Eleanor and Franklin (33 page)

He was fortunate “in having a Highland nurse,” he said, “so that I passed my early years with kilts on the outside and oatmeal and scones on the interior.” If he began on a note of intentional humor, he ended on one that was unintentional. American women instead of cooking vegetables in water “nearly always cooked them in milk, and this of course makes them more nutritious, besides bringing out the flavor.”
⁷
Little as Eleanor knew about cooking, she knew her husband was drawing on his imagination when he spoke of cooking vegetables in
milk and it was a relief when he ended. But his audience loved it and she loved him for coming to her rescue.

As they left for home they received a letter from Sara expressing her delight and gratification over the way they had made her feel she was never far from their thoughts. “I never knew such angels about writing and I
am
so glad Eleanor says that although you have had such a perfect time you are now anxious to see ‘home and mother' again!”

15.
SETTLING DOWN

A
T THE NEWLYWEDS
'
REQUEST
, S
ARA HAD RENTED FOR THEM
the Draper house at 125 East Thirty-sixth Street, just three blocks from her own, and furnished it and staffed it with three servants. If she had looked forward to finding and furnishing her own first house, Eleanor gave Sara no hint of this. “You are an angel to take so much trouble with the house,” she wrote from St. Moritz, and thanked Sara for having done “wonders” for them in the way of “a bargain,” for now they could get settled “so much sooner than if we waited to choose a house on our return. Altogether we feel jubilant over it and I am looking forward so much to getting it in order with you to help us.” Eleanor's requests were minimal: she wanted their bedroom painted white, the kitchen and basement whitewashed, the telephone, if there was one, to remain—and was there a house safe?

Only when Sara offered to spend a considerable amount of money to wire the house for electricity did they demur. “You are a dear, sweet Mama, to want to put it in for us,” Eleanor wrote from Paris a month before their return, “but we are pulled two ways for we will only have the house two years.”

They moved into their “14 foot mansion,” as Franklin called it, as soon as they returned, and two days later he took his make-up exams at Columbia Law School. Sara had sent his law books to London with the advice, “You can do a good deal even crossing an ocean, if you set apart two or three hours a day for work.” He had a retentive memory and a good mind, and with Eleanor to see that he stuck to his studies, he passed.

Through the remaining two years at law school Eleanor's quiet confidence in Franklin's abilities fortified him against indolence and irresolution. He passed his bar exam in the early spring of 1907, was sworn in in May, and in September wrote from Campobello to his mother in Europe that by the time she returned he would be “a full-fledged office boy” with Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. “I shall think
of you on the 23rd beginning work,” his mother wrote back. “I know you will in many ways be glad to start. Try to arrange for systematic air and exercise and keep away from brokers' offices, this advice free gratis for nothing.”

While Franklin was busy learning his way around the municipal courts, Eleanor devoted herself to her mother-in-law. Every day she drove with Sara in her brougham up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park, and they had at least one meal a day together. Eleanor consulted Sara on servants and menus and on where to shop and what to buy, and she listened dutifully to Sara's daily briefings about Franklin's health. Often she had to beg off when Helen Robinson or Nathalie Swan or Corinne Robinson wanted to “have a little gossip.” She had to lunch with Mama, she excused herself. No, she could not go to the lecture or to the theater with them—she was driving or dining with Mama.

Under the firm guidance of her mother-in-law she was becoming a conventional young society matron.
¹
Franklin did not mix socially with his fellow students or professors. The young couple's social life was to be restricted to the group in which they had been raised. New York was throbbing with vital movements in art, politics, and welfare, but for Franklin and Eleanor, New York was limited to the interests of a small group of families of impeccable social standing and long-established wealth. Before her marriage, Eleanor had begun to break loose from this narrow framework through her work at the Rivington Street Settlement and with the Consumers League. But now she was told by Sara and Cousin Susie that if she continued with this work she risked bringing the diseases of the slums into her household. Eleanor's impulse to do things for the less fortunate was to be restricted to serving on proper charitable boards and to making modest donations, the appropriate activity for a young matron, just as the older members of Franklin's family approved of his election as a vestryman of St. James' Episcopal Church and his membership, like his father before him, in the Eagle Engine Company of Hyde Park and the Rescue Hook and Ladder Company of Dutchess County.

The Franklin Roosevelts, while not really wealthy, were well off. Franklin had a $5,000 income from a $100,000 trust fund, and Eleanor had an annual income of $7,500. Also, Sara could always be counted on for generous checks on special occasions. So their life was comfortable and without financial worry.

They were not members of the fastest, gayest crowd, although they saw a good deal of the Teddy Robinsons, who were. Franklin rode
and hunted, but hunt-breakfasts, polo, and steeplechasing were never as important to him as they were to Teddy. The Robinsons engaged in such madcap pranks as turning up at dinner dressed in baby clothes. Eleanor was totally incapable of “letting go” in that way, but if Franklin had been married to someone else he might have joined the fun. He enjoyed gay escapades that Eleanor had little use for and that often left her feeling inadequate.

If he wanted to go on a “bat” with his male contemporaries, she encouraged him. She packed him off to Cambridge for a “real spree” with his Fly Club brethren, which gave her a chance to fix up the house, she said, “so it will look a little better for you.” In June she bundled him off to Cambridge again, for she realized that the true son of Harvard needed the stimulus of a return to the Yard and participation in commencement festivities.

Eleanor got on easily with older people, and joined her mother-in-law and her friends in their discussions of art, literature, and music. Almost everybody in society was organizing classes. Sara Roosevelt had one in history at her home. “Such a funny combination of people,” remarked Helen Robinson, since it consisted mostly of Sara's contemporaries, with only Helen and Mary Newbold and Eleanor representing the younger generation. Around the corner, Eleanor attended the class Aunt Jennie (Mrs. Warren Delano) had in her home in “modern” literature—George Eliot, D. G. Rossetti, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith, Matthew Arnold. She still turned up regularly at the Bible class conducted by Janet McCook.

The pattern of Franklin and Eleanor's life during the first year of marriage was set by Sara, at least to the extent that Eleanor's deliberate self-effacement kept her from expressing her own preferences. No wonder Sara was thankful—she understood what she had gained. In 1905, on Eleanor's twenty-first birthday Sara wrote that she prayed that her “precious Franklin may make you very happy, and thank him for giving me such a dear loving daughter. I thank
you
darling for being what you are to me already.”

But Eleanor had Franklin's love and a home, and that was what counted for her. In September Franklin went to New York and she stayed in Hyde Park alone, their first day apart. “I feel quite lost and sad without you,” she wrote him, “and it was horrid coming home last night so I don't think we will try this experiment again, do you think? Incidentally I hope you miss me dreadfully too!”

Insecure, unsure of her adequacy as a woman, another of her
anxieties when she married Franklin was that she might prove barren.
²
But not long after they returned from their honeymoon she knew she was pregnant. The pregnancy was a difficult one, and for the last three months she was quite ill, but with those around her she remained calm and cheerful. “Eleanor and I walk every morning at ten. She is wonderful, always bright and well,” Sara noted. Eleanor had little patience with her own physical ailments and did not allow them to keep her from doing what had to be done. This had always been one of her nobler attributes, but it had sometimes made her insufferably righteous toward others who were less self-disciplined. Her pain and nausea while carrying Anna, however, humbled and softened her, and although she still refused to yield to her own infirmities, she became more tolerant of those who did.

In December, 1905, Alice Roosevelt announced her engagement to Nicholas Longworth. Since the wedding on February 17, 1906, took place only a few weeks before Eleanor's confinement she was unable to attend, but Franklin went with his mother. “Alice looked remarkably pretty and her manner was very charming,” Sara reported to Eleanor. Cousin Theodore was, “as always, cordial and interesting.” “So Alice is really married,” the family noted with considerable surprise and even more relief.

On May 2, Sara wrote, “Eleanor and I had our usual walk and in the afternoon she and I drove from 2:30 till four, and Eleanor and Franklin lunched here. I went there to dine. We played cards. Eleanor had some discomfort.” The next day, Miss Spring, a trained nurse, called Sara at nine. “I went over and Dr. Ely soon came. At 1:15 a beautiful little girl was born, 10 pounds and one ounce.”

Eleanor always remembered the first time she held Anna in her arms, “just a helpless bundle but by its mere helplessness winding itself inextricably around my heart.” The mother's pleasure in the birth of her first child was only slightly marred by her knowledge that her mother-in-law had yearned for a boy.

Eleanor had scarcely recovered from childbirth when she began to worry about what would happen once the trained nurse left. Stubby Blanche Spring was so competent and sensible that Eleanor became quite attached to her, and felt rather lost when the nurse was no longer with them. “Miss Spring left,” Sara noted in her diary. “Poor little Eleanor is upset by it though she is brave.”

Miss Spring urged Eleanor to care for the baby herself, but Sara argued that a nurse must be employed. So Eleanor added a nurse that
Sara engaged to the household staff of cook, housemaid, and butler. Later she bitterly regretted yielding on this point; if she had insisted on caring for her own children, she felt, instead of turning them over to nurses and governesses, as was customary in her group, she as well as the children would have been happier. In retrospect, she also regretted having been insulated from the household's vital activities; she and Franklin, she said later, would have been better off during the first year of their marriage if they had not had a staff of servants. But Sara shaped their style of life, and when Eleanor had misgivings and consulted her Cousin Susie, she found that Susie was as much a traditionalist as Sara.
³

The baby was christened “Anna Eleanor” at St. James Church on July 1, 1906. The child's godmothers were Isabella Ferguson and Muriel Robbins, and the godfather was Edmund Rogers. A lunch party for thirty-four at Springwood followed the ceremony.

For Sara, the presence of a grandchild was a fascinating experience, and she found it more difficult than ever not to spend all her waking hours with her son and his family. There were times, nevertheless, when Eleanor escaped her mother-in-law, and managed to join her friends at lunch, to call on them at their homes, and sometimes even to entertain them at dinner. Those were the years when most of her bridesmaids and Franklin's ushers were themselves getting married, settling down, and excitedly reporting to each other on their babies. Helen Robinson's son Douglas Jr. was born on November 8, 1905; Helen Wilmerding (née Cutting) gave birth to a son in January, 1906; and Isabella Ferguson had a daughter in September, 1906. “Will you marry me 21 years from today?” the Robinsons telegraphed the Fergusons on behalf of Douglas Jr. “Sorry,” the answer came back, “just eloped with Peter Biddle” (Peter was Nick and Elizabeth Biddle's one-month-old son). The Robinsons took Douglas to call on little Anna Eleanor. “Douglas rather terrifying Anna by his amorous advances,” Helen recorded, “as they sat on the floor together. He wanted to hold her hand but she was quite rebellious.”

Soon after Anna's christening the Franklin Roosevelt household left for the first of many summers on Campobello Island. Resolutely Eleanor set about mastering her fear of water, because life on Campobello would be tedious for her if she didn't sail. If she wanted to keep her children company—not to mention her husband—she had to learn about boats. They went up to St. Andrews in the launch, Franklin informed his mother, “and though slightly rough in Passamaquoddy
Bay for a few minutes E. did not show the least paleness of cheek or tendency to edge towards the rail!” Eleanor even learned to fish: “F. and I fished yesterday afternoon and caught twelve flounders,” she announced laconically.