Eleanor and Franklin (34 page)

She wanted to participate in other sports with her husband, but her feelings of awkwardness and shyness as well as her husband's self-centeredness deterred her. Franklin loved golf, and Eleanor practiced secretly, but when she went golfing with him she played so badly and Franklin was so impatient with her that she gave it up then and there. During their courtship he had tried to coax her onto the tennis court, but he now accepted her protestations that she would only spoil the game for others—so she was relegated to entertaining the guests on the sidelines. At Hyde Park, too, her efforts to join in outdoor activities were unsuccessful. Her ankles were too weak for ice-skating. She enjoyed riding and tried Franklin's horse Bobby, but he was used to Franklin's handling and she could not control him. When Sara, who could handle Bobby (the horse at one time had been hers), took the view that there were not enough people at Hyde Park to justify two saddle horses, Eleanor meekly said that she preferred not to ride.
⁴
As a result, the only outdoor pleasures she shared with her husband were long walks and picnics.

It was not customary for wives to go on long cruises with their husbands, but Eleanor was left out of the carefree active summer life on Campobello more than most young women of her time. She did not complain, however, and at the end of each summer she would busy herself provisioning the
Half Moon
for Franklin and Hall for a run to Nova Scotia or westward to Bar Harbor.
*

The first few summers at Campobello the Franklin Roosevelts lived with Sara, who managed not only the household but everything else with great firmness. Franklin was an expert sailor and he loved the
Half Moon
, but for many years Sara, not Franklin, gave the captain his orders, and only when her son had guests at Campobello was the boat turned completely over to him. Sara also kept the management
of Hyde Park firmly in her own hands. She allowed her son to take some responsibility for the woods and the roads but meticulously kept his operations and hers separate.

Back in New York during the winter of 1906–7, Eleanor led an even quieter life than before, because she still had not completely recovered from her difficult pregnancy and tired easily. Occasionally, however, she and Franklin accepted an invitation to one of the big balls. The night of the Sloane dance, they had the Teddy Robinsons and the Biddles to dinner, went to a play, and then stopped at Mama's to “prink a little” before proceeding to the Sloanes', where they stayed through the cotillion and supper. Sometimes Eleanor encouraged Franklin to go alone or to stay on after she left. At Hyde Park it was customary to dine, dance, and see the New Year in at the Rogers' “with a great deal of noise and a punch bowl.” There was ice-skating on the Hudson and tobogganing and skating on the Rogers pond. There were even baseball games on the spacious front lawn when the weather permitted. “We all went to a dinner of 50 at the Rogers,” Sara noted New Year's Eve. “A dance after it. . . . E. does not seem at all well.” Helen and Teddy were also at the party. “We dined at the Rogers tonight,” Helen wrote, “a great big dinner as Edmund has a lot of men with him, & F.D.R. & Eleanor, Sylvia & Corinne are all staying at Cousin Sallie's & were all at dinner. It was great fun. . . . Teddy stayed till quite late . . . & I was tired, so we slept till 10.30 this morning.”

Corinne also remembered the party. Eleanor had left with Sara after dinner; Franklin had stayed on, at Eleanor's urging, and had had “a lovely time,” Corinne recalled. “It was an all-night affair and he could not have left before three or four in the morning.” The next day when Corinne finally arose, she went in to see Eleanor and afterward ran into Franklin in the foyer. “He was pale as a sheet and furious. His mother had upbraided him for staying out so late, especially with his wife unwell, and had forced him to come down for breakfast at 8 A.M.” Corinne and Franklin went for a walk and stopped in a greenhouse. “Suddenly there was a clatter of pipes and Franklin literally jumped. ‘Are you afraid Mama is after you again?' I teased.”
⁵

If Eleanor was hurt by Franklin's easy acquiescence in her pulling back from most of the gay life of the young-married set she never said so, but much later she confessed that she had sometimes been jealous. She well remembered a young bride, Eleanor wrote in 1931 in a draft of an article, “The Tests of a Successful Wife” (and the reference, although in the third person, appears to be autobiographical), “who
wept many tears because after an absence of some weeks, her husband on his return talked to her more about his business than about his love for her with the result that she thought the romance and glamor of marriage were gone forever.”

Franklin, self-centered and flirtatious, would gladly have joined in every game or mischievous escapade of the moment. Banter came easily to him, and he was an incorrigible tease. Although Eleanor could laugh robustly, she was usually over-serious, sensitive, and felt insecure in casual relationships. Thus, not wishing to spoil her husband's fun, nor expose herself to embarrassment and humiliation, she increasingly withdrew.

Their different temperaments, values, and upbringing created problems of adjustment for both. She had high and precise standards of how her young husband should behave. If he disappointed her—if he, like her father, was as invariably late as she was prompt; if he forgot an anniversary by which she set much store; if he was sometimes less than frank; if, without suspecting the inner distress it caused her, he agreed to domestic arrangements she did not like—she did not speak to him about it. Instead, she withdrew into heavy silence. The depressions were a form of passive reproach: she did not dare to be defiant, for that meant risking the approval of those whom she wanted to love her. She called them her “Griselda moods,” and she was, like Patient Griselda in Chaucer's “The Clerk's Tale,” the medieval archetype of “wifely obedience . . . all meekness, all yielding, all resignation.” Eleanor not only nursed her hurts and disappointments in silence, but performed her wifely duties so excellently, was so helpful, self-effacing, competent, and understanding that, also like Griselda, “Ech her lovede that looked in her face.”
†
Franklin loved and admired his wife but was often puzzled by her “Griselda moods” and wished she would speak up. He wanted to live up to her expectations and was aware of his shortcomings, even if he was not unduly weighed down by them. It
made him unhappy to see his wife sad or depressed, and at those times he left her alone, hoping it would blow over.

There were other differences between the two. Franklin executed his vestryman's duties at St. James Church faithfully, but often skipped Sunday services to play golf. Eleanor went to church regularly; it took time for her to become reconciled to his casual churchgoing habits. Franklin was dilatory about writing, while she was the most dependable of correspondents. “I was horribly disappointed with your hasty little scrap of a note yesterday after not getting anything for two days,” she wrote from Campobello. It was a recurrent reproach.

In the excitement of the moment he often neglected his duties and forgot his promises, assuming that eventually, if others were involved, Sara or Eleanor would square things for him. And they did.

Eleanor took care of the amenities. When babies were born she sent notes of congratulations and ordered the gifts. When someone was ill, she called; when friends or relatives died, it was she who wrote. When Sara was not with them, it was Eleanor who said to Franklin, “I think Mama would love a letter from you” or “Don't forget Mama's birthday is the 21st.” When Sara returned from Europe it was Eleanor who advised Franklin to have a man at customs “to see Mama through quickly . . . she expects us to ‘smooth' things.” She had an obsession about paying bills promptly; Franklin could be quite casual about this and tended to overlook them. She did not want to bother him in the midst of his Cambridge festivities, Eleanor wrote him in June, 1907, but “this has just come and I thought you said you wrote the man a note. . . . ”

Whether gladly or not, she accepted the role of prodder and manager in family affairs in her marriage, just as she had for her brother. On the whole, life seemed good. When two of her bridesmaids, Ellen Delano and Muriel Robbins, wrote her in the spring of 1907 about their young men, she commented to Franklin, “God bless them both and may their husbands be as good to them as you have been to me.”

Her preparations at the end of 1907 for the birth of her second child were a model of serene efficiency. “It is a very active infant or infants (!),” she wrote her mother-in-law, “and I have never felt so well but it will stick out in front and I have great difficulty keeping my clothes from rising up to my chin! Miss Spring says if it is twins she will run away!!” On December 16, Miss Spring again came to stay.

Eleanor wrote out a list of things for Franklin to do.

F.D.
R. List

Tell Sara she can have Mrs. Keenan for the afternoon & evening on her Sunday out & on Thursday evenings. Speak to Mrs. K. yourself. Tell Nurse to put Anna to sleep in her
crib
until I am well enough for her to go in her cage & to bring her down to you in the mornings as soon as you call & then you get the nursemaid when you leave to bring her sewing & stay with her till Nurse can come for her. Telephone G'ma—47 Germantown, Cousin Susie, Isabella 331 Plaza. A. Corinne 6605 - 38th St. Helen 1008 79th St. Telegraph A. Bye 1733 N. St.

Milk tags for cans to be given Sara about Jan. 3d are in left hand drawer of my desk. Address envelopes for bills next to tags.

She bought and wrapped the Christmas gifts and filled the stockings, “even [for] Baby Anna and Miss Spring,” Sara reported in some astonishment. On December 22, 1907, Eleanor, Franklin, and Hall dined with Sara and at 10:30 walked home. An hour later Hall was sent back to Sara's to spend the night there, as Eleanor's pains had begun. Franklin called his mother at 2:45 in the morning.

“I flew over and found Franklin to greet me with ‘a son all right Mummy.'” Sara wrote in her diary. “I hope it will be
James
.”

Franklin, elated, could not wait to inform the world. He called Helen and Teddy before breakfast, and Helen arrived almost immediately. Franklin showed her the “cunning baby,” she reported. “He is lovely & looked like a 3-weeks-old child instead of only 7 hours! Weighs 10 lbs. 5 oz.”

On the day that James was christened, Sara noted in royal phrases, “I gave presents on the place and house in honor of the named.” As for Eleanor, her “heart sang,” and she greeted the birth of a son with “relief and joy.”

Despite James' size he was a sickly baby. He came down with pneumonia, and even after he recovered he was not completely well. The winter was difficult, for both baby and mother—“one of the times” in her life, Eleanor wrote, which she “would rather not live over again.” To be near their doctor, the Roosevelts rented a cottage at Seabright, New Jersey, for the summer of 1908. Sara preferred not to be in Campobello without her children, and commuted between Hyde Park and Seabright during the hot summer months as did Franklin.

That summer Franklin had one of the first Fords around—it had no windshield, was cranked by hand, and was prone to frequent blowouts.
“Has Franklin done anything rash yet—such as driving across the lawn and through the hedge?” Hall inquired. But it was Eleanor, not Franklin, who banged into the gate post when she was learning to drive. She gave up the attempt after the mishap, appalled at having damaged something that was Franklin's. She preferred the victoria, in which she and the children took drives along the beach.

Franklin and Eleanor enjoyed their children, whose first lispings were chronicled in detail. “She kept her eyes fixed on the door and said ‘pa pa pa' all the time,” Eleanor reported of Anna, aged eight months. There wasn't a funnier sight, she told her mother-in-law, than Franklin coming up the hill with Anna on his back, her “two short legs sticking straight out of either side of his head.” Anna's first steps were duly noted. “She began on Sunday going from him [Franklin] to Cousin Susie and does better all the time but she loves it so that she really runs instead of walking which is the cause of many tumbles and subsequent tears.”

In later years Eleanor described herself as having been a model of innocence and ignorance in her methods of child training. A believer in fresh air, she cradled Anna in a wire contraption rigged up outside a window until outraged neighbors, who allegedly threatened to report Eleanor to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, compelled her to give up the experiment. But the other young wives thought her a pioneer. “How well I remember the Tuckermans, etc. on 37th Street agitating over the baby outside the window,” Lily Polk later recalled, “and how wise the younger ones thought it and when we copied you how daring we felt!”

Though Eleanor knew what habits she wanted to encourage in her children, she was not sufficiently sure of herself to overrule the formidable array of mother-in-law, nurses, and English governess. In these early years she yielded to their authority against her own better judgment. “Anna is upset today so I am told though I haven't seen her long enough to judge for myself. Mama and Nelly think so, however, so she has gone to bed and had a dose of castor oil.” On another occasion she thought that Anna wasn't well, but Sara disagreed. The doctor came and said Anna “should have calomel and I expect all would have been well before had I given it but Mama is so against it I didn't dare!” But if Sara and a nurse disagreed, the headstrong Sara laid down the law: “I told Nurse Watson she
must
get up and turn her [Anna] over and soothe her,” Sara once noted in her diary.

When Anna was sixteen months old, Nurse Nelly had to be away. “I am to take charge of her and put her to bed tonight,” Eleanor wrote, and noted the next day, “I never knew before how easy it was to take care of Anna.” When Nurse Nelly returned, the baby was pleased, but, wrote Eleanor, “I am glad to say I think she missed me a little last night!”