White Houses

by Amy Bloom

  If Eleanor has to be infatuated with a man, I prefer Earl Miller, who’d been her devoted, bull-necked, chivalrous bodyguard. I do like Earl, most of the time. He’s married a couple of times but he’s always devoted to Eleanor, and nothing is beneath him. Joe Lash is devoted to Joe Lash. Earl Miller was Eleanor’s knight. He flirted with her, just enough, and walked by her side, watching for varlets and puddles. If cloaks were in fashion, he would have laid his right down. Earl was some kind of masculine balm to Eleanor’s hurt pride. You can see it in the photos. The man was always by her side, at her shoulder, not two inches between them. If he hadn’t gotten her away from the kids and onto the tennis court and up the mountainside, hadn’t kissed her hand and waltzed her around at parties, I don’t think I would have had a chance. Earl opened the door and I walked in. I owe Earl. I don’t think anyone owes Joe Lash anything and Tommie Thompson hates him more than I do, which is good. Tommie’s dislikes run deep and if you aren’t serving Eleanor, you are a worthless Republican, or possibly Communist, piece of trash in her eyes. So, compared to Tommie, I myself am Eleanor Roosevelt: open, tolerant, and determined to give every idiot the benefit of the doubt.

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t think you really appreciate Joe,” Eleanor says.

  “Maybe not. I like Trude. She’s very nice. She impresses me. And I can see how Joe might be the kind of son you wanted.”

  I hope this is right. I certainly hope that late at night, alone in the mahogany bed, she hasn’t been longing for his scrawny little arms around her. “He’s Jewish. He’s a real intellectual. Maybe a Commie. Definitely not a Roosevelt.”

  “You’re right,” she says and she goes into the bedroom and comes out barefoot and without a robe, which are both remarkable events, and she pads back into the kitchen.

  “Does Joe know about us?” I ask. “As we were?”

  Eleanor puts our two sandwiches on a plate and boils water for tea. She pretends not to hear me but because she is who she is, she can’t stick with even this tiny lie of omission for five minutes.

  “It’s not that kind of relationship. It’s not about who I am, it’s about who he is. He is the son I always wanted. He thinks I should be president. He lets me dote on him. He lets me make a fuss over him. And I have really come to love Trude.”

  When Joe went into the Army, Eleanor made him a party at the Brevoort Hotel that was half coronation and half bar mitzvah. There was an eight-piece orchestra and Joe was radiant. He said he was honored and embarrassed and all of us old hands were polite. Earl was an inch away from inviting him to arm-wrestle.

  “With Joe, there are no terrible stories of what I failed to do when he was six, or how I let him down when he was learning to drive, or how I’ve kept him from fulfilling his destiny.”

  I could say that Joe Lash seems to have a very firm grip on his destiny but I want our day to be wonderful and I want my tea.

  “Joe Lash is very, very lucky to have you,” I say. Her boys aren’t bad but I wouldn’t want sons like them either. The Kennedy boys are more likely to succeed because Joe Kennedy is a toad, a bully, and a thief and they’ll be living down their old man all their lives. I don’t say this. I carry everything to the table.

  Eleanor kisses me on the mouth.

  “Thank you,” she says. “And thank you for keeping your mouth shut.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome. I’m learning. And, frankly, Joe Lash does not know the real you,” I say, looking for the right tone. “I do. Lazy. Capricious. Republican.”

  “The real me,” she says. “Ooh-la-la. I believe Time magazine called me ‘gracious, energetic, long-legged.’ I’m delightful. Time magazine said so. And long-legged.”

  She leans back in her chair, putting her long, blue-traced legs up in the air and flexing her feet. I hear the bones snap and pop. I put my thick legs up and flex my feet too. We have two hammertoes, one bunion, and a little bit of gout, between us. We do the ankle circles her doctor recommended. Clockwise. Counterclockwise.

  “Symphony in arthritis,” I say.

  She pokes me with her big toe and I stroke her smooth calf with my instep. We watch our feet and veined legs as if they’re the best show since the Follies.

  “I love this,” I say. “We haven’t done this in so long.”

  Eleanor props herself up on the cushions and strokes my arm. The little ring I gave her ten years ago catches the light.

  “I haven’t taken it off for weeks,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  The little sapphire ring was a fixture in the beautiful love letters Eleanor wrote me: “I say to myself, she must love me or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” I’d see the ring on her hand in newspaper photos, when we were apart, and the sight of it was like being kissed on the mouth. Later, after we declared that we were friends and nothing more, we wrote cool and friendly letters, in which she advised me on my diabetes and I asked after Franklin’s health and neither of us could bear to say, How can this be the awful gray place in which we now live? Then, she one-upped me. I’d written with the sad news that Tini Schumann-Heink had died and I mentioned going to the opera with a new friend, as a way of celebrating Tini’s life. Eleanor wrote back a long, solicitous condolence note offering to give my little sapphire ring back to me for safekeeping. Not, Oh, darling, what a loss for you, that magnificent woman who gave you such an exquisite education. Eleanor wrote two pages about the safety and security of the ring. Should she keep it in a vault? Perhaps she should have it delivered to me, where I could keep it safe in my pantry, my sugar bowl, the back of the icebox? I had so many people, such a large circle of friends, in and out of my shack, where would it be safe? You never lock your doors on Long Island and anyone, just anyone, could push the glass right through those sagging window frames with a strong arm, she wrote. I wrote back, wishing the ink was dripping acid, that the only value the ring had for me was on her hand. If it wasn’t going to be there, she could give it to the suffering poor, whom I knew she liked so much, especially in the aggregate. She didn’t answer that one and she didn’t send the ring back.

  I saw, as soon as she’d come in last night, that it was on her hand and so much less grand than I thought it was, when I was twenty-four. I’d thought then that it was a serious piece of jewelry, the kind of thing Gable would give Lombard and now I knew better. Eleanor rubbed it against her slip, to brighten it, and shrugged, as if it was too hard, or too sad, or too late, to say anything more about it.

  * * *

  —

  Ernestine Schumann-Heink was fifty-five years old when I met her, silver hair in a bun, a collar of broderie anglaise, on top of ivory watered silk, edged around with sharp points of lace, buttoned with gold and ivory roses, topped off with a poof of silver hair under a huge white cartwheel hat, as iconic in its way as the Eiffel Tower. She put out her soft hands, pink-tipped and ivory under the white crocheted glove, and slid them forward beneath her coat’s flounced sleeve, to clasp my hands. I didn’t understand and she let me make a hodgepodge American butch half bow, half curtsy. I’d run through a Milwaukee rainstorm and managed to keep my wet felt hat on my head. I didn’t acknowledge the water pooling under my cracked shoes. There wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t powdered or lacquered, corseted, draped, and ruched. I know now what it takes for a stout, middle-aged woman to look good and keep looking good, and I feel for her.

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t take my admiring eyes off her. Eleanor would have found her ridiculous and vulgar but if you want to celebrate quiet good taste, don’t invite poor people. I’d had enough dirt-colored cloth, plain lines, and ugly things whose function was obvious, to last me a lifetime. Eleanor used to show me pieces of rustic furniture from Val-Kill or Arthurdale, the way you’d show a Frenchman a pastry, I guess—as if just his pedigree made him a good judge of the thing. I hated every just-plain-folks piece of it and when Franklin said he’d pay good money to see even one comfortable armcha
ir come out of either place, I agreed. I suggested William Morris fabric, because it was the most expensive I’d ever heard of, and I suggested it’d be nice to have table legs you wouldn’t split a shin on.

  * * *

  —

  Ernestine Schumann-Heink was very slightly past her prime. If she’d been at the tip-top, I don’t think she’d have bothered with a small-potatoes interview, for The Milwaukee Sentinel. She was still commanding standing room only at the opera houses, she was still compared to Maria Malibran and Geraldine Farrar. She was a great contralto and she’d sung with Caruso, but she knew, the way every pro does, that she was on the far side of the mountaintop now, even if her fans hadn’t found out. She’d perch gracefully, working hard, for another ten years. She sang for the American war effort during the first war and she sang for Jewish War Relief. (My mother was Jewish, she said. She gave me tenderness.) She sang for twenty-seven thousand people in Balboa Park. She did lose her fortune in the Crash and I read that one of her sons died and she was reduced to evenings of “Danny Boy” and “Silent Night” and shilling baby food but from what I heard, she died a diva, surrounded by unpaid dressers, buckets of roses, and silk sheets.

  I was young. I was late. I was soaking wet. Her maid hung my dubious raincoat in a corner. I babbled about Geraldine Farrar’s spoiled dog, to show that I was firmly in Madame Schumann-Heink’s camp, and I told her I wanted to get a German shepherd. I told her that I pictured a Christmas card of me and the dog in matching raincoats, and in December, in matching Santa hats, and she laughed.

  “You are charming,” she said. “Rough outside, sweet inside. Franzbrötchen.”

  The maid gave me a look and poured us glasses of Riesling. A waiter from the hotel brought us a proper German dinner: crisp duck and peeled potatoes sprinkled with parsley, and hot, sharp purple cabbage with caraway seeds and a whipped cream torte. The only one of those things I’d eaten before was potatoes.

  It was a long, languorous dinner. (Call me Tini, everyone does.) I’d had fun dinners on boardinghouse floors with cheap bottles of wine and roasted bratwursts and girls who thought I was the next William Allen White or maybe the next Steinbeck or maybe, at least, the next Edna Ferber but I’d never sat on a velvet divan with a famous and perfumed woman kissing my neck, pressing her pearls against my overheated skin, saying, I’m going to loosen my stays, mausebar. You pour us another glass.

  At midnight, I struggled to my feet.

  “Must you?” she said.

  “I’m the society editor. I have to be at work early.”

  “Wonderful. Interviewed by an editor. Come back after.”

  I came back as soon as I could, and we slept until sunlight came through the crack between the curtains. I could hear the maid in the outer room, piling plates, picking up glasses, talking to herself in German. I was naked. Tini was in layers of lilac silk. She pulled off her eye mask (black silk with a pair of blue velvet eyelids). She kissed me on the shoulder and then on the mouth and she called out for coffee, in German.

  The maid came in with a big wooden breakfast tray twice her size, pulled out its little legs, and set it over Tini, as if I wasn’t there. She poured from a blue and gold china coffeepot and arranged sugar cubes, and their tongs, and small and large teaspoons, and two dishes of jam, one ringed with blue ceramic flowers and the other with white. There was a basket of muffins, about eight inches high, and a butter dish with a cow on top of it. The cow’s tail made the handle. The maid was just on the other side of the bed, picking up Tini’s underclothes, pulling at the bed skirt and looking away from me. I squirmed under the sheets, knowing my hair was a mess and my lips were red and my bare shoulders showed. My underpants were on the floor, near the maid’s feet. I will go to my grave feeling that I have only just stopped being the hired girl and I wanted this skinny, frowning German woman to know that I was on her side and I was not whatever she thought I was.

  Tini spoke sharply in German and the woman left, giving me one long look. Tini hummed and buttered the muffins and put a layer of lemon curd on one half, cut it into pieces, and fed it to me.

  “I’m the Marschallin,” she said. “You’re my Count Octavian.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said. I worried about the muffin falling on the silk duvet.

  She sang a little in German. It was beautiful and very sad.

  “Who died?” I said.

  She sat up to pour herself another coffee.

  “Der Rosenkavalier. I’m never going to play this part. It’s an exquisite role for a soprano, the Marschallin. She knows that she’s going to lose her young lover, sooner or later. And she does. And she sings the hell out of it.”

  She stood up in her silk layers and put on her robe, rose velvet like the curtains, with thick bands of silk quilting at the hem and cuffs. She pinned up her hair and stretched her neck from side to side. She pulled back her shoulders and lifted her breasts with both hands. She exhaled and closed her eyes and I understood that she was going to perform for me. She opened her mouth and I laughed because I had never heard a person make those sounds and I cried for the odd beauty and whatever it was she was saying goodbye to.

  She stood for another minute, the last notes climbing. She held the pose, chin up, hand outstretched to whoever it was that was breaking her heart and then she shrugged. I clapped. I patted the bed and she lay down beside me, a little worse for wear. I poured her a glass of water in the bathroom and she called to me to make it tepid, not cold.

  “She leaves the count, because he’s too young for her. It’s a trousers part. You are my Count Octavian, my beautiful boy, who’s really a girl. I used to think Strauss was an idiot about women, but I was wrong.”

  “I don’t think age is such an important thing,” I said.

  “That’s lovely.”

  We finished the muffins.

  “You go in the bathroom and wash up and get dressed, so you don’t have to face Berthe. She’ll perform her magic and when you come out, I will be presentable and we can take a little walk.”

  We walked through the park, slowly. I held her parasol and she named the flowers. She commented on what women wore, on the men’s hats. (Farmers, she said. There are Bavarians, even here.) We circled back to the hotel for tea and a nap. I ran back to my office for a few hours every day. Tini gave performances every night, for different charities and on the nights I remember, an old man took me down to her dressing room and Berthe let me in. There was a pile of cards, in and out of their envelopes, near her cold cream. There were bouquets wilting in their paper cones and my job was to transfer them to whatever jars and vases and beer bottles Berthe could find. One night, there were two other women in the dressing room, one tall and slim, in a long black dress with a starry ring of diamonds around her neck, and another, in navy-blue silk and pearls, built more along the lines of Tini. Tini gestured to them, and to me. I didn’t catch their names. They smiled at me and spoke in German. Tini washed and creamed her face, as if she were alone. She wiped everything off her face until it was just a slab of white flesh, with tired brown eyes. She pulled off her false eyelashes and put them in Berthe’s hand. Berthe massaged her neck and shoulders. Tini talked to the women and they laughed and when Berthe came back in with four beers, the tall woman handed me one and winked. I had not been sure what they thought but then she winked and the other one arched her eyebrow and I held on to the beer bottle, embarrassed but not sorry.

  We had been together for eleven days. I covered a society luncheon uptown and hurried to her hotel, with a big sheaf of roses and stock. (Carnations are cheap and chrysanthemums are death, she said. No one wants those.) She was dressed the way she was when I met her, in her traveling suit, girded up like a queen, in her wide, gold-buckled belt and a big pearl pin on her lacy lapel. Berthe walked past me with the smallest of the suitcases and a driver came in for the others. I should have asked her not to go, or asked her if I could come with, even though it wouldn’t have done any good. I was Milwaukee and a
lready in her rearview mirror, but I wish I had asked, for me. For practice.

  “Schatzie,” she said. “I can’t stay. You’ll ruin me.”

  She kissed me on the cheek.

  She took a pretty ring off her finger and put it on my pinkie.

  I was crying and looking at the ring on my big hand and still hanging on her sleeve.

  “It’s a nice little sapphire,” she said. “And a couple of diamonds. If you have bad times, you should get a few hundred for it.”

  “I’m never going to sell this.”

  “Life is long, mausebar.” She kissed me very hard, squeezing my jaw so I opened up to her. She handed the flowers to Berthe and walked out.

  Seventeen years later, in love with Eleanor, it was the only pretty and expensive thing I had to give.

  Puttin’ On the Ritz

  SUNDAY AT DUSK, APRIL 29, 1945

  29 Washington Square West

  New York, New York

  “I got a very sweet note from your Marion Harron,” Eleanor says. “She really is a very sweet person.”

  “She is,” I say. “And a first-rate judge.”

  “I’m sure she’s missing you terribly,” Eleanor says.

  She doesn’t offer to show me the note.

  * * *

  —

  The last time Eleanor and Marion saw each other was almost a year ago. Eleanor had sent a note on White House stationery to Marion and handed one to me over breakfast, inviting us to a White House lunch. Marion propped hers up on her mantel, in her Washington apartment, for anyone who dropped by. I didn’t tell her that Eleanor and I had gone back and forth for six months, Eleanor wanting us to come, saying she wanted to give Marion a warm welcome and me resisting, because I didn’t want to back a losing horse—I apologize for the phrase—and then there was a turn between me and Marion, the kind you hope for. I’d wake up next to her feeling loved, not smothered, feeling sexy, not cold and I called out to Eleanor, when I passed her in the White House hall, that Marion and I would really love to join her for lunch. Two weeks went by without a word on the subject. Then, the invitations.