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

from Sara’s yoke. Organizing her children’s and husband’s lives, she discovered she was a natural administrator. Always motivated more by duty than pleasure, she was now scrupulous about fulfilling her duty as the helpmate of a rising political star. “I was perfectly certain that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as themajority of women were doing.” Doing as the majority of political wives were doing—though surely most did not have five toddlers at home—meant a round of ten to thirty social calls each afternoon. But she did not enjoy the Washington matrons’ minuet of luncheon parties, the leaving of calling cards, the prescribed good works. Eleanor liked what she called real talk, conversation with a purpose. She yearned for the deeper rewards of real service.
    The differences between Franklin and Eleanor continued to assert themselves. Where he was devious, she was straightforward. He loved playing games with people, she was incapable of manipulation. Where he fled hard personal truths, she embraced them. Where he was patient, she was impatient. Where he was practical, she was uncompromising. Franklin was the sort of man who was familiar to all yet intimate with none. Exuding a surface openness—he invariably called people by their first names in an age when it was unusual to do so—he never really dropped his guard with anyone.
    Eleanor’s overactive conscience precluded fun for its own sake—something as essential as oxygen for Franklin. Her husband was a flirt who thrived in lighthearted female company. He almost always had a good time, even at formal events that simultaneously bored her and made her anxious. Nor could he join Eleanor in soul-searching conversation. She had come up against what some called his little “black box,” that place no one penetrated, where he stored his most private thoughts. Her husband was discovering that his greatest love was politics. “It is a little like a drug habit,” Franklin wrote, “almost impossible to stop definitively.” At some level, he surely sensed he could never make Eleanor happy for long. “I am sometimes a little selfish,” he wrote a friend, “… and make life a trifle dull for her really brilliant mind and spirit.” He wrote her in 1913, “I know it’s hard for both of us to lead this kind of life,” aware that it was hard only for Eleanor.
    In 1918, when she was thirty-four years old, “the bottom dropped out” of Eleanor’s world when she discovered she was sharing her husband with another woman. She had had her suspicions for some time. Franklin seemed too eager to pack her off with “the chicks” for their summer retreat in Campobello, New Brunswick. “You goosy girl,” her husband had chided her for impugning his motives. The packet of loveletters Eleanor found in his suitcase when he came home ill from a European mission broke her heart and forever shattered her love for Franklin. That they had been written by her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, deepened the pain. Lucy was of Eleanor’s social class and breeding; she was a younger, more beautiful and more lighthearted version of Eleanor. Lucy and Franklin had fallen in love in her house, under her nose. The man who had given Eleanor confidence as a woman and had provided her a secure place in the world suddenly snatched them away. It was a reprise of her worst childhood trauma: the loss of her beloved father. Those she most loved seemed always to desert her. She never again allowed herself to love freely. Unlike her prior losses, however, this heartbreak transformed her.
    Eleanor agreed to stay with Franklin for the sake of their five children and for his political future, which a divorce would have ended. FDR pledged never to see Lucy again. No doubt Eleanor was also motivated by more complex emotions: a powerful bond of affection, respect, a common history and shared