Free First Ladies by Margaret Truman Page B

wife or partner.
    Two years before she entered the White House, when FDR was Governor of New York, Eleanor Roosevelt had been profiled in a magazine as the ideal modern wife. She gave the journalist a thoughtful, penetrating analysis of contemporary marriage. Ideally, for a woman, it consisted of three things: motherhood, partnership, and companionship. In the past motherhood had taken first place, almost obliterating the other two ideals. Now, thanks to labor-saving devices and the rising expectations of modern women, the other two goals had become paramount.
    Eleanor Roosevelt made no attempt to apply this analysis to her own life. No one expected such candor from a politician’s wife in 1930. It was just as well, because the companionship side of the Rooseveltmarriage had collapsed in 1918, when Eleanor discovered FDR was having an affair with Lucy Page Mercer, a Maryland beauty who had been her social secretary for the previous four years. Seldom has a wife been as humiliated by both parties in an infidelity. Lucy and Franklin made a fool of Eleanor, deceiving her literally under her nose in her own house. The marriage teetered on collapse. But in straitlaced 1918 that would have meant the end of the assistant secretary of the Navy’s promising political career, something he found difficult to contemplate. Lucy, a devout Catholic, was ready to sin for love but hesitated to marry a divorced man and cut herself off from her church.
    With the help of Sara Roosevelt, FDR’s strong-willed mother, a truce was arranged, mostly on Eleanor’s terms. FDR was banned from her bedroom forever. The shy, primly correct society matron who had marveled over attracting the handsome Hudson River scion also vanished forever, to be replaced by a disillusioned woman determined whenever possible to go her own way.
    This determination only redoubled when FDR contracted polio in 1921 and emerged from the ordeal a crippled man, bound to a wheelchair except for public appearances, when he donned leg braces heavier than anything worn by Georgia chain gangs. Most betrayed wives would have accepted this cruel fate as more than enough retribution for their pain and grief. But Eleanor Roosevelt was not your average betrayed wife. Her husband’s infidelity had triggered an upheaval in her soul which exhumed the deepest trauma of her childhood—her love for her forlorn father.
    Eleanor was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s brother, Elliott, who despaired of competing with his aggressive older brother at an early age and slowly sank into alcoholism and failure. He married a cold, wealthy New York beauty, Anna Hall, who seems to have disliked her daughter almost as much as she hated her husband. She called Eleanor “Granny” and described her before visitors as a “funny” [strange] child—“so old fashioned.” Only her absent father loved Eleanor without qualifications, and she returned his love with absolute adoration—even when he took her on an outing to his club,parked her in the cloakroom, and adjourned to the bar, where he got so drunk he went home without her.
    Elliott died when Eleanor was ten. Two years earlier her mother had died, leaving her to be raised by her stern, puritanical Hall grandmother, who did not have the word
love
in her vocabulary. In her heart, Eleanor clung to a vision of her father that approached the saintly. She treasured stories of how he once gave away his overcoat to a shivering boy on a New York corner. “With him the heart always dominated,” she said. She carried his letters with her and read and reread them with rapturous intensity.
    This was the young woman Franklin D. Roosevelt married—a person who willed herself into absolute love and refused to see human blemishes. A few days after FDR proposed, Eleanor wrote him a prophetic poem:
    Unless you can swear “For life, for death!”
Oh, fear to call it loving
.
    At the time, she had added: “I wondered if it meant ‘for life, for death’ for