Bess Truman (2 page)
This job sounds important, but the full title was “deputy surveyor and clerk.” The salary was $1,200 a year. That pay was good in 1894, when the average worker was lucky to get $1 a day, but it was not the sort of salary a man needed to support three children and a wife with expensive tastes.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace was growing up. Surviving letters from her mother indicate that Bess was already assuming a surprising amount of responsibility for the care of her two younger brothers by the time she reached high school. For a while, there was a fourth child in the house, a little sister named Madeline, born in the mid-1890s. She died when she was about three years old. Giving birth to four children in ten years - and losing one - strained Madge Wallace’s health and nerves. She always had been considered “delicate” - a word that suggested both physical and emotional fragility in this era. Madge took vacations at nearby Platte City, where her sister Maud had married a wealthy banker, William Strother Wells, and left her fourteen-year-old daughter in charge of the house.
One letter, somewhat incongruously addressed to “my dear little daughter,” told Bess not to let her brother Frank out of the house after dark because he had a cold and to make sure Frank took citrate of magnesia every night and did not forget his Listerine. She also was told to “order what you need and want at the grocery and meat shop.”
If this responsibility troubled Bess Wallace, there is no evidence of it in the happy gaze she gave the world in her youthful photographs. She looks as contented and self-confident as it was possible for a young woman to be, so far as I can see. And why not? The years of her girlhood were a good time to be a woman in America.
The movement toward a more independent woman began in 1848, and by 1890, there was a distinct whiff of liberation in the air. The bustle finally had been banished, and women were asking and getting the right to play sports and join clubs and launch careers and speak their minds on an astonishing number of topics from temperance to the vote. In 1901, the year sixteen-year-old Bess Wallace graduated from high school, a woman lawyer, Carey May Carroll, was named attorney to the Jackson County collector.
For Bess, participation in sports was her first stride toward self-confidence. By the time she was in high school, she was the best tennis player in Independence. She was also an accomplished ice skater and rider. In her younger days, she played third base on her brothers’ sandlot baseball team and was their champion slugger. There is a story in the family of Bess happening by when the boys were losing to a team from a nearby neighborhood by three runs in the last of the ninth. Bess was on her way home from a tennis match. Her brother Frank begged her to get into the game as a pinch hitter. She agreed, and they promptly put three men on base. Frank sent Bess up to bat, and she belted a home run over the center fielder’s head, winning the game.
Next door to Bess Wallace at 614 North Delaware Street lived her closest friend, Mary Paxton. She was the daughter of a successful attorney, and like Bess Wallace, had a number of obstreperous brothers, who frequently got into fights with the Wallace boys. Both older sisters never hesitated to wade into these brawls, grabbing male arms and legs, swatting ears and backsides. Bess, taller and a year older than Mary, was the acknowledged peacemaker. The rascals were told to behave or else. “They were all afraid of her,” recalled Henry Chiles, a high-school classmate who was probably one of the miscreants.
Bess also kept the peace and issued commands with her whistle. It was a piercing sound that carried for blocks. Moreover, she did it without putting her fingers near her mouth. “She was the only girl in Independence who could whistle through her teeth,” Henry Chiles recalled. The whistle summoned wandering brothers and struck terror into their male hearts when they were about to do something they shouldn’t. For her girlfriends, Bess had a more pleasing, melodious whistle. On summer evenings, they waited eagerly for it to sound from the Wallace back porch. It was a signal to come over for ice cream.
The Paxtons and the Wallaces had a good time together. On summer nights, it was so good that some of the neighbors - in particular Colonel William Southern, editor of the local paper - complained of not being able to get any sleep. In retaliation, they called Southern “Sneaky Bill.” A lot of the noise was probably generated by Frank Wallace and his big black dog. Visitors to Delaware Street would ask him what he called the mongrel, and Frank would say, deadpan “U-Know.”
The disconcerted visitor would say: “I don’t know. I just asked you.”
“U-Know,” Frank would say.
And so on, while the visitor got madder and madder and everyone else collapsed with laughter.
U-Know became such an object of affection he thought he could get away with anything. Matthew Paxton, one of Mary’s brothers, had stolen a handful of sugar lumps from his mother’s kitchen and was enjoying them one day. U-Know watched, licking his chops. George Wallace jarred Matthew’s elbow, and the sugar flew up in the air and down U-Know’s gullet. Matthew was so furious he bit U-Know. “Matthew spit black hair for a week,” Mary Paxton recalled. No one seems to remember whether he inflicted any serious damage on the dog.
While she hung around with these rowdy males, Bess was not allowed to forget that she was Madge Gates Wallace’s daughter. She was expected to be a lady, most of the time. This idea of the lady who concerned herself only with the genteel aspects of life, with art and culture and spiritual values, was still alive in the 1880s and 1890s. Madge Gates Wallace was a lady from the top of her well-coifed head to the tips of her elegant fingers. Although she tolerated her daughter’s athletic prowess, Madge insisted that Bess acquire the social graces.
In high school, Bess went to Miss Dunlap’s dancing class on Jackson Square in the center of Independence. Scarcely a Saturday night went by without a hop at that particular ballroom. There were other dances and receptions at the Swope mansion, where Bess was welcomed by Margaret Swope, the daughter closest to her in age. Margaret often asked Bess to join her in the receiving line, a sign of their close friendship as well as Bess’ social status.
“We all learned the polka and the schottische and the Virginia reel,” her friend Mary Paxton recalled. “But we mostly danced the waltz and two-step. We had much the same kind of party dresses, mull with silk sashes, colored or striped. But Bess always looked more stylish than anyone else in the crowd.” In the summer, they sometimes strung Japanese lanterns on the lawn and had outdoor parties. For refreshments in summer, there was ice cream and cake and mints; in the winter, chicken salad with beaten biscuits and charlotte russe.
On summer nights after a dance, the party often piled into one or two old surreys for a ride through the moonlit town and countryside. They would sing songs and no doubt do a little surreptitious “spooning,” although this adolescent sport was frowned upon if the girl seemed too willing or too careless. One girl who spooned on a back porch with a comparative stranger from Kansas City was never invited to another party.
By now, you may be wondering about my omission of a name that eventually became important in Bess Wallace’s life - Harry S. Truman. He was not a native of Independence. He was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, a tiny farm town some 120 miles to the south, where his father, John Anderson Truman, was in business as a horse and cattle trader. About nine months later, the Trumans moved to a farm near Harrisonville, in Cass County, some thirty miles from Independence, but part of Jackson County. There, John Truman helped his wife’s family, the Youngs, run their 600-acre farm. In 1890, when Harry was six years old, his mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, persuaded her husband to move to Independence, because she wanted her children (a second son, Vivian, and a daughter, Mary, had followed Harry) to get a better education than the rural schools could give them.
Not long after they came to town, Martha Ellen Truman met the local Presbyterian minister on the street. He invited her to send her children to his Sunday school. Although she was a Baptist by birth, she accepted the invitation. Thus, six-year-old Harry Truman walked into the classroom of the First Presbyterian Church and saw “a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl" named Bess Wallace. To the end of his life, he insisted that he fell in love with five-year-old Bess on the spot and never stopped loving her throughout his boyhood years. “She sat behind me in the sixth, seventh, and high-school grades,” Harry Truman later recalled, “and I thought she was the most beautiful and the sweetest person on earth.”
Occasionally, Bess would allow Harry Truman to carry her books home from school. He would be dazed with happiness for the rest of the day. More moments of near ecstasy occurred when Bess joined Harry and several other classmates at the home of his first cousin, Ethel Noland, to be tutored in the intricacies of Latin verbs by her older sister, Nellie. Both Nolands soon noted Harry’s adoration of Bess, and he did not try to conceal it from them.
One day, he appeared at their house with a broad smile on his face and announced that he wanted to play his first musical composition for them. The Nolands seated themselves in their parlor, expecting something solemn and high-toned. Cousin Harry had been taking piano lessons for years and was playing Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and other European masters. He reeled off a swarm of arpeggios and then played a series of lilting notes that they instantly recognized. “It’s Bessie’s ice cream whistle!” Ethel exclaimed.
Unfortunately, Bess Wallace had no interest in Harry Truman, nor the least idea that he was in love with her. He was never part of the Delaware Street crowd. Never was he invited to a ball at the Swope mansion. Nor did he participate in those moonlit hayrides. The Trumans were far beneath the social world inhabited by the Wallaces and the Gates, the Waggoners and the Swopes. They were country folk and newcomers. John Anderson Truman’s profession, horse trading, was considered less than genteel by most people. Also, his income was erratic. During high school, Harry had to work at odd jobs to improve the family’s finances.
One story, told by Mary Paxton, sums up the gap between Harry Truman and Bess Wallace better than paragraphs of explanation. On one of those moonlit, spooning expeditions, the Delaware Street crowd was riding around Jackson Square, singing merrily. As they paused for breath between songs, someone said: “Oh look, there’s Harry Truman.”
Harry was sweeping out Clinton’s Drug Store, his last chore for the day. “What a shame he has to work so much,” Bess Wallace said. The words were casual, an observation with little emotional content.
There was another reason, probably as important as social standing, why Bess Wallace found Harry Truman uninteresting. His bad eyes made him a hopeless athlete. His crueler schoolmates called him “Four Eyes” and also ridiculed him for taking piano lessons. A young man needed more than average athletic ability to win Bess Wallace’s attention in those days. Bill Bostian, the postmaster’s son, adored her and took up tennis to promote his standing. Alas, when they played doubles, he had a habit of yelling, “I’ll get it Bessie,” and then not getting it. Bill’s status plummeted.
Throughout these grammar and high-school years, another man was the central figure in Bess’ happiness: her father. She adored him as only an only daughter can. (How well I know that.) In her grade-school days, David Willock Wallace was always romping with her and the other children in the neighborhood. Every Fourth of July, he personally set up and fired off a magnificent display of fireworks for Delaware Street. At patriotic parades on the Fourth and other days, he frequently was asked to be grand marshal, and he would lead the strutting show on a great black horse. It is not hard to imagine what effect this must have had on a girl whose imagination had been fed on southern ideals of masculine chivalry. David Wallace was Bess’ Bayard, the knight without stain or reproach. As she grew older, her awareness of his comparative poverty added a heart-wrenching pity to her love.
Behind his facade of good cheer, David Wallace was an unhappy man. A fifth child, David Frederick, born in 1900, added to his financial problems. He made a stab at starting an importing business in Kansas City, a natural connection to his customs job, but it went nowhere and probably left him even deeper in debt. Like most local politicians, he spent a great deal of time in the Independence courthouse. The hours of his customs job were not demanding. Next door to the courthouse was a political saloon, where he spent even more time. As his debts increased, so did his drinking.
For Bess and her two older brothers, Frank and George, this time must have been the beginning of their troubles. They knew about their father’s drinking, and so did the neighbors - often he was carried home by friends and deposited on the front porch. Complicating the problem was Madge Gates Wallace’s refusal to recognize it. She never reproached her husband for one of these lapses. That would not have been genteel. She was polite and even sympathetic as he struggled through the following day’s hangover and remorse. She acted as if he had twisted his ankle or caught a bad cold.
Another shadow that descended on Bess around this time was the illness of Mary Paxton’s mother, a brilliant woman who had been a college teacher and was the leader of one of the most intellectual study clubs in Independence. The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. A three-year stay in Colorado’s mountain air during Mary’s grammar-school years had done little but make the family miserable over the perpetual separation. Mary Gentry Paxton returned home, and the family and the neighbors could only watch helplessly as she slipped slowly away from them.
The illness of a mother, the failures of a father saddened but did not disrupt young lives. As far as anyone could see, Bess and Mary continued to enjoy themselves. They eluded the troubled adult world (and troublesome younger brothers) at clandestine meetings of the Cadiz Club. This all-female organization met in a barn behind Grandfather Gates’ house. They soon were staging plays there, written by Mary and performed under her direction. Bess was the manager. She collected admissions and saw that the profits went to charity.
