Bess Truman Read online

  It was difficult for Bess to live day in and day out with such an attitude without absorbing some of it into her own feelings. She could remain independent of her mother on matters that required thoughtful analysis or decisive action, but in matters as indefinite as absence from home or as casual as wanting to see the Queen of Rumania, it was easy to slip into disagreement with her traveling man.

  Part of this emotional crosscurrent may have come from the difficult time that Mary Paxton Keeley was having without a husband. Mike Keeley’s mind became affected by his kidney disease, and he was committed to a state asylum in Virginia, where he died. Mary took a job on a country weekly in Missouri and simultaneously tried to raise her child and write a boys’ adventure book. A one-woman band, she spent most of her time driving over mud roads in all kinds of weather and grew more and more exhausted.

  Mary showed up in Independence one day early in 1927, looking like a refugee from a famine. She had a deep cough that alarmed everyone who remembered that her mother had died of tuberculosis. Her father put her to bed, and the doctor diagnosed pneumonia. We can be certain that Bess was one of her constant visitors.

  In these years, Mother demonstrated an extraordinary devotion to friends when they were struck down by illness or misfortune. Shortly before Mary came home, Bess had received a letter from the mother of one of these friends, thanking her for “the inestimable number of dear things” she had done for her daughter during her fatal illness.

  During her convalescence, Mary no doubt discussed with Bess the rise to journalistic eminence of their old classmate Charlie Ross. Charlie had become the Washington, D.C., reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was building a national reputation. We can be fairly certain that he was on Mary’s mind because we know from her letters in the Truman Library that she and Charlie had seen each other around this time, and he had confessed that he still loved her. Since 1913, he had been married to Florence Griffin, a dark-haired beauty from St. Louis, and had two sons. During the year 1926, Mary wrote him a series of passionate letters that she never mailed. “When I think what you have done for me,” she wrote in one of them. “I was growing hard. You have softened me. I thought I must harden my heart against every man.”

  In the Independence of 1926, the iron rules of respectability were still in force and Mary could only pour out her yearnings on paper. She could not even bring herself to confide her feelings to Bess. But Mother’s presence, her loving companionship, had a lot to do with Mary’s recovery. When she was well again, Bess joined Mary’s father and stepmother in advising her to quit the newspaper business. She simply did not have the physical stamina to work twelve hours a day and try to raise a son and incidentally write a book.

  Mary decided to get a master’s degree in journalism and become a teacher. A year or so later, she was offered a professorship at Christian College in Columbia. It was more than a little ironic that she, who had set out to conquer the newspaper world while Charlie Ross hesitated to leave his teaching job, was now the teacher while Charlie was a big-time reporter.

  Meanwhile, Judge Harry Truman was hard at work building his political reputation. He had an all-Democratic county court and the backing of the Democratic organization, but that was only a necessary prelude to accomplishment, as far as he was concerned. Although I was still considerably short (literally) of being an expert observer, I can add a few bits of reminiscence to these days. I remember happy hours in the family Dodge sitting between Mother and Dad while they drove over every mile of road in Jackson County. Again and again, while I lobbied for a stop in Blue Springs, where they made the best ice-cream sodas in the world, Dad would stop the car and get out and stamp on the edge of the road and see it crumble beneath his feet. These “piecrust” roads had been built by previous administrations and were a disgrace as well as a safety hazard. Judge Truman vowed that his administration would build roads that would last. That sounds easy, but in Jackson County, it involved him in all sorts of battles.

  He also was determined to cut the swollen county payroll to enable him to pay for the roads without raising taxes. He boldly reduced the number of road overseers from sixty to sixteen and announced that contracts would be given to the lowest bidder, no matter whether the contractor came from Jackson County and was a Democrat or came from Nebraska and voted the straight Republican ticket. Politicians, contractors, and jobholders went howling to Tom Pendergast, demanding that he discipline Truman. But Pendergast liked the aura of honest government Harry Truman was creating in Jackson County, and he refused to interfere.

  In some diary notes he made in the early 1930s, Dad paints a gritty picture of his two colleagues on the county court, Howard Vrooman and Robert W. Barr. They were both playboys, in politics for what they could get out of it. Vrooman was a follower of the Rabbit boss, Joe Shannon, who ordered him, Dad recalled, “to treat me for what I am in his estimation - that is the lowest human on earth.” But Vrooman was too much of a backslapper to pursue this feud. He preferred to have a good time, even while the court was in session: “He and Barr used to shoot craps . . . down behind the bench while I transacted the business. Joe [Shannon] finally had to send his emissaries to see me when he wanted anything, because when I wanted something done I’d let Barr & Vrooman start a crap game and then introduce a long and technical order. Neither of them would have time to read it and over it would go. I got a lot of good legislation for Jackson Co. over while they shot craps.”

  Working under such conditions, Judge Truman’s headaches soon returned to worry Bess. She herself was affected by the turmoil. She began having what she called “spasms” or “fits” in the middle of the night, particularly after she had a bad dream. On July 14, 1927, she wrote to Harry, who was on reserve duty once more: “Your daughter and I are being extremely lazy while you are gone. It’s just what I need, I guess, because I’m surely feeling better. Haven’t had a spasm since Monday a.m. Had a terrible dream then and it brought on one of those nervous fits. Isn’t that silly?”

  With her resolute, willpower approach to life, Bess was trying to dismiss those attacks of nerves, and by and large, she succeeded. But this tight control of her emotions was sometimes experienced by other members of the family - in particular, her daughter - as harsh and uncaring. “Marg is so cross today,” she wrote in another July 1927 letter, when I was three and a half, “We’ve been continuously at war. No doubt you would lay it to a change in the weather. Personally I think it is the heat and original sin.”

  Right there is prefigured a pattern that would prevail for most of our family life together. My father unceasingly defended and - in Bess’ opinion - spoiled me. She always was ready to lay down the law, reinforced by the hairbrush if necessary.

  Sometimes in her determination to drive original sin out of my system, she was unintentionally cruel to me. She simply did not know when she hurt my feelings. In one of her 1927 letters, she penned a little vignette of how she dealt with me. “I was giving her the very dickens last night about bedtime as usual and she was sitting down here crying and crying and finally she burst forth with ‘When is my daddy coming?’ That settled all the discipline. I just had to howl. It was so ridiculous.”

  I’m sure I was amusing, from an adult point of view. But I was too young to understand why my mother was laughing at me.

  There is an interesting glimpse in these letters of the way Bess saw the difference between herself and her husband. She was far more inclined to be hard on people who deserved it. On his way to camp in a borrowed car, Harry had had a flat, which was obviously caused by the owner’s failure to repair a slow leak. He was furious and vowed he would cuss out the fellow when he got home. Bess agreed he “ought to hear about it. But you’ll calm down before you get home and he’ll never know anything about it.”

  Then she got a fiendish thought. “Maybe it would be a good idea to say nothing and let the same thing happen to him & hope for the worst. That’s a Christian spirit, eh?”

  Throughout this 1927 to
ur of reserve duty, Bess kept Harry in close touch with the political situation in Jackson County, sending him a stream of clippings from the Kansas City Star about the controversies swirling around the county court. The Republicans tried to torpedo Judge Truman’s road program by pushing a law through the legislature calling for a bipartisan commission to supervise the roads of each county. The Jackson County attorney called it unconstitutional, and Judge Truman went ahead with his plan to ask the voters to approve a $6.5 million bond issue for new roads. The Star reported this as the court’s “defi” to the legislature in one of Bess’ clippings that have survived the years.

  In another letter, she reported a visit from an important officer in the DAR (the Daughters of the American Revolution), who gushed over what a wonderful job Harry was doing. “I kept thinking about the marker she wants,” Bess wrote.

  She even kept an eye on his office. She reported that when she paid a visit, she found three of the staff sitting around having a bull session and the secretary cleaning her nails. “Why didn’t you give her a vacation too?” Bess asked. “You might as well have.”

  She let Harry know she missed him acutely. Her cousin Helen Wallace gave a dinner party in Kansas City, and Bess “kept unconsciously looking for you all evening.” She bemoaned a “bum Sunday” without him - and without a letter.

  It is easy to see how this tangle of emotion and pressure could produce nerves. Bess associated them with being overtired and tried to ration her energy as much as possible. When Eddie Jacobson offered to drive her to Fort Leavenworth and come back the same day, she declined. “A six hour drive would about finish me,” she wrote. “The one thing I try to avoid is getting absolutely tired out.”

  But there were some compensations for being Judge Truman’s wife. She told Harry one of them with unconcealed pleasure. She and her mother went shopping for furniture for the downstairs bedroom. Madge Wallace had decided to move to this room, where her parents had slept, because her sciatic hip was making it difficult for her to climb the stairs. The store manager gave Madge “quite a bit off,” Bess reported. “He laid great stress on the fact that he knew Mr. Tucker [the owner] would want to do it for you.”

  That little story emphasizes a new fact in the lives of the Trumans and the Wallaces; 219 North Delaware Street now belonged to Madge Gates Wallace. Her mother, Elizabeth Gates, had died in 1924, about six months after my birth. (It is one of my great regrets that no one had a picture taken of the four generations of Gates-Wallace-Truman women alive for that half year.) She left most of her estate, including the house, to her ailing son, Frank E. Gates, who lived in Colorado Springs. But his health was so frail he could not leave Colorado, so he sold the house to Madge for $10,000.

  Those who lived there, including Bess, constantly were aware that it was Madge’s house. She made many of the curtains by hand. She bought new furniture and disposed of old pieces she no longer wanted. In the late 1920s, she and her son Fred embarked on an ambitious redecorating program, using money Madge had inherited from Frank Gates, who died a year after their mother. Crystal lamps were installed in the living room and music room, and the chandelier in the living room went to the dump. The mirrors and wood shelving around the big fireplace were removed, and the library was repainted white with red trim, which in retrospect strikes me as ghastly.

  Until she decided to move downstairs, Madge Wallace occupied the big master bedroom in the front of the house. Bess and Harry slept in the same east bedroom Bess had occupied since she came to the house in 1904. After two years in a crib in my parents’ room, I moved to a bedroom of my own, which was connected to theirs by a passageway built onto the upstairs porch. My uncle Fred, Bess’ youngest brother, slept in a room down the hall from me. From my four-and five-year-old viewpoint, he was a cheerful bachelor, boyish for his age, who liked to romp around the house with me.

  Dinner always emphasized for me that we were living in Madge Wallace’s house. She and my father sat at opposite ends of the table. Whether she sat at the head and he at the foot or vice versa was anybody’s guess. I sat between my mother and grandmother, on her left, and Fred sat opposite us, on her right. The atmosphere was always formal. My manners were expected to be perfect, and so was everyone’s costume. I always put on a clean dress, as did Bess and Madge. Fred and my father wore suits and ties.

  The conversation always was subdued, even when Fred and my father discussed politics. No one ever raised his or her voice. Nor did Bess ever lose her temper with me, even when I did something as goofy as knocking over a water glass. Under no circumstances were Madge’s nerves to be agitated. Bess sometimes offered her opinion of a political problem or a politician (often one and the same), but on that subject Madge maintained a chilly silence.

  On Sundays, Mother and Dad and I drove out to the Truman farm in Grandview for a midday meal cooked by Mamma Truman. The atmosphere was totally different. The conversation was vivid and salty and full of belly laughs, as Mamma Truman passed judgment on everything from uppity neighbors to the Republicans in Washington. Bess had a wonderful time. She liked Mamma Truman immensely. They were really, behind their different exteriors, remarkably similar. They were both hard on people, but Bess, trained to be a lady, usually hesitated to say what she thought. Mamma Truman never hesitated.

  To please her husband, Bess also worked at being friendly with Mary Truman, her sister-in-law. That was a job, as even Harry was ready to admit. It was now clear that Aunt Mary was going to be an old maid. She was touchy about her failure to get a man, which lowered her in her own eyes and made her demand respect from everyone in the family in all sorts of petty ways. In a letter Bess wrote to Harry while he was on reserve duty in 1928, she apologized for not going to a picnic at the farm and added: “I’m afraid I missed Mary again.” The implication was clear - Mary would soon be complaining that Bess was ignoring her.

  To outside observers, life in the Wallace enclave seemed serene. Bess’ two older brothers and their wives still lived in their small houses beside the main house. Madge also bought these from Frank Gates and sold them to her sons for $1 “and other valuable considerations.” But inside the family, life was not so peaceful. Banker Frank Wallace was in constant turmoil over a quarrel that developed between the Platte City relatives (Aunt Maud’s husband and children) and Boulware Wallace (Aunt Myra’s husband) over the value of their shares in the Waggoner-Gates mill.

  Frank still spent a half hour with his mother every day when he came home from work. But George Wallace had a different attitude. Sharp-tongued and high-spirited, George seemed to resent his mother’s smothering presence. Although he could not break away from her, he seldom went near her, and when he did, the frequent result was a quarrel. He worked as an order clerk in a Kansas City lumber mill.

  But these were minor worries compared to the anxiety generated by Bess’ youngest brother, Fred. He was trained as an architect, but he did not seem able to make enough money at his profession to set up on his own. Even if he had been able to do so, I doubt if he could have left his mother. Mary Paxton, in a letter to Bess, remarked that it was wonderful that Fred and his mother were “pals.” But Fred’s life, as it developed over the next few decades, suggests that it might have been better for him if he had cut Madge’s silver cord.

  Born in 1900, Fred grew up with the century. Everyone liked him. He was charming, good-looking, and he loved a party. Of the three brothers, he was the one who developed the strongest physical resemblance to his father. (That fact alone may explain Bess’ nervous spasms in the night.) By his late twenties, Fred began showing ominous signs that he had inherited David Willock Wallace’s weakness for liquor. Friends carried Fred home completely ossified on more than one night. As she had done with her husband, Madge Wallace never said a word of reproach to her son. Instead, she often would sit up all night beside his bed and continue the vigil into the next day. It is not pleasant to think of the memories these episodes must have stirred in her mind - and in her daughter’s mind.
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br />   In her anxiety to help Fred, Bess made one of the few serious mistakes of her life. On May 8, 1928, Harry Truman’s forty-fourth birthday, the voters approved a $6.5-million bond issue to improve Jackson County’s roads and $500,000 for a county hospital. Bess persuaded her husband to put Fred on the county payroll as the architect in charge of the hospital. Fred’s drinking and general irresponsibility soon became a major source of strain in their marriage.

  Oblivious to these woes, I was growing into a perpetual-motion machine. On rainy days, I demanded and got permission to ride my bicycle around the house. On sunny ones, I zoomed up and down our driveway and around the corner to see my aunts and uncles next door. It took a while for Bess to notice how many of these visits coincided with dinner time and to discover that I was cadging ice cream and cookies, which enabled me to ignore vegetables and any other food I happened to dislike. Directives instantly were dispatched to Aunt Natalie and Aunt May that I was not to be fed anything within three hours of dinner.

  One day, I dug a marvelous canal through the backyard and filled it with water, which demolished some of my grandmother’s favorite flowers. I launched a fleet of boats made from walnut shells, each with a tiny individual sail, and played admiral for several hours before I was discovered. It is interesting that Madge Wallace, although she was upset, did not say a word to me. The complaint was made to Bess, who ordered me to fill up my miniature version of the Suez or else.

  As an ex-athlete, Bess welcomed an active daughter. But she should have been warned by a phenomenon she noticed when I was five: “I’ve been putting extremely few clothes on Marg and letting her out into the sunshine,” she told Dad, “but she just won’t tan. It’s so provoking.” It would take years for Mother to realize that I was not an outdoor type.