Bess Truman (15 page)

Throughout this 1927 tour 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.

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.

It was around this time that Bess started calling me “Marg” with a hard “g” while my father preferred “Margie.” While repeating my disclaimer to be a psychologist, I can only say that Marg still resounds in my ears with orders, impatience, and discipline in it. The other name has none of those things. By five, I was a total Daddy’s girl. One night, while out for a ride to Blue Springs for a soda, everyone started improvising lyrics for songs. Harry Truman had been away on reserve duty for nine or ten days. I piped up with a one-line lament: “I saw my Daddy - once he was here.” Bess and everyone else thought it was hilarious.

In 1930, the year I began school, I gave Mother a scare that she converted into a lifetime worry. A strange man appeared at school one day and told my first-grade teacher he was calling for “Mary Truman, Judge Truman’s daughter.” I was registered under my full name, Mary Margaret Truman, but no one, including my teacher, ever used the first name. She decided to call my father. By the time he arrived with the sheriff, the teacher had also called Mother, who rushed to school fearing the worst. In the meantime, the man had vanished. He was later identified as a political foe who wanted to give Judge Truman a scare. The episode wreaked havoc on Mother’s nerves. Thereafter, she never let me go to school alone, a rule she enforced until I was well into my teens. When it came to worrying, Mother was in a class by herself.

Meanwhile, Judge Truman was pushing ahead with his road program. It was still a struggle. He had to deal with the hatred of the city manager of Kansas City, Henry McElroy, whose bond issue had been defeated at the polls, and the jealousy and greed of numerous crooked contractors from Kansas City, who had bet on McElroy and now wanted to get a piece of the action from Truman. Nevertheless, Judge Truman was on his way to becoming one of the better-known politicians in Missouri. He was president of The National Old Trails Association, and he was rising steadily in the Masonic Order to the post he was soon to hold, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri. Even the normally critical Kansas City
Star
called his administration “extraordinarily efficient.”

Behind the scenes, Bess continued to worry about Harry’s health. The tensions of his job still gave him terrific headaches, and her letters to him make many anxious references to them. In 1928, when he was again on reserve duty at Fort Riley, she asked: “How did your physical examination turn out? Don’t hold anything back!” In 1929, Harry was taking some medicine for his headaches and frazzled nerves. By now, Bess had perceived that these reserve tours really were much-needed escapes from the political pressure cooker in which he worked. “I was awfully glad to hear your nerves were getting back to normal,” she wrote. “Are you still taking your tonic or have you passed the point of needing it? I expect the life you are leading is a better tonic than that green bottle.”

Although she still signed her letters “lots of love,” they now began with “Dear Harry” or occasionally “Dear Dad.” She wrote straight from the shoulder, the way she talked. “You needn’t get so upstage about our coming out [to Fort Riley]. I’d surely like to - but I’ll take that money [the train fare] and have our daughter’s tonsils out.”

That last remark would seem to give us a glimpse of Harry Truman’s honesty. He had just spent $7 million in public money, and his wife had to scrimp (the train tickets cost $15) to have a much-needed operation for his daughter. But that is not the whole story. Partly because of her mother’s extravagance, partly because it came naturally to her, Bess was a fierce penny pincher. Her letters in 1929, when she was forty-four, report her doing such money-saving chores as painting the back porch and the front stairs and making a dress for me.

Bess continued to stay in close touch with all aspects of her husband’s political career. A stream of clippings from the
Star
went to him when he was away. She smoothly fielded phone calls urging him to attend political funerals or see an importunate jobseeker. In 1929, she calmed Harry’s agitation over a threatened investigation of the county farm, about which the Kansas City
Star
had made noises. Bess went straight to the newspaperman who could have done them real damage if he took it seriously, her sister-in-law’s father, Colonel Southern, the editor of the
Examiner.
Southern assured her he had no intention of pursuing the story. Bess told Harry this good news: “I’m glad you’re not here to be bothered with it and don’t let it worry you. There hasn’t been another word in the paper and the
Star
has probably realized the foolishness of publishing the story.”