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 a newspaper 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 younger brothers if her grandparents were not alive and willing and able to rescue them. George Gates and his wife rushed back to Independence by the fastest available trains to comfort their shattered daughter and her children. Nana’s tall, bearded presence not only guaranteed economic security; he was a crucial, steadying influence. His gentle wife Elizabeth played an equally vital role in offering their shattered daughter and grandchildren a loving refuge. Elizabeth Gates knew from firsthand experience the blows that fate could deliver. When she was a child of eight in England, her entire family had died of some epidemic disease and she had been sent to America to live with her sister.

The four young Wallaces and their mother were welcomed into the big house on North Delaware Street. But Madge Wallace’s grief and shame could not be assuaged by this retreat. Her parents decided it might be better if they all retreated from Independence for a while. They had left their ailing son, Frank, in Colorado Springs, probably with the same Gates relative whom Madge and the children had visited during the previous summer. Telegraphs whizzed to this sympathetic man. In twenty-four hours, the grief-stricken refugees were aboard the Missouri Pacific’s crack flyer, The Santa Fe, which deposited them in Colorado Springs the following day.

They stayed a full year. A year that is a blank in young Bess Wallace’s life - a year from which not a single letter survives. But it is not an unimportant year. In those twelve months in Colorado Springs’ clear air, with Pike’s Peak and the other majestic crags of the Rockies towering above her, Bess struggled to understand her father’s suicide. A terrible wound had been inflicted on her spirit. Never again could she regard the world with the serene self-confidence, the blithe optimism, of her girlhood. In sleepless nights and on lonely walks, she had to cope with agonizing questions of guilt and responsibility.

When a woman loves someone as intensely as Bess had loved her father, and he turns his back on her and that love in such an absolute, devastating way, inevitably she questions her own ability to love. As an intelligent, observant young woman, she also had to question the nature of her mother’s love. Something fundamental had failed. She could not bring herself to place all the blame on her father, on ideas such as moral weakness. He had been a loving man, a generous one. Why had his wife’s love failed to sustain him? Was it the cruelty, the callousness of politics that had destroyed him?

No one, above all not an eighteen-year-old girl, could answer these tormenting questions. They settled into Bess Wallace’s mind and soul as doubts, voices that whispered to her in the night. But in this year in Colorado, Bess was able to reach certain conclusions. She saw that her mother’s way of loving her father, the passive, tender but more or less mindless love of the genteel lady, was a mistake. It failed to share the bruises, the fears, the defeats a man experienced in his world. It left him exposed to spiritual loneliness. If she ever found a man she could trust - and that must have seemed a dubious proposition during that first sorrowful year - Bess Wallace vowed she would share his whole life, no matter how much pain it cost her. She rejected absolutely and totally the idea of a woman’s sphere and a man’s sphere.

Bess did not blame her mother for her father’s death. She loved Madge Wallace, also too. To love was added the pity she felt when she saw how shattered her mother was by the catastrophe. Blame was not a word Bess could ever use. But a kind of judgment, an emotional separation took place between mother and daughter during that year in Colorado or soon after their return to Independence in 1904.

Bess saw that she had to become a different woman from her mother. Her success as an athlete and her role as an older sister probably prepared her for this change. But the primary force was sheer necessity. Someone had to take charge of their family, and Madge Wallace was incapable of it. At nineteen, Bess became the parent of her three brothers - and the semi-parent of her mother. Even then, it was obvious that Madge Wallace would never resume a normal life.

I am speaking here of leadership, of a person as a spiritual and psychological force in others’ lives. Grandfather Gates’ money paid for servants and food and clothing. Although he was sixty-nine and his wife was sixty-three, they should not be underestimated as forces in their own right. But they had four other children, all of whom had produced grandchildren. Their feelings for the Wallaces, however poignant, were inevitably diluted by these other descendants.

The Wallaces were acutely aware of these other relatives. Although there was little overt hostility, there must have been some rumblings of discontent about the possibility that the Wallaces would devour all Grandfather Gates’ money and leave nothing for the rest of the heirs. At any rate, soon after the return to Independence, Frank Wallace decided to quit high school and get a job because he did not want to take any more help from his grandfather. Only someone who knows the importance Bess Wallace attached to a college education can appreciate the pain this decision must have caused her.

In 1905, twenty-year-old Bess enrolled in the Barstow School in Kansas City. Founded by Wellesley graduate Mary Barstow in 1884, the school’s chief purpose was the preparation of young women for admission to the leading Eastern colleges - Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar - whose requirements were printed in the back of the Barstow catalog. Well-to-do people in Independence and Kansas City also sent their daughters to Barstow for the academic course, which offered a “broad and thorough” education to those who did not plan to attend college. Barstow was a finishing school, but a tough one. Mary Barstow believed that “to educate women was to educate a nation.”

A glimpse at Barstow’s approach emerges from an account of their first basketball game with Kansas City’s Manual Training High School. As the Manual team came out on the floor, its supporters shouted: “I yell, you yell, all yell, Manual!” To which Barstow replied: “Ho oi, yo ho! Ho oi, yoho! Barstow!” an adaptation of the warrior maidens’ cry in Wagner’s Die Walküre. Adding injury to this elitist insult, Barstow won, 12-10.

Bess enjoyed her year at Barstow. As usual, her marks were excellent, an A in Rhetoric, an A+ in Literature, an A in French. She made new friends, in particular Agnes and Laura Salisbury, whose father owned a 600-acre stock farm outside Independence. She came in touch with the larger world of Kansas City. She used her athletic ability to become the star forward on the basketball team and in a spring track meet she won the shot put.

For Bess, one of the high points of the year was the challenge match with Independence High School. Barstow was used to playing basketball outdoors, and the game was their first under a roof. The girls had to become used to the “inconveniences of the ceiling,” which suggests it was a rather low one. But they were soon playing, according to the reporter in the Weathercock, the Barstow paper, as though they always had practiced under a roof amid cheers. Bess and her fellow Barstow warrior maidens trounced poor Independence, 22-10.

During this same year, Bess resumed her social life in Independence. Her name appeared as a guest at various receptions, in particular at the Swope mansion. But there was no mention of Madge Gates Wallace’s name in the social notices. That year was the beginning of a lifelong retreat from the world around her. Other Independence women busied themselves in charitable activities, such as The Needlework Guild, which made clothes for the poor, pursued culture in study clubs, and enjoyed themselves at weekly bridge club meetings. Sadly, Madge Wallace remained behind the substantial walls of her parents’ house, a virtual recluse.

It is not hard to imagine the pain this caused her children, especially her daughter. At the end of her year at Barstow, Bess did not go to college like many of her classmates. She went home and resumed her role as head of the Wallace family and her mother’s companion. But she did not become a recluse. With that interesting blend of pity and objective judgment that colored her relationship with her mother, Bess continued to enjoy the world around her.

She helped organize a bridge club among friends from high school as well as from Barstow. She became active in The Needlework Guild, which in spite of its Dickensian name, was an effective charity. She continued to enjoy sports, particularly tennis and horseback riding. Her Barstow friends, Agnes and Laura Salisbury, usually had enough horses on their farm to mount a cavalry troop, which was what the Delaware Street crowd looked like, sometimes, trotting down the narrow dirt roads in the spring and summer, throwing up clouds of dust.

Young men from Independence and Kansas City began to call on twenty-one-year-old Bess Wallace. One of these callers was Chrisman Swope, the second son of that wealthy clan. It must have been a little exciting to be wooed by one of the richest young men in town. He was often at the door of 219 North Delaware Street to take Bess for rides in his buggy. But Chrisman’s money seems to have been his only recommendation. He was, like other members of his family, a little odd. One evening as Bess climbed into the buggy, she heard a strange quacking sound. “I hope you won’t mind a stop at the market, Bessie,” Chrisman said. “I want to sell a few of my ducks.”

Raising fowl was a hobby that many people practiced in Independence. But Bess took an exceedingly dim view of sharing Chrisman’s buggy with a dozen noisy ducks. She was not inclined to tolerate that much eccentricity, even for a slice of the Swope fortune. Chrisman’s buggy was seen no more on Delaware Street.

Around this time, Bess announced she did not want to be called Bessie, which she had never liked, although she had signed it on her high-school papers. “Bess” was what her close friends called her from now on.

Like her father, Bess had a remarkable capacity for friendship. “She set the styles; she was always the leader of our crowd,” her friend, Mary Paxton recalled. When people married or moved away, they could not seem to let Bess go. They wrote her letter after letter, continuing to share their lives with her. But no friend was as close as Mary Paxton. Although most of their letters are lost, we can be sure that they continued to correspond throughout Mary’s year at Hollins College in Virginia.

In the fall of 1907, Mary heard the news - perhaps from Bess - that the University of Missouri was about to open a school of journalism. In January 1908, Mary abandoned Hollins and headed for Columbia, although the journalism school was not scheduled to open until the following September. There was an extracurricular reason for this haste. During the preceding summer in Independence, Mary had fallen in love with Charles Ross, the scholar of the class of 1901. Charlie was going to be on the journalism school’s faculty.

After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1905, Charlie had worked for the local paper, the Columbia Herald, and then switched to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Next, in the manner of young reporters then and now, he switched to the St. Louis Republic, where he was rapidly promoted to the head of the copy desk. When the editor of the Columbia Herald, Walter Williams, was named head of the journalism school, Charlie was the first man he hired.

Always bright, Mary had by this time developed an almost omnivorous interest in books and ideas. Elmer Twyman, son of one of Independence’s leading physicians and a member of the class of 1901, wooed her for a while by reading the English philosopher Herbert Spencer to her. Spencer was considered daring by most people in 1905 because he downplayed religion and favored the theory of evolution. Mary had attracted Charlie and vice versa even before she went to Hollins, and they had corresponded in somewhat desultory fashion until the summer of 1907, when their feelings became serious. After a moonlit buggy ride, they stood beneath one of the huge trees on the Paxton lawn and exchanged a kiss that said everything.

Bess’ emotional life also grew more complicated around this time. A young man named Julian Harvey began coming out from Kansas City to call. He soon was on the porch at 219 North Delaware Street two or three nights a week. A great many watching neighbors and friends began to think that Bess took his attentions seriously. There was no doubt that Harvey was serious about her.

But this romance could not compare in intensity with the flame that began to glow on the campus of the University of Missouri, as Charlie Ross and Mary Paxton saw each other night and day. She was his pupil while the sun was shining, his sweetheart when the stars came out. By the summer of 1909, when Mary returned to Independence, she and Charlie were exchanging two letters a day - and discussing marriage. But there were problems. Mary wanted to put her journalistic training - and herself - to the test.

Mary got a job on the Kansas City Post, a newspaper that imitated the sensational techniques of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. This bold move put Charlie Ross in a dilemma. He could not deny he was proud that his pupil had become the first woman reporter in Kansas City. But he did not want a fiancée who was working beside the rogues that he visualized in the Kansas City Post’s newsroom. Charlie’s letters to Mary over the next year are a poignant study of a man in torment.

Mary lived at home and dated other men, notably Pete Harris, which enabled her to be a close observer of Bess Wallace’s romance with Julian Harvey. One day, Bess and Julian and Mary and Pete walked into the country to visit some friends. It turned out to be a six-mile stroll, and their hosts - when they finally got there - fed them nothing but thin cocoa and bread-and-butter sandwiches. They retreated three miles in the other direction to the Salisbury farm, where they were sure of a warmer welcome. There, they dined on fried chicken and ham and chocolate cake and discussed their expedition. Bess offhandedly declared that she thought it was a minor jaunt, at best. Whereupon the men asked her what she considered a real walk.

“Oh, to Lee’s Summit,” she said.

To Lee’s Summit and back was a good twenty-five mile hike.

“You’re on,” said Julian and Pete.

A few days later, Mary and Bess packed a lunch, to which Mary contributed deviled eggs. Everyone wore clothes that would not be ruined by the dust and mud on the unpaved roads. Off they went to Lee’s Summit, stopping to picnic along the way. An indication of what they were really up to is visible in their dining arrangements. At a bridge over a creek, they split up, and Bess and Julian ate on the upstream side; Mary and Pete enjoyed the downstream view.

Intimate conversation was interrupted by a strange sight: a flotilla of deviled eggs floating past. “What’s the matter with my eggs?” Mary called.

“Taste them,” Bess replied.

One of Mary’s charming younger brothers had filled them with red pepper.

The point of this story is not culinary. Nor is it aimed at confirming the villainy of younger brothers. Anyone who goes on a twenty-five mile hike with a young man and makes a point of dining alone with him on the bank of a country creek must be enjoying his company quite a lot. Bess Wallace was obviously almost as serious about Julian Harvey as he was about her. In fact, as we shall soon see from a letter she wrote to another man, she was applying one of her own personally designed tests to Mr. Harvey on this jaunt. She had realized it was practically impossible to decide how she felt about a man under her mother’s vigilant eye at 219 North Delaware Street. Nor did dating him in a crowd of people her own age tell her much. But a picnic was a chance to study him at close quarters, in comparative solitude.

Harvey seems to have failed the picnic test. In later years, he claimed to have liked Bess, but for some reason he could not specify, he never got around to asking the crucial question. Anyone with a little experience in matters of the heart knows that the probable reason for this failure was lack of encouragement. On the other hand, Harvey may have been intimidated by what he saw at 219 North Delaware Street. It was obvious that anyone who married Bess would have to be prepared to spend a great deal of time with Madge Gates Wallace. Those who got to know Bess well soon learned the deep and complex feelings that bound her to her mother. They also learned that Madge Wallace regarded a suitor as someone who was trying to steal her only daughter, the consolation of her tragic life, from her. It took more courage than the average man possessed to face this hostility - with the awareness that he would have to live with it for the rest of Madge’s life.

Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri, another romance was going sour. Charlie Ross was in a flap about the stories Mary Paxton was writing for the Kansas City Post. Mary was daring in all senses of the word. She took a stroll through the red-light district of Kansas City and wrote a vivid report on it. Then the U.S. Army announced it was testing a contraption that would enable observers to spot enemy troop movements and artillery positions from the air. They had tried balloons in the Spanish-American War, and the enemy had shot them down with dismaying rapidity. This new flying observation post consisted of a collection of giant kites. Mary volunteered to go up in it.

Before she had time to realize that she was risking her life, Mary was soaring several hundred feet above Kansas City, clutching a few ropes, with nothing between her and annihilation but steady nerves. Her story of the adventure created a sensation, but the reception it got from her father and Charlie Ross was very different.

Her father was furious. So was her older brother, Frank, who probably only echoed his father when he said: “You’ve disgraced the family.” Charlie’s disapproval was cooler but no less severe. “I don’t want to talk about any such thing as your hanging to the tail of a kite or anything of that sort,” he wrote. Then he hastily added: “You are an angel - most of the time. If you were an angel all of the time, I guess I wouldn’t love you so much.”

As Mary got story after story on the front page of the Kansas City Post, Charlie’s feelings about her became more and more confused. He was encountering a new kind of woman, and he did not know what to do about it. Then came a crisis that seemed to restore the balance Charlie wanted in their relationship. Mary collapsed with an attack of appendicitis on the streetcar while going to work. Charlie rushed to Independence and helped Mary decide that the operation - serious surgery in 1910 - made an early return to the Post’s hectic city room out of the question. He soon was back in Columbia writing to her: “I certainly do hope we can be married in June.”

Mary convalesced for six months, expecting Charlie to arrive in Independence with a diamond ring in June. She had had her year of success as a reporter and was ready to become the kind of wife Charlie wanted, one who would stay home, have children, and let him support her. But instead of a ring in June, Charlie arrived with a hangdog expression on his face. He told Mary that his mother objected to the wedding. She had lectured him on his responsibility to help send his five sisters to college. Charlie’s father was working in Colorado as a miner but apparently sent home little money.

It is evident that Mrs. Ross’ objections to the match were influenced by Mary’s career as a journalist. Why did Charlie succumb to this maternal edict? The reason is visible in one of Charlie’s letters. “I love you,” he wrote, “but I find it harder to tell you about it - a woman, than I did to you - a girl.”

I am convinced that if Mary had burst into tears and told Charlie she could not live without him, he would have gone home and informed his mother that he was getting married the next day. But Mary was so stunned and hurt, she barely reacted. She was a proud, independent young woman. She was not going to beg any man for his love.

Coolly, almost casually, without betraying a trace of her turmoil, Mary turned slightly away from Charlie and said: “That’s too bad. I understand perfectly.”

Charlie went back to Columbia convinced that all his fears were true: Mary had changed and no longer really loved him. Mary careened into an emotional and physical collapse that lasted for the next two years.

Mary’s story is part of the story of Bess not only because they remained friends for the rest of their lives. At a crucial moment in a then unforeseen and unimaginable future, Mary and Charlie would rejoin Bess in an entirely different dimension, when she stepped onto the stage of world and national history. Mary was so hurt, she was never able to reveal what Charlie had done to her for almost fifty years. But Bess undoubtedly knew that some male had deeply disappointed her best friend. Henceforth, Mary’s letters were full of wry, often bitter comments about men.

By this time, Mary’s father had married again, always a difficult experience for a daughter and especially for an oldest child. Mary lost weight to the point of becoming a virtual skeleton. Everyone was convinced she was developing the tuberculosis that had killed her mother. Finally, her father persuaded her to go to Mississippi, where she lived for two years with cousins who owned a large plantation near Greenville.

During the same years that Charlie’s romance with Mary flowered and faded, Bess Wallace had another kind of experience in Independence. It did not affect her deepest feelings as directly, but it was difficult, not to say disillusioning, in its own way. As a frequent guest in the Swope home, Bess knew a good deal about its emotional strains and stresses. The oldest daughter, Frances, had fallen in love with a doctor named Bennett Clark Hyde, whom her mother found objectionable. Frances and Dr. Hyde eventually eloped, and Mrs. Swope did not speak to her for a year. Then there was a tearful reconciliation and Dr. Hyde became a frequent guest at the Swope mansion.

The man who possessed the fortune was Tom Swope, a reclusive bachelor who had more or less adopted Mrs. Swope and her children when her husband, his brother, died. Tom Swope felt embarrassed by his riches, which he often said he did not deserve. He simply had been lucky enough to hold onto the right real estate in Kansas City until it was worth millions. A cousin, Moss Hunton, an amiable fellow, lived with Tom, and to assuage his guilt, used to wander the streets of Independence almost every day, giving away Tom’s money to anyone who asked for it. As for the Swope children, anything they wanted, from trips to Europe to expensive ball gowns, was instantly supplied by Uncle Tom.

Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde observed all this guilt and generosity with a jaundiced eye. From his point of view, the Swope fortune, a good chunk of which he had expected to inherit, was vanishing day by day. He decided to do something about it. His first step was to order a box of five-grain capsules of cyanide of potassium sent to his office. He brushed aside the druggists’ objections to putting this dangerous poison in capsules. It was never done because it could easily be mistaken for medicine.

One night, as a number of the children’s friends gathered at the Swope dinner table for a pleasant meal, Cousin Moss Hunton proposed a toast. As he raised his glass, he toppled to the floor. Tom Swope was so upset, he took to his bed. Both men were put under the care of Dr. Hyde, who gave them medicine in capsule form. In three days, both were dead.

Next, on the pretext that he was performing some experiments on animals, Dr. Hyde obtained from a medical friend a number of cultures for typhoid fever. Soon, four of the younger members of the family were violently ill. Dr. Hyde diagnosed typhoid fever and told his wife, Frances, to stop drinking water from the house cistern. Henceforth, they drank only bottled water. The sick younger Swopes were all put under Dr. Hyde’s care. He gave Chrisman a medicinal capsule, and within an hour, he died in awful convulsions.

Lest the Swopes seem to have been naive beyond belief, it should be noted that the night after Chrisman died, Dr. Hyde was elected president of the Jackson County Medical Association. He was a highly respected physician. A few days later, Bess’ friend Margaret Swope swallowed one of Dr. Hyde’s medicinal capsules and had a seizure not unlike Chrisman’s, but she did not die.

At this point in this bizarre tale, the nurses became very upset. They went to Dr. Elmer Twyman, father of Mary Paxton’s beau, and told him what they suspected. Meanwhile, Dr. Hyde had decamped to New York, where he met Lucie Lee Swope, who had rushed back from Europe on hearing of the outbreak of disease and death in her family. On the train to Missouri, Lucie Lee became violently ill. Apparently Dr. Hyde had poisoned her, too. But his career as a mass murderer came to an abrupt end when they reached Independence. John Paxton, Mary Paxton’s father and the Swope family lawyer, had ordered the bodies of Moss Hunton and Tom Swope exhumed. They discovered cyanide in both corpses, as well as strychnine in Tom’s.

On March 5, 1910, Dr. Hyde went on trial for multiple murder. It was the most sensational event to take place in Independence since Jesse James stopped robbing trains. After a month of wrangling over the evidence, the case went to the jury, which returned a verdict of guilty. But the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict and ordered a new trial. To this day, no one knows why the Supreme Court reversed; under Missouri law, such decisions can be made without stating a reason.

Two more trials, which dragged on through 1912, resulted in hung juries. Mrs. Swope, who had spent more than $250,000 hiring lawyers to prosecute her son-in-law, gave up. The Swopes’ reign as the social leaders of Independence had long since collapsed. The family scattered, most of them moving to California.

For two years, Bess Wallace had watched people whom she considered her friends writhing in the grip of publicity. Day after day, she saw the Swopes and their personal habits and wealth discussed by prying, vulgar strangers. She herself had experienced the anguish that public knowledge of private sorrows can cause. Her mother, the self-sentenced prisoner of shame at 219 North Delaware Street, was living proof of the damage, the pain. Then there was her friend Mary Paxton, once so brilliant, so promising and full of self-confidence, now a wan wraith in Mississippi.

What else could these experiences do but give Bess added reasons to regard the world with wariness and doubt, to wonder again if any man could be trusted, to ask herself if marriage to a husband who piled up money was a promise of happiness any more than marriage to a man who failed? She frequently was tempted to imitate her mother, to choose retirement from this raw, brutal, threatening American world, a retreat to a life of a quiet, dignified mourning.

One night in the summer of 1910, while the gossip and grisly jokes about the Swopes still were reverberating through Independence, the doorbell rang at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess opened it, and there stood someone whom she had not seen or heard from or even thought about in the nine years that had passed since her graduation from Independence High School: Harry Truman. In his hand was an empty cake plate.

Madge Gates Wallace often baked cakes and pies and sent samples to the neighbors. It was the only kind of cooking she enjoyed. Harry’s cousins, the Nolands, now lived at 216 North Delaware, the house across the street. They had recently received one of these gifts and had asked Harry Truman if he would like to return the plate. He had accepted, they later recalled, “with something approaching the speed of light.”

“Aunt Ella told me to thank your mother for the cake,” Harry said. “I guess I ought to thank her, too. I ate a big piece.”

“Come in,” Bess said.