Of the famous homes I’ve visited, I liked FDR’s best. Of course I did. I go for writers’ homes mainly– Poe, Dickens, Hugo, Keats, Thoreau– but I went up to Hyde Park, New York, to see FDR’s as well.
I’ve also visited some famous graves. Chopin’s was the biggest deal to me, although Queen Elizabeth’s was pretty mind-boggling. She knew Shakespeare. She beat that Armada! And she’s right there! That was a kick in the head.
I went to Chopin’s grave as a thank-you. I love those piano preludes. I brought flowers, yellow gerber daisies. It was March in Paris, so cold it wasn’t romantic or cute, and it took me forever to find him. My feet hurt, I had a huge zit on my forehead, and I was starving. I was pinching euros and freezing and malnourished the whole time I was there. They don’t have whole-wheat bread or Mexican food in France. Other than that, I loved it.
There were fresher graves than Monsieur Chopin’s in that cemetery. It wasn’t strange that I had flowers. A child had recently left a crayoned note on one tomb. When I finally found Chopin, other people had left little scrolls of sheet music sitting there. I am not musician enough to have identified the melodies.
It might have even started to snow, but I think that is a handy detail I added when I used this story in some fiction I was working on. So, let it snow or not snow in the Parisian cemetery, on the grave of the great Romantic composer who has a white marble lady plucking a harp carved over his final resting place– whatever makes you happy.
No one else on the FDR home tour was about to wet herself with excitement like I was. He sat in this room! That was his lamp! He pulled himself up this dumbwaiter! (He did– even long after electricity, both to keep himself in shape and to assure himself he could evacuate in case of fire.) Inside the house is neat– but you have to stay with your tour guide to make sure no one spits on the floor.
Outside the house is better. I sat on the side porch for a while, sheltered from the misty rain, eating red jelly beans and admiring the gentle, sweeping view of the Hudson valley hills. Then I walked down the driveway.
Here’s the thing about the driveway: Roosevelt promised himself he would learn to walk again, and he chucked himself down that driveway every goddamn day because he was going to walk again, and that was that. He did this for seven years. He tried and tried to make it all the way down, to the gate, to the road. For seven years. You know the man couldn’t walk, right? And then he died.
FDR’s driveway is one of my favorite stories of all time. It’s the saddest story and the happiest story. It’s deluded and optimistic and tough and crazy and wrenching. The most powerful man in the world (except Stalin, right?) has a driveway he wants to walk down. He has a driveway he tries to walk down. And he just tries and tries. While he’s slipping arms to Britain and then turning the U.S. from a backwater to a 500-pound gorilla. And taking a little time to look over his stamp collection and enjoy a cocktail or two. He’s trying to walk down this driveway, and all he does is fail.
I felt really sappy about it, so all I can tell you is (puts arm over your shoulder), Son, we’ve all got driveways to walk down, don’t we? Everybody’s got a driveway.
You can also see the graves of Franklin and Eleanor on the grounds of their Hyde Park estate. I didn’t leave them flowers, since I have the social welfare safety net to remember them by.
Visiting the grave is a thank-you. You hope someone will visit your grave, someday, so you can exist for a while after you die, and it will mean that they appreciated you.
Visiting the house is taking on the person. Breathing them in. Grasping their bannisters and sitting on their porches to weave your story in with theirs. Knowing a famous person as a physical presence, a person who lived in a physical world as you do, and had to live by its rules. Who wasn’t a symbol or a character or an idol. Just a guy trying to get down his driveway.
Going On 