White Houses

by Amy Bloom

  She’s like a dog with a bone. Here’s where Franklin would make one of his lousy martinis and tell a joke but it’s too early to drink.

  * * *

  —

  Parker Fiske and I met from time to time and after that, we sent each other notes, and sometimes books (three years ago, we sent each other The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and he sent me a postcard of Siamese twins, as a thank-you). Last year, he sent me an old map of South Dakota, with dragons and tumbleweeds he’d sketched around the edges. He signed the back, Your pal, Tom Sawyer.

  * * *

  —

  The first time we met, in 1934, he’d sent a note to my office, saying that he’d be waiting for me in the coffee shop across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, my home away from House then. Maybe he knew I was sleeping in the White House. Lots of people did. Sometimes, I got mail there. We had our performance of Miss Lorena Hickok, friend of the family, coming for breakfast or dinner, which sometimes required me to slip out and stroll back in. Sometimes, for laughs, I’d tie my scarf differently, or pin a brooch to my hatband. Voilà.

  He stood up when I came into the coffee shop and before I could order my coffee, he introduced himself.

  “I do believe we’ve met before,” he said. “Two Christmases ago, at the White House.”

  He lifted his hat. He put his hand on my elbow and said, “Would you care to join me?”

  He stretched out his long legs until his shoes touched mine and then he stretched a little farther, so I pulled my legs under me.

  “Good of you to come.”

  “I admire your work in the State Department,” I said.

  “And yours here at home. You must be just back from your sojourn among the good people of the Dust Bowl and places beyond.”

  “Just back.”

  He waved the waitress over and she poured us both coffee.

  “I understand the reports you’re doing for the Emergency Relief are excellent. Even Republicans weep over them. Pie?” he said. Meaning, obviously a great big creature like yourself eats pie every chance she can get.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “A cup of joe will be fine.”

  “Ever the reporter. Well, in a manner of speaking. I understand that your special friendship made journalistic objectivity impossible. All of Washington understood your dilemma. You made an honorable choice.”

  I sipped my coffee. (All summer, I’d been running into Louis Howe, Franklin’s consigliere, roaming the White House halls in nothing but his boxers and a towel over his shoulders like a small, nearly naked vampire. He’d see me near Eleanor’s room at all hours and say, Well, ain’t that a scoop.)

  “Well, honorable. That may be a little much. I mean, you are shtupping the First Lady. She is a married woman.”

  I choked on my coffee and I took my time, wiping my saucer, patting my blouse, and waving off the waitress so I could think about Parker Fiske threatening me and speaking Yiddish. A special friend had taught me Yiddish for every occasion, shtupping included.

  “Mr. Fiske, we don’t know each other very well….”

  It was true. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, but it was true.

  “I don’t know you, personally,” he said. “I am familiar with your ilk. And I am more than acquainted with the great lady of whom we are speaking. I was a page at the President and First Lady’s wedding. I am their cousin and it pains me to think, I shudder to think, what the President would say, if he were to hear about the filthy byways into which you have pulled his wife.” He dropped his voice on the word wife.

  “You can stop shuddering,” I said. “He knows.”

  “He does not.”

  “Well, I say he does and I say he won’t appreciate hearing what is either nasty gossip or an unpleasant fact or maybe not even that, coming from you. I know your ilk too, buddy. What’s your point? That Franklin doesn’t know and if he did, there’d be hell to pay? Divorce? Not going to happen. Disgrace? Not just my disgrace, pal. You know how men feel about having their wives stolen. And by a broad like me? I mean, it certainly wouldn’t be fair, if Franklin killed the messenger, but I can see it, can’t you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let me take a different approach. Your relationship with the First Lady is a thing of beauty. I don’t wish you any harm, not at all. I thought we might have a mutual interest. I thought we might share information. I might tell you things, you might tell me things.”

  “What kind of things?” I said.

  “So many people come and go in the White House. There might be some visitors that would be of interest, to some of my own friends. And my own friends, let’s not say any one person’s name here, this one very powerful friend has no wish to look closely at you and your special relationship. You are a patriotic American. The First Lady is, of course, a great American. There might be some people who come calling upon her, who even wish to exploit her, and you might, from time to time, as a friend to our powerful friend, pass on names, of people whose presence is…notable. Interesting. Just that. Just that.”

  There was a part of me that thought, This is not the worst deal. Comfort the afflicted—me—and afflict the comfortable, as Mr. Dooley used to say. Furthermore, when I was a reporter, I blackmailed people a hundred times to get them to give me what I needed. “Oh, Mrs. Jones, we’re printing Mr. Jones’s side of the story tomorrow. Don’t you want a chance to tell yours? Gosh, I know I would….” Parker Fiske said we would protect Eleanor and the rest of the country. I did love Eleanor and I did love my country.

  I made myself stand up, like a person with integrity.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

  He left and I slid my coffee over the bill, for the tired waitress.

  She came by. “Not your fella?”

  “Not on a bet,” I said.

  She took me in. “Didn’t think so.”

  I went to the ladies’ room and threw up. What Parker should have said was, I’ll tell Franklin that I know for a fact that everybody’s talking and that the President is facing an organized campaign of moral disgust. No divorce and no disgrace for the Roosevelts, just Lorena Hickok out on her fat ass and not another day or night or telephone call with the lady in question. That was always my fear. Not that Franklin would find out but that someone would persuade him that I’d overstayed my public welcome, that too many people, real people, Democrats who lived in small towns and Midwestern cities, seemed to know lesbian love when they saw it and they were seeing it now. If that’s what Parker Fiske was threatening me with, and all he’d wanted was some gossip in return, I’d been a fool not to listen. I sat in the stall until the waitress knocked.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Eleanor and I hardly saw each other. There were sixteen of us for dinner. Eleanor lifted a hand from across the room and I lifted mine back. The chances were pretty good that when the photo came out, in the Post or The Telegraph, I’d be cropped out of it.

  Heaven Is What I Cannot Reach

  SATURDAY NIGHT, APRIL 28, 1945

  29 Washington Square West

  New York, New York

  Tonight, Eleanor and I are our dumb, happy, animal selves. We do our stretches (my hips, her back) and take our antacids, and we push and pull the pillows, in a comic performance of old ladies getting ready for bed. Whoever gets into bed first sets the mood, but what we do hasn’t changed much from ten years ago. My hand’s in her hair and her left hand is on my left hand. There is a great warm border between us and when things are the way they should be, she pulls my leg closer in behind her and I smooth her hair back from her forehead. We sigh. We give each other little kisses in odd places, the elbow, the shoulder, the chin. Years apart and other loves and still, I feel like my heart has at last, and only now, returned to my body. She rolled over onto me last night, in her sleep and said, I miss you, my dear. I said, I’m right here, and she said, insistently, I miss you, and put her chin on my shoulder. Right now, I love Eleanor more and more easily
, at night, than I do during the day. Sometimes, I love her more when I don’t even see her.

  During the day, we are who we are and that’s too bad. The subject of Franklin the Person seems to be off the table. To keep the peace, I act as if Franklin and I were great pals and, had he lived, we all would have come to a comfortable understanding. The war would end and he’d retire to Top Cottage (Blowjob Cottage, as I thought of it), his Hyde Park hideaway in the woods, away from mother and wife, alternating between the glamorous babes and the devoted handmaidens, and Eleanor and I would get Val-Kill, cozying up on the porch, in matching cardigans, with a pile of books to be read and thick notebooks, for the books we’d write. We’d wave to Franklin, when we saw him up the hill. When the kids came to visit, I’d step back. I’d have lunch in town and sleep in “my” bedroom, which I’d decorated in ’36, making it look like the cell of a nun with a passion for the Dodgers and The New York Times. I kept an antique, ivory brush-and-comb set on the dresser. When Eleanor saw it she gasped. That was my aunt’s, she said. It was in the attic, I said. I thought it made a nice statement. I’ve even brushed my hair with it. I put two shirts in a drawer and hung two old dresses in the closet, for show.

  I never stopped envisioning every piece of that life to come; the two cottages, our dogs; the way, over time, the kids would come to see how happy I made their mother and what good care I took of her. We would keep the best of our friends. Our love would create its own world and alter the real one, just a little. I could see the stand of birch trees, at the edge of the stream near Val-Kill, a few yellow leaves falling in. I could see our breakfast, the scrambled eggs still steaming, the newspapers folded. I could hear the creak of the rocking chairs on the porch.

  It is not true that if you can imagine it, you can have it.

  * * *

  —

  Eleanor hasn’t eaten all day. I offer her a sandwich, Scotch or sherry, crackers or her favorite muesli, and she keeps shaking her head. When the children were small, she says, she barely ate for five years, because of everything. (Everything, she says. Five children and the baby died and then Lucy Mercer. And I was being such a fine, fair person and I thought, I will live with him and just not love him and then he got polio. And I heard the door slam.) It was so terrifying, she says, that she couldn’t swallow.

  “You’ll never guess who tracked me down,” I say.

  Eleanor rolls over.

  “Which girlfriend?” she says, flatly.

  * * *

  —

  Eleanor’s understanding of our relationship was that our remarkable kinship, our communing spirits, made it possible for us to engage in physical intimacy, the likes of which she’d never known. (Sorry, Franklin, but you learned absolutely nothing at Harvard and not much from Lucy Mercer, who I imagine was the “You’re my hero” kind of sex partner. I’ll just say that after the polio, Franklin’s own people spread the word that the man was paralyzed from the waist down and could now be officially held blameless with the ladies, no matter how it looked. There’s a certain lack of imagination among Roosevelt enemies and also, among the Roosevelts themselves.)

  For Eleanor, lovemaking had everything to do with a commingling of souls. She felt this way about all happy couples—that joyful sex had come their way because of their love and when the sex faded away, their love would burn even brighter, because the source of the fuel was now high, not low. I don’t care why the light burns. I think that even if you are both old ladies riding side by side on the Second Avenue subway, with one of you going home to three grandchildren and a doddering husband, you can lock eyes, and remember when you weren’t. You remember that very pleasurable and surprising thing that was done to you by the wrinkly old bag of bones next to you and you breathe in memory the weight and the mortality and the sensible shoes are just costume, falling away, and your real selves rise up, briefly, dancing rosy and naked, in the middle of the subway car.

  * * *

  —

  “My sister Ruby,” I say. “She saw my name in the papers, next to yours. First Friend,” I say, and I poke her in the side. She brushes my foot away and sits up, as if I have finally said something worth listening to.

  “I would love to meet your sister.”

  You will, I say, and I lure her into planning how to help Ruby, and then the rest of the world, into considering that there’s more to life than the Widow of the Great Man. There’s a whole third act, I say, schools and governments and whole continents, all longing for her. The story is not over, I say, no matter how many times she says that it is. And we can start with making a nice luncheon with Ruby Hickok Claff, who wasn’t as sweet as she was in South Dakota, thirty years ago, but wasn’t as soft either. Ruby did her research and came to see me at my Little House on Long Island. She knocked on my door and I didn’t know her and she threw her arms around me. By the time we sat down for coffee, I could see she was disappointed that I didn’t live a more glamorous life and she was more than disappointed to find out that I didn’t even own the house. Everything I owned was my pots and pans, my clothes, my typewriter, two fresh ribbons and three reams of paper, my car, and my dog. I cooked a couple of meals for her and she slept on the couch. We got ready for bed and she told me how things had been for her in Wisconsin, with our mother’s sister. Not really so bad, but I could have used you, she said. You looked out for me. She asked for a loan, which I expected, and I gave her twenty-five dollars, which was no small thing for me. She told me her husband was out of work and that she was thinking of starting her own cookie-baking business, if I’d stake her to it.

  Eleanor loves hard-luck stories and we can start with Ruby.

  PART FOUR

  The Inundation of the Spring

  SUNDAY NOON, APRIL 29, 1945

  29 Washington Square West

  New York, New York

  Eleanor had asked me not to come to the funeral.

  * * *

  —

  “It was a beautiful day,” she says, over her sherry. “I cannot tell you how beautiful it was. Very sunny and bright. I don’t think there was a cloud in the sky. Dearest, the lilacs. White lilacs. Can you imagine they were out already, so early. You should have seen those horses, all decked out. Pulling him up the hill from the train.”

  She wipes her eyes. I wipe mine.

  “There were fighter planes overhead, in formation. I don’t know who thought that was the right touch. Maybe it was. They did the twenty-one-gun salute. Fala barked.”

  “Twenty-one times?” I say, to make her laugh.

  “I think so. I didn’t notice much, besides the lilacs.”

  She slides down in the bed, back to the pillows, and curves around my hip. I look down at her and stroke her arm. Her skin has always been finer and softer than other people’s. Other women’s. It’s like old silk now and the lines, the tiny diamonds traced on her skin, take nothing from the fineness.

  “I should have had you come.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. “You couldn’t do everything. Not even you. You had all those people to organize and comfort and your own grief. You didn’t need to worry about me, on top of everything else.”

  “Are you quoting me?”

  “Pretty much,” I say. “I took it as a compliment.” Which is what I said. When people asked, I told them that Eleanor didn’t want her closest friends there. This funeral is for the whole world, I told them. She’s going to do what must be done and she is going to do it beautifully. It’s not really a private occasion, I said.

  “I couldn’t ask for you to be just one friend among many friends, one more face in the crowd while the whole world wept over Franklin. And the reception. I wouldn’t have had five minutes to hold your hand. For you to hold mine.”

  “You could have asked,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  It was sunny on Long Island too, the day of his funeral. The lilacs were out there too. I took Mr. Choate for a walk in the woods in the morning and even deep in the w
oods, in the thick, shifting light playing on the dead leaves and pine needles, the bright green shoots and narrow tines of forsythia, the spreading damask moss and fat red buds, were all breaking out and up, subtle as a cartoon.

  I came back and showered. I dried myself, without looking, and I patted myself all over with scented talc on a white-feathered powder puff the size of a frying pan. Eleanor had gotten me both last Christmas. War be damned, she said. In thirteen years, we’d only missed one private Christmas, and right then, that seemed promising. I pinned up my hair, and put on a clean shirt, my last remaining pair of the French silk panties, and gardening blue jeans. I sat at the kitchen table, watching the sky, wiggling my toes, trying to get more feeling in my feet. I ate oatmeal with almonds for breakfast, just so I could tell Eleanor I did. I looked at the bacon in my refrigerator and said, Not today, heart attack. I made coffee the way I liked it and tossed Mr. Choate a biscuit. I leaned against the counter, watching the clouds. I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen. By the time we saw each other, I’d have my diabetes back under control and we could stop talking about it. I did my ankle, knee, and hip circles. I did my shoulder stretches and listened to “Nessun Dorma.” I sang “Nessun Dorma,” which surprised the dog.

  If you can be worried, hopeful, truly sad, and enjoying the weather, I was. Mastic was beautiful to me, all year long, but in late spring it was lush and tenderly green in every corner. My Little House, peeling white paint and a kitchen out of Dickens, was my first real home since I’d left South Dakota. The fact that I rented didn’t change my feelings. Renting made it better. Some people like to travel light and like to rent, and I am those people. To have a little white house on someone else’s pretty property, to enjoy someone else’s boat or beach or great front porch and not have to fix any of it is a particular kind of pleasure for me.