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Authors: Greg King

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Alice was also distinctly uncomfortable at East Preston Street for another reason. For some time she had been aware of Solomon’s growing interest in her life. Increasingly, the naive young woman understood that he had fallen in love with her; Alice did not share his feelings, and the tension soon became unbearable. Long silences at the dinner table continued in the parlor as evenings wore on. Anna also quickly realized her son’s feelings and blamed her daughter-in-law for the change in Solomon’s affections. Jealous, the dowager became openly hostile toward Alice, criticizing her incessantly for any perceived shortcoming. In the end, Alice could no longer stand the pressure, scrutiny, unwelcome advances, and condemnation. In 1901 she packed her bags and moved both herself and her five-year-old daughter out.
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To Alice, the situation was desperate. She had no money of her own and no reason to believe that her circumstances would change. She could not turn to her own family for assistance, for they had so strongly disapproved of her marriage that nearly all contact had been severed between her and the Montagues. In the end, Alice was forced to return to the run-down Brexton Residential Hotel, where she and Wallis would live in a double room. Her independence was an illusion, for her life was still controlled from East Preston Street.
Solomon did not abandon his sister-in-law, but his resentment over her rejection spilled into his financial arrangements. Without fail, Solomon dispatched a check each month to Alice to help cover her expenses, but the amounts varied each month, and Alice never knew for certain if she would receive just enough to cover the rent at the hotel or enough to place some in her meager bank account. Some months, she could not meet the bills and had to beg for more. Years later, Wallis surmised that this constantly changing allowance might very well have been her uncle Solomon’s way of both reminding Alice of her continuing dependence on the Warfield largesse and also of the danger of not living frugally.
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Alice had not been raised to work. “She lived for laughter,” Wallis later recalled; “the gay quip was the only currency she really valued.”
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There were few employment opportunities then available to young women, and those that were required skills Alice did not possess. Women of her station were not accustomed to labor—which was regarded as a disgrace—and, in any case, Alice was temperamentally unsuited to regular work. She could engage in sparkling conversation, preside over dinner parties, and charm those around her. The two skills she did possess were sewing and cooking. Using the first of these, she joined the Women’s Exchange in Baltimore, a charitable organization that made clothing for the poor. Alice spent hours carefully crafting and altering these clothes, for which she received a small weekly salary.
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Thus, from her earliest days, Wallis was painfully reminded of both the necessity of money in her life as well as the lack of it in her mother’s bank account. These were days spent scraping for funds, watching her mother make her clothes, while other girls played in the latest store-bought dresses. More than most, Wallis knew the power of money not only for the material comfort it provided but, perhaps more important, for the peace of mind it brought.
Wallis had her toys from Preston Street and wore the clothes which had filled her closets there. But clearly nothing was the same. She was too young to understand the reasons for their move to the Brexton; in place of explanations there was only uncomfortable silence on the part of her mother. Alice attempted to make out of this dreary existence a happy life for her child, but it was all a charade. Their lonely meals, their tension-filled visits to see the Warfields at Preston Street, and their humble new surroundings made a deep impression on young Wallis.
Nothing seemed certain or secure. Wallis was terrified of quiet, of being alone in darkened rooms filled with shadows. Above all, she dreaded the idea of loss, of being abandoned, of having no one left to care for her. “A shivery feeling comes,” Wallis later wrote, “as when on a crisp fall day the sun is momentarily obscured; and the tenuous apprehensions that now assailed me took the form of a dread of being left alone, even for a few hours, as if my mother, too, might vanish.”
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Even with the extra income earned from her clothing, Alice continued to struggle. A year after she moved out of the Warfield house on East Preston Street, she swallowed her pride and accepted an invitation to live with her widowed sister, Bessie Merryman, in her gray-stone house at 9 West Chase Street.
Wallis’s aunt Bessie was to become the third formidable and influential woman in her life. Alice and her sister were utterly unalike in character; whereas Alice was carefree, Bessie was serious. Her concern for young Wallis, as much as sympathy for her sister, had led her to issue the invitation. Wallis adored her mother, but she also longed for the stability which her kind aunt offered. Bessie, in turn, understood Wallis, and the two became inseparable. Wallis came to rely on her aunt’s common sense, a trait notably lacking in her mother. Nor was her influence confined to more practical concerns. Bessie was not yet the matronly figure she was later to become; she cultivated a love of fashionable clothes, elegant surroundings, and the finer things in life, all traits passed along to her impressionable niece. If at times Alice seemed preoccupied with her own pursuits, Bessie more than compensated with a love and affection which helped reassure Wallis.
In 1902, Wallis was sent off to school. Appealing to whatever familial instincts Solomon Davies Warfield possessed, Alice managed to convince him to pay for the education of his brother‘s only child.
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With his money behind her, Alice selected a prestigious private institution on 2812 Elliott Street, run by Miss Ada O’Donnell; her pupils were a mixture of boys and girls drawn from upper-class districts around the school. Wallis did well there, impressing both teachers and fellow students with her wit, energy, and enthusiasm for learning. She became a star pupil, priding herself on her position within the class, and enjoyed the attention and acceptance it brought. Wallis was quickly angered when denied either. Once, when one of her classmates beat her in raising a hand and shouting an answer, she was so incensed that she smacked him over the head with her pencil box.
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Years later, Ada O’Donnell remembered Wallis as “an attractive, lively six-year-old who was full of fun and pep, and was well-liked by all the children.”
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Alice ensured that if Wallis could not have the best of everything, she at least would be immaculate and dressed as well as possible.
In 1906, Wallis left Miss O’Donnell’s. Baltimore possessed several excellent girls’ schools, and both Alice and her daughter fully expected that, whatever their reduced financial circumstances, the scion of the Warfield and Montague families deserved the best. Luckily, Solomon agreed to continue paying the fees, and Alice set about selecting her daughter’s new school. The most fashionable girls’ school, Bryn Mawr, proved too expensive for Solomon’s taste, and so Wallis was forced to settle for Arundell, only slightly less prestigious.
The Arundell School for Girls was an entirely new experience for Wallis, allowing her to meet a wider range of girls, many from distinguished and socially prominent families. The curriculum was a challenge, but Wallis, who was rapidly developing into a scholar, appreciated the difficulty and soon proved more than up to the task. Still, her lingering insecurities—from moving around so much, her fatherless childhood, and the strained relations between her mother and her relatives—took their toll. She was desperate to fit in, to be accepted. When she learned that all of the other girls regularly wore blue or white pleated skirts with white sailor-suit blouses, she quickly begged her mother—who could not afford to purchase the clothes in a regular store—to make them for her. Soon enough, Wallis sported the same fashions as her fellow students, and only her closest friends knew that they were made by her mother.
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Wallis was popular at Arundell. Teachers and classmates alike remembered that she was cheerful without fail, always courteous to others, intelligent, kind, and despite her academic ability, not a show-off. If this sounds too good to be true, it was at least tempered by her appearance, which both Wallis and her mother considered a disappointment. As a baby and young child, she had been engaging; as she grew older, Wallis developed into an angular, almost masculine looking young woman. But her hair was thick and full, and her piercing lavender eyes accentuated the chiseled lines of her face. She took great pride in those aspects of her appearance which she could control: Her dresses were always clean and pressed, her hair was swept back and tied with pretty ribbons or bows, and her shoes were carefully polished. Even if she was not traditionally pretty, at least her clothing and appearance would be above reproach. She also began to develop considerable charm, which she worked to great effect on both her fellow students and her teachers.
Wallis joined nearly all of the teams at Arundell. She did not particularly care for sports but enjoyed being accepted as part of the group. On three afternoons a week, she and the other girls trooped off to a small building at the corner of Charles Street and Mount Vernon Avenue known as the Gymnasium. This was a private establishment run by Miss Charlotte Noland, who would later found the famous Fox-croft School.
Wallis did well at the Gymnasium and managed to play lead positions in several sports.
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Her time there appears to have been happy, although she was not averse to using the odd feigned illness to sit out the more tiring games. Years later, recalling her penchant for suddenly appearing with a sprained ankle, jammed finger, or terrible cramps, Miss Noland declared, “I have never known anyone who could so consistently for so many years so successfully evade the truth.”
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Wallis was a surprisingly diligent student. Each day after school she joined her friends as they played jacks, jump rope, and dolls but was careful to be at her desk every night to do her homework.
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She worked hard at her lessons, determined to remain near the top of her class. She loved English and history but did less well in mathematics, much to the chagrin of her uncle Solomon.
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Although Wallis continued to pay regular visits to her grandmother Warfield and Uncle Sol, her mother—for understandable reasons—did not often accompany her. These occasions were often painful reminders of what Wallis and Alice had left behind: At East Preston Street there were servants and a dozen rooms and shining silver on the dining table. One Sunday evening each month, Wallis had to take her report cards from Arundell and submit them to Solomon for his inspection and approval. Solomon, a man of little imagination, had no taste or understanding of Wallis’s interests or achievements in history or English; a businessman to his very core, he preferred success with practical courses and liked to quiz her with impromptu mathematics questions between mouthfuls of food. Unfortunately for Wallis, Solomon’s stern lectures seldom made much sense, and she invariably gave the wrong answers. One evening, knowing that she was about to face a similar inquisition, Wallis carefully prepared to get the better of her demanding uncle. As he stood up at the head of the table to carve the roast, Wallis, unprompted and unquestioned, shouted out: “The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The area of a circle is equal to pi-r squared.” Solomon was so shocked, according to Wallis, that the carving knife fell from his hand and clattered to the table. Then, with a slight smile, he congratulated her and sat down to his dinner, having forgone his usual inquisition for the evening.
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By 1908, Alice’s finances were once again under control, and she was on the move again. This time, she took Wallis and left her sister Bessie’s town house for a suite of rooms in the Preston Apartment House. She had longed for her independence, and this was certainly a step up from the time she had spent at the Brexton Residential Hotel. The Preston Apartment House, just a few blocks down the same street from where the Warfields lived, was a respectable, solidly upper middle class establishment.
But money still ran short on occasion, and Alice improvised. She sometimes temporarily let extra rooms to relatives. This, however, was not Alice’s only financial endeavor. When she discovered that many of her fellow residents regularly dined out, Alice hit upon a new scheme. Since one of her few skills was an ability to cook, she determined that she would utilize this talent to supplement her income. She hired a cook and quickly lined up a dozen residents who agreed to become her paying guests. But Alice never knew how to temper her extravagant tastes with practicality. She cooked prime rib and squab, and served soft-shell crabs, terrapin, and delicate pastries. The guests loved the overwhelming, elaborate dinners; but soon enough the grocers’ bills arrived, and Alice was unable to pay them. Once again, Aunt Bessie stepped in and arranged for her sister’s debts to be settled. Thus ended what, in the words of her daughter Wallis, “had undoubtedly been the finest dining club in Baltimore history.”
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Charles F. Bove, who lived in the apartment block and occasionally dined at Alice’s table, recalled: “I was particularly fascinated by the young girl who helped her mother serve the meals I took with the family. She was an exuberant child of twelve with . . . hair parted in braids, high cheekbones and a prominent nose that made one think of an Indian squaw. I teasingly called her Minnehaha and she responded with a wide grin.”
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