The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (20 page)

For a little while he showed no improvement. The days dragged on and the doctors kept saying he must have a nurse, but it was hard to get one, so I kept on taking care of him and slept on a couch in his room at night. His temperature at times was very high. It required a certain amount of skilled nursing and I was thankful for every bit of training Miss Spring had given me.

Finally my husband’s uncle, Frederic Delano, begged us to have the well-known infantile paralysis doctor, Dr. Lovett, come up from Newport. He examined my husband carefully and after consultation told me it was infantile paralysis.

I was in a panic because, besides my own children, we had Mr. Howe’s little boy with us. I asked Dr. Lovett what the chances were that some of the children would come down with it. He said that probably none of them would do so since they had not already become ill.

After Dr. Lovett’s visit, we finally got a nurse from New York, called Miss Rockey, but Dr. Lovett had been so flattering as to certain aspects of my husband’s care, not knowing that I had been the only nurse on the case, that it was decided I should continue to do a certain amount of the nursing. This I did until we were finally able to move him back to New York.

My mother-in-law returned from abroad and came up to see my husband and then returned to New York to get things ready for us. When it was considered safe, we obtained a private car in which to move my husband. Dr. Bennett agreed to go down with us, and it was arranged that the car was to be switched around in Boston so we would be able to go straight into New York without any change. This move required a great deal of planning.

Mr. Howe had made up his mind to give up all idea of taking the position that was open to him and to come back to his old boss, because he saw quite plainly that his help was going to be needed. From that time on he put his whole heart into working for my husband’s future. The handling of his mail and the newspapers all fell entirely into Louis’s hands.

At first we tried to keep all news out of the papers, not wanting to say anything until we knew something definite about the future. Of course we were anxious to make the trip home as inconspicuous and unsensational as possible. We put Franklin on an improvised stretcher and took him down from the house over the rough ground and stony beach and put him into the small motorboat, chugged two miles across the bay, carried him up the steep gangway, and placed him on one of the drays used for luggage in that northern part of the country. Every jolt was painful, as we walked to the station and the stretcher went into his compartment through the window.

The strain of this trip must have been great for my husband. First of all, a sense of helplessness when you have always been able to look after yourself makes you conscious every minute of the ease with which someone may slip and you may be dropped overboard, in transferring from the dock to the boat. In addition, he had not wanted crowds to witness his departure, and of course there was not only kindly interest in Eastport but there was a certain amount of interest inspired by newspapers in other parts of the country that were trying to find out just what was the matter.

We finally reached New York, and here again my husband was taken out of the car through the window and then by ambulance to the Presbyterian Hospital.

There followed days and weeks at the hospital. Dr. Lovett came occasionally, but his young associate, Dr. George Draper, was in charge most of the time.

The children were all back at school and stopped in to see him every day, with the exception of James, who was in Groton. The time seemed endless but he actually came home before Christmas.

Franklin’s mother was really remarkable about this entire illness. It must have been a terrific strain for her, and I am sure that, our of sight, she wept many hours, but with all of us she was very cheerful. She had, however, made up her mind that Franklin was going to be an invalid for the rest of his life and that he would retire to Hyde Park and live there. Her anxiety over his general health was so great that she dreaded his making any effort whatever.

Though Franklin was in bed most of the time, Miss Rockey took charge of him except in the afternoons. Then I had to be at home. He was tall and heavy to lift, but somehow both of us managed to learn to do whatever was necessary. For several weeks that winter his legs were placed in plaster casts in order to stretch the muscles, and every day a little of the cast was chipped out at the back, which stretched the muscles a little bit more. This was torture and he bore it without the slightest complaint, just as he bore his illness from the very beginning. I never but once heard him say anything bordering on discouragement or bitterness. That was some years later, when he was debating whether to do something which would cost considerable money, and he remarked that he supposed it was better to spend the money on the chance that he might not be such a helpless individual.

In many ways this was the most trying winter of my entire life. It was the small personal irritations, as I look back upon them now, that made life so difficult. My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet, which made the discussions about his care somewhat acrimonious on occasion. She always thought that she understood what was best, particularly where her child was concerned, regardless of what any doctor might say. I felt that if you placed a patient in a doctor’s care you must at least follow out his suggestions and treatment. The house was not overlarge and we were very crowded.

My husband’s bedroom was at the back of the house on the third floor, because it was quieter there. I had given my daughter, who was fifteen that winter, the choice of a large room at the front of the third floor, which she would be obliged to share with the nurse during the afternoon and early evening, or a small room on the fourth floor rear, next to Elliott’s room. This she would have entirely to herself. She chose the latter.

Mr. Howe took the big room on the third floor, as he had come to live with us during the week, because his wife could find no apartment in New York which was suitable both to their needs and their purse. During the weekends he journeyed to Poughkeepsie, where his wife and little boy were installed in a house and his daughter was at Vassar College. He was downtown most of the day at my husband’s office, so the nurse could use his room undisturbed.

We had a connecting door into a room in my mother-in-law’s house on the fourth floor, so the two little boys and their nurse had those rooms. This accounted for all the bedrooms and left me with no room. I slept on a bed in one of the little boys’ rooms. I dressed in my husband’s bathroom. In the daytime I was too busy to need a room.

The boys soon became entirely oblivious of the fact that their father had ever been ill. By spring he would sit on the floor with the little boys in the library, and they would play with him without the slightest idea that he was not able to do anything he wished to do in the way of rough-housing with them.

Anna, however, felt the strain of the overcrowded house and the atmosphere of anxiety. I had put her in Miss Chapin’s School. I canvassed several schools and decided that Miss Chapin had the kind of personality which would appeal to me. I hoped the same relationship would grow up between Anna and Miss Chapin as I had had with Mlle. Souvestre. I did not realize how set and rigid New York schools were and that a girl coming in from outside would be looked upon by all the children as an outsider and would hardly be noticed by the teachers. Anna was very unhappy, though I did not realize it. She felt lost, and the different methods of teaching bewildered her. She tried to hide her feelings by being rather devil-may-care about her marks and her association with the other girls.

Someone had suggested to her that it was unfair that she should have a little fourth-floor room and Mr. Howe should have the large room on the third-floor front. Because of constant outside influences, the situation grew in her mind to a point where she felt that I did not care for her and was not giving her any consideration. It never occurred to her that I had far less than she had. There were times at the dinner table when she would annoy her father so much that he would be severe with her and a scene would ensue, then she would burst into tears and go sobbing to her room.

I knew nothing, of course, of what had been said to her and went on rather blindly thinking that girls of fifteen were far more difficult to bring up than boys.

I realize now that my attitude toward her had been wrong. She was an adolescent girl and I still treated her like a child and thought of her as a child. It never occurred to me to take her into my confidence and consult with her about our difficulties or tell her just what her father was going through in getting his nerves back into condition.

I have always had a bad tendency to shut up like a clam, particularly when things are going badly; and that attitude was accentuated, I think, as regards my children. I had done so much for them and planned everything and managed everything, as far as the household was concerned, for so many years that it never occurred to me that the time comes, particularly with a girl, when it is important to make her your confidante. If I had realized this I might have saved Anna and myself several years of real unhappiness. I would have understood her a great deal better because she would have been able to talk to me freely, and she would have understood me and probably understood her father and all he was fighting against.

As it was, I am responsible for having given her a most unhappy time, and we can both be extremely grateful for the fact that finally the entire situation got on my nerves and one afternoon in the spring, when I was trying to read to the two youngest boys, I suddenly found myself sobbing as I read. I could not think why I was sobbing, nor could I stop. Elliott came in from school, dashed in to look at me and fled. Mr. Howe came in and tried to find out what the matter was, but he gave it up as a bad job. The two little boys went off to bed and I sat on the sofa in the sitting room and sobbed and sobbed. I could not go to dinner in this condition. Finally I found an empty room in my mother-in-law’s house, as she had moved to the country. I locked the door and poured cold water on a towel and mopped my face. Eventually I pulled myself together, for it requires an audience, as a rule, to keep on these emotional jags. This is the one and only time I remember in my entire life having gone to pieces in this particular manner. From that time on I seemed to have got rid of nerves and uncontrollable tears, for never again has either of them bothered me.

The effect, however, was rather good on Anna, because she began to straighten out, and at last she poured out some of her troubles and told me she had been wrong and she knew that I loved her and from that day to this our mutual understanding has constantly improved.

Today no one could ask for a better friend than I have in Anna or she has in me. Perhaps because it grew slowly, the bond between us is all the stronger. No one can tell either of us anything about the other; and though we may not always think alike or act alike, we always respect each other’s motives, and there is a type of sympathetic understanding between us which would make a real misunderstanding quite impossible.

Dr. Draper felt strongly that it was better for Franklin to make the effort to take an active part in life again and lead, as far as possible, a normal life, with the interests that had always been his. Even if it tired him, it was better for his general condition.

The previous January Franklin had accepted an offer made by Mr. Van Lear Black to become vice-president of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Baltimore, in charge of the New York office, and he had worked there until his illness. Mr. Black was a warm friend and kept his place for him until he was well enough to resume his work.

Mr. Howe felt that the one way to get my husband’s interest aroused was to keep him as much as possible in contact with politics. This seemed to me an almost hopeless task. However, in order to accomplish his ends Mr. Howe began to urge me to do some political work again. I could think of nothing I could do but during the spring I was thrown on two or three occasions with a young woman who interested me considerably. Her name was Marion Dickerman. She was interested in working conditions for women and she taught in a school. I, too, was interested in working conditions for women, harking back to the interests of my girlhood. Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw asked me to attend a luncheon of the Women’s Trade Union League and become an associate member. I joined the organization and have been a member ever since. This luncheon was my second contact with some of the women whom I had first met in Washington at the International Conference for Working Women and this resulted in a long association. I have never lost touch with this group. Many of them were interested in politics, and I soon found that Marion Dickerman also was interested.

Through my acquaintance with Miss Dickerman I met her friend Nancy Cook. Miss Cook invited me to preside at a luncheon to raise funds for the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee. I had been carrying on to a limited extent my work for the League of Women Voters, but I had never done anything for a political organization before nor had I ever made a speech in any sizable gathering. Here I found myself presiding at a luncheon, without the faintest idea of what I was going to say or what work the organization was really doing. That was the beginning of a warm and lasting friendship with both Miss Dickerman and Miss Cook, and through them I met Miss Harriet May Mills and Mrs. Caroline O’Day and went to work with the Democratic women of New York State.

We moved to Hyde Park, bag and baggage, and spent the whole summer there except for a short time when I took the younger children to Fairhaven for a change of air and some sea bathing. I did not even stay with them all the time, but there I became conscious of the fact that I had two young boys who had to learn to do the things that boys must do—swim and ride and camp. I had never done any of these things. I had ridden when I was a child, and up to the age of twenty, but that was far behind me. I had no confidence in my ability to do physical things at this time. I could go into the water with the boys but I could not swim. It began to dawn upon me that if these two youngest boys were going to have a normal existence without a father to do these things with them, I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-round person than I had ever been before.