Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  There are lots of others like those I have mentioned and to have them put in order you must beg your teachers to use all four powers of Persuasion, Instruction, Love, Truth and another force too, Discipline! Of all the forces your Teachers use, Father and you too, Little Witch, probably like Love best, but we must remember the little fact stones as I said at first are such a queer lot, that we have to trust to your Teachers, who know by Experience in building other Education houses in little brains, how much the Idea workmen can do and how also the character of the fact stones, what forces to apply. Think of your brain as an Education House; you surely always wish to live in a beautiful house not an ugly one, and get Auntie Maude darling to explain what Father means by this letter tale. Little Terrier says I must go to bed. Goodnight my darling little Daughter, my “Little Nell.”

  Miss Tomes was a good teacher who knew how to hold the children’s interest, and Eleanor was a diligent pupil. Despite her initial humiliation, she gradually gained self-confidence—only long division eluded her. Usually Mr. Roser urged his girls to skip it on the assumption that well-bred women did not go on to college and would not need mathematics, but her father, while sympathetic, urged her not to give up.

  I know division, especially long division, seemed to me at your age a very tiresome and uninteresting study. I too longed to be in fractions—or infractious but I found afterwards that it had been better,—as it turns out nine times out of ten, that I stood out against my own impatience and lack of desire to become informed, and devoted myself—howbeit against the grain—to the study of the life and the interests of those of God’s creation, whom He calls not his own.

  Arithmetic aside, she did well. “Your letter was undoubtedly without mistake, so far as the spelling is to be considered, and I congratulate and praise you upon the same. You should be proud of, my daughter, Mr. Rosa’s [sic] unlooked for compliment as to your book, and commendation of the good behavior of so young a child.” She was also doing well in French, not surprisingly since she had spoken French before English and there had always been someone who spoke French in the house as long as her mother had been alive.2 She liked her French teacher Mlle. LeClerq, and even though she thought memorizing passages of the New Testament in French a waste of time, she dutifully did so. “I have received your beautifully written French note of the 26th,” her father wrote her. “I see well que vos leçons de français vous fait beaucoup de bien, même en style et en facilité il faut me corriger toujours quand je fait des fautes en vous écrivant.”

  Eleanor’s school work was soon so good that she was singled out for advanced work. Bursting with importance, she reported to her Uncle Eddie.

  March 2d, (1894)

  Dear Uncle Edie

  I hope you are well and Mr. Wright also. Are you having a lovely time in Morroco with hunts and pig sticks and oh so many horses, I should think you were having a beautiful time with so many things to do. Are the people out there very bad ones?

  Now I want to tell you about what I am going to have next May in schooll, a written examination in History and Geographay and I am the youngest one who is to have it.

  With a great deal of love from all and a great deal from me I am your little niece.

  Eleanor.

  At Easter time she sent her father books and he sent her white violets, “which you can put in your Prayer book at the XXIII Psalm and you must know they were Grandmother Roosevelt’s favorite flower.” Eleanor did not have to be told what the XXIII Psalm was; her mother had encouraged her to learn by heart many verses from the Bible. “Is there anything else in life that can so anchor them to the right?” had been Anna’s view. Elliott was no less religious. He sang in the choir of the little Episcopal church in Abingdon and was a favorite of the local clergy. She wore his flowers to church, Eleanor wrote her father, who replied, “I thought of You all day long and blessed you and prayed for your happiness and that of your precious small brothers.” There were always special “love messages” for the little boys, Ellie and Brudie, in his letters to her.

  Tragedy struck the little household again in May, when both boys came down with scarlet fever. Elliott hastened to New York and sadly telegraphed the Ludlows, to whom Eleanor had been sent, to prepare the little girl for the worst. In addition, he wrote his daughter “to let you know that dear little Ellie is very, very ill and may go to join dear Mother in Heaven. There is just a little chance that he may not die but the doctors all fear that he will.”

  “Dear father,” Eleanor replied,

  I write to thank you for your kind note and to tell you how sorry I am to hear Ellie is so sick, but we must remember Ellie is going to be safe in heaven and to be with Mother who is waiting there and our Lord wants Ellie boy with him now, we must be happy and do God’s will and we must cheer others who feel it to. You are alright I hope. I play with the [name indistinct] every day.

  It is so cold here that Uncle Ned wears a fur overcoat. I met a lady that used to live down at hemmestid and she new me right away.

  Goodbye give my love to all and Ellie and Brudie to and for you O so much love.

  Nell.

  Monday [May 29, 1893]

  My darling little Nell,

  I am so glad you wrote Father such a sweet note on Saturday. I received it today and it has comforted me a great deal to know my little daughter was well and happy.

  Ask Aunt Maggie to tell you what a sad day today was for all of us. I do not want to write it to you though I would tell you if your dear golden head was on my breast; my dear, loved little Nell. But do not be sad my Pretty, remember Mother is with Ellie and Aunt Gracie now.

  I sent Morris, my groom, on with your pony and cart tomorrow afternoon’s boat so that he will deliver him to you on Wednesday morning with Father’s tender love to his sweet Daughter. You must get Aunt Maggie’s coachman to teach you how to drive him. He is perfectly gentle and only needs reasonable handling for you to drive him alone. Tell Aunt Maggie this. In fact let Aunt Maggie or Uncle Ned read this letter. I wish I could be with you to teach you how to drive myself but that can not be. Thank Aunt Maggie for asking me to come on after the 22nd and say that I am writing her.

  With a heart full of love,

  Ever fondly, your Father.

  Sympathetic and considerate as Grandma Hall and Great-Aunt Maggie were, Eleanor had only one thought, one purpose—to rejoin her father. That alone would be home. But the family dared not entrust the children to him. “I cannot tell you dear little girl,” he wrote her two weeks after Ellie’s death, “when you are coming home until I have seen Grandma and consulted her.” Mrs. Hall informed Elliott that she did not want him to come to Tivoli during the summer, and that in August Eleanor would be going to Newport. Elliott pleaded with her to bring his children to the city or the seashore “where I can see them and enjoy a little love which my heart craves and for lack of which it has broken. Oh, Mrs. Hall, I have tried so hard and it has been so lonely & weary and the break down seems to me natural in my strained condition. Above all believe me it was not drunkenness. Let me see you soon please Mother. . . . ”

  It was difficult not to yield to these entreaties, and Mrs. Hall turned to Bamie for advice. She would do anything she could, Bamie told her, but Elliott had turned against her, and if she appeared to be intervening he would take the opposite position. She could no longer influence him. She was heartbroken, but he had put it out of her power to do anything for him unless he specifically asked for something. His greatest chance of stability of purpose in regard to his children “lay in the management being purely between you and himself.” There was only one exception to her hands-off attitude: if Elliott tried to take the children from Mrs. Hall, she and Theodore felt that “for Anna’s sake” they would have a right to stop him.

  Her father’s visits brought Eleanor rushing down the stairs to fling herself into his arms, but their reunions were not wholly without anxiety for her. In later years she recalled how one time he called to take her driving in what appeared t
o be a very high dog cart. On the way to Central Park, along Madison Avenue, a streetcar frightened Mohawk, her father’s high-spirited hunter. When the horse shied, her father’s hat flew off, and when it was retrieved, Elliott looked at his daughter and asked, “You weren’t afraid, were you, little Nell?” She was but she did not want to disappoint him by admitting it. When they reached the park and joined the procession of carriages and horses, her father said teasingly, “If I were to say ‘hoop-la’ to Mohawk he would try to jump them all.” Eleanor prayed he would not. Yet despite her “abject terror,” she later wrote, “those drives were the high point of my existence.”

  Worse trials beset the eight-year-old as, for instance, on one occasion when her father came to take her for a walk. “My father had several fox terriers that he seemed to carry everywhere with him,” Eleanor recalled. “One day he took me and three of his fox terriers and left us with the doorman at the Knickerbocker Club. When he failed to return after six hours, the doorman took me home.” It was a shattering experience for a child who was already obsessed with a fear of being deserted by those whom she loved, and when she spoke of it in later years, she sometimes added the terrible detail that she saw her father carried out. It was no wonder that Grandma Hall disapproved of his visits so strongly.

  While the adults in the Roosevelt and Hall families feared that the hapless Elliott might commit some irredeemable folly in a moment of lonely despair, his letters to his daughter continued to be full of tenderness. He wanted her to learn to ride, “for it will please me so and we can have such fun riding together after you come to the city next fall.” She was swimming a little in the Hudson, she told him. That was splendid, he commented, and was Brudie “learning new things, too?” She had a bad habit of biting her fingernails. He wanted her to stop: “I am glad you are taking such good care of those cunning wee hands that Father loves so to be petted by, all those little things that will make my dear Girl so much more attractive if she attends to them, not forgetting the big ones. Unselfishness, generosity, loving tenderness and cheerfulness.”

  But his letters were also full of excuses—why he had not written in “so long,” why he had not been able to see her, why he would not be able to visit her. Nor did his vivid accounts of what he did with the children at Abingdon give Eleanor unmixed pleasure. “Little Miriam welcomed me with the fox terriers at the station though I came by an entirely unexpected train,” Elliott wrote. “The little girl had been down to every train for two days.” Realizing perhaps that Eleanor might be jealous of the girls who could be with him, he added, “No other little girl can ever take your place in my heart.” Another letter must have caused even sharper pangs of envy.

  Miriam, Lillian and the four Trigg children all on their ponies and horses and the fox terriers Mr. Belmont gave me (to comfort me in my loneliness) go out about sunrise and gallop over these broad fields for one or two hours; we rarely fail to secure some kind of game, and never return without roses in the cheeks of those I call now, my children.

  In the fall of 1893, he moved in and out of New York, and had become evasive with everyone in his family concerning his whereabouts and intentions. He told the faithful Corinne that he was going to Abingdon, but ten days later she discovered he was still in town. Corinne and Douglas went to his hotel almost daily, but could never find him in. He would promise to come to stay with them or Theodore or Uncle Gracie and then would telephone to break the engagement.

  He disappeared from his usual haunts, and they learned only later that, although he received mail at the Knickerbocker Club, he was living under an assumed name on West 102nd Street with a woman whose name was unknown to the family. Theodore and Bamie sadly and reluctantly gave up.

  To Bye, Theodore wrote in July, 1894.

  I do wish Corinne could get a little of my hard heart about Elliott. She can do, and ought to do nothing for him. He can’t be helped, and he simply must be let go his own gait.

  He is now laid up from a serious fall; while drunk he drove into a lamp post and went out on his head. Poor fellow! if only he could have died instead of Anna!

  Eleanor had known for many months, from the talks and whisperings of the grownups, that something was desperately wrong with her father. She also knew it from her own experience. Her father would send her a message that he was coming to take her for a drive and then not appear. Unthinkingly, he would arouse her hopes that she would be coming “home” to him. He disappointed her in almost everything, yet her love never faltered, her trust never weakend.

  With the arrival of summer, 1894, Grandma Hall again closed her Thirty-seventh Street house and Eleanor moved to Tivoli and later to Bar Harbor. A handful of Eleanor’s letters to her father that final summer have survived.

  June 14th, 1894

  Dear Father:

  I hope you are well. I am very well and so is every one else. We moved to the country and that is why I have not written before we were in such a hurry to get off for it was so hot in New York. We have two people staying with us—cousin Susie Hall and Mable Drake—do you know her? tell me in your next letter. I rode my pony to-day for the first time this summer. I did not go very far but tomorrow I am going for a long ride with Uncle Valley won’t it be fun. I wish you were up here to ride with me. Give my love to the puppies and every one else that you know. Madlein Brudie and I often drive with my pony.

  With a great deal of love I am your little daughter

  Nell

  July 5th, 1894

  Dear Father

  I would have written before but I went to Cousin Susie. We are starting to-day for Bar Harbor we are in a great flurry and hurry I am in Uncle Eddie’s room. The men are just going to take the trunks away. We are to have lunch at 15 minutes before twelve. We are going to Boston in the one o’clock train. Brudie wears pants now.

  Good-bye I hope you are well dear Father.

  With a great deal of love to everybody and you especially I am your little daughter

  Nell

  P.S. Write to me at W. 37th St.

  July 10th, 1894

  Dear Father:

  I hope you are well. I am now in Bar Harbor and am having a lovely time yesterday I went to the Indian encampment to see some pretty things I have to find the paths all alone I walked up to the top of Kebo mountain this morning and I walk three hours every afternoon. Brudie walks from 4 to 5 miles every day. Please write to me soon. We eat our meals at the hotel and the names of the things we get to eat are to funny Washington pie and blanket of Veal are mild to some other things we get. I have lessons every day with Grandma.

  With a great deal of love, I am your little daughter

  Nell

  July 30, 1894

  Dear Father:

  I hope you are well. I enjoyed your last letter very much. I went fishing the other day I had great fun I caught six fish don’t you think I did well for the first time. I am having lessons with Grandma every day and go to a french class from half past eleven till half past twelve. Alice Fix died three days ago and was buried yesterday was it not very sad.

  Goodby dear dear Father I send you a great deal of love I am your little daughter

  Nell

  With a Knickerbocker Club return address, Elliott wrote his “little Nell” that her letters from Bar Harbor had been his “great delight.”

  When you go to the Indian encampment you must say “How” to them for your old father’s sake, who used to fight them in the old claims in the West, many years before you opened those little blue eyes and looked at them making birch bark canoes for Brudie and Madeleine to go paddling in and upset in the shallow water, where both might be drowned if they had not laughed so much.

  Give my love to all the dear home people and all of my good friends who have not forgotten me.

  Would you like a little cat, very much like the one you used to have at Hempstead and called an “Angostora” kitten instead of what was his correct name, “Angora?” If so, I have a dear friend who wants to make you a present of
one. Let me know after you have asked grandma.

  Please do not eat all the things with the funny names you tell me you have,—that is, if they taste like their names—for a Washington pie with a blanket of veal, and Lafayette left out, would be enough to spoil your French-American history of the latter part of the last century, for some time to come, possibly for so long that I might not be able to correct your superstition. The blanket was what Washington needed and the pie should have been laid out of veal and the neglected Lafayette should have eaten it.

  Again with dear love, I am

  Your affectionate father

  Elliott Roosevelt.

  On August 12 Theodore wrote Bamie from Washington: “Elliott is up and about again: and I hear is drinking heavily; if so he must break down soon. It has been as hideous a tragedy all through as one often sees.”

  On August 13 Elliott wrote his last letter to his daughter.

  Darling Little Nell—

  What must you think of your Father who has not written in so long, but we seem to be quits about that. I have after all been very busy, quite ill, at intervals not able to move from my bed for days. You knew that Uncle Gracie was back. He is so happy at “Gracewood.” You know he was going to ask you there. Are you going?

  Give my love to Grandma and Brudie and all—I was very much amused by hearing my Darkey coachman in his report of Stable News that he had trained all the Dogs to drive together, four and six in hand, and built a wee cart with wooden wheels. It was really funny to see this great big fat “Irish” colored man in this little cart! and six small Fox Terriers driving for all they were worth. I saw Auntie Corinne and the others the other day. They were so funny—They are very well and sent love to you all. How is your pony and the dogs at Tivoli, too? Tell Madeleine and Brudie that Father often thinks of them—With tender affection ever devotedly