Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Loving Eleanor

  A Novel

  by Susan Wittig Albert

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Wittig Albert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. For information, write to

  Persevero Press, PO Box 1616, Bertram TX 78605.

  www.PerseveroPress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or, in the case of historical persons, are used fictitiously.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Albert, Susan Wittig.

  Loving Eleanor / Susan Wittig Albert.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-9892035-6-2

  ISBN 978-0-9892035-5-5

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962 —Correspondence. 2. Hickok, Lorena A. —Correspondence. 3. Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962 —Friends and associates—Correspondence. 4. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Correspondence. I. Title.

  E807.1.R48 A73 2015

  973.917092—dc23

  My dear, if you meet me may I forget there are other reporters present or must I behave? I shall want to hug you to death. I can hardly wait! A world of love to you and good night and God bless you, light of my life.

  —Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok, March 9, 1933

  I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.

  —Lorena Hickok to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 5, 1933

  PROLOGUE

  Goodbye

  Hyde Park, 1962

  Hick didn’t go to the funeral.

  Oh, she was invited, and for that she had Sisty to thank—Eleanor’s granddaughter, the one Hick had known and loved since she was a little girl. During her grandmother’s last illness, it was Sisty who kept in touch. And who took down Eleanor’s last letter because her grandmother couldn’t manage the pen: Dearest Hick, I’m still horribly weak, but as soon as I’m able to hold the phone I’ll call you.

  But Eleanor couldn’t manage the phone, either. The call came instead from Western Union, from a bored young man who read the telegram to Hick while she closed her eyes and tried to shut out his voice:

  THE FAMILY OF MRS. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT INVITES YOU TO THE SERVICE TO BE HELD AT ST. JAMES EPISCOPAL CHURCH, AND TO THE INTERMENT SERVICE IN THE ROSE GARDEN AT SPRINGWOOD.

  No, of course, she didn’t go. Hick had reconciled herself to the waning of passion many years before, had even imagined herself in love with someone else for a while. But her love for Madam (the private name she once had for Eleanor, sometimes said with a soft, sly mockery: Mod-dom!) was a warm river that had begun flowing out of the broken rock of her heart thirty years before, and she couldn’t trust herself not to sob and gulp like a drowning fish while the rest of the mourners sat mannequin-like, hands folded, dry-eyed. She was resentful, too, not on her own but on Eleanor’s account, knowing she wouldn’t have the quiet service she wanted, small and simple, just a plain pine coffin covered with a blanket of pine boughs. Private, only her family and nearest friends.

  “No hullabaloo, Hick,” Eleanor had said once. “No pomp, no circumstance, no foolishness. Tell them to keep it private.”

  But Eleanor had long ago ceased to be a private person, had ceased to be Madam or Mrs. R or even Mrs. Roosevelt. She had become a personage, an icon, an image. She had become ER, the First Lady of the World, and her death, like her life, belonged not to herself nor to the few who loved her nor to the one who loved her longest and best. She belonged to everyone, to those who admired and respected her, even to those who ridiculed her. That’s why the television networks and cameras were there. Why, in defiance of the cold November rain, the mourners stood three- and four-deep behind the ropes.

  All those invited had come, Hick knew, all but herself and Cousin Alice, Eleanor’s longtime antagonist, the Other Washington Monument. Two hundred and fifty political illuminati, as many as the St. James pews could hold. The president and First Lady, JFK studiously somber-faced, Jackie a porcelain doll in a black suit and black mink pillbox. Harry and Bess and Ike. (Mamie had not come, for she had once heard that Eleanor had called her an alcoholic and she had born a grudge ever since.) Ike was awkward and uneasy, a furtive Republican amid a hive of Democrats, probably remembering that he had fired ER ten years before. Adlai was there, bald as an onion, and Lyndon and Lady Bird. And David Gurewitsch, whom Eleanor had loved in her last years, and Joe Lash, whom she had loved foolishly, foolishly, twenty years before. Later, in the Rose Garden at Springwood, they stood at attention like soldiers respecting a truce, while Eleanor was laid to rest beside her husband. She wasn’t the only woman to share FDR’s life or his death or even his bed, but she would be the only woman to share his grave.

  But person or personage, Eleanor remained the First Lady of Hick’s heart, and while the mourners were displaying their public grief, she pulled a box of letters out of her closet at the Old Rectory, only a few blocks from the church. They were Eleanor’s letters from their first year, their happiest, richest year, and she sat on her bed and read them, and wept. An old, sick, crippled, half-blind woman, weeping for what had once been, for what she and Madam had had together, for what was gone.

  Or was it? For in the end, Hick reminded herself, wiping her eyes, there is love, love in all its many disguises, love embracing loss and death and imperfection, love changing, mutable, many-formed, but never diminishing—love, simply, and simply enduring.

  And then, after the bigwigs had been bundled into their automobiles and driven away, Rev. Kidd, bless his heart, had phoned from St. James with an offer to take her to the gravesite. Hick said a grateful “thank you” and went out to the garden to gather a damp bouquet of white chrysanthemums and lamb’s ear and the last goldenrod, tying them with a pink silk ribbon from the nightgown Eleanor had bought for her the summer they were in San Francisco. And then she stood stock still, seized by the memory of that time, held in its terrible, sweet grip.

  Late that evening, Rev. Kidd picked her up. The guard at the Rose Garden let him park close. But it was still drizzling and as dark as the inside of a cow, and neither of them had had the good sense to bring a flashlight. They felt their way along the tall hemlock hedge for fifty yards or so, Hick with her cane, hanging onto the stalwart reverend’s arm. But her arthritis wouldn’t let her go the distance, damn it, so she gave it up and he went on alone, with her flowers. She waited on the outskirts of the garden as she had waited so often on the outskirts of Eleanor’s life, thinking of the two of them as if they were characters in a novel, remembering them as they had been at the beginning of their story, when they had imagined they could go on loving each other forever. And so they had, each in her own way, although not as each had imagined. But wasn’t that the way of love? Never going the way you would think or hope, setting its own pace, its own direction, taking you and your heart with it as far as you could go. And then farther, and then farther still, past all hope, all fear, all comprehension.

  When the reverend returned, he said there was a massive eight-foot bank of flowers at the gravesite, splendid tributes from all over the world, from the governments of all the lands Eleanor had visited. But he had placed her bouquet all by itself on a corner of the white marble slab. Mrs. Roosevelt would know who left it, he said, patting her shoulder with what was meant as a comforting gesture. And that was it, her own private ceremony. No hullabaloo, no pomp. Just
goodbye, dear heart.

  Goodbye.

  ER was gone, but Eleanor’s letters remained, and as the new year opened, Hick understood, with a kind of growing desperation, that she had to decide what to do with them.

  They filled more than a dozen cardboard boxes stacked in the bedroom closet at the Old Rectory and under the bed. Hick hadn’t taken the time to catalog or even count them, but she reckoned offhand that there might be three thousand or more, spanning thirty years. Loving letters that told their story, its sweetness, its sadness, its promise, its pain. Two-thirds were Eleanor’s, she guessed, another third hers, some creased by many readings, others still in their envelopes, read once or twice then tucked away.

  Hick often thought of the collective gasp that would flutter like a panicked bird around the country if the letters from the First Lady of the World got into the papers. Especially satisfying was the thought of the discomfiture of those patronizing Oyster Bay Roosevelts, Cousin Alice especially. And the embarrassment of the Roosevelt boys—James, Elliott, Franklin Jr., John—who never for one instant thought of their mother as a flesh-and-blood woman with her own needs and desires. It would give them an awful jolt, she thought with pleasure. And damn well serve them right for the thousand ways they’d disdained and disappointed their mother over the years.

  But Hick flinched at the thought of the headlines in the tabloids and the right-wing press. Former First Lady’s Secret Friendship! Eleanor’s Lesbian Love Affair! ER Bares All in Love Letters to First Friend. The press couldn’t get to Eleanor; she was safely enshrined in the Rose Garden with a guard at the gate. But she, Hick, was still alive, and a rabble of reporters would be camped on her doorstep from dawn to dark, milling across the lawn like ants at a picnic, hungry for the story, the secret story, the real story. Photographers, too, popping their damn flashbulbs in her face as she struggled with her cane and her packages and her keys, fumbling to open her door.

  And it wouldn’t stop there. Hick knew reporters—of course she did, she had been one of them, hadn’t she, one of the best? They were like a kennel of dogs, snarling, scratching for stories. She understood their tricks. When they couldn’t get the story from her, they’d make it up. Ethical journalism be damned, they would hint or suggest or fabricate, and what they came up with would be ugly, false, lacerating. So the letters stayed in the closet and under the bed and the Old Rectory’s bedroom door stayed closed. And locked. She wasn’t taking any chances.

  And then there was Joe. Joseph Lash, who had fallen into Eleanor’s orbit before the war. Diligent, persistent Joe, who for the last decade had been building his writing career upon ER’s friendship. At her urging, he had been asked to help edit the presidential letters. And now—

  And now, Joe was clamoring for the letters. He had gotten wind of them from ER’s son Elliott, who had heard of them from his sister Anna, who had known from the beginning what Hick and Eleanor had been to each other. Joe had telephoned again last night, reminding Hick that he “coveted” the letters for the “little memoir” he was currently writing, which (Hick was convinced) was chiefly designed to put him into the running to write ER’s official biography, which he hoped would earn him a Pulitzer. And perhaps he ought to have it—the Pulitzer, that is. Heaven knows, Joe had paid a price for the First Lady’s friendship. After he was drafted, the Army Intelligence spy hunters put him on their list and began reading Eleanor’s letters and following the two of them from one hotel room to another. And then he got orders for the Pacific front, courtesy of the White House (that’s what he thought, anyway). But if Joe got a Pulitzer, it would be Eleanor’s Pulitzer. Who in the world would remember Joseph P. Lash, if it hadn’t been for the First Lady’s friendship?

  But jealousy quite aside (well, of course, there was jealousy), Hick wasn’t going to hand the letters over to Joe, and that was all there was to it. She knew perfectly well that he would take them straight to Elliott and Franklin Jr. They would read them with revulsion and destroy them, just as (Hick knew in her bones, though she couldn’t prove it) they had bought and destroyed their mother’s letters to Earl Miller, once her bodyguard, always her adoring friend. If they got their hands on the letters to Hick, all traces of Eleanor’s passionate heart—revealed nowhere else on earth so fully, so intimately, over so many decades—would simply vanish. Joe and the Roosevelt boys could offer Hick all the money in the world, but it would still be no, no, no, never. The letters were all that was left of a lifetime of loving, to be preserved, cherished, defended. Joe Lash wasn’t going to get his hot little hands on them, to trade for favors from the Roosevelts. Oh, no. No. No. No.

  Thinking about all this, Hick almost wished she hadn’t kept them, dangerous as they were. In the beginning, she had saved them because she was meant to write the First Lady’s biography. As a reporter, a writer, an intimate friend, she had been Eleanor’s best, first choice, endorsed by FDR himself, who thought it was a de-lightful idea. To that end, Hick had suggested that the First Lady include in her daily letters a diary of her activities—people she saw, places she went, projects she worked on. Once ER was out of the White House and Hick settled down to the business of writing her biography, the letters would be an invaluable source of names and dates and doings.

  But Hick couldn’t write Madam’s biography—not because she didn’t know enough about her subject but because she knew too much about Eleanor, because she loved her too much. She was defeated by the same conundrum that had evicted her from her AP career: How can you write objectively about someone you adore? And on the other, sinister side: What secrets could she reveal, what secrets must she conceal?

  And there was another, even more baffling question: How could she tell Eleanor’s story without telling her own? Without laying claim to the love that had held the two of them together? The two stories were knitted together as tightly as if they had come straight off Eleanor’s needles. It was impossible to tell the one without telling the other. Or, even more impossible, to tell the public story without telling the very private.

  Eleanor had dealt with that problem by writing a three-volume autobiography that was, beginning to end, a masterful evasion of one important truth after another, all clothed in the most seeming frankness. She had mentioned Hick’s name only casually, tacit proof to Hick that their intimate story, their true story, could not be published—at least, not in their lifetimes. It would rock the world. Hick herself had dealt with it a few years before by writing The Story of Eleanor Roosevelt for young readers and then Eleanor Roosevelt, Reluctant First Lady, published just last year. Both were personal enough to satisfy youngsters and to answer a few adults’ questions about their friendship—although, of course, not revealing anything that would shock anybody.

  But still, there were the letters. They would shock, and time was growing short. Hick had lived with diabetes for nearly forty years, suffering through bouts of near-blindness and poor circulation and other attendant ills, escalating from chronic to acute. She needed to do something about the letters before she was carted off to the morgue and somebody rummaged through her things and discovered the boxes and decided that the Roosevelts ought to have them. So just now, finally, in the past few weeks, she was allowing herself to think about what Ray Corry had suggested.

  A stocky, soft-voiced, spectacled man in his late forties, Ray Corry was the curator of the FDR Museum, which was a part of the library, just two miles up the Albany Post Road. He was smitten by Mrs. R and had taken her his many questions about FDR’s numerous collections—books, naval drawings, ship models. For her part, Eleanor had grown fond of Ray. At her suggestion, he had knocked one afternoon at the front door of the Old Rectory and introduced himself to Hick.

  “Mrs. R says you’ve been a very dear friend since before she went to the White House,” he’d said, holding his hat in both hands. “I’m sure you must be a rich source of information about the family. I would very much like to get to know you.”

  It was pure flattery, but Hick didn’t mind. Talking
about Mrs. R was a selfish indulgence for her, and, of course, it was true that she did know a great deal. She had been deeply involved in Eleanor’s life for so many years and knew so much about every part of it, the personal and the political, the minor and the momentous—far more than the boys and even Anna might imagine. Had Eleanor mentioned the letters to Mr. Corry? Hick thought perhaps she had, at least casually. But since he hadn’t brought them up, the question went unanswered.

  Ray telephoned in the evenings so they could talk, uninterrupted. He ran errands for her, buying groceries and other necessities. He stopped after work to take her shopping, something that was easier said than done, with her arthritis and her cane. He often stayed to supper, too—Hick still liked to cook, when she had a guest who appreciated good food. He was a bachelor and not very well (a “bum ticker and getting bummer,” he’d said ruefully), and Hick knew that he was lonely.

  Well, that made two of them, didn’t it? She appreciated his many kindnesses—particularly the sly, amusing tidbits of gossip he brought about the goings-on behind the scenes at the presidential library. Hick knew its staff—especially Daisy Suckley, FDR’s cousin, and the director, Elizabeth Drewry—quite well. She had spent a great many hours doing research there on Ladies of Courage (a book she had written and to which Eleanor had added her name), as well as her own books, biographies of FDR and ER, for young readers. While Eleanor was alive, Hick had never discussed the letters with anyone at the library. But now she was gone and Hick was beginning to feel, rather urgently, that she had to make some sort of plan, especially with Joe Lash baying like a greedy bloodhound on her heels and the Roosevelt boys behind him.

  That was why, one night when she and Ray Corry were talking on the phone, she had casually mentioned that she had a few of Eleanor’s letters and was wondering what she should do with them. “Joe Lash says he’d like to have them,” she added, “but I don’t really think…” She had let her voice trail off, and Ray—they were on a first-name basis by that time—had snapped like a trout at the lure.