The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (3 page)

Mrs. Ludlow was handsome, sure of herself, and an excellent housekeeper. On one memorable occasion she set to work to find out what I knew. Alas and alack, I could not even read! The next day and every day that summer she sent her companion, Madeleine, to give me lessons in reading. Then she found out that I could not sew or cook and knew nothing of the things a girl should know. I think I was six.

I surmise that my mother was roundly taken to task, for after that Madeleine became a great factor in my life and began to teach me to sew.

I still slept in my mother’s room, and every morning I had to repeat to her some verses which I had learned in the Old or the New Testament. I wish I could remember today all the verses I learned by heart that summer.

Sometimes I woke up when my mother and her sisters were talking at bedtime, and many a conversation not meant for my ears was listened to with great avidity. I acquired a strange and garbled idea of the troubles around me. Something was wrong with my father and from my point of view nothing could be wrong with him.

If people only realized what a war goes on in a child’s mind and heart in a situation of this kind, I think they would try to explain more than they do, but nobody told me anything.

We moved back to New York, the autumn that I was seven, to a house which my mother had bought and put in order on East 61st Street, two blocks from Auntie Bye, who lived at Madison Avenue and East 62nd Street. She had Uncle Ted’s little girl, Alice, with her a great deal, and that winter our first real acquaintance began. Already she seemed much older and cleverer, and while I admired her I was always a little afraid of her, and this was so even when we were grown and she was the “Princess Alice” in the White House.

That winter we began a friendship with young Robert Munro-Ferguson, a young man sent over from England by an elder brother to make his way in the world. My father and mother had known the elder brother, Ronald (later Lord Novar), and so had Auntie Bye. The boy was taken into her house, given a start in Douglas Robinson’s office, and became a dear and close friend to the entire family.

My mother always had the three children with her for a time in the late afternoon. My little brother Ellie adored her, and was so good he never had to be reproved. The baby Hall was always called Josh and was too small to do anything but sit upon her lap contentedly. I felt a curious barrier between myself and these three. My mother made a great effort; she would read to me and have me read to her, she would have me recite my poems, she would keep me after the boys had gone to bed, and still I can remember standing in the door, often with my finger in my mouth, and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said, “Come in, Granny.” If a visitor was there she might turn and say, “She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her ‘Granny.’” I wanted to sink through the floor in shame.

Suddenly everything was changed! We children were sent out of the house. I went to stay with my godmother, Mrs. Henry Parish, and the boys went to my mother’s aunt, Mrs. Ludlow. My grandmother left her own house and family to nurse my mother, for she had diphtheria and there was then no antitoxin. My father was sent for, but came too late from his exile in Virginia. Diphtheria went fast in those days.

I can remember standing by a window when Cousin Susie (Mrs. Parish) told me that my mother was dead. This was on December 7, 1892. Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else. My father was back and I would see him soon.

Later I knew what a tragedy of utter defeat this meant for him. No hope now of ever wiping out the sorrowful years he had brought upon my mother—and she had left her mother as guardian for her children. He had no wife, no children, no hope.

Finally it was arranged that we children were to live with my grandmother Hall. I realize now what that must have meant in dislocation of her household, and I marvel at the sweetness of my two uncles and the two aunts who were still at home, for never by word or deed did any of them make us feel that we were not in our own house.

After we were installed, my father came to see me, and I remember going down into the high-ceilinged, dim library on the first floor of the house in West 37th Street. He sat in a big chair. He was dressed all in black, looking very sad. 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. Someday I would make a home for him again, we would travel together and do many things which he painted as interesting and pleasant, to be looked forward to in the future.

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 going to a school and later be independent.

There started that day a feeling which never left me, that he and I were very close and someday would have a life of our own together. He told me to write to him often, to be a good girl, not to give any trouble, to study hard, to grow up into a woman he could be proud of, and he would come to see me whenever it was possible.

When he left I was all alone to keep our secret of mutual understanding and to adjust myself to my new existence.

The two little boys had a room with Madeleine and I had a little hall bedroom next to them. I was old enough to look after myself, except that my hair had to be brushed at night. Of course, someone had to be engaged to take me out, to and from classes, and to whatever I did in the afternoons. I had governesses, French maids, German maids. I walked them all off their feet. They always tried to talk to me, and I wished to be left alone to live in a dreamworld in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I withdrew as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, and all the time I was walking or when anyone bored me.

I was a healthy child, but now and then in winter I would have a sore throat and tonsillitis, so cold baths were decreed as a daily morning routine—and how I cheated on those baths! Madeleine could not always follow me up, and more hot water went into them than would have been considered beneficial had anyone supervised me.

My grandmother laid great stress on certain things in education. I must learn French. My father wished me to be musical. I worked at music until I was eighteen, but no one ever trained my ear! Through listening to my aunt Pussie play I did gain an emotional appreciation of music. She was a fascinating and lovely creature and her playing was one of the unforgettable joys of my childhood.

I would have given anything to be a singer. I felt that one could give a great deal of pleasure and, yes, receive attention and admiration! Attention and admiration were the things through all my childhood which I wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration.

As I look back on that household in the 37th Street house, I realize how differently life was lived in the New York of those days, both in its houses and in its streets. There were a number of large and beautiful homes, most of them on Fifth Avenue. Madison Square was still almost entirely residential, and from 14th Street to 23rd Street was the shopping district.

In the streets there were no motorcars. Beautiful horses and smart carriages took their place. Horse-drawn stages labored up Fifth Avenue and horse-drawn streetcars ran on other avenues and crosstown streets; cabs and hansoms were the taxis of those days.

Our old-fashioned, brownstone house was much like all the other houses in the side streets, fairly large and comfortable, with high ceilings, a dark basement, and inadequate servants’ quarters with working conditions which no one with any social conscience would tolerate today. The laundry had one little window opening on the back yard and, of course, we had no electric light. We were modern in that we had gas!

The servants’ room lacked ventilation and comfortable furnishings. Their bathroom was in the cellar, so each one had a basin and a pitcher in a tiny bedroom.

Our household consisted of a cook, a butler, a housemaid—who was maid as well to my young aunts—and a laundress. The family consisted of my grandmother, Pussie and Maude, who had been the baby of the family until our arrival, Vallie, my older uncle, and, for brief periods, Eddie, who was some two years younger. Eddie had a roving foot and took at least one long trip to Africa which I remember.

Into this household I moved with my two little brothers and their nurse.

My grandmother seemed to me a very old lady, though I realize now that she was still quite young. She was relegated almost entirely to her own bedroom. She came downstairs when she had visitors of her own, but the drawing room, with its massive gilt furniture covered with blue damask, was the room in which she saw her guests. Her daughters took possession of the library, which was a large front room where the piano stood and where a large bow window on the street gave more light.

The dining room, in the extension at the back, was quite a bright room, having three windows on the side. Back of that was the pantry, where I spent considerable time, for the butler, Victor, was kind to me and taught me how to wash dishes and wipe them, though when I broke one he was much displeased. Sometimes when I was in disgrace and sent supperless to bed, he or Kitty, the chambermaid, would smuggle me up something to eat.

The years had changed my grandmother. With her own children she had been chiefly concerned in loving them. Discipline had been my grandfather’s part. When he died she still wanted to surround them with the tenderest love, but later on she found that she could not control Vallie or Eddie or Pussie or Maude. She was determined that the grandchildren who were now under her care should have the discipline that her own children had lacked, and we were brought up on the principle that “no” was easier to say than “yes.”

Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. I remember an incident when I was about thirteen. Pussie was ill with a bad sore throat and she liked me to do things for her, which made me very proud. One night she called me. Everything was dark, and I groped my way to her room. She asked if I would go to the basement and get some ice from the icebox. That meant three flights of stairs; the last one would mean closing the door at the foot of the stairs and being alone in the basement, making my way in pitch-black darkness to that icebox in the back yard!

My knees were trembling, but as between the fear of going and the fear of not being allowed to minister to Pussie when she was ill, and thereby losing an opportunity to be important, I had no choice. I went and returned with the ice, demonstrating again the fact that children value above everything else the opportunity to be really useful to those around them.

Very early I became conscious of the fact that there were people around me who suffered in one way or another. I was five or six when my father took me to help serve Thanksgiving dinner in one of the newsboys’ clubhouses which my grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt, had started. He was also a trustee of the Children’s Aid Society for many years. My father explained that many of these ragged little boys had no homes and lived in little wooden shanties in empty lots, or slept in vestibules of houses or public buildings or any place where they could be moderately warm, yet they were independent and earned their own livings.

Every Christmas I was taken by my grandmother to help dress the Christmas tree for the babies’ ward in the Post-Graduate Hospital. She was particularly interested in this charity.

Auntie Gracie took us to the Orthopedic Hospital which my grandfather Roosevelt had been instrumental in helping Dr. Newton Schaefer to start and in which the family was deeply interested. There I saw innumerable little children in casts and splints. Some of them lay patiently for months in strange and curious positions. I was particularly interested in them because I had a curvature myself and wore for some time a steel brace which was vastly uncomfortable and prevented my bending over.

Even my uncle Vallie, who at this time was in business in New York, a champion tennis player and a popular young man in society, took me to help dress a Christmas tree for a group of children in a part of New York City which was called “Hell’s Kitchen.” For many years this was one of New York’s poorest and worst sections. I also went with Maude and Pussie to sing at the Bowery Mission, so I was not in ignorance that there were sharp contrasts, even though our lives were blessed with plenty.

Though he was so little with us, my father dominated all this period of my life. Subconsciously I must always have been waiting 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 downstairs was far too slow. I slid down the banisters and usually catapulted into his arms before his hat was hung up.

My father never missed an opportunity for giving us presents, so Christmas was a great day and I still remember one memorable Christmas when I had two stockings, for my grandmother had filled one and my father, who was in New York, brought one on Christmas morning.

One more sorrow came to my father the winter that my mother died. My little brother Ellie never seemed to thrive after my mother’s death. Both he and the baby, Josh, got scarlet fever, and I was returned to my cousin Susie and, of course, quarantined.

The baby got well without any complications, but Ellie developed diphtheria and died. My father came to take me out occasionally, but the anxiety over the little boys was too great for him to give me a good deal of his time.

On August 14, 1894, just before I was ten years old, word came that my father had died. My aunts told me, but I simply refused to believe it, and while I wept long and went to bed still weeping I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dreamworld as usual.