Eleanor Read online

  She was still going strong in late spring, 1962, lending a hand and her apartment to a group of liberals whom James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, brought together to purchase that newspaper when, for a brief moment, Dorothy Schiff thought she wished to sell it; joining two other lifelong champions of the underdog, Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin, to hold hearings in Washington on police and judicial harassment of the Negro protest movement in the South—“horrifying,” she called it; spending a day in Hartford speaking for Mrs. Beatrice Fox Auerbach, organizing a birthday party for Faye Emerson’s son Scoop; bantering on a plane flight up from Georgia with Governor Rockefeller, who wanted her to tell him who the Democratic candidate for governor was going to be; asking Tom Stix to investigate the possibilities of a fall TV program about books, “as I am afraid I must reluctantly admit that I am not quite as young as I was. . .[and] I think I shall have to give up lecture trips,” adding, however, that she would not want to compete with Faye Emerson’s anticipated book program.34 Her strength was flowing out, but in the moments that it returned she was back at the old schedule, touring the borough of Queens for the Committee for Democratic Voters. “My head is heavy and if I go, you’ll have to steady me when I get out of the car,” she told the young man who came to get her. “You see I had to come,” she remarked when a little Negro girl gave her an armful of flowers at one of their speech stops. “I was expected.”

  David had been giving her antibiotics to combat her recurring aches and fevers but thought she was well enough, and she insisted that he go through with his commitment to spend a month on the hospital ship Hope in Peru. He placed her in the charge of another doctor. A few months earlier, when Jim Halsted suggested that an internist be brought in to take charge, she had rebuffed David, who had transmitted the message to her, with a terse “Very well, then, I’ll have no doctor.” He remained the only physician whose advice she would follow, but would not hear of his not going off on an assignment where he might do good for others. “To me all goodbyes are poignant now,” she wrote him as he left for Peru. “I like less & less to be long separated from those few whom I deeply love.”

  Although she began to feel really unwell in the middle of July, it was an effort to get in touch with a doctor whom she really did not know, and she tried, as she had so often in the past, to shake off her illness by sheer will power. But the pain rarely left her now, and she was always so weary that if she saw a chair she was unable not to sit down.

  All summer she had been working with Elinore Denniston on a new book, Tomorrow Is Now. One day she got as far as the desk and lifted a shaking hand for Miss Denniston to see. “I can’t work. I don’t understand it,” she said and added apologetically, “and you have come so far.”35

  Finally, since she had to go to New York City for the meeting of a committee that was advising the Board of Education on the selection of a new school superintendent, she went to see the doctor.

  “You go right home and go to bed,” he ordered.

  She was happy to receive the order. She got into bed, relieved that she would not have to get up again and dress. The next day the doctor insisted on a blood transfusion. She tried to put him off. Could it not be postponed until Sunday when David was returning? The doctor insisted. The transfusion was a disaster. Her fever, instead of abating, shot up, and by the time David returned it had reached 105.5 degrees. She felt like “a fiery furnace,” she said later. And when David ordered an ambulance to take her to the hospital, she was scarcely able to recognize her son James, who had flown up from Washington to be with her.

  Her first days in the hospital were unmitigated torture. There were injections in order to take samples of her blood and injections to fill her with medication. Every half hour nurses recorded her blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, and hospital attendants came with questionnaires. She complained to David about the endless tests. If it were not for the tests, why would they want her in the hospital, David replied. “Eureka!” was her answer to this. “They have you there! You get well but is it really worth it?”36

  There were days of the deepest depression triggered by new anxieties over Elliott as well as her illness. One dream left her shaken and emotionally spent. Her brother Hall and her son Elliott somehow seemed combined into one figure, like a Picasso drawing, and were smothering her. She no longer wished to go on living, she told the few friends whom she allowed to visit her.37

  But then her spirits began to revive. She was permitted to get out of bed for a half hour. She found herself interested again in the newspapers. Why had not Maureen brought the mail, she wanted to know one day. Maureen produced two fat brown envelopes. “Oh, you are efficient,” she beamed. Among the letters was one from Thomas Stix, reporting that he had lined up a sponsor for a new television show along the lines of her “Prospects of Mankind” series, for which she would receive $1,000 an appearance. “Oh, dear. Tell Tom Stix I can’t see him till I feel better. Tell him I’m in the hospital.”38

  As soon as she was allowed to sit up, Mrs. Roosevelt began to plan again a trip to Campobello for the dedication of an FDR Memorial Bridge, linking the United States with this Canadian island. She overruled David’s protests; she conceded that her constitution no longer could take the punishment she meted out to it, but she insisted on going. She wanted David and his wife to fly up with her, and the author’s wife, Trude, would drive down with her.

  Trude, who had joined her in Campobello on the last day of her stay there, wrote of their trip back:

  For the first time that morning she walked up and down in front of the Campo house “so that I can manage the steps of the Scarlett house,” she said. She was terribly frail and complained that she had forgotten how to take a deep breath and had to learn again. She said that she learned that Friday night (when she had 105.6 temperature) how easy it was to die. She was just slipping away without regret or pain, and she was pleading with David to let her go.

  We drove down the Maine coast to do once more the things she always loved to do. We visited Bishop Scarlett and his wife, Leah. We met an old friend, Molly Dewson. . . .Then we went to a place called Perry’s Nuthouse where Mrs. R., Joe and I used to stop to buy wild-strawberry preserves. She was too weak to get out of the car, and when we came back, having purchased what she wanted us to get, was only vaguely aware of what was going on.

  On the long drive to Boston she hardly spoke and when she did it was so faint we could hardly understand her. In Boston Henry [Morgenthau] III came in. From Boston on the way to Hyde Park she stopped for a last visit with Esther Lape, one of her oldest friends, and then she went on to Val-Kill, where she had a few days when she even worked—but after Labor Day the fevers and the chills and the blood transfusions and endless injections took over and the lonely descent began.39

  After her first spell in the hospital, she informed her housekeeper at Hyde Park, Marge Entrup, she would be glad to know there would be no more big parties. In the next breath she casually told her there would be fourteen for breakfast. As a friend explained to Marge the next day, “In Mrs. Roosevelt’s book, that isn’t a big party.”40

  She had spent the Friday before the Labor Day week end in New York City, meeting with Nannine Joseph, trying to help her niece Ellie get a contract to do drawings for a children’s book, conferring with Tom Stix about her television show. Friday night on her return she seemed in good shape, asked for her usual drink of Dubonnet, and although her cheeks were disturbingly flushed, at Johnny and Anne’s, where everyone went for dinner, she entered into an animated discussion of the impending Rockefeller-Morgenthau gubernatorial race. But the next morning when she came down and took her place at the head of the table, she was unable to ring the old Mother Hubbard silver bell to summon Marge. She breathed with difficulty and trembled violently. While her friends made conversation, pretending not to notice, she leaned over to sip her cup of hot tea. She blamed her trembling on the sleeping porch—it had been a cold night. Someone brought a shawl, and finally she wa
s persuaded to go into Tommy’s living room and sit by the fire. As soon as she revived she insisted on going to work with Miss Denniston. David came, but she would not permit him to take her temperature.

  “This I know,” she dictated to Miss Denniston, in a voice that was almost a whisper. “This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being—we can do it!” When Miss Denniston discreetly managed to leave a half hour early, Mrs. Roosevelt finally agreed to allow her temperature to be taken. It registered 101. She would not sleep on her porch again, she announced, and her listeners had the feeling that she was saying good-by to another of the things she loved to do.41

  After lunch she went upstairs for a nap, and when she insisted on coming down at four for Charley Curnan’s surprise party—he had worked for the Roosevelts for twenty-five years—her temperature was down. After the party she sat at her desk trying to balance her checkbooks. There was a telephone call from Rep. Emanuel Celler’s secretary. He wanted to notify her that the congressman was going on television the next day to propose her as Democratic candidate for the Senate. “Under no circumstances,” she said emphatically. “I don’t believe in old people running.”

  Walter and May Reuther arrived, on their way to New York City from Putney School in Vermont, where they had left their daughter. She had always found Walter stimulating. The after-dinner discussion went on until eleven. She would like to borrow an idea of his, she told him, that economic, not military, aid was the way to stiffen the borderlands against the Communists. She described her illness to Reuther in considerable detail so that he might explain to Jim Carey why she was unable to come to his convention, where he was in a fight for control of the electrical workers’ union.

  Breakfast on Sunday was a sad repetition of the previous morning, and the Reuthers saw for themselves how ill she was. She took little part in the conversation, except to ask Reuther, when he went to Japan, to get in touch with her grandson Franklin, whose ship was based there. Again, she refused to allow David to take her temperature. She knew it was high, she told Reuther, but she was going to have Tubby Curnan drive her to church. She was, to the end, one of the Reverend Gordon Kidd’s most faithful parishioners, attending services, paying her pew rent of seventy-five dollars, subscribing an additional $425, and each Sunday handing in an envelope containing two dollars.

  September was a month in which she tried not to give up and take to her bed. She insisted that Lady Reading stay with her. Geraldine Thompson arrived with a bagful of projects and, finding Mrs. Roosevelt strangely resistant, asked in some desperation, “and what do you do for the Audubon Society?” She went out with Tubby to buy some sturdy chairs for the dining room. It was too painful to get in and out of the station wagon, so she had chairs brought out to the sidewalk to her to inspect. She attended the AAUN’s reception for the U.S. delegation to the 1962 General Assembly, sitting on the dais for two hours, and conferred with Robert Benjamin and her grandson Curtis on how to merge the AAUN with the U.S. Committee for the United Nations. Doggedly she kept on doing things she had always done, for fear that if she stopped it would be difficult to do them again afterward. But her mouth bled and her throat was sore. She was feverish and often listless, and it took her an hour and a half to dress in the morning. Instead of saying good night to friends and children she now said good-by.42

  Her children, whom David had kept in touch with the progress of her illness, were in and out. Other doctors were brought in, and when her temperature, instead of going up and down as it had been doing, stayed up, she was taken on September 26 to the hospital again. Elliott and his wife flew in from Minneapolis. Anna and Jim Halsted, who had been in and out all through August and early September, came from Detroit to consult with David and remained, staying at her apartment, Anna taking charge of the household. Mrs. Roosevelt had told David that if her illness flared up again, she did not wish to linger on a helpless invalid, and expected him to save her from a dragged-out, agonizing death. But Dr. Gurewitsch was unable to comply with her wishes. And when the time came, his duty as a doctor prevented him.

  There was only suffering for Mrs. Roosevelt [Trude Lash wrote Paul Tillich] from the first day in July when she was taken to the hospital for the first time. There was no moment of serenity. There was only anger, helpless anger at the doctors and nurses and the world who tried to keep her alive. The doctors had her where they wanted her.

  “They can do with me what they want, not what I want,” she said bitterly.

  I don’t think there was anything to comfort her. She was completely alone and felt betrayed and persecuted by all of us.

  She was not afraid of death at all. She welcomed it. She was so weary and so infinitely exhausted, it seemed as though she had to suffer every human indignity, every weakness, every failure that she had resisted and conquered so daringly during her whole life—as though she were being punished for being too strong and powerful and disciplined and almost immune to human frailty.43

  There were so few people she really cared about, so few, Mrs. Roosevelt whispered to a friend in the hospital. She did not want visitors. She did not want to be seen in her invalid condition. Adlai Stevenson came to the hospital. David, believing it reflected her wishes, sent him away. “Dearest Eleanor,” he wrote her tenderly. “I have been getting regular bulletins from Maureen and pray it won’t be long before I can come to see you—and what a long deferred visit it will be!. . .I love you dearly—and so does the whole world! But they can’t all come to see you and perhaps I can when David gives me permission. Devotedly—Adlai.”44

  For her seventy-eighth birthday, she gave orders from the hospital that she wanted a party at her Seventy-fourth Street apartment—of little children. So on October 11, John’s daughter Joan, Edna Gurewitsch’s Maria, and Trude’s grandchildren Christopher and Annie Pratt came for ice cream, games, favors, and a birthday cake on which glowed a single candle. Curtis Roosevelt (Buzzy) and John Boettiger and their wives joined the sad group of grownups who came with the children for birthday toasts.

  She hated the hospital and implored the doctors to let her go home and “rejoin the human race,” but the specialists who had been brought in insisted that she remain until another series of tests were completed. She was allowed to return home on October 18. Someone tipped off the photographers, and she, who had such dignity and pride of bearing, was shown to the world stretcher-borne, her face puffy, her white hair straggly, her head sagging.

  Yet, so happy was she to be at home in her own room, amid familiar surroundings, that her will to live seemed momentarily to revive. “Maureen, I forgot to thank the stretcher-bearers,” were her first words when she was installed in her own bed. “Will you please tell them that I think they did a magnificent job.” She ordered a small table set in her bedroom and invited Edna and David down to dine while she tried to manage a small meal on a bed tray. She asked for her checkbook and, with unsteady hand, wrote checks in advance. Anna and David did their best to nurture the spark. The Cuban missile crisis, which Stevenson at the United Nations was calling the gravest challenge to world peace since 1945, was at flashpoint.

  “We are almost at war,” David said to her, almost shouting the words because her eyes were closed, as if she wanted to be withdrawn from those around her. “We will read the papers to you.” “I don’t want them read,” she replied. “Joe will read them,” he suggested. When she did not renew her protests, Anna and David decided that this author was the man to try.

  “Hello, Joe,” she said, but then, as the latest developments in the tense confrontation were described to her, appeared to become confused. “It’ll never come together,” she said, “nobody makes sense.” Was she talking about her head and the difficulty she had in focusing on what was being said to her, or about the state of the world? She stirred restlessly. “All I want,” she began again, and her visitor thought she was going to say “is for them to get together
,” but instead she said, “is to be turned over.”

  On October 25 her disease, which had been thought to be aplastic anemia, was positively diagnosed as a rare bone-marrow tuberculosis. That was “cheering news,” David told the press. “It shows we’re on the right track.” But Anna, fearful that Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends might be led to believe she was on the road to recovery, told the newspapers that her condition was “very much the same” and that she “was not responding to treatment.‡

  One day, when she told Nurse Waldron that she wished to die, the nurse said that the Lord who had put her into this world would take her from it when she had finished the job for which she was here. “Utter nonsense,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, looking at the intravenous tube in her arm, the oxygen tank, and the needle punctures in her skin. Confused and incoherent, often in a semicoma, her determination to die alone was steady and iron-willed.

  She rejected pills, clenched her teeth to keep her nurse from administering them, spat them out if the nurse was successful, and, becoming more wily, secreted them in the recesses of her mouth. “There really is no change in her condition,” Anna sadly reported to Uncle David. “There are so many indignities to being sick and helpless. . . .I find myself praying that whatever is the very best for her happens and happens quickly.”46

  The children decided that Stevenson, who had been deeply hurt by David’s rebuff, should be allowed to make a last visit to his old friend, if only to stand at the door and wave to her. “Come, if you would like,” Anna said to him, “but I don’t think she will recognize you.” He dropped everything and came.