A Woman of Independent Means (31 page)

All my love,
Bess

August 5, 1921
St. Louis

Dear Lydia and Manning,

We are between trains here and the memory of my last stop at this station is so overwhelming I am taking refuge in a letter to you, hoping the lively events of the last few days will displace the dark thoughts that fill my mind.

Arthur and Totsie are still talking about the scene which greeted them on their return to the farm a day ahead of schedule. I am not sure who was the more shocked: Dwight to see Totsie with her new husband or Totsie to see Dwight so happy in the company of their son.

It was nice of Dwight to drive us to the train, though Totsie was quite undone at having to tell him good-bye face to face. And the baby cried loudly at having to leave behind someone he had just learned to love. When they married, Arthur told Totsie he would like to replace Dwight as the baby's adopted father and give him his name. Neither expected Dwight to offer any objection since he had been vehemently opposed to the idea of adoption in the first place and only consented to please Totsie. But when Arthur broached the subject to him on the day of our departure, Dwight was adamant in his refusal to discuss the matter. Totsie, however, has discussed little else this entire trip. She is distraught that the child will have one father in name and another in fact.

Arthur assures her that he is equally upset, but I have observed signs of barely concealed relief at the thought that another man is willing to share the responsibilities of fatherhood. Why do women make the mistake of exacting such total commitment from the men they marry? I have a feeling fatherhood is only one of many responsibilities most men would be glad to share. Marriage places such an unfair burden on the husband and I am only one of many young widows paying the price.

Thank you again for all you have done to make the pain of the last few weeks easier to bear. The children are still safe in the cocoon of fantasy you spun for them each night out of fables and fairy tales and I pray they will not break through the sheltering walls of their imaginary world until their wings are strong enough to hold them aloft. Would that we all could soar forever out of reach of the earth—beyond dangers waiting to destroy us the moment we alight.

Even though this trip revives unhappy memories, the train is a form of escape for me. I dread our arrival and the relentless ritual of daily life that awaits me.

Much love,
Bess

August 20, 1921
Dallas

Dear Papa and Mavis,

I know you must be glad to be home again, cultivating your own garden, so to speak. It was generous of you to spend so much of the summer here, first with me and then again with the children when we returned from Vermont. Your cheerful presence sustained us in a way words cannot describe.

Ever since our return my friend Sam Garner has devoted himself to the children and their welfare. I chide him about spending so much time with us when I am in no position to make promises concerning my future, but he merely smiles and says he always does business by extending credit freely. The more I ponder this remark, the more unsettling it becomes.

However, Drew and Eleanor openly adore him. From the day we returned home he set about to win their friendship and within the week his efforts were completely successful. Children give their hearts so easily. Little more than a smile and they are yours forever—or at least until your attention lags. But as long as they have your total attention, you have their total devotion.

Sam has just bought a new rowboat and every Sunday we drive to a different lake, with the rowboat bouncing along behind us on a trailer. While Sam takes the children out on the lake, I read under a shady tree. I pay with endless teasing for my preference for shade and solitude, and I am beginning to feel more alone in their combined company than I do at home in my room. I know it is stupid of me but there are times when I feel the three of them are the family and I am the stranger in town.

Forgive me for letting my feelings show so shamelessly, but though I am seldom alone, there is no one in my life now with whom I can share my deepest thoughts. My friend Arthur Fineman and I used to prolong the dinners we shared for hours, discussing each new face and idea we had encountered since the last time we met. Now that he and Totsie are married, we still see each other frequently but the conversation seems to center on furnishing a house and hiring a staff, topics which none of us considered of even passing interest when we each had a separate and special friendship. And the intimacy which Totsie and I have shared since college suddenly seems nothing more than an ordinary friendship between two middle-class matrons now that we are neighbors.

I do not know what is causing this storm of unrest within my soul, but it is much worse than the sorrow that consumed me when Robin died. With death comes an awareness of life so intense that for a brief moment the world is radiant and beautiful to behold. But how quickly we slip back into our old ways and allow it to become drab and ordinary again. I grieve for my lost child now in a way that would have been abhorrent to me in the days immediately following his death when the world spoke to me in a thousand tongues and everywhere I turned I saw evidence that life had meaning. I grieve for Robin, but even more I grieve for the vision I could not keep.

I do not mean to hurt either of you by saying this, but how I wish my mother were alive.

November 1, 1921
Dallas

Dear Lydia and Manning,

It is All Soul's Day and I feel closer to the dead than I do to the living. I am amazed, though of course grateful, at the unquestioning way the children have accepted the death of their brother. The only time Eleanor has cried since she came home was the night before she was to go back to school. I took her in my arms to comfort her and she confessed, “Everybody's going to ask about Robin and I'm going to be so embarrassed.”

They have survived the loss of their father and now their brother with an equanimity that finally challenges my own existence. Until now my purpose in life has been provided by the needs of other people but I am beginning to realize none of us is really necessary to anyone else. There is always someone to replace us. In a sense I rejoice at the new freedom afforded by this discovery. But I also grow more detached each day from everything and everyone around me.

However, the more alone and apart I feel, the more objectively I witness the curious interdependence that seems to connect everyone else. For instance, my friend Sam Garner. It was his sympathy for my loss that involved him so deeply in my life this summer, but it is his own loneliness that keeps him there. He is as devoted to the children as if they were his own, and they have taken the place in his life of the children his own wife refused to give him, choosing instead the rewards of a career. The topic of professional women is one of the few that threatens his usually cheerful disposition, in spite of the fact that we were introduced by Grace Townsend, who is a respected orthopedic surgeon.

Sam stops by the house nearly every afternoon on his way home from work. The children are always delighted to see him and beg him to stay for dinner and when I add my insistence, he usually does. Last weekend, Drew was staying overnight with a friend and I had retired to my room with a headache when Sam arrived. Eleanor was about to sit down alone to a light supper of soup and sandwiches when to her delight he invited her to dine with him at a restaurant. She quickly put on her best dress and off the two of them went. She had cherries jubilee for the first time in her life and pronounced the whole experience unforgettable.

Sam is an expert photographer and the first person I know to buy a motion picture camera for home use. He follows the children around trying for candid footage, and now they begin clowning whenever they see him, while I sit watching their antics with an eye as cold as the camera.

Sam is going to Philadelphia for Christmas to sign the papers that will make his divorce final. I suspect he will ask me to marry him when he returns, and I am afraid the children will not allow me to refuse. When does a woman cease to be the hostage of her family?

Love,
Bess

December 17, 1921
Honey Grove, Texas

Dear Sam,

My father has been in ill health so we are spending Christmas here with him and his wife. We put a huge Christmas tree up in the hallway yesterday and your lovely packages were the first to go under it. It was kind of you to remember us. I thought you might forget your new friends in Texas once you rejoined your old ones in Pennsylvania. Returning home can make all the time spent in another place seem like a dream. I have been sleeping in the bedroom where I spent my childhood, and this morning I awoke thinking I still had my whole life ahead of me. What a shock to confront my two children at breakfast and realize how much of my future had already been committed.

I am glad you have no regrets about ending your marriage and hope you will enjoy all the freedom your new status affords. You are in a position now to restructure your whole life according to your own desires, with no obligation to accommodate your decisions to anyone else's needs. You must make the most of this opportunity and not assume any unnecessary burdens at this point in your life.

The events of last summer left me more emotionally exhausted than I realized, and I am finding the unhurried tempo of life in a small town very soothing. I play bridge once a week with girlhood friends grown old. It is ironic that the less they have experienced the older they look. And yet I am also amazed to realize that people who have never left Honey Grove can be more content with their lot than I am. My father and his wife belong to a bridge club, many of whose members graduated from high school with me, but they enjoy each other's company as if they were contemporaries. Perhaps that is why my father had no qualms about marrying a woman younger than his daughter. In a small town there are only children and adults. Once you finish school, you're as old as everyone else.