White houses A novel

VIEWING ELEANOR ROOSEVELT'S tenure as first lady through the acrid smoke of Hillary Clinton's history as political wife, senator, secretary of state and failed presidential candidate is like trying to picture a loved one before she suffered a devastating injury: There is no way to un-see that wreckage, to reimagine her whole. But there was once a highly educated, independent American wife and mother who transformed the role of first lady, worked tirelessly for social justice and served as a strategic helpmate to her charismatic, philandering husband - while retaining her dignity, and even some measure of privacy, in that exposed position. It was a different time. Eleanor Roosevelt had legions of detractors as well as acolytes, of course, and yet she was awarded - by a still moderately respectful press and not least by Franklin D. Roosevelt himself - a measure of personal freedom to nurture close emotional ties with others. One of the most significant of these was the A.R journalist Lorena Hickok (known as Hick), who left her job after becoming too close to her subject, worked for the Roosevelt administration and later lived at the White House. In July 1933, just a few months after her husband took office, Eleanor and Hick set out for a vacation in New England and Canada, driving off in Eleanor's sporty blue convertible, unaccompanied by the Secret Service, staying together in hotels and farmhouses. Today it's unthinkable that such a holiday could go undocumented - or unpunished. The couple's jaunty trip in Eleanor's Buick roadster is a central episode in two new novels that remarkably (and no doubt teeth-gnashingly, for their authors) have seized on the same ploy: to chronicle this daring relationship from Lorena Hickok's point of view, in her wiseguy reporter's voice. The psychologically astute storyteller Amy Bloom and the adept historical novelist Kelly O'Connor McNees could hardly be more different as writers; consequently, their books occupy distinct territories. Bloom's lyrical novel, laced with her characteristic wit and wisdom, celebrates love in its fiery and also embered phases, while McNees's more politically detailed fiction has Hick's ultimate solitude, and her disappointment, at its heart. In "White Houses," Bloom weaves back and forth between April 1945, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt's death, and the early 1930s, telling the textured story of a physical passion and spiritual kinship between two middle-aged women that endures through Eleanor's 12 years as the president's wife. Bloom's prologue sketches the women's New England trip as their "golden time," days filled with laughter, sex and poetry: "We had new love and this beautiful country, reckless and wide.... We glided from place to place, in love, in rapture, enjoying each day, all day." Yet in detail this is no soft-focused Sapphic interlude; it's a wry account of two smart, discreet women navigating the risk of public intrusions - "Sometimes people recognized her, and... I'd back away... so she could sip the lemonade or the cider, and admire the children or the goats or the quilts" - with the particular burden that one of them is the first lady. "White Houses" is scattered with colorful period references - to, say, the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping (covered for The A.R by Hick) and Wallis Simpson ("famous for kissing up, and kicking down") - but Bloom employs her research with a light touch. Her narrative is suffused with a vivid sense of the personalities of both Roosevelts, their charms and their arrogance, the loyalty they commanded ("a devotion that makes sex look like a short swim in a shallow pool"). Hick sees through Franklin's manipulations, yet is in awe of him nevertheless. Bloom draws an emotionally convincing picture of this complex domestic tangle. Far from being Franklin's rival, Hick is an enabler and an ally, turning in reports from across the nation on the impact of the Depression and helping Franklin manage at least one of his mistresses, Missy LeHand, after she suffers a stroke. McNees's "Undiscovered Country" unfolds more straightforwardly and in a narrower time frame, opening with Hick interviewing the candidate's wife in the fall of 1932 and with its final chapter closing at the end of 1933. McNees takes us through the women's headiest romantic period, going to the opera and enjoying evenings in Hick's Manhattan apartment, where one night she gives Eleanor a sapphire ring and they vow to live together one day. (The ring was a real gift Lorena made to Eleanor; Bloom also refers to it, though she imagines the scene taking place at the White House.) After Franklin Roosevelt assumes office, Hick's work changes, and McNees devotes several detailed chapters to her reporting on the terrible poverty in West Virginia. Eleanor's increasing absorption with political life causes Hick's resentment to build, however, and from this point on the novel's emotional pull is downward. "This is bigger than us," Hick is told, as Eleanor urges their separation for the greater good. By the end, McNees has consigned Hick to the familiar role of the lonely lesbian, thwarted and excluded by the straight world. This is a shame, since much in McNees's characterization of Hick is lively. She's good, for example, on Hick's smoking and knocking back of bourbon. In early scenes, there's a nice hint of "His Girl Friday" in the newsroom banter. And McNees, like Bloom, describes Hick's hardscrabble past in South Dakota, her rape by her father and escape into independence as a young teenager, and how her work as a reporter saved her. ("My job was the only thing between the past and me. It was the moat that kept me safe.") Hick's love for Eleanor crossed lines not just of marriage and convention but also of class, and both writers are alert to Hick's navigation of financial matters with someone who has never given them a second thought. (One of Eleanor's gifts to Hick was a new Chevrolet, christened Bluette.) Bloom's Hick has innate sympathy for the White House staff: "I have to laugh at my inner hired girl, always looking for a soft moment with The Family." Both novels celebrate an Eleanor Roosevelt who is warm and affectionate, not some humorless do-gooder, and acknowledge their debt to Blanche Wiesen Cook's magisterial three-volume biography of the first lady. McNees points out tartly in an author's note that although "gallons of ink have spilled probing the lives of F.D.R.'s mistresses," Hick's central role for Eleanor has largely been eclipsed. These two novels redress that balance, showing how a loving female companionship sustained Eleanor Roosevelt in her public and private life. She could not have been "Eleanor everywhere," tolerating Franklin's wanderings, if she hadn't had Hick somewhere for herself. Bloom's gift to Lorena Hickok is to shine not just light but also laughter on this neglected figure, highlighting the two women's shared humor, including acknowledgment of their famously unfeminine appearance. ("Eleanor and I were not conventional beauties. That's what we'd say and we'd laugh, to underscore conventional, as if maybe we were some other kind.") Bloom's decision to set many of her novel's framing sections in April 1945 is masterly because it allows her Hick to look back on the two women's early "golden time" while also providing the special solace only a former lover can offer in a period of crisis. Hick comforts Eleanor not just for the loss of Franklin but for the revelation that his mistress was with him at the end. Hick embraces Eleanor and lies down with her. "Oh Hick," Eleanor says simply. "If you don't hold me, I will die." In Bloom's eloquent telling, the love these two women had for each other mattered, and lasted, in a significant way. As Hick puts it, "Eleanor's body is the landscape of my true home." Each writer seizes on the stime ploy: to chronicle this daring relationship from Lorena Hickok's point of view. SYLVIA BROWNRIGG'S most recent novel, "Pages for Her," will be released in paperback in July.

*Starred Review* While researching her previous novel, Lucky Us (2014), Bloom found her next subject: the long-camouflaged if richly rumored relationship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and trailblazing journalist Lorena Hickok. Hick narrates this empathic story of true and besieged love and what a discerning, courageous, and mordantly witty observer she is. She frankly recounts her brutal childhood in South Dakota, her striking out on her own as a young teen (including a stint with a circus), and her discovery of her reportorial talents and feelings for women. When Hick begins covering the White House, she and Eleanor fall promptly in love. As their hidden-in-plain-sight affair gains intensity, and Hick moves into the White House, she gives up her hard-won journalistic career. Via Hick's crisp delivery and fluency in telling detail, Bloom uncloaks the insidious treacheries girls and women face, poor and privileged alike. Through Hick's loving eyes, we witness Eleanor's complex struggles, unwavering discipline, and fierce passion, while Hick's take on FDR and the rest of the Roosevelts is deftly lacerating. Hick's outrage over the trauma inflicted on gays and lesbians, the class divide, the beauty quotient, and the gender double standard fuels this socially incisive, psychologically saturated, funny, and erotic fictionalization of legendary figures; this novel of extraordinary magnetism and insight; this keen celebration of love, loyalty, and sacrifice.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

Bloom, finalist for the National Book Award (for Come to Me), brings to life Eleanor Roosevelt through the eyes of her lover, Lorena "Hick" Hickok, in this fiery historical novel. After eight years apart, Hick visits Eleanor following the death of F.D.R. just months before the end of WWII. Seeing her old friend and lover inspires Hick to reflect on trips the car trip they took to Maine during their initial courtship while Franklin Roosevelt was still governor of New York. It was on this trip that Hick first divulged her life story to Eleanor: growing up in an abusive home in rural South Dakota, leaving as a teenager to work as a housemaid, being hired as a receptionist for a traveling circus, and starting a career in journalism in Chicago. Hick eventually worked the politics beat at the Associated Press before leaving due to her close relationship to the Roosevelts. Bloom beautifully captures the affection the women felt for each other by revealing hushed schemes and stolen moments of passion against the backdrop of world-changing events that end up driving Eleanor and Hick apart. Cleverly structured through reminiscences that slowly build in intimacy, Bloom's passionate novel beautifully renders the hidden love of one of America's most guarded first ladies. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 Luck Is Not Chance In 1932, my father was dead and my star was rising. I could write. People looked for my name. I'd gotten a big bounce from The Milwaukee Sentinel to New York because I was the only woman to cover Big Ten football playoffs and the excellent Smith scandal (idiot corset salesman and buxom mistress cut off the head of her husband and hide it in the bathtub). I had hit it hard in Brooklyn, at the Daily Mirror and moved on to the Associated Press. I had a small apartment, with a palm-­sized window and a bathroom down the hall. I owned one frying pan, two plates, and two coffee mugs. My friends were newspapermen, my girlfriends were often copy editors (very sharp, very sweet), and I was what they called a newspaperwoman. They ran my bylines and everyone knew I didn't do weddings. It was good. The men bought me drinks and every night I bought a round before I went home. They talked about their wives and mistresses in front of me and I didn't blink. I didn't wrinkle my nose. I sympathized. When the wives were on the rag, when the girlfriend had a bun in the oven, when the door was locked, I said it was a damn shame. I sipped my Scotch. I kept my chin up and my eyes friendly. I didn't tell the guys that I was no different, that I'd sooner bed a dozen wrong girls and wake up in a dozen hot-­sheet joints, minus my wallet and plus a few scratches, than be tied down to one woman and a couple of brats. I pretended that even though I hadn't found the right man, I did want one. I pretended that I envied their wives and that took effort. (I never envied a wife or a husband, until I met Eleanor. Then, I would have traded everything I ever had, every limo ride, every skinny-­dip, every byline and carefree stroll, for what Franklin had, polio and all.) It was a perfect night to be in a Brooklyn bar, waiting for the snow to fall. I signaled for another beer and a young man, from the city desk, stout and red-­faced like me, brought it over and said, "Hick, is your dad Addison Hickok? I remember you were from South Dakota." I said, Yes, that was me, and that was my old man. I'm sorry, he said, I hear he killed himself. It came over the wire, there was a rash of Dust Bowl suicides. Traveling salesman, right? I'm sorry. Don't you worry, I said. I couldn't say, Drinks all around, because my father's dead and I am not just glad, I am goddamn glad. No man drinks to a woman saying that. I left two bits under my glass and made my way home, to find a letter from Miz Min, my father's second wife, asking if I might send money for the burial expenses. I lit the envelope with my cigarette and I went to New Jersey. I was the Associated Press's top dog for the Lindbergh kidnapping. We were all racing to tell the story and the Daily News got there first, with an enormous, grainy photo of the baby and the headline "Lindy's Baby Kidnaped," which was clear and short, and the Times's "Lindbergh Baby Kidnapped from Home of Parents on Farm Near Princeton" was more exact but not first. They avoided vulgar familiarity but really, who cares whether the baby's taken from a farm or a ranch or a clover patch. (The Daily News, March 2, 1932.) The most famous baby in the world, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., was kidnaped from his crib on the first floor of the Lone Eagle's home at Hopewell, N.J., between 7:30 and 10:30 o'clock last night. The flier's wife, the former Anne Morrow, discovered at 10:30 that her 20-­months-­old son was missing. Her mother, Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow, who disclosed that Mrs. Lindbergh is expecting another baby, feared that the shock might have serious effect. Anne immediately called Col. Lindbergh, who was in the living room. The famous flier, thinking that the nurse might have removed the child, paused to investigate before telephoning the State police. As rapidly as radio, telephone and telegraph could spread the alarm countrywide, the biggest police hunt in history was under way. Seventy State Troopers from Morristown, Trenton, Somerville and Lambertsville hopped on motorcycles and in automobiles and began to race over the countryside for a radius of a hundred miles around Princeton, which is ten miles west of the Lindbergh residence. At midnight the teletype alarm had been spread over five States. Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney, aroused from sleep, personally took control of the New York City search, which included scrutiny of all ferries, tunnels and bridges. Police in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut were also spreading a gigantic net. Child Carried Through Window The Lindbergh baby had been dressed in his sleeping gown by his nurse, and was asleep in the nursery on the first floor of the country mansion when he was kidnaped. The child was taken out of a window, through which the kidnaper or gang of kidnapers apparently entered the home. A note, contents not disclosed, was found on the second floor of the home. Whether this was a demand for ransom could not be learned - although that was the assumption in some quarters. This went on for a few more columns, bringing in the neighbor with the green car (who had nothing to do with anything) and recounting the loving, playful disagreement the Lindberghs apparently had over what to name the baby in the first place, using sentiment (What shall we name the Little Eaglet?) to underscore the strong and irresistible likelihood of tragedy. I was sliding through dirty New Jersey snow, looking for footprints, happy as a rose in sunshine. I got a byline every day. Every morning, I crawled out of my miserable motel bed and sang while I got dressed. I brought doughnuts and cigarettes and dirty jokes wherever I went and when reporters were getting shut out of Hopewell, New Jersey, I was not one of them. I sat over a typewriter in a freezing room, still wearing my coat and hat, and banged out story after story and chased clue after clue. It was as good a serial as you could find on the radio. Thirteen ransom notes and a host of screwy characters, including John Condon, a high school principal, who popped up out of nowhere to offer himself as an intermediary between Lindbergh and the kidnappers. John Condon seemed serious, modest, distraught and I think he was the best con man I ever saw. None of us ever figured out what his long game was. If poor Richard Hauptmann, the kidnapper, had been as clever as John Condon, he wouldn't have got the chair. And if poor Richard Hauptmann hadn't been German, the press wouldn't have tagged him with the nickname "Bruno" and we wouldn't have had to pretend that the two eyewitnesses against him were anything but blind and broke. I could write anything, take up any crazy clue (a scrap of blue fabric in Maryland, a mystery man in Rhode Island), as long as the root of the story was untouched: American hero and wife search for missing baby. Every suspicion we had of corruption and desperation on the part of the cops and J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, we kept to ourselves. Lindbergh was untouchable. (Never mind his "America First" speeches, blaming Jews for anti-­Semitism. Never mind that famous, boyish grin flashing when he got the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle from Göring in Berlin in 1938, with Hitler's best wishes. And most of all, never mind that just four months before the kidnapping, Lucky Lindy had taken his baby and hidden him in a linen closet while his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, searched the house weeping hysterically. Then he handed her the baby. What a card.) I believed Lindbergh hired John Condon. I thought Lindbergh killed the baby by accident and built a cover-­up with the bravado and precision he was famous for. And when the poor little baby was found, four miles from the house, head staved in and decomposing, poor German Richard Hauptmann didn't have a chance. I didn't write the story I wanted to and everyone knew it. My boss said to me, Give it up. Go cover Eleanor Roo­sevelt for a change, her old man's heading to the White House. I didn't say no. Albany was a one-­horse town and Eleanor Roo­sevelt might be dull and pleasant, which is what I'd heard, but I was pretty sure she hadn't killed her own baby and sent an innocent man to fry for it. She was dull and pleasant for the first five minutes. I sat right next to her in a faded velvet chair, in the old-­fashioned drawing room of the Governor's Mansion on Eagle Street, and looked at her cheap, sensible serge dress and flat shoes and thought, Who in the name of Christ has dressed you? I looked closely, to make notes, and then I looked away to be polite. She poured tea and I did notice her beautiful hands and her very plain wedding band, a little loose on her finger. We chatted. We sipped. I made some remarks about Republicans and she laughed, and not politely. She asked me about the Lindbergh case and I told her about what I'd seen and she shook her head over Lindbergh. I prefer Amelia Earhart, she said. You know, she was a social worker, before she was a pilot. That's not all she was, I thought, but I ate a cookie. We talked about the great state of New York and the needs of its people and then it was time for dinner and we had a sherry-­spiked mushroom soup I can still taste. We ate and talked until late. She told me that her husband believed that the role of government was to help people. I nodded. All people, she said. She told me about Louis Howe, Governor Roo­sevelt's campaign manager, whom she had come to admire. I didn't at first, she said. She said some people thought he was a Machiavelli. She said he was coarse and direct and deeply, deeply political. But Louis Howe is also, she said, the kindest, most loyal, most decent person I know. When my husband got polio--­she put her hand over her mouth. Please don't write that, she said. That is not the kind of thing I wish to discuss, in the newspapers. I made a big show of striking a line. We'll go with Louis Howe and his fine qualities, I said. Now, give me something uplifting, so we go out on a positive note about the governor and his race for the White House. "The function of democratic living is not to lower standards but to raise those that have been too low." "That's very good," I said. She rang a bell and said, Would you care for a sherry? Her eyes were light blue, then dark blue, lake blue. I saw a quick flare, a pilot light of interest come and go. I put away my notebook and we sat, sipping sherry, listening to opera, until a maid came in and asked if she should get my coat. I said, Mrs. Roo­sevelt, I hate to go, but I have a story to file. She said, Don't make me sound like a fool, Miss Hickok. I said that I couldn't if I tried and she said she thought that was the first lie I'd told her. We both stood up and she helped me on with my coat. We looked at each other in their grand, gold-­framed mirror and she adjusted my hat. Then she said, We're grown women, both doing our jobs. Call me Eleanor. I smiled all the way home. We saw each other every week of the campaign and I liked what I saw so much, I offered to cover her full-­time for the Associated Press as Roo­sevelt's race for the White House heated up. My editor liked the pieces and every once in a while he'd say, Your lady's got some good lines. I liked her height and her energy. I liked her long, loose stride and her progressive principles. She insulted conservatives and cowards every time she opened her mouth and I wrote it all down. She smiled when she saw me coming and I did the same. When we had breakfast together, I sometimes took a sausage off her plate. She called me at the end of October and told me that Franklin's secretary's mother had died. I'd already met Missy LeHand, the governor's executive secretary, his lodestar of competence and tact and likely something more. Dozens of reporters, including me, saw Missy sitting very close to Governor Roo­sevelt, late at night, rubbing his shoulders. Eleanor said she didn't want to make the trip to Potsdam, New York, with just dear, bereft Missy and Franklin certainly wasn't going to attend that shit storm of weeping, hopeful women (which was not how Eleanor put it). She said, Won't you come with us, Hick? It's quite a long ride, we'll get better acquainted and then we'll tour a power plant. We can go see where they want to put the Saint Lawrence Seaway. I was between girlfriends and between dogs. I packed my bag. Before we got on the train, we stopped in a department store, for her to get some handkerchiefs. Only a few heads turned. I said I could use a new scarf. We walked through together and for a minute we linked arms, like lady shoppers with time on their hands. We got her plain linen hankies and I picked up and put down a red silk scarf. Very racy, she said. You should get it. We sat, side by side, in the department store café, which would have been heaven to me when I was growing up, a clean place to eat, drinks brought to you by tidy-­looking women, surrounded by silk flowers. I ordered a grilled cheese-­and-­bacon sandwich and wished they served beer. Eleanor, who liked to pretend she didn't care for anything self-­indulgent, had a bowl of split pea soup. It came with oyster crackers and after she had dumped her packet of them into the bowl, she looked to see if I might have some, next to my sandwich. "Why don't you just ask for some more crackers," I said. "This is fine. This is what they gave us," she said. I gave the waitress a little wave and a big smile. When she came by, I asked for three more packets of crackers. Eleanor clasped her hands in irritation and then she turned it on. "The crackers are so good, miss," Eleanor said. "If it is extra, please just put it on our bill." Excerpted from White Houses: A Novel by Amy Bloom All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.