When the Cheering Stopped (2 page)

In the afternoons when the weather was good he and one or more of his womenfolk went riding in one of the White House Pierce-Arrows, big open cars with right-hand drive and the President's Seal on the door. He mapped out a series of routes, and the chauffeur was not allowed to deviate from them: The Number One Ride, The Southern Maryland Ride, The Potomac. Going on these rides, the First Lady saw things that shocked her. She was born in a small town and grew up there and after her marriage lived in a series of small college towns, and the crowded big-city back streets and alleys of Washington were a revelation to her. She walked through the slums and talked a great deal to the Negro servants about their homes, and it became her passion to do something for the people who lived in the houses that appalled her. She urged the President to get a bill passed that would clean up the slums, and he sent one on to Congress. That she was involved in such a project amused diplomatic and political Washington, and people smiled at the mention of her name. Her clothing also caused derisive comment, for she was far from fashionable. When she let it be
known that she did not intend to spend more than one thousand dollars a year for clothes, she was marked down as an eccentric. Actually, for the former Miss Elly Lou Axson and former Mrs. Professor Wilson and former Mrs. President of Princeton, one thousand dollars for clothing was a fantastic sum. In the middle years of her marriage she was accustomed to spending less than fifty a year on her attire, and it was said in Princeton that every fall, year after year, Mrs. Wilson looked sweeter and sweeter in her brown fall dress. She had never in her life owned furs until after her husband was elected President of the United States; then she let him give her sables. She was tiny and gentle and had golden hair and spoke in the softest of Southern tones and painted landscapes in a studio she created in the White House attic. When, anonymously, several of her paintings were sold through a gallery, she donated the money to educational funds for Southern mountaineer people and for crippled children.

She loved flowers and plants and remodeled the gardens on the south lawn of the White House. She planted boxwood, rosebushes and rose trees, tall cypresses and clipped hedges, and placed among them a statue of a small Pan, which the servants said must be symbolic of the boy she had wanted to continue her husband's name. For that husband she had the very greatest of solicitude and worried constantly over his health, which had never been strong. A doctor once told her that as long as a man's neck was full and firm there was little need to worry about him, and often the First Lady massaged that of the President, calling to her daughters to come and see that there were no hollows there. Thinking of her husband's health, she sent for Lieutenant Grayson, who had patched up Aunt Annie with such efficiency, and asked him if he would not look after the President. Grayson took on the job. He found that the President had suffered for years from neuritis and respiratory troubles and that a retinal hemorrhage in his left eye had damaged his sight badly. Grayson's patient had been operated on for phlebitis—“I was flea-bitten,” he explained—and was also subject to headaches, but his greatest trouble came from digestive upsets that caused nausea, heartburn and gastritis, all of which he treated himself with his own stomach pump and
a series of powders. It was a matter of “turmoil in Central America,” he said, of “disturbances in the equatorial regions.” Grayson took away the pump and the powders and put the President on a rigid diet based on raw eggs and orange juice. The President did not mind the juice, but he balked at the raw eggs. “I feel as if I were swallowing a newborn baby,” he groaned. Grayson forced him to stick to it, however, and also instituted regular golf sessions in Virginia and Maryland, getting up himself in the very early morning hours to make sure the President played the entire course. Himself a very mediocre golfer, Grayson was a fit partner for a player who, hampered by his poor sight, rarely broke 100, although his approach and putting shots were not bad. And the outings led to a new Presidential imitation: Grayson Approaching a Golf Ball. Soon the digestive problems were all but completely cleared up and Grayson, working with the President's valet, arranged for the President to be regularly served only well-chosen foods that would also appeal to him: oatmeal, chicken, steak, Virginia country ham, a bit of port after dinner.

But as the President's health improved, that of the First Lady declined. Jessica and Nellie had both gotten married, but as the family's second summer in the White House began, both came back to be with their mother. Then came August, the August of 1914, and she was dying. Holding her hand, the President worked by her bedside, and his secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty of Jersey City, New Jersey, gave it out that there by her bed he wrote his note offering to mediate the disputes of the Europeans falling into the disaster called the Great War. By his instructions the First Lady was not told of the war—“Don't say anything to your mother about it”—but when she asked about her bill to help the slum dwellers they were able to tell her it had passed Congress and would soon be implemented.
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In the end the President knew that she was dying, for she told him so herself, saying also that it was her wish that he marry again. On the morning of August 6, even with the impact of her words upon him, he was able to
write a friend that he was hoping still. But in the late morning or early afternoon of that day a Princeton classmate of his 1879 class, now a Philadelphia doctor, plainly said to him that she could not live more than a few hours. All through that hot afternoon not forty-eight hours after the first German troops crossed the frontier and met Belgian defenders, the President and the girls sat with Ellen in her room filled with flowered chintz and gay cushions and light-colored lampshades. Two nurses and Grayson were there also. In another room the husbands of the two married girls waited with Joe Tumulty, who, not very much older than the daughters, had loved Ellen Wilson like a mother ever since the days in the New Jersey Governor's mansion. They were all together in the other room and Grayson was alone for a few moments with her when she roused herself from a semi-stupor and took the doctor's hand to draw him to her. “Please take good care of Woodrow, Doctor,” she whispered, uttering the last words of her life. A few minutes later Grayson told the family it would be well if they came back into her room. Twilight outside was about to begin; the day was still very warm. They walked to her bed and the girls knelt beside it. The President took her hand and was still holding it when, a little later, just before evening, she died. He was very controlled and looked over the bed at Grayson and said, “Is it all over?” Grayson nodded and the President quickly straightened up to fold her hands over her breast. She was fifty years old and they had been married twenty-nine years. He used to say, recalling the time they first met, when he was a little boy and she a baby, that he had loved her since she was in her cradle.

He walked to the window and looked south over the gardens she had planted and toward the Washington Monument and the Potomac and Virginia. Grayson was busying himself with the dead woman when he first heard the sobs. “Oh my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?” the President said over and over.

Outside, on the bell knob beside the main doorway, a heavy band of black crape soon appeared.

He did not want her to lie in a casket, so they placed her on a sofa in her room and he bent over to put a
white silk shawl around her shoulders. For the rest of her time in the White House she was there, never alone at night, the President and one or more of the girls always sitting by her, talking quietly or reading or simply sitting still.

“God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear,” he wrote a friend, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said to the Secretary that he feared the President was about to have a breakdown. But in fact he did not again completely give vent to his feelings after his first sobs had stopped. At times it seemed as if he were about to, but he would pull himself together, saying, “I must not give way.”

Monday the tenth, in the morning, was the time for her funeral service, she at last in a casket resting on the shining floor of the East Room with its marble fireplaces and concert piano in gold leaf. Afterward the President and the girls withdrew to a room nearby and sat alone looking out toward the south. At two in the afternoon the funeral train left Washington for Georgia and the hillside cemetery in Rome where lay her mother and father, who in life had been, like the President's father, a Presbyterian minister.

Riding down in the nearly empty special train, the President rarely left his wife but sat by the casket, only occasionally napping on a lounge in the car's compartment. By Tuesday morning they were deep in the South, and although only the tolling of the engine bell signaled their approach, at the railroad platforms of the small towns and even at the way stations silent people stood with their hats off. Going through the hills and valleys of north Georgia, they saw old men standing at attention on the porches of the remote rural cabins. At noon in Rome the stores closed and the trolleys stopped running and the factories shut down; when in the early afternoon the train pulled into the station, bells began to toll all over the city. They got out of the train into the hot Georgia sun and a group of her relatives took the casket and put it in the hearse while the President looked at it with a strong fixed stare. They drove directly to the church where her father had been pastor and held a very simple service. There were two hymns and then the mourners formed up to go to the Myrtle Hill Cemetery.
Schoolgirls in white, all holding myrtle branches, lined the way. Although the President had wanted as quiet a funeral as possible, almost the entire population of his wife's home town turned out and stood by as her casket was lowered into the ground. When the casket rested in place, it was suggested to the President that now he leave the cemetery, but he said that he wanted to wait until the work was completely done. The crowds moved back to leave him quite alone with the girls near a large oak, and a breeze came up and moved some of the flowers. The workmen began to pile earth on Ellen's casket where she lay with two rings on her hand, the first her wedding ring, the other a diamond one. His head bared, he stood by the men with their shovels, and a distance off the people of the town, the relatives and the Washington people shortly saw that once again the President was weeping because Ellen was gone.

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It was later declared unconstitutional. Many of the slums are still as they were when Ellen Wilson last saw them.

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The President sat by himself hour after hour on the observation platform of the train heading for Washington and the now unbearably lonely White House. “I feel so utterly alone,” he said, and begged some of Ellen's relatives to stay with him for a while. They did so, and for long hours he talked to them, saying it was his ambition and his career that killed her. Her brother said to him that it was not so, but that even if it were Ellen would not have wanted it otherwise.

Ellen was dead, Jessie and Nellie were married, and Margaret was often away. There was no woman to take charge of the White House. He asked his cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, who had been brought up by his mother and father, if she would step into the breach. She took up permanent residence with him, hoping also that her two pets, Sandy the Airedale and Hamish the sheep dog, would amuse him. But of course nothing was the same, and often he sat alone reading Ellen's favorite poems
or went walking the corridors of the Corcoran art gallery to look again at paintings she had loved.

Ellen was dead. “I do not care a fig for anything that affects me,” he wrote a friend, and to another indicated that it would come as a blessing if someone would assassinate him. “If I hadn't gone into politics she would probably be alive now,” he told her sister, and took a great interest in hearing from the British Ambassador details of how British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, when he lost his own wife, worked to submerge his grief in his love of the outdoors, of flowers and fishing. Even as Great Britain went to the war, Sir Edward took time to write the President a sympathetic note. The lonely man in the White House read it out loud to the people around him.

Cary Grayson saw his patient declining before his eyes and worked harder than ever to keep up the golfing and auto rides. The doctor also stayed many nights in the White House to be on hand if the President wanted someone to chat with. And often the gentle Helen Bones would sit by her cousin in silence, simply wanting him to know that she was there to help. In her eyes he was something like a Bengal tiger she had once seen in a cage; she thought him trapped by his own cage of high position that prevented him from seeking out friendships wherever he could find them. As summer turned to fall and spring of 1915 came, Helen Bones herself sickened in the depressing atmosphere of the White House, and Grayson began to worry about her. She was a shy person and quiet, and had hardly any friends at all in Washington. Grayson decided that what she needed was a woman friend to talk with, someone who could take her out of the White House now and then.

Grayson looked around for the proper person and decided to introduce Helen to the older friend of the girl he would shortly marry. Grayson's future wife was Alice Gertrude Gordon, who was called Altrude by her friends, and Altrude's friend was a forty-two-year-old widow who owned a Washington jewelry shop left her by her late husband. The shop was a profitable one and ran itself with little aid from its owner, who was able to travel widely, take a great interest in clothes, particularly Paris
frocks, and drive around in an electric automobile which, she said, was the first ever owned and operated by a Washington woman. She lived alone save for two maids in a house on 20th Street, N.W., at New Hampshire Avenue. She was tall and imposing and had a beautiful smile and appealing dimples. Her family was one of the oldest in Virginia and her father had been a plantation owner, Confederate officer, lawyer and judge, but she had been brought up in the impoverished post-Civil War South and had but two years of formal education. She was a non-political person, not active in Society or charitable circles, and in almost twenty years of Washington residence had never been inside the White House. Her name was Edith Bolling Galt.