The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Read Online Free Page B

interested. There I saw innumerable little children in casts and splints. Some of them lay patiently for months in strange and curious positions. I was particularly interested in them because I had a curvature myself and wore for some time a steel brace which was vastly uncomfortable and prevented my bending over.
    Even my uncle Vallie, who at this time was in business in New York, a champion tennis player and a popular young man in society, took me to help dress a Christmas tree for a group of children in a part of New York City which was called “Hell’s Kitchen.” For many years this was one of New York’s poorest and worst sections. I also went with Maude and Pussie to sing at the Bowery Mission, so I was not in ignorance that there were sharp contrasts, even though our lives were blessed with plenty.
    Though he was so little with us, my father dominated all this period of my life. Subconsciously I must always have been waiting for his visits. They were irregular, and he rarely sent word before he arrived, but never was I in the house, even in my room two long flights of stairs above the entrance door, that I did not hear his voice the minute he entered the front door. Walking downstairs was far too slow. I slid down the banisters and usually catapulted into his arms before his hat was hung up.
    My father never missed an opportunity for giving us presents, so Christmas was a great day and I still remember one memorable Christmas when I had two stockings, for my grandmother had filled one and my father, who was in New York, brought one on Christmas morning.
    One more sorrow came to my father the winter that my mother died. My little brother Ellie never seemed to thrive after my mother’s death. Both he and the baby, Josh, got scarlet fever, and I was returned to my cousin Susie and, of course, quarantined.
    The baby got well without any complications, but Ellie developed diphtheria and died. My father came to take me out occasionally, but the anxiety over the little boys was too great for him to give me a good deal of his time.
    On August 14, 1894, just before I was ten years old, word came that my father had died. My aunts told me, but I simply refused to believe it, and while I wept long and went to bed still weeping I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dreamworld as usual.
    My grandmother decided that we children should not go to the funeral, and so I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on I knew in my mind that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.
    My father and mother both liked us to see a great deal of Aunt Gracie. She was beloved by all her great-nephews and -nieces. As I remember her now, she was of medium height, slender, with clear-cut features, but always looked fragile and dainty. Ladies wore long dresses in those days, which trailed in the dust unless they were held up, and I seem to remember her generally in the rather tight-fitting bodices of the day, high in the back, square-cut in front and always with an immaculate frill of white lace or plaited linen around the neck.
    Often her hands would lie folded in her lap as she told us a story and I, who loved to look at hands even as a child, remember watching them with pleasure. My Saturdays were frequently spent with this sweet and gracious great-aunt. Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Robinson, and I were the three who enjoyed those days the most.
    After my father died, these Saturdays with Aunt Gracie were not allowed. My grandmother felt we should be at home as much as possible, and perhaps she feared we might slip away from her control if we were too much with our dynamic Roosevelt relatives.
    The next few years were uneventful for me. New York City in winter, with classes and private lessons, and for entertainment occasionally, on a Saturday afternoon, a child or two for supper and play. My grandmother believed in keeping me young and my aunts believed