THE YEAR 1887. ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT continued to be a restless soul, hardly living the kind of dreams he shared with his daughter. He might have seemed a glamorous figure from the outside, might have continued to be portrayed as one in the society columns. But inside he was churning with a sharply edged angst. He did not say why. Most likely, he did not know why. He did, however, think he knew what to do about it.
Once again, he needed a change. Once again, his destination would be Europe. He had to get away from the tedium of New York real estate and the empty clatter of Swells’ gaiety—all those homes entombed in opulence, all those dinner parties with the silverware shining so brightly that it reflected off the chandeliers and made a fellow squint. He even had to get away from the polo fields for a time. He had to leave everything that was familiar behind him.
This time he did not go alone. Accompanied by Anna, her sister Tissie, two-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor, and the child’s nurse, he embarked on the cruise ship Britannic. The plan was for “an extended tour of the continent.” He would put an ocean between himself and his troubles, whatever they were.
It was not to be.
THE SHIP’S FIRST DAY AT sea was a foggy one and visibility wavered between poor and nonexistent. A steamer called the Celtic, chugging its way to port in New York and within a few miles of its goal, lost its sense of direction completely. It crashed into the side of the Britannic, heading the other way. Actually, the Celtic practically crashed through the ship carrying the Roosevelts, penetrating it by more than ten feet. The result was death, alarm, and screams that pierced the fog like the arrows of a bowman. The number of people who lost their lives is not certain, but one of them was a beheaded child. Several hundred passengers on both ships were injured, including another child who lost an arm.
Elliott responded heroically. He helped his wife, sister-in-law, and the baby nurse into a lifeboat, and then called for little Eleanor, clinging frantically to a crewman, to be dropped into his waiting arms. But Eleanor would not let go. She screamed and cried. The din all about her was terrifying. Her abiding memory was her profound fear of being dropped from the deck into her father’s arms. The crewman finally freed her fingers, and Eleanor always remembered that fall, the feel of plummeting from the deck high above into the pitching lifeboat below, surrounded by “cries of terror.” And shouts for help.
Eleanor landed without a scratch in her father’s grasp, crying in relief. Or was there another reason for the tears?
Yes, she was happy to have been saved. But as young as she was, she never forgot the horror of the experience, not the result of the leap but its anticipation. When, a year or so later, her parents decided they would once more try a cruise to Europe, Eleanor begged to be left behind. Elliott and Anna pleaded with her to come, the latter with less enthusiasm than the former, but their little girl was adamant. She would run and hide from them when the topic was even mentioned. Even her father’s soothing ways, his vows of assurance, could not get through to her. So, reluctantly, her parents left their daughter at the Gracewood estate of Elliott’s uncle and employer, James King Gracie. They sailed abroad by themselves.
At first Eleanor was mollified. But that is not the same thing as being pleased. She did not want her mother and father on a different continent from her. Further, she did not know her great-uncle well, nor his family, and could not easily accustom herself to the care of strangers. However, she had no choice, for “the accident [had] left Eleanor with a fear of heights and water that was connected to a lifelong sense of abandonment. If she had not cried, if she had not struggled, if she had not been afraid, if she had only done more and been better, she would be with her parents.”
Despite making countless journeys in her lifetime—by land, sea, and, later, air—Eleanor never entirely lost the fears with which her experience on the Britannic had left her. Her fear of abandonment would become a dread of special poignancy in the years just ahead, when, before her eleventh birthday, she would be abandoned twice, both times in the most horrifying of ways for a child.
AT THE AGE OF SEVEN, Eleanor developed another fear, that of boys and girls who were new to her. Not just adults, like the Gracie clan, with whom she had ended up spending an entire summer; now it was children as well. There seems to be no explaining it, either the fear itself or the time when it first seized her. But seize her it did, and so powerfully that she was often forced into isolation, which, by this time, was already a comfortable place for her.
In the Roosevelts’ social circle, it was common for parents to treat their children to parties on Saturday afternoons. Eleanor tried to go but could not. She could not spend time with boys and girls she didn’t know in a house with which she was not familiar, no matter how pleasant the occasion otherwise.
Of course, she did know many of these children, who were in fact schoolmates Eleanor saw every day. But she did not know them well, did not allow herself to know them well, and in their presence at a social occasion she “would break into tears and have to be brought home. Anna arranged to have some boys and girls come in on Friday afternoons to play and stay for tea so that Eleanor could begin to make some friends, but the plan was never carried out.”
Eleanor didn’t want it to be. She wanted her mother to leave her alone. “In Eleanor’s later portrayals of these years,” Joseph Lash writes, “she emerges as a child who was full of fears—of the dark, dogs, horses, snakes, of other children. She was ‘afraid of being scolded, afraid that other people would not like me.’ She spoke of a sense of inferiority that was almost overpowering coupled with an unquenchable craving for praise and affection.”
AS LATE AS 1917, WITH her husband serving his fourth year as assistant secretary of the navy and spending much of his time in Washington, DC, Eleanor’s fear of being abandoned, which had never really released its grip on her, tightened once again. This time it was Franklin, she believed, who was abandoning her—and deliberately so. The feeling “was not relieved by FDR’s breezy letters, and the summer of 1917 [with the United States having entered the Great War and Roosevelt busier than ever at his job] seemed the longest summer of her life.” She wrote to him in gloom and anger. “I don’t think you read my letters for you never answer a question and nothing I ask for appears!”
As was the case with most of his wife’s pleas, Roosevelt did not reply. Her letters did not make sense to him and, even if they did, there was nothing he could do about their being separated. Truth to tell, he was becoming disappointed in her. Did she not understand the gravity of world events that kept them apart? Was she that wrapped up in her own life?
But at the beginning of August, with her husband having been hospitalized by a throat infection, Eleanor was finally able to answer her longing for his company. She took a train to Washington and spent almost two weeks with her husband, all of them in the hospital. But then it was time to go, and Eleanor made sure Franklin knew that her emotional struggles had returned as soon as she’d gotten home and withdrawn a sheet of stationery. The first letter she wrote upon departing from the nation’s capital, after his release from the hospital, said, in part, “I hated to leave you yesterday. Please go to the doctor twice a week, eat well and sleep well and remember I count on seeing you the 26th. My threat was no idle one.”
The words are harsh, her insecurity great.
A mere five days later, her husband was not only enjoying his return to work but was also feeling healthy enough for an outing to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Three friends accompanied him. One of them, Lucy Mercer, who would later be employed as the First Lady’s social secretary, was already becoming more than just a friend to Franklin, and Eleanor’s eventual suspicion that he was romantically entwined with Mercer would turn out to be the most perceptive of all her fears.
Her son would later write about Eleanor’s instability in a biography of her. “‘I was always afraid of something,’” Mother remembered, “‘of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear.’”
IT IS NO SURPRISE THAT the only person capable of easily crossing the barrier was Eleanor’s father, and there was no prospect to her more frightening than letting him down. It did not happen often, but when it did, Elliott could respond in what struck Eleanor as a totally un-Elliott-like manner. In fact, he could be “shockingly mercurial with the daughter who adored him.” But he was always quick to realize his inappropriate behavior and apologize for it. Eleanor in turn was always forgiving, eager to resume their usual ways, not eager, or even willing, to question the reasons for an atypical burst of behavior.
Elliott was probably at his most mercurial after a long and wearing struggle to persuade his daughter to join him and Anna for yet another trip across the Atlantic. This time Eleanor agreed, and she would look back fondly on the beginning of the family’s adventures overseas. “I remember my father acting as gondolier,” Eleanor wrote in her autobiography, “taking me out on the Venice canals, singing with the other boatmen, to my intense joy. I loved his voice and, above all, I loved the way he treated me.” For a time, Eleanor wanted to become a singer when she grew up, believing it would please her father.
But then a different Elliott appeared, also in Italy. One day, as he and Eleanor and some others set out by donkey to explore the countryside near Sorrento, the young girl found herself suddenly terrified by the terrain. The riders had been trotting along pleasantly and peaceably, the sun warming them and the land rolling gently, when they approached a steep downward slope, almost a crater in the ground. Eleanor, taken aback by both the height of the abyss and the possibility of falling off her animal and hurting herself, reined him in. Passing her, Elliott did not even slow his mount, and as he and his companions rode down the plunging hillside, he shouted back up to his daughter, “I never knew you were a coward.”
The words were like a snakebite to her. More than four decades later, when she wrote of them, she could still remember “the tone of disapproval in my father’s voice.”
His disappearance also stung. One moment Elliott rode next to her, the next he had vanished as if the earth had swallowed both him and everyone else in the party. Eleanor gently prodded her donkey to the edge of the slope. She sat there alone, watching as the men reached the bottom. Her father said nothing else to her and did not look back.
After a few minutes, she began to explore her surroundings and found a path around the descent. Proceeding with as much caution as forward motion would allow, she made her way—a long way—back to her party, which had climbed back up the other side of the chasm and, in the process, grown impatient waiting for her. Her father, however, greeted her with a big smile on his face. It took no more than an instant for her smile to be a match for his.
Elliott and his daughter continued their ride as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened, as if he had not frightened Eleanor just a short time before. His girl was happy again, in the place she most liked to be, at her father’s side.
Another incident from the trip to Italy, also involving elevated ground, stayed with Eleanor for years to come, as well.
I remember my trip to Vesuvius with my father and the throwing of pennies, which were returned to us encased in lava, and then the endless trip down. I suppose there was some block in the traffic, but I can remember only my utter weariness and my effort to bear it without tears so that my father would not be displeased.
Eleanor did not blame her father for causing her trepidation, in this case or any other. She knew he loved her. Always thinking the best of him, she might have assumed he was trying to toughen her up, prepare her for the difficulties that all children will face in the years ahead. Or she might have assumed he had some other reason, benevolent in purpose if harsh in the execution. At all times, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.
In time, however, she would learn that he did not always deserve it. She would learn that her father was cursed with a special darkness, one that was fated, in the near future, to drop over him like a shroud, shaping itself to his very contours. But she also learned—knew already, in fact—that his love for her was a constant, and as her savior in childhood and spectral mentor for all the years to follow, she would love him through all the turmoil that the future would bring.