Bessie Glass

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Bessie Glass (née Gallagher) is a fictional character created by J. D. Salinger. She is the mother of the seven Glass family children; Seymour, Franny, Zachary (Zooey), Buddy, Walt, Beatrice (Boo Boo), and Waker and wife of Les Glass.

She is a retired vaudeville performer and is of Irish birth, to which her son Zooey mockingly refers to her as an "Irish Rose."

While all of Bessie's children are exceptionally intelligent and sophisticated (being a family given to prodigies and the activities implied therein), she herself is not nearly as accomplished. Bessie is a simple woman, playing the part of the semi-stable well from which her creative children are wont to draw in times of doubtful stability), who remarks at one point in Zooey, "I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy."

Bessie is a minor character of many Glass family stories.

Bessie, while wandering around the Glass apartment, wears a "hoary midnight-blue Japanese kimono", onto which she has added two over-sized pockets at the hips, which typically contain "two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters". Her daughters Boo Boo and Franny both detest the kimono, and make several unsuccessful attempts to dispose of it.