by Amy Bloom
I wouldn’t call it nagging. It was like having the Statue of Liberty watch you have one beer too many. Everyone except Franklin would shrink a little and Eleanor would purse her lips, as if she was so clobbered with disgust, she couldn’t hide it. When I wasn’t the victim, I loved it. And when I was the object of her love, when her eyes lit up across the room, when she touched her fingertips to the pulse at the base of her throat, to mark the spot for me, to mark herself, I thought that there was no sacrifice I wouldn’t make.
* * *
—
Eleanor leans forward and the strap tears off from her slip and we both hear it.
“That slip’s done,” I say. “I’m glad.”
She pulls it off and I unbutton my shirt. I let my robe open and our tired white flesh meets and what may not look beautiful does feel beautiful.
Eleanor says that we should turn out the light and I say, I will pay you a million dollars to let me look at you.
Every woman’s body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.
The Words the Happy Say
SATURDAY EARLY MORNING, APRIL 28, 1945
29 Washington Square West
New York, New York
I wake up before dawn and Eleanor’s in the living room, glasses on, tea steeping.
She smiles up at me.
“More letters. Missy’s nieces. And her brother too.”
“I liked Missy,” I say. “I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.”
“I know. Poor Missy. Good heavens, Princess Martha as a rival. Missy deserved better.”
We both roll our eyes and Eleanor pushes back an imaginary hat with two fingers and wrinkles her nose at the same time, making her a perfect naughty rabbit, or, if you knew her, a perfect Princess Martha of Norway, Franklin’s frequent guest.
“You were very good to Missy,” Eleanor says.
I was.
* * *
—
Four years ago, it was warm but not yet hot and Eleanor was traveling for weeks. I was rabble-rousing for Democrats and Missy was in charge of the White House staff party. She wore a nice black crêpe dress, with a lace collar and only a little pink lipstick. Like Eleanor, she was a study in beautiful gray and white and unlike Eleanor, her dress clung, top and bottom. Eleanor always arranged for corsages for the female staff and Missy’s was just like Eleanor’s, a cascade of three white orchids. I always thought she looked enough like Eleanor to be a younger sister, with better teeth and a stronger jawline, but no one else in the world seemed to have noticed, so I didn’t say.
Franklin rolled into the party, wearing a chef’s hat and apron, and everyone clapped. He turned on the twinkle and served up a few plates. He winked at Missy, patted me on the arm (Missy’s done it up, he said; too bad the missus couldn’t come), and wheeled out. Missy called for three busty girls to get up and do their version of the Andrews Sisters and I said to Grace Tully, If I hear “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” sung one more time by girls who wouldn’t kiss a Jewish boy if his life depended on it—and Tully, Franklin’s junior secretary, shushed me. Missy put a finger to her lips to scold me and then she clapped both hands to her forehead. She grabbed at the buffet table and brought the tablecloth, the plates, the petits fours tower, and the bowls of fruit down around her.
Oh, she kept saying, oh God. Oh God have mercy, what is this, she said. Her lips turned blue.
Tully grabbed her by the belt going down and I knelt down to catch her. In twenty years, Missy sometimes had a few too many drinks, which was mostly her wish to keep up with the boss, and also, and I have no high ground here at all, her wish to periodically forget that he was the whole world for her and she was a delightful little village for him. I thought this might be only that.
The lead singer caught my eye and signaled the other two. They paused and everyone looked around to see why. The blond singer sat down on a pink velvet ballroom chair. Mabel from housekeeping picked up the fruit and the smashed chocolates, frowning at the waste and at poor Missy, shaking in my arms, peeing on my skirt.
I carried Missy out of the room. Tully followed with Missy’s handbag. Two of the Secret Service guys met me at the elevator. We took the elevator to the third floor. I’d never been to Missy LeHand’s room before. It was like a maid’s room in Hyde Park. One high, joyless window. One narrow twin bed, too short for anyone who’d had a decent childhood. A stained marble basin in a wood vanity so old the lacquer was coming off in dismal brown strips, like the last leaves. There was a big crystal vase filled with fading tulips and some letters weighed down with two snow globes of the White House.
By the time we’d undressed her and put her in her white pajamas, with the pink piping, which were a gift from Eleanor the year before, the doctor was knocking on the door. Her mouth hung open and her right eye fluttered like a moth. The doctor looked at my wet skirt and shoved us out of the little room. I’m guessing it’s a heart attack, he said.
Tully and I walked down the hall, Tully still holding Missy’s silver jacket. I could slip a note under Franklin’s door and he might love me for it. I wrote the note and I stopped outside his closed office door and put it in my pocket. Whoever’s job that was, it wasn’t mine.
* * *
—
Eleanor came back the next day and bustled while Missy lay there. She was her worst and her best self. She hired a cadre of nurses. She let people know that it was possible that this was all psychological. She arranged for massage therapists and doctors. And when Missy had another, bigger stroke, there was fresh fruit every day, cut very small, which Missy could hardly eat because her left side, from her eye to her chin, wasn’t working at all. We had one ceremonial, excruciating visit from Franklin, rolling in with the big laugh and the flowers that Eleanor had put on his lap in the elevator. Eleanor hovered and I walked down the stairs, so as to not kill anyone.
“He hates illness,” Eleanor said to me. “It’s painful for him to see her this way. Missy is…she’s always been so lively. And charming.”
That’s what we all said about Missy. We said it to White House staff. We said it to visitors. We said it to reporters. The idea that Franklin preferred his secretary to his wife didn’t offend any newsmen, not the Catholic ones and not the married ones. Eleanor was a Great Lady and what man in Christ’s name wanted to be married to that?
At six, every day, Tully came by with carefully sifted news for Missy, which was worse than no news. It was the news that Eleanor and Franklin allowed Tully to give out to the cousins, tidbits designed to look like the real thing. Missy LeHand had been Franklin Roosevelt’s confidante and secretary and stage manager and mistress. Her ass had rested on the arm of Franklin’s chair, the fabric of her dress flowing over his sleeve, both of them feeling an invisible, electric wire between them. She’d sat in his lap while he looked at top-secret documents or read the paper, with her head on his shoulder. She’d rested her hands on his shoulders while he mused about exactly what lie he would roll out in the middle of lunch with an irate cabinet member and she laughed and gave him a kiss on the temple. Oh, F.D., she said, aren’t you a one. She put on the Irish, which he loved; there was no kind of mockery he didn’t love. And Franklin would say, when he felt too pressed, or backed into a corner or reminded of something he’d promised to someone in need, who was now revealed to be a colossal pain in the ass, Humankind cannot bear very much reality. We all knew that he’d heard that line from Winston Churchill, who learned it from Clementine Churchill, who had actually read T. S. Eliot’s poems.
Eleanor did better than Franklin. She brought embroidered pillows. She had Missy’s robe cleaned and bought her two new ones. Cotton, not satin, because it was summer and because there was no point pretending Missy wasn’t spilling things down the front. Eleanor c
ame into the room one morning, carrying small green crown-shaped bottles of Inauguration, the perfume Prince Matchabelli (an actual prince) had made for her. It smelled like carnations and burning rubber and we all hated it. Eleanor gave out bottles to every woman she knew. Amelia Earhart sniffed it, twisted the top tightly, and handed it to her husband, George, who put it in his pocket. Eleanor gave a bottle to Tommie, over breakfast. Tommie held it up to the light, admired the green ribbed glass and pushed it back as if it was just too grand for the likes of her. Every time Eleanor put a bottle on my dresser, I put it back in her underwear drawer. She had twenty-five bottles of the stuff.
“Enough for everyone,” she said, and she put two of the bottles down on Missy’s breakfast tray. “Dear Missy, I am so sorry to run off. Hick, darling, I’m so glad you can visit for a little while with Missy.”
Missy looked at me.
“I brought you some things,” I said. “We’re not going to sit here like dopes. I got cards, I got the newspaper, and I got you this.”
I took out the alphabet board I’d found at a school for the deaf.
“Look at this thing.” I tapped a few keys encouragingly, as if we weren’t both damn good typists.
She took the board in her left hand, which was weak but not useless like the right.
GO.
“I can’t go,” I said. “You heard her. I’m visiting with you for a little while.”
She closed her eyes. I didn’t blame her.
I offered Missy bourbon, from the bottle in my bag.
“I won’t tell, if you won’t,” I said. “Just two scholarship girls, grabbing a drink, while the fancy folks go about their business.”
She looked right at me, her wide white face trembling.
“I know,” I said. “I do know how it is. And you had it much better than I ever did. You weren’t cropped out of all the photos. No one in the White House pretended not to know your name. Jesus Christ, Missy, I’ve come in more back doors and down more hidden staircases, with more fake names than a Russian spy but, you, the attractive secretary and the dashing Great Man, especially dashing while in a wheelchair, everyone loved that story.”
Missy and Franklin put a smile on reporters’ faces. Eleanor and I were no one’s favorite secret. I tended to scowl. Eleanor sometimes turned her face away. We were puzzling. I was not the travel companion the press wanted for her (Time magazine said I was rotund, with baggy clothes and a peremptory manner, and no one in the White House said, Oh, my dear, how could they?) and it was clear, to all those men, covering her all the time, that there was something wrong with the picture and the descriptions of me were even worse than the pictures. I’d spent my whole adult life with good-looking women sitting on my knee and expressing interest but in the world of Time magazine and The New York Times, I was a musical comedy nanny. I was a fat sheepdog in rumpled clothes. (Did they know Eleanor had my suits made? That I was wearing French silk panties, bought and paid for by the First Lady?) My job, as the world saw it, was getting Eleanor Roosevelt from event to event, nipping at Mrs. Roosevelt’s heels.
But that was old news and I was still around. I was still having lunch with Eleanor, still finding boxes of hand-me-down evening gowns in my armoire, still getting occasional checks with emphatically kind notes and carrying on with Marion, which made me feel alive. Missy had nothing but bouquets bought by Eleanor.
“Just you and me, kid,” I said. “Come on, I’ll tell you a story.”
Everything I’d seen, she’d seen, except the stories that were too private. I didn’t expect her to tell me how it felt, helping Franklin from the chair to the bed and leaving that bed to run up to the third floor at three A.M. She didn’t expect me to tell her about the time Eleanor and I found ourselves in ridiculous, middle-aged passion in a not very large dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, while Eleanor was still First Lady and looking for a new blouse. We were down to our slips and hose, her sitting on my lap, both of us bracing against the collapse of the little chair. It still made me smile.
“I’ll tell you what really happened when we went to Yosemite. Everyone loved that disaster.”
Her eyes came back to me and her lips lifted a little, on the left side.
Everyone in America knew about our Yosemite vacation, what we privately called “our second honeymoon,” because I fell off a horse. Every newspaper covered the story but no one had a photograph and that was luck enough for me. The papers gave a whole column of comedy to Mrs. Roosevelt’s bulky sidekick, sliding off a stubborn horse in one of our great national treasures, and into a creek, surrounded by handsome park rangers. I was humiliated but I wasn’t hurt and I managed to laugh, for Eleanor’s sake.
Oh, Missy, I said. I was just a fool, in public and private on that holiday. I fell off a horse. I told the tourists to go to hell. I don’t have your grace, I said.
Who doesn’t like to hear that?
Missy nodded.
Once we were back in the lodge, Eleanor hung up my clothes to dry and stuffed my boots with paper and put them by the fire. She poured sherry into two small tin cups and pulled me down to the quilt. It’s still just us, she said. We’re just Jane and Janet Doe making our way through the Wild West and naturally, mistakes will occur. The fire flickered across her face and she rubbed my sore feet, my aching legs. She swaddled me and kissed my forehead, like I was an invalid, and when the sun came up and there were more horses to ride and more tourists to charm, I smiled like a Roosevelt. I was a good sport and she was very kind, and I appreciated her kindness and she appreciated my good cheer, and somehow, that was that.
In four years, we’d run out of possibilities. She wouldn’t leave Franklin until he was out of office, and I didn’t actually want her to. When she said she could, I pointed out how important he was to her own goals and to the country. When I said that maybe, we could take a month in New Mexico, maybe we could get our own place in Manhattan, she pointed out that we’d have reporters everywhere, and always would. I couldn’t pose successfully as her aide-de-camp because in public, she would take my hand, sometimes, or press up against me, and in spite of myself, I had to tell her not to.
“I am this way with all of my friends,” she said. It was true. They were all an endless daisy chain of pats and squeezes, of affection and endearments.
“It looks different when it’s us,” I said. “I like it. Jesus, Eleanor, I love it, and that’s the problem. We do not look like the dearest of friends. Trust me.”
“I wonder if we aren’t, really, the dearest of friends. Deep down.”
* * *
—
I drove back East by myself. I banged the living daylights out of an old girlfriend in San Fran, pardon my French, and I did my best to move forward without complaint. I didn’t succeed, but I did try.
(It became a very popular story back East. For the next year, Franklin and his sons, and every other man in the White House, would give me a poke or a look, whenever the subject of the national parks or horseback riding or even just vacations came up.)
CANT LIVE, Missy wrote. PLS.
“You can,” I said. “Looky here.”
I took mint and sugar out of my bag. I made us mint juleps in honor of there being some horse race somewhere. I crushed the mint with my fingers and poured her drink into a cup and put in a straw. It was hard for her to get her lips around the straw and she began to cry, only her right eye leaking tears.
Don’t worry, I said. I poured the julep into a bowl and I fed it to her.
Missy swallowed a few times and put her left hand up to her mouth, to stop me.
F.D., she typed.
I started to say that I was sure he’d come by soon and I closed my mouth. I was no better than the rest of them.
I packed up my julep fixings. I washed out the bowl. I left the little keyboard on the nightstand. I said that she must know how much all of the Roosevelts loved her and that all we wanted, him especially, was for her to get well.
Franklin had changed h
is will and let everyone in the family know that if he died before Missy, half of his estate would be put aside for her medical bills and ongoing care. Everyone acted as if this made sense, as if any man would do this for his devoted secretary and announce it to all, and Eleanor kept on with the fruit and the flowers and the visits and so did I. I thought that if I was in Missy’s shoes, I would hope somebody’d kill me, and if they couldn’t do that, I’d hope they’d visit me and bring the bourbon.
* * *
—
There wasn’t enough bourbon.
In February, Missy choked herself with a chicken bone from lunch and if the nurse hadn’t come back in to get the sweater she’d left behind, Missy would have died, vomiting blood on her sheets. In March, she set herself on fire in the middle of the night, matchbooks flaming at the four corners of the bed. Her hands and chest were burned. She needed gauze bandages on both hands, for a little while, and a nurse had to feed her and turn pages for her. Come spring, Princess Martha of Norway fled the Nazis and became the White House’s effervescent guest. In early May, Franklin came into Missy’s room for ten minutes. He went back downstairs to dinner with the princess. Missy had a relapse of some kind and by ten P.M., a nurse and a maid had packed up what Missy had and put her in a car for her sister’s house in Somerville, Massachusetts. She could recover there, is what everyone said, by which we all meant, suffer in private and not burn down the White House.
According to the letters from her sister, things got better in Somerville. After eight months, Missy could write her own brief notes, and she did. She didn’t write to me but she wrote to Grace Tully, and to Franklin and to Eleanor, both of whom read her short, shaky letters aloud to each other, and sighed. She was walking now, she wrote. She was doing so well, her bed had been moved back upstairs.
Work took me near Somerville and I wrote that I could come by in a week, with a note from Franklin and gifts from everyone. It was Tommie who put together the package and Tully who ran down to give me a note from Franklin. Anna LeHand Rochon called me at the hotel and said that they would be happy to have me over for tea at 101 Orchard Street.