Eleanor and Franklin (104 page)

In return for clear title to the shop building, Eleanor proposed to relinquish her share in the Stone Cottage. It is not clear why Nan and Marion refused, except that they must have sensed that the new arrangements signified a change in Eleanor's feelings toward them and her withdrawal from a relationship that had been most significant in their lives. Franklin felt they had become too possessive; grateful as he was for the companionship they had given Eleanor—he had even agreed to their becoming members of the Cuff Links group—he was irritated, he told Agnes Leach, who was a good friend of all three women, by the way they went around saying “Eleanor this” and “Eleanor that,” and he was outraged that after all Eleanor had done for them they should be making difficulties over the shop.
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That was the way matters stood when, in the summer of 1938, Marion went abroad. “While I was gone,” she recalled three decades later, “something happened between Eleanor and Nancy. I don't know what. Nancy and Eleanor had a very tragic talk in which both said things they should not have said, but when I came back Nancy was crushed and Eleanor refused to see me. What took place I don't know.”
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Eleanor did, however, spell out her version of what had happened in a letter to Marion on November 9, 1938, when she made a new attempt to gain clear title to the shop by turning over her share in the Todhunter School Fund to Nancy and Marion, and again, half a year later, when she finally insisted on withdrawing totally from Todhunter.

The talk I had with you last summer was a very preliminary one, but it was the result of a long period in which you may not have realized that you, Nan and I were having serious difficulties. After you left, I had a long and very illuminating talk with Nan which made me realize that you and Nan felt that you had spent your lives building me up. As I never at any time intended to put you in that position, and as I never had any personal ambitions, I was a little appalled to discover what was in Nan's mind, and of course must
have been in yours. I know Nan well enough to know that you are a great influence and factor in her life.

In addition, on a number of occasions Nan has told me how extremely difficult my name made the school situation for you. You have told me that in spite of that, you wished me to continue my connection because we had begun together. However, in view of the fact that other factors have entered the situation which made me feel that we no longer had the same relationship that I thought we had in the past, there was no point in subjecting you to a situation which was detrimental. One real factor was that certain things came back to me through Franklin which made me realize many things which I had never realized before.

With a completely clear understanding, both financially and personally, I feel sure that we can have a very pleasant and agreeable relationship at Hyde Park. Any work I do in the future will of course be along entirely different lines which will not bring me into close contact with either of you in your work.

I shall always wish both you and Nan well in whatever you undertake, and I feel sure that we can all enjoy things at Hyde Park but not on the same basis that we have in the past.

I am looking forward very much to having you and Molly and the girls here on Friday. The arrangements which you suggested for Saturday have all been made, and the girls here invited for four o'clock.

She signed herself “affectionately.” Marion replied that she had never used the expression “building up” nor even entertained the idea, and she knew nothing of what had come back to her from Franklin, with whom she had spoken for a few moments only after Eleanor had refused to talk with her for the second time. However, she accepted Eleanor's decision to sever her connection with the school and wished to consider a matter closed which had caused her much unhappiness and disillusionment. She, too, signed her letter “affectionately.”

Eleanor's final transaction of giving up her share of the Todhunter School Fund, however, added to her disaffection from her friends. When Marion informed Franklin that she considered the fund a school trust and not the personal property of the three, Eleanor indignantly pointed out that they had all paid income taxes on their share of the fund which came out of the school profits; “If I were to die my executors would be obliged to get my share of that fund for my estate.” If
Marion did not consider this a fair way of compensating Nancy for her share in the shop building, Eleanor was prepared to agree to a cash payment. “I have, however, as great a desire to feel during my life I am living in a building which I own as you have to feel that this fund which you have earned shall be used for purposes which you decide on. Therefore, I will only live in the shop building if there is a tangible settlement of the cash values according to Nancy's accounts.” And when Harry Hooker told her that she did not have to file a gift-tax return in connection with the transfer of the fund to Marion and Nancy, Eleanor stubbornly insisted she “would rather pay the gift tax, as I want to have it registered that I gave up something which I had possessed. It is not a school fund. It belonged to the three of us jointly.”
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Eleanor brought all the financial papers to Elizabeth Read, who did her income-tax returns. Elizabeth was horrified by the injustice of the settlement, but she was unable to get Eleanor to change her mind. “Elizabeth, what you say is true—but I can never forget that these two girls are afraid of the future and I am not.”
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For Eleanor, the chapter of Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman was closed. She continued to include them in the Cuff Links dinners at the White House and invited them to the big entertainments at Hyde Park when the president was there, and she sent them a turkey at Thanksgiving and small gifts at Christmas, but she brushed off every attempt to revive the old relationship. The real state of her feelings was indicated by Tommy, who in writing a well-meaning gentleman said, “I doubt if it would be of much help to you to consult Miss Cook about anything concerning Mrs. Roosevelt.”
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Eleanor thought of herself as a countrywoman, and at times even imagined that if she had been born under other circumstances she might have made “a fairly adequate farmer's wife, having the necessary health and energy.” Those she had, but other rural talents she lacked. She was all thumbs; try as she would she was never able to achieve the results with furniture stains, flower arrangements, and vegetables that Nancy managed effortlessly. Fortunately, there were always friends eager to serve her, and while communications between the two houses at Val-Kill, which were only 150 feet apart and connected by a flagstone walk, were, after 1938, restricted to the amenities, the costs of landscaping and the flower beds continued to be shared and for a time were under Nancy's supervision.

But Eleanor wanted the cottage to be her own and had made that clear even before the break. Otto Berge, who built the furniture,
should bring it to the house, but “I don't want anything moved into its place until I am there to direct it.”
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There was a good deal of pine paneling in the new cottage and she had the woodwork rubbed down to look the way the furniture did, but she was the judge of when a satisfactory stain had been achieved. The pool was in front of the Stone Cottage; she invited the contractor who had built it to come to Val-Kill with his family for a picnic “and incidentally show some of the rest of us what has to be done about the pool so if anything happens to the man in charge, there would be more than one individual who understood the works.” She supervised the spring planting around her cottage herself, and the excitement of returning to the country a few weeks later to find all her plants and bushes growing so fast she hardly recognized them had a special savor. “I love contrasts in flowers as I do in people, the pale columbine is a good foil for the sturdier zinnia,” and no garden was complete for her without “some old fashioned yellow rose bushes, a bed of lilies of the valley in some shady spot and sweet peas and pansies to grow more abundant the more you pluck them.”
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She was happy at Val-Kill; it was her house in a way none had ever been before—a rambling, two-story stucco structure with some twenty rooms of all sizes and shapes, each with its own books and pictures that Eleanor took pleasure in selecting herself. Since the house in time accumulated wings, there were unexpected step-ups and step-downs, alcoves and recesses everywhere, and guests, if they wanted it, could have complete privacy. Eleanor's bedroom overlooked the pond in which the sunrise and sunset were reflected. She slept on a sleeping porch surrounded by trees; in the morning there was the chirping of the birds to awaken her and at night a croaking chorus of frogs. On her bedside table was her father's copy of the New Testament with his interlineations, the one that had accompanied him all around the world and that he and Anna had read together in the days of their courtship.

Tommy, who had become much more than Eleanor's secretary, had her own apartment in the cottage. When they had started to work together in the twenties at the New York Democratic State Committee, there had been one immediate bond between them: Eleanor had been no more experienced in dictating letters than Tommy had been in taking shorthand, and as a result they had gotten along famously. “Now Mrs. Roosevelt can dictate enough letters in one hour to keep me busy for two days,” Tommy told friends in 1936. Working for Eleanor Roosevelt was her life, and she wanted no other. She had begun as a shy, awkward girl from the Bronx, the daughter of a
locomotive engineer, and now was a poised woman of the world. She had a strong, determined chin and could even say “no” to “Mrs. R.,” as she called her, in order to protect her. Once when Eleanor started to dictate a letter to an official asking him to do something on behalf of a petitioner, Tommy let her hands fall to her side: “You can't do that,” she told Eleanor. “Of course I can,” was the reply, to which Tommy's rebuttal was: “Don't you know he'll be back and ask to be invited to the White House as a return favor?” The letter was not written. During her White House years Tommy refused to go out socially. “If I lost my job tomorrow, those people wouldn't give me house room,” she used to say. “And anyway you're always expected to pay for such favors—in some way.”

Eleanor reciprocated Tommy's loyalty. Copy number 3 of
This Is My Story
went to her, and when Tommy became ill in 1938 and was taken to the hospital, Eleanor canceled all her appointments to be at her bedside.

Tommy's apartment in the Val-Kill cottage had two bedrooms and a screened porch where, on genial summer days, breakfast and lunch were served. A living room served as Tommy's office and a kitchen served as a bar, usually presided over by Henry Osthagen, a gruff-voiced employee of the Treasury Department who had been gassed in the war and who became Tommy's companion after she and her husband separated. Guests at the cottage usually assembled in Tommy's office-living room for drinks before going to dinner, a ritual that Eleanor never allowed to become too protracted. It was a family joke that when mother announced dinner, there was no nonsense—“it was ready—now.”

After dinner the guests went into the living room and sat around the fireplace. Conversation never flagged, with Eleanor, her fingers busy with some piece of knitting, setting the pace. She loved to read aloud, especially poetry, and often the much-used
Home Book of Verse
or Auntie Corinne's many books of poetry or, in the late thirties, “John Brown's Body” by Stephen Vincent Benét was brought out. She read well and without self-consciousness.

She managed an occasional week end at Val-Kill all through the winter but really lived there from Memorial Day until the end of September. The seasons in Dutchess County are very distinct, each with its own colors, shapes, and scents, and the changes and Eleanor's pleasure in them were faithfully chronicled in her letters and columns.
In winter she walked the snow-deep trails in high walking boots, a captive of the peacefulness of the winter landscape, and in summer she rode through the same woods on her horse Dot. Occasionally she saw a deer silhouetted against the trees and in July “an old friend,” a blue heron, flying out of the marsh. In July, too, the purple loosestrife, which grew in marshy ground, enveloped Val-Kill in a violet haze. The marshes were also a breeding ground for large wood-flies, which sometimes kept her from riding until the wind blew them away.

She swam daily in the pool, and her effort to go off the diving board head first was a demonstration of sheer grit: she bent over the edge slowly, her fingers reaching toward her toes, at last tilting into the pool with a great splash. She never mastered it; she never gave up trying. She was always on the lookout for games and sports with which to amuse her guests and keep herself in trim. One season it was archery, another it was skiing (“I tried coming down one hill and to everyone's amusement landed in a heap at the bottom”).
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But it was only deck tennis that she could enjoy herself rather than through her friends' pleasure.

Her guest rooms were usually occupied, and rare was the day without its special excitement, whether it was the child star Shirley Temple and her parents, for whose visit Eleanor collected as many grandchildren as she could, or NYA administrators, who came to discuss their problems with her and whose presentation, when Franklin drove over and the officials crowded around his open car, she skillfully steered so that they put their best foot forward, for she wanted them to get more funds.
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Much as she loved the peacefulness of Val-Kill and a rainy day alone there before an open fire, she loved people more. Whoever interested her was invited to spend the day and told to bring his bathing suit. Eleanor would be at the Poughkeepsie station to meet him, a summery figure in a linen skirt and cotton blouse, white shoes and white stockings, a white ribbon around her hair.