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By Root 1355 0

to let the public see him as the cripple he was. And here we were viewing him with his trousers off, so to speak. I was particularly taken with a room full of all the handmade gifts that had been given to him when he was President and then presumably stuck at the back of a very large cupboard. There were carved walking-sticks by the dozen and maps of America made of inlaid wood and portraits of F.D.R. scratched on walrus tusks and etched with acid into slate. The amazing thing was how well done they all were. Every one of them represented hundreds of hours of delicate carving and tireless polishing, and all to be given away to a stranger for whom it would be just one more item in a veritable cavalcade of personalized keepsakes. I became so absorbed in these items that I scarcely noticed when the old people barged in, a trifle breathless but none the less lively. A lady with a bluish tint to her hair pushed in front of me at one of the display cases. She gave me a brief look that said, ‘I am an old person. I can go where I want,’ and then she dismissed me from her mind. ‘Say, Hazel,’ she called in a loud voice, ‘did you know you shared a birthday with Eleanor Roosevelt?’

‘Is that so?’ answered a grating voice from the next room.

‘I share a birthday with Eisenhower myself,’ the lady with the bluish hair went on, still loudly, consolidating her position in front of me with a twitch of her ample butt. ‘And I’ve got a cousin who shares a birthday with Harry Truman.’

I toyed for a moment with the idea of grabbing the woman by both ears and driving her forehead into my knee, but instead passed into the next room where I found the entrance to a small cinema in which they showed us a crackling black and white film all about Roosevelt’s struggle with polio and his long stays at Warm Springs trying to rub life into his spindly legs, as if they had merely gone to sleep. It too was excellent. Written and narrated by a correspondent from UPI, it was moving without being mawkish, and the silent home movies, with their jerky movements that made all the participants look as if someone just out of camera range was barking at them to hurry up, exerted the same sort of voyeuristic fascination as F.D.R.’s legbraces. Afterwards we were at last released to see the Little White House itself. I fairly bounded ahead in order not to have to share the experience with the old people. It was down another path, through more pine trees and beyond a white sentry-box. I was surprised at how small it was. It was just a little white cottage in the woods, all on one floor, with five small rooms, all panelled in dark wood. You would never believe that this could be the property of a President, particularly a rich President like Roosevelt. He did, after all, own most of the surrounding countryside, including the hotel on Main Street, several cottages and the springs themselves. Yet the very compactness of the cottage made it all the more snug and appealing. Even now, it looked comfy and lived-in. You couldn’t help but want it for yourself, even if it meant coming to Georgia to enjoy it. In every room there was a short taped commentary, which explained how Roosevelt worked and underwent therapy at the cottage. What it didn’t tell you was that what he really came here for was a bit of rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living-room and his was on the other. The taped recording made nothing of this, but it did point out that Eleanor’s bedroom, tucked away at the back and decidedly inferior to the secretary’s, was mostly used as a guest-room because Eleanor seldom made the trip south.

From Warm Springs I went some miles out of my way to take the scenic road into Macon, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot scenic about it. It wasn’t unscenic particularly, it just wasn’t scenic. I was beginning to suspect that the scenic route designations on my maps had been applied somewhat at random. I imagined some guy who had never been south of Jersey City sitting in an office in New York and saying, ‘Warm Springs to Macon?