The Little White House

The glass in the low window is hazy with scratches. The little dog used to get so excited when visitors walked up the lane. Propping himself against the glass, he stood on his hind legs and yelped his high-pitched yelp, body quivering, front paws raking the glass. Fala, no need to shout, his master might have said, wheeling slowly toward the door. But inwardly I think he was gratified by the dog’s joy, and although the housekeeper tried to convince him to have the window replaced, he refused. Let happiness, usually so fleeting, for once leave its mark.

Sixty years have passed since the black Scottie dog clawed the window. Fala is long gone, but the scratches remain, as do the books laid open in the study, the mixing bowls nested inside each other in the kitchen cupboards. Everything remains as it was on that day in April 1945 when Fala’s master, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait. I have a terrific pain in the back of my head, he said, slumping. People came running and lifted him from the chair, his favorite, carried him to his narrow bed, and laid him there. A few hours later he died, another casualty of the Second World War.

I made my pilgrimage to Warm Springs on a damp January day. FDR is dear to me for his Works Progress Administration, which built Easley High’s handsome red-brick auditorium, and for the Civilian Conservation Corps, which cleared the trails and raised the cabins at Table Rock. I like FDR for his Fireside Chats, which actually say something, for how he figured out what his listeners needed to hear but didn’t pander. And I like him for his leadership in a war I’d argue he didn’t want to fight. It’s plain from the pictures how the responsibility wore on him. Remember the famous shot of FDR with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta? How bent he looks under his black shawl, dark circles under his eyes.

I walked alone through the house, stepping carefully around the sensors that triggered canned historical interpretation. The ranger at the door told me that FDR came to Warm Springs for polio treatments, building what would come to be known as the Little White House in the winter of 1931, when he was governor of New York. This ranger pointed out that even the toilet paper in the house is original. “I celebrate its birthday in February, same time I have mine,” he said. “I figure, FDR died April twelfth, and the toilet paper was probably manufactured a couple of months before that. Everything in the house is original,” he said. “Everything.” There it hangs, brittle as parchment, encased in Plexiglas.

That was why I’d made the trip, of course: the scratches in the door, the original toilet paper. I walked through Eleanor’s room and saw my face reflected in her oval mirror. His favorite chair, the one he’d been sitting in when the stroke hit, still sags with the memory of his body. The unfinished portrait he was sitting for stands on an easel in his study. His face is colored in—mouth set in a line of mingled pride and humility, graying hair swept back from the wide forehead and dark brows. The neck of his overcoat is there, and the oxblood tie, nondescript, the kind of thing anyone might wear. But there’s only a blurry sepia wash to indicate his shoulders, and where are his hands that famously held his jaunty cigarette? Not here, and maybe that doesn’t matter; the eyes are most important, hollows dark. He’s an old, tired man. The Yalta photos show him to look even worse. The painter has been kind.

A photo hangs in the front room of the nearby FDR museum: a man playing the accordion next to the train tracks at the Warm Springs depot. In the background, the President’s crepe-swathed funeral car pulls away from the station. Tears stream down the man’s face as his fingers press the keys of the accordion, its bellows half-extended.

Racks of walking canes, given to the President by individuals and groups from every state and some foreign countries, fill a wall. Hand carved with names and dates and animals. I think of all the time put into them. His polio was too far gone for any of them to be of much use, but he didn’t let on.

In the beginning of the Depression, my grandfather wrapped himself in newspaper to keep warm. Years later, when I knew him, he had odd habits: savings balled in a sock, compulsive stockpiling of sale items. Ketchup, even. Rows of glass bottles lined the dusty shelves of his cellar. What happened to them after he died? They may be there still, the meager treasure. He saved what he could.

There’s a book at the Little White House where visitors old enough to remember write where they were when they learned of FDR’s death. I paged through this. Some were vague: Stationed at army base. Teaching. This one was more specific: Walking home from school. Man working in cornfield called out to me: “Have you heard?” I ran down the dusty road. Momma sat crying on the porch.

My grandfather has no such book, no museum or rack of hand-carved canes. No one ever painted his portrait. What there is: kind black earth, rolling hills, a hay baler for sale across the cemetery road. Beautiful, mute, he is one of millions.

Eleanor, with her formidable energy, wrote a regular newspaper column that was widely syndicated. After her husband’s death, she told the story of General Eisenhower journeying to FDR’s grave to place a wreath. When Fala heard the military cavalcade pulling up the driveway, his ears perked and he looked around excitedly. He must have thought his master was coming, Eleanor mused. The sound of the sirens. Remember me. Remember me.