by Amy Bloom
We love the attentiveness of powerful people, because it’s such a pleasant, gratifying surprise, but Eleanor was not a grand light shining briefly on the lucky little people. She reached for the soul of everyone who spoke to her, every day. She bowed her head toward yours, as if there was nothing but the time and necessary space for two people to briefly love each other.
Mostly we met farmers and elderly Republicans, people who didn’t look at newspapers, if they could help it, except for local news and sports and feed prices. Mostly, we were, as we liked to pretend, Jane and Janet Doe, walking arm in arm, talking mouth to ear. Middle-aged women who liked each other: sisters, cousins, best friends. We kept ourselves to ourselves, except for Eleanor’s strong wish to be pleasant to everyone, and mostly people thought of us whatever people think of middle-aged ladies and that’s all.
We took a break from the goats and quilts and Eleanor drove us to Quebec, to Château Frontenac, telling me, as we got to the outskirts, Close your eyes. I think when I am an old lady, when people have to shout to get my attention, you could murmur, Château Frontenac, and I will smile like a cat paw-deep in cream. Eleanor did for us what she never liked doing for herself and she did it on a grand scale, with gilt edges. We sat, I should say, we cavorted, in the French Canadian lap of luxury. We got massages together with two strong ladies coming into our suite with two massage tables, picnic baskets of warm towels, and rose and orange oils. I pretended that I’d somehow wandered in from the hideaway bed in the living room. They set up the tables and indicated we should strip and wrap ourselves in sheets. We did and we tottered over to the tables, to be rubbed and patted by these two frowning women who couldn’t understand our language. Our faces were only two feet apart, our bodies glistening with rose-scented oil.
I said, “This is too much.”
“I know,” Eleanor said. “We have manicures after lunch.”
* * *
—
I said to Eleanor, This is our trip to Erewhon and she agreed. Our particular Nowhere, she said, will be found at the northern tip of Maine. Grab your sweater. We drove to a cabin overlooking the ocean at dusk and unpacked before dark. We shared a brandy and the last of the pretzels and stood in our nightclothes on the little porch, the big quilt around us. The mottled, bright white moon pulled the tide like a silver rug, onto the dark pebbled beach. It should have been a starry sky, but it was deep indigo, like the sea below, with nothing in it but the one North Star.
“I’m making a wish,” I said.
We ate potato pancakes for breakfast. (Every café and diner featured potatoes. We had buttery and cheesy grated potatoes mounded in potato skins, which were delicious, and chocolate cake, enhanced with mashed potatoes, which was not.) We took walks and designed our dream cottage. Sometimes it was another version of her beloved Hyde Park cottage, Val-Kill, a rabbit warren of rooms with plenty of space, a library, and a communal dining room. Sometimes, it was a cottage on Long Island, where I now live, rose-covered and overlooking the Sound. One night, I made shadow puppets of everything we would see from our dream porch. I did a fox, a heron, a squirrel, and two people kissing, which is all the shadow puppetry I knew. We had tuna fish sandwiches on the rough, windy beach and furnished our dream apartment in Greenwich Village. We imagined trips to places neither of us had been. How about Gaspé Bay, I said. We’ve never been here before. Baie de Gaspé, she said. All right, I said. Let’s add Upper Gaspé, Land’s End, Chaleur Bay. Don’t forget Armonk and Massapequa. All the nightspots.
I imagined Eleanor telling her children about us. If they’d been actual children, I would have liked my chances better. I’d have told them myself, if they were actual children. Children liked me. I was quick with the cookies, and slow to scold. I could bait a hook, build a house of cards, and make strawberry shortcake. I winked behind their mothers’ backs when they had their hands on the last biscuit and I liked the feel of a small child on my shoulder. I was a natural but the Roosevelt boys were spoiled and empty and endlessly wanting and Anna was pretty and shrewd. She could’ve been a cooch dancer at L’Étoile du Nord, if she’d had a stronger work ethic. I felt for them all what the hardworking poor feel for the rich (not, by and large, admiration and affection) and they felt for me what children feel about that person who seems to have your mother’s heart. I might be able to get Anna on my side but the thought of telling Eleanor’s sons anything shut me up.
Eleanor pointed out that we did not have to make an announcement.
“It’s not as if we’re calling them into the Oval Office. There’s no need for fuss,” she said.
She sat the way she did when she lectured her children, spine straight, hands clasped. I threw a pillow at her and she ducked.
“It’s the end of his term—”
“He’ll have two terms,” I said.
She frowned.
“Pretend I never spoke,” I said. “Carry on.”
“We say, ‘My dears, now that Father is no longer president, he and I have the opportunity to continue in public service, and continue our marriage. But we will also go our separate ways.’ ”
“Which is nothing new,” I said.
“That’s correct. I say that Franklin and I will always be a team, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Boola boola.”
“That’s Yale,” she said, shaking her head.
“And then Junior collapses likes he’s been shot, Jimmy gets drunk, John asks for an increase in his allowance, and Elliott starts screaming about ‘Who will look after poor Pater?’ ”
“Jimmy is not that big a drinker. I say to them, ‘Your father and I love each other and our marriage will continue.’ I say, ‘You may visit him at Campobello and you may visit us…’ ”
She wiped her eyes.
“This is a silly game,” she said. “When the time comes, you and I will move into Val-Kill, that’s all.”
“That’s plenty,” I said.
* * *
—
We think we’ll remember it all and we remember hardly anything. Even when the car is only doing forty, it’s still going too fast. The trees are a green and gray blur, the restaurant where we thought we’d die laughing over the misspelled menu has come and gone. Neon-green streaks and bolts of flamingo pink blow up the sky on a winter night in Maine and we think—oh, we will never forget these northern lights, but we do. What we remember is only the curling picture in the left-hand drawer (Presque Isle, Maine, 1934) or a gorgeous half-page photo in an old travel magazine, but what we saw when we held hands, lifting our chins to the sky as if we could leap into the jagged, jeweled brilliance above us, was seen for ten seconds only, and never again.
* * *
—
She loved the theater. She was mad for Cole Porter and there wasn’t a song of his she didn’t know. She nodded to everyone. She clasped every hand. The house lights dimmed and Eleanor kissed me, on the palm, and she whispered, in tune, You’re the top. You’re Mahatma Gandhi. You’re the top. You’re Napoleon brandy. I thought, I will remember this. And I do.
* * *
—
We were in the Rose Garden and ducked behind a tower of pale pink roses to kiss. We walked upstairs and past the Secret Service man and Eleanor said, Good evening, Wyatt. I’m in need of repair, and he said, very warmly, Yes, ma’am. She said, This party will run another two hours, don’t you think, and he looked at his watch. That’s what we were told, ma’am. We racewalked into her bedroom, as if we were hell-bent on finding safety pins. Her sequined jacket slid to the floor and with it her three-story white orchid corsage, which would have to reappear in an hour or so. She said, Do not touch that thing. She pulled me onto the bed. I didn’t think, I have to remember this. But I have.
PART ONE
Luck Is Not Chance
In 1932, my father was dead and my star was rising. I could write. People looked for my name. I’d gotten a big bounce from The Milwaukee Sentinel to New York because I was the only woman t
o cover Big Ten football playoffs and the excellent Smith scandal (idiot corset salesman and buxom mistress cut off the head of her husband and hide it in the bathtub). I had hit it hard in Brooklyn, at the Daily Mirror and moved on to the Associated Press. I had a small apartment, with a palm-sized window and a bathroom down the hall. I owned one frying pan, two plates, and two coffee mugs. My friends were newspapermen, my girlfriends were often copy editors (very sharp, very sweet), and I was what they called a newspaperwoman. They ran my bylines and everyone knew I didn’t do weddings. It was good.
The men bought me drinks and every night I bought a round before I went home. They talked about their wives and mistresses in front of me and I didn’t blink. I didn’t wrinkle my nose. I sympathized. When the wives were on the rag, when the girlfriend had a bun in the oven, when the door was locked, I said it was a damn shame. I sipped my Scotch. I kept my chin up and my eyes friendly. I didn’t tell the guys that I was no different, that I’d sooner bed a dozen wrong girls and wake up in a dozen hot-sheet joints, minus my wallet and plus a few scratches, than be tied down to one woman and a couple of brats. I pretended that even though I hadn’t found the right man, I did want one. I pretended that I envied their wives and that took effort.
(I never envied a wife or a husband, until I met Eleanor. Then, I would have traded everything I ever had, every limo ride, every skinny-dip, every byline and carefree stroll, for what Franklin had, polio and all.)
* * *
—
It was a perfect night to be in a Brooklyn bar, waiting for the snow to fall. I signaled for another beer and a young man, from the city desk, stout and red-faced like me, brought it over and said, “Hick, is your dad Addison Hickok? I remember you were from South Dakota.”
I said, Yes, that was me, and that was my old man.
I’m sorry, he said, I hear he killed himself. It came over the wire, there was a rash of Dust Bowl suicides. Traveling salesman, right? I’m sorry.
Don’t you worry, I said. I couldn’t say, Drinks all around, because my father’s dead and I am not just glad, I am goddamn glad. No man drinks to a woman saying that. I left two bits under my glass and made my way home, to find a letter from Miz Min, my father’s second wife, asking if I might send money for the burial expenses. I lit the envelope with my cigarette and I went to New Jersey.
* * *
—
I was the Associated Press’s top dog for the Lindbergh kidnapping. We were all racing to tell the story and the Daily News got there first, with an enormous, grainy photo of the baby and the headline “Lindy’s Baby Kidnaped,” which was clear and short, and the Times’s “Lindbergh Baby Kidnapped from Home of Parents on Farm Near Princeton” was more exact but not first. They avoided vulgar familiarity but really, who cares whether the baby’s taken from a farm or a ranch or a clover patch.
(THE DAILY NEWS, MARCH 2, 1932.)
The most famous baby in the world, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., was kidnaped from his crib on the first floor of the Lone Eagle’s home at Hopewell, N.J., between 7:30 and 10:30 o’clock last night.
The flier’s wife, the former Anne Morrow, discovered at 10:30 that her 20-months-old son was missing. Her mother, Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow, who disclosed that Mrs. Lindbergh is expecting another baby, feared that the shock might have serious effect.
Anne immediately called Col. Lindbergh, who was in the living room. The famous flier, thinking that the nurse might have removed the child, paused to investigate before telephoning the State police.
As rapidly as radio, telephone and telegraph could spread the alarm countrywide, the biggest police hunt in history was under way.
Seventy State Troopers from Morristown, Trenton, Somerville and Lambertsville hopped on motorcycles and in automobiles and began to race over the countryside for a radius of a hundred miles around Princeton, which is ten miles west of the Lindbergh residence.
At midnight the teletype alarm had been spread over five States. Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney, aroused from sleep, personally took control of the New York City search, which included scrutiny of all ferries, tunnels and bridges. Police in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut were also spreading a gigantic net.
CHILD CARRIED THROUGH WINDOW
The Lindbergh baby had been dressed in his sleeping gown by his nurse, and was asleep in the nursery on the first floor of the country mansion when he was kidnaped. The child was taken out of a window, through which the kidnaper or gang of kidnapers apparently entered the home.
A note, contents not disclosed, was found on the second floor of the home. Whether this was a demand for ransom could not be learned - although that was the assumption in some quarters.
This went on for a few more columns, bringing in the neighbor with the green car (who had nothing to do with anything) and recounting the loving, playful disagreement the Lindberghs apparently had over what to name the baby in the first place, using sentiment (What shall we name the Little Eaglet?) to underscore the strong and irresistible likelihood of tragedy.
* * *
—
I was sliding through dirty New Jersey snow, looking for footprints, happy as a rose in sunshine. I got a byline every day. Every morning, I crawled out of my miserable motel bed and sang while I got dressed. I brought doughnuts and cigarettes and dirty jokes wherever I went and when reporters were getting shut out of Hopewell, New Jersey, I was not one of them. I sat over a typewriter in a freezing room, still wearing my coat and hat, and banged out story after story and chased clue after clue. It was as good a serial as you could find on the radio. Thirteen ransom notes and a host of screwy characters, including John Condon, a high school principal, who popped up out of nowhere to offer himself as an intermediary between Lindbergh and the kidnappers. John Condon seemed serious, modest, distraught and I think he was the best con man I ever saw. None of us ever figured out what his long game was. If poor Richard Hauptmann, the kidnapper, had been as clever as John Condon, he wouldn’t have got the chair. And if poor Richard Hauptmann hadn’t been German, the press wouldn’t have tagged him with the nickname “Bruno” and we wouldn’t have had to pretend that the two eyewitnesses against him were anything but blind and broke. I could write anything, take up any crazy clue (a scrap of blue fabric in Maryland, a mystery man in Rhode Island), as long as the root of the story was untouched: American hero and wife search for missing baby.
Every suspicion we had of corruption and desperation on the part of the cops and J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, we kept to ourselves. Lindbergh was untouchable. (Never mind his “America First” speeches, blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Never mind that famous, boyish grin flashing when he got the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle from Göring in Berlin in 1938, with Hitler’s best wishes. And most of all, never mind that just four months before the kidnapping, Lucky Lindy had taken his baby and hidden him in a linen closet while his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, searched the house weeping hysterically. Then he handed her the baby. What a card.)
I believed Lindbergh hired John Condon. I thought Lindbergh killed the baby by accident and built a cover-up with the bravado and precision he was famous for. And when the poor little baby was found, four miles from the house, head staved in and decomposing, poor German Richard Hauptmann didn’t have a chance.
I didn’t write the story I wanted to and everyone knew it. My boss said to me, Give it up. Go cover Eleanor Roosevelt for a change, her old man’s heading to the White House. I didn’t say no. Albany was a one-horse town and Eleanor Roosevelt might be dull and pleasant, which is what I’d heard, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t killed her own baby and sent an innocent man to fry for it.
* * *
—
She was dull and pleasant for the first five minutes. I sat right next to her in a faded velvet chair, in the old-fashioned drawing room of the Governor’s Mansion on Eagle Street, and looked at her cheap, sensible serge dress and flat shoes and thought, Who in the name of Christ has dressed you? I looked closely
, to make notes, and then I looked away to be polite. She poured tea and I did notice her beautiful hands and her very plain wedding band, a little loose on her finger. We chatted. We sipped. I made some remarks about Republicans and she laughed, and not politely.
She asked me about the Lindbergh case and I told her about what I’d seen and she shook her head over Lindbergh. I prefer Amelia Earhart, she said. You know, she was a social worker, before she was a pilot. That’s not all she was, I thought, but I ate a cookie.
We talked about the great state of New York and the needs of its people and then it was time for dinner and we had a sherry-spiked mushroom soup I can still taste. We ate and talked until late. She told me that her husband believed that the role of government was to help people. I nodded. All people, she said. She told me about Louis Howe, Governor Roosevelt’s campaign manager, whom she had come to admire. I didn’t at first, she said. She said some people thought he was a Machiavelli. She said he was coarse and direct and deeply, deeply political. But Louis Howe is also, she said, the kindest, most loyal, most decent person I know. When my husband got polio—she put her hand over her mouth. Please don’t write that, she said. That is not the kind of thing I wish to discuss, in the newspapers. I made a big show of striking a line. We’ll go with Louis Howe and his fine qualities, I said. Now, give me something uplifting, so we go out on a positive note about the governor and his race for the White House.
