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

own wife and two children now saw him only on weekends, thus making their own sacrifice to Franklin Roosevelt’s needs.) It would be years before the children came to recognize any good traits in the sloppy, crotchety Howe, and they resented the friendship that grew between Howe and their mother. Sara Roosevelt, still astonished by her son’s decision to try for a political comeback and afraid that his life was still in danger long after the poliovirus had left his body, was free with objections and arguments. In icily polite exchanges, she and Eleanor waged daily warfare over Franklin, the children, Howe (whom Sara detested), and just about everything else. If the children brought complaints to FDR, he would say, “That’s up to Granny and Mother. You settle all this with them.”

He still loved his wife and he certainly loved his children. But he put his battle against paralysis above everything else. In this Franklin was not so different from many American fathers of his time. He saw his role in the family as that of a chief executive. He would make the big decisions about money and household arrangements, which schools the children would attend and how they would spend their summers. But as for the children’s day-to-day well-being, that was for his wife and mother to worry about. He hated to dole out punishment, even when the children deserved it. When he was paying attention to them, he was loads of fun. But he seems not to have thought very hard about what each of them really needed from him. “When we did have him,” James wrote later, “life was as lively and exciting as any kid could want it to be.” But even in the children’s early years, he said, “we had so little of Father.”

Now, during the fight of his life, they would have even less of him.

When FDR returned to New York from Boston in the spring of 1922, the family began to make plans for spending the summer together, either in Hyde Park or perhaps at an oceanside cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. But the doctors had their own ideas.

Dr. Draper believed the endless arguments between Sara and Eleanor were driving his patient quietly nuts. FDR needed a break from “the interplay of those high-voltage personalities.”

Dr. Lovett agreed. The best thing, he said, would be a few months of exercise with absolutely no distractions.

So FDR went up to the big estate at Hyde Park. He was accompanied only by Nurse Rockey and a full-time helper, LeRoy Jones, an African American man whom FDR called Roy.

Almost nothing is known of LeRoy Jones. He was one of many people the Roosevelts could afford to pay for doing the nitty-gritty work of daily life—cleaning, cooking, shopping, hauling, driving. In Jones’s case, much of his job was even more intimate. He helped FDR get in and out of his clothes, right down to his underwear. He helped him in and out of chairs and his bed. He had to learn the delicate task of lowering FDR onto the toilet, then hoisting him off again, with FDR’s hands encircling Jones’s neck in a tight grip—a job he performed several times every day. For FDR that was one more loss to his sense of privacy and independence. What did it mean for LeRoy Jones? If others ever asked him, they made no record of what he said.

Once FDR was at Hyde Park, the family mostly stayed away. Louis Howe came for visits, as did a distant cousin invited by FDR’s mother. Her name was Daisy Suckley (pronounced SOOK-lee), and in time she became one of FDR’s closest friends.

The Roosevelts’ estate at Hyde Park spread over many acres of lawn, field, and forest between the Albany Post Road—the old thoroughfare between New York City and the state capital—and the Hudson. The main house, built in stages from about 1800 to the 1910s, was more bulky than graceful, with squared-off rooflines and stubby chimneys. But for a big house it was inviting and comfortable. Tall windows afforded lovely views of the trees, the river, and the far shore. Inside the house, FDR knew every column and cupboard. Outside, he gazed on woods, slopes, and trails he had known since his boyhood.

All that summer and early fall of 1922, FDR exercised.

Indoors, he did pull-ups on his bed. Then he would sit at the bottom of a staircase, put his hands on the stair behind him, and hike himself up all the way to the top, stair by stair.

On the lawn, wearing his braces and a tight corset to keep from bending at the waist, he would stand between two parallel bars—one at waist level, the other at the height of his head—then reach forward and pull himself along from one end of the bars to the other, back and forth.

Often he would talk while he exercised. If his companion was Louis Howe, they would discuss politics and business. If it was Daisy Suckley, who had grown up and still lived in the nearby village of Rhinecliff, they would gossip about Hudson Valley relatives and friends.

She often heard him say, “I’m not going to be conquered by a childish disease.”

Week by week, the muscles of his neck, shoulders, arms, and chest swelled. Friends continued to be astonished at the new bulkiness of his body above the waist. In a letter, a navy friend who had seen a recent photo of FDR remarked that he appeared to be “passing from the Battle Cruiser to the Dreadnaught class.”

“Don’t worry about my getting fat,” FDR replied. “The upper part of me weighs, of course, more than it did before, but that is because my arm and shoulder muscles have developed tremendously in the effort of getting about with crutches.”

Actually, “getting about with crutches” was the one activity he seemed to be neglecting. Eleanor, who came to Hyde Park from time to time, and Nurse Rockey, who watched him every day, told Dr. Lovett the patient