by Rebecca Dean
From the moment Bessie Wallis and Pamela walked into the classroom together, it was clear that Pamela was going to be Bessie Wallis’s best friend and that no one else stood a chance.
The boys in the class were uncaring, but the girls were furious. “How come Bessiewallis always gets just whatever it is she wants?” Mabel had demanded at lunchtime as the rest of the disappointed clustered around her. “And where has Bessiewallis taken Pamela? Where have they gone?”
“They’ve gone to take a peek at the rabbit.” Edith Miller sounded crushed. No one blamed her. Edith’s daddy was a member of the state legislature and if anyone should have been showing Pamela the school’s pet rabbit, it was Edith.
“I vote we never speak to Bessie Wallis ever again,” Violet Dix said maliciously. “It isn’t as if she should even be at Miss O’Donnell’s. Not when she ain’t even got a daddy to pay the fees.”
There was a shuffling of feet, and then Edith put into words what most of them were feeling. “It isn’t Bessie Wallis’s fault her daddy is dead, and Bessie Wallis is fun. I don’t want to stop speaking to her.”
“An’ if we stop speakin’ to her,” someone else interjected, “she’ll make sure Pamela never speaks to us and then we’ll never get invited to a duke’s house for tea.”
This was something none of them had thought of, and, even for Mabel, it settled the matter. Mad as they were at Bessie Wallis for cheating them all of the chance of becoming Pamela’s best friend, none of them was going to run the risk of being ostracized by the only duke’s daughter they were ever likely to meet. Also, as Edith had pointed out, Bessie Wallis, with her Indian feather in the back of her hair and her peppy way of talking—she’d once told Miss O’Donnell that arithmetic brought her out in hives—was good fun. Not speaking to her anymore would be just too boring for words.
If Miss O’Donnell’s pupils were hopeful that a duke would have conjured up a castle in which to live, they were disappointed. Pamela’s home was, however, in the very best part of Baltimore. An Italianate mansion set in vast grounds, if Rosemont wasn’t a castle, it was certainly near to being a palace—a palace that Wallis was soon able to regard as her second home.
She was nine when she realized she and Pamela could well find themselves being separated. Miss O’Donnell’s school only took children up to the age of ten, and when she left Miss O’Donnell’s she was to go to Arundell, a Baltimore school with a prestigious reputation.
“Or she will be if Sol comes up with the fees,” she’d once heard her mother say to Aunt Bessie.
It was a doubt that filled her with apprehension—but not nearly as much apprehension as when Pamela said, “Won’t it be swell when we go to Bryn Mawr next year?” It was the summer of 1905 and they were on Rosemont’s terrace playing jacks.
“Bryn Mawr?”
As Pamela scooped up four jacks, Bessie Wallis stared at her.
“Of course.” Pamela missed catching the ball. “What other school is there to go to?”
Bessie Wallis picked up the ball, but she didn’t continue with the game. There were three other schools in Baltimore—one of them being Arundell. And though Arundell was prestigious, it wasn’t as prestigious as Bryn Mawr. No school in Baltimore was. Her nails dug deep into the ball. If there was doubt about Uncle Sol coming up with Arundell’s fees, there wasn’t even a chance of his coming up with Bryn Mawr’s fees.
Her chest felt painfully tight. How would she and Pamela be able to continue as best friends if they began going to different schools? And what if Mabel and Violet—or anyone else in their class—went to Bryn Mawr? How would that make her look? She knew what the answer was. She would look poor.
“Well, we are poor, Bessie Wallis.” Her mother was always cheerful and laughing, and even though she was now being frank about this very painful truth, she didn’t sound glum or resentful. “Your Grandma Warfield didn’t at all like me marrying your daddy, and the minute he did so, she cut him off without a penny. As for the Montagues—it’s a long time since any of them have lived in the style they once took for granted.” Laughter crept back into her voice. “I guess Montagues have just been too carefree to keep hold of their money, Bessie Wallis.”
That her happy-go-lucky mother was every inch a Montague was something Bessie Wallis had long realized. She had also come to realize that she and her mother were funded almost entirely by Uncle Sol and that Uncle Sol increased or decreased their allowance in proportion to how nice—or how not nice—her mother was being toward him.
The knowledge gave her a nasty shivery feeling down her spine. How nice would her mother have to be to Uncle Sol before he agreed to pay Bryn Mawr’s colossal fees? The answer made her feel a little sick, and she knew, right then and there, that she wasn’t going to mention Bryn Mawr to her mother. No matter what the cost to her friendship with Pamela, she was going to settle for the school Uncle Sol had already half agreed she should go to. She was going to settle for Arundell.
“Arundell?” Pamela stared at her mystified. “But why?”
They were in their own private part of the playground, and as no one else could overhear and as they didn’t have any secrets from each other, Bessie Wallis told her.
Pamela gave her the same knowing look she had given her when they’d first met and Bessie Wallis had lied about why she was sitting outside the classroom door.
“I don’t think you’re being very bright about your Uncle Sol, Bessie Wallis.”
They were sitting on the warm ground and Pamela hugged her knees with her arms.
“I think he’s in love with your mother.” There was unnerving certainty in her voice. “I think that’s why he increases his allowance to her when she’s nice to him and cuts it short when she isn’t.”
The shivery feeling Bessie Wallis was beginning to get used to ran down her spine again. She wanted to tell Pamela she was wrong; that as Uncle Sol was her uncle, how could he possibly be in love with her mother? She thought about the scene she had witnessed between her mother and Uncle Sol just before she and her mother had left East Preston Street. She remembered Uncle Sol’s angry desperate voice and the sound of her mother crying, and she knew one thing for sure. Even if Uncle Sol was in love with her mother, her mother most definitely wasn’t in love with Uncle Sol.
The subject was so unpleasant she didn’t want to discuss it anymore, not even with Pamela. She jumped to her feet. “Miss O’Donnell will be ringing her handbell in a minute.”
“Let her.” Though uncaring of Miss O’Donnell and her handbell, Pamela reluctantly rose to her feet. “At least that’s one thing we won’t have at Arundell.” She tucked her hand in the crook of Bessie Wallis’s arm. “High schools have whistles, not handbells.”
“But you’ll be at Bryn Mawr.”
“No, I won’t. If you aren’t going to Bryn Mawr, then I’m not going. Don’t tell Mabel or Violet, though. We don’t want them changing from Bryn Mawr to Arundell.” Amusement fizzed in her voice. “Wouldn’t you love to see their faces when they get to Bryn Mawr and find that I’m not there!”
The thought was so delicious Bessie Wallis giggled along with her all the way back into their classroom.
Her happiness that she and Pamela would be going to Arundell together lasted for the rest of the afternoon and until she was back at West Chase Street in time for tea. She had been looking forward to telling her mother and Aunt Bessie that Pamela had chosen Arundell over Bryn Mawr—and why she had done so—but the minute she stepped into the house, she knew something was wrong, and the words died on her lips.
Her Aunt Bessie, like all Montagues, possessed a sunny disposition. Bessie Wallis had never known her aunt to be anything but equable and buoyantly good-humored.
She wasn’t good-humored now. As she faced Bessie Wallis’s mother across the dining room table, there were angry spots of color in her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Alice,” she was saying as Bessie Wallis walked in on them—and not sounding sorry at all—“but a widow with a nine-year-old daugh
ter has no call to be going out on an evening with unsuitable men. You’re going to get yourself a reputation you won’t ever be able to lose.”
“What would you like me to do, Bessie?” There was color in her mother’s cheeks, too, but in her mother’s case the color only made her look even prettier. “Wear black and sit in a rocking chair all day like my mother-in-law?”
“I’d like you to think about Bessie Wallis.” Her aunt looked toward her. “Go to your room, Bessie Wallis, dear. This isn’t a conversation you should be listening to.”
“No!” Alice sprang to her feet. “You stay just where you are, Bessie Wallis. Your aunt has brought you into this silly row, and so you just tell her that you don’t mind at all if I go out and have a little fun.”
In rising alarm Bessie Wallis looked from her mother to her aunt, and then back to her mother again. It was quite true that she didn’t mind her mother going out and enjoying herself, but she didn’t like it when her mother went out with gentlemen friends. Her doing so was the reason Grandma Warfield referred to her mother as being “flighty”—a word that thanks to Pamela, she now knew the meaning of.
To admit in front of Aunt Bessie that her mother’s flightiness made her feel uncomfortable would be to let her mother down, but neither did she want to fib. Her cheeks flushed scarlet and, aware of her hideous dilemma, her aunt said with swift kindness, “Of course Bessie Wallis doesn’t mind you going out and having a little fun, Alice. Nor do I. But while you are living under my roof, I draw the line at your having a succession of disreputable suitors cluttering up my front porch.”
The row was on again with a vengeance, but at least Bessie Wallis was now no longer a part of it.
The last thing she heard as she escaped from the room was her mother snapping defiantly, “Then there’s only one answer to that, Bessie!”
Sick with apprehension, Bessie Wallis ran up to the bedroom she shared with her mother, slammed the door behind her, and, sitting cross-legged on the bed, put her hands over her ears.
Minutes later her mother raced up the stairs and flung the door open. “We’re leaving!” she announced, dragging a portmanteau from the bottom of their closet. “I don’t have to be spoken to by my elder sister as if she’s my mother!”
She began opening drawers, scooping up their contents and tossing them into the portmanteau.
“But where will we go, Mama? Where will we live? Are we going back to Preston Street? Are we going to live with Grandma Warfield again?”
“No, we are not!” Her mother slammed half a dozen pretty frocks into the portmanteau. “We’re going to go to … we’re going to go to …” She snatched up a pile of undergarments, and Bessie Wallis knew that her mother still hadn’t thought of where they would go.
“We’re going to go to the Preston Apartment House,” her mother said suddenly, with a triumphant flourish. “It is where me and your dear-departed daddy once lived, and it will suit the two of us just fine, Bessie Wallis.”
In her haste she had dropped a lace-trimmed chemise and a whalebone corset. Bessie Wallis picked them up, her anxiety deepening. “But won’t it cost an awful lot of money to live in an apartment house? And we don’t have an awful lot of money. We only have Uncle Sol’s allowance.”
Her mother scooped a silver-backed hairbrush and hand mirror from the dressing table and packed them on top of their underclothes.
“Uncle Sol is just going to have to increase our allowance, Bessie Wallis.” Bessie Wallis’s tummy turned a hideous somersault. It was so her mother wouldn’t have to do such a thing that she hadn’t asked if she could go to Bryn Mawr.
Her mother squashed down the lid of the portmanteau and fastened the buckles on its leather straps. “Stop looking as if it’s the end of the world,” she said spiritedly, as if their leaving Chase Street were an adventure, “and let’s be on our way.”
In a sea of misery, Bessie Wallis followed her out of the room and down the stairs.
Aunt Bessie was waiting for them in the hall, her face anguished. “I wish you’d start acting like a grown woman and not a child, Alice,” she said, stopping her in her tracks. “Where are you going to go? Mrs. Warfield won’t give you a home again. She’s too afraid Sol will ask you to marry him.”
Alice gave an indignant toss of her head. “Then she’s worrying over nothing, because he already has and I’ve already refused him.” She switched the heavy portmanteau from one hand to the other. “And let me remind you that it’s your fault Bessie Wallis and me are leavin’. It was you who gave the ultimatum—and don’t you worry about how we’re goin’ to manage, because we’re goin’ to manage just fine!” And with that she opened the door and marched down the front steps, the portmanteau banging against her legs.
Her aunt gave Bessie Wallis a tight hug. “Be a good girl for your mama and make sure she brings you to see me often—and that she takes you to your Grandma Warfield’s often as well.”
“I will, Aunt Bessie. I promise.” She was having to try very hard not to cry and knew that her aunt was fighting the same battle.
“Run along now after your mother, and remember that I love you and that whatever happens I’ll always be here for you.”
The words took the edge off Bessie Wallis’s panic. If she was still going to see her aunt and her grandmother regularly, living at the Preston Apartment House might not be as bad as she’d feared.
Her aunt gave her a last good-bye kiss and lost the battle she had been fighting. Tears filled her eyes and streamed down her homely face. Bessie Wallis didn’t mind. The tears meant her aunt loved her and, in a world that was becoming increasingly precarious, Aunt Bessie’s love represented stability. Stability she was very much in need of.
“So what is it like, living in rented rooms?” Pamela asked, deeply interested.
“It’s a lot different than living at Rosemont.”
It was a typical blunt sassy Bessie Wallis answer, and Pamela grinned. “Come on, Wally. Because my father’s too snobbish to allow me to visit an apartment house, I can’t tell for myself, so spill the beans.”
They were lying on the grass at the side of Rosemont’s tennis court.
Bessie Wallis rolled over onto her back. Once it had become known that her address had changed from West Chase Street to the far less salubrious Preston Apartment House, all her classmates had been told by their parents that it was beneath them to visit her there. Some of them had even told her they were no longer able to invite her to their homes. That she was suffering this humiliation at the hands of families who didn’t have an iota of her own family pedigree enraged her, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. All she could be grateful for was that she hadn’t been barred from visiting Rosemont.
“It’s not half as bad as I thought it was going to be,” she said now, in answer to Pamela’s question. “Everyone else in the apartment block is very friendly. Most of them go to local restaurants to eat, and so Mama has thought up a way of earning pin money. She’s going to throw dinner parties for them, which they will pay to attend. Mama will do the cooking, and I’ll help her.”
Pamela shot into a sitting position. “You’re going to cook?”
“I may not actually cook, but I’ll certainly bake. I can already make a pecan pie and a Lady Baltimore cake.”
“What on earth is a Lady Baltimore cake?”
“It’s a cake filled with raisins, figs, candied cherries, and chopped pecans and frosted with meringue.”
Pamela’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “It sounds scrumptious. Could you show me how to make one?”
Bessie Wallis raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever been inside a kitchen, Pamela?”
“No, never.”
The admission had them giggling so hard, their tummies hurt.
One thing Bessie Wallis didn’t talk to Pamela about was her mother’s partying. Without Aunt Bessie to keep a check on the number of evenings she spent with gentlemen friends, her mother’s partying had increased dramatically.
“Now you just go to sleep and have pleasant dreams until I come back,” she would say lovingly, tucking Bessie Wallis up in the big feather bed the two of them shared.
Her mother would always be wearing a very pretty dress. Sometimes it would be silk that shimmered in the lamplit room; sometimes taffeta would rustle. Always her mother’s golden hair would be swept up high, and, instead of tortoiseshell combs, a glittering barrette would be holding her waves and curls in place.
When she kissed Bessie Wallis good night, there would be a touch of rouge on her lips, and when she left the room after snuffing out the lamp, the scent of violets would leave the room with her.
Then would come hours Bessie Wallis hated, for she never could do as she’d been asked and go to sleep and have nice dreams. Instead she would lie awake in the darkness, overcome by the fear that her mother might never come back; that she might disappear from her life just as the father she had never known had disappeared and just as the lifestyle she had once known at her grandmother’s and then at Aunt Bessie’s had disappeared; for if there was one thing Bessie Wallis knew for certain, it was that nothing could be guaranteed to last forever.
On her tenth birthday, something happened that had never happened before. Her Uncle Sol asked to have a private meeting with her at 34 East Preston Street.
Though she couldn’t be certain, Bessie Wallis thought she knew the reason. West Chase Street, where they had lived with Aunt Bessie, was a distance from 34 East Preston Street, but the Preston Apartments were only a few blocks away, and Uncle Sol couldn’t help but see her mother’s gentlemen friends coming to call. His reaction had been to drastically reduce her allowance.
In order to overcome this blow, her mother had increased the number of dinner parties she gave for paying guests, and she and Bessie Wallis now spent backbreakingly long hours in the kitchen, slaving over the stove. If word of their doing so had gotten back to 34 East Preston Street, it would be the reason Uncle Sol wanted to meet with her—and he would be doing so to demand she cease letting his family name down by working like a servant in a kitchen.