Bess Truman Read Online Free PDF Page A

were small and burglaries surprisingly frequent, even on fashionable Delaware Street. David Wallace picked up the revolver and walked softly, steadily down the hall to a bathroom in the rear of the house. Perhaps he paused there to stare at himself in the mirror, to tell himself one last time that it was all a bad dream, that somehow, somewhere, he could find a way to make his wife happy, his children proud of him. Then he placed the muzzle behind his left ear and pulled the trigger.
    The gun crashed in the dawn. The harsh sound reverberated through the house. In her bedroom, eighteen-year-old Bess Wallace sat up, trembling. She heard her brother Frank running down the hall to the bathroom. There was a cry of anguish. “Papa! Papa’s shot himself!”

 
    Next door, Mary Paxton was awakened by her father. “Mr. Wallace just shot himself,” he said. “Go see what you can do for Bessie.”
    Mary flung on her clothes and rushed into the dawn. She found Bess walking back and forth behind the house, her head down, her hands clenched. Police, a doctor, other neighbors pounded up and down the stairs inside the house. For a half hour, there was a faint hope that David Wallace might live. Then Madge Gates Wallace began screaming and sobbing. The two young women, already best friends, and now united by a searing bond of sorrow, walked back and forth together, saying nothing. What was there to say?
    Those first hours were only the beginning of the Wallaces’ agony. Two days later, the Jackson Examiner published a graphic account of the suicide on the front page. It contained a moving tribute to the “sweetness” of David Wallace’s nature, his “natural and spontaneous” attractiveness. It also included such grisly lines as: “The ball passed through his head and out at the right temple and fell into the bath tub.” The story ended on an emotional note that could only have been heart-wrenching for the family to read: “Why should such a man take his own life? It is a question we who loved him are unable to answer and one which has been asked many times from hearts torn in rebellion against the things that are.”
    Meanwhile, David Wallace’s fellow Masons had taken charge of the funeral. He recently had been elected the presiding officer of the Knights Templars in the state of Missouri. They attempted to console the family by giving the dead man what some people have called the most elaborate funeral ever held in Independence. Hundreds of plumed and beribboned knights escorted the body from the First Presbyterian Church to the Wallace plot in Woodlawn Cemetery. A fellow Knight Templar from Kansas City gave a sonorous oration at the grave. He, too, paid tribute to David Wallace’s gift for friendship and closed with the claim that his “genial smile and warm heart” would “shine with greater glory and refulgence in the beautiful but unexplored beyond.”
    No one among these well-intentioned people seemed to have realized that they were only worsening the family’s agony with all this public attention. Even today, most families will try to persuade anewspaper not to publish that a loved one has committed suicide. In 1903, it was considered a far worse stigma. For Madge Gates Wallace, it was mortifying beyond belief. It flung her from the top of Independence’s social hierarchy to the bottom. She could not bear the disgrace. “She just went to pieces,” was the way one member of the family described it years later.
    Complicating her collapse was the discovery that David Wallace was heavily in debt and had left no will. The ever sympathetic surveyor of the port of Kansas City, William Kessinger, wrote to Washington suggesting that his deputy’s salary for the month of June be paid in full. The Republican at the Treasury informed him that there was “no authority of law” to pay a nickel beyond the day of David Wallace’s death.
    It is frightening to think about what might have happened to Bess and her three