Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  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.

  Tell Alice that Eleanor takes French lessons every day and tries hard to learn how to write so she won’t be far behind when we return. Eleanor is learning to skate too, quite well. She has some little German friends with whom she coasts and plays snow balling all day. She really talks German very well. Little Boy understands both German and English but can only say “Nein” “Mama” and “da-da” as yet. He is so fat and well. Eats all the time. He looks just like little Ted used to those days at Sagamore when I used to laugh so at his back view digging holes in the walk. And playing he was as big as the other children. Do you remember?

  Ever lovingly yours,

  Nell.

  But the Graz interlude was brief, and on the advice of Vienna specialists Elliott entered the Mariengrund sanitarium for treatment. Bamie was sent for, and persuaded the Vienna doctors to allow her to stay at Mariengrund with him.2

  April brought a precipitate dash to Paris. It is not clear why, but the departure was so hurried that the children were left behind and traveled to Paris with their nurse Albertina and her husband—Elliot’s man Stephen. At one stop the train went off before Eleanor and Albertina managed to get back on, causing much fright and telegraphing back and forth. At the suggestion of the doctor whom they engaged to take care of the pregnant Anna, the family rented a house in Neuilly.

  Since it was a small house, it was decided that Eleanor would be better off in a convent, where she would be out of the way when the baby arrived and able to improve her French. The six-year-old child saw this as a banishment. She was miserable, made to feel like an outsider by the other little girls, whose religion she did not share and whose language she spoke awkwardly.

  Loneliness, the sense of exclusion, the hunger for praise and admiration led to the episode of the penny. When one of the other little girls became the center of excitement and attention because she had swallowed a coin, Eleanor went to the sisters and announced that she, too, had swallowed a penny. It was a pathetic but revealing bid for the limelight. The sisters did not believe her but could not budge her from her story, so they sent for her mother, who took her away in disgrace. Her father “was the only person who did not treat me as a criminal.”

  In Paris Elliott’s behavior became more frightening and erratic. He disappeared for days on end and then turned up depressed, penitent, full of promises to reform; he made violent scenes and then tried to reassure his family. Anna and he were “quietly happy,” he wrote his mother-in-law. “Anna and I walk together in the morning . . . we often sit and read for two hours at a time while the children play; that is Joss does, for Eleanor is at school except in the afternoon when she comes, too, and feeds the fishes and the ducks.” But to his Meadow Brook cronies he wrote boastfully about his good times with the Jockey Club set hunting boar with the Duc de Gramont’s hounds.

  . . . the horns played a little and then we galloped in single file up and down miles of beaten forest roads (without a chance of danger or excitement unless one should be to sleep in the saddle and fall out) guided by clever Piquers until we killed. It was fun and interesting but how I did long for a gentle school (over Hempstead Plains even) with you or one of your kind.

  The family’s breakup came soon after the birth of Hall in June, 1891. Elliott seemed to lose control of his actions completely. He feared that he was losing his mind, and the terrified family became afraid to have him with them.

  The more frenzied Elliott’s excesses, the more his unhappy, sorely tried wife, backed by Bamie, took refuge in strength and rectitude. In desperation, during one of his wilder, more prolonged bouts of drunkenness, they finally had him placed in an asylum for medical treatment. He said they “kidnapped” him. Anna, Bamie, and the children sailed for home, Anna agreeing not to get a divorce if Elliott consented to stay under the care of physicians for six months at the Château Suresnes outside
of Paris.

  Fearful, however, that he would dissipate the remainder of his estate, the family applied to the U.S. courts to have him adjudged insane and incapable of taking care of himself, and to have his property, which Theodore valued at $175,000, placed in trust for his wife and children. In their affidavits, Theodore and Bamie said that as long ago as 1889 they had noticed the deterioration in Elliott’s physical and mental condition, his inability to concentrate, loss of memory, irrational behavior. Three times he had threatened to commit suicide.3

  The months during which the proceedings dragged on were anguished ones for the family, none of it made easier by the sensation the court move had created in the press. A reporter for the World tracked Anna down at her mother’s house in Tivoli where she was staying with her children. She was afraid that she would be “nasty” but could not risk having her mother talk to him. Was Elliott really insane, the reporter wanted to know. “I said no doctor had ever thought him so excepting from alcohol,” she replied, “and that I considered any man irresponsible when under the influence of alcohol.”

  Elliott alternately cooperated and resisted. In one letter to Anna, he first accused her of the most “abominable” things and sounded like a “madman,” she wrote Bamie, and then after picturing himself as the injured party, abruptly changed his tone and said that she was a “noble woman” and that he trusted her entirely. “His letter is so hopelessly sad and I so long to help him, not to make him suffer more.”

  The family was divided over the recourse to the courts. The doctors disagreed over the cure. Elliott himself wrote to the court, objecting to the proceedings. Finally, Theodore, who was then a member of the Civil Service Commission and living in Washington, made a hurried trip to Paris. He persuaded Elliott to come home and make a new start, promising that the legal proceedings would be discontinued if Elliott would place most of his money in trust for his family. Elliott agreed to take a course of treatment for alcoholism in the United States, resume a business connection, and prove himself worthy of being reunited with his family.

  A woman to whom Elliott had turned in Paris, who met him with welcoming love rather than lectures, passed harsh judgment on Anna and Theodore. While she was clearly a biased witness, Eleanor was not wholly unsympathetic when in later years she came into possession of the journal entries in which this woman’s feelings were recorded.

  “This morning,” this woman wrote,

  with his silk hat, his overcoat, gloves and cigar, E. came to my room to say goodbye. It is all over, only my little black dog, who cries at the door of the empty room and howls in the park, he is all that is left to me. So ends the final and great emotion of my life. “The memory of what has been, and never shall be” is all the future holds. Even my loss was swallowed up in pity—for he looks so bruised so beaten down by the past week with his brother. How could they treat so generous and noble a man as they have. He is more noble a figure in my eyes with all his confessed faults, than either his wife or brother. She is more to be despised, in her virtuous pride, her absolutely selfish position than the most miserable woman I know, but she is the result of our unintelligent, petty, conventional social life. And why is it that the gentle, strong men always marry women who are so weak & selfish. Perhaps the feeling of protection & care given to a feebler nature is part of the charm. If she were only large-souled enough to appreciate him . . .

  In later years Eleanor said that it might have been more helpful to her father if her mother had responded to his drinking with love instead of high-minded strength. Her mother was a good woman, she said, and very strong, but if something was right there was no excuse for not doing it. Her father might not have been able to conquer his drinking, she later concluded, but would have been happier if he had felt loved.

  How much six-year-old Eleanor knew of her father’s crack-up is unclear. She said that it was only after her mother died that she began to have any awareness that there was something seriously wrong with her father. But she was so bound up with his moods and actions that she could not have been wholly shielded from the sad events that were taking place in the tiny household. But, whatever she heard or saw, her sympathies were with her father.

  5.HER MOTHER’S DEATH

  ELLIOT RETURNED TO THE STATES ANXIOUS TO REDEEM HIMSELF in the eyes of his family, especially his wife. She had stipulated a year of separation during which he would have to regain command of himself, stop drinking, choose an occupation, and stick to it.

  He went, in February, 1892, to Dwight, Illinois, the headquarters of Dr. Keeley and the “Keeley cure” for alcoholism, but undertook this new course of treatment and probation rebelliously. He considered it “wicked and foolish” and only agreed to it because “it is Anna’s wish.” After drying out in Dwight, he felt that he should return to New York and undergo his final probation “in my family with the aid and strengthening influence of Home.” To start anew in some western or southern city, as his family was insisting, would only separate him further from his wife and children. He had wanted to see Anna before he went to Dwight so that she should “see me as I am. Not as she last saw me, flushed with wine, reckless and unworthy but an earnest, repentant self-respecting gentle-man.” But Anna had refused to receive him.

  As the five-week treatment drew to a close, Elliott was less rebellious and was prepared to “do anything required of me by my loved ones to prove the completeness of my cure and the earnestness of my desire to atone.” His brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, proposed that he go to southwest Virginia to take charge of the large Robinson holdings there. Bamie and Theodore sided with Anna but the Robinsons, especially Corinne, joined the Gracies and the Liverpool Bullochs in taking Elliott’s part. The Robinson properties covered a vast, almost primeval wilderness of virgin forest, laurel thicket, and high peaks, which the Douglas Land Company had decided to begin to tap. This meant bringing in railroads, improving mountain trails, settling boundary disputes, selling land to homesteaders.

  The work was difficult and hazardous but “by meeting the mountaineers upon their own grounds” Elliott was soon considered a “friend,” the Washington County paper wrote. “Children loved him; negroes sang for him; the poor, the needy and the unfortunate had reason to bless him; the young girls and the old ladies ‘fell for him;’ and men became his intimate friends.”1

  He quickly assembled “a stable of choice mounts,” gathered “a rare assortment of dogs, including terriers, setters, pointers, ‘coon’ dogs, hounds,” and hunted everything “from snakes to bears. . . . He dropped into homes and fitted into every family circle, eating apples by the open fire, reading poetry, talking of local things or about his own wife and children.” He always functioned best away from his strong-minded wife and very successful brother but does not seem to have recognized this. And although he carved out a place for himself in Abingdon, he felt exiled, and his letters home were full of remorse and pleas that the “homeless and heartsick and lonely” sinner be forgiven and allowed to return to his family. “You who know no sin which compares with mine,” he wrote his wife, “can hardly know the agony of shame and repentance I endure and the self condemnation I have to face. I need indeed be brave to make my fight. . . . ”

  Anna had an equally anguished time, torn between wanting to try again yet not daring to hope that Elliott would change. She made few moves without consulting Bamie. “This letter from Elliott worries me so that I send it to you,” she wrote from Tivoli. “I am so awfully sorry for him. My heart simply aches and I would do anything I could that could really help him. . . . It seems to be dawning on him for the first time that he is not coming home this Autumn.”

  It was the summer of 1892, when Anna was nearly thirty. She suffered from backaches, complained that her eyes were giving out, and was to have an operation in the fall. Eleanor was then sleeping in her mother’s room and spent hours rubbing her mother’s head with her strong, competent fingers, happy, she said, to be of some use to her suffering parent. Only seven, she was already tak
ing care of her mother.

  The life of a beautiful young woman separated from her husband was not an easy one in New York society of the 1890s. Anna was aware of how easily a woman alone might be considered to have overstepped the line of correctness and propriety. When she and Eleanor went to Bar Harbor she was continually preoccupied with how much fun and gaiety she could allow herself. A string of queries went off to Bamie. Should she “matronize” dinners? Could she go rowing or driving in the afternoon with a man, although, of course, she would not go more than once or twice with the same man? It was

  an awful temptation when one feels desperately lonely and wildly furious with the world at large, not to make up one’s mind to pay no attention to criticism as long as one does no wrong and to try to get some fun out of the few years of our youth. I hate everything and everyone so and am most of the time so miserable that I feel anything one could do would be a comfort to forget for one moment.

  Many members of her family were at Bar Harbor—her sister, Pussie; her brothers, Vallie and Eddie; Cousin Susie and her husband Henry Parish. There were endless discussions about Elliott. “Something was wrong with my father and from my point of view nothing could be wrong with him,” Eleanor wrote much later. But no one told her anything, and the anxious talks, which she now strained to catch, left her confused, torn between her adoration for her father and the distress of her mother.