Eleanor and Franklin (9 page)

The relationship between Alice and Eleanor, both born in 1884, may not have been as serene as their elders assumed. The two cousins were very different. Though a frail child, “Baby Lee” was as proud, self-assured, and competitive as her father. Golden-curled and saucy, her blue eyes flashed an endless challenge, while Eleanor was gentle, docile, shy, and already painfully aware of her ungainliness. For two years Eleanor wore a steel brace to correct a curvature of the spine, “a very uncomfortable brace.” Alice, like Eleanor, idolized her father, and also felt rebuffed and neglected by her mother—in her case, her stepmother. Her response was to rebel, to turn tomboy, which she knew annoyed her stepmother, while Eleanor, much as she would have liked to imitate Alice, withdrew into injured melancholy. Alice seemed “older and cleverer,” she said much later, “and while I always admired her I was always afraid of her.”

The summer of 1888 had been a time of closeness to her parents and happiness for Eleanor, who was going on four. “The funny little tot had a happy little birthday,” her father wrote to Bamie, thanking her for Eleanor's birthday present, “and ended by telling me, when saying good night (after Anna had heard her say her prayers) that she ‘loved everybody and everybody loved her.' Was it not cunning?”

That fall and winter were to be the last time Anna, Elliott, and Eleanor enjoyed life as a family. By late spring, 1889, they were finally and fully settled in their “country seat,” which they called “½-way Nirvana.” Anna was pregnant again and expected to spend a quiet summer.

It was only a few weeks later that Elliott, rehearsing with friends for an amateur circus to be staged at the Waterbury place in Pelham, fractured his ankle in turning a double somersault. The break was incorrectly diagnosed as a sprain, and he was in agony for two weeks after the plaster had been broken off. There were days of such pain “that he could eat nothing and at night he would sob for hours.” His leg had to be rebroken and reset. He told Eleanor what the doctors were going to do. She gave him courage and comfort, but it was a thoughtless act, considering that she was not quite five. He did not complain, but Eleanor, being a child of amazing sensitivity, did not have to be told; as leaves moved to the wind, she stirred to the thought of others in pain. If a playmate was injured she wept, and her father was the person she most loved in the world. Her eyes brimmed with tears as he pulled himself on crutches out to the waiting doctors. Eleanor never forgot this experience.

Elliott Jr. was born October 1, 1889, and this event evoked the first letter, dictated to Pussie, from Eleanor, who had been sent to Tivoli to stay with her grandmother.

Dear Father:

I hope you are very well and Mother too. I hope little brother doesn't cry and if he does tell the nurse to give him a tap tap. How does he look? Some people tell me he looks like an elephant and some say he is like a bunny. I told Aunt Pussie today she would be very unhappy if she were a man because his wife would send her down downtown every day she could only come home on Sunday and then she would have to go to church. Goodby now dear Father, write me soon another letter. I love you very much and Mother and Brother too, if he has blue eyes.

Your precious little

Eleanor.

“And,” added Pussie, “Totty [the name by which her Hall aunts called her] is flourishing. She has quite a color and tell Anna the French lessons are progressing, although I am afraid the pupil knows more than the teacher.”

“Eleanor is so proud of her baby brother and talks of nothing else,” was the next report from Tivoli.

Elliott and Anna were equally pleased. The birth of their first son was the fulfillment of “their hearts' desire.” Elliott, in spite of his continuing pain, doted on “Baby Joss,” as the new arrival was called. But even though Elliott was with his new son, Eleanor sensed no change in her father's attitude toward her. She never doubted that she was first in his heart.

With her mother, however, the birth of little Ellie and a year later of Hall did make a difference. Forty years later, in 1929, Eleanor wrote a story for a magazine whose fictional heroine, Sally, was obviously herself.

Her forty-fifth birthday. . . . As she looked [into the fire] pictures formed in the dancing flames, first, there was a blue-eyed rather ugly little girl standing in the door of a cozy library looking in at a very beautiful woman holding, oh so lovingly, in her lap a little fair-haired boy. Through Sally's heart passed the old sensation, the curious dread of the cold glance which would precede the kindly and indifferent “Come in Sally, and bring your book.”

In her autobiography, published in 1937, she was more explicit about her feelings of being left out when her mother was with the two little boys, Ellie and Hall. Her mother did not consciously exclude her; she read to Eleanor and had Eleanor read to her and recite her poems, and Eleanor was allowed to stay after the boys had been sent off to bed. But what Eleanor emphasized was standing in the door, “very often with my finger in my mouth,” and her mother bidding her “Come in, Granny,” with that voice and look of kind indifference. Child psychologists had not yet discovered the connection between the “finger in the mouth” and the hunger for affection. To visitors her mother would explain that she called Eleanor “Granny” because she was “so old-fashioned.”

“I wanted to sink through the floor in shame, and I felt I was apart from the boys.”
⁸

To Eleanor her mother's sigh and exasperated voice were further proof that only her father understood and loved her. And her father was leaving her again. His foot had to be stretched every day to prevent its shortening. He had begun to take laudanum and morphine and to drink ever more heavily to kill the excruciating pain in his foot.
When his behavior became hostile even to those he loved most and he threatened suicide, the doctors prescribed a complete rest, and at the end of December, 1889, he embarked on a trip to the South—without saying good-by to his wife and children. His wife desperately tried to reach him through his love for the children. “Eleanor came rushing down when she heard the postman to know if there was a letter from you and what you said. I told her you would not be here for two weeks and she seemed awfully disappointed, but was quite satisfied when I told her you were getting well.”

Eleanor's whole life was spent waiting for her father. “Eleanor lunched with us yesterday,” wrote Tissie; “she rushed to the stairs every time the bell rang to see if it was her Papa. I shall be so glad to see my
dear
Father, she kept saying. She certainly adores you.”

4.
THE CRACK-UP

T
HE SOUTHERN CURE DID NOT WORK.
E
LLIOTT
'
S DRUNKEN SPREES
became more violent and dissipated. In 1890, in a final desperate effort to hold the family together, they decided to lease their houses in town and Hempstead, sell their horses, and go abroad for a tour of mountain resorts and watering places. Anna declined the Gracies' offer to leave the children with them, and Eleanor, almost six, and baby Elliott accompanied their parents on a restless, troubled journey that ended in disaster.

They went directly to Berlin, and Anna's first extended report to Bamie was bright and hopeful. Count Bismarck got them “splendid places” for the parade of the garrison. Count Sierstorff took them to see the cavalry drill. And the only moment of danger came when Buffalo Bill, who was also in Berlin, offered Elliott whiskey to drink to his health. Sierstorff was wonderful, Anna reported, took the glass out of Elliott's hand, and told Buffalo Bill it was against doctor's orders.

From Berlin they proceeded to Reichenhall, in Bavaria, where the Germans were “all of a class that no one would think of meeting,” Anna wrote. But Elliott took the baths and drank the waters and except for “awful attacks of depression” was sleeping well and his foot had stopped hurting.

“Elliott is really studying German now,” she added, “and I hope he will take some interest in it. Eleanor is beginning to speak a little but teaching her to read is hopeless. She is as good as gold.”

After a month in Reichenhall they went on to Munich and then to Oberammergau for the Passion play before heading for Vienna and Italy. Their expenses, lamented Anna, seemed enormous. “I don't know how it is, but we don't seem to be able to travel under $1,500 a month,” even though they were not buying things. On the way to Vienna they stopped to visit the estate of Count Arco, and that was a disaster. “Elliott was an angel up to Wednesday night. Then I
think
he drank champagne for dinner, though he denies it.” Anna was ill and had to stay in bed, but she tried to accompany Elliott everywhere, “excepting when they were shooting.” Elliott, however, finally eluded her, and she found him drinking brandy and water. “I was furious and said so. It affected him at once. . . . I am sure it is the first alcohol he has touched in two months.”

That fall they moved south to Italy. From Venice, at the end of October. Elliott wrote “Dear Anna's Mother” that though they had “done so much and worked so hard over our amusements . . . the children and Anna are both very well.” Lots of sightseeing and visiting but

her great delight of course; as mine; is in Baby “Joss.” He gets stronger and fatter and rosier every day. I am afraid he is a son of his father, though, for he is not at all a “good boy.” Eleanor is so sweet and good with him and really is learning to read and write for love of it making it possible to tell him stories which he cannot understand.

He told her of

the little things such as Ellie's feeding the pigeons on the Piazza at St. Marks, the lovely music on the Canal in decorative Gondolas by the band of the “32” Regiment, the delight that Eleanor and I have taken in the Lido Shore, wandering up and down looking over the blue Adriatic watching the gray surf and catching funny little crabs!

For Eleanor, the high point in Venice was her father acting as gondolier and singing along with the other boatmen.

They moved on to Florence and then Naples, because, said Anna, “it is warmer.” From Sorrento in November, Anna wrote to Bamie that Elliott

goes sailing every day & takes the children in the morning. I went one afternoon but cannot stand it. Elliott generally takes a nap in the boat in the afternoon. Last night I only got four hours sleep owing to a dear sweet letter from Aunt Annie which completely upset Elliott. Don't repeat this, but beg them to write brightly. Elliott is so nervous everything upsets him. First he sobbed, then got furious and went out, said he would never go home, etc. and worked himself into a perfect fever of excitement.

To her mother she wrote more reassuringly.

This is the most beautiful place, right on the bay with Naples. Vesuvius and Capri opposite and only a little way off Pompeii. Elliott takes both children sailing every morning, while I have an Italian lesson from the Priest here, and later in the afternoon we drive and then go on the water for the sunset.

Pregnant again and unwell, Anna was in bed much of the time, and when Elliott proposed a trip to Vesuvius she begged off. He took Eleanor and her nurse, Albertina. The three were late getting back and Anna had worried herself into a state close to hysterics. For little Eleanor it was an exciting but exhausting trip. Years later she recalled the endless journey down the slope and how it took all her self-control to stand it “without tears so that my father would not be displeased.” Fear of her father's displeasure also seared Eleanor's memory of the donkey that she was given in Sorrento.

“You are not afraid are you?” The tone was incredulous, astonished, and the man looked down from his horse to the child on her small donkey. The eyes were kind, but she sat shivering and hung back, looking at the steep descent. A steely look came into the man's eyes and in a cold voice he said: “You may go back if you wish, but I did not know you were a coward.” She went back and the man went on sliding down the hill after the grown-ups—the nurse and the little donkey boy escorted the five year old girl along the dusty highway back to Sorrento, Italy.
¹

In her autobiography Eleanor recalled another episode with the donkey and the little donkey boy, whose feet were cut and bleeding. “On one occasion we returned with the boy on the donkey and I was running along beside him, my explanation being that his feet bled too much!”

Grasping at externals, Anna thought Elliott was getting better in Sorrento. Not that she supposed he could as yet stand temptation, but she hoped for great things from the next two months; perhaps by the beginning of March they might be able to return home. But she did not feel she could manage the homeward trip alone. She was expecting a baby in June and pleaded with Bye to come over. As the winter rains started and the children took sick “in the nasty wet cold,” the doctors
prescribed a cold, dry climate, and the family settled down for the winter in the old university city of Graz in Austria, in “the beautiful mountains of southern Styria.” At first they all felt “the benefit” of the “hardy, honest and healthy climate,” and Elliott even managed to get off a cheerful report to Theodore, chiefly about his children.