Bess Truman (6 page)
Like Bess, who had become an Episcopalian, Harry had “strayed from the Presbyterian fold,” although he still remembered his Sunday school days “very well.” He had become a member of the Baptist Church in Grandview, but he had very independent ideas about religion.
I am by religion like everything else. I think there is more in acting than in talking. . . . We had a neighbor out here who could pray louder and talk more fervently in meetin’ than anyone I ever heard. He’d say in every prayer, “O Lord help this congregation to stop and think where they’s a going at.” We finally found that he beat his wife and did everything else that’s “ornery.”
I think religion is something one should have on Wednesday and Thursday as well as Sunday. Therefore, I don’t believe that these protracted meetings do any real good. They are mostly excitement and when the excitement wears off people are as they always were.
I like to play cards and dance as far as I know how and go to shows and do all the things they [the Baptists] said I shouldn’t but I don’t feel badly about it. I go when I feel like it and the good church members are glad to hear what it’s like. You see I’m a member but not a strenuous one.
Another colorful aspect of farm life, horse trading (his father’s profession), inspired a lively letter and some significant thoughts about men and morals.
A fellow traded me a horse yesterday. That is, he parted me from a hundred dollars and I have a horse. You know horse trading is the cause of the death of truth in America. When you go to buy they’ll tell you anything on earth to get your money. You simply have to use your own judgment if you have any. I haven’t much but I think I got my money’s worth. Can’t tell though until I work him a few days.
A neighbor of ours once had a sale of his furniture and stock. He had a great many horses and some that were no good. He had one that was probably an octogenarian in the horse world. He was very aged anyway. This horse he wanted to sell to a poor lame man who had tried to buy it before the sale. So he took a quart of bad whiskey and soaked the poor lame one and then told him he wasn’t going to put the horse up. Well that fellow begged so hard that the horse was sold to him for $170. Just about $100 more than he was worth. The owner had a “buy bidder” to run him up. So that between the booze and the bidder he was mulcted for $100. O he the honest farmer. I have found that they sell gold bricks now. That is what rural delivery and party-line phones have done for our uplift.
I am not a pessimist though. There are some honest ones and they are always well thought of even by crooks. They are always the last ones you get acquainted with too.
We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know. I don’t know why that is, either. . . . It’s all a matter of viewpoint. A man’s mighty lucky if he has two.
In this letter, Bess Wallace encountered one of Harry Truman’s most remarkable gifts, the ability to look at himself and other people, including his father, and see their shortcomings with a clear and steady gaze without relapsing into cynicism. He remained an optimist about himself, his fellow Americans, the future. Her father’s suicide had left Bess with a different attitude toward life. She was much closer to being a pessimist. Psychologists say that people who fall in love instinctively reach out for qualities in the other person that they sense they lack in themselves. I think this may explain why Bess Wallace was attracted to Harry Truman. But it was an attraction that had to overcome deep doubts and hesitations.
In mid-April 1911, continuing the streak of bad luck that had been haunting the Trumans since his father went bankrupt in 1901, a calf broke Harry’s leg. That, too, was used for Farmer Truman’s pursuit of the athletic Miss Wallace. He joked about the injury, declaring it reminded him of the Irishwoman who mourned her husband after he drowned in the Big Blue River by howling: “To think that Mike should a crossed the great ocean and thin be drowned in a hole like the dirty Blue. Tis a disgrass indeed it is.” Harry said that he felt the same way about having a suckling calf break his leg. In another letter, he casually mentioned that the calf weighed a mere 300 pounds.
Harry’s broken leg soon healed, but it became apparent that 1911 was not going to be a good year for farmers. It simply refused to rain. Even the Trumans’ vegetable garden failed. “We are living on bread and bacon with some canned goods thrown in,” Harry wrote.
This fact did not prevent Harry from discussing with remarkable candor the probable state of mind of a mutual friend named Minnie Clements, who had just married. Bess remarked that she suspected Minnie wished she could turn back the clock. Harry replied that he thought it took several months for that kind of disillusion to set in.
They tell me that for the first few months she can burn the biscuits every morning if she chooses and it’s all right, but after that she learns what a good cook her ma-in-law was. And . . . he can be as no-account and good-for-nothing as he wants to be but he soon learns how his pa-in-law made his money. Then it’s ho for Reno or South Dakota [divorce mill capitals in 1911]. It’s certainly awful what pessimists those two places have made of people. I am a Catholic when it comes to divorce. . . .
Marriage was clearly on Harry’s mind. On June 22, 1911, less than a year after he appeared at the door of 219 Delaware Street with Mrs. Wallace’s cake plate, he proposed. He began obliquely, commenting that the drought was making water as much of a luxury as diamonds. He then took the plunge: “Speaking of diamonds, would you wear a solitaire on your left hand should I get it? Now that is a rather personal or pointed question provided you take it for all it means. You know, were I an Italian or a poet I would commence and use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer. I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that some day maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything. It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers. I am blest that way. Still that doesn’t keep me from having always thought that you were all that a girl could be possibly and impossibly. You may not have guessed it but I’ve been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you’d even look at me. I don’t think so now but I can’t keep from telling you what I think of you.”
All Harry got in reply was a devastating silence. She obviously did not know what to make of this incredibly honest farmer, who was asking her to marry him and simultaneously admitting that he was probably going to be a financial failure. If Harry Truman had deliberately tried to wreck his chances with Bess Wallace, he could not have chosen a more ruinous remark. Here was a man asking her to repeat her mother’s experience. But there was something about this man that stirred a response in Bess Wallace’s bruised, wary heart. That amazing optimism in the face of experiences that would have discouraged or disillusioned most men. The energy, the vitality he exuded. She could not say yes, but she did not want to say no.
After three weeks of agony, Harry wrote a wary letter: “I have just about come to the conclusion that I have offended you in some way. . . . Would you object to my coming down this Saturday evening?”
Although the phone service between Grandview and Independence was erratic at best, this letter must have been answered that way, because two days later, Harry was writing Bess another letter, telling her how he felt about his visit and their talk. She had turned him down, but she had done it in the gentlest, most considerate way. She had said that she hoped they could continue to be friends.
You turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. . . . I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.
I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girl friends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. . . . I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.
Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope, though.
Here was candor that ought to have melted any woman’s heart, but Bess only agreed to let Harry give her his picture. By the end of July, he had delivered the “cat chaser,” as he called it. Then he launched a campaign to lure the athletic Miss Wallace to Grandview. He undertook to build a tennis court on the family farm.
For the next month, his letters were full of references to this project. He planned a grass court. “We have a heavy field roller, and I can make it as hard as the road and mow the grass real short,” he told her. “I am going to have it ready by Labor Day.”
On the eve of Labor Day weekend, he sent Bess a map of the road to Grandview. All day Sunday, Harry toiled on the court. On Monday, instead of Bess and her friends in their tennis outfits, there was only a message that she had decided not to come because it was raining in Independence. Forlornly, Harry reported that the sun had been shining brightly in Grandview.
Refusing to allow the word discouraged into his vocabulary, Harry persuaded the elusive Miss Wallace to set another date for a visit to Grandview. She declined to do so - and then made an impromptu visit, with virtually no warning. In the meantime, the tennis court had deteriorated from exposure to wind and weather and was pronounced unusable. It was not level enough. Harry was reduced to hoping he could persuade the road overseer to come in with his grader to flatten it out.
No more was said about the tennis court. Harry began finding an amazing number of excuses to go to Independence and Kansas City. By October 1, 1911, he was inviting Bess to a matinee
of H.M.S. Pinafore,
which soon was arriving at the Shubert Theater in Kansas City. He added an invitation to the evening’s vaudeville show at the Orpheum and dinner in Kansas City, because “it will take so long to go to Independence and back so many times.” Bess accepted, and Harry abandoned his rural ways to become Miss Wallace’s escort to the metropolis.
A few weeks later, Harry traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, with friends to file claims for mineral rights in the nearby hills. It was a kind of lottery, with about 400 claims available, worth from $40 to $16,000. Alas, he reported to Bess he did not even draw a $40 claim. “I never could draw anything though. Not even the lady I wanted,” Harry wrote, adding that he was sure he was born under an unlucky star.
Ignoring this uncharacteristic outburst of pessimism, Miss Wallace replied by asking if “wanted” meant his interest in her had waned. Harry hastily replied that the past tense only meant his grammar was at fault. His feelings for her were “something that will never be past with me.” He spent the rest of the letter bemoaning his lack of a “benzine buggy,” as hoboes called an automobile. If he had one, he would “burn the pike from here to Independence” so often he would “make myself monotonous to you.”
By the end of 1911, in the eighteenth month of their courtship, Harry had a standing invitation to visit 219 North Delaware Street every Sunday. But he was still far from getting Miss Wallace to consider marriage. On one of these Sundays, which happened to be rainy, Harry asked her if she was getting tired of him hanging around so much. Bess replied that she thought he was the one who would get tired of it.
“I’ll never get tired,” Harry said.
Bess looked out the window at the rain and said: “I wish I had some rubber boots.”
A day or two later, Harry wrote her a letter, recalling the scene. He told her she should not have been afraid “of my getting slushy or proposing until I can urge you to come to as good a home as you have already.” Then, either with great shrewdness or great honesty or both, he added: “Still, if I thought you cared a little, I’d double my efforts to amount to something and maybe would succeed.”
Bess responded with some thoughts on husbands and money. Harry could not know, at this point, the painful memories this subject stirred in her mind. She told him that she and her friend Mary Paxton had decided that a woman should never get involved with a man who was unable to support her in decent style. Mary, obviously reacting to her bitter experience with Charlie Ross, added that she lately was inclined to wait around for a millionaire.
Harry replied that he was surprised to find that he agreed with Mary Paxton for once. When they were kids, they never were able to agree on anything. But Mary was not the point here, although he wished her the best of luck in her hunt for a millionaire. “I am going to start in real earnest now . . .,” Harry wrote. “For what you say sounds kind of encouraging, whether you meant it that way or not.”
After that exchange, money became a frequent topic of discussion between them. When Bess invited Harry to dinner at the Salisbury farm and told him they would walk the three miles from Independence, he protested that he was more than willing to hire a buggy. He obviously was not acquainted with Miss Wallace’s fondness for marathon walks or that this invitation was another favorable sign.
On February 13, 1912, when Bess turned twenty-seven, Harry apologized for not giving her a birthday present or sending a valentine for the following day because he did not have the money to buy anything “good enough.” Bess replied by giving him a stickpin with her birthstone in it for Valentine’s Day. Harry reported that he had found a fortune teller’s prospectus in a cough-drop box, and it said that people with February birthdays had a quieting effect on the insane. “I suppose that means those they have caused to become dippy. Don’t you?” he asked.
Three weeks later, on March 4, 1912, ten months after she rejected his proposal, Harry began calling her “Bess.” He had been admitted to the inner circle. Even more encouraging was the way she took him into her confidence about her name. She told him she was not really happy with Bess and was considering several other variations on her baptismal name, Elizabeth. Harry offered some lively comments and observations on the subject.
