Eleanor and Franklin (58 page)

Franklin's cheerfulness at the time was a fugitive affair, as Eleanor's next letter to Rosy hinted. His temperature had returned to normal, she wrote on the eighteenth, “and I think he's getting back his grip and a better mental attitude though he has of course times of great discouragement.” She had not yet told Franklin that Dr. Keen had warned that his recuperation would take a long time. “I dread the time when I have to tell Franklin and it wrings my heart for it is all so much worse to a man than to a woman but the 3 doctors agree he will be eventually well if nothing unfavorable happens in the next ten days or so and at present all signs are favorable, so we should be very thankful.”

Dr. Keen had brought another doctor into the consultations, but in the meantime Uncle Fred, on the basis of Louis Howe's description of the illness, had consulted doctors in New York who leaned toward a diagnosis of infantile paralysis. “On Uncle Fred's urgent advice,” Eleanor wrote Rosy,

which I feel I must follow on Mama's account, I have asked Dr. Keen to try to get Dr. Lovett here for a consultation to determine
if it is I.P. or not. Dr. Keen thinks
not
but the treatment at this stage differs in one particular and no matter what it costs I feel and I am sure Mama would feel we must leave no stone unturned to accomplish the best results.
¹³

Dr. Keen tracked down Dr. Robert W. Lovett, a specialist in orthopedics, at Newport, and he went to Campobello immediately. Dr. Lovett promptly diagnosed infantile paralysis, but would not commit himself as to the future course of the illness. Eleanor, determined to know the worst, begged Louis to ask Lovett what the chances were of Franklin's recovering the use of his lower limbs, because she felt that the doctor would be more frank with someone who was not a member of the immediate family.

It was impossible to tell, Lovett replied, but whatever chance there was depended on the patient's attitude. “If his interest in resuming active life is great enough, if his will to recover is strong enough, there is undoubtedly a chance.” Eleanor should be prepared “for mental depression and sometimes irritability.”

When she heard the diagnosis of polio she felt a momentary sense of panic because of the children, in addition to her anxiety over Franklin.
¹⁴
She had thought of polio as a possibility, she wrote Dr. Peabody at Groton, and while “it seemed incredible” she had kept the children out of Franklin's room, but that did not mean they were safe.
¹⁵
Lovett assured her, however, that since the children were not already stricken they had probably not been infected. When the trained nurse at last arrived from New York, Lovett and Keen, impressed with Eleanor's skillful care of her husband, felt that she should continue to share the nursing responsibility.

She also acted as Franklin's secretary and scribe. She wrote Langdon Marvin not to come up because “you wouldn't be allowed to see me if you came.” Franklin could not get to the Sulphur Spring meeting, she advised the Fidelity and Deposit home office, but in her letter to Dr. Peabody asking whether James should return to Groton in September in light of his father's illness, she added, “Franklin says to tell you he can still do lots of work on the committee he hopes!” Miss LeHand, meanwhile, not knowing that Franklin was ill, had asked for a raise in salary. Mr. Roosevelt could not jump her to forty dollars but might manage to get her thirty-five, Eleanor wrote.

The most difficult letter was to Sara, who was due to arrive August 31.

Campobello

August 27, 1921

Saturday

Dearest Mama,

Franklin has been quite ill and so can't go down to meet you on Tuesday to his great regret, but Uncle Fred and Aunt Kassie both write they will be there so it will not be a lonely homecoming. We are all so happy to have you home again dear, you don't know what it means to feel you near again.

The children are all very well and I wish you could have seen John's face shine when he heard us say you would be home again soon.

Aunt Jennie is here with Ellen and we are having such lovely weather, the island is really at its loveliest.

Franklin sends all his love and we are both so sorry he cannot meet you.

Ever devotedly

Eleanor

Louis went to New York. “Everything in connection with your affairs is in the best possible shape,” he reported. “I took breakfast with ‘Uncle Fred' before your mama arrived, and filled him full of cheery thoughts and fried eggs. That night, being so exhausted with his day's labors, he decided to take dinner with me and we went together to the movies.”
¹⁶

As soon as she arrived Sara went to Campobello. The façade of cheer she found there did not fool her, but if Eleanor and Franklin were able to put up a brave front so would she. She was heartsick, but noted that Eleanor was doing “a
great
deal” for Franklin and commented, “This again illustrates my point that the lightning usually strikes where you least expect it.” She wrote her sister, Doe (Mrs. Paul R. Forbes):

It was a shock to hear bad news on my arrival at the dock, but I am thankful I did not hear before I sailed, as I came directly here, and being very well and strong I could copy the happy cheerful attitude of Eleanor and even of poor Franklin, who lies there unable to move his legs, which are often painful and have to be moved for him, as they have
no
power. He looks well and eats well and is very keen and full of interest in everything. He made me tell him all about our four days in the devastated region, and told me what he saw when there. Dr. Lovett, the greatest authority we have on
infantile paralysis, pronounced it that and says he
will
get well. At best it will be slow.
¹⁷

“He and Eleanor decided at once to be cheerful,” she reported to her brother Fred,

and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness, so I have fallen in and follow their glorious example. . . . Dr. Bennett just came and said “This boy is going to get well all right.” They went into his room and I hear them all laughing. Eleanor in the lead.

Franklin persuaded his mother to go to Louise Delano's wedding as there was little for her to do at Campobello. “I am glad you sent her off to the wedding. It will do her good,” Rosy wrote from Hyde Park. “Poor Tom Lynch I told him today about you, and he burst out crying.” Lynch was not the only one. “I simply cannot bear to have beautiful, active Franklin laid low even for a time,” Mary Miller wrote when the news caught up with her. Everyone found it difficult to think of “such a vigorous, healthy person ill,” but they admired the “magnificent spirit,” as Adolph Miller put it, which Franklin and Eleanor were showing. Husband and wife did not yield to self-pity, and they discouraged weeping and wailing by those around them. In the letters that Eleanor wrote for him, Franklin set a tone of optimistic banter that he expected those close to him to follow. “After many consultations among the medical fraternity,” his letter to Langdon Marvin said,

my case has been diagnosed by Dr. Lovett as one of poliomyelitis, otherwise infantile paralysis. Cheerful thing for one with my gray hairs to get. I am almost wholly out of commission as to my legs but the doctors say that there is no question that I will get their use back again though this means several months of treatment in New York. . . . The doctors say of course that I can keep up with everything and I expect to do this through Mr. Howe, my former assistant in Washington who will act as my go-between from 65th Street to 52 Wall and the F & D Company.
¹⁸

Howe and Miss LeHand went along with his tone of cheerful badinage. “By the way, Mr. Howe took me up with him in a
taxi
,” Miss LeHand wrote Roosevelt; “isn't that scandalous? I love scandal! . . .
I have moved my desk and typewriter into your office right beside the telephone. Do you object?” Eleanor was grateful. “Your letters have amused him and helped to keep him cheerful.” “Dear Boss,” Louis wrote,

I loved the way Eleanor telegraphed to go into Tiffany's to buy a watch for Calder without mentioning whether it was to be a $1200 Jorgerson or a Waterbury Radiolite; also to have it inscribed without mentioning what to inscribe on it! Lord knows I have acted as your alter-ego in many weird commissions, but I must positively refuse to risk my judgment on neckties, watches or pajamas.
¹⁹

The watch was purchased and given to Captain Calder by Eleanor when the private railroad car that Uncle Fred had obtained pulled out of Eastport with Franklin aboard. It was the captain who, with the aid of some island men, had carried Franklin down the hill to the Roosevelt wharf on a stretcher that he had improvised and placed him on a motorboat for the two-mile crossing to Eastport. There, Louis, who stage-managed the whole move, skillfully diverted the waiting crowd while the stretcher was placed on a luggage cart and pulled up to the train. Each jolt was agony for Franklin, but Calder and his men could not have been gentler as they passed him through a window into the waiting car. Eleanor was deeply grateful to the captain and promised to let him know how Franklin stood the trip as soon as they arrived in New York. Her thoughtfulness as well as Roosevelt's evoked the sea captain's admiration.

I went over to see Dr. Bennett yesterday afternoon and learned from him just how Mr. Roosevelt is taking everything. Isn't it wonderful to think how bravely and hopefully he is facing it all? . . . Say to Mr. Roosevelt that I carried his message to the engine driver who was so careful on the way to Ayer's Junction and he was more than proud.
²⁰

Calder also thanked her for the watch,

which I can accept from you and Mr. Roosevelt, as the spirit in which it is given is so different, also for the real good friendly note which accompanied the same. Who could dare be disloyal to a friend like you? I only hope that Anna can be just like you as she grows older.

In New York Franklin entered Presbyterian Hospital and his case was taken over by Dr. George Draper, Harvard friend and orthopedic specialist. Whether Franklin could recover the use of his leg muscles was wholly uncertain. “I told them very frankly that no one could tell them where they stood,” Lovett advised Draper. The case was a mild one and Lovett thought that “complete recovery or partial recovery to any point was possible, that disability was not to be feared.” But then he hedged; it could go either way, he admitted. It looked to him “as if some of the important muscles might be on the edge where they could be influenced either way—toward recovery, or turn into completely paralyzed muscles.” The doctor's ambiguity heightened the strain on Eleanor. A little later Draper wrote Lovett that he was concerned about his patient's “very slow recovery both as regards the disappearance of
pain
, which is very generally present, and as to the recovery of even slight power to twitch the muscles.” Draper shrank from the moment when they would have Franklin sit up and he would “be faced with the frightfully depressing knowledge that he cannot hold himself erect.” He felt strongly that

the psychological factor in his management is paramount. He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.
²¹

Eleanor understood the psychological factor better than anyone. Franklin came back to New York believing he would soon be well enough to leave the hospital on crutches and resume work. At Campobello, all of them—Franklin, Louis, herself—had taken it for granted that he would soon be able to work again. They were returning to New York rather than Hyde Park, she had written Rosy, not only because that was where he could best be treated, but so that he could carry on his “various business activities.” His determination to remain active was supported by his wife and by Louis, who underwrote his loyalty and faith in his friend's recovery by giving up his personal and family life and moving into the Roosevelt home in order to handle Franklin's affairs.

But the charade of a busy man of affairs which all three played at Campobello was based on the assumption of a relatively speedy and
complete recovery. What would happen when Franklin realized that it might take years to regain the use of his legs or the even more somber possibility of permanent disablement? Any suggestion of retirement would diminish his recuperative powers, Dr. Draper felt. Eleanor was sure that if her husband was to hold onto the will to recover, he had to cling to his faith that he would return to politics and business.

Franklin was discharged from Presbyterian Hospital on October 28, but his record read “not improving” and some of the most painful days were ahead. At home he set about his exercises, but he was still running a temperature and his muscles were still tender.

Now the most excruciating pain began. The tendons behind his right knee began to jackknife and lock, and his legs had to be placed in plaster casts into which
wedges
were driven deeper and deeper, to stretch the muscles. It was as if his legs were on the rack. Not since Eleanor had seen her father go to have his leg rebroken had she witnessed such pain. But Franklin had a toughness and resilience her father had lacked, and he bore it stoically. He and Eleanor had taught the children to face illness and injury without tears or complaint; pain was to be borne silently. He followed his own Spartan precepts. Those who called him “feather duster,” the political opponents who derided him as “Mama's boy,” simply failed to see the iron fortitude behind the smiles and cheer. And if there were moments, as there must have been, when he was tempted to cry out against his fate, to surrender to his infirmities, Eleanor was there to brace him against them.

Their biggest problem was Sara. In her view, public service was an affair of
noblesse oblige
, not civic duty, and the life of a public man, especially of a politician, was less attractive than the quiet, secluded existence of a country gentleman. She now adamantly preached its virtues to Franklin and Eleanor. She was, moreover, genuinely afraid for her son. She was fearful that the callers whom Eleanor encouraged to come to the house sapped his vitality, that keeping up with his interests tired him. And she was sure that her mother's heart knew better than Franklin or Eleanor or Louis or the doctors what would speed his recovery. (She was not the only Hudson River matriarch with such views. Her good friend Mrs. Robert Livingston had prevailed upon her son to abandon the law and withdraw to the vacuous life of a country squire when his eyesight began to bother him. In later years his contemporaries, viewing his squandered talents, would say that Franklin had had Eleanor and Louis to save him from his mother while Robert
Livingston had been unprotected.)
²²
All through the winter a struggle between the two women went on, usually with politeness and courtesy but sometimes with acrimony.