by Amy Bloom
I sit next to her on the bed, so that we can both look out the window at the opening green and red buds.
“Damn right,” I say. “And I’ll be at home on Long Island, cheering like crazy, clipping your articles, waving to your plane overhead.”
She pulls at the chenille dots on the bedspread.
“I’ll need a press secretary, if I am doing all these grand things.”
“You have Tommie for secretary and you have all those junior Tommies, the Tommie-ettes. And one of those girls will be articulate, silk-covered steel and she can do what you need done. That’s not me.”
“Not really silky,” she says.
“Not really.”
“You could handle the itineraries,” she says. “Or you could just come. We’d have a wonderful time.”
“You’ll love it.”
“You could love it,” she says.
I kiss her hand.
“Lie down with me,” I say.
“Tommie’s coming,” she says.
“She’s not coming before eight.”
Eleanor picks up her hat and moves it to the chair. I put the suitcase on the floor. I take off my coat. We don’t take off anything else. We lie face-to-face on the bed, the ends of my red scarf lying on her kimono sleeve.
“What will you be doing?” she says.
“I told you, cheering you on. And walking the dog. I’ll be writing. Planting peonies. Someone’s gotta sit on that porch, Dearest.”
“You’ll love it,” she says.
She sighs and I pat her face. I sigh too.
“What a pair we are,” she says.
“That’s the way to look at it. Not together, necessarily, but a pair, nonetheless.”
“You’re so cheerful,” Eleanor says, and I am as angry with her as I have ever been.
She puts her hand on my shoulder. I rest my cheek against her hand. The sun is much higher now, and brightly yellow, in the clear blue sky.
We lie on the bed a few seconds more, forehead to forehead.
I say, Tommie will be here before you know it. I know, she says. I say that I’ll write in a few days and Eleanor says, Do. She says, Of course I will too and we’ll see each other, soonest.
Lilac and Star and Bird
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1962
The Rectory Apartments
Hyde Park, New York
I dream about Eleanor’s death.
* * *
—
I dream I’m in the Washington Square apartment, in the narrow kitchen, making tea and toast for us. The kitchen table is piled with dirty plates and cups, on top of the books I’ve written. I walk into the bedroom, with a tray, and Eleanor’s lying on the bed in her pink nightgown, mouth open, eyes closed. I’m afraid to touch her but I can see she’s dead. I get dressed in a hurry, wanting to leave before I’m discovered there but I hear sirens and I know they’re coming for me. A broken window shade rattles in the dream and I wake up.
* * *
—
I dream Eleanor is at Val-Kill, walking alone through the autumn woods. She trips on a root and falls in slow motion, her cardigan rising like a sail behind her, her arms flying up, like a ballet dancer, and she hits her head on a rock. She lies there, faceup in the wet leaves, eyes open, bleeding out. The sun rises. I don’t appear in this dream at all.
* * *
—
I dream I’m at the beach with Eleanor. We’re in the wool bathrobes we wore at Campobello and we walk barefoot to the edge of the ocean. It’s early. The sun is just rising through the clouds. We drop our robes and we are naked. We are girls in our twenties, as we never knew each other. The air is lush and light on our perfect bodies. We hold hands and walk into the sparkling water, slowly and quietly, as if it’s sacred. We walk until the water closes over our heads, like a silk sheet. There’s nothing frightening about it. I put my arms up and push the water aside. I’m not at all worried as I walk out, onto the sand. I walk to Eleanor’s robe, lying in a heap, and I sit down next to it, crying in a girlish, theatrical way. Even in the dream, I’m disappointed in what a crybaby I am. Eleanor rises from the water and walks out. She shakes the sand out of her robe and pulls me up, close to her, before she puts it on. We are wet body to wet body, our heads on each other’s shoulders. She kisses me and she is all brine and beach roses. She says, I died, you silly.
* * *
—
Eleanor and I had our last picnic, three months ago. It was August, still and sticky. We sat under the big maple tree in my yard. She’d made a grand tour, dedicating the FDR Bridge between Maine and Canada, seeing old friends all over the place and working for world peace, when she wasn’t in bed, sick as a dog.
“Those transfusions for the anemia are terrible,” she said. “I was running such a high fever, a month ago, I thought to myself, I could just give up and die.”
“Please, don’t,” I said. “You’ve worn yourself out.”
“I’m not afraid of dying. And I’m seventy-eight,” Eleanor said. “I am allowed to be a little bit worn-out.”
I laughed. I said that she’d worn out everyone around her years ago.
Eleanor lay down on the grass, carefully, and she put her head in my lap.
“Oh, this is what I needed,” she said. “I might never get up.”
“ ‘Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.’ Article Twenty-four,” I said. “It’s a human right. You said so.”
“You studied it,” she said. “That declaration was what I was put on earth to do, and now I’ve done it.”
“Close your eyes,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I thought that if we both died, right then, under the enormous green hands of the maple leaves, we would be delighted. We would start believing in God, I thought, just as we died. I held my breath for a few seconds, to encourage a heart attack.
“Listen,” she said, poking me. “You’re the only one who will listen to me. Do not let them keep me alive, just because they can. I don’t want a thousand tests and a thousand treatments. I don’t care if it’s anemia or the common cold. I don’t want David to show the world what a great doctor he is by throwing himself between me and death.”
I don’t find David Gurewitsch to be a great doctor. I’m not sure he’s even a good doctor. He’s got the accent and the manners and from where I stand now—very far from the Manhattan townhouse Eleanor’s sharing with him and his wife, the malleable, wide-eyed Edna—the man has played my beloved like a violin. People talk, as they always do, but it’s not much. Eleanor’s an old lady now. David (Do call me David, he said. Don’t bother with the title.) had the good sense to marry Edna, who’s now making a career out of being Eleanor’s little friend. The worst anyone can say is that Eleanor is generous with her friends and loves the company of clever, younger men. She says it herself. If she were a man, other old men would be slapping her on the back.
We talked for hours. I told her my book on American labor was coming along and that my book about Helen Keller was just made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and she pulled me down and kissed me on the cheek.
“Tell me I was right,” she said. “You’re making money hand over fist, as they say, and young people love these books. Five books, Dearest. You are a proper and successful writer again. You have me to thank.”
I stroked her forehead. “You were right. I have you to thank.”
She struggled to sit up and we helped each other, like falling skaters, grabbing the lowest branches of the tree, clinging to the trunk, trying not to step on the dog. We were panting and laughing up to the house. I poured us a little Dubonnet so we could catch our breath.
“Look at this,” she said, waving her hand down toward the tree. “I love this apartment. It’s perfect for you.”
“I like it,” I said. “I miss my Little House but…”
“It’s not Val-Kill,” she said. “But even Val-Kill’
s not what it was. It’s a madhouse. Did I tell you, Elliott sold Top Cottage.”
“You told me.” Elliott Roosevelt sold Hyde Park and the Roosevelt name and every Roosevelt thing he could get his hands on. He hustled soap and hairbrushes on his radio show, saying, It’s the kind Mother uses. I would bring up Lucy Mercer before I would bring up those commercials.
“I’m sorry, Dearest,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“Likewise,” I said. “How do you like the place in New York, with David and Edna?”
She shrugged. “Very nice. I know what you think. You think he’s a charming rogue—”
“Those baby blues,” I said. “And so big on the hand-kissing.”
“—and that once more I’ve been taken in by a man who needs a mother, and on top of that, I’ve adopted the wife, the baby, half a house, and the whole kit and caboodle.”
“Well,” I said. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
She laughed and sipped her drink. I traced the veins on the back of her hand. She slipped her fingers through mine and I said, Our hands look like something from the Museum of Natural History.
“Dinosaurs,” she said. “Do you remember our honeymoon to Vermont? You reciting Emily Dickinson, ad alta voce? Rowing in Eden. Perhaps all poetry should be shouted from a roadster—”
“By women madly in love,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Wasn’t that a time.”
She held both my hands.
“Do not make me cry,” she said. “Do not come visit me. You will have to run the Roosevelt gauntlet and you will hate what you see. And I will hate for you to see it. I am going to think of us, under this tree. Under this tree in your yard and under that beautiful tree in Maryland. Those cherry blossoms all over us? That’s what I’ll be thinking of.”
We sat and held each other, twisting close in the kitchen chairs, until her car and driver appeared.
* * *
—
In October, she was in and out of the hospital. The newspapers got a tip, and no matter that she was First Lady to the World, no matter that she’d held a thousand press conferences and fought for freedom of the press everywhere she went, they all ran the same awful photo of her being carried out on a stretcher. She looked disheveled and disoriented and if you didn’t know who you were looking at, you’d think victim of some natural disaster or plague because sick and old is essentially both of those things.
NOVEMBER 8 1962
THE FAMILY OF MRS FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT INVITE YOU TO THE CHURCH SERVICE TO BE HELD AT ST JAMES EPISCOPAL CHURCH HYDE PARK NY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 10TH AT 2:00 PM AND TO THE INTERMENT SERVICE IN THE ROSE GARDEN FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT LIBRARY HYDE PARK IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING—PLEASE PRESENT THIS TELEGRAM FOR ADMISSION
The new secretary was good enough to call me early in the morning. Maureen said Eleanor told her I had to be called before the telegram arrived. And so she was calling. I asked if they had let her die at home and she said yes. I asked who was with her, and she said, only the family, and I said, I was glad to hear it. She said to me, Mrs. R. wanted a plain pine box and she didn’t want a public announcement to be made, until after the funeral. Fat chance, I said.
Crying in public upsets people, Eleanor used to say. Her grandmother always told her to cry in the bathroom. Her grandmother said, If you have to cry, go to the bathroom and run the taps. If I went to Eleanor’s funeral, I’d be rending my garments and climbing into the grave. Eleanor would be horrified.
When Mary Todd Lincoln died, they flew the flag at half-staff, and I don’t think this country has mourned a First Lady since. There’ll be a trifecta of funerals, Hyde Park, Washington, and Manhattan, but Hyde Park is where the big shots will be. Truman, always a decent man, and Eisenhower, always a genial monster, and the ambassadors, the heads of state, governors, and some portion of the Supreme Court. Adlai Stevenson will be there. No one could keep him away, he loved her so. Marian Anderson will come and class the place up. All the Roosevelts, all twenty-seven grandchildren, plus spouses, the thirteen great-grandchildren, and every last Oyster Bay cousin, every single wife and stepchild. Every half brother and hanger-on, every illegitimate sprout and right behind them, with more teeth and more dimples, the persistent Kennedys (I was wrong about him, Eleanor said. His inaugural address was magnificent.) and Jackie, who has more up her pretty, couture sleeve than anyone thinks. Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird, who knows how things should be done. What’s left of the old crowd. The remaining Sapphic Sisters were there, I’m sure, and Joe and Trude, taking notes for his next book while they mourned, and the Gurewitsches, yielding softly to their elegant, telegenic grief.
I couldn’t act as Eleanor would have liked, so I didn’t go.
I am the last of our little tribe. I am the only one left who knows what Abyssinia means. I am the only person in the world who knows that when she said, Je t’aime, je t’adore, it wasn’t just I love you, I adore you, in her fancy French, it was a promise to leave everything else behind, even if it was only for the length of the whispered call, for the three minutes stolen from the state dinner.
I don’t know that she would feel this way, if she were the last of us.
* * *
—
I stayed in bed most of yesterday. It rained on and off. I walked the dog. Breakfast was the way it’s become. Bran flakes more or less in the bowl, hot water on top of that because the milk had gone bad. My sense of smell is first-rate, still, and so is my hearing. If it takes me ten minutes to get out of bed, it takes closer to twenty and a few extra to find my slippers and not fall over while I’m putting them on. I can still see shapes and colors and big signs and I can smell everything: the dog, last night’s beef stew dinner, coffee, bananas, beer, pine trees, that terrible perfume Eleanor used to give to every luckless soul she met. Five small green bottles are still in my closet, in a shoe box. It’s been seventeen years and I can still smell her own scent, salt and cucumber.
Under our breasts and in the creases, we smelled like fresh-baked bread in the mornings. We slept naked as babies, breasts and bellies rolling toward each other, our legs entwined like climbing roses. We used to say, we’re no beauties, because it was impossible to tell the truth. In bed, we were beauties. We were goddesses. We were the little girls we’d never been: loved, saucy, delighted, and delightful.
We slept under a damp, clean, patched sheet with wind howling through the splits in the log cabin walls and I made tea from a kettle hung over the hearth. We hadn’t been out of bed for hours. Eleanor sat up and said, We really should take a walk, and I said, Should we? Should we, really? I loved to see the quick dark flash of amusement in her eyes but this was nothing like that. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I do keep busy, darling. I have to. I would be undone with sadness, most of the time, otherwise. But not when I’m with you, not here.”
Not now, I said. And we drank more tea, in front of the fire.
* * *
—
I can still see faces. I can see the general outline of things and some detail and most mornings, my left eye is pretty good and where that would have crushed me ten years ago, these days, a working left eye seems to be enough. I’ve done two more books, one-eyed, and I expect to do two more. Some mornings I contemplate Tolstoy’s epilepsy and Byron’s clubfoot and Milton’s blindness, just to get myself going. Emily Dickinson said—or someone said that Emily Dickinson said—Rigor is no substitute for happiness. Nothing takes the place of happiness but I think rigor comes close. It’s a comfort and a bulwark. The work rewards my attention. The sentences I wrote yesterday reassure me (when they don’t appall me). I’ve had the same daily routine since Franklin died, and I love my schedule, like I love my dog, like I loved my cottage, like I love my apartment and my maple tree. Discipline, of all things, is now at the center of my life and I listen to the radio day and night, on a schedule. Morning is walk the dog and breakfast and the news. Lunch is half a sandwich and light entertainment and the
O’Leary boy bringing me the mail and baseball news. Afternoon is me and the typewriter. Nighttime is dinner and the opera. Two hours on Sunday afternoon are reserved for tidying up and making a brisket and occasionally, visiting with my upstairs neighbor. We’ve discussed what I’m to do, if I find her body, and what she’s to do, if she finds mine.
I can read for an hour or so at a time but I miss reading books by the boatload. I have stored up pages of poetry (O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night) and I recite the lines while I cook, or walk the dog. Sometimes I do Sunny Florent’s ballyhoo for the dog. I see Gerry’s little white breast and feel its warm weight in my hand. I see women’s bare bottoms, beckoning. I see Eleanor in every position, including a headstand, once, when I doubted her. I see my sister Myrtle’s cold, cross little face when my father delivered me to the farm to cook and I wonder if that cold look was despair, not irritation, and I am sorry I didn’t look for her, when I could have. I see Ruby from not so long ago and I’m sorry I haven’t kept her closer. I see the several hats I stole, from several people, and I know I must have had my reasons. I see Eleanor, in a blue kimono, eating Chinese food on the bed in Washington Square. Grains of white rice are scattered all over the dark-blue silk. They’ve fallen so they look like snow on the embroidered bridge and willow trees. Eleanor wets her fingertip and picks them up, one by one.
* * *
—
I lean hard on my cane and the steps from my kitchen to the porch just about kill me tonight, but I fix my face, as Gerry used to say. The Reverend Gordon Kidd knocks on my door. He calls out, “How are you managing, Miss Hickok?” and I say, “Oh, better than some,” and he chuckles and I pull myself together to walk to the car and make our raid on the Hyde Park cemetery. I don’t know why this good man has offered to drive me to Eleanor’s graveside but I think I can find the right moment to ask. My hope is that he’ll say, I know what love looks like.
