Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (9 page)

The sordid details were kept from Eleanor, who knew only that her father loved her with a strange desperation. He needed Eleanor, for Eleanor loved him as Anna never could. Eleanor made no demands, held him to no standards. Eleanor forgave his absences—in sanatoriums and hospitals, often, drying out—and greeted him more ardently the longer he was gone. “Though he was so little with us, my father dominated all this period of my life,” she remembered. “Subconsciously I must have been waiting always for his visits. They were irregular, and he rarely sent word before he arrived, but never was I in the house, even in my room two long flights of stairs above the entrance door, that I did not hear his voice the minute he entered the front door. Walking down stairs was far too slow. I slid down the banisters and usually catapulted into his arms before his hat was hung up.” There was no other man for Eleanor—not when she was a girl, and not when she was a young woman. “He dominated my life as long as he lived, and was the love of my life for many years after he died.”

His importance to her grew even as his presence diminished. When Eleanor was eight, Anna died of diphtheria. Elliott came home for his wife’s final days, and he broke the news to Eleanor. “He was dressed all in black, looking very sad,” she remembered. “He held out his arms and gathered me to him. In a little while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was gone, that she had been all the world to him, and now he had only my brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young, and that he and I must keep close together.” He said that he had to leave and that the children would stay with their mother’s parents. But he would return. “Some day I would make a home for him again. We would travel together and do many things which he painted as interesting and pleasant…. Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or whether he felt that they would be at school…. There started a feeling that day which never left me—that he and I were very close together, and some day would have a life of our own together.”

The promised day never came. Elliott spiraled downward after Anna’s death. He drank more heavily than ever and consorted with women of ill repute. Even Theodore, who had hardened his heart against his brother’s sins, pitied him, more or less. “Poor fellow!” he declared after learning that Elliott had crashed a carriage into a lamp post and injured his head. “If only he could have died instead of Anna!”

Elliott’s end came soon enough. Seized by a fit of delirium tremens, he thrashed about uncontrollably, tried to leap out a window, sweated and foamed, and finally collapsed in a fatal heart attack.

Eleanor refused to credit the news when she heard it. Since moving in with her grandparents, who had exhausted their tenderness on their own children and had none left for Eleanor or her brothers, she had perfected a habit of retreating into a world of fantasy when things went wrong. This defense made her seem strange and sullen to adults and other children, but it shielded her from disappointment when her father didn’t come as promised, when her grandmother scolded her for behavior she didn’t realize was wrong, or when the servants took out their own frustrations on her, knowing she was too timid to report them. The word of her father’s death arrived just before her tenth birthday. “I simply refused to believe it,” she remembered. “And while I wept long and went to bed still weeping, I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dream world as usual.” Her grandmother decreed that the children not attend the funeral. “So I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on, I knew that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”

Her early teens were deeply troubled. She was lonely, physically fearful, and yet stubborn. By her later admission, she lied as a matter of course, which simply elicited harsher responses from her grandmother. For reasons best known to herself, Mrs. Hall refused to let Eleanor visit her Roosevelt relatives more than once or twice a year. Perhaps she thought the demons that had hounded Elliott to his death lived in the Roosevelt closets; perhaps she thought Eleanor’s cousin Alice, who was just eight months older than Eleanor but already displayed a wild streak, was an evil influence. Yet the distance didn’t prevent Eleanor from idolizing Alice, who seemed “so much more sophisticated and grown-up that I was in great awe of her.”

The other Roosevelts were mostly nice. Aunt Corinne, Elliott’s and Theodore’s sister, threw Christmas parties for the youngsters of the clan. Eleanor attended, with a mixture of anticipation and dread. She liked seeing people her own age, but she was awkward and shy. She couldn’t dance, and her clothes were horribly out of fashion. Yet a certain boy seemed not to notice. “I still remember my gratitude at one of these parties to my cousin Franklin Roosevelt when he came and asked me to dance with him.”

Thoughts of Franklin helped tide her through difficult days. The Halls grew harder and harder to live with. Besides her stern and narrow-minded grandmother, Eleanor had to endure some uncles who were undeniably alcoholic and potentially abusive. For protection—presumably before the fact but possibly after—her grandmother or an aunt installed three heavy locks on Eleanor’s bedroom door. A girlfriend who spent the night asked Eleanor what the locks were for. “To keep my uncles out,” she replied.

Life took a turn for the better when, at fifteen, she became old enough to attend boarding school. Her Hall aunts transported her to England and deposited her at Allenswood, a school for girls just south of London. Where none of the students had parents at hand, the orphaned Eleanor no longer felt uniquely alone. In fact she had one distinct advantage over most of the other girls. Her first nurse had been French, and with her mother constantly socializing and her father frequently gone, she had learned French before she learned English. The Allenswood headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, insisted that the girls speak French. “It was quite easy for me,” Eleanor wrote. “But for many of the English girls who had had very little French beforehand, it was a terrible effort.”

In her seventy years Marie Souvestre had developed decided notions of propriety and pedagogy. The girls got three baths a week; any more would have elicited queries as to how one became so dirty. Their beds and dressers were inspected daily; a drawer out of order could result in the contents being cast across the floor. The morning constitutional, a brisk walk about the town common, took place in rain, sleet, or snow. The school had nominal central heating but none of the girls could feel it. Field hockey was required; bruises to arms, legs, and heads were expected.

Yet Eleanor grew to love Marie Souvestre. In the first place, as a French-woman among the English, the headmistress favored her few American students. In the second place, she flouted orthodoxy. She was an atheist who couldn’t imagine a God being bothered with the pettiness of human affairs. Religion, she said, was a crutch for the weak. Eleanor had never heard anything so radical. “Mlle. Souvestre shocked me into thinking,” she said.

Marie Souvestre made Eleanor sit opposite her at meals, and gave her portions of the special dishes she sometimes ordered prepared for herself. When guests came to the school—including Beatrice Chamberlain, the sister of future prime minister Neville Chamberlain—Eleanor was introduced, and she participated in the conversations they had with the headmistress.

Marie Souvestre sometimes took Eleanor with her for holidays. On one trip they traveled by train from Marseilles, ticketed to Pisa. But when the conductor announced the station at Alassio, their plans suddenly changed. “I am going to get off,” she told Eleanor. Eleanor grabbed their bags and they tumbled out. Souvestre explained, as they stood alone on the platform with night falling, that she had a friend in Alassio. “Besides,” she said, “the Mediterranean is a very lovely blue at night, and the sky with the stars coming out is nice to watch from the beach.” As it happened, her friend was away, and they spent the night in a damp room that caused Souvestre to catch cold. But they saw the stars rise over the sea, and she deemed the discomfort well worth it. “I had learned a valuable lesson,” Eleanor recalled. “Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been heretofore.”

At eighteen Eleanor’s idyll ended and she returned to America. Her debut into New York society was “utter agony.” She felt too tall and ungainly. She knew few of the girls and fewer of the boys. She still couldn’t dance. The mirror condemned her as visibly inferior to the other Hall women. “I knew I was the first girl in my mother’s family who was not a belle, and though I never acknowledged it to any of them at that time, I was deeply ashamed.”

F
OR THIS REASON
she responded to Franklin’s overtures with skepticism, albeit grateful skepticism. She had encountered Franklin a few times since the dance where he plucked her from among the wallflowers. On a visit home from Allenswood she had been traveling by train up the Hudson toward her grandmother’s house when he walked past her in the coach car. He stopped and they chatted, and he invited her to say hello to Sara in the Pullman car. Sara was pleasant but proper. Nothing came of this encounter.

After Eleanor returned from England for good, she saw more of Franklin. They moved in the same circle and went to the same parties and receptions. In January 1903 Eleanor attended Franklin’s twenty-first birthday party. During the subsequent months they saw each other several times, sporadically at first, then more often. One day he dropped by a settlement house on Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she did volunteer work with immigrant children. “All the little girls were tremendously interested,” she remembered, “and the next time they gathered around me demanding to know if he was my ‘feller.’”

He wasn’t yet. Franklin moved cautiously in courting Eleanor. He required time to discover his heart; he also worried what his mother would think. He had dated other girls, including a seventeen-year-old named Alice Sohier with whom he grew sufficiently serious that her parents sent her to Europe to chill the romance. The strategy worked, and the relationship faded. Franklin never told Sara about it. Sara made no secret of her belief that young people lost their minds when they heeded their hearts. Franklin must finish college and get well started on a career before even thinking about a serious relationship.

Such was her reasoning on the subject; her emotions were no less strong. He was the man in her life, and she wasn’t one to share. Eventually, of course, he’d have to marry. She wanted grandchildren. But there was plenty of time for that.

She didn’t tell Franklin all this; she didn’t have to. Her tone of voice when he discussed girlfriends said more than enough. As a result he simply stopped speaking of girls with her. For many months he disguised his growing attachment to Eleanor. The fact that they were kin made the deception easier, as their appearance at many of the same events was taken as a matter of course.

Consequently Sara was astonished when Franklin informed her at Thanksgiving 1903 that he and Eleanor intended to marry. He had proposed to Eleanor the previous weekend, and she had accepted at once. He wanted to delay telling Sara, but Eleanor urged him to speak out. “I never want her to feel she has been deceived,” Eleanor wrote him. “Don’t be angry with me, Franklin, for saying this, and of course you must do as you think best.” He accepted the advice and told Sara at the Delano Thanksgiving dinner. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” Sara remarked in her diary that night.

But she kept her composure, determined to attack this unwelcome development obliquely. Franklin was planning to visit Eleanor in New York; Sara insisted on joining him. The three would have a good conversation, she said. Sara allayed Eleanor’s fears that she would reject the engagement outright, instead simply counseling patience. They mustn’t rush into anything. Eleanor was relieved. “Dearest Cousin Sally,” she explained to Sara, “I must write you and thank you for being so good to me yesterday. I know just how you feel and how hard it must be, but I do so want you to learn to love me a little. You must know that I will always try to do what you wish.” Franklin sent his mother similar thoughts from Harvard. “Dearest Mama,” he said, “I know what pain I must have caused you, and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it.” But he could
not
help it; he loved Eleanor. “I know my mind, have known it for a long time…. Result: I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest.” He added reassurance that Eleanor would never come between them. “Dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have been and always will be to each other.”

Without apparent difficulty Sara persuaded the couple to postpone any public announcement of their engagement. This left her free to try to undo what young love had done, without the world being any wiser. She scheduled a six-week Caribbean cruise and, despite the demands of Franklin’s newspaper work during his final semester at college, insisted that he join her. If distance alone didn’t diminish his ardor for Eleanor, she calculated, he might meet another girl. He did meet other girls, and some older women too. But he didn’t forget Eleanor, and he returned to New York more devoted than ever. Sara then applied to Joseph Choate, a longtime friend and the current American ambassador to Britain, to take Franklin to London as his private secretary. Choate said he’d like to help but already had a secretary.