Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

to time. At the end of ten days he thought his patient was doing rather well. Confidentially, he wrote to Sara Roosevelt: “I wanted to get hold of him alone and observe him and see whether I thought he had been persistently overdoing at home … as in this way I thought I could control him better. Miss Wright has been able to teach him new tricks about walking and managing himself which have increased his confidence. I have made some changes to his braces, which I think will add to their efficiency, and he is really a good deal better and walks much better than he did when he came.”

Dr. Lovett’s goal for his patient was the same as it had been for some time—to walk well with crutches.

FDR’s own goal was also unchanged. He intended to walk well without crutches.

When FDR first got home from the hospital, Anna remembered years later, it was “the beginning of a period of adjustment to an entirely new life for the whole family.”

At fourteen, she and her father were close. They had tramped the woods together at Hyde Park, gone riding on horseback, skated on the Hudson, swum at Campobello, always talking and joking. The realization that he was paralyzed shook her world. “I gradually grew accustomed to a new relationship with Father—a relationship where I had to go to his room and sit on a chair or at the foot of his bed when I wanted to talk to him. For some months my knowledge that he was suffering made me shy with him. But gradually his gaiety, his ability to poke fun at himself as he learned to move himself around through the use of his arms, broken down the tension we had been feeling.” When she overheard rumors at school that his disease had affected his mind, she was outraged. She had no idea her father’s political adversaries might spread such ideas just to hurt his chances of a comeback. “I did know, however, that the rumors were untrue,” she wrote later. “I watched his courage, his suffering, his humor. I learned fast that he wanted no maudlin sympathy.”

Instead, he dealt with the children’s fears by bringing them into his confidence and telling them all about his effort to recover. He would invite them to his bedside and show them the depleted muscles in his legs, naming each one and explaining what he was doing to build them back up. The tactic worked. It chased away the children’s sense of dread. “He would shout with glee over a little movement of a muscle that had been dormant,” Anna said. “So, gradually, I almost forgot that he had once had well-developed muscles. The battle Father was making became a spirited game.” With the boys he would drop to the floor and challenge them to wrestling matches.

Still, the family’s focus had shifted entirely to one person—FDR himself—and the children’s longings for him and their mother to pay attention to their own activities often went unmet.

Even before polio, the Roosevelts’ family life had not been idyllic. The marriage had nearly broken apart when Eleanor learned that Franklin had conducted a love affair with Eleanor’s secretary during World War I. The Roosevelts decided to stay together, but FDR’s faithlessness had wounded Eleanor, and their relationship had been badly strained. She began to put more time into activities of her own, helping women and working people. Then, in the early days after the polio attack, her devotion to his care brought them closer again, though they seemed perhaps more like an adult brother and sister than husband and wife.

As for the children, they sensed the change in their parents’ relations without knowing the reason. But that was just the latest development in their hectic history.

Eleanor had always been anxious about being a parent. Though she’d been born into privilege, she’d grown up in a tragic household. Her mother, Anna, renowned in New York society circles as a great beauty, was selfish, even nasty. Because Eleanor as a little girl was so serious-minded, her mother called her “Granny.” Then Anna died of diphtheria when Eleanor was only eight. The child idolized her charming father, Theodore Roosevelt’s brother Elliott, but he was an alcoholic who alternately adored and neglected her, then killed himself just two years after his wife’s death. So her parents had been anything but models of good parenting.

As a teenager Eleanor blossomed at boarding school in England, where a brilliant and loving headmistress nurtured her intelligence and ability. But then, without attending college, at the age of just twenty, she married Franklin—and fell under the stern and constant gaze of her mother-in-law.

Eleanor read progressive advice about modern parenting and concluded that her children needed to be given a long leash and allowed to make their own mistakes. FDR largely agreed, remembering how aggravated he’d been by a mother who had directed his every move.

But their permissive style of parenting had its downside, especially because Sara often undermined their efforts by giving her grandchildren treats after they’d been disciplined. The kids grew up pretty wild. On Sixty-Fifth Street, James and Anna practiced their aim with bags of water dropped on passersby from the upper-story windows, and Elliott once tried to shoot out stained-glass windows across the street with his air rifle. Then there was a string of badly chosen governesses—young women who supervised the children when their mother was busy. One of them locked the boys in closets and once sent Anna to school with a wad of cotton stuffed in her mouth, saying the cotton had better be there when Anna came home at the end of the day. (She was finally fired only after Eleanor discovered she’d been drinking whiskey on the job.)

When polio invaded the household, Eleanor had to reengineer the daily schedule to accommodate FDR’s work with nurses and doctors. Anna was forced to give up her bedroom when Louis Howe moved into the house every Monday through Friday. (Howe’s