February 15, 1933
I buttoned my coat as I ran across the lobby and out onto Madison. It had started to snow, and several taxis sailed by without slowing down. Finally, one pulled over and I barked the address.
The crackpot “tried” to shoot FDR, Bill had said. What did that mean? Had he succeeded? My mind scrambled to understand it. In a crowd, the president-elect was a sitting duck in his open car, since he couldn’t run from the scene or quietly slip away through a crowd. He traveled with Secret Service men and bodyguards, but they couldn’t cover every angle. Whatever had happened, I was at that moment one of the only people in the country who knew about it.
I thought of the millions of dollars and thousands of hours that had gone into raising this man up to the highest office in the land; I thought of all the hopes that rested on his shoulders. The taxi jerked through an intersection, and I braced myself against the seat with my hand. The entire American democratic experiment was in peril if that assassin were a good shot. Tomorrow’s articles could incite panic. Was FDR lying dead in some hospital bed? And was Nora in danger?
Traffic crawled and the chorus of horns was like a church organ at a funeral. When the driver pulled up in front of the town house, I threw my money into the front seat and jumped out, racing up the wide stone steps. A servant moved the curtain aside and peered out before I had the chance to ring the bell. She opened the door and ushered me inside.
“Good evening, Miss Hickok,” she said. Her eyes were puffy from crying.
“Have they told you not to let anyone in?”
She nodded.
“Good girl.”
“No one but you or Tommy, but she is upstate at a party meeting. We haven’t heard anything about Mr. Roosevelt.” She closed the door and took my coat.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said, though I wasn’t in the least convinced of it.
The parlor was empty, so I went upstairs and into a room I had never entered: the president-elect’s bedroom. Nora sat on the foot of his bed clutching a handkerchief, though her eyes were dry. Her back was very straight and she looked pale. Behind her on the wall were dozens of framed pictures of family and friends, houses, horses, dogs, boats—the retinue of a wealthy, powerful man.
“Hick, thank God,” she said. “What have they heard at the AP?”
I shook my head. “Nothing more than you know already, sounds like. Someone tried to shoot him.”
“We don’t know if he was hit. Louis has been trying to get through.”
On the other side of the large room, Louis stood by a small oak table, jiggling the receiver with a cigarette between his fingers. “Operator?” he shouted a few times. “I need Miami. Hello?” He kicked the wall. “Damnit.”
“Louis, please,” Nora said. I could see she was making a mighty effort to keep her composure.
He shook his head with the handset pressed to his ear. “I knew I should have gone on that trip with him.” He slammed down the telephone and then lifted it to try again. “Operator!”
“But it was a pleasure trip.” Nora looked at me, bewildered. “He was supposed to be on Vincent Astor’s yacht for his birthday. I don’t understand why he was even giving a speech.” Her eyes shot to Louis. “Has anyone called the boys? Or Anna? We can’t let them hear it on the radio.”
I thought of Anna’s beau, the reporter from Chicago. “If she’s with Mr. Boettiger, she may know already. But first things first, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said, addressing her with care in Louis’s presence. “Let’s confirm that he’s all right.” I stepped carefully toward the telephone. “May I try?”
He nodded, but, as soon as he set the telephone down, it rang. He snatched it up.
“Hello?” Louis closed his eyes and the tension went out of his narrow shoulders. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at Nora. “It’s him. He’s fine. He didn’t even get hit.”
Nora emitted a wail of relief that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She leaped over the bed and grabbed the handset from Louis. I could hear her husband shouting—the connection was bad— but laughing too, and I let out the breath I’d been holding for what felt like an hour. Suddenly, I was exhausted. On behalf of the United States of America, I was relieved he was all right. But watching her talk to him forced me to remember his primacy in her life, and it made me sorry for myself. I wondered whether his mistress Missy LeHand was down in Miami with him, listening while he talked with his wife. I was no better than Missy was; both of us were playing bit parts in this tale.
Nora didn’t say much, just murmured “thank heavens” and “that’s terrible.” A moment later, she said “All right, goodbye” and hung up.
“Well? What the hell happened?” I asked.
She sat back down. “He decided on a whim to go to a rally tonight in Miami—they had docked there this morning—and, outside the hall, he gave a speech from his car. He was talking about fishing and he had just reached over the side of the car to shake Tony Cermak’s hand when shots rang out. He said Tony fell instantly, and Gus threw his body over Franklin. The driver tried to pull off through the crowd, but Franklin made them wait to load Tony into the car so they could get him to the hospital.”
Louis lit another cigarette. “So this nut tried to kill the president but hit the mayor of Chicago instead?”
“That’s what Franklin said. That poor man. There must have been a lot of blood. My husband cannot stand the sight of blood,” she said, almost to herself. “Another bullet hit the back of the car and a handful of bystanders. But Franklin says the only thing that’s wrong with him is sore ribs, because Gus is no lightweight.”
Louis sat down in a chair in the corner with his short legs sprawled out and unbuttoned his collar. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” He pulled a flask out of his jacket.
“I’ll take some of that,” I said with a little too much enthusiasm.
Louis handed it to me. It was gin, which I hated, but I choked it down. “Will Cermak be all right?”
Nora shook her head. “The doctors are working on him now. So we’ll wait for word.” She stood and straightened the front of her jacket. “What time is it?”
“Time to take a breath,” I said. I glanced at the brass clock on the mantel. “Nine thirty.”
“I have to call the children before they hear something and start to worry. My speech is in the morning and the overnight train to Cornell leaves at eleven. Hick, if you’re going to cover it, we’d better get a move on. I assume you’ll need to stop in at home before we head to the train?”
“You still want to go?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Franklin is fine. There’s nothing I can do for the mayor at the moment, and I won’t tie up the line calling his wife now. Why should I disappoint people who are counting on me to show up?”
I laughed. “I think they’d understand.”
“I’m going,” she said, and I knew there was no dissuading her. It was both impressive and a little frightening to see how deftly she could harness her emotions and pivot to the next item on the agenda.
I took one last pull on the gin and handed the flask back to Louis. “All right,” I said to her. “Why don’t you make your calls, and I’ll take down some notes. I don’t need to stop at home—I have a toothbrush in my desk drawer at the office. And I need to stop there anyway to check in, or Bill will have my head.”
Nora nodded. “Louis will call downstairs for the car,” she said, all business, and went down the hall to the telephone in her bedroom.
I leaned against the wall and pulled my notepad and pencil from my pocket. Eager to preserve the details, I began writing down everything that had just happened. Without looking up, I asked, “All of this is up for grabs, right, Louis?”
As soon as the words were out, I regretted them, but it was too late to retreat. I hoped he hadn’t heard me, but it was clear from his arched eyebrows that he had. No reporter worth her weight in steno pads would ask for approval before filing a story of this magnitude: the near assassination of the leader of the free world. I might not encounter a bigger story in my lifetime, and here I was giving him the chance to massage the facts. I could read the complex panoply of thoughts on his face. As a former reporter himself, it had to make him queasy to see my commitment to journalism go down in flames. And yet perhaps my failing could be useful to him.
“Hick,” he began, but then stopped and appeared to change course. “How are things going for you over at the AP?”
“Fine,” I said quickly. “Great.”
“And Bill is happy with your coverage of Mrs. Roosevelt?”
I wondered if he knew the answer to that and decided to keep my mouth shut.
He took one last drag and stubbed his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray next to the telephone. “Would you ever think about crossing over to our side, working for me in public relations for the Roosevelts? You could have a real hand in shaping her image.” He opened his cigarette case and offered it to me. I pulled out a Lucky Strike.
I balked at this suggestion—my training had taught me to consider working in the city dump before I resorted to public relations— even though building Nora’s image was precisely what I’d been doing with my less-than-objective articles about her. I rolled the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger. “I don’t think so, Louis. I’m a reporter to the bone. Can’t say I’d be very good at toeing the line.”
Louis nodded, weighing my answer. He wore his thin hair slicked to his scalp with oil, and the trying day had pried a few strands loose. They’d migrated to his forehead, making him look a little off-kilter. “You two spend an awful lot of time together,” he said. “I wonder— are you sure you’ll still be able to do the job when the time comes? Call her out when she makes a mistake? Dig around for dirt?”
I knew the answer was no, but I couldn’t say it.
He looked at the end of his cigarette as he lit it, not at me, as he spoke out of the side of his mouth. “There’s a reason why editors tell you to keep a healthy distance from a source, don’t you think?”
That remark contained the shadow of a threat, and I snapped to attention.
Finally he met my eyes. “Like I said, you’ve been spending a lot of
time with the incoming first lady.”
In that moment, I understood that he knew. Either Marcus had reported what he had seen, or Louis had discerned it himself. He was certainly no dummy and had nearly worked himself to death to secure a Roosevelt presidency. He was not in the business of leaving anything up to chance.
Louis could have told me right then to stay away from her and put the whole thing to bed, but instead he said nothing, only rolled his thumb on the striker of the crystal lighter so that I could finally light the cigarette I’d nearly pressed flat in my fingers.
At the other end of the hallway, Nora’s door swung open and she stalked toward us. “Are you all set here, Hick? We can’t miss that train.”
“She’s ready,” Louis said with a disingenuous smile that came off like a wince. “And she’s got a pretty big scoop on her hands, so you’d better get her over to the AP.” He wasn’t going to tell me what to write. The phone call, Nora’s reaction to it, and the details of what had transpired in Miami—all of it was fair game. And he wasn’t going to tell me to stay away from Nora, not today, anyway. Though I almost wished he would.
We emerged from the front door to find it flanked with more Secret Service men than I’d ever seen at once. As they scanned Sixty-Fifth Street, I tried to imagine how they would react if some evildoer came barreling out of the shadows and tried to tackle Nora. Did they have guns at the ready? Across the street was an apartment building ten stories tall, and each window was a tableau of some private existence—a man with a late-night ham sandwich, drawn curtains in another concealing lovers, a lonely dog waiting for its owner to come home. Behind any of those windows could be a man with a rifle, waiting for Nora to step outside. I put my hand on her lower back and ushered her toward the waiting car. For once she didn’t complain about not being able to walk to the train station.
“Would you rather go on to Cornell alone, Nora?” I whispered. I wondered if I should tell her that I thought Louis was onto us, but it seemed cruel to add to her troubles.
She gave me a severe look. “Don’t you dare leave me right now, Hick.” She swallowed, and when she spoke again her voice was faint. “Please.”
It took me only ten minutes to type up my piece at the office. Someone else would write the lead story on the assassination attempt, with help from a reporter in the Miami bureau. My contribution was the reaction on the home front.
At Grand Central, more Secret Service agents sprouted like black cornstalks, and they kept the throng away from her path between the entrance and the track. Our footsteps echoed through the hall. We boarded a special car that had been cleared by agents; once we entered, it was sealed off from other passengers.
In the darkness of the tunnel, as we waited for the train to move, she held my hand and finally her erect shoulders slumped forward; she let her head hang down and cried. I swept my palm in slow circles over her back.
“It has been a terrible night,” I said.
She shook her head and wept for another minute before she could take a breath and speak. “If only you knew some of the thoughts that went through my head.”
“You are under a tremendous amount of stress.” It felt like something near treason, what we were skirting around, and I didn’t want her to give it voice. The train began to rumble and crawl through the tunnel below the streets.
“When I heard what happened, I only wanted you, Hick. You know what I mean, don’t you?” She looked up at me. “What I was thinking?”
I glanced around to confirm that we were still alone. “I do,” I said. That if he had died we could be together for good and without compromise—a notion as dangerous as an electrified rail. “But I don’t think we should talk about it anymore.”
“You’re right. It will do us no good. It already seems impossible again—the world without Franklin.”
She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her face; then she turned on the lamp beside her head and took out her papers and reading glasses. The car was flooded with light and it ushered all the invisible things—the unsayable, the impossible—back into hiding.
The image of a man holding a rifle in the shadows appeared in my mind again. Brief contemplation of the world without Nora landed like a hard smack on my cheekbone, and I drew in a breath. I knew she didn’t belong to me, but before that night, I had not understood how fully she was owned by the world at large, how she had ceded her autonomy to the greater good, despite the dark elements it contained.
I longed to take her in my arms to quell the anxious cells that vibrated in my chest. But a steward was coming into the car to ask whether we needed anything, and I felt the familiar dismay that our relationship had to be conducted in whispers and glances, that even in a matter of life and death I did not have the right to bring my grief into the open. What did it mean to be joined if we could never let anyone else know? Her blue satchel sat on her lap, and I remembered our sandwiches on that first train ride together, the checkered napkins and the way I’d laughed at her carrying the fine saltshaker. I wondered if at least a few crumbs of bread remained at the bottom of her bag.
Thank you for helping me with all the shopping. You know I dread it and hate to spend so very much on what seems to me so frivolous, but the calendar is full of events in the next few weeks and I suppose I would be ridiculed if I wore my old tweeds to them all. I especially like the dress you chose at the Milgrim shop, the camel cashmere with the flared hem. And the hats from Lilly Dache really are lovely. You are welcome to borrow them anytime!
Please say you will come with me on the train to Washington. I will give you the exclusive interview in the W.H. Bill is asking for—but only for you. I rely on you, Hick, now more than ever. I feel so wretched when I think how we will be separated by the long miles. But we can talk on the telephone when I can slip away, and I promise to write all the time. You will just have to burn the letters if I am indiscreet.
All my love to you, darling. It is your face I think of as I fall asleep, your hands in mine.
Love,
Nora