Eleanor and Franklin (29 page)

She liked to share her literary enthusiasms with him, and one of the books she wanted him to read was Balzac's
La Peau de chagrin
. There was a stoic strain in her, and perhaps the appeal of the book was its thesis that every aspiration of the heart, brain, or will that is fulfilled must in the end be paid for. “There are so many things I want to cover and read with you some day when we have time,” she wrote Franklin. Another book that she wanted him to read with her was Ruskin's
Sesame and Lilies
. What in this work particularly attracted her? Was it the metaphor of the library as a silent storehouse where the reader is privileged to hold communion with the kings and prophets of all ages? Or was it Ruskin's passionate outcry against the exploitation and injustice rampant in England and his denomination of idleness and cruelty as the two most heinous sins? Or did she want to see what Franklin's reaction would be to Ruskin's appeal to women to exercise their power against injustice and war? How different in this respect was Ruskin's outlook from that of the Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix, Margaret Dix's father, who weekly inveighed not only against women's suffrage but even against college education for girls. But Eleanor was far from a feminist. She did not go to Barnard as some of her friends did, and she was vigorously opposed to women's suffrage. She even declined an invitation to become a founding member of the Colony Club, the most exclusive of women's clubs, as did Franklin's mother, who said, “She could not see any reason for a women's club and would never have any reason to go inside one.”
⁴

Eleanor attended church faithfully and was very interested in Janet McCook, one of the girls in society who went to Barnard and also taught Bible classes; she later received an M.A. and became something
of a Biblical scholar. Eleanor, who attended Janet's classes and often discussed religion with her, went with her to hear a popular preacher, Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, a leader of the Northfield Extension Movement. “It was really very interesting and impressive but quite at the end he called upon all those who felt themselves to be
really
Christians to get up and that flavored too much of a revival meeting to me but it was interesting to see.” She went to hear him a second time, but she felt that his sermon was addressed “to the crowd whose emotions must be touched and that kind of thing does not appeal much to me.”

So with attendance at church and the opera and a few parties and Bible classes and lessons in German, the weeks passed and at last she could write Franklin that she was leaving for Washington. “My class in Rivington Street bade me a sad farewell today for two weeks and they all promised to be good with Helen and I feel sure they will be as bad as they can be.” She was reluctant to leave, for there were many things in New York she hated to miss, “but I love being with Auntie Bye and I hope it won't be too gay, for a perpetual society would kill me.”

She arrived in Washington and was “immediately taken out calling!” Friends came to tea, and then “A. Bye and I went to dine with Uncle Theodore. I am sorry to say A. Edith is away but we had a very pleasant dinner during which I just sat still and listened while the men discussed the appointments for the Panama Commission,” she wrote in her last letter to Franklin, whose cruise ended in Nassau. There they were the guests of the C. T. Carters, whose daughter, Evelyn, flirtatiously entertained Franklin and Lathrop. On their way back to Washington, Franklin and his mother stopped briefly in Palm Beach, where they found, according to Sara, “much dressing and display, crowds of overdressed, vulgar people.”

A note was waiting for Franklin at the Shoreham in Washington. “Just a line to tell you how
more
than glad I am to have you here at last. I will be home as near twelve as possible Honey, and I hope you will be able to get here. Auntie Bye will I think, be in about then also.” Shortly after their arrival Mrs. Cowles called. “Went to Bammie's to tea. Eleanor at Bammie's,” Sara noted.

Sara was not ready yet to concede defeat, and tried once more to separate the young couple. She forgot the episode, she said, but years later Mabel Choate reminded her of it.
⁵
Sara took Franklin to see Joseph Choate, whom Theodore had summoned home from his ambassadorial post in London in connection with the Russo-Japanese War, and asked the ambassador to take Franklin with him to London
as his secretary. But Mr. Choate had already engaged a secretary, and, in any event, he felt that Franklin was too young for the job.

Sara had lost.

“Darling Franklin,” his mother wrote him when she returned to Hyde Park from Washington,

I am feeling pretty blue. You are gone. The journey is over & I feel as if the time were not likely to come again when I shall take a trip with my dear boy, as we are not going abroad, but I must try to be unselfish & of course dear child I
do
rejoice in your happiness, & shall not put any stones or straws even in the way of it. I shall go to town a week from Friday just to be with you when I can. I have put away your albums & loved fussing over them & I placed the new volumes of Punch in their row. Looked over more papers & pamphlets & have written several notes & now at 11 I think I shall leave the rest until tomorrow & go to bed. Oh how still the house is but it is home and full of memories dear to me.
Do
write. I am already longing to hear.

Back in Tivoli, Eleanor was full of compassion for Sara. “I knew your Mother would hate to have you leave her dear,” she wrote Franklin in Cambridge, “but don't let her feel that the last trip with you is over. We three must take them together in the future that is all and though I know three will never be the same to her still someday I hope that she really will love me and I would be very glad if I thought she was even the least bit reconciled to me now. I will try to see her whenever she comes in town if she lets me know.”

 

*
The palatial Mills' house at Staatsburgh, a few miles north of Hyde Park, is described by Edith Wharton in
The House of Mirth
, where it is called Bellomont.

13.
EPITHALAMION

S
ARA STILL RESENTED THE MATCH, BUT PRUDENCE AS WELL AS
breeding now required that she yield gracefully. She realized, moreover, that her best hope for preserving a close relationship with her son lay in Eleanor's extraordinary sense of duty and in the girl's eagerness to be accepted by her future mother-in-law.

Sara's letters to Franklin began to report the things she did with “the dear child”: they had spent the afternoon together; Eleanor had accompanied her to the dressmaker's for a fitting; they had had tea; Eleanor has been “as sweet as ever.” Sara invoked Eleanor to get Franklin to do things he might otherwise refuse. “Much as I want to see you,” she wrote him in early May, even more she wanted him to attend the Thayer-Russell wedding; it would please the Russells—with whom the Delanos had been intimately associated in their China ventures—to have one member of the family there. And then she added, almost in desperation, “I am going to have Eleanor here next week, so you will find her, and I think you will be willing to do what I ask.”

Eleanor, whose resentment had given way to magnanimity and duty, was sorry for Franklin's mother and tried to ease her anguish. Sometimes she arranged to be elsewhere so that Sara and Franklin could be alone. When Mrs. Warren Delano invited her to Barrytown for the Fourth of July, she was unable to accept and confessed to Franklin that it was “just as well for Cousin Sally's peace of mind that I can't.” She assumed the role of mediator between mother and son, urging Franklin to be forbearing; “We will have to learn to accept the little things,” she wrote him after a clash between the two, “and not show our annoyance. I know it is harder for you.”

Because of Sara's jealousy, Eleanor rejoiced at all signs that Franklin's family liked and accepted her. She spent a day at Algonac, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Delano Hitch (Mrs. Hitch was Franklin's Aunt Annie). The place was as lovely as Franklin had said, she wrote him. Mr. Hitch “petrified” her, but Mrs. Hitch took her around the
house and grounds and for a long afternoon drive and could not have been sweeter. From Tuxedo she reported with delight that another of Cousin Sally's sisters, Mrs. Price Collier, had asked her to call her “Aunt Kassie.” And Franklin was meeting with equal acceptance from her own Hall family, she wrote him happily. They liked him so much, she said in mock despair, that she feared they would not think her half good enough when they learned of the engagement. His mother and Mrs. Parish had had a long talk, and Sara had been “sweet” to Cousin Susie. “I don't think Honey, your Mother could be anything else. Everyone has to fall in love with her.”

Helen Roosevelt and Eleanor's cousin Theodore Douglas Robinson were to be married in June at Hyde Park. Eleanor and Helen, who was Franklin's niece, were the best of friends and Eleanor carefully followed the preparations and decisions that Helen made since she soon would confront many of them herself. Uncle Ted was coming for the wedding and Eleanor, Alice, and Corinne were to be among the bridesmaids.

Never had spring been so wonderful as that year—to Eleanor's wide-awake senses it seemed that she heard “all the lovely summer noises beginning” as she walked through the woods. She would awaken early and lie in her bed dreamily, wishing she had Peter Ibbetson's capacity to imagine what her lover was doing. She wondered “how life could have seemed worth living before I knew what ‘love' and ‘happiness' really meant.” She could not see enough of Franklin. When they were together, the world and its cares were banished, but at the moment of separation an uncontrollable sadness would well up in her. She hated partings, and sometimes was overwhelmed by melancholy, almost depression. “A woman's moods are sent her,” she wrote Franklin apologetically, “just as a man's temptations.”

Eleanor spent the Fourth of July week end in Oyster Bay at Sagamore. Young Corinne and Isabella Selmes were staying nearby with Lorraine Roosevelt at Waldeck, the home of the West Roosevelts. There was dancing, “a nice hen party for lunch,” and a great deal of tennis, which Eleanor played poorly; Corinne won the tournament despite an injured leg. Eleanor accompanied her cousin to the doctor in New York, and afterward the two girls lunched with Bob Ferguson and Nick Biddle. The latter, a young man of great gaiety, was taken with Eleanor, but Corinne, who was not aware of her cousin's feeling for Franklin, thought that perhaps Eleanor was interested in Bob.
¹

Eleanor was better than Franklin at playing the Victorian charade
that she and Franklin were friendly cousins, not plighted lovers. Her lapses of candor caused twinges of conscience, but to have violated the pledge to Sara to keep their engagement secret would have caused her greater inward stress. Franklin was the opposite: he found it difficult to hide his feeling for Eleanor—or probably he did not wish to and took the pledge to his mother less seriously than Eleanor did. The result was a Shakespearian comedy of errors at Islesboro in Dark Harbor, Maine, where Eleanor went to visit her Aunt Corinne and young Corinne. Caroline Drayton was there, too, and the three girls were reading Browning together when Franklin and some Harvard classmates appeared on the
Half Moon
. The two Corinnes were soon persuaded that Franklin was quite in love with Eleanor but that she did not seem interested in him, which, they thought, was a pity. They noted that Franklin took Eleanor canoeing but that Eleanor seemed indifferent.
²
After the
Half Moon
had departed Eleanor wrote Franklin at Campobello saying that aunt and cousin “both undertook to talk to me seriously yesterday about you, because they thought I did not realize how serious you might be, etc. and I led them on very wickedly and made believe I was much worried at the thought that you might really care for me in more than a friendly way! May I be forgiven for all my white lies, but it seems like I can't help doing it!”

She did not lack attentions from other men, and her Dark Harbor letters were filled with chitchat about Boston boys who had gone to Groton and Harvard and who were “attractive” and “interesting.” There was Howard Cary, who was much in evidence at Dark Harbor. His intense, searching eyes seemed to be asking for answers she could not give him, and he invited her to go climbing with him, to explore the other side of the island, to come to dinner, to tea. And when she lunched with Caroline Drayton “it brought me a rather terrifying proposal which I was obliged to accept and in consequence Mr. Drayton and I are going walking together tomorrow morning! I haven't yet recovered from the shock and my terror is great!” Was she wholly teasing? She evidently enjoyed the attentions of other men, and with feminine instinct realized that such interest on their part enhanced her appeal to Franklin and also served to bridle any inclination he might have to philander. The name that cropped up most often was Nick Biddle's. She had seen him frequently in town and invited him to Tivoli in June. He amused her: “Never have I known anyone able to talk the steady stream that Mr. Biddle does,” she reported to Franklin.
One of her friends thought they were secretly engaged, and even the astute Mrs. Cowles was puzzled. Auntie Bye had written her, Eleanor informed Franklin, that she wanted a long visit to Oldgate in the autumn “and wanted to have you and Nick Biddle while I was there but thought she had better have you at different times! I really think the family must think me either a dreadful flirt or an awfully poor one, I don't quite know which.” Franklin was not leading a cloistered life, either. Evelyn Carter was back on Campobello, staying with Mrs. Kuhn, and one of Eleanor's comments in a letter from Dark Harbor was almost too nonchalant: “I did not know you had Edith Weekes with you.”