Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era

Clever Girl

Harper Collins Publishers

Chapter One

In the rolling hills of western Connecticut, at the foot of the Berkshires, where the Housatonic River cuts a wide swath south to the Long Island Sound, sits the self-possessed, quintessentially New England town of New Milford. Bucolic, picture-postcard pretty in all seasons, it is a town that could have been engraved by Currier & Ives, with its expansive village green, its tall, white-steepled churches, and its quiet, leafy lanes. Up from the river, on Main Street and Bridge Street and Bank Street, the houses are wood-frame colonials, impressive Greek Revivals and elegant Queen Anne Victorians, one historic building after another, built to last by merchants and farmers, cavalrymen and clergy, doctors and bankers, the solid, and stolid, New Englanders who made this place their home since the early 1700s.

But New Milford is more than a comely village. It is a town with a pedigree. It was the birthplace of Roger Sherman, a leading colonial statesman and politician who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and served as one of Connecticut's first senators. A hundred years later, the town was animportant stop on the Underground Railroad. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a diverse and prosperous commercial center, with two banks, three hardware stores, four blacksmiths, five hotels, six dry-goods stores, seven doctors, eight churches, and one billiards parlor. Its population of five thousand made it the largest town in the Berkshire Valley. Still, it was largely a rural community, the few, well-manicured downtown streets surrounded by rolling farmlands. Out in the countryside, there were one-room schoolhouses to serve the farm families. In town, there was the New Milford Center School, housing grades one through eight, and presided over in 1906 by a bright, well-read, plain-faced, twenty-nine-year-old spinster named Mary Charlotte Turrill.

The Turrill family had the deepest of roots in New Milford. Daniel Turrill, Mary's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, was one of the original purchasers - from "the Heathen," as town records indicate - of the New Milford townsite in 1702. But he was not the first Turrill in the colonies. That was his father, Roger Tyrrell, who came to America from Hereford, England, on the ship Lion in 1632 as part of the great Puritan migration. By the time of the Revolutionary War, in which nine Turrill men fought, the family had already been in Connecticut for five generations. John Turrill, Mary's great-grandfather, was a private who fought at Germantown and survived the winter at Valley Forge. After the war, he married the niece of colonial statesman Roger Sherman, thereby connecting two of the "first families" of Connecticut. Mary's father, Frederick Jay, a member of the eighth generation of Turrills in America, was an ardent trout fisherman, a vestryman of St. John's Episcopal Church of New Milford, and owner of one of the finest tobacco farms in the area. He and his wife, Julia Frances Smith - a "conscientious Christian, a devoted wife and mother" - had seven children, the oldest of whom was Mary Charlotte, born in the summer of 1877.

She was a bright child and an eager learner, a girl of both strong character and strong faith. The Turrills lived close to town, with its venerable public library, its active civic and cultural life, and its laudable public schools, which, by town meeting decree, distributed textbooks free to all "scholars." Her parents must have encouraged her educational ambitions, for when Mary finished eight grades of public schooling in New Milford, she was sent to Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in the hills of northern Massachusetts. A college preparatory boarding school founded by a free-thinking evangelist preacher, Northfield Seminary - commonly referred to as "Mr. Moody's School" - was famous for having graduated a former slave in 1889 and enrolling Choctaw and Sioux students. Mary Charlotte returned to New Milford a young woman enlightened, and a young woman with a vocation, teaching, which she found deeply rewarding. By the age of twenty-nine, she was a veteran teacher at Center School in the village and, by the standards of the day, a confirmed spinster.

There was, however, a man in town who caught her eye, a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor named Charles Prentiss Bentley. He was a long-faced, jug-eared man with a strong chin and intelligent eyes. The son of a Baptist minister, he was the direct descendant of a dissident English clergyman who had arrived in Boston Harbor in 1637. His ancestor had preached from the pulpit of the church attended by Mary Charlotte's ancestor Roger Tyrrell.

Charles Bentley had spent his early adulthood trying to distinguish himself in a career outside the church. He was still trying. He had worked in New York City for a number of years, moving from one dry-goods establishment to another, while also serving on the staff of the Dry Goods Economist, the leading trade paper in the industry. At the end of 1900, he moved to New Milford to take over management of C. H. Booth's store on Bank Street. Booth had been selling everything from clothing to carpets, hats to "fancy crockery," from a small establishment just off the town green for more than forty years. It was time, he told his customers in a letter published in the local newspaper, to "lay aside some of the care and responsibility of business." In January of 1901, the store was renamed Booth & Bentley Company, with Charles the junior, but more active, partner.

The schoolteacher and the merchant wed in the spring of 1907, setting up their home in one of the well-kept, clapboard houses on Terrace Place, a lovely, tree-lined street near the center of town. The homes were not grand, but the street was one of the most respectable in town ...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Clever Girl by Lauren Kessler
Copyright © 2003 by Lauren Kessler
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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