Sara couldn’t understand why Eleanor ever went to the cottage at all. She privately wrote to her own friends to ask their opinion: what is she up to over there? Perhaps Eleanor went to swim in the pool. That explanation did not satisfy Sara; she wanted Eleanor home at Springwood. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eleanor’s sharp-tongued cousin, relished reporting that someone had heard pillow fights coming from a room in a lodging where Eleanor was staying with friends. Eleanor, it seemed, was frolicking like a girl.9
Eleanor was not the only one asked not to sleep away from the Big House. Sara was unhappy when Franklin wanted to build a cottage for himself near Eleanor’s, and she insisted that he was never to spend a night there but always return to Springwood. Just as Franklin had overseen the building of their cottage when Eleanor, Marion, and Nan were away, years later Eleanor watched Franklin’s cottage going up, cabling him in the summer of 1938, when he was enjoying a restful Pacific cruise, that everything was going well on the construction. Apparently, Franklin never did spend the night at what would be called Top Cottage, but one wishes otherwise, because he had so few remaining years left. He and Daisy Suckley had planned the cottage on what they called their “favorite hill.”10 Soon after he had returned to Springwood to try to rest and recover from the effects of polio, Sara had called Daisy, an unmarried cousin living in her family’s Victorian mansion in Rhinebeck on the Hudson, to please come spend time with him. Franklin and Daisy remained the closest of friends, especially in the last years of his life. Private friends were good for Eleanor—and good for Franklin, too.
The unconventional three-way household of Eleanor, a married mother of five, and Marion and Nan, life partners, was boldly conceived, and the fact that friends sent gifts of china and silver showed how they embraced the women’s choice to be a family. FDR was being playful in calling the cottage the “honeymoon cottage” and their “love nest,” and they felt no need to defend themselves. Franklin didn’t have to explain Missy, and Eleanor didn’t have to explain Marion and Nan. She did not even feel that she had to explain her choices to her own family. She had changed a great deal from the uncertain little girl she once had been. Once she figured out what she wanted in life, Eleanor had an amazing ability to go her own way.
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Val-Kill was a testing ground for the forceful woman Eleanor would become. With her share in the cottage and two friends of extraordinary emotional intensity, she had become a nonconforming wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. As she became more independent in her personal life, she became more independent politically. By the end of her life she had moved away from the views of her own class to become a public advocate for women, blacks, Jews, unions, peace, and justice. And in Marion and Nan, who had already defined themselves as progressives, she found two independent spirits and accomplices. Being part of the Roosevelt family elevated them to a new status. Eleanor did not reject all aspects of her privileged life, and she used it to advance her own causes and those of friends, many of them all too willing to ask for favors. The children went to prestigious private schools (Eleanor may have wanted Elliott to try a public school, but she failed to get Franklin’s support); she insisted that Anna make her debut; and she lived at good addresses, traveled abroad, drove nice cars, employed a staff, and had her own inheritance and could spend the money she made as she wished. On the other hand, her friends were drawn from different social classes. Mama didn’t like the way they looked (so mannish!) or behaved (so casual!) or their uncertain origins (children of immigrants!), but Eleanor welcomed them all to the cottage. Val-Kill was her sanctuary—a safe haven where she could enlarge her intimate circle and her mind.
7: VAL-KILL AS REFUGE
Give us grace.—Book of Common Prayer
If Eleanor, Marion, and Nan wanted Val-Kill to be a refuge from other problems we know nothing about, they expressed their hopes in private conversations we can never recover. The landscape of Val-Kill, however, is a living revelation of nature’s gifts: quiet, peace, and beauty. It is a place for solitude as well as for company. Solitude was especially precious for Eleanor, with her large, demanding family and many commitments. She liked to take walks alone, when she could think through what was troubling her. This need to be alone does not contradict all the evidence that she also liked to be around other people. She was still something of a shy introvert, and perhaps remained so all her life despite her strenuous efforts to meet people everywhere.1
This is how she might have spent a morning alone:2 Eleanor had returned to Val-Kill on a November weekend when no one was at the Big House to insist that she stay there, and she had given herself time to do what she wanted. It wasn’t easy for Eleanor to be free from responsibility; it was easy for her to do her duty. But she had planned carefully: it was the end of her favorite season, autumn—leaves on the ground, bare branches, winter coming, the morning sun just rising. She stepped outside and breathed in the cold air. She had spent the night in the cottage with Marion and Nan, who were so happy to have her to themselves. And because they had stayed up late talking, Marion and Nan were still sleeping when Eleanor started the car and eased across the bridge for the five-mile drive that would take her to the cemetery at St. James Episcopal Church, where her infant son was buried.
Eleanor sometimes spoke to others about the uncertainties of life—a mother’s death, a father’s death—but of her own child’s death she seems seldom to have spoken except in a few letters to her friend Isabella and on occasion when she was consoling others who had lost a child. She felt that Franklin had never been fully attentive to the grief that had overwhelmed her then. And because she could not talk about it, she withheld a part of herself that no one would ever know.
But this morning she was thinking of the boy she had lost, the first Franklin Jr., born 1 November 1909, who never had a chance to grow up, who died when he was not yet one, twenty years ago. Perhaps her husband remembered, but they had not spoken of it. They seemed unable to communicate their deepest feelings to one another, and each had so little time to talk now that he was governor and she was always on the go.
This was her time; this was her place. As she approached St. James Church, she sensed the presence of the great Vanderbilt estate across the road. She did not turn to look, as passersby often did. She parked in front of St. James, got out, and took a deep breath. Then she slowly stepped through the open gate and into the cemetery and walked to her son’s burial place. Kneeling, she laid a few leaves on his stone, speaking words from the Book of Common Prayer: “O God, whose most dear Son did take little children into his arms and bless them; Give us grace, we beseech thee, to entrust the soul of this child to thy never-failing care and love.” She stood up and walked away; then, turning back, she moved toward the church. Trying the door and finding it unlocked, she stepped inside.
The church was dark, the early light barely illuminating the stained-glass windows, and without pausing she felt her way hand over hand to the front, where she slipped into the family pew where she had sat so often, and knelt again. When she was finished with her prayers, she left the church as quietly as she had come.
As she crossed the Val-Kill bridge on her return, she paused to look at the cottage, appreciating the way it had made a place for itself in the landscape. The pond reflected the season’s changes; already the birds were fewer, the last skeins of migrating geese were long gone to the south, and no frogs jumped into the water to mark her passage. When she entered the cottage, Nan had the teakettle whistling in the kitchen and Marion was making the fire, but both stopped what they were doing and came quickly toward Eleanor. She was home and they had so much time! What would they do? They had their breakfast in front of the fire. Eleanor picked up last night’s book and read her favorite parts from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, remembering the Shenandoah Valley and a farmer’s fields. And for a long time they sat by the fire, until Marion first, and then Nan, stood up and came over and put their hands on Eleanor’s shoulders. She reached back and patted them both, and the
y let the silence come to them.
In the quiet beauty of nature on Campobello Island Eleanor had acquired a sense of peace that she rarely found anywhere else. Now she felt it again in the special magic on the Val-Kill, where woods, creeks, and ponds were the central characters in a play of seasons: in winter, the cottage nestled in deep snow; in spring, bird songs awakened sleepers; in summer, swimmers and sunbathers refreshed themselves; and in the fall, Marion and Eleanor rode horseback or walked the deeper, higher trails.
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The natural landscape was the perfect setting for Stone Cottage, but Nan saw possibilities to improve it. Perhaps there was nothing that personally satisfied Nan more than gardening. She could do it alone and had no one to please except herself. Soon after the construction site had been stabilized, she began planting, trusting the natural landscape to imprint itself upon her imagination. The heavy work of putting in roads and a driveway and improving the rickety bridge was left to William Plog, the estate superintendent, and the construction crew, and efforts were under way by 1926 to dig out Fall-Kill Creek, recirculating water for a small swimming pool (later closed when a pool better suited to Franklin’s needs was built up the hill).
Gardening teaches patience; Nan needed to learn patience. She had an artistic bent, and a garden in many ways reflects the dream life of the gardener. She had unusual energy and skills. Until she designed and planted gardens at Val-Kill, she may not have known herself how talented she was. With the eye of a photographer, she had been studying the landscape for several years; she was now ready to make it hers. Sara Roosevelt had a rose garden and a staff to tend it. Nan was starting out on her own. Eleanor confessed that her own garden experiences were limited to raising radishes in her childhood garden at Tivoli, and Marion preferred active sports—she liked sailing, ice skating, and boating—and left the gardening to Nan. At the end of the day, though, both women were delighted to view Nan’s progress.
Like most gardeners, Nan probably spent winter evenings looking at seed catalogs and at magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and House Beautiful (it was the golden age for women’s magazines), but she probably learned best how to garden by doing it. In the first years, Nan, still feeling her way, did not put in many formal gardens. The dense wetland vegetation sheltered the cottage and gave it a feeling of privacy and seclusion, and birch and cedar trees grew along the banks of Fall-Kill Creek. Across the road from Val-Kill was a working farm where FDR’s tenant and friend, Moses Smith, raised livestock and crops.
The natural landscape was dramatically different from New York City streets, and the women loved it. The country was quiet; it was a retreat, and it was theirs. But it was not a fortress holding the world at a distance. Nan’s was not a secret garden behind high walls and a locked gate. From the very beginning she allowed the way they lived to dictate the terms of her design, placing the formal beds close to the cottage and the patios for outdoor living and allowing the hills, trails, and meadows to invite silences. In time, Eleanor would write in her 26 December 1946 “My Day” column about “the serenity and beauty of a countryside in winter” with a lyricism unexpected from her workaday political prose. “The murmur of the brook under the ice in winter, the little animal marks on the new and untouched snowfall—all of these things are joys which only the country can give us.”
8: A GIFT FOR FRIENDSHIP
I think perhaps I would prefer when I am dead to have it said that I had a gift for friendship.—Eleanor Roosevelt
After Eleanor, Marion, and Nan settled in Stone Cottage, their special times were evenings when they could share a simple meal in front of the fire and talk long into the night. At first they were able to sustain the illusion that theirs was a private, exclusive time and place, and the friendship was free and easy. But soon they also had other ideas for themselves—projects they could discuss all the time (organizing statewide Democratic women, a furniture factory, a school in New York)—and the beginnings were stimulating, giving them so much to talk about. After FDR’s election in 1928 as governor of New York and his ascension toward the White House, however, Eleanor’s interests became so far-reaching and her new friendships so numerous that long before she left Val-Kill for the White House her calendar had begun to fill up with new engagements. Marion and Nan had wanted to be part of Eleanor’s life, and they could not have anticipated how often they would not be the magical threesome. Eleanor loved people: once she had become part of the New York network of progressive women, she moved beyond the lonely years when she was a frightened mother and a neglected wife and had no one to talk to. Friends became her family. Ironically, the home life Marion and Nan modeled for Eleanor allowed her to grow well beyond the confines of Val-Kill.
Eleanor Roosevelt understood and embraced her need for friends. “I think perhaps I would prefer when I am dead to have it said that I had a gift for friendship,” she said when she spoke about Miss Laura Johnson Wylie, a beloved professor of English at Vassar College for almost four decades, in a service of remembrance in 1934. “I might not see her for weeks,” Eleanor said, “but if I went into her house and heard her voice and sat down and talked to her even for a few minutes, I came away with a warm feeling around my heart because she made us conscious of the warmth of her feeling for her friends. . . . You never went in to see her and came out without feeling a sense of stimulation and refreshment.”1 Eleanor’s remembrance of Miss Wylie would be echoed in the remembrances of those who met Eleanor. Martha Gellhorn said about her, “There has never been a woman in public life of the quality, of the nobility, of the pure splendor of Mrs. Roosevelt.”2 Cissy Patterson, a journalist and later owner and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald, believed that Eleanor Roosevelt had accommodated to life better than any woman she had ever known. She said, “I adore her above all women.”3 This kind of affection was based not as much on Mrs. Roosevelt’s public service, though it was widely admired by progressives, as on her remarkable personal charisma. In 1922 when Nan chose her as her speaker for a Democratic fund-raiser, she must have sensed immediately from Eleanor’s reception in a room full of women that, although she had chosen her for the Roosevelt name, Eleanor left them with “the warmth of her feeling.”
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In the early 1920s one of Eleanor’s earliest circles of friends outside New York City was centered in Ithaca, where she made friends with the women who founded Cornell University’s program in home economics. She first met Martha Van Rensselaer there in her work with the League of Women Voters, and when Martha and her friend and cohort, Flora Rose, were working to establish a publicly funded school of home economics at Cornell, they often went to talk with Governor Roosevelt about their needs.4 Eleanor invited them to stay at the governor’s mansion on those occasions; at other times they were invited for meetings at Hyde Park. Martha was so interested in the furniture that Nan was making in the shop at Val-Kill that she ordered a Val-Kill partner’s desk for her and Flora so that they could work across from one another. Martha and Flora were so inseparable, in fact, that some people called them Miss Van Rose collectively. Scholars of the home economics movement have pointed out that domestic partnerships such as theirs set an example of how fulfilling a female household can be. Their partnership showed that “the proper management of domestic matters both within and outside the home could bring about a more perfect society.”5 Watching Martha and Flora work together reinforced Eleanor’s preference for the shared interests of friends.
Eleanor began taking Nan, perhaps the “homemaker” of Val-Kill, with her to Ithaca, and they drove in all kinds of weather to attend the annual Farm and Home Week with thousands of farm women. Eleanor herself was a frequent lecturer at the event, and she liked sleeping in the room where there were photographs of Miss Van Rensselaer, where, even after Martha’s death in 1932, her spirit seemed immortal. Also driving with Eleanor and Nan was Elinor Morgenthau, whose husband, Henry, who would become FDR’s secretary of the treasury, had studied in the university’s agriculture program
. Like Eleanor, Martha and Flora had a constant flow of guests, and dinner-table talk always included conversations about the development of statewide programs for women in rural New York and invariably turned into lively planning sessions for upcoming events.
Martha and Flora were not only colleagues; they were a couple, unhappy when they had to be separated. When Martha had a six-month sabbatical in 1931, she wrote Eleanor that she hoped to see her when she came to Washington to help with the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. However, she explained, “I have so little enthusiasm in regard to my going that I am not burning any bridges behind me.” After her signature, “Very affectionately, Martha Van Rensselaer,” she added a handwritten note, “Flora is no happier than I am about it.”6 Eleanor wrote similar notes about not wanting to be away from Marion and Nan. She understood Martha’s and Flora’s dependence on each other and recognized how much work they accomplished together.
Ironically, Eleanor had seldom had a chance to be a “housewife,” and the opportunity to learn some domestic skills was exciting. She was impressed by the economy of rural housewives as taught in extension courses offered by Cornell. Many of the tips for economizing that Eleanor applied in the New York governor’s mansion and in the White House came straight out of Flora Rose’s programs for rural women held at Cornell. She, Elinor, and Nan were frequent participants. Nan had more to learn about how to cook and how to set up their own cottage kitchen, a popular subject for the extension movement. After Eleanor moved into the White House, she tried to have her kitchen prepare some of Flora Rose’s seven-and-a-half-cent meals, one of which included hot stuffed eggs, potatoes, bread, prune pudding, and coffee. They proved to be so unpopular with guests and were so ridiculed in the press, however, that she asked her housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, to come up with some new menus. Nesbitt, with no training except in her own kitchen in Dutchess County, was confident that she knew what people liked (simple foods), but despite complaints from many who ate at the White House (including FDR), Eleanor kept Nesbitt for all twelve years. She agreed that perhaps the cheap meals should be served only to the family, not to guests, but she was eager to apply the economic lessons she had learned from the programs at Cornell, and certainly the Great Depression gave her all the reason she needed to save money. She intended to demonstrate that the White House kitchen could serve as a model for “a struggling populace.”7
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 8
