Eleanor and Franklin (16 page)

The summer months in her grandmother's house on the Hudson were among her happiest, even though none of her friends lived close by except Carola dePeyster, whose parents' house was five miles away and with whom she exchanged visits twice each summer. All the great
houses along the Woods Road were on land rising in terraces.
⁵
Below, the Hudson was wide, slow, and majestic, while westward the Catskills rose in hushed silence.

A stone gatehouse led into the Hall estate, and the road went by large stables and came out onto a lawn that was shaded by towering oaks. The driveway went past a lawn tennis court said to have been one of the first built in the United States. Vallie and Eddie were both outstanding tennis players, each in turn winning the National Championship for singles and together for doubles. There was an old orchard behind the water tank and a sluggish little stream in which Eleanor and Hall caught tadpoles.

The children loved Oak Terrace, as the high-ceilinged drafty house with fourteen bedrooms was called. On the first floor there were reception, dining, and music rooms and the massive library wing. The large crystal chandeliers were not used, and the rooms were lit by kerosene lamps. Two bathrooms served the square bedrooms upstairs. On the third floor there were the servants' quarters, and the kitchen and storerooms were in a deep cellar, with a dumbwaiter to transport meals to the dining room. Staples were stored in barrels, and every morning Eleanor accompanied her grandmother to the storeroom and watched her measure out exactly what the cook would need. There was also a big, old-fashioned laundry in the cellar, presided over by Mrs. Overhalse, a neighboring farm woman. Eleanor was told that she could help the kindly lady, and she turned the wringer and learned to iron. There were enormous washes “because for every dress” her aunts wore “there were at least three petticoats.” Eleanor often watched as her aunts dressed for the evening. “The top dress was pinned to the petticoat all the way round the edge so that the flounces would come straight and they would fall correctly.” She watched with envy, wondering when her turn would come.

There were always errands to be run for her aunts and uncles, but in return they played games with the children. They had campfires and evening picnics in the hemlock grove. Uncle Vallie taught her to jump her pony, Captain. Aunt Pussie read her poetry, and Pussie and Maude occasionally permitted Eleanor to accompany them on a drive through the countryside, and she would sit with her legs dangling from the rear of the Hall buggy.

Sunday was a special day in the household. The family drove to church in the victoria, with Eleanor sitting in a little seat that faced backward. Sometimes the victoria swayed so much that she would
begin to feel seasick. St. Paul's Church, on the Woods Road, had been built by the Livingstons, Ludlows, dePeysters, Halls, and Clarksons, and its tree-shaded churchyard was little more than a family burial place with a row of vaults built into the side of a hill. The front pews in the little church were reserved for the Livingstons, with Eleanor's branch on the right side. There was a special door for John Watts dePeyster by which that eccentric man came into a transept that was reserved for him. Before church Eleanor gave a Sunday school lesson to the coachman's little daughter. She also recited a hymn and collect to her grandmother.

There was a minimum of cooking, most of the Sunday dinner having been prepared the day before. In the afternoon no games, not even croquet, were allowed, only walks. The religious pattern that had been set by Grandfather Hall was even followed on weekdays. “My grandmother always had family prayers in the morning to which everybody including every servant in the house and even the coachman was expected to come and there were always evening prayers though all the outside people were not expected to come.” After her aunts and uncles were grown up, Eleanor noted, “they weren't so good about observing all these rules.”

She was a scrupulously well-behaved girl in class, but at Tivoli she sometimes broke her grandmother's rules, playing games along the high gutters of the house with Hall or sliding down the roof of the ice house and getting her clothes dirty, for which she would be sternly scolded. She even practiced high-kicking, although she had to do it secretly because when she expressed admiration for ballet dancing, her grandmother told her that no lady did anything like that.
⁶

Most of all, Tivoli was a place for reading. There were long summer days when she would lie on the grass or climb a cherry tree with a book, sometimes forgetting to appear at meals. On rainy days the attic was her favorite spot. She often awakened at dawn and just as often violated her grandmother's injunction that she was not to read in bed before breakfast. The library was full of her grandfather's heavy theological works, but there were also Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray, and “sometimes a forbidden modern novel which I would steal from my young aunts, purely because I heard it whispered that the contents were not for young eyes.”

Eleanor read everything, disappearing into the fields or woods, often to “cry and cry” over such books as Florence Montgomery's
Misunderstood
and Hector Mallet's
Sans Famille
. The heroes of both these
books were orphaned outcasts with whom she obviously identified.
Sans Famille
, which became
No Relations
in English, began with the declaration “I was a foundling,” and the adventures of this waif were reminiscent of those of Antoine Lemaire in Eleanor's composition for Mr. Roser.
Misunderstood
was a great favorite of the Victorians; as a young girl Sara Delano also sobbed over its pages. In that book the lad Humphrey welcomed death because it would reunite him with his mother and end an existence that had been rendered “miserable” by his father's partiality for Humphrey's little brother. She still enjoyed them, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1950, but she thought them “very sentimental, foolish books to allow a rather lonely child to read.”
†
Sometimes she made a play out of the book she was reading, in which she was the principal character and her brother, six years younger, the supporting cast.
Robinson Crusoe
especially lent itself to such dramatization. The desert island was a secret place in the woods a quarter of a mile away from the main house. Hall was “poor Friday,” and in that role was “forced to do many strange things.”
⁷

Another fictional waif who engaged her sympathy was Peter Ibbetson, the main character in the du Maurier novel by that title which swept romantic young America at the end of the century (probably one of the books she purloined from her aunts). Peter Ibbetson, orphaned at twelve like Eleanor, retreated to an “inner world” where he achieved happiness by learning to “dream true”—that is, to evoke at will the people he loved and to carry on a fantasy life with them in his “private oasis.” Generally her reading was not censored, but if she asked inconvenient questions the books prompting them disappeared. On Sunday mornings the book she was reading was taken away “no matter where I was in it,” and she was given what were called “Sunday books,” works of religious edification.
‡

At fourteen Eleanor had definite opinions, was reflective, and was capable of a crisp expression of her views. An essay on “Ambition” exists only as a draft, and toward the end the corrections she made in it became somewhat illegible, but the main ideas are clear. She was ambitious. She wanted to succeed.

A
MBITION

Some people consider ambition a sin but it seems to me to be a great good for it leads one to do & to be things which without it one could never have been. Look at Caesar. It was because he was ambitious that they killed him but would he ever have been as great a man had he not had ambition? Would his name ever have come down to us if he had not had enough ambition to conquer the world? Would painters ever paint wonderful portraits or writers ever write books if they did not have ambition?

Of course it is easier to have no ambition & just keep on the same way every day & never try to do grand or great things, for it is only those who have ambition & who try & who meet with difficulties, they alone feel the disappointments that come when one does not succeed in what one has meant to do for the others say “It was meant that we should not succeed. Fate has so decreed it” and do not think of it again. But those who have ambition try again, & try till they at last succeed. It is only those who ever succeed in doing anything great.

Ambition makes us selfish and careless of pushing others back & treading on them to gain our wish it is true, but we will only be able to push back the smaller souls for the great ones we cannot tread on. Those who are ambitious & make a place & a name in the great world for themselves are nearly always despised & laughed at by lesser souls who could not do as well & all they do for the good of men is construed into wrong & yet they do the good & they leave their mark upon the ages & if they had had no ambition would they ever have made a mark?

Is it best never to be known & to leave the world a blank as if one had never come? It must have been meant it seems to me that we should leave some mark upon the world & not just live [&] pass away. For what good can that do to ourselves or others? It is better to be ambitious & do something than to be unambitious & do nothing.

Ambition is essential for any kind of success. Even those best men who condemn ambition, must have it or they would never do
anything good. For it is their ambition that makes them wish to do better things than other people.

Therefore it seems to me that after all people have said against it ambition is still a good thing.

While she considered ambition a virtue, wanted to achieve great things and even echoed Roser's social Darwinism with the suggestion that only the fittest survive—and deserve to survive—these were not really the beliefs by which she lived. Highest in her scale of values were loyalty, friendship, service to others. And women, she lamented in another composition, lacked these qualities, which were so much more desirable than mere beauty. Thus did she seek to come to terms with her own lack of good looks. Her distaste for women who kissed one moment and the next tore each other's characters to shreds was also the response of a judgmental young girl to the mercurial crushes of her schoolmates and aunts—some of whom, at least, thought her too high-minded, too serious, too good.

L
OYALTY AND
F
RIENDSHIP

Loyalty is one of the few virtues which most women lack. That is why there are so few real friendships among women for no friendship can exist without loyalty. With a man it is a point of honor to be loyal to his friend but a woman will kiss her best friend one moment & when she is gone will sit down with another best friend & pick the other's character to pieces.

It may seem strange but no matter how plain a woman may be if truth & loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her & she will do good to all who come near her & those who know her will always love her for they will feel her loyal spirit & have confidence in her while another woman far more beautiful & attractive will never gain anybody's confidence simply because those around her feel her lack of loyalty & by not having this great virtue she will lose one of the greatest gifts that God has given man, the power of friendship. . . .

She was, of course, talking about herself. She was the “plain” one, who by her truth and constancy would gain the love and confidence of those around her. She would succeed by the strength of her character since she did not have beauty to fall back upon. The first entry
in a briefly kept journal is a careful copying out of a long poem, “My Kate,” by Mrs. Browning:

She was not as pretty as women I know, yet one

. . . turned from the fairest to gaze in her face.

And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth

You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth. . . .

She never found fault with you, never implied

Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side,

Grew nobler, girls purer as through the whole town

The children were gladder that pulled at her gown.

“So like Aunt Pussie,” Eleanor wrote at the bottom of the poem. “How I wish I was like her. I don't suppose I ever will be though.”

Actually, Pussie, who was the most volatile of the Hall sisters, was not very much like Mrs. Browning's Kate. Pussie was constantly involved in tempestuous love affairs whose ups and downs she shared with Maude and Eleanor, much to their delight. She was also frequently depressed, and when she was she locked her door and talked to no one for days. She was an accomplished pianist, briefly tried her hand at painting, shared her literary enthusiasms with Eleanor, and even took her to meet the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Eleanor devotedly served her lovely aunt, rubbed her temples when she complained of headaches, and once even groped tremblingly down three flights of stairs in the dark of night to get her some ice from the backyard icebox at Thirty-seventh Street. Because Eleanor adored Pussie, she invested her with Kate's nobility, but because Pussie was irresponsible as well as irrepressible, she was scarcely a woman, as Eleanor herself later realized, at whose side men grew nobler and girls purer.

“I have a headache journal tonight,” Eleanor wrote on November 18, 1898.

I am feeling cross. Poor Auntie Pussie she is so worried. I am going to try and see if I can't do something for her tonight. I have studied hard two lessons but I can't think of a composition. I suppose I can think tomorrow. Am not going to tell you—unless something happens. I've tried to be good and sweet and quiet but have not succeeded. Oh my.

She was setting herself very high ideals, an entry for November 13 indicated.

To be the thing we seem

To do the thing we deem enjoined by duty

To walk in faith nor dream