Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Copyright © 2020 by Dianne K. Salerni

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Salerni, Dianne K., author.

  Title: Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt ghosts / Dianne K. Salerni.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references. | Audience: Ages 9–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: “In this alternate version of 1898 New York City, where ghosts are common household nuisances, young Eleanor and Alice Roosevelt battle the fierce spirits that are threatening their family”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019043186 | ISBN 9780823446971 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962—Childhood and youth—Juvenile fiction. | Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 1884–1980—Childhood and youth—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962—Childhood and youth—Fiction. | Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 1884–1980—Childhood and youth—Fiction. | Ghosts—Fiction. Cousins—Fiction. | Roosevelt family—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—History—1865–1898—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S152114 Ele 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043186

  Ebook ISBN 9780823448821

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1

  For my siblings and siblings-in-law, who never fail in their support—

  Laurie and Keith

  Laura and Brian

  Deb and Larry

  Three ghastly ghosts erupted in my house

  Each one silent and slippery as a mouse.

  The Unaware does what it did in life.

  The Friendly has fun with its afterlife.

  But when I feel that bone-deep chill

  I know the Vengeful has come to kill.

  A Child’s Nursery Rhyme

  Author Unknown

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Eleanor Discontented

  2. Alice in Disgrace

  3. Eleanor Acts on Impulse

  4. Alice in the Hall House

  5. Eleanor Eavesdrops

  6. Alice Meets a Celebrated Woman

  7. Alice in the Attic

  8. Eleanor’s Discovery

  9. Eleanor on an Escapade

  10. Alice Learns the Truth

  11. Eleanor Defiant

  12. Eleanor and the Cousins

  13. Alice at the Seance

  14. Eleanor and Franklin

  15. Alice and Her Aunt

  16. Eleanor Takes Charge

  17. Alice Challenges an Expert

  18. Eleanor Discovers the Value of a Life

  19. Alice Goes Home

  20. Eleanor Remembers “We’re Roosevelts”

  21. Alice Learns the Truth, Part Two

  22. Eleanor at the Party

  23. Alice Meets a Crackpot

  24. Eleanor Besieged

  25. Alice in the Flames

  26. Eleanor Through the Looking Glass

  27. Alice, Her Father, and the Rest of the Truth

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  What to Read Next

  1

  ELEANOR DISCONTENTED

  ALLENSWOOD. Linden. Wadleigh.

  I repeat the names silently, like a prayer, while I wait for Grandmother to finish reading a letter over her afternoon tea. Too nervous to eat a biscuit, I sip from my cup instead and rehearse my approach to a subject that Grandmother no doubt thinks was settled long ago.

  Allenswood Academy in London, the school of my dreams.

  Linden Hall in Pennsylvania, a perfectly acceptable alternative.

  Wadleigh High School for Girls, the one she’ll have no reason to say no to.

  Nibbling on her tea biscuit, Grandmother turns the sheet of stationery over to the other side, and her eyebrows climb above the rim of her spectacles. Whatever is in this letter, she seems to be devouring it with relish. My grandmother corresponds regularly with elderly ladies up and down the Eastern Seaboard, passing along news of who has died or is likely to die, who is ill, and who has fallen on hard times.

  My toe taps a staccato rhythm on the floor while I wait for the right moment to speak. Grandmother’s generation doesn’t believe in higher education for girls, and she thinks that in my thirteen years I’ve had all the “book learning” necessary for my station in life. I can argue that public opinion on girls’ education is changing, but she’ll counter by telling me there is no money for me to attend school, that what little she has is going toward the education of my little brother, Gracie. I have an answer for that.

  Across the room, the mantel clock ticks. The wallpaper fades a little bit more. Mice in the walls are born and others die.

  Finally, Grandmother lays down the letter and takes off her reading spectacles. “It seems your cousin Alice has been banished from Washington and sent here to New York.”

  Your cousin Alice. The way someone else might say Billy the Kid.

  I set down my tea, the last swallow sticking in my throat like a lump of sausage. Another subject of the old ladies’ letters is whose children are behaving badly, and my first cousin Alice Roosevelt’s name has appeared with frightful regularity. “What has she done now?”

  “What hasn’t she done? Chewing gum in public. Breaking curfew. And she’s apparently taken up with a gang of boys, riding bicycles, lighting firecrackers under bushes, and I don’t know what else!”

  “Why is she coming to New York?”

  “Your uncle’s second wife can’t control her. With all the other children that woman has, I suppose she has no time for one that’s little more than a wild animal put into good clothes. They’re sending her to your aunt Bye in the hope that she can stop the girl from running riot.”

  My shoulders sag. That is what I feared.

  “Keep your distance, Eleanor,” Grandmother says. “I don’t want you picking up any of her unsavory habits.”

  “I don’t think Alice will want to spend time with me.” When I last saw Alice, she called me an old stick in the mud because I wouldn’t spit off a bridge with her. “But Grandmother, Aunt Bye and I have been working on a quilt for the baby.”

  Grandmother dismisses our quilt with a wave of her hand. “Let Alice learn to use a needle. Although, if you ask me, it tempts fate to quilt a blanket for a babe one doesn’t yet have in one’s arms. Especially at Bye’s age.”

  This isn’t the first time my grandmother has predicted a tragic end for my aunt’s late-in-life marriage and impending motherhood. She revels in the troubles of other people the way a pig wallows in mud, which is an unkind comparison, but I don’t feel particularly sorry for it. Especially when she proves me right by taking up another of her favorite topics.

  “Truth be told, I would prefer you spend less time in the deathtrap they’ve made of that house. Electric lights! What newfangled foolishness. Mark my words. Your aunt will be lucky if her entire family doesn’t burn up in an electrical fire!”

  My shoulders hunch around my ears, even though this isn’t the first time she’s predi
cted that fate and probably won’t be the last. It’s a good time to change the direction of the conversation, and I plunge forward with my planned opening. “Grandmother, did you see the recent editorial in the Tribune written by the president of the New York City School Boar—”

  The chime of the clock interrupts me, and Grandmother flinches. Shifting in her chair, she squints at the mantel. The dim February sun does little to light the parlor, but Grandmother won’t allow the gaslights on until seven, no matter how dark it gets. “Five o’clock already?” My heart sinks when she sets down her teacup, knowing my opportunity has come and gone. “I’m going upstairs to rest before supper, which will be cold meat, served at eight. Tell Rosie.”

  “I will,” I promise, even though supper is always cold meat, served at eight.

  Grandmother rises from her chair, as tall and sturdy as a mountain. “I’ll see you at supper, then, Eleanor. Return the tray to the kitchen and mind the teacups.”

  And I always return the tray and mind the teacups.

  Grandmother hustles from the room, moving faster than one expects from a woman of her age and girth. She wants to be shut in her room by the time her son—my uncle Valentine—climbs the stairs at precisely sixteen minutes past the hour carrying a shotgun and a bottle of Wild Turkey.

  I gather dishes on the tray, and I don’t mind the cups as much as I usually do. I’m angry at myself for not addressing the question of my education before she opened her mail. The truth is, I dawdled on purpose because…until I ask, she cannot say no. If I ask at the wrong time or in the wrong way, I might lose any chance of making my case. Tonight at supper will not be a good time to try again. Grandmother enjoyed her criticism of my Roosevelt relatives far too much to be in the mood to change her mind about anything.

  I blame Alice, who will apparently be moving into Aunt Bye’s house for the indeterminate future. I imagine her sitting in my favorite yellow chair, taking a needle to the fabric patches I cut, and, a few months from now, wrapping the finished quilt around the baby I want to cuddle. Why couldn’t Alice behave and stay in her own home, where she has a half sister and four half brothers of her own, the youngest still a baby himself?

  I don’t even have Gracie, now that Grandmother has sent him away to school.

  It’s not that my aunt won’t want me visiting while she has Alice to keep her company. Aunt Bye loves a full house and would have hosted all my Roosevelt cousins last Christmas if she hadn’t been ill at the time. It’s that Alice won’t welcome me there. She’ll never say it directly, but a thousand little looks and gestures will make it obvious what she thinks of my outdated clothes, my old-fashioned manners, and every awkward word that comes from my mouth.

  The haven I enjoy at my aunt’s house, the one place where I’m never treated like an orphan and a burden, will become Alice Roosevelt’s domain.

  In the kitchen, I hand the tea tray over to Rosie, who assures me that she will slice chicken for our supper before she takes her evening off. Then, as the clock in the parlor chimes the quarter hour, I climb the front stairs to sit on the second-floor landing and wait for Uncle Valentine. It doesn’t matter to him, but it makes me sad to think of him without anyone to mark his presence.

  A minute later, the temperature drops, as if someone has opened a giant icebox. The ghost of my uncle, Valentine Hall III, appears at the bottom of the staircase and mounts the first step.

  He looks frayed around the edges, like one of our tea towels. I can no longer read the label on the bottle of whiskey, and the shotgun over his shoulder is little more than a shadow. When he reaches the landing, I tilt my head to look up at him, wondering if he’ll speak to me. Because Uncle Valentine died before I was born and his ghost is an Unaware, oblivious to his own death or anything since, he doesn’t know who I am. Sometimes he says, “Hello, Annie,” addressing me by my mother’s name.

  “Hello, Uncle Val,” I whisper. “What are your thoughts on the education of girls?”

  The ghost walks past me without acknowledging my presence or my words. He’s fading. Soon there will be nothing left of him but a ball of light making this trek upstairs, where Uncle Valentine planned, on his last day of life, to shoot pigeons from the attic window. After that, he’ll disappear completely.

  I drop my head back against the wall. In Alice’s shadow, I feel the same way.

  2

  ALICE IN DISGRACE

  ALICE Roosevelt sits in her aunt’s front parlor on a recently reupholstered love seat. Her white shirtwaist is tailored; her mauve skirt, smartly pleated. Beside her rests her new hat—wide-brimmed, made of indigo felt to match the color of her winter coat, and trimmed with ostrich feathers because she likes to stand out in a crowd.

  “Darling Alice,” Aunt Bye says, sitting opposite on a lemon-colored chair. “I’m so happy to have you back. I think of this as your second home.”

  As far as Alice is concerned, this is her first home, and Aunt Bye, her first mother. But to Alice’s dismay, the parlor, with its fresh wallpaper, new furniture, and electric lighting, is almost unrecognizable.

  At least Aunt Bye, the woman who raised Alice for three years after her mother died, is the same as ever. Dark hair tucked into a bun, she lists slightly to the side, her body turned to favor the ear that wasn’t deafened by childhood illness. She’s quite a bit plumper than the last time Alice saw her, but other than that, pregnancy seems to suit her better than Alice’s stepmother, who suffered greatly through all of hers.

  “I suppose Mother Edith has told you terrible things about me,” Alice says.

  “Not terrible.” Aunt Bye purses her lips. “But you can’t deny you took advantage of her infirmity.”

  “I helped mind the children when she was confined to bed!”

  “By encouraging them to sled down the staircase on dinner trays?”

  “No one was seriously injured, and Teddy had a spare set of eyeglasses.”

  This statement is met by a snort. Alice’s eyes wander over to the snorter—her new uncle, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander William Cowles, who, returning from carrying her suitcase upstairs, takes a stance behind his wife’s chair. He winks, and Alice relaxes a bit, thinking she has an ally.

  “Alice,” Aunt Bye continues, “there will be rules and regulations here, and unlike the ones you ignored in Washington, I expect you to follow them. Do you understand?”

  Alice snaps her attention back to her aunt and nods vigorously.

  “You won’t be tearing around as if every day is a great party. Things need to be put back in their places. No hats left on the sofa to be sat upon.”

  Alice moves her ostrich-feathered hat to her lap.

  “And I hope you will spend time with your cousin Eleanor. She has always had a calming influence on you.”

  Alice smiles blandly and doesn’t commit one way or the other to time spent with “calming” Eleanor.

  Folding her hands over her rounded stomach, Aunt Bye leans forward. “Now, I’ve said I won’t allow you to treat every day like a party, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun and even a great party now and then. Helen and Franklin have a winter break from school, so I’ve invited them to visit next week. My sister says she’ll send Corinne as well.”

  “That’s wonderful news!” Alice exclaims. Her twelve-year-old cousin, Corinne Robinson, visits Alice’s family in Washington fairly often, but Alice hasn’t seen her older, more distant cousins since the Roosevelt gathering at her father’s home on Long Island last summer.

  “Rules and regulations first.” Aunt Bye raises her index finger. “I would hate to cancel these visits because of misbehavior.”

  “You won’t have to,” Alice promises.

  Uncle Will clears his throat. “Let me escort you upstairs, Alice. I hope you like the way we’ve redecorated your room.”

  She would have preferred her room not be redecorated, but she follow
s Uncle Will upstairs without comment. He reaches into Alice’s old room and flips the switch that powers the new electric ceiling light. An incandescent filament flares and settles into a golden glow. The room looks smaller, lit from above. The wallpaper is new—rose and gray and patterned with peonies. She dislikes it instantly. But the furniture is the same, and her suitcase rests on top of her familiar bed.

  “Do you like the change?” her uncle asks.

  “Why, yes,” she lies, setting her hat on the dresser.

  “I’ll leave you to unpack. The bathroom down the hall has new plumbing, although it takes a while to get the hot water going. Your aunt and I will be in the parlor if you care to join us later.” Uncle Will withdraws from the room, pulling the door halfway closed.

  Giving her privacy, but not shutting her in. Surprisingly thoughtful, this new uncle.

  Alice sighs, sinking onto the bed next to her suitcase. Home again. And yet, not quite the home she craves. With Aunt Bye’s new husband in the house and a baby on the way, Alice might once again end up as an extra appendage on a family that is sufficient without her.

  A wriggling movement against her leg makes her jump. Oh! She almost forgot. Alice slips a hand into her skirt pocket and pulls out a twelve-inch length of slender green snake. “There you are,” she coos. “How did you like your very first train ride?”

  A red tongue flicks in and out.

  “We’ll have to be very good if we don’t want to get sent back to Mother Edith. You can help me with that, can’t you?” Alice kisses the little snake and snaps open her suitcase with her free hand. Gently she lays Emily Spinach on top of her divided bicycling skirt.