My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  Unlike Franklin who used his house to showcase his hobbies, Eleanor covered her walls with photos of friends and family, the people she collected over the course of her life who were important to her. On her walls, grandchildren, her secretary, and secretaries of state all mingled together. Her house had no trappings of power. The TV room, with its 1950s television and slip-covered armchairs, also doubled as her office, her desk occupying only a small corner. The nameplate read ELANOR ROOSEVELT.

  “Why is Eleanor’s name spelled wrong?” a familiar voice piped up. The dad from Franklin’s house.

  “A little boy made that for her in his woodshop class and she didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d misspelled it. When guests asked why she kept it displayed so prominently, she replied, ‘In case he comes back to visit one day.’ ”

  She never stopped writing. She drafted most of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here after Truman appointed her to the United Nations. When she died of bone cancer at age seventy-eight, she was in the middle of writing a book, Tomorrow Is Now. Altogether, she churned out seventy-three hundred newspaper columns and twenty-seven books. I couldn’t fathom that kind of output. If I sat down at my computer when I got home and didn’t get up for fifty years, I don’t think I could produce that much writing.

  Because the house was small, the tour went by much more quickly than the one at Springwood. As Matt and I retraced our steps down the driveway, I slipped my arm through his. Of course, we knew about living in separate houses. When Matt’s editors had deployed him to Albany two years before to cover the state government beat, our relationship entered a holding pattern. Because he didn’t live in Manhattan, we never had to deal with the issue of moving in together. Or getting married. Everything remained exactly the same, frozen in time like Eleanor’s house. But how long could we keep this up? I wondered. How long until we became emotionally distant as well? What if he moved back and we realized we preferred our part-time relationship?

  In the end, Eleanor came back to Franklin. She was buried next to him and their dog Fala in Sara’s rose garden at Springwood. The couple shared a gravestone, a modest rectangular block bearing both their names. FDR always said he didn’t want a gravestone bigger than his desk in the oval office. Walled in by tall hemlock hedges, Franklin and Eleanor could finally be alone. Sara, who died only three and a half years before her son, was buried off premises at a local church. That had to be something of an indignity, I imagined, being outranked by a Scottie. There’s a Sara Delano Roosevelt Memorial Park in New York, which I had happened upon during a recent walk around my neighborhood. It was just a few blocks from my apartment. Eleanor was right: You never knew when she was going to appear.

  Franklin and Eleanor’s children went on to lead fairly turbulent lives. Elliott, bizarrely, wrote a mystery series starring his mother as a detective. He angered family members by penning a trilogy of revealing books about his parents, including details about their sexual lives and FDR’s affairs. Between the five of them, the siblings had nineteen marriages, fifteen divorces, and twenty-nine children. Anna married three times. Franklin Jr. and Elliott each had five wives. James fathered seven children with four different wives and made headlines when his third wife stabbed him during a domestic argument. John was only married once but—perhaps most disturbingly of all for the Roosevelts—became a Republican. Yet Eleanor’s support never wavered.

  “No one ever lives up to the best in themselves all the time,” she said, “and nearly all of us love people because of their weaknesses rather than because of their strengths.”

  As we walked back to the parking lot, we paused under the shade of the trees on the bridge over the dam Franklin had built for Eleanor. The creek happily burbled away on our right, teeming with energy, the lily pond earnest and steady on the left.

  Matt leaned against the railing. “How much they did—the sheer productivity—just blows me away,” he said, shaking his head. “I really felt that I was transported back to this period where greatness wasn’t what you owned, it was what you did.”

  Standing there, staring into the water, I knew I needed to recommit myself to the project. The Roosevelts dedicated themselves to public service, and I was running naked through apartment buildings and taking stripper classes. Obviously, I needed to get more serious with my challenges. And maybe find a way to get more outside of myself as I do them. I’d never been in a position where I was offering something truly useful or important to others.

  “To be useful is, in a way, to justify one’s own existence,” Eleanor said.

  When I got home, I did an Internet search of the words New York and volunteer. The first website that popped up was a local hospital looking for volunteers. Perfect. Eleanor began volunteering as a child, accompanying her aunt Gracie to visit handicapped kids at a hospital in Manhattan. At the end of World War I, she visited the naval hospital in Washington, D.C., once a week, bringing flowers and chocolates, and words of cheer. This contact with wounded soldiers, Eleanor later said, taught her an important lesson: “I was beginning to feel pity for the human condition. I was beginning to ask what I could do.”

  I downloaded the application and filled it out. The essay portion asked: “Why do you want to be a hospital volunteer?” I quickly banged out two hundred words: “My thirtieth birthday is approaching and as I look back at my life so far, I am ashamed at what I see. What stands out are not the things that I’ve done but the things I have failed to do. How can it be that I have been on this earth for almost thirty years but done nothing to help other people? When I look back at my life, I want to see a person who helped make other people’s lives better . . .” I printed the essay out, read it over. Was it too over the top? Before I could second-guess myself, I stuffed the essay and application into an envelope, threw on my coat, and headed out to the mailbox at the end of my block.

  Chapter Eight

  The greatest thing I have learned is how good it is to come home again.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  When I arrived in Texas for Christmas, my Year of Fear was almost halfway over. My first night home, my dad invited the Valby family out to dinner at an Italian restaurant renowned for its pagers that lit up like spaceships to signal diners their table was ready. Mr. Valby was my dad’s tennis partner. He was a cheerful man in his late fifties who loved to hear about my life in New York. When I told him about the project over dinner, he was fascinated. As Mr. Valby asked question after question, I noticed my dad’s head going back and forth between us, looking increasingly displeased as if he were witnessing the world’s worst tennis match.

  Finally Dad cleared his throat and said, “Her mother and I think it’d be better if Noelle moved back home for a while, get her head on straight. Maybe help out at my office.”

  Oh God. Could it come to that? What if my Year of Fear bankrupted me and I had to move in with my parents in Sugar Land, Texas? The shame! Oh, how I’d teased Mom and Dad when I was in college and they announced they were moving from Houston to Sugar Land! “Is that next to Candy Land?” I’d asked. “How far is your house from Gum Drop Mountain? Will you have to drive or can you just take the rainbow trail to get there?”

  My parents are actually lovely people. They’re supportive but incredibly practical. Having come from a long line of hardy farmers and businessmen of modest means, they had a hard time grasping that a person could make a living as a writer. For years they’d tried to steer me toward law school or a career in dentistry.

  “You’d make enough money to support yourself,” my mom would say, sounding slightly dreamy. She’d been a devoted stay-at-home mom, but I’d always sensed she regretted not forging a career for herself. “A woman shouldn’t have to depend on a man for her livelihood,” she’d often told me.

  After I graduated from college, they’d watched nervously as I’d toiled away at newspapers on a $25,000-a-year salary while living in a very expensive city. They’d bee
n thrilled for me when I’d landed the high-paying blogging job. Telling my parents I’d been laid off was harder than being laid off. As I’d picked up the phone to call them with the news, they’d felt more like my children than my parents. I’d wanted to shield them from the disappointment I was about to cause.

  “Well,” Mr. Valby’s jovial drawl cut through the tension, “I still think this project of yours sounds mighty interestin’. You know what you should do?” He speared a shiny chunk of steak with his fork.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You should climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Fourth-highest mountain in the world, you know,” he added, before depositing the steak in his mouth.

  “Oh, that sounds dangerous. I don’t think it’s a good idea,” my mother said, though I was pretty sure that, like me, she knew almost nothing about Kilimanjaro.

  “Doesn’t that kind of thing take years of preparation?” I asked. With only six months left on the project, I didn’t have that kind of time. “I don’t have any mountain-climbing experience.” I was picturing looming cliffs of ice, complicated rope systems, and frozen appendages that turned black and had to be self-amputated with a Swiss Army knife.

  “You don’t need climbing experience for Kilimanjaro because it’s not really a climb,” he said. “The mountain is so broad you’re essentially just walking to the summit in a couple of days. Kilimanjaro requires no technical skill.”

  “That’s me,” I deadpanned. “Technically no skill.”

  Mountain climbing combined my two least favorite things on this planet—camping and exercise. Throw in crapping in the woods and that’s a pretty accurate description of how I imagine hell. Still, I wondered if the universe was telling me—in the guise of a middle-aged tennis enthusiast—that I needed to go mountain climbing.

  When I got home from dinner, I plopped in front of my parents’ computer to find out more about Kilimanjaro, like, for instance, what continent it was on. Answer: Africa. The closest I’d been to visiting Africa was on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland.

  Mr. Valby was right. Climbing Kilimanjaro didn’t necessitate prior mountaineering experience. But the level of difficulty was a matter of much debate. Reading hikers’ testimonies about climbing Kilimanjaro was like asking a group of Democrats and Republicans what they thought of the president of the United States. Half the hikers shrugged off Kilimanjaro as a long walk. A disturbing number of people had climbed it on their honeymoon. Others claimed it was the hardest thing they’d ever done, mentally and physically. More than twenty-five thousand people tried to climb Mount Kilimanjaro each year, but only 40 percent made it to the top. Fifteen thousand turned back before they reached the summit. These numbers gave me pause. That was a lot of people getting their asses kicked by a mountain. Was I just setting myself up for failure? Or something even worse?

  Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research:

  “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.”

  A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes?

  But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My eyes were stinging from staring at the computer too long, so I shut it down.

  I wandered into my little sister’s room, knowing she was away at a swim meet, to look for clues about what she’d like for Christmas. The walls had been painted bright blue since my last visit; they were full of photographs of her with friends I didn’t recognize. Jordan had been a late arrival to the family, born fifteen years after me. I was in the delivery room when she arrived and even cut the umbilical cord (my father, a squeamish man, enjoyed the proceedings behind the safety of a curtain). I’d assumed we’d be best friends because we were too far apart in age for sibling rivalry. I’d been too young to understand that this age gap essentially guaranteed we wouldn’t be close. She’d been a toddler when I’d left for college; since then she’d only seen me a few times a year during holidays.

  On one wall there was an expansive cork bulletin board with her swimming medals dangling from ribbon necklaces on hooks along the bottom. They hung at least seven feet across. She was only fourteen but already ranked in the top ten nationally. Looking at that bulletin board, I felt very proud, of course, but I ached for her as well. There was something a little heartbreaking about this curtain of medals. At this point, it was more surprising when Jordan didn’t win first place. I wondered if she’d gotten to the point where the fear of losing far outweighed the joy of winning.

  “Oh, you startled me!” my mom said from the doorway where she stood, hand over heart, and smelling of sunflower-based perfume. “I didn’t know you were in here. I’m just looking for the scissors. Jordan always takes them and forgets to put them back.” She bustled into the room, shaking her head in exasperation. Sure enough, when we opened a desk drawer there was a pile of scissors.

  “Oh, for Lord’s sake!” Mom exclaimed, but her tone was affectionate.

  Mom ran her fingers anxiously over the gold choker she always wore. “Do you think she’s okay at the swim meet?”

  “Of course. Mom, this is like her millionth swim meet away from home. The coaches are with her.”

  “I think I’ll call again just to make sure. Anyway, I need to remind her not to stay up too late and to eat lightly at breakfast because she could get a cramp during the race and—”

  “Okay, you’ve gotta stop doing that!” I burst out.

  “Doing what?” Mom looked confused.

  “Worrying all the time.”

  “I’m just trying to protect her.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. My mom’s entire life was about being a mom, and I was about to tell her she had been doing part of it wrong. “You think you’re helping her, but you’re really just making it harder for her in the long run. She’ll grow up not knowing how to handle setbacks and disappointment. It’s good for her to fail once in a while,” I said, talking about myself as much as my sister. “Failure is a better teacher than success.”

  I took a deep breath and continued: “You have to give her freedom to fail once in a while so she can learn to give herself freedom to fail.”

  My mom’s eyes filled with tears, but I had to finish this.

  “And I’m not talking just about her, Mom. When you’re always expressing doubt about the things that I’m doing, it make
s me feel like you don’t have confidence in my abilities. Which makes me doubt myself more.”

  That did it. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she said, “I do it because I care!”

  At the sight of her tears, the frustration I’d been feeling toward her in the last six months dissipated. Worry was how my mother loved, I realized.

  “But you’re teaching her to equate caring with worrying,” I said gently. “She’ll grow up thinking that if you really care about your career, you should always be worrying about work. Or that if you really care about your relationship, you should worry whether your partner is cheating on you or falling out of love with you. That’s not an easy way to go through life. I know you don’t want that for her.”

  “No, you’re right. I need to trust you girls more.” She looked up at the ceiling while she wiped the tears away, to avoid smearing her mascara. “I just—I just like having people to take care of, you know?”

  “You could always have another baby. Jordan’s almost the age I was when you had her.”

  This got a laugh. “Oh, right! Could you picture the look on your father’s face?”

  “No, because I’ve never had someone stroke out right in front of me before.”

  She started laughing uncontrollably, and soon I joined her. Finally, we’d mostly settled down, with just a few aftershock giggles.

  “It wasn’t even that funny,” I said. For some reason, this made us explode all over again.

  The next morning as I was checking my e-mail, the phone rang. When I picked it up, Jessica started in without saying hello, a gesture that should have been rude but always gave me a sort of heartwarming thrill.

  “So apparently,” Jessica reported, “when I was stumbling home from our office holiday party last night, I bought a Christmas tree.”