Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Upon hearing of the incident, Mayor Van Wyck demanded an inquiry. “It is outrageous that, in this day and age, our city guild members cannot properly diagnose a haunting, especially in the home of a distinguished citizen such as Mrs. Cowles, whose family, the Roosevelts, have served New York for decades.” When asked how this investigation should proceed now that the house is gutted and the haunting nullified, Mayor Van Wyck had no response.

  GUILD DEFENDS ITSELF

  Mr. Hampton Grier, senior diagnostician for the Manhattan Ghost Diagnostics Guild, denies vehemently that the haunting in Mrs. Cowles’s house was misdiagnosed.

  “I oversaw that case myself,” he said in a public statement. “I am certain that the ghost was a Friendly and that any electrical fire is the result of shoddy workmanship, not malevolent supernatural agency.”

  Mrs. Cowles was taken to the hospital, where she remains. Other members of the household were treated for smoke inhalation and minor injuries before being released. Mrs. Cowles’s husband, Lieutenant Commander William Cowles, is currently serving in the United States Navy in Cuba.

  26

  ELEANOR THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  EVERYONE was relieved when doctors at Bellevue Hospital determined that Aunt Bye wasn’t in labor. And she hadn’t been poisoned. Or, at least, she’d taken too little to do her harm. They gave her fluids, and the pains subsided quickly. Because of her “advanced maternal age,” however, they decide to keep her for a few days of observation.

  “Advanced maternal age,” Aunt Bye grumbles when I visit her two days after the fire. “I’m forty-three, not a white-haired granny. Oh, Eleanor, I am so sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?” I asked.

  “We should have abandoned that house after the eruption. That’s what Will wanted to do. I was stubborn, putting a house ahead of everyone’s safety.”

  “But the ghost was supposed to be a Friendly, and there was no way of knowing at first that it wasn’t.”

  Aunt Bye presses her lips together and shakes her head. “The moment I started hearing it whisper to me, I should have known. Looking back, what happened seems like a sort of madness. I can’t even remember why I was convinced the baby’s safety depended on my staying there. I wish I could go back in time and slap some sense into myself!”

  I pat her hand. “Vengefuls attack. That’s what makes them Vengefuls. This one just did it differently than most.”

  Instead of threatening us physically, it attacked us emotionally. There were those cups of tea and the sugar, but we’ll never know if there was poison in them. What we do know is that the ghost preyed on our insecurities. It made me overhear a conversation that I am positive never happened. Alice never told me what it said to her, but I can guess what the subject matter was. Something made Helen desperate to host that party, and something prompted guests to fight among themselves. I bet the others were affected too, although I haven’t asked them.

  I wouldn’t want to tell them what it did to me.

  “Where will you go when the hospital releases you?” I ask. “You’re welcome at Grandmother Hall’s house.”

  Aunt Bye laughs outright at that, and I smile, happy to have my aunt back to her normal self. “It’s kind of you to offer! No, I’ll be going to Theodore’s house on Oyster Bay and taking Alice and Teddy with me. Edith and the other children will meet me there.” She hesitates before going on. “Theodore has resigned his post with the navy to join the U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.”

  “He’s going to war.”

  “If it comes to that.”

  I only have to skim the newspaper headlines to know it’s coming to that. My heart breaks for Alice.

  “Eleanor,” my aunt says. “I want to talk to you about something. It’s been on my mind for some time, but I wasn’t sure…not until these past weeks when you’ve grown so strong. You’ve been a rock for us to lean on during this difficult time.”

  My cheeks burn. No one has ever said anything like that about me. It’s what people say about Aunt Bye and Uncle Theodore. My instinct is to deny it, to point out every mistake I made. Such as not telling her about the meeting with Nellie Bly, and not making sure Alice was right behind us when I guided Franklin down the stairs.

  Then Aunt Bye begins to talk, and I’m riveted by what she has to say.

  By the time I leave the hospital room, she’s given me a lot to think about. I don’t hurry finding my way out to the street where the hired cab is waiting, in spite of Grandmother telling me to make my visit short. She begrudges every penny of this fare, but at the moment, I don’t care about her displeasure.

  There is money for me to attend the school in London.

  Not Grandmother’s money, and not Aunt Bye’s money either, which Grandmother would label charity. Money that belongs to me.

  After my grandmother Martha Roosevelt died, her children each received an inheritance. However, when Aunt Bye and Uncle Theodore were forced to put my father into a sanitarium because of his drinking, they took control of his share, and Uncle Theodore started trust funds for me and my brothers. It is that money that is currently paying for Gracie’s boarding school, even though Grandmother led me to believe that she was paying for it.

  “Your grandmother is your legal guardian, so Theodore and I have been hesitant to interfere,” Aunt Bye explained. “I believe it’s time for you to make up your own mind. Your grandmother is a lonely woman, but that doesn’t give her the right to steal your future.”

  I gaze out the window during the cab ride home. Ever since the ghost eruption, my life has felt like a surreal version of itself. It’s as if I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole or stepped through a mirror, like the heroine in Lewis Carroll’s books, and came out as a different person on the opposite side.

  I’m not going to ask Grandmother if I can go away to school.

  I’m going to tell her.

  Not today, though. She told me this morning that she was “exhausted” from having “all these people” in her house. She means Alice and Teddy. I’ll wait until they’re gone, perhaps a day or two extra for her to recover. Then I’ll break the news.

  When I arrive home, Grandmother calls out to me from the parlor. “It’s about time, Eleanor. You have a guest, and your absence has been holding him up, as well as requiring me to do your duty as hostess.”

  Poking my head into the parlor, I find Franklin sitting with my grandmother, a tray of tea and a couple of biscuits between them. “Oh, I am sorry!” I say to Franklin.

  His lips twitch in a smile because he knows what I’m really apologizing for. “I haven’t been waiting long.” He rises as I enter the room, gives me a cousinly peck on the cheek, and then—before I can cross to another chair—takes my hand and makes me sit beside him.

  “How is your head?” I ask.

  “Hard as ever,” he replies cheerfully. “I’m afraid I’ve come to say goodbye. I’m taking the train back to Hyde Park late this afternoon.”

  Since the fire, Franklin has been staying with a relative of his mother’s. Helen went home yesterday, as did Corinne. I was happy that Franklin lingered longer.

  “I wanted to stay until the end of the week, but Mother insists I come home,” he says.

  “As well she should,” Grandmother declares.

  Franklin looks down at his feet. “Considering the situation in Cuba, a summer gathering on Oyster Bay seems unlikely, so I probably won’t see you again until Christmas. I was wondering if I may—if you would mind if—I wrote to you?” Slowly, he raises his eyes back to mine.

  I’m about to say that of course he may write me and why wouldn’t he, when I see the flush in his cheeks. He’s not asking to write me as a cousin. Once again I feel like Alice. Alice in Wonderland, that is. Not Cousin Alice. “I would like that,” I say, the heat rising in my own face.

  Grandmother sips her tea, oblivious to the earthshaking ch
ange that has occurred.

  We talk a little longer, grinning foolishly the whole time, and he stands up to take his leave just as Alice and Teddy return with an avalanche of packages. They’ve been shopping to replace their things that burned up in the fire. Aunt Edith wired money, and Maisie was recruited to accompany them in the absence of Aunt Bye. There’s a great commotion in the foyer as Franklin takes his leave and Grandmother tuts at the wasteful expenditure when “all they really needed was one practical outfit each.”

  Alice and I escape with her packages, which promptly explode in a hurricane of color and fabric all over my room. “What are you doing?” I ask as Alice digs into the boxes and throws items over her shoulder like a dog digging in a garden.

  “Here they are!” Alice holds up a pair of rose-colored silk stockings. “And these.” The next pair is ivory and embroidered with colorful hummingbirds. “These are for you,” she says proudly, holding them out to me. “Throw out those black ones!”

  “I told you not to!”

  “When do I ever do what I’m told? You saved my life, Eleanor. That has to be worth two pairs of stockings!” Only Alice could act indignant while presenting a gift.

  Hesitantly, I accept them. They are beautiful, but…“Why are they so pretty if no one is supposed to see them?”

  “Well, you see them, silly. Besides, everyone will see them if you wear them with that skirt.” I blush, looking down at my midcalf hem, while Alice snaps her fingers and rummages in another bag. “That reminds me. I bought you a new skirt of the proper length. If your grandmother complains, tell her it was made for me but didn’t fit.”

  “I’m supposed to tell her the seamstress accidentally cut it six inches too long?”

  “Eleanor, coming back into that house for me was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if I could have done it. If you can’t stand up to your grandmother over a skirt, then heaven help you!”

  I can stand up to my grandmother. A gift is not charity, no matter what she says. Then Alice’s words sink in. “Are you saying you wouldn’t have come back for me?” From the floor, amid the boxes and the wrapping paper, my cousin looks up at me sheepishly. I burst out laughing. “I don’t believe that for a second!”

  Alice thinks it over. “All right,” she admits, “I would have come back for you. But I don’t believe I would’ve thought of bringing the wet towels or the rat poison. I would’ve charged upstairs with no plan at all, and we both would’ve been killed.”

  “That’s strange, because I was terrified to go back into the house. But when I did, I thought, What would Alice do? And then I knew exactly what to do and in what order.”

  Her lips spread into a wide grin, and at that moment, I would tell her my news about school (and maybe even confide to her about Franklin) except that Grandmother bellows up the stairs, “Al—ice! You have a visitor!” That’s followed by her grumbled comment, which is audible even from a floor below. “Since when did my house become Grand Central Depot?”

  27

  ALICE, HER FATHER, AND THE REST OF THE TRUTH

  HE’S waiting in Mrs. Hall’s gloomy parlor—pacing, which doesn’t surprise Alice. Her father never stays still for long.

  Alice switches on the gas lamps, even though it’s against Mrs. Hall’s rules. Her father turns to face her when the lights go up. Silent for a long moment, he finally says, “Come here so I can get a good look at you.”

  Alice’s father isn’t a tall man, but he is a huge, commanding presence, filling any space he occupies. Alice feels small as she approaches and stands before him.

  Clasping his hands behind his back, Father looks her up and down through his spectacles like a general inspecting the troops. “I was told you were not injured. Is that true?”

  Well, she coughed up soot for two days and is still black and blue from her tumble down the stairs. “Yes. That’s true.”

  He recommences pacing. “I blame myself. I should have summoned you back to Washington when I first heard about the eruption. Or I should have insisted my sister vacate the premises, especially after her husband was called away. As for those incompetent diagnosticians, they should be disbarred and held to account.”

  “I don’t think it was their fault,” Alice pipes up. “Mr. Tesla believes this was a rare type of Vengeful and very difficult to identify.”

  Father adjusts his spectacles. “Who is Mr. Tesla, pray tell?”

  “An inventor.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, Nellie Bly thinks highly of him.”

  Father clears his throat and makes a point of examining a portrait of Mrs. Hall’s deceased husband hanging on the parlor wall. “I was also told that you could have left the house safely with your cousins but instead delayed to retrieve a photograph.”

  Safely is a relative term, as she recalls Eleanor’s escape with the stunned and bleeding Franklin, but Alice nods. “It’s the only one I have.”

  Her father stares at the portrait for several more seconds. Then he turns, crosses to the sofa, and folds himself into a sitting position. Removing his spectacles, he lets them hang by their chain and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  He wasn’t interested in that painting, Alice realizes. He’s just having a hard time looking at her. Stubbornly, Alice goes to the chair opposite her father and plants herself in it, willing him to face her.

  “That is my fault,” he says finally.

  It takes Alice a second to track that assertion back to her last statement: It’s the only one I have.

  “What has Bye told you about her death?” he asks.

  Alice clenches her hands. “I want you to tell me what happened.”

  He raises his eyes to her at last. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

  “Why should I?” Alice feels a jolt of unexpected power over her father.

  He laughs shortly, without humor, and looks down at his hands. Alice waits him out, and after twenty or thirty seconds, he begins to speak.

  “I was in Albany when you were born, attending to business in the State Assembly. You weren’t supposed to come yet, and I thought I would be back in New York City in time. But a telegram arrived, informing me that you had been born early and urging me to return at once. Your mother was very sick with a disease no one knew she had.”

  Your mother. He has never said those two words to Alice before, unless it was in reference to Mother Edith. Alice shivers and hugs her elbows close to her sides.

  “I arrived barely in time.” His voice is heavy and almost expressionless, but one of his knees jiggles up and down. “We had no more than a few hours together before she…before the light went out of my life.”

  The finality of that statement smacks Alice in the face. For the first time she imagines what her stepmother must feel. To not be the light of her husband’s life.

  “Two days later…” Father pauses and busies himself cleaning his spectacles with a bit of cloth. “I did not sleep in those days, and then—that night—I went down like a felled tree. Slept for hours and woke suddenly for no reason I understood. I got up and walked into the nursery. And there she was.

  “I thought I was dreaming. Or that I had dreamed her death and this was reality. I stood in the doorway like a big, stupid ox, and she smiled at me. I thought everything would be right again.” His eyes are shiny, and he does not look at Alice.

  “Bye pushed past me into the nursery and yanked the crib away from…Because she was holding a pillow over your face. While she was smiling at me, she was trying to suffocate you. I didn’t even notice. I was looking only at her. The…ghost…knocked Bye to the floor, but Bye sheltered you. I stepped in finally, blocking her, trying to reason with…her…it…while Bye escaped with you. She yelled at me to get Mother, and I did, but she was already dead. Mother had been smothered before any of us awoke…. I carried her out,
but—”

  Alice has never seen her father at a loss for words like this, and she doesn’t like it. It’s as if the ground has changed places with the sky, or a mountain has crumbled into dust. She wants to take back her demand for him to tell her this story. But she’s frozen, unable to speak or interrupt, just the way he was frozen in the doorway of her nursery so many years ago.

  “I failed Mother, and I failed you,” Father says. “If it hadn’t been for Bye, we would have lost you. Every single day I remember how I failed my family in their moment of need. But I see that by fixating on my lapse of judgment then, I have continued to fail you in all the days since.”

  Now Alice is going to cry. She looks away, blinking furiously.

  Her father replaces his spectacles. “The house must come down,” he says to his shoes. Then he repeats the statement, as if he needs to hear it again. “The house must come down. Bye is right. She always is. It should have come down years ago. When I heard that you and Teddy went in there—”

  “It’s not her,” Alice says quietly.

  “What?”

  “It’s not her. If that’s why you kept the house…”

  “I know that ghost is not your mother,” he says gruffly.

  But he doesn’t deny that her ghost is why he kept the house.

  “I’ll hire the best extraction crew in the city to retrieve your mother’s belongings before the house is razed. Her jewelry. Some favorite belongings. I don’t ever want you to think that a photograph is worth risking your life for. There are others, I assure you.”

  Photographs Alice has never seen. Jewelry. Things he kept from her. Resentment and eagerness seesaw within her.

  “I am going to do better, Alice.” He says her name slowly and deliberately.

  Well, that’s a start.

  The mantel clock ticks loudly while they sit in silence. Alice is aware of how much it cost her father to tell that story. Although she wishes he had told her the truth long ago, she realizes that she might not have understood it without having been in that nursery herself.