Free Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash Page A

wonder if it would do any good to talk to him about his imprudence! I suppose not. I wish he would come to me for a little while; but I guess Oyster Bay would prove insufferably dull, not only for Elliott but for Anna.” Soon Elliott was back on his feet, playing polo with Theodore in Oyster Bay. “I know we shall be beaten,” Anna confided to her sister-in-law, “since Elliott can barely stay on his pony.” Elliott’s team lost. “We have great fun here at polo,” Theodore wrote CabotLodge. Theodore worked and played strenuously, but he found the pace set by Anna and Elliott too frantic and ultimately meaningless. “I do hate his Hempstead life,” he confided to Bye. “I don’t know whether he [Elliott] could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.”
    For Eleanor, Hempstead was a happy place. She was not too far away from her cousin Alice, with whom she loved to play. “She and Eleanor are too funny together,” Anna reported. They both went to Aunt Gracie’s for lessons every morning. “Alice is looking so splendidly and plays so beautifully with Eleanor,” was the report. But when Elliott left to go cruising on the Mayflower, the 100-foot sloop that had won the America’s Cup several years before, Anna made a point of letting him know that “Baby is well but very fiendish.” Eleanor’s anger did not last, however. Soon she was caught up again in the excitement of her full summer life. “Eleanor is on the piazza building a house with blocks and seems very well and happy,” Anna wrote in her next report. “She won’t hear of going home as she says, she would not have Alice any more. Aunty and Uncle Bunkle took Alice and Eleanor sailing yesterday. They did enjoy it so much. They are coming over from Sagamore Hill to lunch, and tonight we tea there.”
    The relationship between Alice and Eleanor, both born in 1884, may not have been as serene as their elders assumed. The two cousins were very different. Though a frail child, “Baby Lee” was as proud, self-assured, and competitive as her father. Golden-curled and saucy, her blue eyes flashed an endless challenge, while Eleanor was gentle, docile, shy, and already painfully aware of her ungainliness. For two years Eleanor wore a steel brace to correct a curvature of the spine, “a very uncomfortable brace.” Alice, like Eleanor, idolized her father, and also felt rebuffed and neglected by her mother—in her case, her stepmother. Her response was to rebel, to turn tomboy, which she knew annoyed her stepmother, while Eleanor, much as she would have liked to imitate Alice, withdrew into injured melancholy. Alice seemed “older and cleverer,” she said much later, “and while I always admired her I was always afraid of her.”
    The summer of 1888 had been a time of closeness to her parents and happiness for Eleanor, who was going on four. “The funny little tot had a happy little birthday,” her father wrote to Bamie, thanking her for Eleanor’s birthday present, “and ended by telling me, when saying good night (after Anna had heard her say her prayers) that she ‘loved everybody and everybody loved her.’ Was it not cunning?”
    That fall and winter were to be the last time Anna, Elliott, and Eleanor enjoyed life as a family. By late spring, 1889, they were finally and fully settled in their “country seat,” which they called “½-way Nirvana.” Anna was pregnant again and expected to spend a quiet summer.
    It was only a few weeks later that Elliott, rehearsing with friends for an amateur circus to be staged at the Waterbury place in Pelham, fractured his ankle in turning a double somersault. The break was incorrectly diagnosed as a sprain, and he was in agony for two weeks after the plaster had been broken off. There were days of such