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When Boston racketeers tried to force them into selling policy slips, the Piersons left the Cape.
Selling vacuum cleaners, reading the want ads, living for five days on onion sandwiches, watching crises come so fast they did not know they were crises, the Piersons proved in their own careers that the enrolling avalanche of ill-fate was only part of the story. When they were almost starving, the boys, coming out of steel mills and preparatory schools, won scholarships at Yale.
By 1936 Mrs. Pierson and Louise were intense Roosevelt idolators. "You and I are the only people for Roosevelt. Everybody else is just Democrats."
Roughly Speaking ends with the beginning of the Third Term. Once Mrs. Pierson returned to Quincy to see her father's house: "It was just the same! I couldn't believe my eyes. . . . The widow's walk on the roof where we used to go to watch fires . . . the opaque glass in the windows of the servants' dining room . . . the summerhouse with the well in it ... the drooping cut-leaf maple. It was all just as I remembered it. Nothing was changed. ... In the library, a light flashed on. ... I knew my mother was standing at the top of the stairs in her kitten's-ear broadcloth with the long train, the diamond butterfly from Tiffany's sparkling at the black-velvet ribbon around her throat. . . . But I couldn't see her for the mist in my eyes."