When the Cheering Stopped Read Free

light-colored lampshades. Two nurses and Grayson were there also. In another room the husbands of the two married girls waited with Joe Tumulty, who, not very much older than the daughters, had loved Ellen Wilson like a mother ever since the days in the New Jersey Governor’s mansion. They were all together in the other room and Grayson was alone for a few moments with her when she roused herself from a semi-stupor and took the doctor’s hand to draw him to her. “Please take good care of Woodrow, Doctor,” she whispered, uttering the last words of her life. A few minutes later Grayson told the family it would be well if they came back into her room. Twilight outside was about to begin; the day was still very warm. They walked to her bed and the girls knelt beside it. The President took her hand and was still holding it when, a little later, just before evening, she died. He was very controlled and looked over the bed at Grayson and said, “Is it all over?” Grayson nodded and the President quickly straightened up to fold her hands over her breast. She was fifty years old and they had been married twenty-nine years. He used to say, recalling the time they first met, when he was a little boy and she a baby, that he had loved her since she was in her cradle.
    He walked to the window and looked south over the gardens she had planted and toward the Washington Monument and the Potomac and Virginia. Grayson was busying himself with the dead woman when he first heard the sobs. “Oh my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?” the President said over and over.
    Outside, on the bell knob beside the main doorway, a heavy band of black crape soon appeared.
    He did not want her to lie in a casket, so they placed her on a sofa in her room and he bent over to put awhite silk shawl around her shoulders. For the rest of her time in the White House she was there, never alone at night, the President and one or more of the girls always sitting by her, talking quietly or reading or simply sitting still.
    â€œGod has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear,” he wrote a friend, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said to the Secretary that he feared the President was about to have a breakdown. But in fact he did not again completely give vent to his feelings after his first sobs had stopped. At times it seemed as if he were about to, but he would pull himself together, saying, “I must not give way.”
    Monday the tenth, in the morning, was the time for her funeral service, she at last in a casket resting on the shining floor of the East Room with its marble fireplaces and concert piano in gold leaf. Afterward the President and the girls withdrew to a room nearby and sat alone looking out toward the south. At two in the afternoon the funeral train left Washington for Georgia and the hillside cemetery in Rome where lay her mother and father, who in life had been, like the President’s father, a Presbyterian minister.
    Riding down in the nearly empty special train, the President rarely left his wife but sat by the casket, only occasionally napping on a lounge in the car’s compartment. By Tuesday morning they were deep in the South, and although only the tolling of the engine bell signaled their approach, at the railroad platforms of the small towns and even at the way stations silent people stood with their hats off. Going through the hills and valleys of north Georgia, they saw old men standing at attention on the porches of the remote rural cabins. At noon in Rome the stores closed and the trolleys stopped running and the factories shut down; when in the early afternoon the train pulled into the station, bells began to toll all over the city. They got out of the train into the hot Georgia sun and a group of her relatives took the casket and put it in the hearse while the President looked at it with a strong fixed stare. They drove directly to the church