WE ARE WELL INTO THE story. But I believe there is something that should be said at this point before it continues.
I have taken some liberties so far, not with the truth but with my method of telling it. I have skipped back and forth in time between Eleanor Roosevelt as a child and Eleanor as an adult. I have taken smaller skips, but skipped nonetheless, with her father. In short, I have been more concerned with theme than chronology; that is, more concerned with Elliott’s background and, later, his remarkable influence on Eleanor, than with writing a diary of their relationship, heeding the dictates imposed by a calendar.
It is for the same reason that I am about to do even more skipping, this time taking not steps but leaps. This will allow me to fill in the blanks hinted at but not detailed in the preceding chapters. Henceforth, Elliott will appear only during a period of thirty-four years, ending in 1894. As for Eleanor, she will not appear until 1917, when the Great War, later known as World War I, forces her out of her cocoon and into the realm of politics already occupied by her husband. There will, thus, be no intercourse between them except for flashbacks and memories, although many of these will appear. They will provide evidence of a bond that itself makes a leap—in this case a leap over time, not only ignoring the calendar but transcending death.
Again, I am allowing theme to trump chronology, and asking for the reader’s patience. I am trying to tell the story in what I believe to be not only an engaging manner but also a “factual” one, factual as Ralph Waldo Emerson once employed the term. “If a man wishes to acquaint himself with the real history of the world,” Emerson wrote, “. . . he must not go first to the state-house or the court-room. . . . It is what is done and suffered in the house, in the personal history, that has the profoundest interest for us. . . . The great facts are the near ones.”
Elliott and his daughter could not have taken more divergent paths in life. In most cases, a circumstance like this creates a gulf between parent and child that cannot easily, or ever, be bridged. Especially given the path that Elliott took, however much against his will, however due to perversities of his nature that were as unwanted as they were uncontrollable.
But this did not happen with the two Roosevelts. Despite their divergent paths, Elliott would be the most important person in Eleanor’s life for all of her days, even to the last one, even when he was no longer corporeally present. Theirs was a relationship for the ages, fascinating to contemplate if not always easy to understand. The role of the parent in the growth of a child is one of the deepest and most important of human mysteries, one that cannot be predicted or, as it seems with the Roosevelts, solved even after the fact.
As I worked on Someone to Watch Over Me, I thought of a painting. Most biographers who write about America’s longest-serving First Lady try to tell the complete story of her existence, from unpromising start to esteemed world figure. This means telling of war and peace, of conversations and disputes with the most influential men in the world, of leadership in a wide variety of spheres, of opinions that mattered, expressed in a wide variety of forums. It means, as well, telling of one of the most extraordinary transformations that a human being has ever made from child to adult.
Biographers, then, think of her story as a mural, and they are correct to do so; Eleanor’s was among the richest, most widely ranging lives of a public figure in the twentieth century.
What I have chosen to do, and I believe with equal validity, is something altogether different. I have focused on only a part of the painting, one small section, perhaps easy to overlook but to me, a section of particular interest, where the action is more intense than elsewhere on the canvas and the meaning more significant. To me, that small section is in the center of the mural, and I believe that from that position all the rest of the painting, all the rest of the qualities that made Eleanor Roosevelt the unique person she was, may be said to radiate outward.
The mural cannot be taken in with one glance. To understand it, to appreciate the wide-ranging aspects it reveals, one must know where to cast his or her gaze initially. I trust that I have found the proper place and, further, that the description of it that follows, is more complete than any presented before.