DOUGLAS ROBINSON’S IDEA FOR ELLIOTT’S immediate future actually belonged to his wife, Corinne. She has been described as “the most sympathetic” of Elliott’s siblings, and despite his dissatisfaction with his sister’s plan, it was probably the most practical decision the family could have made. And the most sympathetic as well.
Corinne persuaded her husband to offer Elliott a job managing the Robinsons’ newly acquired coal and timber businesses in Virginia. In addition he would oversee the thousands of acres surrounding them—except that it was not an offer; it was an ultimatum. Elliott accepted, and, as he thought of it, “went voluntarily into exile.” Among others, he left behind Mrs. Sherman and Mrs. Evans, who would see him only on his occasional visits to New York for the next year and a half, and who, each without knowing of the other, missed him terribly.
Elliott’s Elba, his Saint Helena, was the small town of Abingdon, 361 miles from Washington, DC, 581 miles from the Roosevelt home in New York, but, sadly, less than a short walk from the nearest neighborhood tavern. In fact, we learn from Mason White, “One evening, drunk and naked, he knocked over a lamp and burned himself badly.”
It might have been this incident, or possibly a later bout with his spirituous demons, that led to the following, one of countless letters he wrote—or, in this case, dictated—to the daughter he could no longer see, the daughter who, as an adult, did not publish such correspondence:
Dear little Nell:
Father has your sweet note of May nineteenth and as he may not be allowed to write for a day or two has asked his nurse to drop you these lines to assure you as ever of his love. . . .
I am much better, have had an attack of “la grippe”.
Yours affectionately and Devotedly
Elliot [sic] Roosevelt
On another occasion, Elliott had to enlist someone other than a nurse to write a brief note to his daughter. Like the previous one, it was undated.
Dear little Nel [sic]
Your father is not well, and unable to write. He sends you lots of love, and hopes you are very well and happy.
Sincerely,
H. G. Moore
There is no way of knowing whether this letter, too, was the result of a drunken binge that, perhaps causing an injury, made it impossible for Elliott to hold a pen steadily. His earliest days in Abingdon were a torment for him. But that would soon change.
TO DISTRACT HIMSELF FROM HAVING to settle in what was, to him, so remote a part of the country, and the further travail of a puzzling new set of vocational duties, Elliott threw himself into a hobby that came naturally to him: horse breeding. His previous passion for polo served as a foundation for his interest, which was also a passion for many others who lived around him. Soon, in fact, he found that raising horses was not the only thing he enjoyed about Abingdon. His experiences there proved to be much more pleasant than he ever could have imagined.
In the spring of 1892, Abingdon was “a sprawling old Virginia village,” with about fifteen hundred residents, fewer than the number who lived within a couple blocks of his childhood residence in New York. But even those men and women he met apart from the horse farms were, by and large, amenable sorts. He was not only at ease with them but also impressed. “Old families of the Virginia aristocracy type lived in mellowed houses within the corporate limits and on outlying plantations, or farms as they are called in this part of Virginia. Army officers, congressmen, State Governors and Supreme Court Judge, and men of their ilk had always been among the leaders of the community.”
As for the life that Elliott Roosevelt lived in these far-from-urban environs, it was not only different from anything he had known before, but more demanding of his time.
Father would write you a long letter if he could but he is very busy and even to send off these few lines is more than he so should do.
I hope my little girl is well and I thank her for the two precious little notes she wrote me.
And:
My darling little Nell:
What can you think of your Father, neglecting to write you for so long. Though you are the naughty pretty little recreant as you owe me one or two I think. . . . I have been very, very busy down here, working at things which someday you will be interested to hear about when you get older. . . . [G]ive everybody my love. Keep a great deal for yourself my little Nell.
Ever devotedly,
Your Father
Because of their separation, both Elliott and his daughter were extraordinarily sensitive to each other’s epistolary needs. If one of them feared that he or she had let too much time elapse without a reply, the next letter always contained an apology. “We moved to the country,” Eleanor told her father in the summer of 1894, “and that is why I have not written before we were in such a hurry to get of [sic] for it was so hot in New York.”
In the hope of eliminating a delay in response, one was likely to urge the other on, as Eleanor did a month later, “Please write to me soon.” And later it was “Write to me soon another letter. I love you very much. . . .”
More than once, Elliott had to apologize not for allowing too much time to pass before writing but for the likelihood that he would not see her in New York as planned. His absence would be especially poignant in the winter of 1892. After asking her for “a little list of Christmas wants so that I can prepare to tell Old Santa Claus about them,” he was forced to say, “Goodbye. I may not see you at Christmas though I shall try to be up from Virginia at about that time. Everlovingly Your Father.”
He did not see her that Christmas. He was too busy working; that, at least, was the excuse. In reality, he was forbidden by his family to visit Eleanor.
THERE IS NO REAL NEWS in most of these letters, but that is of no significance. Rather, it is important to understand the cumulative effect of the messages that father and daughter exchanged, the reassurance that they were thinking of each other, the willingness they revealed to always find the time to write and then mail the messages. It is no small thing to keep up a frequent correspondence. For Eleanor and her father, it was a constant reaffirming of love and need—a presence in the midst of absence. That is the real content of the letters; that is what makes them indispensable in understanding the relationship between the pair. When they wrote to each other, Elliott and his daughter were solidifying the foundation, already in place, that would not only keep the bond between father and daughter firm despite the distance, but would also continue to support Eleanor when she needed propping up in the future, a future that her father would not live to see but that Eleanor ever attributed to his influence.
To his Little Nell, Elliott was always light and affectionate when he wrote, allowing no trace of his pining for her to appear and cause her to fret.
In addition, he knew that the more cheerful he seemed in his writing, the more puzzled Eleanor would be by his seclusion, which would make her more likely to plead for an end to it—to her mother, to Uncle Ted, to Corinne and Douglas, to Grandmother Hall. On paper, Elliott was able to seem the soul of cheerfulness in Abingdon. But, although he enjoyed it more than he expected, he did need to dart off for occasional escapes.
And Eleanor was able to believe in his good cheer, in the return of his normality, as she grew older and felt more and more the miles between them, each of the hundreds a pinprick of pain that the two of them felt equally. Historian Nathan Miller writes that Eleanor “lived for Elliott’s letters to his ‘Little Nell,’ and carried them about as a talisman.”
The last point is a crucial one in understanding Eleanor’s years of ascent, still almost two decades away. In fact, it is crucial to understanding her entire life’s underpinnings.
IN HER COMPOSITION BOOK, ELEANOR wrote a story, dressed up as fiction, that was reminiscent of something Sissy Jupe might have written when she found that her father had disappeared in Hard Times.
“A child stood at a window. . . . Her father [was] the only person in the world she loved, others called him hard & cold but to him she was everything lavishing on him all the quiet love which the others could not understand. And now he had gone she did not know for how long but he had said ‘what ever happens[,] little girl[,] some day I will come back’ & she had smiled. He never knew what the smile cost.”
THE AIR IN ABINGDON WAS fresh, clean, crisp, scented bracingly.
And birds chirped. Elliott swore he could hear birds chirping, at the same time that he heard the faint rustle of leaves when they fluttered onto them and then through. Did birds chirp in New York? He had no idea. He could not remember. Perhaps they did but were drowned out by carriages clattering on cobblestone streets; machines that were tearing down old buildings and putting up new ones as Manhattan moved ever northward; newsboys standing on street corners braying out the latest tabloid headlines, with the loudest boy selling the most papers. Were birds smart? Probably not, or the word birdbrain wouldn’t be one of the language’s pejoratives. But a bird could be pretty dumb and still have the sense to flap itself away from the crowded din of New York for the peace and beauty of Washington County, Virginia, the huge, gently rolling green swards and endless white fences of horse country. So many places for them to alight contentedly. Maybe they were like him, exiles from Manhattan. But unlike him, they could return with ease.
Elliott Roosevelt’s life in Abingdon involved not only a lot of responsibility but also a lot of territory.
The Robinson properties covered a vast, almost primeval wilderness of virgin forest, laurel thicket, and high peaks, which the Douglas Land Company had decided to begin to tap. This meant bringing in railroads, improving mountain trails, settling boundary disputes, selling land to homesteaders.
In none of which occupations had Elliott so much as the slightest whiff of experience. But he did seem to possess the right instincts. Joseph Lash continues:
The work was difficult and hazardous but “by meeting the mountaineers upon their own grounds” Elliott was soon considered a “friend,” the Washington County [Virginia] paper wrote. “Children loved him; Negroes sang for him usually when he was sick in bed: the poor, the needy and the unfortunate had reason to bless him; the young girls and the old ladies “fell for him;” and men became his intimate friends.
Elliott’s social success in Abingdon seems, in large part, to have been the result of a single party, which his new acquaintances held in his honor, fearing that he might be bored with them and their existence, so rural and unsophisticated. Assuming—incorrectly, as had always been true—that Elliott was as lordly as his last name suggested, the upper crust of Abingdon decided that it would be wise neighborliness to make a friend of him.
The gathering started out, prior to the guest of honor’s arrival, as “a very stiff and formal and altogether proper affair. He came. The stiffness thawed out, the formality disappeared, and the reception became one of the jolliest of their usual easy and natural parties. From then on he was simply one of the crowd, except that he was the life of every party and his presence in any gathering was a guaranty of a jolly good time for everybody.”
IN THE MONTHS AFTER THE election of 1932, the future First Lady of the United States would pay a visit to Abingdon, another homage to her father that, like publishing the book of letters, she was advised not to do. But, again, she refused to listen. She knew what she had to do, and that was to thank all the people who had been so gracious to Elliott when he lived among them. She had to know what they were like, to feel what her father felt in their midst. She had to make sure they knew what she felt about their kindness toward the man who was always kind to her.
HIS SOBRIETY, IT SEEMS, WAS never an issue in Abingdon. Apparently no one, or perhaps just a few people, saw his unclothed self when he knocked over the light, and his burns might have been covered once he attired himself again. There is no other report of a public display of inebriation on his part. Which is not to say he was now sober, only under control. And which is not to say that he did not drink copiously when alone.
About this we obviously do not know.
What his fellow Abingdonians did see was something close to the Elliott Roosevelt that Manhattan high society saw only a few years ago—although how difficult it was for him to maintain this veneer is also something we don’t know.
“He dropped into homes and fitted into every family circle, eating apples by the open fire, reading poetry, talking of local things or about his own wife and children.” He always functioned best away from his strong-minded wife and very successful brother but does not seem to have recognized this. And although he carved out a place for himself in Abingdon, his letters home were full of remorse and pleas that the “homeless and heartsick and lonely” sinner be forgiven and allowed to return to his family. “You know no sin which compares with mine,” he wrote his wife, “can hardly know the agony shame and repentance I endure and the self condemnation I have to face. I need indeed be brave to make my fight.”
Such a different tone from the letters he wrote to his daughter.
But Anna was no less troubled than her husband. That she wanted him to recover and rejoin her family cannot be questioned; she wanted his help with the children, wanted the friendship and adoration of the man she had known as a suitor, who was then the envy of all in her circle. But that she believed it was unlikely to happen, no matter how hard he tried, was equally obvious. After receiving one of Elliott’s emotional messages, perhaps the one just cited, she wrote to Bamie, “This letter from Elliott worries me so that I send it to you,” she told her. “I am so awfully sorry for him. My heart simply aches and I would do anything I could that could really help him. . . . It seems to be dawning on him for the first time that he is not coming home this Autumn.”
INITIALLY, ELLIOTT LIVED OVER A store on Main Street. Hardly regal in the Rooseveltian sense. Soon, however, he moved up a notch, renting rooms in the home of Mrs. Mary Branch Campbell, the widow of a local judge and “a lovely old lady of motherly heart and infinite understanding of the ways of young men.” For Elliott, these ways included the invitations he extended to the young ladies of Abingdon “to drive with him on the high seat of his swanky trap or in his two-seated yellow jersey wagon and he was a much sought addition to the masculine conclaves of men both young and old.”
But there is no evidence, not even a suggestion, that Elliott ever did anything with an Abingdon woman other than ride with her and tell her tales, heavily edited, of his previous life. No attempted liaisons, no drunken revels. At least when others were present, especially those of the opposite sex, he seems to have been on his best behavior. Did he long for flesh, for the lusty responses of his two New York mistresses? Yet again, something we do not know. No letters between Elliott and either of the ladies exists. Or, if they do, they are certainly not housed in an official Roosevelt archive.
Elliott was also behaving on the job, despite Joseph Lash’s previous description of it as “difficult and hazardous.” For the first time in his life he seemed to enjoy going to work, helping to transform Abingdon into a more modern and economically thriving area. He even went so far as to tell some of his recently made friends that he was thinking of settling permanently among them.
He did not mean to fool them. Certainly, though, he was fooling himself. He could not stay in such rural environs. He needed the pace of Manhattan society again, even if he was excluded from it. More important, he needed the proximity of the large Roosevelt clan, which would make it easier for him to beg for forgiveness, to take him back and include him again in familial life.
And, of course, more than anything else, he needed his daughter, needed to call her “Little Nell” to her face, not simply write the words in the salutation of a letter.
The appellation, however, was becoming inappropriate. It might still have been appropriate for her age, but Eleanor was growing up fast in her father’s absence, becoming “an independent and willful child.” That is how her mother described her at this time. “Since Anna never took her into her confidence, [Eleanor] created a life of her own. [She] understood only that her home was a battlefield. . . . She looked accusingly at Anna. She blamed her mother for all her unhappiness.”
It was, of course, not true. In fact, according to Blanche Wiesen Cook’s view of the family dynamics, Anna deserves at least some of the credit for the relationship Eleanor had formed with her father. Believing that emotional nearness was the best thing for both of them, especially Elliott, she worked at it, encouraged it. Cook asserts that Anna “had no intention of turning her daughter away from Elliott, of betraying the unquestioning devotion Eleanor felt for her father. It might have been easier for Anna if she had. But, with enormous self-control, even as [Eleanor’s] clear blue eyes gazed at her with such hatred and misunderstanding, even as they reflected her own pain and suffering, Anna said nothing.” She hoped that, eventually, her husband and daughter would find enough contentment in each other to be less hostile toward her, and that with less hostility would come peace of mind, as well as fewer nagging ailments for her, ailments that persisted and were at times debilitating. Ailments for which Eleanor could find only minimal sympathy.
ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS, ELLIOTT BEGGED Anna for a reconciliation. She would have none of it. The time was not right. It was Eleanor and his two boys, his wife knew, with whom he really wanted to be reconciled, not her, and she would not allow his presence to torment her for the children’s sake. She was not even sure that the boys longed for him, and little has been written about Elliott’s relationship with them.
Anna’s initial refusals angered Elliott, then brought replies that were equal parts frustration and grief.
I have not found one person in either my wife’s or my connection who encourages me . . . when I propose that the Children join their Father.
What he did find, he said, was that the family had united against him, conspiring in their belief that Anna, Eleanor, Ellie, and Hall belonged with Anna’s mother, with whom all of them now lived. There, he continued, complaining enviously, they were
surrounded by every thing in the way of luxury and all the advantages, both educational and otherwise to which they have become accustomed. . . . I have told my Mother-in-Law that she shall have the children until I feel I must have them and when that time comes she has promised to give them up to me—No matter if I am living alone on White Top [in Abingdon] or in Ceylon.
The effect of her father’s exile on Eleanor was greater loneliness than she had known before. To combat it, she spent more time on her tree limb, sometimes without a book. When on the ground, she often kept quietly to herself, sometimes imagining that Elliott was accompanying her, walking with her, that they were talking privately and silently to each other. It is not as strange as it sounds. Many children who are seven, eight, or nine have imaginary friends; in Eleanor’s case, it was her father.
And she did not want to be interrupted when the two of them were together. She was referring to other members of the teeming Hall household—her mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles, little Ellie and littler Hall, maids and other servants, governesses and tutors—when she complained as follows: “They always tried to talk to me and I wish to be left alone to live in a dream world in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I retired as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, and all the time I was walking or when any one bored me.”
IN OCTOBER 1892, ANNA NEEDED surgery. Eleanor told her father and, although he did not know the reason for the operation, he wrote to Grandmother Hall, insisting that a husband’s place at a time like this was at his wife’s side.
He was told he was not wanted.
No, he insisted, he belonged in New York.
He should stay in Abingdon, he was told again, and it was an order; he would be notified by mail of the results of the procedure. Elliott did not understand how his family could believe that such coldhearted exclusion would rehabilitate him. If anything, it made him thirstier.
Several days later, he received a letter. The operation, whatever the reason for it, was successful. But Anna’s good health was always a tenuous thing, more so under the present circumstances than ever before. As it turned out, she would barely outlive her period of recuperation.
However, both she and her mother, with Theodore’s assent, had already conceded the point that, for Eleanor’s sake, Elliott must be allowed the occasional visit with her. They laid down the conditions. Elliott was not allowed to spend more than a day or two at a time with his daughter, despite having to make the journey of 581 miles each way. He was not allowed to see her without first being given approval of the activities he had planned for them. Sometimes, he was actually chaperoned by another family member, or told that the two of them were to report in partway through the day. As for warning him not to drink in Eleanor’s presence, not a word was uttered. It was understood that, if he stopped again at the Knickerbocker Club or any of the other watering holes he once frequented, he would never see his daughter again. Nothing, no treatment that he had yet endured, was more effective in keeping Elliott sober. For short periods of time, at least.
“Though he was so little with us,” Eleanor wrote of her attitude when Elliott’s appearances drew near, “my father dominated all this period of my life. Subconsciously I must have been waiting always for his visits. They were irregular, and he rarely sent word before he arrived, but never was I in the house, even in my room two long flights of stairs above the entrance door, that I did not hear his voice the minute he entered the front door. Walking down stairs was far too slow. I slid down the banisters and usually catapulted into his arms before his hat was hung up.” One can only imagine what Anna thought when she watched her normally sullen child become so suddenly animated.
Elliott and Eleanor seldom had much time together, and so they passed the majority of it in their favorite activity: mapping out a future that neither of them fully believed would come. “They would spend the day walking around Central Park, spinning out fantasies of the ideal life they would have together when he finally got a house of his own and was able to bring her and her brother, Hall, to live with him.”
Another visit, however, not nearly so dreamy, offered yet another reminder of the donkey ride near Sorrento.
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 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.”
Elliott might have stopped for a few drinks that day before calling on his daughter. Getting up his nerve no less than quenching his thirst. Or he might just have been exhibiting his normal recklessness, exacerbated by his declining mental state. Eleanor might or might not have known that he had imbibed before his visit. Regardless, she was not about to tattle on him, especially since his behavior with her was usually above reproach.
BACK IN ABINGDON AFTER THIS or another of his New York treks, Elliott found himself on the verge of the greatest misfortune of his life so far. Slightly more than a year and a half later, there would come another. He barely had a chance of saving himself even before these two occurrences. Afterward, it was just a matter of time.