Eleanor

Chapter One ONE
IN FEBRUARY 1884, JUST AS Anna Hall Roosevelt learned that she was pregnant, a blinding fog closed over Manhattan. Thicker and heavier than any in recent memory, it shut the city down for days.1

Late on February 12, the fifth straight night of precautionary bells tolling along rails and rivers,2 Anna's husband, Elliott Roosevelt, was summoned through the filthy gray cloud to the family townhouse at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street. His brother Theodore's "flower-like" young wife,3 Alice Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to their first child, also Alice. Elliott wired the happy news to Albany, where Theodore, only twenty-five, was in his third term as the blond, side-whiskered "Cyclone Assemblyman," crusading against machine politics, corruption, and "that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class."4

But delivery had gravely weakened the mother, and by next evening everything was falling apart. "There is a curse on this house," groaned Elliott to his younger sister, Corinne.5 By the time Theodore burst through the front door, his wife was semi-comatose from Bright's disease while, a floor below, his mother, fifty-year-old Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, sank beneath acute typhoid fever. By three in the morning, Mittie was gone.

By two that afternoon Alice had died in Theodore's arms, only twenty-two. It was St. Valentine's Day.

The double catastrophe knocked the surviving Roosevelts entirely off course. Putting the city of death behind him, Theodore stumbled west to his Dakota ranch, leaving his older sister, Anna, known as Bamie (pronounced "BAM-ie"), to take care of little Alice.

For Elliott, twenty-four and unmoored by the loss of his mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt's death cast a dread of fatherhood over his wife's recently established pregnancy. Anna herself now feared that childbirth would kill her. The whole family was wracked with apprehensions.6

LESS THAN EIGHT MONTHS LATER, on a fair, breezy Saturday,

David Michaelis is the bestselling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N.C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. He lives in New York with his wife and family.

"An excellent single-volume biography of America's greatest first lady . . . Absolutely spellbinding."
-Douglas Brinkley, The Washington Post