Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands Page B

Eleanor or her brothers, she had perfected a habit of retreating into a world of fantasy when things went wrong. This defense made her seem strange and sullen to adults and other children, but it shielded her from disappointment when her father didn’t come as promised, when her grandmother scolded her for behavior she didn’t realize was wrong, or when the servants took out their own frustrations on her, knowing she was too timid to report them. The word of her father’s death arrived just before her tenth birthday. “I simply refused to believe it,” she remembered. “And while I wept long and went to bed still weeping, I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dream world as usual.” Her grandmother decreed that the children not attend the funeral. “So I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on, I knew that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”
    Her early teens were deeply troubled. She was lonely, physically fearful, and yet stubborn. By her later admission, she lied as a matter of course, which simply elicited harsher responses from her grandmother. For reasons best known to herself, Mrs. Hall refused to let Eleanor visit her Roosevelt relatives more than once or twice a year. Perhaps she thought the demons that had hounded Elliott to his death lived in the Roosevelt closets; perhaps she thought Eleanor’s cousin Alice, who was just eight months older than Eleanor but already displayed a wild streak, was an evil influence. Yet the distance didn’t prevent Eleanor from idolizing Alice, who seemed “so much more sophisticated and grown-up that I was in great awe of her.”
    The other Roosevelts were mostly nice. Aunt Corinne, Elliott’s and Theodore’s sister, threw Christmas parties for the youngsters of the clan. Eleanor attended, with a mixture of anticipation and dread. She liked seeing people her own age, but she was awkward and shy. She couldn’t dance, and her clothes were horribly out of fashion. Yet a certain boy seemed not to notice. “I still remember my gratitude at one of these parties to my cousin Franklin Roosevelt when he came and asked me to dance with him.”
    Thoughts of Franklin helped tide her through difficult days. The Halls grew harder and harder to live with. Besides her stern and narrow-minded grandmother, Eleanor had to endure some uncles who were undeniably alcoholic and potentially abusive. For protection—presumably before the fact but possibly after—her grandmother or an aunt installed three heavy locks on Eleanor’s bedroom door. A girlfriend who spent the night asked Eleanor what the locks were for. “To keep my uncles out,” she replied.
    Life took a turn for the better when, at fifteen, she became old enough to attend boarding school. Her Hall aunts transported her to England and deposited her at Allenswood, a school for girls just south of London. Where none of the students had parents at hand, the orphaned Eleanor no longer felt uniquely alone. In fact she had one distinct advantage over most of the other girls. Her first nurse had been French, and with her mother constantly socializing and her father frequently gone, she had learned French before she learned English. The Allenswood headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, insisted that the girls speak French. “It was quite easy for me,” Eleanor wrote. “But for many of the English girls who had had very little French beforehand, it was a terrible effort.”
    In her seventy years Marie Souvestre had developed decided notions of propriety and pedagogy. The girls got three baths a week; any more would have elicited queries as to how one became so dirty. Their beds and dressers were inspected daily; a drawer out of order could result in the contents being cast across the floor. The morning constitutional, a brisk walk about the town common, took place in rain, sleet, or snow. The school had nominal central