My Year with Eleanor (14 page)

The third floor was closed to the public, so Matt and I ventured out onto the veranda and admired the view. The house sits on a hill, looking haughtily over the estate's six hundred acres. We lumbered down the outside staircase and back to the front of the house where Meg was waiting. Eleanor once noted that Franklin's polio was “a blessing in disguise, for it gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest lesson of all—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”

As if to illustrate the point, before seeing everyone off, Meg pointed down the lengthy driveway. “If you want to know what it takes to be president, consider this,” she said. “FDR came out here every day on his crutches and tried to make his way a quarter mile down the driveway to the main road. He felt that if he could make it to the end unassisted, one day he'd be able to walk again. If he fell, he'd lie facedown in the road until someone happened upon him and helped him back up. He never made it the whole way, but he still tried.”

Most of the group headed back toward the presidential library, but Matt and I wandered through the orchard, enjoying the late fall sun.

After a few minutes, Matt stopped and looked around. “So which way to Eleanor's house?”

“We should probably drive, considering she lives two and a half miles away.”

“Two and a half miles?” he repeated as we headed toward the parking lot. “Not exactly subtle.”

When Franklin was stricken with polio, he'd been in politics for ten years as a state senator and the assistant secretary of the navy and had a failed bid at the White House as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in the 1920 election. He refused to accept that he was paralyzed and spent much of the 1920s doing physical therapy. To keep Franklin active in politics, Eleanor had to be his legs and his voice. She became active in organizations, made speeches. While volunteering for the women's division of the Democratic Party, she became best friends with longtime lovers and political activists Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. Franklin liked the couple too. One day, while the foursome picnicked by Fall Kill Creek, he proposed building a cottage on-site where the women could live full time.

“That's a little”—Matt paused before easing the Buick onto the main road—“unorthodox, isn't it?”

“He knew she needed to escape from Sara. I'll bet he was sick of the tension in the house himself.”

He hired an architect, and by 1925 the women had a one-and-a-half-story fieldstone house overlooking the creek. Franklin even put in a dam to redirect the water into a swimming pool. Eleanor referred to Stone Cottage as their “love nest.” The women traded everything from bathing suits to lipstick. They monogrammed their initials—EMN—on the linens and towels.

“I can honestly say I've never looked at any of my guy friends and thought, ‘Let's make this official in terry cloth,' ” Matt joked.

I told him how the women built a second structure on the property, Val-Kill Cottage, and started a furniture factory so unemployed locals could earn a supplemental income. Nan supervised the business while Eleanor taught literature, drama, and American history at a school in Manhattan where Marion was vice principal.

“And do those who monogram together stay together?” Matt asked.

“Not exactly. The factory went under in '37. Then one night when Marion was in Europe, Eleanor and Nancy had a terrible argument. Eleanor immediately moved out of Stone Cottage, and Marion and Nan later moved to Connecticut.”

“What was the fight about?”

“No one knows. Though Marion later said it involved ‘things that should not have been said.' ”

“So?” Matt prompted. “Was she or wasn't she?”

“I honestly don't know. She did have a number of close lesbian friends . . .” People had been gossiping about this question since the 1920s and 1930s. Eleanor's own cousin, the mischievous Alice Roosevelt, once commented loudly in a chic Washington restaurant, “I don't care
what
you say, I simply cannot
believe
Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”

I told Matt that in 1978, the staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library opened eighteen boxes containing sixteen thousand pages of letters between Eleanor and Lorena Hickok, a thirty-five-year-old gay Associated Press reporter who smoked cigars and wore flannel shirts and trousers that brought to mind a lumberjack. Hick was assigned to cover Eleanor but became her confidante. She gave Eleanor a sapphire ring, which she wore at Franklin's 1933 inauguration. Eleanor sent her note after the ceremony that read, “Hick darling, I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and I think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.”

Hick wrote to Eleanor, “I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.”

“Okay, hold up,” Matt said. “Is there really a question here?”

I shrugged. “Not necessarily. Historians have pointed out that Victorian women wrote love letters to platonic friends because they were so starved for romance. Besides, some of Eleanor and Hick's letters suggest the feeling wasn't mutual.”

In 1937, Eleanor wrote to Hick, “I know you have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind, but I love you just the same.”

Matt followed a sign for the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site and pulled the car into the parking lot.

“My feeling is, who gives a shit if she was a lesbian?” I said, closing the car door behind me. “Why does that matter? The woman ditched her harping live-in mother-in-law, built her dream house, and brought along her favorite gays. Personally, I think that's kind of awesome.” Eleanor was ahead of her time. Back in 1925, she wrote in her diary, “No form of love is to be despised.”

From the parking lot, we followed the curved path through the trees and came to a brook with a wooden plank bridge. Below, Fall Kill Creek murmured over the rocks. On the other side there was a pond, glass still and lined with bushy trees that left their reflection imprinted on the water.

This time our guide was a librarian type in regular, non-ranger clothing.

“A lot of people ask where Val-Kill got its name. Don't worry, we're not a bunch of murderers up here!” She tittered, and I suspected she'd said this line hundreds of times. “This area was settled by the Dutch and ‘kill' means ‘little stream.' ”

If Springwood was a twenty-thousand-square-foot thirty-five-bedroom fortress, Val-Kill Cottage was a bungalow. Its seven rooms were tacked on over the years, giving it a hodgepodge feel, as if an architect let all five of his multiple personalities have a go. Shaped like a bent arm, the front door was tucked into the crook.

“Visitors always thought that the front door was the back door,” the tour guide noted as our group of ten traversed the threshold. The interior was encased in wood paneling, but a few screen porches kept it from feeling stuffy.

“When the weather was agreeable, Eleanor bunked on a sleeping porch upstairs,” the guide informs, “where she liked having ‘only the stars to look at, just because it gives one a feeling of taking in.' ” I tried to imagine her lying there on this bed, waking up in the fresh air (she woke up at eight
A.M.
every day, no matter what time she'd gone to sleep). But whenever I toured historical homes, I could never picture their famous owners puttering around in them.

The rooms were, like Eleanor, welcoming and informal. The First Lady's official bedroom was a twin bed with a simple chenille bedspread, but with more photos and personal items than its Springwood counterpart. Springwood had been released to the government after Franklin's death in 1945 and Eleanor had returned to Val-Kill. For almost twenty years, dignitaries still called on her and sat around on the cushy chintz chairs in the living room to knock around ideas about affairs of state.

“Eleanor entertained the likes of Winston Churchill and Gandhi here,” the guide said as we crowded in front of the roped-off casual dining room. “She often served them herself from this here side table.” Winston also swam in the backyard pool while smoking a cigar, which made me like him even more.

Unlike Franklin who used his house to showcase his hobbies, Eleanor covered her walls with photos of friends and family, the people she collected over the course of her life who were important to her. On her walls, grandchildren, her secretary, and secretaries of state all mingled together. Her house had no trappings of power. The TV room, with its 1950s television and slip-covered armchairs, also doubled as her office, her desk occupying only a small corner. The nameplate read
ELANOR ROOSEVELT
.

“Why is Eleanor's name spelled wrong?” a familiar voice piped up. The dad from Franklin's house.

“A little boy made that for her in his woodshop class and she didn't have the heart to tell him he'd misspelled it. When guests asked why she kept it displayed so prominently, she replied, ‘In case he comes back to visit one day.' ”

She never stopped writing. She drafted most of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here after Truman appointed her to the United Nations. When she died of bone cancer at age seventy-eight, she was in the middle of writing a book,
Tomorrow Is Now
. Altogether, she churned out seventy-three hundred newspaper columns and twenty-seven books. I couldn't fathom that kind of output. If I sat down at my computer when I got home and didn't get up for fifty years, I don't think I could produce that much writing.

Because the house was small, the tour went by much more quickly than the one at Springwood. As Matt and I retraced our steps down the driveway, I slipped my arm through his. Of course, we knew about living in separate houses. When Matt's editors had deployed him to Albany two years before to cover the state government beat, our relationship entered a holding pattern. Because he didn't live in Manhattan, we never had to deal with the issue of moving in together. Or getting married. Everything remained exactly the same, frozen in time like Eleanor's house. But how long could we keep this up? I wondered. How long until we became emotionally distant as well? What if he moved back and we realized we preferred our part-time relationship?

In the end, Eleanor came back to Franklin. She was buried next to him and their dog Fala in Sara's rose garden at Springwood. The couple shared a gravestone, a modest rectangular block bearing both their names. FDR always said he didn't want a gravestone bigger than his desk in the oval office. Walled in by tall hemlock hedges, Franklin and Eleanor could finally be alone. Sara, who died only three and a half years before her son, was buried off premises at a local church. That had to be something of an indignity, I imagined, being outranked by a Scottie. There's a Sara Delano Roosevelt Memorial Park in New York, which I had happened upon during a recent walk around my neighborhood. It was just a few blocks from my apartment. Eleanor was right: You never knew when she was going to appear.

Franklin and Eleanor's children went on to lead fairly turbulent lives. Elliott, bizarrely, wrote a mystery series starring his mother as a detective. He angered family members by penning a trilogy of revealing books about his parents, including details about their sexual lives and FDR's affairs. Between the five of them, the siblings had nineteen marriages, fifteen divorces, and twenty-nine children. Anna married three times. Franklin Jr. and Elliott each had five wives. James fathered seven children with four different wives and made headlines when his third wife stabbed him during a domestic argument. John was only married once but—perhaps most disturbingly of all for the Roosevelts—became a Republican. Yet Eleanor's support never wavered.

“No one ever lives up to the best in themselves all the time,” she said, “and nearly all of us love people because of their weaknesses rather than because of their strengths.”

As we walked back to the parking lot, we paused under the shade of the trees on the bridge over the dam Franklin had built for Eleanor. The creek happily burbled away on our right, teeming with energy, the lily pond earnest and steady on the left.

Matt leaned against the railing. “How much they did—the sheer productivity—just blows me away,” he said, shaking his head. “I really felt that I was transported back to this period where greatness wasn't what you owned, it was what you
did
.”

Standing there, staring into the water, I knew I needed to recommit myself to the project. The Roosevelts dedicated themselves to public service, and I was running naked through apartment buildings and taking stripper classes. Obviously, I needed to get more serious with my challenges. And maybe find a way to get more outside of myself as I do them. I'd never been in a position where I was offering something truly useful or important to others.

“To be useful is, in a way, to justify one's own existence,” Eleanor said.

W
hen I got home, I did an Internet search of the words
New York
and
volunteer.
The first website that popped up was a local hospital looking for volunteers. Perfect. Eleanor began volunteering as a child, accompanying her aunt Gracie to visit handicapped kids at a hospital in Manhattan. At the end of World War I, she visited the naval hospital in Washington, D.C., once a week, bringing flowers and chocolates, and words of cheer. This contact with wounded soldiers, Eleanor later said, taught her an important lesson: “I was beginning to feel pity for the human condition. I was beginning to ask what I could do.”

I downloaded the application and filled it out. The essay portion asked: “Why do you want to be a hospital volunteer?” I quickly banged out two hundred words: “My thirtieth birthday is approaching and as I look back at my life so far, I am ashamed at what I see. What stands out are not the things that I've done but the things I have failed to do. How can it be that I have been on this earth for almost thirty years but done nothing to help other people? When I look back at my life, I want to see a person who helped make other people's lives better . . .” I printed the essay out, read it over. Was it too over the top? Before I could second-guess myself, I stuffed the essay and application into an envelope, threw on my coat, and headed out to the mailbox at the end of my block.