by Amy Bloom
Every once in a while, there was that kind of laugh, between Anna and me.
* * *
—
“Oh, Hick. Did my mother tell you about…Warm Springs?”
Her mother had. Her mother had called me as soon as she got back from the Little White House in Warm Springs.
Eleanor said to me, “My daughter brought Lucy Mercer all the way to Georgia to be with Franklin. She says she didn’t but I know she did.”
She coughed, instead of crying. “I could never betray anyone, in that manner,” she said.
And it was true, she never could. I could. I had. Franklin could have and had done, probably five times before breakfast, most days of the week.
I told Eleanor that I knew that, and loved her for it. She’d already told me every awful minute she had in Warm Springs, getting Franklin’s body back to Washington, and every awful minute after that. Warm Springs was Franklin’s great comfort and his best self. He’d tried every reasonable and ridiculous treatment on earth and when he knew he’d never walk again, he tried bathing in the waters that flowed down from Georgia’s Pine Mountain and he moved his right leg a few inches. Being one of the world’s great con men didn’t keep him from falling for the idea of therapeutic waters. He bought that run-down resort in Bullochville, Georgia, for two hundred thousand dollars (Eleanor was horrified, she said, and she had no way to talk him out of it; they were his legs, she said, and he believed), put in a decent pool in 1926, and made it Warm Springs and if no one ever made a recovery from the Pine Mountain water, no one ever got worse from it. He gave hundreds of polio victims the chance to be treated, the chance to be seen as people (some of them were delivered by desperate families, lying on a blanket in the back of a pickup, and some came, bundled into a boxcar, with just the clothes they wore and a pair of crutches) and to get as much help as they could use. Eleanor said that she loved that he loved it, but it was his place, not hers, his cottage, and she was happy to have Missy sleeping across the hall from Franklin and sitting across from him at the dinner table, down there. He was every patient’s father, and their friend, and their tireless fundraiser. He was the crippled king and when he told me that he’d rather spend the evening eating canned ham and baked beans with two fourteen-year-old boys from Biloxi, showing him the wheelchair song-and-dance routine they’d worked up, instead of having cocktails with Claudette Colbert, I believed him. He was their Eleanor.
In the last week of his life, he was too tired to visit the patients. Lucy Mercer played hostess. Her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff painted his portrait. The Secret Service made their rounds and the crazy Roosevelt cousins jockeyed for position at the dinner table. Shoumatoff’s turpentine and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd’s thick perfume were still in the air when Eleanor got down there. She sat with Franklin’s body.
“I looked at him. I sat alone with him for a few minutes. I kissed him,” she said. “How could they think I wouldn’t know? Do they think I’m a fool? I had to ride in the car with Cousin Daisy, who is a fool. And Cousin Polly.”
“Cousin Polly is a crazy, purple-haired bitch,” I said. “She should have stayed home with all of her stupid dogs.”
“Oh no, she wasn’t going to miss a chance to cozy up to Franklin. And she got to tell me that not only was Lucy Mercer cuddling with Franklin in Warm Springs but it wasn’t the first time and ‘Oh dear, was she letting the cat out of the bag, but Anna knew all about the whole Lucy thing.’ ”
“That bitch,” I said. “Please stay away from her or at least, please don’t be so nice to her.”
“Lucy Mercer came to the White House,” she said. “And everyone knew. Except me. And you.”
This was technically true. I’d heard some things but people didn’t tell me what they didn’t want Eleanor to hear.
“Anna wants to apologize,” Eleanor said. “I know I have to let her and I know I have to forgive her but I don’t want to do it now. I don’t think I can control myself.”
“Leave it alone,” I said. “You got years.”
* * *
—
“Hick?” Anna says.
“Yeah, Warm Springs. That must have been tricky, when your mother arrived.”
Anna is not daunted by the likes of me. “It was innocent—”
“If it was innocent, you probably should have told your mother, and then she would have agreed that it was innocent and then on the day of her husband’s funeral, your mother wouldn’t have had to postpone her mourning, to sit with you while you explained how difficult it was for poor you, all that distressing back-and-forth, so your father could have private time, relaxing time, as you keep saying—with Lucy Mercer, that little buffet of relaxation. And not just in Warm Springs, with no one to watch except the staff and the cousins and forty patients with polio traipsing in and out of the Little White House, but even in the real White House and at your mother’s dinner table, in the family dining room, in front of people who’d been serving your mother, the First Lady, for twelve years.”
“I told my mother. I told her right away, I didn’t know about Warm Springs.”
“You’re full of shit,” I say, cheerfully. I do like a fight. “You chose your father over your mother and now you pretend you did it out of love. You did it to cement your position and to give your mother just one more shove to the side. Oh, you kids. You’d run your mother over to get a smile from the old man. And now, who you got? Your mother. And me.”
I can hear Anna breathing. If Eleanor were awake, she’d kill me.
“Your mother’ll forgive you,” I say. “You know she will. That’s the whole story, right? She’ll forgive you for betraying her. Jesus H. Christ, she’d forgive you for much worse than that, and your father would never, ever have forgiven you for not helping him romance the past, with a little help from Lucy Fucking Mercer.”
“Oh, Hick,” she says. “All right.”
* * *
—
Turning fifty seems to have flattened my moral high ground, like a great left hook. And I do like Anna. She has always been a fool for love, and I like that in a person.
When she was getting divorced and carrying on with John Boettiger, the four of us were a road show for romance, even if the two of them didn’t know it. She was in love, John was in love, I was in love, and Eleanor was in love with me. Eleanor was always happy to help other lovebirds. If Al Capone had broken into the White House with a hot dame, Eleanor would have hustled them up to the third floor to give them a little privacy. We were all four of us aglow in 1933. Anna bounced on her mother’s bed like a kid, crying and laughing about her great, amorous adventure and Eleanor and I pressed hands where she couldn’t see. We touched under tablecloths, beneath napkins, behind the newspaper. When the halls were quiet and the maids had gone, Eleanor unlocked her bedroom door for me and I ran in.
* * *
—
“It’ll be all right,” I say to Anna. “Your mother just needs a few days. Tell your brothers to take care of themselves. Maybe they can manage not to steal anything or lie to anyone or knock anybody up, just for a year or two. And you take care of yourself and the babies, and John. It’ll be fine.”
“Hick,” she says, and I think maybe she’ll apologize for the sneers and the looks and the careful arrangement of the seating at parties and the gifts that were calibrated to be exactly, or a little less than, what was given to housekeeping and my chest tightens. And I have to laugh at my inner hired girl, always looking for a soft moment with The Family. Anna is no more going to apologize to me than Lucy Mercer is going to apologize to Eleanor for sleeping with her husband and betraying their friendship.
Oh, these pretty, wifey women. I’d read Lucy’s condolence note. I took it out of Eleanor’s hand to read it and then burn it. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd sent love and deep sympathy on the occasion of Franklin’s death. She wrote that Eleanor was the most blessed and privileged of women and made it clear that she knew exactly what the blessings were. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd had failed to break u
p their marriage when they were all young and healthy and she failed again when she was a pretty widow. She showed up for dinner and tea and rides with Franklin in the countryside and still, she herself would wind up nothing more than a racy footnote and Eleanor would always be a front-page story in this country. I should know better than to let Anna rile me.
“Here’s one for the books. Your mother sent Lucy one of Shoumatoff’s little watercolors of your father. And she did it after she got that smug, cruel, unbearable little note. Your mother is extraordinary.”
“I know,” Anna says in her small bird voice.
“You don’t,” I say, and I hang up the phone.
* * *
—
I pull the blanket up over Eleanor. I make a pot of Chinese tea and pour two jiggers of gin into it. In Milwaukee, we used to call it Mother’s Ruin but Eleanor wouldn’t find that funny. All I care about is getting a little gin inside her so she can rest.
She grabs my wrist. Her hair’s half-down and she’s struggling to wake up, to get from the last grief to the next.
“Oh, darling, I keep dreaming about those circus people, when you were a girl. I’m glad you got away.”
“They weren’t keeping me,” I say. The prissy Eleanor is not my favorite. “And they weren’t bad.”
She says that she can’t bear to think of the bad times I’ve had.
I don’t say anything. I don’t say, the two worst days of my life so far have been when my father raped me and that day in the White House, ten years ago, when I waited for you from morning till night, while everybody watched. I waited so long I ran into Franklin twice and got scalded by his grinning sympathy. (“Still waiting for Babs?” he said. “She’s somewhere.” And he wheeled off to bed.) I’d been expecting her since breakfast. I fixed myself up. I got my skirt and jacket pressed, always walking that thin line between too much effort, which leads to a Minneapolis matron look or else the Oscar Wilde of South Dakota—and no effort at all, which is trousers and a sagging sweater, like an old sailor. Eleanor didn’t come home until after midnight. I’d gone to bed. She pushed a scented note under my door and I smelled it, before I saw it. I opened the envelope before dawn and I can still quote the whole goddamn thing. Je t’aime and je t’adore and I know you have no wish to make me unhappy. It said that the real task for the two of us was to learn how to love and let go and yet keep loving. When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.
* * *
—
Eleanor reaches for her blouse and fumbles with the pearl fleur-de-lis pin on the collar. She takes the pin off, with her eyes closed, and puts it in my hand.
“He gave it to me. I’m giving it to you.”
Another heirloom, from him to her to me.
She lies down again.
“I’m asleep already, dearest,” she says. “Wake me on Monday.”
I can wait, I think.
Swinging on a Star
FRIDAY NIGHT, APRIL 27, 1945
29 Washington Square West
New York, New York
It’s hard to believe that the first thing she says to me, over the cheese and crackers and sidecars, is “Dearest, Tommie will be here bright and early Monday morning. Early.”
“I won’t linger,” I say.
“You’re insulted,” she says.
Damn right.
“Half and half,” I say and I get a kiss for that and I’m more insulted by the reward, like I’ve mastered Sit and Shake Hands.
“I could stay on,” I say, just to see.
Eleanor says, “That would be hard on Tommie, wouldn’t it?”
Tommie Thompson’s been with the Roosevelts since before me. She lives to serve Eleanor. She’d watch me get hit by a car, and grieve only for Eleanor’s distress and my guess is, she feels that way about everyone in the world, including her first husband and her current beau. If Tommie comes in to find me drinking coffee in my pajamas, she’ll nod and cough. I’ll get a half smile. She’ll pace around the living room like it’s a boxing ring. Hat on, hat off. Finally, she’ll plant herself at the dining room table, pull her hatpin out like she’s ready to kill Hitler, take her hat off one last time, open her portable typewriter and say, Mrs. R., let’s get started. Then she’ll go to the kitchen and make coffee that could strip paint (a cup for each of them) and sit there, square as a house (I should talk) while she waits for me to gather up my things, hang up my towel, and go back to Long Island.
For years, Tommie and I would find ourselves going to the same meetings, jammed in Franklin’s elevator. It was a tight fit. We faced each other, there was no other way. We were square women, standing wide front to wide front, smelling each other’s morning coffee and cigarettes.
“Goin’ up,” she usually said. “Ladies’ shoes, linens, kitchenwares.”
“Secrets of the White House,” I’d say and she’d snort.
* * *
—
I walk into the kitchen, which gave me such pleasure to clean a little while ago, and I look for things to break. I don’t think Tommie minds me that much. I’m not disloyal, like some. I’m not a snob like the bluestockings, who make anyone who can’t quote Sappho and Catullus feel like a shmuck. (I told them Franklin’s joke about the sailor and the kangaroo and changed the sailor to Sappho. No one laughed.) I’ve put a bottle of Scotch under the tree for Tommie every year, and she’s done the same for me.
Me and Hick, we’re Mrs. R.’s right hands, she’d say to reporters, to Franklin, who grinned and bit his tongue, to the relentless Roosevelt cousins, always sniffing for gossip and gold.
“I certainly don’t want to upset Tommie,” I call out.
Eleanor doesn’t say anything and I walk back to the living room. Only the small lamp is on. She’s lying on the couch in her kimono, with her hair unpinned and her eyes closed.
“Sometimes, I get sick of my own self,” she says.
“Likewise,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”
She says, “The first time Franklin was elected president, when he beat the pants off Mr. Hoover, I cried so hard, I couldn’t even greet our guests the next morning. We’d just met. I was wild about you. I’d never met anyone like you and I thought, He’ll lose and he’ll be governor for a while longer and who cares what the governor’s wife does anyway. I thought, I’ll keep teaching and you and I will be together, all the time. And then he won and I thought, It’s over.”
“It wasn’t,” I say.
* * *
—
I covered Herbert Hoover when he entered the White House, saying, “We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.” And a year later, stockbrokers were jumping out of windows and farmers were killing their families and hanging themselves from oak trees.
The Crash pushed on, deeper and harder, and Hoover made a few gestures, like an old lady facing the incoming tide. When seventeen thousand World War I veterans gathered on the National Mall to cash in their service certificates, I covered the story. They brought their wives and children. They built tar-paper shacks Hoover could see from the White House. The attorney general ordered the veterans driven out and I covered the story when they resisted. I covered it when American police officers opened fire on decorated veterans of the United States Army and two veterans died of gunshot wounds. I covered the story when Hoover ordered that buffoon Douglas MacArthur to lead the infantry and six tanks to drive out soldiers who had served their country and needed the money they’d been promised. I covered it when the United States Army burned the tar-paper shacks and the veterans left, with their wives and children, leaving behind jackets and diapers, cots, pots and pans. The fires stank to high heaven and when they turned the tanks on the fleeing veterans, I thought, Hide, you cowardly, tightfisted son of a bitch, Roosevelt is coming.
We were on the story of the Depres
sion every day, most of us doing our best to record the lives and deaths of people and shame President Hoover. We called old newspapers “Hoover blankets” and delivered piles of them to the edge of hobo camps. People hitched their broken-down cars and pickup trucks to mules—if they had mules—and Midwestern newpapers ran the photos, calling them “Hoover wagons.” Hoover made one cautious mistake after another while people lost their jobs and banks failed, every day. A thousand economists wrote to him, basically saying, Don’t be a jackass, and Hoover said, The marketplace will sort it out. It sorted him right out of office. Franklin came in on a tidal wave of decency and great speeches. (True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.) The country had a leader. Hired girls had a hero.
* * *
—
We’ve both showered and washed our hair with French shampoo from before the war. We’re sitting on the couch in our old terry robes.
I say, “We look like a pair of polar bears.”
Eleanor says, “I have never stopped loving you. That’s what I was trying to say.”
“I know,” I say. “Likewise. You know what I’ve always loved about you?”
“No,” she says, as if she can’t recall.
“I always loved when you’d walk into one of Franklin’s late-night soirées, with Princess Martha tossing her curls at him like she was on the piano at the Norwegian Box Top, and you’d just clear your throat. That’s all you had to do. And they all froze.”
She clears her throat to make me laugh.
“I loved that. I did. They just stopped on a dime. You’d pocket their balls and walk out. I loved that, every time.”
“Did I seem like a nag?”
