Bette Davis Read Online Free

had already attracted the offer of a position on the legal staff of a major Boston firm, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation on South Street. In keeping with Boston ideals of rootedness and stability, Harlow would work there for the next quarter century, rising steadily to be head of the Patent Department. And soon after graduation, a newfound sense of self-importance (but not self-indulgence; Boston frowned on that) would lead the promising young lawyer to move his family from their modest row house on Westminster Street to a considerably larger and nicer place (but no showplace; Boston frowned on that too), with a big open porch overlooking tree-lined College Avenue in Somerville.
    Ruthie had eagerly anticipated the family's move to their new house, but her life in Somerville proved a disappointment. Once a constant presence in his wife's photographs, Harlow abruptly dropped out of sight, much as he did from the daily lives of his family. Single-mindedly preoccupied with his new job at United Shoe Machinery, Harlow had little time for Ruthie or the girls. During the early years of her marriage, Ruthie's energies had been absorbed by her relationship with a loving husband and by the births of two children in rapid succession. She had been preoccupied with Harlow's needs as he went through law school. There had been little time for her to think about her own repressed ambitions, her longing for something more than a conventional family and home. Now, with Harlow out of the house every day, working long hours at his new job, and her two pregnancies behind her, with no thought of more children on the horizon, a nagging sense of frustration seemed gradually to overcome her. Scarcely had the family moved to College Avenue when Ruthie began to experience periods of increasingly severe depression and lethargy. Harlow's reaction to his young wife's upset was to exacerbate her feelings of abandonment by pulling further away from her, seeming to cut himself off emotionally as well as physically from the wife who had once seemed a safe harbor and now seemed a burden.

    Betty, who felt abandoned by the sudden absence of her adored father, reacted to the unspoken new dynamics between her parents, and to the feelings of discord and disorder they entailed, by developing an obsession with neatness and cleanliness. Family records trace the beginning of Betty's monomania to the summer after her second birthday. Dirt or disorder of any kind began to provoke violent tantrums. Betty would start shrieking, and as Ruthie soon discovered, the child seemed unable to control her outbursts. More often than not, her rages were wildly out of proportion to the things that appeared to trigger them. When Betty noticed a small grease spot and some wrinkles in a dress Ruthie had just put on her, she began to sob. Only when Ruthie replaced the soiled dress with a ftesh one did the crying stop. There was no predicting when the obsessive thoughts associated with what Ruthie described as Betty's strange passion for order might overcome her. On a much-anticipated trip to the circus with Harlow, Betty suddenly noticed a crooked seam in the long green carpet that cut across die center ring. Immediately it was as if everything else had vanished for her except the terrible sign of disorder. The circus was forgotten. Not even the parade of circus animals marching the length of the carpet could distract her attention from the tiny imperfection that no one else seemed to see. Unable to put the senseless thought of it out of her mind, Betty spent the afternoon in a pout.
    Lonely and depressed, and overwhelmed by Betty's violent outbursts, Ruthie tried to soothe her own agitated nerves by seeking a new outlet for her energies. If her husband was mostly absent from Ruthie's photographs in this period, something began to take his place: a newly discovered fascination with photography as a means of self-expression, which led her to experiment with light and pictorial