THE FOG CARRIED A WHIFF of tar from London’s chimney pots. Behind this motionless curtain, a brick boundary wall greeted their arrival at Allenswood. At the center of a six-acre park and gardens hulked the Earl Spencer’s Victorian Gothic manor house, converted for thirty-five or so international schoolgirls and their teachers to live in chilly dormered bedrooms. Mademoiselle’s pupils attended classes in stove-heated dayrooms and took their meals in a formal dining room.
Within the gate, the lower branches of a lofty cedar of Lebanon pointed up the drive to the school portico. There, a regal woman with a head of snow-white hair came buzzing down the steps to welcome Eleanor. When their eyes met, the newcomer felt the headmistress’s hard black stare drill “right through to my backbone.”1
Eleanor would later poeticize her first impression as one of immediate liberation upon crossing the school’s threshold.2 Installed in her room, she discovered that Mlle. Souvestre, “with her instinctive understanding,”3 had chosen her just the right roommate, Marjorie Bennett, a gentle English girl who showed Eleanor the ropes and helped her to realize that she was well prepared to meet the school’s standards of honesty, diligence, and loyalty, not to mention its cardinal rule that every girl speak French throughout the day.
From her first school meal, Eleanor found her voice. Her old crushing loneliness had briefly ambushed her when Aunt Tissie departed, but once seated at the headmistress’s table, she chatted in such a mature and fluent tone (“when we hardly dared open our mouths,” recalled one classmate4), that Mademoiselle flooded the table with acclaim for the new student. Afterward, when several girls came to Eleanor—“Totty”5—for help with their required weekly compositions, her delight in their compliments went straight to her cheeks: “I was in a glow.”6
The next morning, each girl turned out in the school uniform—white shirtwaist, striped school bow tie, ground-sweeping skirt, beribboned boater—and for once Eleanor eagerly took her place as the conspicuous tallest. Confident to be dressed correctly and like all the others, she felt that here, at last, she would be “free from all my former sins and traditions.”7
JOYOUSLY ALIVE WITH FLOWERS THROUGHOUT the dayrooms in fall and spring, Allenswood had three special customs that immediately freed Eleanor from old hurts.
The first was “kissing time.”8 Every morning after room inspection and every night before bedtime, the girls gathered around the stove in the big study hall. At a signal, each would greet or say good night to every other girl with a kiss, as a way of supporting and sustaining a clique-free community of affectionate participants in a common cause—an ideal that Eleanor would seek to foster for the rest of her life.
Second, for a full hour and a half after the midday meal, a small selection of students would be called upon to lie down and fix their minds on a single thought that would then be discussed over tea with Mademoiselle—a practice that Eleanor would apply as the mother of a chronically ill child. Those chosen were expected to discourse freely and boldly on their insights; and once again Eleanor showed sense in ways that made her seem “so very much more grown up than we were,” recalled one classmate.9
Finally, there were the evenings in Mademoiselle’s library. Small, handpicked groups sat in little chairs on either side of the fireplace’s crackling logs and beneath nudes painted by the French muralist Puvis de Chavannes, a friend of Mademoiselle’s father, the writer and futurist Émile Souvestre. Reviewing such intimate subjects as race, religion,10 or reactions to Toynbee Hall, the pioneering East London settlement house,11 Mademoiselle urged each student to take active responsibility for her ideas.
The two precepts of these evening seminars were to think for oneself and to speak forthrightly—ferociously, if necessary—whether the subject was the British Empire’s oppression of subject peoples, or “the plight of the Negro in America,” or the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer falsely convicted of espionage. Souvestre’s sympathy for small nations, for trade unions, for innocents ruined by French justice, for underdogs in general—all came into play.
On October 11, 1899, Eleanor’s fifteenth birthday, the British and the Boers went to war. The South African War, as viewed from Mademoiselle Souvestre’s library southwest of the oppressor’s capital city, exposed Eleanor to the reality of authority’s miscalculations. A war that everyone in England supposed would be over by Christmas would end up becoming the longest, bloodiest, costliest, and most chastening conflict fought by Britain between 1815 and 1914.12 “The debate as to whether that war was right or wrong gave me my first burning concern with a grave public issue,” recalled Eleanor.13
The Boers also gave Eleanor a special place in Mlle. Souvestre’s politics. Bitterly critical of the war and its motives, Souvestre did not just rail against the crude ruthlessness of British power; she analyzed the ethics of the warring governments. When her English students celebrated British victories, she tolerated their loud revels in the gym and withheld her own opinions from those pupils “whose parents might have considered them heretical, if not traitorous,”14 while feeling free to unload privately in her study with Eleanor and the German, Swiss, Swedish, Russian, and Italian girls. This went on up to the evening of June 1, 1902, when word came that a peace treaty had been signed in Pretoria. Allenswood’s English girls danced around the schoolrooms until Mlle. Souvestre, “perfectly furious,” shut down the celebration, reminding them that an imperial nation had rounded up civilians and penned them into “concentration camps,” where thousands had perished of starvation and disease.
That evening, the English girls trooped off to Thanksgiving service, while Eleanor remained with Mademoiselle.15 “I often wish,” she wrote in a distant future, “that I might take Mlle. Souvestre with me to the United Nations.”16
Mademoiselle was merciless in her insistence that her advantaged pupils had been given truly unusual capacity and choice over others in a world still desperately poor. It would be a criminal waste not to put these gifts to the greater good. On any subject related to religious belief, she could be witheringly sarcastic. In one discussion, after asking for opinions on the question of “why it was good to pray,” she challenged the beliefs of every girl until one dared to ask what Mademoiselle thought. Whereupon Souvestre drew herself up and declared that she never shared such aspects of private thought, and only liked to hear the opinions of children on religion because they amused her.17
Explosions—the word students used to describe both Mademoiselle’s laughter18 and her rage19—seemed to combust out of nowhere. Afterward, Souvestre withdrew into implacable silence. Behind closed doors, trays would be brought by the school’s tiny adjunct power, Pauline Samaia, the Italian teacher who served Allenswood as housemother and business manager, and Souvestre as nurse, selfless companion, and emotional caretaker.
When Mademoiselle was away, everyone noticed the calm. Without that powerful voice and the action she churned up around her, quiet fell over the house.20 But when Signorina Samaia went up to London even for the day, Mademoiselle became “restless and ragey,” and positioned herself beside a heavily trafficked hallway door expressly to scold, and if possible to shame, any pupil who let it bang.21 As for the loyal Samaia, one student remarked that Souvestre was apt to treat “Signorina” “just like a child.”22
Some pupils felt exposed by Souvestre’s physical assertion of authority: the snow-white hair, the onyx eyes, the erect spine, the charged probing. She seemed to penetrate so intently into her girls’ concerns that some of them came to believe that she could read their minds, which only ensured that they kept her even more obsessively in mind. Some froze at the mere sound of her voice. Others stopped breathing when she approached.23 One student, recalling this paralyzing awe, summarized: “We respected her and loved her but most of us were a little afraid of her. Totty never seemed to be, though.”24
ON THE FIRST EVENING SESSION of every term, Souvestre read poetry aloud. Challenging the girls to listen carefully, she read out a favorite poem two or three times, lingering over lines she especially liked. Then she would call for a volunteer to stand and recite these lines back to her without looking at the printed page.25
On her first poetry night, Eleanor stood, finding that the lines came to her as naturally as Uncle Ted’s old favorites from “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”26 In fact, she was a prodigy of aural memory, but at Oak Lawn no one had noticed these triumphs of the ear. At Allenswood, her talent shined.
The attention she captured intensified the next day when Mademoiselle praised her before a full assembly.27 In her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt reflected, “This was the first time in all my life that all my fears left me.”28 But no sooner had she shown promise as a school exemplar than self-consciousness welled up behind her new public front.
This time, it started when Eleanor, anticipating a visit with a new friend’s family, became “so homesick and woebegone that everyone was sorry for her.”29 The new comrade who triggered this episode was Helen Agnes “Nelly” Post,30 a spirited, roguish girl who had been at school a full year longer. Eleanor would come to feel intimate with “Bennett,” her sturdy roommate; and she increasingly admired the lovely German girl Carola de Passavant, and enjoyed her friends Avice Horn, sent “home” from Australia, and Hilda “Burky” Burkinshaw, back from India. But to Eleanor, mischievous Nelly Post was the tuning fork. Without even a knock—simply by bursting impishly through the door of Mademoiselle’s library—Nelly set everyone around her vibrating.
From their first class together Eleanor found her irresistible. She “had a fine mind and a very warm heart,” said Eleanor, but she also “had the most violent temper I have almost ever seen, and I doubt if anyone had ever tried to discipline her.”31 In Fraulein Petritsch’s classroom, to Eleanor’s horrified delight, Nelly’s pranks and capers repeatedly brought the lesson to a complete standstill. She was a natural subversive—more like a Western American than an Easterner. Indeed, Nelly’s family’s ranch in the Texas Panhandle,32 the vivid unseen promise of its wild “miles and miles of country to ride in”—525,000 acres, to be exact33—became one of their secretly shared subjects at Allenswood.34
The two Americans took history with Mademoiselle Souvestre, and though there were eight others in the headmistress’s study, so far as Eleanor was concerned “there was no one but [Nelly]. This impression of mine was helped considerably by the fact that Mlle. Souvestre seemed to feel that there were only two members of her class—[Nelly] and myself.”35
She was elated by the headmistress’s recognition of their yin-and-yang closeness. Still more mystic chords seemed to have been struck from their startlingly similar backgrounds. Nelly’s father, like Eleanor’s, had been a much-loved New York sportsman—Arthur Post, who five months before Nelly was born had died in the Anglo-American sporting community of Pau. Nelly’s mother, Lizzie Wadsworth, was fashionable, beautiful, and impersonal.36
Eleanor and Nelly made friends so quickly, and so immediately generated excitement as a pair, that when Nelly’s family planned to drive out from London the very first Sunday afternoon, Nelly insisted that Eleanor come with them. She thought that it would be pleasant for Eleanor to “see some other Americans.”37
All of a week earlier, Eleanor had felt wondrously free of her former life. Now, faced with the prospect of being exposed to family acquaintances as the laughably plain daughter of Anna Hall Roosevelt, she wanted to run and hide. Worse, any outing that involved horseback riding with gutsy Wadsworth women, as Nelly had gaily promised, could not help but reveal Eleanor’s own fears.
No amount of coaxing could pull “Little Nell” out; she was spooked, once more diminished into the form of “a big girl with a pigtail.”38 When the polished carriage clattered up the drive with Nelly’s cousins and half sister and glamorous mother, Eleanor stayed in her room. Nelly went out by herself to greet her family and tell them about her friend. Sixteen-year-old Harriet Wadsworth would recall her cousin describing “the little American girl who was so homesick,” then going back inside to “lead out the most pathetic and awkward little girl you ever saw.”
Eleanor said hello shyly, recalled Harriet, then “slunk back into the school.”39
While these superb horsewomen could only remind her of her failures, she redeemed herself among other notable figures. When Mademoiselle had important guests to dinner—illustrious literary or artistic figures, as well as “one or two Prime Ministers of England and France” whom she sat on either side of herself—Eleanor had no trouble contributing from her place opposite the adults. Her classmates marveled at how “Totty” was “never awed by anyone”40 and could “lead Mademoiselle off on almost any track and keep her going.”41
Playing the part of Mademoiselle’s mindful protégée allowed Eleanor to exercise her natural curiosity and to pick up material from the visiting adults, which she would blend into her own thinking and then sprinkle into related subjects at her next evening session with a delighted Souvestre. Eleanor ever after felt guilty of copycatting, believing herself to be simply mirroring her way into a position of pseudo-authority without sustained study.42 When variations on this situation repeated in her adulthood, she made an art of being better informed and more carefully prepared than her colleagues.
By the end of first term, her report card showed enthusiastic endorsements from her teachers and high praise from the headmistress: “She is the most amiable girl I have ever met.”43 Eleanor could be counted upon “to influence others in the right direction.”44 And as time went on: “Eleanor has the warmest heart that I have ever encountered. As a pupil she is very satisfactory but even that is of small account when you compare it to the perfect quality of her soul.”45
EVERY DECADE OR SO, MARIE Souvestre singled out a favorite not just to be admired or applauded as a school leader, but for a broader mission. More than a schoolroom pet, the favorite was to carry Souvestre’s high culture to the world. Bamie Roosevelt had been such a one; Beatrice Chamberlain, another; Dorothy Strachey, a third. Implicit in Eleanor’s fall-term victories was her chance to become their official successor.
That fall, as Nelly once again cut up in class, Eleanor took a place at her side as the steady one who had no quarrel with the system. Mademoiselle could see that Eleanor had a calming effect on Nelly: she was impartial and fair, not easily swayed, nor was she susceptible to “anything that was not perfectly straightforward and honest.”46 So Mademoiselle confidently put Nelly alone with Eleanor for an additional German tutorial, and all went well until the day that Fräulein Petritsch angered Nelly, who pitched a glass-and-metal inkstand at her.
Eleanor knew at once that this was unpardonable. Nelly had shown a raw force that Mademoiselle could not close her eyes to. If she were to give in, it would seem favoritism, cowardice, or truckling to the powerful Wadsworths. Mademoiselle was also fighting the stereotype that women achieved their ends by tantrum. To Souvestre, so personally volatile herself, calmness was true self-mastery. Here was an already favored Anglo-American, a girl of the Empire, violating Allenswood’s core value of self-discipline.
Eleanor, completely heartbroken, went to ask the headmistress to show mercy.47 But to no avail: Mademoiselle was adamant, Nelly was expelled, and a tearful Eleanor was once again alone.
For a number of years afterward, she tried to stay in touch with Nelly. Nelly’s life as a maiden-in-waiting to several royal princesses occupied her completely, and they lost track of each other. Eleanor later heard that she had married a gentleman usher and groom-in-waiting to King Edward VII and had children. When she came to write about Nelly in her autobiography, extolling “a really fascinating girl,” and casting their friendship as the relationship whose intensity “marked… the earliest months at Allenswood,” she revealed a yearning to keep feelings for Nelly alive: “Her glamour is still with me, so that I would give much to see her walk into my room today.”48 When she wrote this—early January 1937—a White House invitation from Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was all but guaranteed to bring people to her door. She could fairly easily have seen Nelly, soon to be Lady St. Germans,49 had she been confident of the Nelly who would turn up.
Instead she made a secret of Nelly’s name. Perhaps she was exercising an abundance of discretion since, by then, Nelly’s husband, the 8th Earl of St. Germans, and her son (as a page), were honored intimates of the future King George VI.50 Whatever the reason, in three volumes of autobiography, peopled by hundreds of notable figures, Eleanor Roosevelt felt the need to keep just one person’s identity safe under a pseudonym. She memorialized Nelly as “Jane.”51
SUMMER RETURNED. ELEANOR ENVIED THE girls with homes to go to. She was kept in Europe, and suffered a burden of guilt about not going home to look after her brother. To be sure, Hall did not lack for surrogate mothers, but he was Eleanor’s special duty; and in Eleanor’s first year’s absence, Pussie had irritatingly taken Hall further under her wing. As always, Eleanor was carrying the new passion too far, energizing the relationship with pity—distinctly not what Hall needed—while keeping concealed her own needs for attachment.
During school breaks, Eleanor holidayed alone with Mademoiselle on the Continent. Here her mentor detected an executive drive in Eleanor and put her directly in charge of buying their tickets, securing hansoms, tipping porters, anticipating expenses. She insisted Eleanor take full responsibility for seeing each task through. These skills, which “gave me a kind of experience that was to be very useful when I had children of my own,”52 encouraged her to put things in order and mobilize them in exciting ways.
Touring Italy the following two Easters and at Christmas came as a revelation. Wherever they went, Mademoiselle would sniff out the best of the local foods; reconnoiter the “one” cathedral worth spending time in; give high marks to some great thinker of the region. The only way to know an urban landscape, Mademoiselle insisted, was on foot. They walked everywhere and never stayed in the accepted hotels for Americans or Britons but instead lodged with the bourgeoisie, as when they spent several weeks in Florence at the house of a painter. For Eleanor, the elasticity of these days showed her how rigidly she had viewed life from Oak Lawn. Daily discussions with her Florentine painter host about how he was posing his models for a rendition of the Last Supper opened Eleanor to the idea that the Christ figures she had known in Doré’s Bible in the library at Tivoli were not “a real likeness of a real man” but aspects of a collective and evolving consensus of sacred images. “Isn’t it queer,” she later wrote, “how children take things for granted until something wakes them up?”53
“It all served,” she later realized of these awakenings, “to make you a citizen of the world, at home wherever you might go.”54
Souvestre marveled that Eleanor never tired. She was “never out of sorts, never without a keen interest in all that she sees. I have rarely seen such a power of endurance.”55 For Eleanor, it was more a question of how to take it all in, when she was feeling “keener than I have probably ever been since.”56 On their first morning in maze-like Florence, Mademoiselle saw at once that Eleanor would march her to exhaustion, and so put a guidebook in the sixteen-year-old’s hand, letting her loose without a thought for conventional chaperonage or even safety. “Perhaps she realized that I had not the beauty which appeals to foreign men, and that I would be safe from their advances,” Eleanor said self-deprecatingly in later years. “Being ugly and innocent, nothing disagreeable ever happened to me, and I never expected it to.”57
Unsurprisingly, she could not see how appealing she was. She had a beautiful smile, but the face she turned to the tearooms and galleries of the ancient city was doleful. “Totty—so intelligent, so charming, so good,” said Mademoiselle definitively, before throwing up her hands in exasperation: “Mais elle n’est pas gaie!”58
No evidence survives of any erotic attraction between teacher and student. Biographers would later ask if Eleanor was aware that her teacher was gay.59 Souvestre did depend emotionally on Eleanor, who became more skilled at reading her mentor’s moods the longer she remained at Mademoiselle’s side—learning which were safe and thus allowed for spontaneity, and which were explosive and required her to improvise.
THE POSSIBILITY OF ELEANOR’S FAILING to measure up was no longer on anyone’s mind. The Totty Roosevelt who returned to Allenswood the next two falls became an intermediary, mediating tensions between her fellow students and Mademoiselle. She had tried to do this for Nelly Post; and though she had failed to save her friend, she came into her own as the beloved ombudsman for Allenswood’s international student body.60
Mademoiselle privileged her further by assigning her to look after the girls who were ill, mothering them and administering medicines. Through damp English winters, Eleanor maintained the school’s precautions against influenza by soaking pieces of cotton wool in eucalyptus oil and hanging the swatches from the chandeliers in study hall. She made school purchases, helped Signorina Samaia run the house, and welcomed new girls from Germany, France, Russia, nursing them through their struggles and adjustments, making them feel rapidly at ease in circumstances so different from their usual lives.
In September 1901, when the assassination of President McKinley transformed Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two, into the youngest chief executive in American history, Eleanor sensed new eyes upon her. She would later admit that even with Uncle Ted now leading the nation, she did not “have the least idea how our government was run, nor did I have any curiosity about it.”61
The more Allenswood kindled her instinct to serve others, the more she resisted going home to “come out” in society. Her youthful ideal—professional nursing—necessarily remained a dream. To Grandmother Hall’s generation, the thought of nursing the public was vulgar; a well-bred girl taking her place in society was supposed to marry, not scrub the sick or empty bedpans; even caring for family members was best left to servants. College was also out of the question, since at Vassar or Bryn Mawr Eleanor would only become the kind of serious young woman no gentleman would ever look at. “All you need, child,” rasped Grandmother, “are a few of the social graces to see you through life.”62 She insisted that Eleanor return for her debut in winter 1902.
Eleanor would remember Allenswood as the happiest time of her early life and Mademoiselle as her most profound influence, after her father.63 She could imagine returning one day to Allenswood to teach alongside her mentor and to mediate between Souvestre and her latest worshipful followers. But Eleanor made no cult of her teacher; and the real education of Eleanor Roosevelt depended most on that part of herself that responded to misfortune as the super-adult everyone needed.64
This survival skill neatly dovetailed with the Souvestrian belief that whatever came her way was hers to handle. And without higher education or further training in social sciences, this alloy of universal responsibility would fill her life with commitments, often petty, sometimes damaging, always time-devouring. Years would pass before she could accurately take her own measure or discriminate among those causes and people vying for her help and her heart. For now, whatever and whomever was left on her doorstep was her responsibility.65
THAT JULY, 1901, AUNT PUSSIE—ELEANOR’S anti-Souvestre—landed in England to pursue yet another married man and, incidentally, to take Eleanor home from school.66 Pussie was now, as Eleanor later commented, “a liberal education in how a person who is really probably emotionally unstable can make life miserable for the people around them.”67
Unmarried and embittered at twenty-eight, Pussie seized new love as fiercely as if it were a revolver. Anxiously awaiting a proposal from her latest target, she checked herself and Eleanor into a London hotel for a night of “long discussions and tears.”68 As the hour of sailing approached and no word came, Eleanor assumed that the man “did not relish a scandal, and there was not going to be any further love story going on.”69 Pussie’s obligation to bring Eleanor back left her no choice but to board the steamer home, her hopes put aside again.
As the sluggish Atlantic Transport Line vessel steamed for New York, Pussie restarted the melodrama, declaring this her last voyage, and vowing to throw herself overboard.70 Eleanor took her at her word, jumping up every time she started for the cabin door, whereupon Pussie would mock Eleanor’s newfound Allenswood-alpha-girl authority.71
Everyone agreed that she had become much comelier while abroad. One friend recalled the returning Eleanor as a “lovely appealing young girl—fresh from school in Europe—winning all hearts by her charm and seriousness, and exquisitely turned out [in] beautiful and chic clothes.”72 Another friend saw in her tall new presence a “Gibson-girl figure, a pensive dignity, the charm of tenderness, and the sweetness of youth.”73 Even Cousin Alice had to admit that there was “something loveable about her.”74
Pussie may simply have been ashamed at being so needy as to have put her niece on protracted alert—her niece, moreover, who was about to bud into a debutante. Whatever the reason for her bile, when they both stayed at Northeast Harbor in July, Pussie took her revenge, turning on Eleanor the blast she kept threatening to use on herself.
The summer had been stormy on Mount Desert Island, the buoy in the harbor clanging on the afternoon Eleanor braved the windy, thundering walk from Cousin Susie Parish’s to Aunt Maggie’s cottage on the harbor shore. Inside, when tea was served, the talk of the day turned to Eleanor and what she would wear to the next of the summer’s dances, which raised the subject of Mlle. Souvestre’s tailor having fitted her for a stylish gown in Paris. Put out by this, Pussie wondered aloud if Eleanor wouldn’t always look like a child dressed up? “You’re so homely,” Pussie told her, with point-blank relish, “that no man will ever want to marry you.”75
This was suspect, coming from a famous beauty who was six years past the average age of marriage for women. But Pussie was too quick to be caught, and immediately let fly another round of live ammunition, sniping at Eleanor for her “neglect” of brother Hall. When Eleanor stoutly protested that her father had left her in charge of Hall, Pussie went in for the kill. “You’re so innocent,” she taunted, “you don’t know anything about your father.”76
She then grimly laid out for Eleanor the dire facts of Elliott’s infamy seven summers before. Her father had died—not in Virginia, as the newspapers had said and as Eleanor had always believed—but in sordid surroundings: his mistress’s apartment on West 102nd Street. Doping himself. Guzzling alcohol by the quart. Knocking on a neighbor’s door during a fit of delirium tremens to ask if “Miss Eleanor Roosevelt were at home,” and upon learning that she was not, asking the neighbor to “tell her her father is so sorry not to see her.”77 Then running violently up and down stairs. Then jumping from a parlor window.
Eleanor had a half brother, didn’t she know? Elliott Roosevelt Mann,78 later to change his name to Elliott Robert Mann to expunge his mother Katie Mann’s early attempt to prove his paternity.79 Eleanor’s father had gotten the housemaid pregnant, bringing further shame on the family when this Katie Mann tried to blackmail the Roosevelts. Uncle James Alfred Roosevelt had paid off the woman, only to find that Katie reappeared, bastard in her arms, at the reading of Eleanor’s father’s will. But before Miss Mann could state further claims, the husband of a Mrs. Evans, Elliott’s newer mistress, had brandished a loaded revolver, and this “Mr. Evans” had kept his finger on the trigger as he threatened to shoot up the Roosevelt family lawyer’s office.…80
As if smiling through a curl of her own gunsmoke, Pussie finished: “That’s the kind of father you had.”
Elliott Roosevelt’s death had stopped her nine-year-old life in its tracks. Now, seven years later, here it was blasting out of the back of her adolescence.
Pussie was cruel. “What right had she to make [me] so miserable?” volleyed an older Eleanor. “It seemed to me then that she was the most selfish person I had ever known.”81 But her authority was sufficient to cast a spiral of doubt that sickened Eleanor. Had she been the only one from whom the truth had been kept? “Father’s little Golden Hair.” Was she nothing special after all—just a newer Miss Roosevelt in Elliott Roosevelt’s ongoing serial?
There seemed no bottom to the depths she must now reexamine. The new information undermined her most basic understanding of herself and her family, which now included a pitiable half brother. It embarrassed her to know that somewhere lived a disadvantaged little boy bearing her father’s name.
After Cousin Susie corroborated Pussie’s story, Eleanor limped back to Tivoli, clinging to the hope that Grandmother Hall would deny it. But Grandmother only intensified Eleanor’s confusion when she further explained that Elliott’s “weakness” had been the deciding factor in Anna’s tragedy: “It ruined your mother’s life.”82
AND WITH THAT, HER DREAM was gone.
If she could only get back to Allenswood, where she could take refuge. What comfort to know that she had a third and final year under Mlle. Souvestre’s wing. Even though she would have to come back and live with Pussie during her debut, it was heartening to know that she had a real mentor, upon whom she could now rely “as a guide for me—to think of what I could do, rather than about what I could not.”83 For if Pussie was right, and her father had been a bad man, Eleanor now understood that she could redeem him just as absolutely by being an extremely good woman.
No one would ride herself harder or adhere more closely to codes of conduct. She would show the Assembly Ball matriarchs—her mother’s generation of matrons who had treated her in the wake of her father’s death “like the daughter of a wicked, ruined man.”84 She would lecture roguish Cousin Alice on which presents were permissible to receive from gentlemen (flowers, books, cards; positively no jewelry), as Alice vaguely fingered a string of seed pearls she had won from a passing admirer the week before.85
More satisfying, she would show vampish Aunt Pussie how to expand into marriage, and banish forever the bad story of her parents, by putting virtue and a virtuous husband in her own. From now on, wrote Eleanor, “a certain kind of orthodox goodness was my ideal and ambition.”86