The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Read Online Free Page A

pitcher in a tiny bedroom.
    Our household consisted of a cook, a butler, a housemaid—who was maid as well to my young aunts—and a laundress. The family consisted of my grandmother, Pussie and Maude, who had been the baby of the family until our arrival, Vallie, my older uncle, and, for brief periods, Eddie, who was some two years younger. Eddie had a roving foot and took at least one long trip to Africa which I remember.
    Into this household I moved with my two little brothers and their nurse.
    My grandmother seemed to me a very old lady, though I realize now that she was still quite young. She was relegated almost entirely to her own bedroom. She came downstairs when she had visitors of her own, but the drawing room, with its massive gilt furniture covered with blue damask, was the room in which she saw her guests. Her daughters took possession of the library, which was a large front room where the piano stood and where a large bow window on the street gave more light.
    The dining room, in the extension at the back, was quite a bright room, having three windows on the side. Back of that was the pantry, where I spent considerable time, for the butler, Victor, was kind to me and taught me how to wash dishes and wipe them, though when I broke one he was much displeased. Sometimes when I was in disgrace and sent supperless to bed, he or Kitty, the chambermaid, would smuggle me up something to eat.
    The years had changed my grandmother. With her own children she had been chiefly concerned in loving them. Discipline had been my grandfather’s part. When he died she still wanted to surround them with the tenderest love, but later on she found that she could not control Vallie or Eddie or Pussie or Maude. She was determined that the grandchildren who were now under her care should have the discipline that her own children had lacked, and we were brought up on the principle that “no” was easier to say than “yes.”
    Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. I remember an incident when I was about thirteen. Pussie was ill with a bad sore throat and she liked me to do things for her, which made me very proud. One night she called me. Everything was dark, and I groped my way to her room. She asked if I would go to the basement and get some ice from the icebox. That meant three flights of stairs; the last one would mean closing the door at the foot of the stairs and being alone in the basement, making my way in pitch-black darkness to that icebox in the back yard!
    My knees were trembling, but as between the fear of going and the fear of not being allowed to minister to Pussie when she was ill, and thereby losing an opportunity to be important, I had no choice. I went and returned with the ice, demonstrating again the fact that children value above everything else the opportunity to be really useful to those around them.
    Very early I became conscious of the fact that there were people around me who suffered in one way or another. I was five or six when my father took me to help serve Thanksgiving dinner in one of the newsboys’ clubhouses which my grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt, had started. He was also a trustee of the Children’s Aid Society for many years. My father explained that many of these ragged little boys had no homes and lived in little wooden shanties in empty lots, or slept in vestibules of houses or public buildings or any place where they could be moderately warm, yet they were independent and earned their own livings.
    Every Christmas I was taken by my grandmother to help dress the Christmas tree for the babies’ ward in the Post-Graduate Hospital. She was particularly interested in this charity.
    Auntie Gracie took us to the Orthopedic Hospital which my grandfather Roosevelt had been instrumental in helping Dr. Newton Schaefer to start and in which the family was deeply