Free Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash Page B

pain “that he could eat nothing and at night he would sob for hours.” His leg had to be rebroken and reset. He told Eleanor what the doctors were going to do. She gave him courage and comfort, but it was a thoughtless act, considering that she was not quite five. He did not complain, but Eleanor, being a child of amazing sensitivity, did not have to be told; as leaves moved to the wind, she stirred to the thought of others in pain. If a playmate was injured she wept, and her father was the person she most loved in the world. Her eyes brimmed with tears as he pulled himself on crutches out to the waiting doctors. Eleanor never forgot this experience.
    Elliott Jr. was born October 1, 1889, and this event evoked the first letter, dictated to Pussie, from Eleanor, who had been sent to Tivoli to stay with her grandmother.
    Dear Father:
    I hope you are very well and Mother too. I hope little brother doesn’t cry and if he does tell the nurse to give him a tap tap. How does he look? Some people tell me he looks like an elephant and some say he is like a bunny. I told Aunt Pussie today she would be very unhappy if she were a man because his wife would send her down downtown every day she could only come home on Sunday and then she would have to go to church. Goodby now dear Father, write me soon another letter. I love you very much and Mother and Brother too, if he has blue eyes.
    Your precious little
    Eleanor.
    â€œAnd,” added Pussie, “Totty [the name by which her Hall aunts called her] is flourishing. She has quite a color and tell Anna the French lessons are progressing, although I am afraid the pupil knows more than the teacher.”
    â€œEleanor is so proud of her baby brother and talks of nothing else,” was the next report from Tivoli.
    Elliott and Anna were equally pleased. The birth of their first son was the fulfillment of “their hearts’ desire.” Elliott, in spite of his continuing pain, doted on “Baby Joss,” as the new arrival was called. But even though Elliott was with his new son, Eleanor sensed no change in her father’s attitude toward her. She never doubted that she was first in his heart.
    With her mother, however, the birth of little Ellie and a year later of Hall did make a difference. Forty years later, in 1929, Eleanor wrote a story for a magazine whose fictional heroine, Sally, was obviously herself.
    Her forty-fifth birthday. . . . As she looked [into the fire] pictures formed in the dancing flames, first, there was a blue-eyed rather ugly little girl standing in the door of a cozy library looking in at a very beautiful woman holding, oh so lovingly, in her lap a little fair-haired boy. Through Sally’s heart passed the old sensation, the curious dread of the cold glance which would precede the kindly and indifferent “Come in Sally, and bring your book.”
    In her autobiography, published in 1937, she was more explicit about her feelings of being left out when her mother was with the two little boys, Ellie and Hall. Her mother did not consciously exclude her; she read to Eleanor and had Eleanor read to her and recite her poems, and Eleanor was allowed to stay after the boys had been sent off to bed. But what Eleanor emphasized was standing in the door, “very often with my finger in my mouth,” and her mother bidding her “Come in, Granny,” with that voice and look of kind indifference. Child psychologists had not yet discovered the connection between the “finger in the mouth” and the hunger for affection. To visitors her mother would explain that she called Eleanor “Granny” because she was “so old-fashioned.”
    â€œI wanted to sink through the floor in shame, and I felt I was apart from the boys.” 8
    To Eleanor her mother’s sigh and exasperated voice were further proof that only her father understood and loved her. And her father was leaving her again. His foot had to be stretched