then sleep. We used to do it all the time. Once a year in high school, our princi pal, Mr. Toerag, would file the whole school into the auditorium and make us spend a tedious day answering multiple-choice questions on a variety of subjects for some national examination. It didn't take you long to deduce that if you filled in the circles without bothering to look at the questions, you could complete the work in a fraction of the time, and then shut your eyes and lose yourself in erotic eyelid movies until it was time for the next test. As long as your pencil was neatly stowed and you didn't snore, Mr. Toerag, whose job it was to wander up and down the rows looking for miscreants, would leave you alone. That was what Mr. Toerag did for a living, wander around all day looking for people misbehaving. I always imagined him at home in the evening walking around the dining room table and poking his wife with a ruler if she slouched. He must have been hell to live with. His name wasn't really Mr. Toerag, of course. It was Mr. Superdickhead.
CHAPTER 8
I DROVE THROUGH bright early-morning sunshine. Here and there the road plunged into dense pine forests and led past collections of holiday cabins in the woods. Atlanta was only an hour's drive to the north and the people hereabouts were clearly trying to cash in on that proximity. I passed through a little town called Pine Mountain, which seemed to have everything you could want in an inland resort. It was attractive and had nice shops. The only thing it lacked was a mountain, which was a bit of a disappointment considering its name. I had intentionally chosen this route because Pine Mountain conjured up to my simple mind a vision of clean air, craggy precipices, scented forests and tumbling streams-the sort of place where you might bump into John-Boy Walton. Still, who could blame the locals if they stretched the truth a little in the pursuit of a dollar? You could hardly expect people to drive miles out of their way to visit something called Pine Flat-Place.
The countryside became gradually more hilly, though obstinately uncraggy, before the road made a gentle descent into Warm Springs. For years I had been harboring an urge to go there. I'm not sure why. I knew nothing about the place except that Franklin Roosevelt had died there. In the Register and Tribune
Building in Des Moines the main corridor was lined with historic front pages which I found strangely absorbing when I was small. one of them said PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DIES AT
WARM SPRINGS and I thought even then that it sounded like such a nice place to pass away.
In any event, Warm Springs was a nice place. There was just a main street, with an old hotel on one side and row of shops on the other, but they had been nicely restored as expensive bou tiques and gift shops for visitors from Atlanta. It was all patently artificial-there was even outdoor Muzak, if you can stand itbut I quite liked it.
I drove out to the Little White House, about two miles outside town. The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in some place like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama.
The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist.
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
I bought my ticket and quickly overtook the old people on the slope up to the Roosevelt compound.
The path led through a woods of tall pine trees that seemed to go up and up forever and sealed out the sunlight so effectively that the ground at their feet was bare, as if it had just been swept. The path was lined with large rocks from each state. Every governor had evidently been asked to contribute some hunk of native stone and here they were, lined up like a guard of honor. It's not often you see an idea that stupid brought to fruition. Many had been cut in the shape of the state, then buffed to a glossy finish and engraved. But others, clearly not catching the spirit of the enterprise, were just featureless hunks with a terse little plaque saying DELAWARE. GRANITE.
Iowa's contribution was, as expected, carefully middling. The stone had been cut to the shape of the state, but by someone who had clearly never attempted such a thing before. I imagine he had impulsively put in the lowest bid and was surprised to get the contract. At least the state had found a rock to send. I had half feared it might be a clump of dirt.
Beyond this unusual diversion was a white bungalow, which had formerly been a neighboring home and was now a museum. As always with these things in America, it was well done and interesting.
Photographs of Roosevelt at Warm Springs covered the walls and lots of his personal effects were on display in glass cases-his wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces and other such implements. Some of these were surprisingly elaborate and exerted a morbid interest because FDR was always most careful not 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 FDR 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 nonetheless 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 FDR's leg braces. 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 paneled 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
