The Three Graces of Val-Kill

by Emily Herring Wilson

  With Nan and Marion along, the trip would be a delightful adventure for Eleanor. Not only had she found friends for herself; she had also found helpmates for the children—Nancy with her skills for cooking and camping out, Marion with her skills for managing rambunctious boys.

  •

  Campobello had been a popular summer resort for wealthy families from the Northeast since the middle to late 1800s. In the days before World War I families came and stayed for the entire summer. In late summer or early fall the summer people packed up and left, leaving their staffs to close up the houses, take in the wicker chairs from the porches, collect the lamps for winter repairs, clean out the fireplaces, and close the shutters, returning the island to the locals, who fished and cooked and told stories during the long winter days and nights. The families who came to the island for the summer provided work for most of the island’s men and women, but the locals knew the difference: at St. Anne’s Anglican Church the Roosevelts and other wealthy families occupied the center pews while the islanders sat on the sides. The summer people were nevertheless an important source of income in the island’s economy.

  Before the Roosevelt International Bridge was opened in 1962, there was no easy way to reach the remote island. Summer families arriving in the late 1800s to stay at the Tyn-y-Coed and Tyn-y-Maes hotels faced a long journey by train and boat. In the summer of 1921, when Sara Delano Roosevelt arrived home from England, having been told that Franklin was ill and anxious to reach Campobello, she traveled by train from New York, changing in Boston and at Ayers Junction, Massachusetts, to make the last part of the journey on a single railcar pulled by a tiny wood-burning engine to Eastport, Maine, where a boat met her and carried her to the island.1 Even today, with easy automobile travel and bridge access, the trip to Campobello is a long drive.

  •

  Eleanor, seasoned by moving her large family from New York City to Hyde Park several times a year, was masterful at getting them to Campobello every summer, with a lot of help from an entourage—often she brought along a tutor and one or more governesses. At the end of her life Eleanor had become known as one of the most traveled women in American history. Perhaps it is not too much to say that she learned a great deal about how to manage travels during all her summers going to and from Campobello. Sometimes she would stay there only a few weeks, return home, and then come back to be with family or visitors. Her stamina often tested Marion’s and Nan’s.

  Perhaps the most dramatic change on Campobello Island since Eleanor’s first visit in 1904 was in Eleanor herself. She had first come as a shy girl courted by her ebullient cousin and carefully watched by his mother. Sara was less observant than a next-door neighbor, who saw the couple falling in love and told Sara that she was making arrangements in her will for Sara to buy her house for Franklin and Eleanor, which Sara did in 1909. Eleanor delighted in rearranging the furniture in every room to suit her. It was her first chance to be her own interior decorator.

  Eleanor recorded other important personal dates in Campobello as well. In 1914 she miscalculated her due date and unexpectedly gave birth to her fourth child, Franklin Jr. In 1918 she was there alone with the children and her staff, wondering about the reason for Franklin’s long delay in joining the family. Why was he spending so much time boating on the Potomac (along with others, it was Lucy Mercer’s name that leapt out)? In the summer of 1917 she worried about being in Campobello without him and urged him to join them. In his letter to her, he chided her for accusing him of not wanting to join them, calling her a “goosey girl.”2 Then she discovered the love letters from Lucy to Franklin that confirmed her suspicions, and she confronted him with the evidence. The crisis passed, the marriage was preserved, but the damage was done. In late August on the island in 1921 Franklin was stricken with polio. He was thirty-nine years old. So many unhappy memories, and yet here she was, going back in 1925 with Marion and Nan and the boys, hoping for a different experience. They set out to drive the seven-passenger Buick north along the Hudson, Lake George, Lake Champlain, and on into Canada, and then down through New Hampshire and across Maine to Campobello.

  Now that Eleanor had a touring car and could share the driving with Marion and Nan, they got to know the New England road map as never before. Eleanor was intensely drawn to the natural landscape, and en route to Campobello Island she, Marion, and Nan had time to take in the beauties of northeastern rural life. The trip reaffirmed the women’s conviction that the woods and water of Val-Kill would give them the inspiration they needed to prepare for the next phase of their lives.

  •

  We learn a lot about how well we get along with others when we travel with them. Apparently for the three women the only wrinkle in the long car trip was the high energy of the young boys—together with Brud and John they had George Draper Jr., the son of FDR’s doctor, and Henry Roosevelt, the son of Eleanor’s younger brother, Hall. Brud and John got into various scrapes and accidents along the way that were especially unsettling to their mother. Eleanor had been nervous about taking the boys in the first place, unsure that she could manage, but Marion and Nan reassured her, Franklin wanted them to go, and the boys were excited.

  Camping en route to the island proved a unique experience for all of them. They stayed in primitive sites, heated coffee in a frying pan, and ate under the stars before turning in for the night. Once a landowner turned them away from his fields, saying that he did not want the kind of women who traveled without their husbands camping there. They moved on. The air grew lighter as they traveled closer to the sea.

  Of special pleasure were the stopovers to visit relatives and friends, particularly Mary (“Molly”) Dewson, the head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, and her partner, Polly Porter, who spent their summers in Castine, Maine. The overnight at Moss Acre, their summer home in Castine, was to be the last before the final leg of the motor trip to Campobello. By the time they reached Castine, the Maine landscape had imprinted itself upon Eleanor’s imagination, and her thoughts had turned to Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. Eleanor was with her best friends, who were helping her relax her strict rules for the two little fellows she wanted to learn to mother.

  The little town of Castine on Penobscot Bay glowed in the midday light, and the great, welcoming home of Molly and Polly beckoned them as they rolled down the long driveway. The rural landscape was a reminder of the setting they would come home to at Val-Kill at summer’s end. Dogs barked and leapt and were shushed by Polly, while Molly reached for the bags. As the boys piled out of the car and started scuffling, Eleanor tried to quiet them, but Marion merely laughed and shooed them away. There was an ease in the way the women held hands and leaned into one another. Molly and Eleanor immediately started talking New York Democratic politics. The others disappeared into the back of the house, where a cook had left supper on the wood stove. Molly and Eleanor sat down in front of the fire in the large living room that looked toward the bay.

  After a while, the women all took a walk to bring provisions for the boys, who had gone to a cabin by the shore, and then returned to the house for a nap. And when everyone was rested they gathered on the wide, shady porch. After another hour or so, supper. More hours passed in laughter and conversation, and before they all went to their rooms to close the windows, they stood together in the near-dark and watched light disappear over the water. Eleanor had promised the boys that she was going to sleep with them in the small rustic cabin, and off she went to the shore. Down below, the boys had quieted. As Eleanor walked to join them she had reason to feel that she was beginning to master life at last.

  The next morning Eleanor and the boys straggled up to the house for breakfast (sausage, syrup, pancakes), and then they all hugged one another in farewell—the boys escaping the kisses—and the travelers were once more on their way. Another stop for extra provisions and then on to Lubec, which smelled of fish, for a simple lunch at one of those small places of local renown found on every co
ast, and a hearty welcome from the owner. Time was of the essence—they must arrive before 5 p.m. or miss the boat—so there were constant reminders to hurry, hurry. Then they all piled into the ferry for the trip across the Narrows, found their sea legs on the choppy water, and, landing, stepped off and steadied themselves on the slippery dock. The boys were fearless, “made of rubber,” their father had laughed, and it made them feel good to think they were. A few local men came down to help them up the hill with their bags. Before mounting the steps to the porch of the Roosevelt cottage, the women, a little breathless, turned back for a last look at the shore that now seemed to all but disappear. The sound of the sea birds, the East Quoddy Lighthouse, and the fog blowing in at night were familiar: Eleanor was home, and Marion and Nan experienced with her what home could mean. Accustomed to far less comfort during their travels, Marion and Nan luxuriated in the thirty-five-room “cottage” on an island with dramatic sunsets, scenic walks, and boating expeditions (with meals packed for the occasions), in the company of a large family the two of them could call their own.

  Tomorrow, Eleanor announced, they would pick blueberries. Eleanor had first picnicked on the island in the summer of 1904, when she was secretly engaged to Franklin. Over the years, entertaining guests with a picnic had become a Roosevelt signature. The same informal manner of eating out-of-doors would later prevail at Val-Kill: baskets would disgorge quantities of food until the children were satisfied and had gone off to their mysterious games, and the adults walked or lay back in the sun and listened to silence broken only by bird calls, and sometimes by the clang of a buoy, and sometimes a murmur of contentment from the gang.

  The women unpacked, talked, laughed, complained a little about their aches and pains after the long trip, caught up with the neighbors, sent word by post to Castine that they had arrived (there was no telephone), tested the lamps (already filled, the wicks trimmed), ate a light meal, and lit the fires that had been laid for them. In no time the boys, promised a sail the next morning with Captain Calder, were asleep in their beds.

  Sailing picnics were a favorite entertainment at Campobello. Eleanor’s granddaughter Nina Roosevelt (Gibson), John and Anne Clark Roosevelt’s daughter, remembered, “Our picnics often were on the fishing boat while we were fishing or watching whales that came into the bay in August. . . . Somehow the hot dogs tasted best on the open water and the smell of the charcoal grill which was placed on the stern of the boat gave off that lovely cozy feeling of a fire at home on a cold wintry day.”3 Eleanor “Ellie” or “Sistie” (Seagraves), Eleanor’s first grandchild, Anna’s daughter, remembered that nothing was fancy about her grandmother’s picnics—“There were no cucumber or watercress sandwiches or dainty things! Things were generally ‘rough and ready’ for the period, especially if in an open, informal location, such as the beach at Campobello, or around the pool at Hyde Park.”4

  Before the local women who had been there to greet them and look after them left for the day, Eleanor met with them to ask about their families and their needs. “She is one of us,” they always reported to inquisitive strangers. And of course they knew Franklin, a native son loved by the islanders since he was a boy on a sailboat. That is the way they liked to think of him, not the way it was when they had stood back and watched him carried out of the house on a stretcher, struck down by that dread disease, polio. He did not come anymore. When Eleanor returned without him, she always brought friends. “There are good and bad memories there,” she reflected, “but the bad get the better of me when I’m there alone. . . . There the night has a thousand eyes.”5

  •

  Now Eleanor’s time begins. Campobello gives her a sense of rest. She knits and reads by the fire. Between the mainland and the island the great tides rise and fall, dividing her world. Peace comes. On 18 July Eleanor writes in her journal, “We marked our first towels.”6 The linens, monogrammed E M N, are for the new cottage on the Val-Kill. Tonight Eleanor might read to her friends from her favorite book, Death Comes for the Archbishop, by the American novelist Willa Cather, a story of friendship. Since her school days at Allenswood near London she has loved to read aloud—and she reads slowly, the perfect pace for the story of Father Vaillant and Bishop Latour, two French priests sent to serve in the vast, unruly new American territory of New Mexico. She lingers over descriptions of the Southwest, where she had been an enchanted traveler herself once with Franklin on a visit to see her dear friend Isabella Greenway and Isabella’s family. There is so much that she appreciates in the priests’ story. It is a story of courage and loneliness and the loyalty of friendship. No book speaks more intimately to her heart.

  Eleanor has heard that Miss Cather has a place on the next island over, Grand Manan, and she has often wished she could meet her. Perhaps she has heard that Miss Cather does not like to be interrupted. Eleanor understands that, though she herself would never turn anyone away. Sometimes she has stood on the crescent of Herring Cove and looked across the Bay of Fundy to Grand Manan and wondered what an artist does all day. Nan has helped Eleanor understand how imagination works and has filled her with respect for what Nan can make with her own talented hands. Eleanor may suspect that Miss Cather, a conservative lady, would dislike her liberal views, but if that is true, Eleanor would tolerate their differences.

  Eleanor looks at her friends seated around her and begins reading: “One summer evening in the year 1848 three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills overlooking Rome.” Nan and Marion smile at one another. The story is set in motion: Jean Marie Latour, stimulated by his recent seminary studies, is going to be sent to the new vicariate in New Mexico, where he will travel with his friend Joseph Vaillant. Jean and Joseph are often separated by their visits to remote and dangerous places to deliver the sacraments, and at those times each lives mostly in solitude. They save up much to say to each other during their times together, and their reunions are always cherished.

  Eleanor pauses, adds a log to the fire, and thinks. A determination to try new things will be her most enduring quest. Her friends watch her closely because of late she has begun to show signs of letting down her reserve. The story of the priestly comrades casts warmth over the friends seated in front of the fire. Eleanor loves Cather’s world, which she has described to Marion and Nan from her own travels in the Southwest—the pueblos, the pinyon logs burning in the fireplace, the Indian blankets covering earthen floors or hung on the walls like tapestries, and the shrines. Eleanor and Marion and Nan have talked of having just such a home, with a fireplace and a colorful Indian blanket and white stucco walls that will frame their cottage on Fall-Kill Creek.

  The fire has settled and her friends are nodding off, Marion’s long face as composed and solemn as a priest’s. Eleanor smiles and says it is almost time to go to bed. But she will send them off with one final scene. She gives the old priest Jean Latour the last words: “The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is about us always.” She closes the book.

  Eleanor stands at the window and looks across the glittering water toward Lubec. It seems to her like the ghost of Mont St. Michel—a place she will one day see with Marion and Nan and the boys—where the great tides that sweep in à la vitesse d’un cheval au galop are as severe as those in the Bay of Fundy. She thinks of the legend of the Archangel Michael appearing before the bishop and instructing him to build a church on the rocky isle. She thinks of Cather’s story of the Mexican peasant’s humble vision of the Virgin Mary and of the shrine to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. And she feels that she herself is beginning some pilgrimage of her own, searching for the greatest of miracles, sanctuary.

  As the Campobello night ends, the friends mount the stairs to their beds, hands holding to the banister in the dim light. The lamps are tu
rned down, the fire is banked.

  The next morning Eleanor, Marion, and Nan feel at one with one another and with the great outdoors. They continue their discussion of the cottage going up on the Fall-Kill, what it will look like, how they will use the rooms, how they will walk the trails and listen to the creek. They warm to the thought of the life they will make together.

  5: THE LOVE NEST

  . . . the birds chirping everywhere.—Marion Dickerman

  Once it was agreed that a cottage would be built at the Fall-Kill and that Franklin would supervise the construction, Franklin and Nan began talking with the architect Henry Toombs—Caroline O’Day’s cousin—whose Val-Kill design would be the first of several important projects he would work on with Franklin: the James Roosevelt Memorial Library in Hyde Park; the post offices at Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck; Franklin’s cottages at Warm Springs; and Top Cottage at Val-Kill. Indeed, the handprint of Franklin Roosevelt would be seen all over the valley. Franklin had good reason to think of himself as the historian of Hyde Park.

  While Eleanor, Marion, and Nan were with the boys in Campobello, Franklin took care of getting the cottage under way. His letters to the women described the progress: excavating for the swimming pool, ordering lumber and lawn seed, and dealing with merchants in Poughkeepsie and elsewhere. Some of the plans for the cottage contained his notations, which delighted him.

  When historians record that FDR built a cottage for Eleanor and her friends, readers have reason to assume that he paid for it. His mother, after all, had built a house for him and his family next to hers on East 65th Street, paid the costs, and held the deed. But in fact, Eleanor, Marion, and Nan, although with more limited resources, shared equally in the costs of building the cottage, and they owned it together. Eleanor had an inheritance from her family, and Marion and Nan had been earning salaries for most of a decade and living modestly; they were prepared to invest their savings. Marion later said that, though she and Nan had less, they always wanted to do their part.