Read Online Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash - Free Book Online Page B

mother’s disappointment in her, considered this a reproach, but behind the reproach was a mother’s bafflement over her little girl’s precocious sense of right and wrong and the sadness in her appraising eyes. But these same traits amused and charmed her father, who called her his “little golden hair.”
    My father was always devoted to me, however, and as soon as I could talk, I went into his dressing room every morning and chattered tohim often shaking my finger at him as you can see in the portrait of me at the age of five which we still have. I even danced for him, intoxicated by the pure joy of motion, twisting round and round until he would pick me up and throw me into the air and tell me I made him dizzy. 5
    Eleanor’s first nurse was French. “My mother had a conviction that it was essential to study languages, so when I was a baby, she had a French nurse for me, and I spoke French before I spoke English.” What this nurse was like, Eleanor nowhere said, but in later life she spoke French as fluently as English, which suggests that this first nurse had the baby’s confidence.
    While Eleanor’s own warmest memories of her early childhood years were all associated with her father, that attractive man was, in fact, putting his little family through a grim ordeal. Nervous and moody, he spent much of his time with the Meadow Brook men, often in reckless escapades and drinking sprees that worried his family and mortified Anna. In the spring of 1887, dissatisfied with himself and his business prospects, he gave up his partnership in the Ludlow firm. Anna prevailed upon him not to risk another Long Island summer. An extended stay in Europe, away from his cronies, she hoped, would enable him to get hold of himself and regain his health. So, on May 19, the Elliott Roosevelt family, a nurse for two-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor, and Anna’s sister Tissie sailed for Europe on the Bri tannic .
    One day out, the Britannic was rammed by the incoming Celtic in a fog. “The strain for a few minutes,” Anna wrote Bamie, “when we all thought we were sinking was fearful though there were no screams and no milling about. Everyone was perfectly quiet. We were among those taken on life boats to the Celtic .” Eleanor’s recollection of “wild confusion” was significantly different, and closer to reality.
    As passengers described the collision to newspapermen, the prow of the Celtic struck the Britannic a slanting blow, glanced off and then struck again, her nose entering the Britannic ’s side fully ten feet. Several passengers were killed, a child beheaded, and many injured. The sea foamed, iron bars and belts snapped, and above the din could be heard the moans of the dying and injured. Grownups panicked. Stokers and boiler men emerging from the depths of the Britannic made a wild rush for the lifeboats until the captain forced them back at the point of his revolver. The air was filled with “cries of terror,” Eleanor’s among them. She clung frantically to the men who were trying to drop herover the steep side of the ship into the outstretched arms of her father, who stood in a lifeboat below. Although the sea was calm, the lifeboats were pitching, and the distance seemed vast to Eleanor. The transfer was finally completed despite Eleanor’s struggles, and they were rowed to the Celtic , which took them back to New York. 6
    Anna and Elliott decided to go through with their plans, because Elliott’s health depended on it. But Eleanor, in terror, refused to go and remained unmoved even by her father’s endearments and pleas. The puzzled young parents turned to the Gracies, and Eleanor was left to spend the summer with them. “We took a cab,” Aunt Gracie wrote to Corinne,
    and called for our sweet little Eleanor and brought her out here with us. She was so little and gentle & had made such a narrow escape out of the great ocean that