Author takes deeper, fictional look at Eleanor Roosevelt’s affair with ‘Hick’
Historical fiction about “forgotten women’s lives” has become a comfortably familiar, if not always scintillating, literary form.
Leave it to Amy Bloom to give the genre a swift kick in the knickers with “White Houses,” her irresistibly audacious re-creation of the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickok.
Wait, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had an affair with another woman? Thousands of letters, preserved at Hyde Park, attest to their passionate connection, and historians now are certain their relationship was physical. (In 2016, the two women were the subject of the non-fiction book “Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady” by Susan Quinn, which expanded on revelations in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s 1999 biography of Eleanor.)
(Susan Quinn’s 2017 biography “Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady” deepens the portrait of Hickok, who was born in East Troy, Wis.)
So what does bestselling short story writer and novelist Bloom (“Come to Me,” “Away,” “Lucky Us”) bring to the party? The rollicking, Damon Runyonesque narration of “Hick,” the chunky “lady” reporter in tailored suits whose first-person storytelling skills (in Bloom’s deft hands) keep us glued to the page.
The story begins in 1945, with FDR dead and Eleanor visiting Hick in New York City, renewing, for the moment, a flame that has cooled. Then the novel backtracks, as Hick recites the jawdropping story of her life (dirt-poor childhood, raped by her father, forced to work as a hired girl). The pièce de résistance of this early section is when Hick joins the circus and sleeps with a hermaphrodite. It may be wholly invented, but Bloom, who is also a psychotherapist, challenges P.T. Barnum for sheer brash showmanship in this carnal carny scene.
Hick’s hard-knocks real-life education makes her a natural as a newspaperwoman, and she moves from covering the Lindbergh baby kidnapping to an assignment to interview Eleanor in 1932, as a gung-ho FDR sets his sights on the presidency.
The two very different women become friends, then lovers, and after Franklin wins election, Eleanor moves Hick into the White House. Hard to imagine in 2018, but even in a pre-Michael Wolff world, people talked. Hick has to give up her AP beat covering the first lady, and FDR sends her on the road as an investigator for his Depression-era Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Bloom convincingly weaves tender romance with hard-boiled reality, although there is an occasional misstep. Granted, FDR had his own well-known dalliances, but his metrosexual tête-àtête with Hick (“You and the missus,” he asks, “the fire’s gone out?”) is a stretch.
At its heart, however, “White Houses” feels true. In an afterword, Bloom notes that the White House staff routinely cropped Hickok out of photos. In “White Houses,” she’s in the center of the frame, and nobody who reads this sad, funny, frisky novel will forget her.