A Woman of Independent Means (37 page)

Sam and I hope to see you some day soon. We usually go for a drive on the weekend. Sam brings home a bushel basket of farm produce, and I return with the title to a new piece of property. All the young people growing up on the farms and in the little towns around Dallas are eager to sell the land they have inherited and move to the city. Why can't they see that the city is moving to meet them and the way to make their fortune is to stay where they are? Fortunately I can.

We look forward to paying you a visit soon.

Love,
Bess

June 23, 1928
aboard the
Aquitania

Dearest Sam,

The steward says this has been the worst June crossing in his memory, so I cannot in all honesty say I wish you were here.

Eleanor and I have not left our stateroom since we sailed and have subsisted on chicken sandwiches and hothouse grapes brought to us in bed by our delightful steward. He is our only link with the outside world and with our trays brings us rollicking stories about other crossings. I wish he could accompany us on the rest of our travels.

We have not seen much of Andrew since he joined forces with his Choate friends. I deliberately booked passage on the same ship with his school tour but I did not expect to lose his company completely. Fortunately the stormy crossing does not seem to have affected his stomach at all, and he has not missed a meal. He described the first night's dinner to us in graphic detail—beginning with shark fin's soup, which I suspect he ordered for the name rather than the taste—but Eleanor and I proved so unresponsive to his rapturous account that we have not heard a word from him since.

Our leavetaking was very gala. I wish you could have come as far as New York with us but I am holding you to your tentative promise of a Paris rendezvous. You must get over the idea that you will be helpless in a country whose language you cannot speak. We are always at the mercy of strangers when we travel—even in our own country. In Europe we are just a little more so.

My friend Dwight Davis drove us (with our ten pieces of luggage following in a taxi) to the Cunard Pier at the foot of 14th Street where the
Aquitania
was waiting in all her majestic splendor, so there was at least one friendly face in the crowd that waved us good-bye. Your sweet telegram was waiting in the stateroom. You are indeed a man of few words, my dearest, but the words you choose I cherish. I have your orchid pinned to my bed pillow. I trust it—and I—will look well enough to attend the dance the captain is giving tomorrow night.

All my love,
Bess

June 25, 1928
aboard the
Aquitania

Dear Lydia,

Thank you again for the lovely guidebooks you gave us as a going-away present. I had an opportunity to enjoy them sooner than I expected, since a stormy crossing has sharply curtailed all physical activity. I spent the first two days in my stateroom getting my sea legs (and losing my stomach).

Yesterday I was determined to get dressed. The sun appeared for the first time and so did I. It was very pleasant on deck, and I claimed a deck chair next to a most attractive man from Atlanta, Georgia, who is traveling with his son. His name is Richard Prince and he recently retired as president of a large manufacturing company. He lives on a 500-acre estate outside the city and, in addition to a Rolls Royce, owns a private yacht. The more we talked, the more we discovered how much we had in common, including marriage partners who dislike traveling abroad.

He invited me to join him at the captain's table for dinner. I wore my new silver lamé evening dress with my orchid from Sam pinned to my shoulder. Judging from the response I received when I sat down to dinner, I would say the effect was quite stunning. Throwing discretion to the winds, I indulged freely in the lavish lobster dinner that was set before us.

Then the dance began and in two hours I made up for the two days I had spent in seclusion in my stateroom. There are a great many charming men aboard and I danced with all of them last night. It was not until midnight that I had cause to regret the lobster. I said a precipitant good-night to my partner and left the dance floor as the waltz ended. Fortunately I reached the deck in time to return my lobster to its natural habitat before retiring to my stateroom for the evening.

I felt fine again this morning and persuaded Eleanor to leave the safety of her bed and venture outside with me. She made it as far as a deck chair before her legs gave way, but felt better after a little bouillon. Richard Prince brought his son over to be introduced. He is a splendid-looking young man, over six feet tall already and only sixteen years old. He invited Eleanor to play a game of deck tennis but unfortunately she was not feeling well enough to accept. She said the sea air was making her sleepy so we left her alone to nap. Richard and I strolled the deck and when we finally returned to our deck chairs he showed me by the pedometer strapped to his leg that we had walked over a mile. I am not used to that much exercise, which is probably the reason I have felt so breathless all afternoon.

Must stop now and get ready for dinner. My orchid has faded but I have just begun to bloom.

Much love,
Bess

July 10, 1928
London

Dear Lydia,

After two weeks of motoring through the English countryside, we were as excited as provincials at our first sight of the capital.

We were greeted at our hotel by very welcome letters from you and Sam and messages from shipboard friends who arrived ahead of us—including one from Richard Prince inviting me to dine with him at the Savoy Grill. He is a delightful dinner partner who spends several weeks a year in London and knows everything that is happening here. But since I became a regular subscriber to
The London Times
several years ago, so do I. I was fascinated by his appraisal of the current political situation and he was visibly astonished at my knowledge of the events that had precipitated it.

After dinner we walked along the lighted banks of the Thames watching the boats (in England even the barges move with a kind of majesty). We soon discovered we shared another passion: the theater. He plotted my theater schedule for the rest of the week and even arranged to book all my tickets.

The next night the two of us attended an intriguing mystery play called
Alibi
, and I was introduced to the remarkable acting of Charles Laughton. Only an Englishman could give such a delightfully wicked portrayal of a French detective. After the theater we had a late supper at a charming restaurant on the edge of Covent Garden and made our way home through crates of cabbages. It was a cheery scene with fires burning in metal cans to ward off the night cold and a chorus of cockney voices calling good-night as we climbed into a taxi.

I invited Richard and his son to be our guests for dinner the next night at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese where Dickens used to dine, but unfortunately they had a prior commitment. However, Andrew's history master and his wife accepted the invitation readily, obviously grateful for an evening in the company of anyone over sixteen.

Sunday Andrew accompanied Eleanor and me to services at Westminster Abbey on the condition he would never have to enter another cathedral on the entire trip. Sometimes I think back wistfully to our first trip to Europe when he never objected to anything I wanted to do. Whatever happened to that cheerful, agreeable little boy? I have lost him to life as surely as I lost my beloved Robin to death.

Tomorrow we take the Golden Arrow express train to Paris. It has been fifteen years since my first visit. I never dreamed I would have to wait so long to see it again. I keep hoping Sam will be there to meet us. If I were traveling alone, I do not think I would miss him so much but I feel our marriage has made him responsible for the children—or is it that the children were responsible for our marriage? In any case he should be with them. The three of them are invariably interested—and bored —by the same things.

However, my heart sings at the thought of seeing Paris again—with or without Sam.

Much love,
Bess

July 16, 1928
Chez Madame Sèze
44 Avenue Wagram
Paris

Dearest Sam,

Your telegram was waiting for us on arrival. We were happy to hear from you but it would have made us happier to see you. The children say they are no longer interested in seeing the Italian lakes without you to take them rowing.

Our accommodations here are very pleasant and quite a bargain. Madame Sèze has placed her entire apartment at our disposal (even the drawing room where she sleeps on a daybed during our occupancy) for the sum of 125 francs per day (francs are four cents now). I hope you are impressed with our economy. A shipboard companion of mine from Atlanta, Georgia, is paying thirty-five dollars a day for a suite in a fashionable hotel.

We had made reservations and paid in advance for a tour of Versailles the day after we arrived, realizing too late that it was Bastille Day. The travel agency was closed, naturally, and it was too late to get our money back, so there was no choice but to join the mob that stormed the palace.

Paris, along with the rest of the continent, is suffering from a record heat wave, and Louis XIV would have been shocked to see the deplorable condition of his gardens. The grass is brown everywhere and the streams almost empty. Only the Grotto of Apollo looked cool and inviting, but the descendants of Robespierre soon spoiled even its quiet seclusion, filling the air with raucous laughter and the stench of garlic. I have never been more in sympathy with poor, bewildered Marie Antoinette, and I am thankful for the few happy moments she enjoyed playing shepherdess in her adorable hamlet. (I hope you are reading
The Letters of Madame de Sévigné
which I left on the bookshelf by your bed so that you may at least share our adventure in spirit.)

We made an early return to the city and watched the dancing in the streets below from the comfortable perspective of our balcony. The Eiffel Tower was illuminated in the distance and I went to sleep feeling I had arrived at the center of the universe.