White Houses

by Amy Bloom

  There was nothing wrong with the house, pictures of Ireland, of the saint with the snakes, of the Irish grandparents, of her late parents, holding their two daughters on their lap, while the oldest, Missy’s brother, Daniel, stood aside, his hand on his mother’s shoulder. Missy’s nieces, whose names I’d learned and forgotten a dozen times, came downstairs, out of curiosity. I stood in the doorway, with my coat and hat still on, next to Missy’s sister and the nieces, and we all watched Missy, in a loose sweater and dowdy plaid skirt, walk down the stairs, very slowly. She gripped both stair rails and she came down the way I sometimes do myself, letting one leg do most of the work, always taking the step down at an angle.

  I clasped both of Missy’s thin hands so as not to knock her over and we walked side by side to the sofa. Finally, one of the nieces took my coat and hat.

  I looked behind Missy and saw the big sterling cup Franklin had sent her, with a curly monogram of MLeH on it. It had fresh roses in it.

  “The Roosevelts have been so wonderful,” Anna said. “They send gifts all the time.”

  Missy nodded and looked toward the coffee table where there was a copy of The True Story of Fala, an insipid book about Franklin’s dog, written by Cousin Daisy. It was open to an inscription from Franklin, and I picked it up and looked, as I was supposed to.

  “You know who’s always here?” Missy’s sister patted my arm. “Bill Bullitt. He sends notes, he comes by. He sends the craziest gifts, doesn’t he, Missy? So extravagant. He’s still in love with you, honey.”

  Missy nodded again.

  Most of us thought Bullitt chased Missy to catch Franklin, and no one thought much of him. Before her stroke, she’d carry on stagy, flirtatious phone conversations with him and then hang up, rolling her eyes at whoever was nearby. And last year, when Franklin was completely fed up with the man, he told Bullitt that there’d be no promotions, no cabinet position coming, ever, and he encouraged him to run for mayor of Philadelphia. Bullitt said, All right, he would. And then Franklin called up every captain and cog in the Philadelphia machine the summer of ’43 and told them, “Cut his throat.” Eleanor told me she’d sat on the couch while he made the calls. He was in great spirits, she said.

  Bill Bullitt was an opportunistic, anti-Semitic, Commie-chasing piece of shit. I didn’t say that either.

  I said, “You look wonderful. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  Her sister stiffened.

  Missy clasped her hands in front of her and rolled back her shoulders. She said, I think: Not much.

  Her sister laughed, like Missy was such a comedian. “Oh, Missy, that’s not true. You exercise. You read. You’re wonderful with Babe and Barbara, those are my daughters. We go to the movies. The President gets us tickets, you know.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. I handed Missy the note from Franklin. She dropped it and picked it up before I could help. She pressed it to her chest and made an ugly little sound in her throat.

  Her sister made a move to take it from her and Missy moved it up to her bare skin.

  Missy said: F.D.

  Anna poured more tea.

  Missy said: Loves me.

  She nodded. I nodded back.

  Anna said that maybe Missy’d like to read it later. Missy nodded, her head tilting left, and then she held the note to her cheek.

  Anna said, “It’s so wonderful that he took the time to write, honey.”

  Missy lowered her eyes.

  “Speaking of the White House,” I said. “Your old beau, Bill Bullitt? Gosh, did you ever hear about the beautiful ball he gave in Moscow, in the thirties? Talk about extravagant.”

  I gave that story everything I had. I gave them detail upon detail and what I didn’t know, I made up. I told them about dancers from the Bolshoi twirling en pointe through birch trees placed in the chandelier room, re-creating the Russian countryside. I described the long dining room table, covered with Finnish tulips from end to end, and chicory planted in rolls of wet felt, to make a living lawn, inside the ballroom. There were parakeets and a few pheasants and zebra finches. Zebra finches are so beautiful, I said, and I described them like an avid bird-watcher. Plus, I said, the man brought in goats.

  “Goats,” Anna said, gamely. “How crazy is that?”

  “And white roosters and a baby bear. The poor little bear got drunk on champagne. It was all written about in a famous Russian novel,” I said. “It was called The Spring Ball of the Full Moon.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful,” Anna said. “I can just picture it.”

  Missy said something that sounded like: Wonderful.

  I think I stayed long enough, to show whatever it was I thought I needed to show. I kissed Missy goodbye and shook hands with her sister and waited in the front hall while they rounded up the daughters, who waved from the stairs. I got back in my car and thought, Jesus Christ, please let me never complain again, about anyone or anything.

  PART THREE

  Remembrance Has a Front and a Rear

  We came back from our northern holiday, more in love than when we’d left. People could see it a mile away. People asked Eleanor if she’d changed her hair. They told me I’d lost weight. We acted like people who’d leaped off the shipwreck just in time, and found themselves on a desert island with sunshine, shelter, and plenty of pineapples. I smiled when I saw other reporters. I could live without the bylines, easy. The night we came back, we were invited to a big lesbian dinner party with some of Eleanor’s old friends from Mademoiselle Souvestre’s boarding school. Your debut, Eleanor said. There were married ladies with a wandering eye and Eleanor’s Seven Sister friends in Harris Tweeds and jaunty walking sticks (silver swan handle, are you kidding me) and elegant English walking shoes (Lobb’s, the woman next to me said, holding up her foot, like I should sail right over and order a pair). One woman was divorced and after two martinis, she said she was as happy on the day they got divorced as she was when they got married and maybe more. Eleanor looked down at her plate.

  Everyone talked about whichever girl they’d had a crush on in boarding school. Eleanor had been the reigning princess at Allenswood, which apparently made me every junior girl who laid flowers at her feet, screamed for her on the hockey field (where I would have kicked her ass, I’m pretty sure), and made her bed for her while she was brushing her teeth. The women laughed and clinked glasses: Here’s to mad passion and pash madness. Eleanor squeezed my hand, in front of everyone, which was not a small thing, and then she said, Oh, Dearest, you know what English boarding schools are like. I sat up straight, representing my people, the hired girls of South Dakota, and I said, Oddly enough, I have no idea at all about boarding schools, English, French, or Fuck All. The prettiest woman from the old boarding school days coughed up her champagne and everyone pounded her on the back. Someone asked me what I did and Eleanor broke in to tell them I was Harry Hopkins’s right-hand man, and there was suitable tittering. I was invited to describe the terrible things I’d seen in our great country, by two women who did care, and by women who were on their third glass of champagne, and then there were strawberries and cream and then we went back to the White House and we made love but we didn’t talk.

  * * *

  —

  For two years, I took my job for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration seriously. I traveled across the country and wrote to Eleanor and to Harry Hopkins every week, about the Depression: women dying in city hospitals, lying in the corridors, four in a row, piss and shit dropping to the floor, like they were so many cows. If they were poor enough and one of the adults was able enough, they could do the work some pencil pusher thought they should do, for a wage that didn’t upset the local businesses. Farmers watched their babies get through the flu, survive mumps and measles, and then die of just plain starvation, before they turned two. Small boys and girls, still a little unsteady on their feet, pulled sugar beets from dawn to dusk. Gray-faced women tried to tidy their shacks the way my mother had: sweep the dirt out to the yard,
watch it drift back in like a grim brown tide, wet two cloths, tie one over your hair and forehead, and use the other one to clean the sills and clean the table so you could make some kind of meal without the dust and cottonwood filling your mouth.

  A girl, skinny and still flat-chested, saw my fedora and my coat and smelled my cigarette. She said, Mister, I costs you a dime. I said, It was all right, I’d give her the dime if she went home. She put out her filthy hand for the dime and walked up to the next corner, making sure I wasn’t following and cutting into business. I stayed in a tent village in the Ozarks and saw a river of sewage cut a path down the middle of a dirt road. I stood in rubber boots at the edge of the water and I had to go back to my car when the toughest little boy, my shirtless hero, started fishing things out with a stick and a hairpin. He made a pile and stood guard over it, so when he was done, he could wash it in the lake two miles away and then, as he told me, he’d sell it maybe, or anyways, something for his sisters. I had my nose rubbed in my own racialism so often, and so hard, by meeting colored people who were so much worse off and had been hard done by for so much longer. Negro men and women, working from can to can’t, surrounded by a sea of hungry, wide-eyed children and at least one rail-thin, night-dark old lady in the corner, sitting like a seer in her one dress, all knowing that their suffering registered less, that their dead weighed less, that there was less chance they could climb out of this terrible canyon, and fewer people to reach for them as they did. I finally had to give it up and it hurt me, I tell you, to understand that the Hickoks of Bowdle, South Dakota, with shoes from a dead girl to wear on school days only and oatmeal for dinner, were lucky people.

  I Have No Life but This

  SATURDAY MORNING, APRIL 28, 1945

  29 Washington Square West

  New York, New York

  We’d napped, rolling over to find each other. I reach for her before I open my eyes. She’s in the living room, reading already. She looks up and smiles. She doesn’t put up her arms for me.

  “I’ve been reading for an hour,” she says. “There’s more tea. And a letter from Missy LeHand’s nieces. And one from her brother.”

  Two years ago, I was living down the hall from Eleanor. We’d had a modest wartime Christmas. No rubber, no metal, no sugar, no butter. Eleanor and I exchanged gifts (a check from her, a blue scarf I got from the Democratic National Committee and put in a new box for her) in her room and we walked downstairs for cocktails, chaste as sisters. Franklin held up a cocktail shaker and a letter from Anna LeHand. Anna LeHand had written to Franklin that Missy was a wreck. She spelled out every detail of Missy’s infinite misery and finally Franklin said it was a damned shame and he’d invited Missy to come for a week’s visit, as soon as she was up for it. Eleanor nodded pleasantly and pointed out that there was not a single empty bedroom. Franklin waved his hand, to show how little this detail mattered. Three days later, Missy’s sister wrote back to say that this was the best possible news, that Missy was very excited and when could she bring Missy down? Franklin handed the note to Eleanor and Eleanor had Tommie write to say regrettably, it wasn’t possible at this time, but they would, of course, reschedule.

  Missy’s sister made damned sure the visit was rescheduled because she loved her sister and hoped to God that they could get out of Somerville and claw their way back to important meetings and White House dinners, with evening gowns and matching jackets, but it was canceled again, while I was out of town. Only Eleanor could have done that. I doubt Franklin thought any more about Missy and if she had come, she’d have been Eleanor’s problem then too. I only knew because Grace Tully had no one else to tell.

  On July 31, 1944, Missy’s sister wrote, furiously, that they’d gone to the movies. There was a newsreel of the president and Missy rose unsteadily in the middle of it and announced to the theater that she needed to go home, immediately. That night, she took out all of her albums and letters from Franklin and laid them on her bed. She opened every page to a picture of him. She had a stroke, and called out his name and fell onto the pile. She was forty-eight. Not old.

  * * *

  —

  Franklin was on his way to Alaska. Bill Bullitt was in Naples. None of the Roosevelt children came, except James’s ex-wife, Betsey the starlet, who chatted up Eleanor at the interminable wake.

  Eleanor and I, and the old postmaster general, Jim Farley, and Bishop Cushing and Judge Frankfurter, both of whom knew what was what, and young Tip O’Neill and vile Joe Kennedy came to the funeral at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Eleanor and I sat while the statement from the White House press secretary was read. The White House emphasized faithful and painstaking. Franklin hadn’t seen her for almost three years. He found a few different ways to say it was a great thing, the way she’d laid down her life for his, with selfless efficiency. He said she had a real genius for getting things done. By which he meant, things for him. The cigarette, the blanket, the cushion, the prompt arrival of the presidential car, preceded by her deflecting everyone’s attention from the quick carry of the president down a back stair. Missy was a genius at shining the light just so. She delivered the notes indicating yes when everyone in the White House knew the answer was, and always would be, no. The press secretary wrote: Faithful and painstaking, with charm of manner inspired by tact and kindness of heart, she was utterly selfless in her devotion to duty. Hers was a quiet efficiency, which made her a real genius in getting things done. Her memory will ever be held in affectionate remembrance and appreciation, not only by all the members of our family but by the wide circle of those whose duties brought them into contact with her.

  There’s a large rock nearby with a bronze plaque that simply reads LEHAND and Missy’s buried next to her sister, nowhere near Hyde Park. The Roosevelts paid for the funeral and her headstone carries a quote from that press release, like a letter of reference. She was utterly selfless in her devotion to duty. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  I don’t think she would have liked more visits from me. There was nothing I could bring or say that would have helped. Eleanor and Franklin paid for the casket and the blanket of red and white flowers that covered it.

  He ate her, I said to Eleanor, on the drive home. For twenty years. Those were the bones.

  Oh really, Hick, Eleanor said.

  Good Night, Sweetheart

  LATER, SATURDAY MORNING, APRIL 28, 1945

  29 Washington Square West

  New York, New York

  Eleanor passes me more letters and begins reading one aloud. This is from Parker Fiske, she says.

  She waves a large white envelope marked Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “It says, ‘Deliver to Eleanor Roosevelt in the event of my demise.’ Do you think Parker’s dead?”

  Eleanor had taken lessons to get her high, fluting voice under control, which she almost has, and now, when she’s distressed, she sounds like a bored radio announcer from Illinois.

  I say, “If he died in the last three weeks, we would have heard about it. I’m sure he’s fine.” But even if he’s not dead, I don’t think he’s fine. By the time we got to know each other, Parker was never fine. “You could call White Horse Hill, if you’re worried,” I say.

  She cleans her glasses and reads to me.

  18/4/45

  White Horse Hill Manor

  White Horse Hill, Maryland

  Dear Eleanor,

  I am so sorry. The loss of Franklin is as terrible to me, as the loss of my own mother was. I can only imagine how dark these days have been for you. But I know you. I know every time one of us stumbles to express how sorry we are for your loss, you’ll say the right thing. In fact, I’m sure you’ve had to say it a hundred times, to all sorts of people, to every simpering Roosevelt cousin (I know you will find it unkind for me to say, but that flock that followed him, that gaggle of admirers seemed to have been chosen entirely for their ability to fawn without pausing for lunch), and to the haberdasher from Missouri. You put your hand on every shoulder and you tell them
that you are, in your turn, very sorry for them. You are kindness itself but in that sweet, fluting tone there’s more than a hint of: If I can pull myself together, dear, surely you can too.

  You are kindness itself. You have never once spoken of my meetings with Miss Hickok but I feel sure that she told you about them. I would say that it was not my finest moment, but that list of not-fine moments is quite long. I have to add to them tonight. By the time you get this, I hope I’m dead.

  Eleanor looks up over her glasses.

  “I doubt it,” I say.

  “You had a conversation, you had conversations, with my cousin Parker Fiske. About what?” she says, in exactly the tone Parker Fiske was writing about.

  * * *

  —

  He was a tall, lean, mean, well-dressed man. He had a long, disdainful face and steel-frame spectacles. He never looked out of place at the White House. He looked like what he was, a Roosevelt cousin, a page at their wedding, a famously deft, much-married diplomat who knew how to wrestle other countries into agreements. He looked like a man who knew how to ride horses and which fork to use and how to properly address the younger brother of a duke—and he was. He didn’t look like a man who propositioned working-class men, white and black, in every possible conveyance (I’m just remarking that this stuff took place on trains, in cabs, in horse-drawn carriages, in the back of limousines, and on cruise ships, barges, and large sailboats). I think that’s what almost saved him and that’s what brought him low. People didn’t see his homosexual self coming (unlike yours truly) and that bothered them. He didn’t look at all like that type of man, so everyone who liked him—smart and charming and so good at his job—pretended it didn’t happen, or that somehow it had happened but only due to a mix of bourbon and misunderstanding. I don’t know what kind of misunderstanding it could have been. (No pussy down there? My mistake, sir.) The only time I ever heard Franklin refer to it, nothing was explained.