“Oh, no,” I said. “They get much harder.”
We reached the bottom of the ravine, where the water was. This was one of the reasons I'd worn wool stockings; it was cold for mid-October, and Father was bound to get us wet somewhere. We splashed through the creek. The senator tried to creep across on top of the rocks. He fell in. The water wasn't deep, but it was deep enough to make him mostly wet. Father helped him out. “Too much for you?” he asked. “Shall we go back?”
The senator looked at Father. Then he looked at me. I was still mostly dry, except for my shoes, and I hadn't fallen once. The senator grinned ruefully. “Of course not,” he said. “Aren't we having fun!”
I was having terrific fun. We came to a downed tree I couldn't quite climb over. I got down on my belly and scooted under it. Father and Kermit cheered. Archie followed me. The only clean part of him was his eyes.
It was twilight by the time we headed home. The French ambassador's suit was mud stained and torn; the senator's clothes were still wet, and he looked as if he was clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. Father was warm and happy. He held me on his lap in the carriage. I put my head against his chest. He smelled like wet wool and shaving soap. “Did you have fun, dearest Ethel?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“Please don't make me go back to school,” I begged at breakfast on Monday. “I'll learn better at home. I'll learn faster. I promise.” Father chuckled. “It's a fine school, Ethie. You'll get used to it.” “Give it time, dear,” Mother said serenely. “Do I have to?” Father and Mother exchanged calm glances. “Yes,” Mother said. “You do.” Quentin was sitting straight across from me, scooping up big globs of jelly with a spoon. He looked wide-eyed. “Won't you miss me, Quenty?” I said. He took the spoon from his mouth. “Not especially,” he said.
At school we did not get newspapers, but of course the day girls could read them at home. By Friday noon the whole school was buzzing about something. Girls whispered among themselves as we lined up for the lunch procession; they looked at me, then looked away. I was used to being stared at by some of them. I was not used to being noticed by everyone. When we filed past the principals’ dais, Miss Bangs pressed her lips together and looked at me with sympathy. It made me nervous. Miss Bangs wasn't usually sympathetic.
“Do you know what your father did?” Harriet asked me when we were seated and grace had been said.
“No, what?” I looked quickly toward the principals. Surely if there had been trouble Miss Bangs would have told me. “Did something happen? Was he hurt?”
Harriet sneered. “Of course he wasn't hurt. Who would hurt him?”
The same sort of person who would hurt President McKinley. I didn't say anything. My heart thumped.
“On Wednesday night,” said Gertrude, also sneering, “your father ate dinner with a—”
“That's enough,” Miss Mallett said firmly. “I think today we should practice our German. Emily, lead us off. Ask Harriet a question.” Emily sighed and stumbled through a line of German from one of our first exercises. She asked Harriet her name. Harriet replied with a long, beautifully pronounced sentence that didn't seem to contain her name at all, or any other words I recognized. I wondered how to say insufferable show-off in German, and who Father had eaten dinner with, and why anyone should care.
After lunch I thought of asking someone about Father, but I didn't. When I went up the stairs to get my books for my afternoon classes, a knot of girls at the top shushed themselves and started giggling the moment they saw me. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of speaking to them after that. If something was wrong with Father, I would find out when I got home.
School was almost out. I waited in a fever of impatience. When our last class was over I raced for the stairs. Emily was right in front of me, climbing slowly. I danced up and down on the step, wanting to push past her but not wanting to be rude. I knew Emily thought I was rude already, from the way I'd spoken to her Monday. Somehow during the whole week that had gone by, I hadn't made amends.
“Hey,” I said to her. “Aren't you glad it's Friday?”
She turned and paused. “Are you leaving again?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “When are you allowed to go home?” Almost all the other boarders stayed for the weekends, but they had to go home sometime.
She made a face. “Christmas.”
“Not Thanksgiving?”
Emily got a look on her face as if she was trying not to cry. “At Thanksgiving we have only one day off. I live too far away. I can't get home and back again that fast.” She sniffed. “Mother said she'd make it up to me at Christmas.”
“That's horrible,” I said.
Emily nodded. “But Mother writes me nearly every day.”
Mother wrote me nearly every day too. Father wrote me two or three letters a week, funny ones with little drawings of our animals. Ted and Kermit wrote sometimes, Sister almost every week.
I could tell Emily liked school better than I did. She did well in almost all her classes. She was much better at the piano than I was—she practiced every evening for an hour, while I mostly used my free time for reading. But she also seemed as homesick as I was, and she wouldn't see her family for two and a half months.
“I love letters,” I said, “but they're not the same.”
Emily's eyes filled with tears. “I have to go,” she said. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes and ran the last few steps to her bedroom door. I went out to the carriage that was waiting for me, feeling so awful for Emily that I completely forgot the girls had been whispering about Father.
The next morning there weren't any newspapers on the breakfast table, and when Father rang for them, Mr. Hoover himself answered the bell.
“Not this morning, Mr. President,” he said politely but firmly. “Not with the children at the table.”
Kermit and I exchanged puzzled glances. Archie, lining up a row of sugar cubes in battle formation, didn't look up. Mother sighed. “Very well. Have them sent up to my library. Theodore and I will read them later.”
Father stabbed his bacon.
“Is it because of Mr. Washington?” Kermit asked.
“Washington?” I said. “What's he got to do with it?”
“Not President Washington,” Kermit said. “Booker T. Washington. He ate dinner here on Wednesday night.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is that what everybody at school was whispering about?”
Mother shook her head sadly. “I suppose so,” she said.
“Is he some kind of criminal?”
“No, Ethel,” Kermit said. “He's a Negro.”
I knew Negro was the polite word for a person with black skin. “Is that all?” I asked.
“Mr. Booker T. Washington,” Father said sternly, “is an educated, genteel, and extremely intelligent man. He did this house honor. He came for a private meal and I greatly enjoyed our conversation.” Father adjusted his spectacles. “That is all I have to say.”
I didn't expect him to say more. Father almost never spoke to us about his dinner guests. But I didn't expect him to look so agitated, either. Kermit sighed. When Father wasn't looking, Kermit shook his head.
I sneaked up to Mother's library later and read what Mr. Hoover thought I shouldn't. The papers said the most awful things. I had seen all sorts of men and women visit the White House. Anyone who was properly dressed could ask permission to speak to Father. But dining with him, it seemed, was another matter. The idea of Mr. Booker T. Washington's eating dinner with Father made people angry. He could do what he liked in his own home, one paper said, but not in the home of the president of the United States.
One paper wondered if Mother's knees had touched Mr. Washington's under the table while they ate. One said Father was an affront to all southern women, including his own mother, who had been born in Georgia.
Mother came in as I was reading. I was so shocked by the hateful words in the papers that I forgot I wasn't supposed to be
reading them. I looked at Mother. “I don't understand,” I said. “Father and Kermit say Mr. Washington is a great man.”
Mother put her arms around me. “He is,” she said. “But in this supposedly civilized society, prejudice runs wide and deep.”
“But isn't Father the president of everyone?”
I meant that he was president of Booker T. Washington, too, but Mother sighed and said, “Yes. He is the president of those inflammatory bigots, whether they like it or not. Don't worry about it, Ethel. It'll pass.”
“Would Grandmother really be ashamed?” I asked.
Mother took the newspaper out of my hand. She stacked the papers together and slid them out of sight between her desk and the wall. “Your grandmother Roosevelt?” she asked.
I nodded.
“She was from the South,” Mother said. “I honestly don't know what her views on this matter would have been. But she was more gracious and had better true manners than any woman I've known. When I was a young girl my family didn't have the money to hire a tutor, so your grandmother arranged for me to study alongside your aunt Corinne. Your grandmother never made me feel as if I were taking charity. I always felt welcome in her home. If she had been at dinner with us and Mr. Washington, she would have made him feel welcome, I'm sure.”
Yet Father still seemed troubled. “He didn't do anything wrong,” Kermit said. We were up on the roof of the White House. Kermit had discovered a stairwell near Miss Young's new bedroom that led there from the attic. The roof of the White House was flat, with a high wall around it, and when I stood on my toes to peek over the edge, I could see for miles all around—buildings and people and the green strip of grass called the Mall. No one knew we were up there. It was the perfect place for private conversations.
“He didn't, and he knows it,” continued Kermit. “But he hates for people to think he did the wrong thing.”
“If he knows he's right, he shouldn't worry about what people think. Or say,” I added.
Kermit snorted. “You know that isn't true. Anyway, it does matter what people think about Father. If people don't respect him because of this, they won't listen to him about important things. Like the canal he wants dug in Panama. Like the trusts and monopolies. Congress has to be happy with him. Everyone does.”
“That's stupid,” I said to Kermit.
He nodded. “But it's true.”
I still didn't understand why talking to Father in his office was acceptable but eating dinner with him was not. Kermit explained, “Eating dinner with Mr. Washington— sitting down at a table with him—means Father was treating him as an equal.”
On one hand, I didn't think anyone was equal to Father. On the other hand, Father and Mother dined with people almost every night. I remembered Mother complaining about some of the councilmen in Albany who smelled bad and had terrible manners. If they were Father's equals, then Mr. Washington should be too. “Well, of course,” Kermit replied when I said as much. “But some people don't see it that way.”
The Sunday papers were worse. Editorials pointed out once again that Father's mother had been a southern woman and that Father was insulting her, Mother, and every white woman in America. Mother did not look as if she felt insulted. But for the first time since we'd come to the White House, Father wasn't smiling.
“Can't talk about that, miss,” Arthur said when I asked him about it on the drive back to school Monday morning. “I got no opinions. Don't ask me no more.”
Father had left the breakfast table early. He was taking a train to Connecticut to speak at Yale University. Father had gone to Harvard, and all my brothers were going to go to Harvard too. “Do you mind going to Yale?” I teased him.
He furrowed his brow. “No, no, of course not,” he said, missing my joke entirely. He mopped his mustache with his napkin, kissed us all distractedly, and rushed off with Mr. Craig and Mr. Loeb at his heels.
“Never mind,” Mother said. “It'll all blow over soon.”
At school it had not blown over a whit. When I rushed upstairs with my things, Emily grabbed my arm and whispered, “All weekend they were saying such terrible things!”
I yanked my arm away and glared at her. She looked hurt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “Why would I want to know something like that?” I said. I narrowed my eyes at her. “I'm surprised at you, repeating tales.” Oh, how I wanted to be home! I threw my things into my room and rushed downstairs. When I ran into the classroom the other students went absolutely still. No one said a word. No one even looked at me.
At lunch no one talked. Emily stared at her plate. The other girls exchanged glances. Even Miss Mallett couldn't keep the conversation going. “I suppose silence is golden,” she said at last, giving up.
I didn't understand until we'd been given permission to leave our places. Under the noise of the scraping chairs, Harriet muttered, “Miss Bangs said we weren't to speak to you about your father's actions. Well, then we aren't going to speak to you at all!”
I felt my eyes fill with tears. I fought crying. I wouldn't, in front of Harriet. She began to smile, a slow, smug smile, and I felt a surge of anger well up in place of my tears. I smiled back, a fierce, glittering smile.
Then I kicked her in the shins as hard as I could.
After I had sat for an hour on the wooden bench in the hallway outside her office, Miss Bangs let me come inside. “Ethel,” she said not unkindly, “we do not resort to physical violence in this school.” I didn't say anything, though I didn't think it was fair. I never got in trouble when I kicked Kermit. Then I felt a ray of golden hope shooting from my heart. “Am I going to be expelled?” I asked. Oh, please. Miss Bangs shook her head. “No,” she said. “Though we would of course expel any student we found to be permanently out of harmony with her surroundings.”
“I'm out of harmony,” I said.
“You're adjusting,” she said. “You're doing fine, Ethel. But you may not kick Harriet.”
“But she said—”
Miss Bangs held up her hand. “I don't care. You may not kick her, or hit her, or anyone else in this school, for that matter. The next time you do, I will not allow you to go home for the weekend. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma'am. But she said—”
“Ethel. That's all.”
I got up, smoldering with anger.
At dinner Emily took a deep breath and began, “Ethel, did you like—” Harriet shot a look at Gertrude, who elbowed Emily. “Hey—” said Emily. “Girls!” said Miss Mallett. I put down my fork, looked at Harriet, the cause of the trouble, and said, “My father is the president of the United States. He may invite whomever he chooses to dine, and that person cannot in politeness refuse. Anyway, it wasn't a state dinner, it was a private meal.” “Well,” snapped Harriet, “all I know is that my father would never invite someone like that to our house, let alone for dinner.” Neither one of us said Mr. Washington's name. But everyone at our table—and at the tables surrounding ours, to judge by the sudden silence in the room—knew who we were talking about.
“No,” I agreed, “I don't suppose many intelligent, well-educated gentlemen come to your house.”
Harriet gasped. So did half the room. Miss Mallett said, “Ethel! For shame!” I smiled at Harriet and went back to my meal. As I reached for my glass of milk, I looked up at the principals’ dais. Miss Bangs caught my eye. Her lips weren't smiling, but her eyes were.
I didn't get into trouble at all.
The only problem was that too many of the girls had heard me say “My father is the president of the United States.” I hadn't been bragging. I'd been defending Father. Yet now they said I was proud and boastful. “She must think she's something special,” a quiet girl named Sophie whispered to Emily as we got up. Emily didn't look at me, but she nodded. My heart sank.
“Why don't you invite all of us to the White House, then?” Gertrude asked me the next morning. “After all, we wouldn't dare refuse.” “I can't,” I said. “Won't your fathe
r, the president, let you?” “No,” I said. You aren't my friends.
I was never so glad to leave school as I was that Friday. I burst out the door and ran down the steps. Arthur lifted me onto the box, laughing. “Miss Ethel!” he said. “Don't you look like a spring morning!”
“I can't look like spring,” I said. It was late October; the leaves were turning brown and gold.
“You do. All that happiness.”
“It's because I'm going home.”
Arthur smiled and put the reins into my hands. I slapped the horses into a trot, and he didn't make me pull them back. “Got another surprise for you at home,” he said.
“More horses?”
“No, miss.”
I turned to look at him. “What? A new dog?”
“No, miss. Watch the road, now, if you're going to drive.”
“Another guinea pig had babies.”
“No.”
“Quentin broke his arm.”
“No, miss. It's a good surprise. Least I figure you'll think so.”
“The emperor of Abyssinia really is going to send us a zebra and a lion!”
Arthur chuckled. “I believe he is—but Mrs. Roosevelt says they have to go to the zoo.”
“Rats.” We'd been offered all sorts of gifts in honor of Father's presidency, but the zebra was the best. I thought a zebra could be very happy grazing on the White House lawn.
“What is it, Arthur? Tell me.”
“No, I think I'll let you see for yourself.”