Bess Roth and Evelyn's sisterhood

Bess Roth and Aunt Evelyn are sisters whose bond is marked by a long history of caregiving, unequal burdens, and political divergence. Bess’s sympathy for Evelyn’s independence is inseparable from her awareness that Evelyn spent years looking after their ill mother, even as Evelyn’s later choices unsettled the family.

Family and shared responsibility

Until their mother died of heart failure, after a decade as a coronary invalid, Aunt Evelyn cared for her in the small apartment the two women shared on Dewey Street. When a neighbor could not keep watch, Bess took the bus there after work to cover the care until Evelyn returned. Their mother’s needs thus linked the sisters through practical, repeated labor, while also shaping the demands each made on the other.

Evelyn’s commitments sometimes left Bess covering for her well beyond an ordinary visit. When Evelyn went to New York to see a play, Bess might spend the night away from her husband and children, returning to Dewey Street to tend to their mother. The arrangement shows both sisters’ involvement in their mother’s care and the way Evelyn’s absences could transfer responsibility to Bess.

Bess’s understanding of Evelyn

Bess believed that caring for their mother had cost Evelyn part of the life she might otherwise have built. She thought that without those years of nursing, Evelyn might have settled down after earning her teaching certificate rather than entering relationships with married fellow teachers. This was Bess’s explanation of her sister’s path, not a judgment Evelyn is shown to share.

That view also tempered Bess’s response to Evelyn’s conspicuous style and unconventional decisions. Their father and a school principal considered Evelyn’s clothes unsuitable for a teacher, but Bess could not condemn her sister’s boldness. Her sympathy came partly from reproaching herself over Evelyn’s having had to sacrifice her youth to family care.

Divergence and continuing attachment

Evelyn’s political course marked a sharp break with her earlier commitments. A substitute teacher and a founding participant in the left-wing Newark Teachers Union, she resigned from teaching, left the union, and went to work for Lionel Bengelsdorf in the Office of American Absorption. The contrast between her former union advocacy and her new government work widened the distance between Evelyn’s public choices and the loyalties her family expected her to keep.

Bess’s response, as the account presents it, remains distinct from her husband’s more openly critical stance: she is described as unable to judge Evelyn’s boldness harshly, even after Evelyn’s political turn. Several months later, the family learned that Evelyn and Lionel Bengelsdorf had been involved privately and that he intended to marry her. The disclosure adds a new dimension to Evelyn’s changing place in the family, but the evidence does not describe a direct confrontation between the sisters over the engagement. Their relationship is defined less by an explicit reconciliation or rupture than by Bess’s enduring, if complicated, understanding of what her sister’s years of caregiving had cost.