Eleanor and Franklin (39 page)

Eleanor dressed smartly—even the style-conscious Pussie was delighted to get her hand-me-downs. She was slim and tall and the sheath gowns of the era did justice to her Gibson Girl figure. She had tapering, expressive fingers and masses of soft brown hair full of golden tints. Her profile, with its overly prominent teeth and receding chin, was not attractive, but, like Auntie Bye, she had an inner radiance that prevailed over physical looks. Her eyes, as Beatrice Webb had said of her own mother, caressed one with sympathy and studied one with intelligence. Even the self-deprecating Eleanor admitted that her eyes were her best feature. She was glad that her children had inherited their father's looks—his fair skin, his smile, his jutting jaw—but their eyes, she thought, came from her side of the family, and they were good eyes, she said.

The Halls still turned to her in every crisis, and the crises were frequent. “Eleanor has been here every day,” Grandma Hall wrote. “She is so good.” Tivoli was decaying. Presided over by the violent-tempered Vallie who brandished a gun at visitors, and Grandma Hall,
now a roly-poly lady in black dress and bonnet, Oak Terrace was no longer a proud Hudson house but the setting for a Gothic tragedy. “I am so sorry about Grandma,” Eleanor wrote Maude,

and one's hands are tied unless Vallie can be removed from Tivoli, which of course she won't agree to now. . . . I wish you and I could talk it over as I would do anything to make these next years easier and happier for her. Can't I let you have some money?

An equally urgent problem was what should be done with Eddie's three children, whose beautiful mother had died. “I feel after this,” Eleanor wrote when Eddie had disappeared on another prolonged bat, “he should not dream of taking the children to his own house this spring and hope no one will make it possible so long as the Zabriskies are willing to keep them.” Her stern advice echoed Auntie Bye's admonition fifteen years earlier to her own family that under no circumstances should Eleanor's father be permitted to have his children. But Eleanor had never acknowledged the wisdom of keeping herself and her father apart; the world of reality and the dream life she lived with her father were still separate.

Eleanor was Maude's confidante in matters of the heart as well as her mainstay in disentangling her private affairs, including some large debts. Maude, with her masses of red hair, great warmth, and puckish sense of humor, charmed men and women alike. She had turned down a Whitney to marry Larry Waterbury, and at one time the society pages were full of her doings. “Seated in a big automobile at the Jockey Club races at Newport last summer, Mrs. Waterbury performed the feat of eating half of a large watermelon without removing her white gloves—and without soiling them.” Although Larry Waterbury was attractive and an outstanding polo player, he had no money. The two lived beyond their means, and contracted heavy gambling debts, and finally the marriage broke up. When Maude decided to sell her pearl collar, “Totty” was her agent in the negotiations with Tiffany's and Black, Starr and Gorham. To free herself of debts, Maude, like Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth
, tried running a dress shop and even considered, until Eleanor discouraged her, serving as a hostess in a new restaurant whose owner was eager to have society patronage. Eleanor loved having her aunt at Campobello. Would Eleanor mind, Maude inquired, if a Mr. David Gray joined her on the island?

Eleanor could not quite make up her mind about the romance but
she welcomed Mr. Gray to Campobello and undertook to chaperone them. “If you think best casually mention to Mama that Mr. Gray is boarding in the village,” she wrote Franklin, “but if you think the surprise is better for her, just let it go.” The son of a Buffalo editor, David Gray was witty and charming, wrote fashionable stories about the hunting life, and was much in demand in society.

Eleanor kept Franklin informed of her reactions to Mr. Gray. He had “the best anthology I've ever seen called
The Home Book of Verse
, compiled by a man called Stevenson. You can give it to me for my birthday as he has mended the turntable so I don't need a new one!” Mr. Gray read poetry well, and they were having “a grand poetry orgy,” her next letter said. He was a delightful companion “but something is lacking and it worried me. I wish you were here and could form an opinion.” He read them a story he had just written. “He certainly has the gift of the short story. Whether he has it for the big things is not yet proved and I wonder if it ever will be.” How did Eleanor like him, Maude asked after they had been at Campobello several weeks. “I told her I did not feel I knew him yet. . . . I somehow shall never feel quite straight about it all till I've told him all my fears for them and seen how he takes it.”

Meanwhile there was Sara to be dealt with. Appearances meant a great deal to her. Once Harry Hooker, one of Franklin's law partners, had come to Campobello while Franklin was away, and “Mama has chaperoned us pretty carefully,” Eleanor noted with amusement. When Eleanor first mentioned David's name to Sara she “fairly snorted,” and Eleanor foresaw trouble. Publicly Sara was kind, gracious, and devoted to Maude, but she “confided in Laura (who promptly told me),” wrote Eleanor, “all her outraged feelings in regards to Maude, David and me. . . . I know I'm in for a grand scene with Mama and tears one of these days.”

David finally allayed Eleanor's misgivings: “I think you will like David Gray,” she advised Franklin. If Maude ever made up her mind to marry him, “he will take good care of her. He strikes me as a man who has enjoyed life, had some big disappointments but kept his ideals, though up to now he has wanted a big incentive for work.”

Her doubts about her brother Hall's marriage were of a different kind. A handsome young man, Hall had graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa in 1912 and was about to enter engineering school. Eleanor had great faith in his abilities and wanted to be sure the girl he married would bring out the best in him; she thought of Hall
as her oldest child, and if he was ever in trouble she was at his side. “Eleanor is a wonder,” a friend remarked who saw them together; “it was delightful to see the sweet feeling between that sister and brother.” When Hall first brought Margaret Richardson, a lovely Boston debutante, to meet Eleanor, Eleanor had some reservations. Margaret was a sportswoman who rode, played tennis, and enjoyed camping trips and dancing. “Hall is holding you up as an example to me,” Eleanor teasingly reported to her. They were different types, and Eleanor could not get on “an intimate footing” with Margaret, she confessed to Franklin, and Margaret had the same problem with her. Eleanor “was perfectly lovely to me,” Margaret recalled, “but I never felt at home with her.”
¹⁶
Eleanor thought a woman should stir a man to large undertakings and be able to keep up with him intellectually, not just be someone to have fun with, and she was not sure Margaret was the right person for her brother. After Hall and Margaret were married, however, she counseled him not to make too many demands on his young wife. Hall had just awakened to poetry and philosophy, which were like wine in their effect on him, Eleanor observed in a letter to Franklin adding, “He expects Margaret to feel as he does and to grasp things just as quickly and it is very hard on her for she has been accustomed to a sleepy atmosphere. He is impatient of her family and wants her to keep out of the atmosphere of Boston which she has always been in! Oh! these periods of readjustment, they are hard all round, aren't they?”

Painful as the process had been, she had made the adjustment from innocent bride to manager of a large household, from sheltered wife of a fun-loving young lawyer-about-town to competent helpmate of a promising public official. Politics was already for her as well as for her husband a way to self-fulfillment. It was an activity she could share with him, a domain where she could be helpful, unlike sports and frivolities where she so often felt inadequate and excluded. Politics pivoted around Franklin and the family pivoted around her, but she was more than the mother of his children, the custodian of the hearth. He respected her judgment and valued her opinions—how much so he attested in a letter he wrote Maude. He wanted Maude to come back to Campobello next year, “as I know what a delight it is to Eleanor to have you and I am afraid I am sometimes a little selfish and have had her too much with me in past years and made life a trifle dull for her really brilliant mind and spirit.”

 

*
In later years he often regaled his wife and children with the song that he and Connell sang as they neared some port of call:

Are we almost there?—Are we almost there?

Said the dying girl as she neared her home.

Be them the tall poplar trees what rears

Their lofty heights against Heaven's big dome——

Are we——al——most there——

(agonized diminuendo)

17.
THE ROOSEVELTS GO TO WASHINGTON

I
N MID
-J
ANUARY
, 1913, F
RANKLIN HAD BEEN SUMMONED TO
Trenton for a talk with President-elect Wilson about New York patronage. Franklin wanted to serve in the new administration himself, but when he, Eleanor, and Sara went to Wilson's inauguration, he still did not know whether he would be able to get the post he most coveted, the assistant secretary of the Navy, the position that Theodore Roosevelt had held before moving on to the governorship of New York and the presidency.

The morning of the inauguration he ran into Wilson's new secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, homespun editor of the
Raleigh News and Observer
, prohibitionist, pacifist, and progressive. They had met at the Baltimore convention, where Josephus had instantly taken to Franklin, “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen . . . a case of love at first sight.”
¹

“How would you like to come to Washington as assistant secretary of the Navy?” Daniels queried.

“How would I like it? I'd like it bully well,” Franklin replied. “All my life I have loved ships and have been a student of the Navy, and the assistant secretaryship is the one place, above all others, I would love to hold.” He is “our kind of liberal,” Daniels told the president two days later when he brought up Roosevelt's name.

After his confirmation on March 17, Franklin elatedly pulled out an assistant-secretary-of-the-Navy letterhead, impressively embossed in the corner with the office's insignia of four stars around an anchor, and wrote his “own dear Babbie,” as he called her. She had remained in New York to hear what was to be “our fate.”
²

I didn't know till I sat down at this desk that this is the 17th of happy memory. In fact with all the subdued excitement of getting confirmed & taking the oath of office, the delightful significance of it all is only just beginning to dawn on me. My only regret is that
you could not have been here with me, but I am thinking of you a great deal & sending “wireless” messages!

He was already at work, he went on gaily, “signing vast quantities of ‘stuff' about which I know nothing,” and would she have calling cards made for him, “by next Monday if possible”?

Eleanor meanwhile had written Franklin:

A telegram came to you from Mr. Daniels so we know you are confirmed & finally launched in your work!

P.S.

March 17th.

Many happy returns of to-day dear. I ordered your 17th of March present as we couldn't do anything else together!

Franklin also had written his mother, “I am baptized, confirmed, sworn in, vaccinated—and somewhat at sea!” She was grateful that her son had thought of her in the moment of his success: “You can't imagine the happiness you gave me by writing to me yesterday. I just
knew
it was a
very
big job, and everything so new that it will take time to fit
into
it.” Big jobs, in Sara's mind, required appropriate signatures: “Try not to write your signature too small,” she added, “as it gets a cramped look and is not distinct. So many public men have such awful signatures, and so unreadable!”

Shortly after Franklin began his new job he was invited to Raleigh, North Carolina, Josephus Daniels' home town, to address the Agricultural and Mechanical College. Daniels was one of its trustees and was proud of this college of farm boys, as he was of his young aide.

Eleanor, wearing a big hat and a dress with a high choke collar, according to the local paper, accompanied Franklin who sported a derby. “I am a hayseed myself,” the pince-nez'd patrician northerner said at one point in his speech, “and proud of it.”
³

Eleanor, more fastidious in her choice of words, would never have called herself “a hayseed,” and she was suddenly conscious of a kind of upper-class insularity. “There seems to be so much to see and know and to learn to understand in this big country of ours,” she wrote Maude afterward, “and so few of us ever try to even realize that we ought to try when we've lived in the environment that you and I grew up in.”
⁴