forget about the reporters, but she had her own problems with the press. The week before Thanksgiving, she was upset because some of the tabloids were speculating about the two Roosevelt divorces—Anna’s and Elliott’s—currently in the news. The gossip bothered her. We can’t hide things, can we? she wrote sadly, adding, It’s a good thing you’re not a man, Hick.

  I had to smile at that. People might talk about us, yes. But under the circumstances, being a woman had a definite advantage. If I were a man, tongues would wag a hundred times harder.

  By the next day, she was braver. So you think they gossip about us. Well, they must at least think we stand separation rather well! I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little what “they” say! I remembered that she had to deal with the gossip about Franklin and Lucy Mercer. Perhaps, I thought, her skin had grown tougher than mine.

  Eleanor spent Thanksgiving in Warm Springs with the rest of the Roosevelt tribe—including her mother-in-law and Missy. She wrote, forlornly, I thought, that she’d wished that FDR might realize that she would like me to be there, too. You know how one dreams? she added. I do so wish you were here, Hick.

  I was a dreamer then, and I knew how one dreams, knew it all too well. But I also knew that I would have been miserable in Warm Springs. I would have wanted us to have time for one another. But Eleanor—wife, daughter-in-law, mother, grandmother—would be pulled in a dozen different directions by a dozen different people. And she was almost never happy there herself. Conscious that it was FDR’s and Missy’s retreat, she felt like an intruder. It was better to be apart for now and to look forward to our Christmas holiday together.

  And I needed something to anticipate, to pull me into the future—oh, how I needed it. That third trip was a journey into the farthest, darkest reaches of my past. To Wisconsin, where I was born over a creamery in the tiny, leafy town of East Troy. To the Dakotas, where I was first a girl and then a hired girl. To Minnesota, where I earned a place in my profession and learned to love Ellie. Harry Hopkins had sent me to farming country, where it was feared that too many years of crop failures and rock-bottom prices might fan the farmers’ discontent into outright rebellion. Looking back now, it seems a little far-fetched, but at the time, the New Dealers in FDR’s administration were afraid that Communist organizers would invade the Midwest and rally the desperate communities. Fast relief and plenty of it would calm the storm, they thought. I was supposed to tell Hopkins how much money was needed and where it should go.

  In New York City, the need for aid had been so great that there wasn’t enough money in the New Deal pocket to meet it. Here, the problem was different. While there was a growing bitterness among the farmers, they seemed to me more despairing and desperate than violent—and while federal money might have temporarily eased their pain, relief was no real remedy. What the farmers needed most of all was rain.

  From horizon to horizon, the prairie had been destroyed by drought. The winds whipped up maniacal dust storms and howled and screamed and sobbed around the windows of the small-town hotels where I slept at night. Every day, everywhere I looked, I saw the crushing drabness of life and felt a nameless, formless dread like a lid of gray cloud over the bleak landscape. I was nearly overwhelmed by the suffering of people and animals on the farms, in the towns. I had lived and worked here, too, scrubbing floors and emptying chamber pots in other people’s houses, and by some miracle of grace, I had broken out, as from a prison. Looking around me, I wondered now how I had managed to escape, when all these others were still here. Was it simple luck? Or had there been something in me, urging me outward, onward, farther?

  But what if I had stayed? Who would I be?

  Would I be the gaunt and toothless mother, whose only cow had just gone dry, leaving her baby with no milk? Would I be the woman who had so few dishes that she and her husband and their four elderly parents, all living in the same house, could not sit down together for a meal?

  Or would I be the woman who had ten children—so many that she couldn’t remember all their names—and was pregnant again and begged me, begged me, to ask Mrs. Roosevelt to send her something that would keep her from having more babies? Could that life have been mine?

  These unanswerable questions haunted me day and night, and when I reached the next dreary hotel in the next sad little town and found a letter from Eleanor, I snatched it up and held it to my heart. It was my lifeline back to her—and to civilization. I cried when I read what she had written in one letter, that she was prouder to know me than she could ever tell me, because anyone who is “you” after all you’ve been through need never be afraid of anything or anyone.

  Later, I would think about that and take a kind of bleak refuge in the thought that, while the miseries I witnessed daily were changing me, I was still myself, at the core. For now, Eleanor’s words gave me courage to face the next day and t
he next. They helped to carry me into the next week. They gave me a horizon to look toward and a sweet wind at my back. Now, all my attention was focused on mid-December, when this endless, awful journey would be over and I would be back in civilization, back with her.

  I was in far northern Minnesota that last week, in Bemidji, in the timber country, where it was bitterly cold and government relief—in the form of money for warm clothes or help with the rent or with jobs—had been very slow in coming. I was doing my job: noting what was needed (blankets, clothing, food, and money, lots of money), where it should be sent, and how the distribution should be handled in the sparsely populated northern counties. And at the same time, I was trying to cope with my diabetes.

  I had lived with mood swings for years, but now they seemed to intensify. Whether it was the disease or the stress of travel or the bleakness of the lives I was witnessing, I couldn’t be sure—most likely, it was a combination of everything. But there were many days when I was exasperated, frustrated, physically exhausted, and weighed down with the sadnesses I saw and felt around me. Depression was a constant dark shadow.

  And all of this, of course, intensified my longing. Eleanor was a lighthouse, a lifeline, my hope of salvation. My heart was already in Washington, with her, and I was counting the days and hours, as lovers do. At the end of a long December letter, I wrote, I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips… Good night, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall! It was true. My surroundings were so bleak and people’s needs were so overwhelming that I could only survive by living in the future, with her.

  She was counting the days, too. Less than a week now, she wrote. I know I won’t be able to talk when we first meet but though I can remember just how you look I shall want to look long and very lovingly at you. Long and loving looks, touches, kisses. These were the future hopes that warmed me through the cold, dark present of that journey into the bleak heart of the country I had come from. In her letters, I read the same eager hope. But I was—and I think she was, too—creating a fantasy so fabulous, so miraculous, that its reality could only be a bitter disappointment.

  It was the Christmas season—the first for the Roosevelts in the White House—and Edith Helm, the First Lady’s social secretary, was determined to fill her calendar with holiday events. I arrived expecting that Eleanor and I would be able to spend evenings together, but Edith had other plans. In fact, there were so many holiday events heaped on top of Mrs. Roosevelt’s usual heavy load of daytime activities that there was not a single evening left for us. I was relegated to a few breathless catch-as-catch-can conversations during the day and a late-night half-hour before bed, when I was tired and Eleanor was completely exhausted.

  While I waited for Eleanor to return from whatever holiday event Edith had scheduled, I used the time to write my wrap-up reports for Harry Hopkins and catch up on my mending and reading. I had almost run out of things to do when at last Madam promised, promised, that we would spend one whole evening together, decorating the little tree in her sitting room and exchanging our gifts. She cancelled her attendance at the event that Edith had scheduled for that night and asked Mrs. Nesbitt to make something special for our dinner. She even asked the head usher to chill a bottle of bubbly.

  But Anna arrived late in the afternoon, once again in tears over her coming divorce, and Eleanor gave her my evening. I had grown fond of Anna and her daughter Sisty, and the three of us would remain friends over the years. But I was hungry for time with her mother, a hunger that our separation had intensified to a starvation. It hurt like hell to be put aside, like a book that Eleanor could open and close—or simply ignore—whenever something else came up.

  I didn’t blow up or stage a dramatic scene punctuated with accusations and tearful recriminations. I waited until Anna had gone to bed across the hall and Eleanor had changed into her nightgown and her old chenille robe. I had packed a bag with what I needed, and I set it beside the door.

  “Goodbye,” I said, pulling on my coat.

  “Goodbye?” She looked at me blankly. “You’re not leaving, Hick. Why? Where are you going? It’s the middle of the night. And it’s snowing!”

  I took a deep breath and recited the little speech I had prepared. “People who love one another keep the commitments they make. Tonight was our time—finally, our time together—and you gave it away to someone else.”

  “But… but Anna is my daughter,” Eleanor said blankly. “I love her. She needs me!”

  I managed a small smile. “I love you and need you, too, my dear. Anna will be here next week and next month and the month after that. I won’t.” Then, at nearly midnight, I left the White House and checked in for the night at the Powhatan, a few blocks away. The next morning, I took the train to New York and retrieved Prinz from the kennel. We went to stay with Jean Dixon.

  That night, Eleanor called. “I’m sorry, Hick,” she said contritely. “Oh, so sorry. Sometimes I— Sometimes I let things get the better of me. I’ve told Edith and Tommy to clear the calendar. I’m coming to New York. Will you and Prinz come and stay with me?”

  I agreed, of course. We had a lazy three days, reading, walking, going to see As Thousands Cheer, Irving Berlin’s hit musical revue, at the Music Box. The revue was made up of witty songs and satirical sketches based on recent newspaper headlines. In one, President and Mrs. Hoover gloomily leave the White House, Hoover giving his cabinet a Bronx cheer. Eleanor tried not to laugh at that one, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Best of all, there was time for the talk that seemed to make things right between us. When she went back to the White House, she wrote, Dearest one bless you and forgive me and believe me you’ve brought me more and meant more to me than you know and I will be thankful… every day for your mere being in the world.

  Now, with decades of hindsight, I can see that what happened during that holiday season was a preview of times to come, when it would be increasingly difficult for me to find a place in her overscheduled, overcrowded life. But I didn’t understand it then. Only one thing seemed different to me, and important: that I had stood up for myself when I felt she was using me. I loved her, but I had left her when I couldn’t be with her for just one evening on my terms, even when those terms were terribly compromised.

  The significance of this eluded me then. But after I had done it once, I would find that I could do it again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  An Infinite Succession of Things

  My first FERA trip of 1934 took me south, to Georgia, where the new Civil Works Administration had created enough construction jobs—primarily bridges and roads—to blunt the worst effects of the Depression. The situation was bad, yes, especially for the Negroes who were competing with white people for the available jobs. But life didn’t seem quite as dire as it was in the upper Midwest or in coal country, perhaps because the weather was warmer, or perhaps because I didn’t get out into the rural areas. In the cities and large towns and among the local business people, I found a spirit of optimism and a sense that the future held brighter prospects.

  And I was optimistic, too. Madam and I were planning a weekend together, a quiet weekend, just the two of us. On a Friday in mid-January, Bluette and I picked her up at the Atlanta airport and drove to Warm Springs. The president was in Washington, so we would be alone there.

  Warm Springs had been FDR’s haven for nearly ten years. He had invested nearly two hundred thousand dollars of his own money in the purchase of the old run-down Meriwether Inn and much more in new buildings and facilities: a riding stable, a golf course for his friends, and pools and treatment facilities for the “polios” who came there to recuperate. The 88-degree springs were the powerful attraction, for the minerals in the bubbling water bu
oyed a polio victim up, allowing him or her to exercise paralyzed limbs in ways that weren’t possible anywhere else.

  Just two years before, FDR had built a white clapboard, green-shuttered cottage on a rise overlooking a dense stand of Georgia pine. In the center was a large living-dining area, with Missy’s bedroom on the right and his on the left, with a smaller room for Eleanor and a porch in the back that overlooked the ravine. When she was there, Missy presided over the Little White House with a happily proprietary air. She was in charge, and more nearly FDR’s wife than she was anywhere else.

  For visitors, including the president’s mother, there were comfortable cottages in the woods, some of them furnished with Val-Kill beds, sofas, and chairs. Eleanor, who thought of herself as a visitor, preferred the guest cottages—and that’s where we stayed. Our meals were brought to the cottage, where we ate, and in the evenings, we read aloud to each other in front of a blazing fireplace.

  The weekend was lovely, an intimate foretaste, I thought then, of the best times to come, when the First Lady had stepped out of the national spotlight. On Saturday, we slept late, then swam in the heated water of the pool, and went riding. That is, she went riding. I stayed behind with a book, feeling pampered and lazy, loving the way the tall Georgia pines clustered around our cabin, closing it in from the world. In the days before white conquest and settlement, the warm, spring-fed pools had been a healing sanctuary, and the warring Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw came there under truce. There would be no fighting at the springs. It was a refuge. That’s how I felt there: that Madam and I were a pair of refugees from a contentious world—shut away, shielded, sheltered from the openly disapproving or the merely curious. We were just ourselves. We were just two women who loved each other.

  On Monday, I took her to Atlanta and put her on a plane. And on Monday night, I wrote to her. Each time we have together that way—brings us closer, doesn’t it? And I believe those days and long pleasant hours together each time make it perhaps a little less possible for us to hurt each other. They give us better understanding of each other, give us more faith, draw us closer. If it wasn’t quite all that I might have wanted, that long, sweet arc of hours at Warm Springs created a dream of the future for me, and I held it in my mind for a long time. That was what our life together could be, would be, if we could only get through the arid desert of Eleanor’s years as First Lady.