Free Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash

it made her seem doubly helpless & pathetic to us. . . . She asked two or three times in the train coming out here, where her “dear Mamma was, & where her Papa was, & where is Aunt Tissie?” I told her “They have gone to Europe.” She said “where is baby’s home now?” I said “baby’s home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle & Aunt Gracie,” which seemed to entirely satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came near the Bay driving by Mrs. Swan’s she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed way “Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat.” It is really touching. . . .
    Aunt Gracie’s hopeful interpretation of Eleanor’s acquiescence may have calmed her own anxiety but showed little real understanding of the ordeal the two-and-a-half-year-old child was going through in numb silence. She had not been able to overcome her terror of the sea. She had disgraced her parents, and as a punishment they had deserted her and she had lost her home.
    This violent experience made an indelible impression on Eleanor. She never lost her fear of the sea. Throughout her life she felt the need to prove that she could overcome her physical timidity by feats of special courage. Desertion of the young and defenseless remained an ever present theme—in her reading and her compositions for school; the mere suspicion that someone she loved might have turned away from her always caused the same taut, hopeless bewilderment.
    Anna remained uneasy about the separation, “I do so long for her,” she wrote from Paris, “but know it was wiser to leave her.” And evenif Anna had understood how seriously the child was being hurt, she could not have acted differently, because her troubled husband needed his wife’s reassuring presence and love if he was to get well.
    By August he was “a thousand times better,” but he did not wish to risk exposure to his family until he was “really strong and fit to work hard.” They returned to New York after six months and Elliott, full of good intentions, joined his Uncle Gracie’s banking and brokerage firm. But he also rejoined the hard-drinking, hard-riding Meadow Brook crowd. In spite of his family’s misgivings he began to build a large, handsome house in Hempstead, L.I. Polo and hunting became more the center of his life than ever, and he became an ever more reckless rider. One day the hunt started from the Mineola Fair Grounds, the hounds streaking across the Jackson and Titus farms. Forty started out but by the time they were taking the fences of the Titus place only Elliott was following the huntsman. He could hear his companions shouting “don’t follow that Irishman, you will be killed” when he was thrown at the third fence and broke his collar bone. On another occasion he arranged a hair-raising midnight steeplechase. “Your father was one of the greatest sports I ever knew,” Joe Murphy, the Meadow Brook huntsman, later wrote. 7
    Anna and Eleanor shared Elliott’s excitement about the new house in Hempstead—Anna because she hoped it might steady him, Eleanor because it meant she would spend more time with her father. The family rented a cottage nearby to be able to supervise the construction. “Anna is wonderfully well, enjoys everything . . . even the moving and looks the beautiful girl she is. Little Eleanor is as happy as the day is long, plays with her kitten, the puppy & the chickens all the time & is very dirty as a general rule. . . . Baby Eleanor goes up to look after it [the house] every day and calls it hers,” a delighted Elliott informed Bamie.
    The idyll was brief. In June, 1888, Elliott, exhausted by his hectic life, became seriously ill, and though he rallied miraculously, his family was far from reassured. “Elliott is very much better,” Theodore wrote. “I lunched with him Wednesday, and he is now able to go out driving. I