Master of His Fate by James Tobin (books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

“This time I think I have hit it,” he wrote Van Lear Black. “Dr. McDonald has gone one step further than the others and his exercises are doing such wonders that I expect in the course of another 10 days to be able to stand up without braces. What I did before in the way of swimming at Warm Springs was all to the good, but now I begin to see actual daylight ahead.”

Day after day he kept at it. The breezes off the bay turned too cold for him to get in the water, but he worked and worked on the walking board.

He welcomed all the company he could get. Missy and Louis Howe came and went. Eleanor visited. So did his mother. They would sit nearby as he did his rounds of exercises, talking the days away.

On several October afternoons he had the company of a friend he had known since childhood, when she had been Bertie Pruyn, the daughter of a friend of his father’s from Albany. Now she was Bertie Hamlin, a journalist who had married another member of Woodrow Wilson’s White House circle. The Hamlins owned a summer place nearby. Like Daisy Suckley, Bertie was someone with whom FDR could reminisce about their Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley, and they could trade news of politics, too.

She had clear memories of Franklin in the years before polio, first as a friendly boy who had been more daring than she and her brother at sledding on snowy slopes; then as “a most attractive young man” at Harvard; and finally as a neighbor in Washington, D.C. She had an especially clear recollection of a moment when she had seen FDR running up a long slope to catch a train, “a splendid, athletic young man in his prime.”

Now she saw her friend in his new condition, “very broad-shouldered and heavy” above the waist, but with legs altogether different from what she remembered.

FDR told the Hamlins he had been overdoing his exercises, and as a result one of his knees had locked up, so now he was doing additional exercises to get it working properly again. They sat and talked as he worked on the walking board. “For two or three hours … he talked and laughed and dragged his legs after him … never a word of regret or complaint from him.”

Early in December 1925, FDR began to pack for the trip home to New York. He had been with Dr. McDonald at Marion for more than three months.

Slowly, cautiously, he had been practicing walking with crutches and a brace on only his left leg, and no assistants. Now, as a final test, he set off down Water Street to see how far he could go on his own.

One house.… two houses … three houses …

He kept going.

Dr. McDonald, LeRoy Jones, and Mrs. McDonald trailed just behind, ready to catch him if he started to fall.

Finally he made it to the edge of the wharf, nearly a block from McDonald’s house. He lifted his head and cried: “I can walk!”

He called for a photograph. He slung his arms around the shoulders of Jones and McDonald. As Mrs. McDonald prepared to snap the shutter of her camera, FDR’s face broke into as broad a grin as he had shown the roaring crowds at Madison Square Garden, where his hope of returning to politics had been reborn.

In December 1925, all the Roosevelts came together at Hyde Park. No snow had fallen since the first day of the month, but inside the house, Christmas was blooming. FDR could no longer forage in the woods to find the family’s Christmas tree, as he had done every December before polio. But he supervised the placement of the tree in the long, high-ceilinged library and the affixing of candles in its branches. (A pail of water was always kept nearby in case the tree caught fire.)

On Christmas Eve, snow began to fall, and by the next night a two-inch blanket covered the house, the lawn, and the woods. People who worked for Sara on the estate brought their children to come inside the house and see the towering tree. Later FDR performed his annual reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “soaring into the higher registers for … Tiny Tim,” Elliott remembered, “then shifting into a snarly imitation of mean old Scrooge.” (“You know,” he once told a friend, “I like to read aloud—I would almost rather read to somebody than read to myself.”)

The members of the family had been scattered for months. FDR had spent much more of 1925 in Florida, Georgia, and Massachusetts than he had in New York. Eleanor was mixing her teaching role at the girls’ school she had helped start in New York City with her travels as an important figure in state politics and women’s affairs. Anna had been away at Cornell University for part of the year. During the school terms, James and Elliott had been at Groton School; then they’d spent the summer at a ranch in Wyoming. They’d barely seen their father in a year.

In late October, FDR arranged to be driven from Dr. McDonald’s place up to Groton to watch Jimmy play in a football game. But he allowed no time to sit and talk with Jimmy and Elliott. He couldn’t even join the other parents on the sidelines. “Will arrive about 2 p.m. & have to go back right afterwards,” he wrote Jimmy. “Also please tell the Police Force to let me have a parking space where I can see from the car!”

Supervised by more governesses, the youngest boys were often lonesome, as a forlorn string of notes written by Franklin Jr. shows.

Dear Father,

I hope you are well. I hope you are coming up here soon … John wants mother to come next week with you.

Dear Mother and Father,

I hope you are well. The night that John came here he cried for