Love to all of you,
Bess
May 2, 1933
Naples
Andrew Steed
Calhoun College
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Dearest Andrew,
This is the first time I have been to Europe without you and your ever-present sketchbook. I miss your wicked habit of sketching the tourists looking at the sights as a way of avoiding the sights yourself. I still treasure your sketch of the fat German tourists staring with such visible lack of appreciation at the Mona Lisa. One wonders why those people bother to travel at all.
We are on our way back to Florence after a weekend in Sicily with Count Fabrini and his family. Our visit did more to illustrate to Eleanor what marriage to an Italian is like than anything I could have told her. They were charming and gracious to us, of course, but no American woman could help but be offended by the authoritarian manner in which an Italian man rules his family. I cannot imagine any woman who is used to having her opinions received with respect submitting by choice to such arbitrary authority. Fortunately neither can Eleanor and, to my great joy and delight, she said good-bye to Count Fabrini and left him in Sicily with his family—forever, I trust. She is traveling back to Florence with us. At the moment that is as far as she plans to go but once there, I hope I can persuade her to pack her things and return home.
Your spring vacation visit with the Wainwrights sounds most pleasant. They must be proud of Roger. I am very impressed to be personally acquainted with the new editor of the Harvard Crimson. I had always hoped you would try for a position on the Yale paper but verbal expression appears to hold little attraction for either of my children. Have you considered submitting any of your drawings to the paper? Political cartoonists are also held in high regard.
Sam will be disappointed you have decided against taking the job he offered you at the plant this summer. Having attended a trade school himself, he considers hard physical labor a necessary corollary of a college education and feels everything you learn in books should be balanced by direct application of your knowledge in some salaried position.
However, I can sympathize with your desire to enjoy to the fullest your last summer of leisure, and you have my permission to join the Wainwrights on the Cape. On one condition: I will expect you to meet our ship when it docks in New York on June 29. In fact, why don’t you invite Roger to be your guest for a weekend in Manhattan, beginning the day we arrive? It would be a gracious way to repay him and at the same time provide an attractive escort for Eleanor in the happy event she agrees to come home with me.
See if you can arrange theater tickets for Design for Living. I hear it is marvelous and I am always fascinated by unconventional living arrangements.
I look forward to our homecoming. One of the nicest things about traveling to Europe from Texas is coming back by way of New York.
Love,
Mummy
May 6, 1933
Cas’ Alta
Firenze, Italia
Dear Sam,
The more I see of Italian family life, the happier I am to have a husband like you waiting for me at home, one who treats his wife as an equal, not merely an accessory. How I look forward to sitting across from you at supper again, listening to you describe your new profit-sharing plan.
I have been very encouraged about the state of our economy by Walter Lippmann’s articles in The New York Herald Tribune, which I read every day. Even you will finally have to admit Roosevelt made a wise decision in taking the United States off the gold standard. However, I think you would be wise to put the wage increases you are proposing on a “contingency basis” until you are completely convinced that they can be justified by increased production.
The drive here through the green valleys of winter grass was beautiful. Mussolini is determined to end the importation of wheat and make Italy self-supporting, and judging from the amount of land under cultivation, I predict he will be successful. I worry about what will happen to the countries with wheat to sell when they lose Italy as a customer but that does not seem to concern anyone here.
I am living like a lady of leisure in Florence. The strenuous sight-seeing of the previous weeks has left me exhausted and unable to ignore any longer the recurring back pains that are the inevitable toll of cobblestone streets.
I have been greatly impressed with Eleanor’s Italian “mother” of the past year, Signora Manolo, and the manner in which she runs her household. No wonder Eleanor has been so happy here. There is only one servant, but she is a marvel, getting up before dawn to clean the house and do the marketing, preparing three-course luncheons and four-course dinners, with a change of plates for each course.
I just wish I could bring an Italian domestic home with me. I asked Signora Manolo about wages and was amazed to learn she pays her servant only two hundred lire a month. At the old exchange rate of twenty lire to the dollar, which Eleanor was getting when she arrived, this is only ten dollars a month, but even at the current rate of fifteen lire to the dollar, that is still quite a bargain compared to the cost of household help in our country.
However, I could not be persuaded to make my home in this country at any price. Even in a private residence like Signora Manolo’s, guests are required to show their passports to the police. Apparently there have been numerous attempts on Mussolini’s life (none of them reported in the Italian press, which is only interested in love triangles), and the police are constantly on the lookout for political dissidents. Private citizens are subjected to strict laws governing all aspects of their behavior. For example, it is against the law for an unmarried woman of any station to receive a gentleman caller in her bedroom. Police have the right to enter any home whenever they have the least suspicion any of these laws are being broken.
Eleanor has finally agreed with me that it is dangerous to continue living in a country where the government has the right to intrude so freely on the private life of its citizens, so we will be sailing home at the end of June. It is thrilling to see how much she has grown in the five years since our last trip together, both as a person and in her appreciation of all that Europe has to offer. I was overwhelmed with pride as we stood in the dimly lit Church of St. Carmine and she pointed out to me the first stomach muscles in Renaissance art (on Masaccio’s Adam).
She is very serious about continuing the study of art she began here and would like to take an apartment in New York in the fall. I cannot bear to think about losing her again so soon but at least we will have her in Dallas for the summer. It will be nice to be a family again—albeit briefly and without Andrew.
All my love,
Bess
June 15, 1934
New Haven
Dear Lydia and Manning,
Sam and I watched with great pride while Andrew received his diploma today. I just wish his father could have been here. When I think of the mark he made in the business world with only a Texas diploma, I rejoice at how many doors a Yale degree will open to his son. Andrew is still undecided about a career. All he knows for certain is that he will never set foot in another classroom, so graduate school of any kind is out of the question.
Eleanor met our train in New York and we spent several happy days there with her. Her apartment is tiny but she has made the most of the available space. She would rather be alone in a crowded apartment than share a spacious one and I heartily concur. Dwight Davis, who is now a successful decorator and much happier than he was as a stockbroker, generously provided advice and professional discounts, so the apartment is exquisitely furnished.
Eleanor insisted on cooking dinner for us one night. Her culinary skill is limited to one menu—steak and artichokes—but that is one more than I ever mastered, so I was quite impressed. After dinner she showed us a portfolio of her costume sketches—the result of her study this year at the Design Institute. I think she has real talent in this field and could compete on a professional level; however, she appears to have no
interest in a career.
She accompanied us to Yale for Andrew’s graduation, then traveled alone to Princeton for the commencement activities of her friend Henry Prince. I would love to have gone with her—I have seen neither Henry nor his father since we said good-bye in Italy almost six years ago—but Sam felt we belonged here with Andrew.
Eleanor has spent a great deal of time with the Prince boy since moving to New York last fall but insists they are simply good friends and says I must not expect anything further to develop from their relationship. I know she is only trying to prevent my future disappointment, but nothing will keep me from being heartbroken if they cannot find permanent joy in each other’s company.
The two of them are making plans to travel through Germany this summer—on foot where possible and by train everywhere else, no itinerary, only impulse to guide them. Under any other circumstances, I simply could not permit Eleanor to make a trip of this kind, but I have the highest regard for Henry Prince and I can only hope this will be the first of many adventures the two of them will share. Henry and his father are the kind of men who are at home anywhere in the world, and I could ask nothing better for my daughter.
Congratulations to Marian on all her academic honors. You must be very proud of her.
Love to all of you,
Bess
SEPTEMBER 9 1934
DALLAS TEXAS
MISS ELEANOR STEED
ROTHENBURG-OB-DER-TAUBER
DEUTSCHLAND
IN ANSWER TO YOUR CABLE YOU WERE BORN AT 4 35 P M
AUGUST 25 1913 ARE YOU BEING INTERROGATED AM
FRANTIC WITH WORRY IF YOU ARE IN TROUBLE GO TO
AMERICAN EMBASSY AT ONCE PLEASE ADVISE OF YOUR
SITUATION IMMEDIATELY
LOVE
MOTHER
September 21, 1934
Dallas
Miss Eleanor Steed
Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber
Deutschland
Darling,
I was so relieved to get your letter and to learn you needed the hour of your birth for astrological purposes only. However, I was stunned that, according to the stars, you have yet to meet the man you are going to marry. I thought you and Henry were having a wonderful summer. What has gone wrong?
I can understand his ambition to be a poet and it is a profession he can certainly afford. The examples of his work that you sent me are indeed impressive and I imagine he will find in England just the intellectual climate his work requires in order to grow and flourish. But why is he going to England alone? And what is keeping you in Germany?
I had hoped you would be coming home in time for the fall social season. The president of the Idlewild Club has called me several times to see if you are interested in making your debut. I have taken the liberty of assuring him that you are—anything less would seem insulting—though I did warn him it might not be this year.
You have acquired a rather glamorous reputation in absentia but it is time to reinforce it with your presence. People are admittedly intrigued at first by someone who stays away, but finally distance becomes an affront. However, someone who chooses to come home when there are clearly so many other choices available, is accorded a welcome unknown to those who never left.
It has been a joy to have Andrew living at home again. He has not had any luck finding a position equal to his education, but times are difficult and he was grateful to get a job with the gas company last week. Unfortunately the hours are not very compatible with his heavy social schedule, but any job that would allow him to sleep until noon would also require his presence after dark and of course that is out of the question—at least until after the holidays.
Please let me know your plans in detail. I am delighted you are acquiring such fluency in German. In spite of Annie’s patient efforts with all of us, it is a tongue I could never master. I am dazzled to think you will soon have four languages at your command. That is a greater fortune than anything you will inherit from me. However, what finally matters is what you are saying and not in which language you are saying it. At this moment I must confess I do not understand you in any language. But I love you in all of them.
Mother
November 23, 1934
Dallas
Mr. Richard Prince
Greenhill Estate
Atlanta, Georgia
Dearest Richard,
Today is my birthday and I feel my life is over at forty-four. The end came this morning with a birthday greeting from my daughter, now studying sculpture in Munich. She told me she and Henry made a vow in September when they parted—to renounce the limited pleasures of earthly love and consecrate their lives to art. In the same letter she told me you had remarried. My past and my future have been taken from me with one blow and without them my present has no meaning.
I long ago abandoned the hope that you and I could have a relationship within the boundaries of this country and the responsibilities to which our previous lives had already committed us but, until I was deprived of it this morning, I did not realize how much I cherished the illusion that our children would continue what we began. Without it, I am lonelier than I have ever been.
I know that you and your new wife are now on an extended Mediterranean cruise but since your Georgia address is the only one I have, I am sending my letter there in the hope that it will be forwarded to you abroad. I do not know your itinerary but I am sure you will be seeing your son in England. Please remind him that the greatest poets have been inspired to new heights of achievement by the love of a woman. Where would Dante have been without Beatrice?
Though it would have thrilled me to announce the marriage of my daughter to your son, I would be quite content at this point with a less permanent arrangement. I can understand how a poet might resist any relationship that threatened to disintegrate into domestic routine, but Henry and Eleanor share so many of the same elusive goals, it seems a pity they cannot pursue them in tandem if not united in marriage. Besides, as you and I both know, a union of souls is often more easily accomplished outside of marriage.
However, I trust this is not the case with you at present. Please accept my congratulations. I will try to take comfort in the knowledge that someone who traveled alone for so much of his life has at last found a partner to share his excursions. I suppose it is because I have been deprived of this experience that I seek it so desperately for my daughter.
Why do I suddenly seem so old at forty-four—and wise only by default? I know I will feel better in the morning, but how will I get through the night? (That is merely a rhetorical question. Unfortunately my nights are not your affair.)
Adieu,
Bess
April 18, 1935
aboard the North Star at
Helsinki
Andrew darling,
Eleanor was thrilled to learn of your engagement and will be coming home with me for the wedding.
This trip has made both of us realize how little we really know of the world. Eleanor met my ship at Southampton and we spent a week in London before embarking on the North Cape cruise. She was anxious to see Henry Prince again. They had corresponded faithfully all year, each encouraging the other’s single-minded pursuit of his chosen art form, but it came as quite a shock to Eleanor, who has studied sculpture with the solitary devotion of a nun, to find that Henry composes his poetry in the company of a young man who shares his flat.
Eleanor felt so betrayed as both an artist and a woman that when she returned to our hotel, she threatened to destroy the terra-cotta madonna she had made for my birthday. Fortunately I got to it in time and it is now packed safely away, out of reach of her anger. I treasure it all the more knowing she will never again work at her art with so pure a motive.
We left London in just the mood to appreciate the stark beauty of the Scandinavian countries and as we approach our final destination—Leningrad—I am intrigued at the thought of penetrating a culture so different from our own. Though I had a hard time convincing Eleanor to
come with me on this cruise, she is now very glad that she did. It seems the best way of getting her home to Texas is by way of a place she has never been.
As soon as we return I would like to give a party at the country club in honor of your engagement and Eleanor’s homecoming. You choose the date and book the orchestra but do not extend any invitations until I have approved the guest list.
Love,
Mother
JUNE 5 1935
ABOARD QUEEN MARY
MR ALBERT HENDERSON
PRESIDENT
IDLEWILD CLUB
ADOLPHUS HOTEL
DALLAS TEXAS
ELEANOR JUST GAVE VERBAL CONSENT FOR FALL DEBUT
HOPE YOU ARE STILL FREE TO ESCORT HER
BESS STEED GARNER
October 5, 1935
Dallas
Dearest Lydia and Manning,
After so many quiet years when the children were away at school, our house has come alive again. Sam complains constantly of the noise but I cherish every sound—even the victrola music coming from the third floor at three o’clock in the morning.
From the beginning that floor has belonged to the children. Now all the furniture has been cleared from the large center area that was once a playroom to make room for dancing. Eleanor has claimed the two rooms to the left for her bedroom and studio and Andrew calls the two adjoining rooms on the other side his suite.
Last Saturday night they brought several members of the band home with them from a party and danced till dawn. When Sam and I awoke Sunday morning, we had twenty unexpected guests for breakfast. Fortunately my housekeeper is as happy as I am to have the children home so she was undaunted by the size of the crowd. She didn’t even mind missing church. She said she could praise God just as well making pancakes as she could standing in a pew.
A Woman of Independent Means Page 22