by Amy Bloom
Franklin and Eleanor were terrific owners of things. They were stewards of properties and collections and furniture that had been around for two hundred years. They had silver, they didn’t buy it, was what people like that said. I had six forks and six knives and I always had eight dinner plates in case I went crazy and threw a couple. The day Franklin died, I walked to the beach, without the dog, and broke all I had. He was the greatest president of my lifetime and he was a son of a bitch every day. His charm and cheer blinded you, made you deaf to your own thoughts, until all you could do was nod and smile, while the frost came down, killing you where you stood. He broke hearts and ambitions across his knee like bits of kindling, and then he dusted off his hands and said, Who’s for cocktails? If Missy’s strokes hadn’t killed her, Franklin’s cold heart would have.
* * *
—
I planted pansies the morning of his funeral and worried. I worried for the country. I worried for our soldiers. I worried for the poor, and the Negroes. I worried for the Jews, who hadn’t even been people to me, when I was a girl. Franklin didn’t do much for them but he wanted them safe, even if most of America didn’t give a damn, and I wasn’t sure Harry Truman worried much about people who were not like Harry Truman. I was sorry for us all. Harry Truman was a decent man but he was not going to be chugging brandy at two A.M. with Winston Churchill, belting out “Marching Through Georgia.” Harry Truman would, admirably, do what he said he would do, in his stubborn, guileless way, and he would at least get us through the end of the war. There wouldn’t be two courts in the White House anymore, two full sets of chutes-and-ladders for those in the know, and even if cocktails were served, Harry wasn’t likely to dress up as Julius Caesar and sing “I Get a Kick Out of You” and Bess Truman wasn’t going to make an appearance in a home movie as a Victorian maiden struggling, but not too hard, to get away from wicked pirates. Mousy Mary Margaret Truman wasn’t going to make headlines. Franklin was a terrible husband and an unnerving friend and my rival and my president. I had kissed him on his birthday one night and he had held on to my hand, pressing hard, and I was, for that minute, as in love with him as any of them.
He’d left us, in a half hour, between lunch and dinner, when we’d let down our guard and now we were all sick with grief. Those of us who knew him and needed him didn’t want to stop grieving, for fear we’d step forward, toward the future, and entirely lose the trace, the smell, and the feel of him.
It’s All Right with Me
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 29, 1945
29 Washington Square West
New York, New York
“Dearest?”
Eleanor takes another envelope from the gray canvas mailbag. It will be more love, more sympathy, and more requests for help, in the form of cash and favors, tucked into sympathy. I’ve gotten cash and I’ve gotten favors and I know better than to raise an eyebrow at even the baldest lie.
“Did I tell you?” she says. “I got a letter from Missy’s sister.”
“Anna LeHand? That’s nice,” I say.
Eleanor nods. I open the curtains and she shakes her head, to make me close them.
“Anna LeHand herself was not nice,” I say. “You make me say these things. You make me say Anna LeHand wasn’t nice. You won’t say it, so I have to. I want to lie through my teeth. I’m sure Anna is still her envious, small-minded self and just a monument of resentment. The greatest moment in that woman’s life must have been when that piece of shit Joe Kennedy put his hand on her knee at Missy’s funeral.”
“I don’t make you say these things.” Eleanor turns on her bedside lamp. She looks at me over her glasses. “You choose to. And here I sit, about to remark on your basic decency and clear-eyed compassion.”
“You’re killing me,” I say.
We can, I hope we will, go back and forth like this all day. Her propriety, my brass knuckles. Her Hyde Park–iness, my South Dakota gloom. The Roosevelts cultivate Chin up and make the best of it. None of them ever see that what they’re making the best of is tons of money, a tenement’s worth of servants, and such a grand old name that it doesn’t matter that two hundred years ago they were no better than the Hickoks of South Dakota, which is a damn low bar. Rich people.
Stacks of condolence notes, to read, or not read, are in every room, spilling over the coffee table, snaking down to the floor, up to and under the couch. The first night, we put hundreds of the ordinary-people ones right into the blue mail sack, for the secretaries Tully recruited. Eleanor loves the ones written in pencil, the ones where people have fashioned their own envelopes from another piece of paper and a little glue, and if you don’t have glue, you line up the two corners, tear a little tab into the middle and fold it back. I wrote letters that way myself twenty years ago, freezing my ass off in the Battle Creek post office, scrounging for two-cent stamps, so I don’t love them so much. The letters from the Most Famous People have already come. Churchill wrote and Eleanor said, I know he meant it. Stalin’s letter was sentimental and terrifying. The State Department sent Eleanor the front page of Pravda, trimmed in black. Admiral Kantaro Suzuki broadcast his mysterious condolences from Japan. He offered his profound sympathy. He praised FDR’s leadership in bringing our country to an advantageous position in the war. It was such an un-American thing to do, to express genuine admiration for the man responsible for firebombing your civilians, we almost took it as propaganda. Eleanor said, I think Japan and America will never understand each other.
Every minor royal joined in. Clementine Churchill’s note is so elegantly heartfelt and well written, I don’t even make a face when Eleanor reads it aloud to me, again, and says, as she does every time Clemmie’s name comes up, What a lovely woman. So strong, so much more progressive than he is, that big baby. Clemmie has a good head on her shoulders, let me tell you. She’s better than he deserves, she says.
“As people always say about you.”
I bury my face between her shoulder blades. She reaches back to press my head to the base of her neck. This is the happiness I want. Not the tidal wave of early romance, swamping all the boats, carrying us to some impossible shore. I’m not looking for wildness, half-undressed beneath the gorgeous blizzard of cherry blossoms that covered us and our picnic, in the farthest corner of a Maryland park. I don’t need another bruising, blinding sunset at Gaspé, fiery orange streaking over the green lawns and red cliffs, dropping into the dark sea and leaving us to feel our way along the path, her hand in my waistband, making the case that there’s nothing for us to do but buy the cabin we’re sleeping in and never go back. She caught my hand in the dark and said, We will live someplace just like this.
I hold on to a hundred secret candlelight dinners, a towel spread out on the hotel bed, plates on the nightstands and two decanters on the floor, sherry and Scotch. Two hundred secret lunches. Working on her speeches, with the windows open and the birds singing. Whole secret weekends, beginning at nine o’clock on a Friday night and ending before noon on Sunday. Every Friday night was Roman candles and every Sunday morning, a slow, sad gathering up until we found ourselves, sitting over tea, just waiting for the hearse of real life to come to the door at noon. In that first year of craziness, whenever we were supposed to be working, there’d come a moment when everyone else had stepped out of the room. Our reports and folders slid to the floor. Eleanor put her hand firmly on the doorknob and locked it and untied the bow at her neck.
“Could we?” she’d say.
* * *
—
I remember every time we made love. I remember the light on her body, on dozens of beds. I remember all the blankets because I remember her hair spread out on them, caught in the weave and the smell of mothballs at Campobello and the smell of the cucumber skin cream we both used one winter. I remember the satin ticking on the old wool blanket at my place on Long Island and her arms overhead, her fingers tucked under the stitching, gripping the wool. That’s what I did at night, these last eight years of being demoted to
First Friend. I remembered. I was still better off than poor dead Louis Howe, who had loved Franklin with his whole faltering, manipulative heart. I was no worse off than Tommie Thompson, my pal, the other priestess at the shrine of Eleanor. Tommie’s beau, Henry, was as undemanding as a potted plant. I used to refer to him as Tommie’s beard, but that wasn’t fair, because what was being hidden wasn’t sex of any kind, but a devotion that makes sex look like a short swim in a shallow pool.
* * *
—
The month of our final breakup was one long Alphonse-Gaston routine. No one could go first, so we didn’t go at all.
Eleanor pretended that what she wanted, more than anything, was my happiness. If I complained about how little I saw her, or our long evenings with Earl Miller, her old bodyguard, and whichever wife he was married to, or my blood sugar or that the reporters dogged our every dinner out, it was all evidence of my unhappiness. Unhappy was not the kind of girlfriend Eleanor wanted. I could stop bitching about how little time we had and stop complaining about the gossip or I could stop being her Dearest in All the World. And I pretended that all I wanted was her happiness. And if she was worried about me, or my behavior, if she was fretting about my gallivanting or nagging me about my diet, or complaining that I hadn’t come by in the fifteen minutes she’d allotted to me, well, then, she wasn’t happy, either, was she?
With all the goodwill and dissembling in the world, we almost dumped each other a dozen times and still we couldn’t part. We stated the facts, over multiple breakfasts. We made observations. We summed things up, neatly, which was just like lying, and we both said that we would never stop loving each other, which was, unfortunately, absolutely true. We were determined to be the people we wanted to be and not the blind, desperate people we were.
Every few days, I said we needed to talk, and every few days, she said the same thing to me.
One morning, Eleanor said brightly, “Franklin said you haven’t been around much. He said he’s missed seeing you.”
I said, “We really do need to talk. Get your hat. We can take my car.”
I drove to Rock Creek Cemetery, so we could sit under her favorite statue. We got out and Eleanor looked up at the big woman, grieving and almost peaceful, and she smiled a little.
“Oh dear,” she said.
I said, “I love you. You love me. In another life, we would have the cottage or the school, or the townhouse, or whatever it is. But not in this life. Not in this life, Eleanor, and I’m not going to be the White House pet.”
I called her Eleanor, to show I wanted a fight.
“What a thing to say. You’re not a pet. You’re part of our family.”
I stood up and she shrank, a little.
“We could try. You could be patient, and when he’s no longer president—”
“When he’s no longer president, which will be the worst loss of his life, as bad as polio, you’re going to leave him? I don’t think so.”
She put her hands on the base of the statue.
“I don’t care what people say about us,” she said. “And Franklin doesn’t listen to gossip.”
“Franklin has the greatest ear for gossip of any man I’ve ever known. He’s heard plenty.”
“Well,” she said, “he has never raised any objection.”
It was my turn to study the granite folds. Maybe it was all vanity, maybe it was only that I didn’t want to be First Friend, barking but harmless, and truly housebroken. I didn’t think there was any decent way to say that since I couldn’t destroy her marriage, I had to retire from the field. Franklin had won, as he and I and Eleanor had fully expected, and I wasn’t even entirely sorry. The country needed him and he needed her.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Dearest, I don’t think I can be what you’d like me to be. I will always want—”
She didn’t come to me. She sat on the bench and waited for me to finish.
“I will always want to be your lover. Your mistress. To have you be my mistress. However you put it, I don’t actually want to be your dear friend. I want to have fights. I want to get jealous. Just a little. I want you to get jealous. I want to follow you into your room—”
She stood up and put her hands out.
“I wish you could love me a little less, in that way,” she said. “Not less. I don’t mean less.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. I jangled the car keys. “You know that Dickinson poem. So we must meet apart, You there, I here, with just the door ajar…”
“You know, Emily Dickinson had no husband, no children. She did not have to do what I have to do.”
“You’re right,” I said. “You are right. About all of this.”
We drove to the White House in silence. I would move out and back to New York. I would still come and go to the White House. She would write to me often and I would write a little less often. I’d counsel her about the kids, who mystified her, and she’d send me a winter coat for Christmas. She would say, Nothing has really changed.
* * *
—
By 1939, I was part of the White House menagerie, once more.
My finances weren’t in great shape and Eleanor knew it. It so happened there was an empty room in the White House, as there usually was. It so happened that this room was not so close to Eleanor’s as six years before but it wasn’t so far away either, and of course, Eleanor offered it to me, and of course, I accepted.
I was included at meals, because it would be odd and revealing not to include me. Housekeeping tidied up my room. I wasn’t asked about my needs or preferences, or why the hell I was there, because no one wanted to hear about why my presence was desired and despite everyone’s relief that I was no longer First Friend, it was too bad that I wasn’t entirely gone and it was upsetting to people that when I came into the room, Eleanor Roosevelt stopped whatever she was doing, as if there’d been a shift in gravity. She’d clear her throat and carry on, never looking anywhere near me.
I lived in the White House and wrote for money. I hustled hard doing PR for the New York World’s Fair, all 1,216 acres of it, trying to make Flushing, New York, a place people would come to by choice. I wrote press releases and brochures day and night for the world of tomorrow. I wrote about the Eyes of the Fair (on the future) and the Fair of the Future (familiarity with today is the best preparation for tomorrow). I wrote about the Westinghouse Time Capsule, not to be opened until 6939, in which we’d put a Mickey Mouse watch, twenty newsreels, a fountain pen, a woman’s hat (Lilly Daché), a slide rule, a pack of Camels, seeds for all kinds of crops, from carrots to cotton, some pages from Albert Einstein, and a book by Thomas Mann (I voted for Willa Cather, the great novelist, exemplar of chunky, no-nonsense Midwest womanhood). I interviewed the creators of Futurama and of Democracity. People closely involved with the fair tended to think of themselves as ancient, omniscient Egyptians or as visionary beings, coming back from the future to share it with the average American. I quoted the chairman of the board of Westinghouse, on opening day, when he said (with no help from me): “May the Time Capsule sleep well. When it is awakened five thousand years from now may its contents be found a suitable gift to our far-off descendants.”
I ate lunch in the French Pavilion almost every day. I interviewed Jiggs, the trained orangutan, and all of the almost-topless ladies who modeled as Greek goddesses and Italian art. Franklin opened the fair with a televised speech about peace and our four freedoms and the next day, television sets, the greatest thing since the radio, went on sale. Eleanor loved it. Forty-four million people came to the fair and I was thrilled when it was over.
I pretended every day to be Eleanor’s friend. I pretended to feel fond and calm, concerned but apart. There wasn’t any room for what I did feel, which was a sort of furious shame, run through with terrible strands of hope. (This is not just the province of lesbians, I’m pretty sure. See: Eleanor, Missy, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, my mother.) I pretended that other women, especially Marion, p
rettier, sweeter, less high-hat and less self-righteous, were just what I was looking for, which they should have been. When there was no one else in my bed, I imagined, like all lovesick girls, that the pillow was Eleanor’s face, that my folded quilt was the length of her, that the dog at the foot of my bed would break the spell and reveal herself to be the woman I was crying over.
* * *
—
Today, I’m putting my trust in the visible world: in our cups of coffee, our reading glasses, my insulin, her aspirin, our hairpins, our toast, hers dry, mine soaked with jam, and our pale, naked feet, calloused and bony, pressing against each other. I do know better. I know cups of coffee with our coral and red lipstick stains are no different, no more permanent, than the pink and white cherry blossoms that shook down on us one beautiful afternoon but I kid myself that if I skirt the mercurial and magic moments, the coffee cups and reading glasses will promise, and deliver.
“I’m thinking of making a sandwich,” I say. “What do you hear from Joe Lash?”
This is not the smartest move on my part. Young Joe Lash is a thorn in my side. He is Eleanor’s Princess Martha of Norway and if I said that, I’d find myself standing in the hall, holding my coat. Eleanor sighs and smiles at me for the first time this weekend.
“He wrote me a beautiful note. He’s still in the Pacific. I do worry about Joe.”
She worries about him all the time. She worries about him and reminds everyone about his brilliance and his dazzling principles and if Joe Lash is in Guadalcanal because Franklin had him sent there, well, thank you, Franklin.
“Of course you worry,” I say, which is a pretty good alternative to what I think.
