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bottles and shakers and greet whoever happened to be staying in the house as well as the odd guest who might be joining the family for dinner.
    Caroline opened the Queen’s-room door to find herself face to face with a Secret Service man in a wrinkled gray suit. He blushed. “Sorry, ma’am.”
    “You are on the job, sir.” Caroline stepped around him. As always, she was struck by how small the White House was. The corridor on what Americans called the second floor and she thought of as the first floor ran from west to east. For some unfathomable reason, the east end was higher than the west end and had to be reached by steps. At either end there was a semicircular window that gave surprisingly little light—dusty panes? At the corner of the southwest end, Eleanor had a two-room suite with a view of the Cabinet room and the President’s office as well as, from her bedroom, the sloping South Lawn and, just beyond it, the somewhat pointless obelisk to George Washington, which Eleanor always found, she liked to say in all her wise innocence, deeply comforting.
    The President’s bedroom was just up the hall from Eleanor’s suite; connected, however, not with hers but, through a small door, with theoval study across from the Queen’s room. The long dark corridor was decorated with dull paintings of interest only to the inhabiting family, while bookcases of different sizes contained the latest unread product of the nation’s publishers, tribute to the First Reader. The southeast corner contained the Lincoln bedroom, which Franklin said had actually been Lincoln’s office and Cabinet room, now combined into one large and one small bedroom. “There is a ghost, of course,” he had added.
    “Lincoln’s?”
    “I’ve never seen it. More likely a disappointed office-seeker. They never let you alone, in life or in death.”
    “A very proper ghost,” said Caroline, “for such a house.” The President had quoted her twice since. But then he collected phrases and anecdotes to decorate his strategically defensive, as she thought of them, monologues. Or, as Eleanor put it, “It is often so important for Franklin to keep on talking in order
not
to allow certain people to tell him certain things.”
    Caroline liked the oval study best of all the admittedly dismal family rooms. Paintings of the Roosevelt family, of ships, of John Paul Jones hung on the walls. There was a fire in the fireplace and the room smelled of wood smoke and furniture wax that, somehow, kept the heavy Victorian pieces from gleaming. To the left of the fireplace there was a sofa and a curious metal stool on which the President’s legs could be arranged.
    Opposite the hall door, the President sat at a table desk, strewn with papers as well as two telephones that had never yet rung, at least when Caroline was in the room. Plainly this was the one place in the house where Franklin was allowed to escape his high office. She still thought of him as the handsome flirtatious young man whom she had known so long ago. But now that he was literally historic, she found no difficulty in addressing him correctly.
    “Good evening, Mr. President.” She even felt for an instant that she should curtsy in the awesome presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a figure who towered even when seated in his wheelchair. It was the head and neck that did the trick, she decided, with a professional actor’s eye. The neck was especially thick while the famous head seemed half again larger than the average, its thinning gray hair combedseverely back from a high rounded forehead. Roosevelt removed his pince-nez, worn, Eleanor had sighed, as a reminder of his political mentor, President Woodrow Wilson. “We hope Franklin won’t make the same mistakes poor Mr. Wilson did.”
    “Such as going to war?” Caroline, like everyone else in the world, wanted to know what the President intended to do about the European war in which, thus far, no gun had been fired. Caroline suspected that