Free Kati Marton by Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History Page A

not yet possess. She already bristled at their over-privileged lives. “One thing I am glad of every minute I stay here,” she wrote her fiancé from a Long Island mansion, “is that we won’t ever have to have a house half so beautiful or half so overwhelming! I’m afraid Iwasn’t born to be a high life lady, dear, so you’ll just have to be content with a simple existence, unless you teach me how to change!” She saw how much Franklin enjoyed being Franklin, and wished for some of that lighthearted sense of well-being for herself. Cynical observers who saw only their surface differences said that in marrying Eleanor, Franklin was trying to get close to her “Uncle Teddy,” the politician he most admired. That is at odds with their evident and powerful feelings for each other.
    A poem she sent him—part admonishment, part solemn vow—reveals how momentous their bond was to Eleanor. She kept a copy of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, and its lofty standard for love, all her life.
    Unless you can think, when the song is done,

No other is soft in the rhythm;

Unless you can feel, when left by one,

That all men else go with him;

Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,

That your beauty itself wants proving;

Unless you can swear “For life, for death!”—

Oh, fear to call it loving!
    “I wondered,” she wrote Franklin, “if it meant ‘for life, for death’ to you at first, but I know it does now. I do not know what to write. I cannot write what I want. I can only wait and long for Sunday when I shall tell you all I feel I cannot write.”
    Their first child, Anna, was born on May 3, 1906, followed in rapid succession by James, Franklin (who died soon after birth), Elliott, Franklin and John. “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one,” Eleanor wrote.
    But her husband never did leave his mother. Through her control of the family finances, Sara still largely determined where and how they lived and even how they raised their children. Five years into their marriage, Sara bought them a town house in New York City adjacent to her own with a connecting door between the two on each floor. At the dining table at Hyde Park, Franklin sat at one end and Sara the other, Eleanoralong the side. To this day, two enormous armchairs flank the fireplace of the cavernous Hyde Park living room. The hearth belonged to mother and son; Eleanor was the visitor. Until she built her own house nearby, she had no place that was hers.
    Eleanor could have borne all this had Franklin been the partner she longed for. But once their courtship was over, he could not share his emotional life with his wife and was puzzled by her need to do so. “In the autumn of 1908,” Eleanor wrote,
    I did not know what was the matter with me, but I remember that a few weeks after we moved into the new house on East 65th St. I sat in front of my dressing table and wept, and when my bewildered young husband asked me what on earth was the matter with me, I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live. Being an eminently reasonable person, he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.
    It was more than her emotional life that was unfulfilled. The high-necked frocks and tight corsets she wore were only the outward manifestation of the constricted lives of women of Eleanor’s class. While her husband enjoyed his man-about-town status, her hungry mind was undernourished. Eleanor was searching for a way out of her confinement.
    Escape came once Franklin launched the political career he patterned after Uncle Teddy’s. Moving to Albany when Franklin became a New York state senator, then Washington when he was appointed undersecretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, finally freed Eleanor