Eleanor (49 page)

We drove down the Maine coast to do once more the things she always loved to do. We visited Bishop Scarlett and his wife,
Leah. We met an old friend, Molly Dewson. . . .Then we went to a place called Perry’s Nuthouse where Mrs. R., Joe and I used to stop to buy wild-strawberry preserves. She was too weak to get out of the car, and when we came back, having purchased what she wanted us to get, was only vaguely aware of what was going on.

On the long drive to Boston she hardly spoke and when she did it was so faint we could hardly understand her. In Boston Henry [Morgenthau] III came in. From Boston on the way to Hyde Park she stopped for a last visit with Esther Lape, one of her oldest friends, and then she went on to Val-Kill, where she had a few days when she even worked—but after Labor Day the fevers and the chills and the blood transfusions and endless injections took over and the lonely descent began.
³⁹

After her first spell in the hospital, she informed her housekeeper at Hyde Park, Marge Entrup, she would be glad to know there would be no more big parties. In the next breath she casually told her there would be fourteen for breakfast. As a friend explained to Marge the next day, “In Mrs. Roosevelt’s book, that isn’t a big party.”
⁴⁰

She had spent the Friday before the Labor Day week end in New York City, meeting with Nannine Joseph, trying to help her niece Ellie get a contract to do drawings for a children’s book, conferring with Tom Stix about her television show. Friday night on her return she seemed in good shape, asked for her usual drink of Dubonnet, and although her cheeks were disturbingly flushed, at Johnny and Anne’s, where everyone went for dinner, she entered into an animated discussion of the impending Rockefeller-Morgenthau gubernatorial race. But the next morning when she came down and took her place at the head of the table, she was unable to ring the old Mother Hubbard silver bell to summon Marge. She breathed with difficulty and trembled violently. While her friends made conversation, pretending not to notice, she leaned over to sip her cup of hot tea. She blamed her trembling on the sleeping porch—it had been a cold night. Someone brought a shawl, and
finally she was persuaded to go into Tommy’s living room and sit by the fire. As soon as she revived she insisted on going to work with Miss Denniston. David came, but she would not permit him to take her temperature.

“This I know,” she dictated to Miss Denniston, in a voice that was almost a whisper. “This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being—
we can do it!
” When Miss Denniston discreetly managed to leave a half hour early, Mrs. Roosevelt finally agreed to allow her temperature to be taken. It registered 101. She would not sleep on her porch again, she announced, and her listeners had the feeling that she was saying good-by to another of the things she loved to do.
⁴¹

After lunch she went upstairs for a nap, and when she insisted on coming down at four for Charley Curnan’s surprise party—he had worked for the Roosevelts for twenty-five years—her temperature was down. After the party she sat at her desk trying to balance her checkbooks. There was a telephone call from Rep. Emanuel Celler’s secretary. He wanted to notify her that the congressman was going on television the next day to propose her as Democratic candidate for the Senate. “Under no circumstances,” she said emphatically. “I don’t believe in old people running.”

Walter and May Reuther arrived, on their way to New York City from Putney School in Vermont, where they had left their daughter. She had always found Walter stimulating. The after-dinner discussion went on until eleven. She would like to borrow an idea of his, she told him, that economic, not military, aid was the way to stiffen the borderlands against the Communists. She described her illness to Reuther in considerable detail so that he might explain to Jim Carey why she was unable to come to his convention, where he was in a fight for control of the electrical workers’ union.

Breakfast on Sunday was a sad repetition of the previous morning, and the Reuthers saw for themselves how ill she was. She took little part in the conversation, except to ask Reuther, when he went to Japan, to get in touch with her grandson Franklin, whose ship
was based there. Again, she refused to allow David to take her temperature. She knew it was high, she told Reuther, but she was going to have Tubby Curnan drive her to church. She was, to the end, one of the Reverend Gordon Kidd’s most faithful parishioners, attending services, paying her pew rent of seventy-five dollars, subscribing an additional $425, and each Sunday handing in an envelope containing two dollars.

September was a month in which she tried not to give up and take to her bed. She insisted that Lady Reading stay with her. Geraldine Thompson arrived with a bagful of projects and, finding Mrs. Roosevelt strangely resistant, asked in some desperation, “and what do you do for the Audubon Society?” She went out with Tubby to buy some sturdy chairs for the dining room. It was too painful to get in and out of the station wagon, so she had chairs brought out to the sidewalk to her to inspect. She attended the AAUN’s reception for the U.S. delegation to the 1962 General Assembly, sitting on the dais for two hours, and conferred with Robert Benjamin and her grandson Curtis on how to merge the AAUN with the U.S. Committee for the United Nations. Doggedly she kept on doing things she had always done, for fear that if she stopped it would be difficult to do them again afterward. But her mouth bled and her throat was sore. She was feverish and often listless, and it took her an hour and a half to dress in the morning. Instead of saying good night to friends and children she now said good-by.
⁴²

Her children, whom David had kept in touch with the progress of her illness, were in and out. Other doctors were brought in, and when her temperature, instead of going up and down as it had been doing, stayed up, she was taken on September 26 to the hospital again. Elliott and his wife flew in from Minneapolis. Anna and Jim Halsted, who had been in and out all through August and early September, came from Detroit to consult with David and remained, staying at her apartment, Anna taking charge of the household. Mrs. Roosevelt had told David that if her illness flared up again, she did not wish to linger on a helpless invalid, and expected him to save her from a dragged-out, agonizing death. But
Dr. Gurewitsch was unable to comply with her wishes. And when the time came, his duty as a doctor prevented him.

There was only suffering for Mrs. Roosevelt [Trude Lash wrote Paul Tillich] from the first day in July when she was taken to the hospital for the first time. There was no moment of serenity. There was only anger, helpless anger at the doctors and nurses and the world who tried to keep her alive. The doctors had her where they wanted her.

“They can do with me what they want, not what I want,” she said bitterly.

I don’t think there was anything to comfort her. She was completely alone and felt betrayed and persecuted by all of us.

She was not afraid of death at all. She welcomed it. She was so weary and so infinitely exhausted, it seemed as though she had to suffer every human indignity, every weakness, every failure that she had resisted and conquered so daringly during her whole life—as though she were being punished for being too strong and powerful and disciplined and almost immune to human frailty.
⁴³

There were so few people she really cared about, so few, Mrs. Roosevelt whispered to a friend in the hospital. She did not want visitors. She did not want to be seen in her invalid condition. Adlai Stevenson came to the hospital. David, believing it reflected her wishes, sent him away. “Dearest Eleanor,” he wrote her tenderly. “I have been getting regular bulletins from Maureen and
pray
it won’t be long before I can come to see you—and what a long deferred visit it will be!. . .I love you dearly—and so does the whole world! But they can’t
all
come to see you and perhaps I can when David gives me permission. Devotedly—Adlai.”
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For her seventy-eighth birthday, she gave orders from the hospital that she wanted a party at her Seventy-fourth Street apartment—of little children. So on October 11, John’s daughter Joan, Edna Gurewitsch’s Maria, and Trude’s grandchildren Christopher and Annie Pratt came for ice cream, games, favors, and a birthday cake
on which glowed a single candle. Curtis Roosevelt (Buzzy) and John Boettiger and their wives joined the sad group of grownups who came with the children for birthday toasts.

She hated the hospital and implored the doctors to let her go home and “rejoin the human race,” but the specialists who had been brought in insisted that she remain until another series of tests were completed. She was allowed to return home on October 18. Someone tipped off the photographers, and she, who had such dignity and pride of bearing, was shown to the world stretcher-borne, her face puffy, her white hair straggly, her head sagging.

Yet, so happy was she to be at home in her own room, amid familiar surroundings, that her will to live seemed momentarily to revive. “Maureen, I forgot to thank the stretcher-bearers,” were her first words when she was installed in her own bed. “Will you please tell them that I think they did a magnificent job.” She ordered a small table set in her bedroom and invited Edna and David down to dine while she tried to manage a small meal on a bed tray. She asked for her checkbook and, with unsteady hand, wrote checks in advance. Anna and David did their best to nurture the spark. The Cuban missile crisis, which Stevenson at the United Nations was calling the gravest challenge to world peace since 1945, was at flashpoint.

“We are almost at war,” David said to her, almost shouting the words because her eyes were closed, as if she wanted to be withdrawn from those around her. “We will read the papers to you.” “I don’t want them read,” she replied. “Joe will read them,” he suggested. When she did not renew her protests, Anna and David decided that this author was the man to try.

“Hello, Joe,” she said, but then, as the latest developments in the tense confrontation were described to her, appeared to become confused. “It’ll never come together,” she said, “nobody makes sense.” Was she talking about her head and the difficulty she had in focusing on what was being said to her, or about the state of the world? She stirred restlessly. “All I want,” she began again, and her visitor thought she was going to say “is for them to get together,” but instead she said, “is to be turned over.”

On October 25 her disease, which had been thought to be aplastic anemia, was positively diagnosed as a rare bone-marrow tuberculosis. That was “cheering news,” David told the press. “It shows we’re on the right track.” But Anna, fearful that Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends might be led to believe she was on the road to recovery, told the newspapers that her condition was “very much the same” and that she “was not responding to treatment.
‡

One day, when she told Nurse Waldron that she wished to die, the nurse said that the Lord who had put her into this world would take her from it when she had finished the job for which she was here. “Utter nonsense,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, looking at the intravenous tube in her arm, the oxygen tank, and the needle punctures in her skin. Confused and incoherent, often in a semicoma, her determination to die alone was steady and iron-willed.

She rejected pills, clenched her teeth to keep her nurse from administering them, spat them out if the nurse was successful, and, becoming more wily, secreted them in the recesses of her mouth.
“There really is no change in her condition,” Anna sadly reported to Uncle David. “There are so many indignities to being sick and helpless. . . .I find myself praying that whatever is the very best for her happens and happens quickly.”
⁴⁶

The children decided that Stevenson, who had been deeply hurt by David’s rebuff, should be allowed to make a last visit to his old friend, if only to stand at the door and wave to her. “Come, if you would like,” Anna said to him, “but I don’t think she will recognize you.” He dropped everything and came.

“I am a tough old bird,” she had written David Gray in 1956. On November 7 her strong heart finally ceased to beat.

“I don’t know whether I believe in a future life,” she had said on Edward R. Murrow’s program “This I Believe.”

I believe that all that you go through here must have some value, therefore there must be some
reason
. And there must be some “going on.” How exactly that happens I’ve never been able to decide. There is a future—that I’m sure of. But how, that I don’t know. And I came to feel that it didn’t really matter very much because whatever the future held you’d have to face it when you came to it, just as whatever life holds you have to face it in exactly the same way. And the important thing was that you never let down doing the best that you were able to do—it might be poor because you might not have much within you to give, or to help other people with, or to live your life with. But as long as you did the very best that you were able to do, then that was what you were put here to do and that was what you were accomplishing by being here.

And so I have tried to follow that out—and not to worry about the future or what was going to happen. I think I am pretty much of a fatalist. You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
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*
Remarks of Benjamin V. Cohen on the occasion of his being presented the Isaiah Award of the American Jewish Committee. Reprinted in the
Congressional Record
, CVX/187, November 13, 1969.

†
As late as August, 1959, she did not consider the use of the atom bomb against Japan a mistake. At that time (August 12, 1959) she wrote ex-president Truman:

As you know, I have always said that you had no choice but to use the atomic bomb to bring the war to an end. For a time I was disturbed at our having used it in Nagasaki but after being in Japan and seeing the defenses and talking with one of our representatives who had been a prisoner of the Japanese and who explained that unless there had been a second demonstration the Japanese would have felt they could defend themselves which would have resulted in the destruction of the whole of Japan and the loss of millions of our own men, I realized that you had this knowledge and that you could make no other decision than the one you made. I have since written this publicly a number of times. I would give a great deal, however, now if we could come to an agreement for stopping the whole use of atomic energy for military purposes.