Authors: Roberta Latow
“By the time the letter arrived, W.R. knew the evacuation fleet had limped out of Singapore harbor on February 13, 1942, in the early hours of the morning, ships bursting with women and children. Only a fraction survived sinking or capture. My father was devastated by the news, and never forgave Churchill or the English for the tragedy of Singapore.
“I hope this isn’t all boring you, Nicholas? I seem to be droning on with my life story.”
“Boring me? Absolutely not. I’m fascinated. Go on. I don’t want you to leave anything out.”
“My first five years were filled with love and affection from my devoted father, care and loving from my nanny, being watched over and coddled by the chauffeur, and loved and cherished by some of the most powerful men in the world. I was their little stray, W.R.’s little burden. Men like Harry Hopkins took time to bring me candy. Franklin doted on me. Eleanor, my godmother, made an effort at birthday parties and rides in the country. I wailed and cried at the sight of Winston Churchill, who tried bribing me with a painting set. I played with the buttons of General George C. Marshall’s jacket, learned to add and subtract with Bernard Baruch, who always gave me a dime when he saw me, instructing me to ‘Buy a lollipop with two cents, Arabella, and put the rest in the bank. Think that way and you will always be a rich woman.’
“What little girl could ever forget all the times she was allowed to cuddle the most famous dog in the world, Fala, in her arms, to sit on F.D.R.’s knee? He had a weakness for his best friend’s little girl and I loved him the most after Daddy. I was the little girl who asked General MacArthur to please bring her mummy home.
“My father’s friends, all the famous public men and their
neglected wives who gave me so much love and affection when I needed it, will always have a place in my heart. They were, after all, my beginnings.
“I remember I was only three years old when the first great loss came that I understood. It was the death of my beloved F.D.R. The first sorrow I had ever seen was that of my father for his best friend, his president. I recall being dressed in a yellow hat and coat, black patent-leather shoes, and white stockings. I rode on the train bearing the body of my adored Mr. President from Washington to Hyde Park. I watched the thousands of people lining the tracks as the black-draped funeral procession rolled on its way. I walked, holding my father’s hand, to F.D.R.’s last resting place in the Rose Garden. It was the saddest day of my life, but I did not shed one tear because my daddy had said Mr. Pres was going away and would not come back, but he would send my mummy home soon to replace him.
“I also remember that on August 14, 1945, the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender and the formal ceremony took place on September 2, 1945.
“During the last days of August my mother was found in the worst of all the Japanese war camps for women, Loebok Linggau, on the island of Sumatra.
“I heard that Raine was lying on a stretcher, looking out of the aircraft’s window as they flew low over Singapore. She wept uncontrollably when she saw the vast Allied armada in the sun on the sparkling water. She felt the first strength and security she had known since she faced the evacuation fleet in Singapore in 1942.
“Five days later I spoke to my mother for the first time.
“Raine was dying of starvation and suffering from a particularly ferocious type of malaria. She was carried into the hospital in Singapore a skeleton of sixty-one pounds covered with scabies. She remained there, W.R. at her side, until she was well enough to be flown to the United States.
“During the two years Raine was in the hospital, she eased herself into my life through telephone calls, letters, and tape recordings. When we finally met, the care, love,
and preparation had been well worthwhile. The reunion was far less traumatic for all concerned.
“Her health restored, her beauty revived, Raine was at last with me in time to celebrate my sixth birthday.
“F.D.R. was gone, the war over. W.R. retired to a life of making us happy, writing political essays, and remaining close to his old friends in the government.
“We lived at the Mayflower in the middle of Washington, close to the White House. It was a first-class transient hotel. A great, old-fashioned place, a Democratic stronghold for visiting VIPs of the party from all over the States. Several senators and congressman kept rooms there. The hotel maintained a certain conservative glamour in remembrance of Roosevelt inaugural parties held there — and later the Kennedys’ comings and goings — and took pride in serving the powerful Republican visitors who were occasionally invited to the walnut-paneled dining room.
“It was the ‘Who’s Who in the Government’ hotel and instilled an atmosphere of solid party and family unity, government solidarity. I was brought up there; the only baby ever reared there! The Mayflower and all its staff and elegant public rooms were my home.
“There was, however, the rare visit to the house on the Potomac. I longed to live there, play in the gardens, walk along the river with my playmates. It grew to be a symbol of something I yearned for, missed with all my little heart. I dreamed of living in a house with my mummy and daddy, just like my school chums did, having a swing in the yard, girlfriends to stay the night. I wanted to be just like all the other children I knew. But I wasn’t.
“My parents held nothing back from me. When I questioned them about why we were living at the Mayflower and the differences between my life and my friends’, they always answered me. They openly explained how Raine had been away, stranded with strangers, not nice strangers, and how she had been ill for a long time. How Raine had lost her father forever like I had lost F.D.R. They told it all as honestly and simply as one could to a six-year-old without
the horror or gruesome details of Raine’s incarceration. They promised that one day, when Raine was tired of the hotel and wanted to take on more responsibility, we would all move back to the Crawford house.
“Living at the Mayflower was one of Raine’s eccentricities. She was unable to live in the house on the Potomac. She felt fearful of leaving all the strangers who lived together in the hotel. She had been too long and gone through too much in the camp with strangers and felt that to leave the hotel was to abandon them once again as she had done when they were released from the camp in 1945.
“As I grew older, I was able to accept the fact that occasionally my mother did peculiar things. While dining in restaurants, it wasn’t unusual for Raine to sneak a potato, a few green beans, a chunk of bread from her plate and slip them into her handbag in full view of everyone at the table, without ever realizing what she had done. This was a throwback from days of starvation in the Japanese prison camp.
“On rare occasions she could be seen trying to coax people sitting alone on the fringes of the lobby in the Mayflower to move into the center of the room. Once she had accomplished her task, she would say something like ‘It’s safer here; we are safer in a group,’ and then go about her business.
“The one thing that disturbed her family most, filled us with heartbreaking pity for her, was when we were out walking in the streets or in the countryside. Something would click inside her head and she could not stop; she felt compelled to keep walking. It was virtually impossible to stop her and the farther she walked, the more depressed and panicky she became. In time we learned how to control that awful throwback to the forced marches she had endured on Sumatra, which she had survived when more than half died en route.
“Because our family was so strong, it was easy for the three of us to sit down and work out any problems that entered our lives. That was how we all learned to understand and accept Raine’s sometimes erratic, strange behavior.
“We lived at the Mayflower Hotel for years, expanding the rooms to fit the family’s needs. I was ten years old when, to many people’s astonishment, my baby brother, Robert Franklin, was born.
“My mother’s fear of being isolated from the group as she had been during her many months of solitary confinement, along with most of the other fears, finally subsided after Robert was born, and we moved home at last when he was one year old.
“The house on the Potomac was a magnificent white clapboard colonial affair, large and rambling, set on six acres of lovely old gardens with luscious green grass banks undulating down to the river’s edge. My parents filled it with guests, glamorous dinner parties, laughter, fascinating and interesting people who all understood and made light of Raine’s sudden disappearances in the midst of a party, from the dinner table, or even during the middle of a tennis match.
“Strangely enough, she forgave the Japanese, but insisted on appearing as a witness at the Japanese War Crimes Trials in Tokyo. Not for what horrors and degradations, torture and inhumane, acts they had inflicted on the unfortunate, innocent women and children; there were hundreds of others to give evidence about that. Nor was it as a witness to the merciless death by disease and starvation of a third of all the women prisoners who were buried in shallow unmarked graves. The jungle rapidly grew over the graves so that they were lost forever.
“My mother went to Tokyo to tell how they had bombed the evacuation fleet; how the survivors had struggled through the burning sea in whatever they could find to float on; how after the ordeal of surviving that, they had landed on a deserted beach to eventually give themselves up to the enemy. How the soldiers had separated the Australian nurses from the group and marched them to the water’s edge. In the hot sun, the brave women had stood on the white, white sand, with a clear bright-blue sky above. They had been marched backward in silence, except for the sound of the
waves breaking against their legs and the occasional shouted order from the Japanese officers. They had been machine-gunned down from a clump of jungle where their murderers were hidden and left rolling in and out of the waves with the tide. Their blood had turned the water deep pink.
“She was marvelous, and we were very proud of her courage. But during the years that followed, definitely by the time I went to college, we all began to realize Raine was spending more and more time cultivating her garden. I suppose you’d say it became an obsession. It was a ‘safe’ thing to do, but it wasn’t normal. Yet, it was so beautiful! It boasted the most luxuriant, exquisite herbaceous borders — a wild English garden filled with everything from hollyhocks to lilies, poppies to little English primroses. There was a rhododendron garden, a water-lily garden with ponds, a ‘jungle’ garden with orchards. Raine lost herself in them and the pavilion W.R. had built for her in one of the more secluded tropical gardens.
“W.R. was an old man by then, though still handsome and active. Robert was a lovely brother and a wonderful son, extraordinarily close to Raine. I was more like my father with my mother’s looks. I passed through the awkward stage between girlhood and womanhood swiftly. I was said to be beautiful, with a rich, passionate sort of beauty that swelled the hearts of women and aroused the hearts of men. I was rather highly sexed, like my father, free and uncomplicated about it. I had my first lover when I was sixteen — a naval attaché of thirty, my father’s friend’s son. He was a handsome, kind young man who watched me and wanted me for two years. When he finally took me, he was gentle, sweet, loving, and kind. A perfect introduction to sex. I felt quite comfortable and passionate in my lovemaking but was actually not promiscuous.
“I had a flair for money and mathematics. I was quick, understanding the bottom line of things, the core, the solution, at once. I was encouraged by my family and teachers to challenge myself with remedying failing projects, small businesses and investments of my friends, turning them
around into successful enterprises for them. By the time I was twenty-one, I felt I had nowhere to go but up!
“I came into a small trust fund from W.R., who by that time had begun to turn his affairs over to his attorneys and his children, making it clear that everything was to be kept in trust for Raine, that we children were to see that she never lacked for anything after he was gone.
“It was a wise and clever W.R. who sent his children into the world when we were twenty-one with a firm foundation to build on. He wanted us to be independent and live our lives without feeling responsible for Raine and himself. Raine’s eccentricities had multiplied with the years.
“It was a sunny Sunday in June, teatime in the rose garden that rambled down to the water’s edge. The air was heavy with the scent from two acres of forty-one different varieties of rose — full blown, rich in their colors, beautiful in their shapes, endearing in their romanticism.
“We always called this Raine’s week of the roses. Robert and I always returned home for that week. There were lunches and tea parties on the lawn. Guests drifted in and out. There was even a formal summer Ball of the Roses, when a dance floor was laid on the grass and lanterns were strung across the lawns. The rosebeds were lit from below as well as from above.
“Raine was dressed in a white sheer cotton dress, tight at the waist with a full, soft skirt that rippled in the warm breeze. It was a gift from me, one of the St. Laurent collection of romantic summer dresses. She wore a large, once-elegant straw hat that was tied under her chin with a cord of blue silk. Robert and I were walking on either side of her close to the bank of the river, in worn blue jeans and white shirts. All three of us were barefoot.
“I said, ‘When I come home next time I must bring you a new hat. I saw some lovely ones in Paris. I should have thought about it.’
“ ‘Oh, don’t do that dear,’ said Raine. ‘Your father loves this one. He says it makes me look like a faded Vivien
Leigh in an updated version of
Gone with the Wind
when I wear it in the rose garden.’
“Just then we heard W.R. call. We turned and saw him sitting in the Chinese pavilion in the middle of the rose garden. The silver tea service sparkled in the light. He waved and we waved back. Then he called us to join him for tea.
“We wandered slowly back toward him through the rose beds. Suddenly Raine called out ‘Oh, no, W.R.!’ touched her hand to her head, and slumped against Robert. In seconds she had herself under control and, with tears streaming down her face, she said, ‘Hurry! Your father is dying!’ Robert rushed to Father’s side. Raine and I followed as quickly as we could. W.R. was dead.