Chinese Chrysanthemums from ‘The Golden Age of Botanical Art’

BETTY SMITH is a very Plain-Jane kind of name and in many ways the woman I knew who bore that name was perfect for it. She was a person of obvious simplicity. She radiated simplicity. But if simplicity can be complex, Betty Smith’s simplicity was complex.

Sometimes women who dress elegantly have a coldness about them, but Betty, whose maiden name was Betty O’Grady, always dressed well, often in classic suits (I do not remember seeing her in pants), and yet she was so sweet it is impossible to imagine her having said a sharp or nasty word to anyone. As long as I knew her from the time I was a girl, I remember her having striking white-gray hair perfectly combed in a simple pageboy to her chin. She had light blue eyes and very pale skin. She wore pastels mostly and it would have been unimaginable to see her in black, except at a funeral. One of her most wonderful outfits was a light sky-blue tweed coat with green and pink threads. She carried handbags, not shoulder bags, and held back in conversation, often not speaking unless she was addressed personally.

Betty and my mother were neighbors when they were young mothers and they were friends ever after that. Betty had one child, an adopted son named Chris, whom Betty doted upon, and a husband, Ed, whose gruffness and sarcasm were a foil to her tender and pervasive solicitude. He had one eye that was partly shut from some ailment and a cigar always jutting from a corner of his mouth. He looked like George Burns. Betty doted upon him too and was never above waiting on him. She seemed to find his grumpiness, which I don’t believe ever entailed real meanness toward her, charming.

Betty’s home was one of the neatest and most orderly homes I have ever known. When we were children, every Christmas afternoon, my parents, my six siblings, and me, visited the Smiths. It was more of an attack than a visit. We would file into the Smiths’ pristine living room, laughing and tired, and Betty, wearing a white Christmas apron tied at the waist, would serve us cut-caramels, tea sandwiches and champagne. More often than not, one of us was in some adolescent, petulant black mood that could not be sustained in Betty’s living room. Within minutes of her cheerful arrival in the room with a plate, the beautiful tea sandwiches and caramels, arranged as if for royalty, not for us, would vanish. There would be an embarrassing moment when it was clear we had eaten everything. The scent of the Christmas roast in the oven prompted the tacit suggestion that we could perhaps eat more. We then said goodbye, leaving the living room strewn with crumpled napkins, dirty glasses and crumbs.

Betty loved Christmas — it was part of her simplicity to feel this ongoing child-like wonder over Christmas — and she once confided in me that she kept a decorated tree at all times in one bedroom of the house. She would go up there every so often during the year and turn on the Christmas lights. She was very embarrassed when an electrician had to go into the room to do some work and saw the tree, her secret pleasure.

It is impossible to imagine Betty being a career woman. There was so much to do being Betty. Every single time I saw Betty Smith from the time I was a teenager on, she told me how wonderful my mother was. “Oh, your mother!” she would say. “How does she do it all?”  Or she would say, “You know, Laura, I just have to tell you. I admire your mother so much. She’s a remarkable woman, you know, don’t you think? She’s so energetic.” Being appreciative of others, as Betty was, could not have been easily compatible with a career. Such appreciation was born in the silent hours in her home when a woman who was not able to have children of her own looked out at the world not with grievance but with gratitude and awe.

Every Friday, for all the many decades that my mother knew her, Betty would put a single fresh rose by the statue of the Blessed Mother in her home. If my mother was out with her for lunch on a Friday, Betty would always stop to buy the flower. Yesterday, when my mother, I and the others at her funeral, which was a month before her 90th birthday, each put a large rose on Betty’s coffin before it was gently let down into the earth, I thought of how fortunate I was — and I cried to think of how I never appreciated it enough — to have come close to such immortal sweetness.

— Comments —

Christine Smith writes:

I enjoyed reading your description of Betty Smith. Just last night, I suggested to my husband that we might name a future daughter Elizabeth, but call her Betty. [Laura writes: What synchronicity!] Usually, I want to avoid “common” or “ordinary” names for our children, since our last name is already so common itself. But there is something appealing about the name, and I think you are correct in pointing out that it exists in its very simplicity.

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