C--
Why you aint come like you said you would last night. Why you aint come. I waited in the barn til way past midnite up in the hayloft, there wont enough light to see my watch by but it was after 3 when I clumb down the ladder and left be cause I heard the courthouse bell in town ring. I waited even tho I was cold, be cause I knew once you came and I was holding you close we would be warm enouf to stand the chill. Frost might come and we would not pay it no mind. With us lieing so close together. With our bodies pushed together close. With our hands in one anothers. With our breath on each others skins. I knew we would warm each other but you aint come and the chill got to me in that cold damp hay and so I lef. Must of been 2 I thout I heard footsteps and I thout it was you but it wont nobody, old Mr. Shelton maybe or a deer. But not you. Not you.
And then to day you pass me strate by on Main Street without so much as look at me. You walk strate by me into Aubreys like I wont even there. Your eyes that are customed to laugh and dance when we are with one another like stone, and your town hat on your head and your bag held close and your hands that have touched the most secret place in white gloves. Walk strate by and the glass door of the store swung shut behind you. But your dauter looked at me as she was going in behind you. Yes she did. I seen how her eyes looked me over, up and down, up and down. She has the fast eye. And I thout if one wont another will. If one wont another will. Maybe since you wont come your dauter will and how would you like that. All I have to do is look at her the right way and she will come to me, that I know. And how would you like that.
But I dont want your dauter I wont you come tonight promise you will or else I dont know what Ill do. Tonight. Dont say no. Dont be late. Come up the later and wear your stockings so I can hear the sound they make as they come off the ssss as they peel down your leg. Just come. Just come
T
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Tues. July 28, 1992
Dear Jean,
Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?
It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.
But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.
At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.
At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.
Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.
An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.
Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.
Love,
Margot
Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?
It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.
But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.
At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.
At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.
Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.
An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.
Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.
Love,
Margot
Saturday, May 26, 2007
April 2, 1961
Dear Dorothea,
I forgot to tell you in the letter I just mailed that I have met the sweetest boy! Well, I'm not sure others would use that term to describe him, but to me he is quite adorable, though he carps and complains all the time and says something unsettling to me every time we see each other. The other day he told me I was looking "blowsy," all because I wore a handkerchief to chorus practice due to having just washed my hair. Then this afternoon he told me that I could stop the fluttery Nicole Diver act, for this was a benighted college in the provincial South, not the French Riviera. And I haven't even read that book or scarcely any Fitzgerald at all! At any rate I told him he was a typical embittered, disillusioned _scion_ of the fallen southern gentry--a Quentin Compson type, if you like (I wasn't going to let him get away with making literary references without coming back with one myself)--and thank God I didn't have to carry around any aristocratic baggage of that kind, since my family were all humdrum shopkeepers and clerks. (Of course that isn't strictly true: your mother can't be classed in that phylum!) He got red in the face and couldn't come back with anything smart! Of course that made me like him more.
Oh, I haven't even told you how he looks. Well, he's no Tab Hunter! Very thin and tall, and already going bald at the crown of his head, wears glasses (dark and horn-rimmed). But he has the sweetest long-fingered hands (today I could hardly keep myself from grasping one of them when I was sitting next to him in the caf) covered with soft brown hair and he has green eyes! I'm not lying--they really are green. Today we were walking by the chapel in full sun and I looked carefully and made sure. Earlier I had thought they might be merely hazel, a much more prosaic shade. But they really are green. And he has a full mouth that turns up at the edges a little. Very aristocratic looking--a cleft chin too! I would really hate him if I didn't like him so much!
We're singing Elijah, and none too well. The sopranos are very off. The alto, some lady from town, is wobbly. She ruined Jezebel's solo. Dan says--did I mention his name is Daniel?--he says the part where Elijah contends with the priests of Baal is so poignant; it makes him sympathize with the Baal worshippers, who are the losers, he says, in the "God sweepstakes." Dr. Whaley was red-faced with annoyance at that remark. Dan says Elijah is like a big juicy rich Victorian fruit cake: dense but without any real substance, and no nutritional value. I love it though. I cried at the end during our last run-through, and lost my place. Did I tell you that Dan has the sweetest baritone voice? I told him that he ought to be singing Elijah himself but he says he doesn't have the heft, with his "feeble Pelleas voice."
Must go now--I have a trig exam to study for, and I need to get in the shower before all the hot water is gone. (Some of these girls, these damned horse-riding debutantes-to-be-girls, take forever to bathe.) I'm not going to appear at practice with my hair wet again! Tell me more about life in New York, and about _Johann_--I'm dying to hear what comes of that! I don't think I would lend him any more money, and as for him sleeping on your daybed--well, my dear girl, take care!
Love,
Pat
I forgot to tell you in the letter I just mailed that I have met the sweetest boy! Well, I'm not sure others would use that term to describe him, but to me he is quite adorable, though he carps and complains all the time and says something unsettling to me every time we see each other. The other day he told me I was looking "blowsy," all because I wore a handkerchief to chorus practice due to having just washed my hair. Then this afternoon he told me that I could stop the fluttery Nicole Diver act, for this was a benighted college in the provincial South, not the French Riviera. And I haven't even read that book or scarcely any Fitzgerald at all! At any rate I told him he was a typical embittered, disillusioned _scion_ of the fallen southern gentry--a Quentin Compson type, if you like (I wasn't going to let him get away with making literary references without coming back with one myself)--and thank God I didn't have to carry around any aristocratic baggage of that kind, since my family were all humdrum shopkeepers and clerks. (Of course that isn't strictly true: your mother can't be classed in that phylum!) He got red in the face and couldn't come back with anything smart! Of course that made me like him more.
Oh, I haven't even told you how he looks. Well, he's no Tab Hunter! Very thin and tall, and already going bald at the crown of his head, wears glasses (dark and horn-rimmed). But he has the sweetest long-fingered hands (today I could hardly keep myself from grasping one of them when I was sitting next to him in the caf) covered with soft brown hair and he has green eyes! I'm not lying--they really are green. Today we were walking by the chapel in full sun and I looked carefully and made sure. Earlier I had thought they might be merely hazel, a much more prosaic shade. But they really are green. And he has a full mouth that turns up at the edges a little. Very aristocratic looking--a cleft chin too! I would really hate him if I didn't like him so much!
We're singing Elijah, and none too well. The sopranos are very off. The alto, some lady from town, is wobbly. She ruined Jezebel's solo. Dan says--did I mention his name is Daniel?--he says the part where Elijah contends with the priests of Baal is so poignant; it makes him sympathize with the Baal worshippers, who are the losers, he says, in the "God sweepstakes." Dr. Whaley was red-faced with annoyance at that remark. Dan says Elijah is like a big juicy rich Victorian fruit cake: dense but without any real substance, and no nutritional value. I love it though. I cried at the end during our last run-through, and lost my place. Did I tell you that Dan has the sweetest baritone voice? I told him that he ought to be singing Elijah himself but he says he doesn't have the heft, with his "feeble Pelleas voice."
Must go now--I have a trig exam to study for, and I need to get in the shower before all the hot water is gone. (Some of these girls, these damned horse-riding debutantes-to-be-girls, take forever to bathe.) I'm not going to appear at practice with my hair wet again! Tell me more about life in New York, and about _Johann_--I'm dying to hear what comes of that! I don't think I would lend him any more money, and as for him sleeping on your daybed--well, my dear girl, take care!
Love,
Pat
May 12, 1953
My dear little Patricia,
Thank you for your sweet note. I am glad you are settling in at Aunt Evie's and getting on so well at school there. Evie is a dear woman, a little flighty at times, but with a core of steel. Did I ever tell you about how she killed a copperhead that had gotten into our room one night when I was a child? I woke up and heard a pounding and saw her crouched on the floor in her little flannel robe, hammering that snake to death with one of Mama's old heavy irons. There is no telling what might have happened if she had not spotted it, for our baby sister Marcia was sleeping in her crib in the same room. Poor Marcia, the diphtheria took her when she was only two. She was a dear baby who laughed all the time. But I know she is in a better place now, in Jesus's loving arms. Anyway I have every faith that Evie will take good care of you until we can be together again.
They have just fed us lunch and now we are allowed to sit on the porch a spell. The food is fair, not good but nothing to make you sick. The other day they served us some custard that was like my mother used to fix. But the potatoes were lumpy. From the porch I can see live oaks in the distance, near the river bank. In the haze they look sort of like weeping angels, all hunched over in their robes, stretching out their arms in consternation and remonstrance. One of the groundkeepers ran over a yellow jacket hive near one of the trees the other day and was stung badly. But today he is out in the grass again, mowing what he did not finish. He has a poultice on his arms one of the kitchen women made him. They say it will be a hot dry summer and it is already miserable here. The ceiling fans do little to ease the sweltering heat.
There is not much company to speak of here. Some of the patients are so sick they cannot speak or so much as look at you, and when they do their eyes are vacant and cold. Others mumble and cry out in the night. Sometimes when I gaze upon them it is difficult for me to believe we are members of the same species, God forgive me.
There is one nice man here, a real scholarly type with a great shiny domed bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. He can discourse on Fichte and Hegel and Kant for hours. Surprisingly he has a sweet tenor voice. The other night he sang "Ah, may the red rose live alway'" to the accompaniment of the piano playing of one of the nurses. It was delightful. Some of the other patients wept. But then he forgot the last sad verse about the departed flowers and became so upset he rushed from the room. The only trouble with him is that he counts things--the tiles on the floor, the windowpanes, his own heartbeat. You will be having a nice conversation with him and suddenly he will start mumbling numbers under his breath. And once he starts that it is as if you are no longer there. I don't know that he will ever get well. One of the nurses told me he was here last winter and had to come back again. And he was doing so well at his post at the university.
I know I am improving every day and that I will soon be strong enough to take you home with me again, and we will live together once more like a father and daughter should. I am taking daily exercise and eating well. There are times when I think of your dear mother and her loss is as fresh as it was the days just after she left us. In some ways the pain is far more keen than it was then. There are moments when it is as if a shadow descends upon me and I cannot catch my breath from the suffocating misery of not having her near, and the knowledge that she is gone forever. But then thirty minutes later I am smiling again. I am smiling because I know that of course she has not left us. In fact she is very close by us at all times.
Do you want to know how close? There is a framed picture in my room of a fishing boat with its nets and tackles drooping over the side. Behind it there is a small hole in the wall, just big enough for somebody to look through, though there is nothing inside it but the dark inside of the wall. One day I pressed my ear to the hole--I do not know why--and suddenly I heard your mother's voice, calling my name. It was so shocking that I cried out and the nurses had to come and put me to bed. All that I night I wept and moaned into my pillow, for it seemed a very frightening thing to hear your mother's voice, without warning, out of the blue. I thought that maybe I was getting worse, that perhaps there was something truly wrong with me, which I had never thought before.
But the other day when they were not watching I put my ear to the hole again, just to make sure my mind was not playing tricks on me. And I heard her voice again. This time she said much more, in a normal speaking voice, clear and distinct. She spoke to me so matter-of-factly and plainly, just as she used to from her place on the other side of the breakfast room table in the morning. She told me we need not worry about her, for she is in a place filled with love and shining light. She said she is watching us every hour, every day, weeping with us as we weep, laughing as we laugh, giving us strength to carry the heavy burden of grief we must bear. It is her burning wish that we live together as a family once more. And she is certain we will, once I am well again. And I know that I soon will be; hearing her voice has done more than any of the treatments I have received here to set me on the path back to health.
This morning when I put my ear to the hole I was distressed not to hear her voice, though I waited for some time. But I know that it will not be long before she speaks to me again. Now that the silence that death had placed temporarily between us has been broken, I am confident that we will be in everlasting contact, and that the love we shared during this lifetime will continue on and on, growing stronger and stronger, binding us together in a bond that death can never break.
Keep the faith, my dear Patricia, and be strong, supported by the knowledge that we will soon be together again--maybe sooner than you think!
Give my love to Evie.
I am,
as always,
your loving Father.
P.S. Let us keep what I have told you about your mother a secret between you and me. I know what people would think if they knew. Let it be our happy little secret to be joyfully silent about. We will cherish it together, trusting in what your mother has promised us. I believe what she has told me, and I know that you, my loving daughter, will too!
Thank you for your sweet note. I am glad you are settling in at Aunt Evie's and getting on so well at school there. Evie is a dear woman, a little flighty at times, but with a core of steel. Did I ever tell you about how she killed a copperhead that had gotten into our room one night when I was a child? I woke up and heard a pounding and saw her crouched on the floor in her little flannel robe, hammering that snake to death with one of Mama's old heavy irons. There is no telling what might have happened if she had not spotted it, for our baby sister Marcia was sleeping in her crib in the same room. Poor Marcia, the diphtheria took her when she was only two. She was a dear baby who laughed all the time. But I know she is in a better place now, in Jesus's loving arms. Anyway I have every faith that Evie will take good care of you until we can be together again.
They have just fed us lunch and now we are allowed to sit on the porch a spell. The food is fair, not good but nothing to make you sick. The other day they served us some custard that was like my mother used to fix. But the potatoes were lumpy. From the porch I can see live oaks in the distance, near the river bank. In the haze they look sort of like weeping angels, all hunched over in their robes, stretching out their arms in consternation and remonstrance. One of the groundkeepers ran over a yellow jacket hive near one of the trees the other day and was stung badly. But today he is out in the grass again, mowing what he did not finish. He has a poultice on his arms one of the kitchen women made him. They say it will be a hot dry summer and it is already miserable here. The ceiling fans do little to ease the sweltering heat.
There is not much company to speak of here. Some of the patients are so sick they cannot speak or so much as look at you, and when they do their eyes are vacant and cold. Others mumble and cry out in the night. Sometimes when I gaze upon them it is difficult for me to believe we are members of the same species, God forgive me.
There is one nice man here, a real scholarly type with a great shiny domed bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. He can discourse on Fichte and Hegel and Kant for hours. Surprisingly he has a sweet tenor voice. The other night he sang "Ah, may the red rose live alway'" to the accompaniment of the piano playing of one of the nurses. It was delightful. Some of the other patients wept. But then he forgot the last sad verse about the departed flowers and became so upset he rushed from the room. The only trouble with him is that he counts things--the tiles on the floor, the windowpanes, his own heartbeat. You will be having a nice conversation with him and suddenly he will start mumbling numbers under his breath. And once he starts that it is as if you are no longer there. I don't know that he will ever get well. One of the nurses told me he was here last winter and had to come back again. And he was doing so well at his post at the university.
I know I am improving every day and that I will soon be strong enough to take you home with me again, and we will live together once more like a father and daughter should. I am taking daily exercise and eating well. There are times when I think of your dear mother and her loss is as fresh as it was the days just after she left us. In some ways the pain is far more keen than it was then. There are moments when it is as if a shadow descends upon me and I cannot catch my breath from the suffocating misery of not having her near, and the knowledge that she is gone forever. But then thirty minutes later I am smiling again. I am smiling because I know that of course she has not left us. In fact she is very close by us at all times.
Do you want to know how close? There is a framed picture in my room of a fishing boat with its nets and tackles drooping over the side. Behind it there is a small hole in the wall, just big enough for somebody to look through, though there is nothing inside it but the dark inside of the wall. One day I pressed my ear to the hole--I do not know why--and suddenly I heard your mother's voice, calling my name. It was so shocking that I cried out and the nurses had to come and put me to bed. All that I night I wept and moaned into my pillow, for it seemed a very frightening thing to hear your mother's voice, without warning, out of the blue. I thought that maybe I was getting worse, that perhaps there was something truly wrong with me, which I had never thought before.
But the other day when they were not watching I put my ear to the hole again, just to make sure my mind was not playing tricks on me. And I heard her voice again. This time she said much more, in a normal speaking voice, clear and distinct. She spoke to me so matter-of-factly and plainly, just as she used to from her place on the other side of the breakfast room table in the morning. She told me we need not worry about her, for she is in a place filled with love and shining light. She said she is watching us every hour, every day, weeping with us as we weep, laughing as we laugh, giving us strength to carry the heavy burden of grief we must bear. It is her burning wish that we live together as a family once more. And she is certain we will, once I am well again. And I know that I soon will be; hearing her voice has done more than any of the treatments I have received here to set me on the path back to health.
This morning when I put my ear to the hole I was distressed not to hear her voice, though I waited for some time. But I know that it will not be long before she speaks to me again. Now that the silence that death had placed temporarily between us has been broken, I am confident that we will be in everlasting contact, and that the love we shared during this lifetime will continue on and on, growing stronger and stronger, binding us together in a bond that death can never break.
Keep the faith, my dear Patricia, and be strong, supported by the knowledge that we will soon be together again--maybe sooner than you think!
Give my love to Evie.
I am,
as always,
your loving Father.
P.S. Let us keep what I have told you about your mother a secret between you and me. I know what people would think if they knew. Let it be our happy little secret to be joyfully silent about. We will cherish it together, trusting in what your mother has promised us. I believe what she has told me, and I know that you, my loving daughter, will too!
Saturday, May 19, 2007
January 16, 1953
Dear Claudine
Yes I still here at the Poker house. Everybody come and gone for Miss Louisa's funeral and now I here alone with Miss Patricia and Mr. Poker. I can't stay here much longer with them, this a crazy house. Mr. Poker, he ain't been right since she died. All night I hear him walking in the bedroom up above mine at night, the room where Miss Louisa breathe her last. He go back and forth, back and forth, talking. Crying too. Going through her clothes and spreading them all on the bed and pressing his face down in them, smelling for her. I know cause I saw him, when the door was crack open. One time he got the child up out of her bed to pray with him way pass midnight in the bitter freezing cold. Had her down on the floor with him on her knees and she ain't got nothing on but her little cotton nightdress. I march up there and raise the child up and say Mr. Poker, this child stay in my room with me tonight, she need her rest and I do too. Miss Patricia she follow me like nothing wrong. She climb up in the bed next to me like it was hers, lean her head back on the pillow next to mine. She don't sleep though. Don't cry neither. She lie there so still and straight. I say go on and sleep now, go on and sleep, but she don't. About three I ask her why she ain't slep and she say she thinking about how cold her mama must be in that ground. I say don't you know your mama in heaven with Jesus? She don't say nothing. She turn on her side and face the wall.
Miss Louisa she fade so quick, I never seen nobody go so fast. It was like she wanted to hurry on through her sickness and get the dying over with as quick as she could. Wouldn't take no food cep an egg I would fix for her with a little milk whip up in it. She said I believe I take a little egg like you fix me, but no bread, no butter, no meat. She sit up in bed and write out her funeral service, letters. She got her jewelry box out and portion it out. She leave this to her sister, this to somebody else. She tell me get down this box and she write somebody name on it, wrap this up in newspaper and put it over here. She terrify me, the way she sat up so high in bed, her head prop up against the bolster, all gaunt and drawn, and her eyes burning, telling me do this, do that. I say Miss Louisa please let me ease you back in bed so you can rest, but she refuse. She say she got too much to do and too little time to do it.
Only when the end came near did her pride slip. Then she cry out for Jesus, for mercy, then she moan from the pain. She say what Jesus suffered on the cross was nothing compare to what she living through, with something eating her alive inside. She say let it be soon, let it be soon, it hurt too much to take one more breath, like teeth cutting into her flesh. And then late one night she tell me something, clutching my hand so hard I thought she'd crack my bones. She said Mrs. Charles left me some money in her will when she died but that her and her father fix it so I wouldn't get it. She cry out and ask me to forgive her. She wail so loud that Mr. Poker came in to see what was the matter. And by the time he was gone she was asleep, her breathing rough, catching every time she breathe out like she might not draw in another.
Next morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed like she feeling better. She had put her lipstick on and comb her hair herself. And I ask her what she meant last night about a will and she act like she don't know what I mean. She say bring her robe, she think she get up a spell. But she never rose from that bed again. Because near about 11:00 she start breathing real ragged again and she lay there a long time with her eyes open with her head turn toward the window, but she don't see nothing, just breathe slower and slower, rougher and rougher. Mr. Poker went to get the doctor but by the time he get back she was gone. Her breath catch a final time, she breathe in once more, a long strained breath, then she still. She so still, lying there with her eyes open that don't see nothing no more. I had to close them myself.
I habent told nobody about the will. I don't know who to tell or what to say. Ain't nothing to say, like as not. The will is made and the money gone and Mrs. Charles and Miss Louisa is dead and I'm here in this crazy house with a man who ain't right in his head and a child who ought not be here. I say to Mr. Charles this child don't blong in this house, she need to be where somebody can look after her. And if she go I go. My hip bother me too much to be running around this cold house. Yesterday it pop as I was carrying a tray up the stairs and I nearly dropped it. I put some salve on my side Brother Webb prepare for me but it ain't help none.
Give my love to Drucie. I in close five dollars for her books. Tell her to study hard and get her lessons every night cause she smart enough to do something sides carry trays and run around for white folks.
Love,
Essie
Yes I still here at the Poker house. Everybody come and gone for Miss Louisa's funeral and now I here alone with Miss Patricia and Mr. Poker. I can't stay here much longer with them, this a crazy house. Mr. Poker, he ain't been right since she died. All night I hear him walking in the bedroom up above mine at night, the room where Miss Louisa breathe her last. He go back and forth, back and forth, talking. Crying too. Going through her clothes and spreading them all on the bed and pressing his face down in them, smelling for her. I know cause I saw him, when the door was crack open. One time he got the child up out of her bed to pray with him way pass midnight in the bitter freezing cold. Had her down on the floor with him on her knees and she ain't got nothing on but her little cotton nightdress. I march up there and raise the child up and say Mr. Poker, this child stay in my room with me tonight, she need her rest and I do too. Miss Patricia she follow me like nothing wrong. She climb up in the bed next to me like it was hers, lean her head back on the pillow next to mine. She don't sleep though. Don't cry neither. She lie there so still and straight. I say go on and sleep now, go on and sleep, but she don't. About three I ask her why she ain't slep and she say she thinking about how cold her mama must be in that ground. I say don't you know your mama in heaven with Jesus? She don't say nothing. She turn on her side and face the wall.
Miss Louisa she fade so quick, I never seen nobody go so fast. It was like she wanted to hurry on through her sickness and get the dying over with as quick as she could. Wouldn't take no food cep an egg I would fix for her with a little milk whip up in it. She said I believe I take a little egg like you fix me, but no bread, no butter, no meat. She sit up in bed and write out her funeral service, letters. She got her jewelry box out and portion it out. She leave this to her sister, this to somebody else. She tell me get down this box and she write somebody name on it, wrap this up in newspaper and put it over here. She terrify me, the way she sat up so high in bed, her head prop up against the bolster, all gaunt and drawn, and her eyes burning, telling me do this, do that. I say Miss Louisa please let me ease you back in bed so you can rest, but she refuse. She say she got too much to do and too little time to do it.
Only when the end came near did her pride slip. Then she cry out for Jesus, for mercy, then she moan from the pain. She say what Jesus suffered on the cross was nothing compare to what she living through, with something eating her alive inside. She say let it be soon, let it be soon, it hurt too much to take one more breath, like teeth cutting into her flesh. And then late one night she tell me something, clutching my hand so hard I thought she'd crack my bones. She said Mrs. Charles left me some money in her will when she died but that her and her father fix it so I wouldn't get it. She cry out and ask me to forgive her. She wail so loud that Mr. Poker came in to see what was the matter. And by the time he was gone she was asleep, her breathing rough, catching every time she breathe out like she might not draw in another.
Next morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed like she feeling better. She had put her lipstick on and comb her hair herself. And I ask her what she meant last night about a will and she act like she don't know what I mean. She say bring her robe, she think she get up a spell. But she never rose from that bed again. Because near about 11:00 she start breathing real ragged again and she lay there a long time with her eyes open with her head turn toward the window, but she don't see nothing, just breathe slower and slower, rougher and rougher. Mr. Poker went to get the doctor but by the time he get back she was gone. Her breath catch a final time, she breathe in once more, a long strained breath, then she still. She so still, lying there with her eyes open that don't see nothing no more. I had to close them myself.
I habent told nobody about the will. I don't know who to tell or what to say. Ain't nothing to say, like as not. The will is made and the money gone and Mrs. Charles and Miss Louisa is dead and I'm here in this crazy house with a man who ain't right in his head and a child who ought not be here. I say to Mr. Charles this child don't blong in this house, she need to be where somebody can look after her. And if she go I go. My hip bother me too much to be running around this cold house. Yesterday it pop as I was carrying a tray up the stairs and I nearly dropped it. I put some salve on my side Brother Webb prepare for me but it ain't help none.
Give my love to Drucie. I in close five dollars for her books. Tell her to study hard and get her lessons every night cause she smart enough to do something sides carry trays and run around for white folks.
Love,
Essie
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Sunday afternoon, February 25, 1979
My children--my dear children. My dear Sid, my dear Mary Renfroe--
I'm lying here in bed, listening to you all running in and out the front door, checking to see if the snow the weather man has forecast is falling yet. The door slams, opens, slams again; I can feel an icy chill creeping under the coverlet from the winter air you've let in the house. Now I can hear one of you yelling from outside. Have you spotted the first snowflake, perhaps? So much excitement, so much commotion over what I am afraid will be not much. No, not much in the way of winter weather. I don't think there will snow; I think all of this blustery dampness will end in nothing but chill rain, at most maybe some sleet and freezing drizzle. A glassy coating on the trees--that will be something to see, at least. Nevertheless you two are convinced that snow is on the way. I'm sorry, I truly am. I know how much you all had been looking forward to it, and perhaps staying home from school tomorrow. But there will be, for you, other ice storms, other snows.
It's funny, just this moment I'm remembering the ice storms of my childhood, how we'd go outside and carefully peel away the icy molds the frozen rain had made on the leaves of the camellia in front of our house. How delicate they were, and how faithful to the leaves' shape--every vein and ripple was duplicated in the ice's surface. You could see every detail if you held the ice-leaves up to the light. We'd admire them a while, then pop them in our mouths, a leaf meal. Why I'm remembering this I don't know; it may be the stuff I'm taking, these godawful drugs. A thousand memories, a thousand trembling fallen leaves of memory I thought I'd lost forever, have come back to me these past few months from wherever they'd been blown to. Some of them I don't want to come back, some I do. It seems I don't have any choice about what I get to remember, so I just let them come. I just let them come.
It's not an approach to dealing with things that I find easy. I'd much rather marshall them into orderly piles--color-coded piles, perhaps! This pile I'll sort through on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday at 10:00 p.m., after you two have gone to bed. It would be quieter then. But I've discovered these past few years that there are a lot of things that are beyond my power to shape or organize. I just have to take them, however they come, and when, and no matter what they are. Lately I've just been sort of welcoming them. Oh, you want me to accept that too, on top of everything else? Well hand it over, I say, hand it over; I'll find somewhere to put it. That top shelf, maybe? But there are some things that are so much harder than others to take that I can hardly begin to think how I'll accept them. But I'm learning. I'm learning. And by the time I have to hold out my hands for them I hope I will have learned to take them gracefully.
Which brings me to why I'm writing. I think we all know by now that I may not be able to be here with you much longer. None of us really knows, of course; I've had so many setbacks and rallies these past few years that I've given up making any guesses about what may or what may not happen in the near future! But I think that it's safe to say that I've reached a place where the treatments that were working aren't really working anymore, and there isn't much else to try. And I'm sicker and weaker, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think we all sense and know that. I've tried to be honest with you about it, your father has too. At times we've let hope get the best of us, and perhaps allowed ourselves to be a little more optimistic than we really should have been. But of course there was reason for hope! We had a miracle, after all. I've had these last few years with you that I really wasn't supposed to have; I stole time that wasn't rightfully mine, and got away with it! That was a true miracle, and I can't be angry or bitter about it now that it seems that I'm on the other side of it, that I've had it and now it's over. It was a miracle, and I'm deeply grateful; I can't ask for more.
Because you see I'll be with you now, much more than I could have been if I'd had to go when the doctors were thinking I might originally. You've seen more of me (maybe more than you would have liked to at times!), you know me better (maybe things you didn't want to know!) now than you did then; you have more memories or me--the memories of near-adults, not the hazy, murky memories of children. And so I'm confident that I'm going to be with you, I'm going to stick. I'm going to go on being with you in a way I never could have if I hadn't had these years. That's the real miracle.
I'm going to be with you. When I say that I don't mean like some spirit or fairy-godmother or angel or anything silly like that. I had a foolish old aunt who told me when my own mother died that she would always be "watching over me" from above, an idea I came to find rather macabre and upsetting, to tell you the truth. The notion that one is being "watched over" by some angel, however benign, isn't very pleasant, let me tell you. No, I mean I'm going to be with you in the way that someone who has loved you, who has known you well, is always with you, worked into your muscles and sinews and skin, embedded so deeply in your memory that you can't say goodbye to them even if you wanted to.
And you will want to--that is something I know. You'll think about me and dream about me (oh the dreams!) till you wish you didn't. There will come a time when you'll be very angry with me, full of resentment and bitterness. You'll say, why did she say this, do this, why didn't she do that, why did she leave us? Why was she such so stupid, so thoughtless, so impossible? It is perfectly all right and natural for you to be angry with me: that is what I want to tell you. It is all right. I don't mind. It is all right to be sad for me, to pity me, to laugh at me, to ridicule me, and to love, to hate me, even, in succession, or all at once, as you grow older. It is good. Because it means that I will be growing and changing along with you as you go through life and think and feel differently about me, instead of staying the same, like a photograph on a wall that never moves, that never changes its expression.
I'm going to be with you--I'm not going far. It's just an instant away, it's just a moment. It's just a few molecules of air away. It's nothing. I'll be there, whatever happens, whatever you decide to do or be, whatever mistakes you make, whatever unpleasant things come your way. And you will make them, they will come your way. But I know that you're good and talented and smart and brave enough to not be ground down by them, not be diminished by them, not be deceived into living a less full or courageous life than you deserve because of them.
Once I can recover a little energy and feel a little less queasy I am going to come downstairs and see what you all are up to. You've been so good most of the afternoon, letting Mommy rest, but now that's over. You're bickering, I call tell that--you just threw something, Mary Renfroe, I think, a big sofa pillow or book. I'll put a stop to all that. The next thing I'll do is tell you to put that awful handheld football game your father let you buy away, Sid. I can hear its beeping all the way up here. Then I'll clean up the newspaper funnies you've strewn all over the floor and see what sort of mess you've made in the kitchen: I'm sure it's a wreck. If I'm not mistaken somebody was running the blender. Then maybe I'll see what can be done in the way of supper before your father comes home from his office; I think it would cheer him so much if he could see me put a meal together. I'm going to do all these things when I come down. But right now I need to rest a little longer. I need to rest. And do you know it's rather pleasant to lie here and simply listen to you all carp at each other and misbehave and stomp around like elephants? It's lovely, it's heaven, in fact--I could go on listening to you forever, if I could.
I think it really is snowing now! I just saw some flakes out the window, falling by the streetlight down by the corner, which has just come on. You two were right; I ought to have believed you. And now you've opened the front door again to see the falling snow--I can feel the chill draft against my face up here in bed.
I love you both so very much. Never forget that. Never forget it.
Mom
P.S. I don't know when you'll get this. Maybe much later, maybe not for a long time--when you're ready. Maybe never; I simply don't know.
And now I'm going to put down this notebook and pen and turn out the light for a while.
I'm lying here in bed, listening to you all running in and out the front door, checking to see if the snow the weather man has forecast is falling yet. The door slams, opens, slams again; I can feel an icy chill creeping under the coverlet from the winter air you've let in the house. Now I can hear one of you yelling from outside. Have you spotted the first snowflake, perhaps? So much excitement, so much commotion over what I am afraid will be not much. No, not much in the way of winter weather. I don't think there will snow; I think all of this blustery dampness will end in nothing but chill rain, at most maybe some sleet and freezing drizzle. A glassy coating on the trees--that will be something to see, at least. Nevertheless you two are convinced that snow is on the way. I'm sorry, I truly am. I know how much you all had been looking forward to it, and perhaps staying home from school tomorrow. But there will be, for you, other ice storms, other snows.
It's funny, just this moment I'm remembering the ice storms of my childhood, how we'd go outside and carefully peel away the icy molds the frozen rain had made on the leaves of the camellia in front of our house. How delicate they were, and how faithful to the leaves' shape--every vein and ripple was duplicated in the ice's surface. You could see every detail if you held the ice-leaves up to the light. We'd admire them a while, then pop them in our mouths, a leaf meal. Why I'm remembering this I don't know; it may be the stuff I'm taking, these godawful drugs. A thousand memories, a thousand trembling fallen leaves of memory I thought I'd lost forever, have come back to me these past few months from wherever they'd been blown to. Some of them I don't want to come back, some I do. It seems I don't have any choice about what I get to remember, so I just let them come. I just let them come.
It's not an approach to dealing with things that I find easy. I'd much rather marshall them into orderly piles--color-coded piles, perhaps! This pile I'll sort through on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday at 10:00 p.m., after you two have gone to bed. It would be quieter then. But I've discovered these past few years that there are a lot of things that are beyond my power to shape or organize. I just have to take them, however they come, and when, and no matter what they are. Lately I've just been sort of welcoming them. Oh, you want me to accept that too, on top of everything else? Well hand it over, I say, hand it over; I'll find somewhere to put it. That top shelf, maybe? But there are some things that are so much harder than others to take that I can hardly begin to think how I'll accept them. But I'm learning. I'm learning. And by the time I have to hold out my hands for them I hope I will have learned to take them gracefully.
Which brings me to why I'm writing. I think we all know by now that I may not be able to be here with you much longer. None of us really knows, of course; I've had so many setbacks and rallies these past few years that I've given up making any guesses about what may or what may not happen in the near future! But I think that it's safe to say that I've reached a place where the treatments that were working aren't really working anymore, and there isn't much else to try. And I'm sicker and weaker, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think we all sense and know that. I've tried to be honest with you about it, your father has too. At times we've let hope get the best of us, and perhaps allowed ourselves to be a little more optimistic than we really should have been. But of course there was reason for hope! We had a miracle, after all. I've had these last few years with you that I really wasn't supposed to have; I stole time that wasn't rightfully mine, and got away with it! That was a true miracle, and I can't be angry or bitter about it now that it seems that I'm on the other side of it, that I've had it and now it's over. It was a miracle, and I'm deeply grateful; I can't ask for more.
Because you see I'll be with you now, much more than I could have been if I'd had to go when the doctors were thinking I might originally. You've seen more of me (maybe more than you would have liked to at times!), you know me better (maybe things you didn't want to know!) now than you did then; you have more memories or me--the memories of near-adults, not the hazy, murky memories of children. And so I'm confident that I'm going to be with you, I'm going to stick. I'm going to go on being with you in a way I never could have if I hadn't had these years. That's the real miracle.
I'm going to be with you. When I say that I don't mean like some spirit or fairy-godmother or angel or anything silly like that. I had a foolish old aunt who told me when my own mother died that she would always be "watching over me" from above, an idea I came to find rather macabre and upsetting, to tell you the truth. The notion that one is being "watched over" by some angel, however benign, isn't very pleasant, let me tell you. No, I mean I'm going to be with you in the way that someone who has loved you, who has known you well, is always with you, worked into your muscles and sinews and skin, embedded so deeply in your memory that you can't say goodbye to them even if you wanted to.
And you will want to--that is something I know. You'll think about me and dream about me (oh the dreams!) till you wish you didn't. There will come a time when you'll be very angry with me, full of resentment and bitterness. You'll say, why did she say this, do this, why didn't she do that, why did she leave us? Why was she such so stupid, so thoughtless, so impossible? It is perfectly all right and natural for you to be angry with me: that is what I want to tell you. It is all right. I don't mind. It is all right to be sad for me, to pity me, to laugh at me, to ridicule me, and to love, to hate me, even, in succession, or all at once, as you grow older. It is good. Because it means that I will be growing and changing along with you as you go through life and think and feel differently about me, instead of staying the same, like a photograph on a wall that never moves, that never changes its expression.
I'm going to be with you--I'm not going far. It's just an instant away, it's just a moment. It's just a few molecules of air away. It's nothing. I'll be there, whatever happens, whatever you decide to do or be, whatever mistakes you make, whatever unpleasant things come your way. And you will make them, they will come your way. But I know that you're good and talented and smart and brave enough to not be ground down by them, not be diminished by them, not be deceived into living a less full or courageous life than you deserve because of them.
Once I can recover a little energy and feel a little less queasy I am going to come downstairs and see what you all are up to. You've been so good most of the afternoon, letting Mommy rest, but now that's over. You're bickering, I call tell that--you just threw something, Mary Renfroe, I think, a big sofa pillow or book. I'll put a stop to all that. The next thing I'll do is tell you to put that awful handheld football game your father let you buy away, Sid. I can hear its beeping all the way up here. Then I'll clean up the newspaper funnies you've strewn all over the floor and see what sort of mess you've made in the kitchen: I'm sure it's a wreck. If I'm not mistaken somebody was running the blender. Then maybe I'll see what can be done in the way of supper before your father comes home from his office; I think it would cheer him so much if he could see me put a meal together. I'm going to do all these things when I come down. But right now I need to rest a little longer. I need to rest. And do you know it's rather pleasant to lie here and simply listen to you all carp at each other and misbehave and stomp around like elephants? It's lovely, it's heaven, in fact--I could go on listening to you forever, if I could.
I think it really is snowing now! I just saw some flakes out the window, falling by the streetlight down by the corner, which has just come on. You two were right; I ought to have believed you. And now you've opened the front door again to see the falling snow--I can feel the chill draft against my face up here in bed.
I love you both so very much. Never forget that. Never forget it.
Mom
P.S. I don't know when you'll get this. Maybe much later, maybe not for a long time--when you're ready. Maybe never; I simply don't know.
And now I'm going to put down this notebook and pen and turn out the light for a while.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Saturday, March 31, 1956
Dear Mama,
Thank you for the chocolates. I shared them with some of the other girls on my wing. Nobody wanted to eat the kind with pink jelly stuff inside them, but there is a fat girl named Elspeth who will eat anything and I gave them to her. She has asthma and is excused from P.E. class--lucky. Is asthma something you can catch? If you send chocolates again please send Whitman's. Theirs are better than Schrafft's.
Last Saturday Hermione's mother came for the day and invited me to have lunch with them in town. She brought her man friend along. His name is Nicola and he is very good-looking, with black curly hair and very white teeth. Also he is very much younger than Hermione's mother. I asked Hermione if they would get married and she said no, he is just one of her mother's amours--that is the term she used. We went to the restaurant in the hotel in town, the Lockley. You should have seen the waitresses in there when he walked in, they nearly fell all over themselves trying to be the one to take his order. Usually they look so sulky and mean. There is one there with a big bottom and and a tower of frosted hair who is especially nasty. One time she said that Hermione had bedroom eyes already at thirteen and that if she didn't stop looking at the busboys the way she did she was going to end up in trouble, and it was lucky it was her mother was so rich, because she could probably pay to fix it if she did. Even she tried to act nice, and smiled at us. When she did that I could see why she never does smile--she has a big gap between her teeth, which are big like a rabbit's.
Nicola kissed me on both cheeks when he left, like they do in France. He is trying to be a painter. Do you think he knows Alfred? Probably not. I don't think Alfred knows anybody that young. Hermione says she is going to invite me home one weekend to her mother's weekend place on Long Island. There is an old lady who lives there, a sculptor, who gives garden parties on the weekends and Hermione says that her mother will take us. She says that she will lend me one of her dresses if we go--nothing I have is nice enough.
I am clearing the tables in the dining hall in the evening as part of my work scholarship. I do not mind. I have a way of stacking the plates up on the trays so quickly that everyone wonders how I do it. They think I am going to break them, the way I fling them into piles, but I never do. Some girls stay late after they've finished eating to watch me do it. It is fun. The women in the kitchen call me Rita on account of my red hair.
Alfred wrote me a short letter back in the fall but I have not heard from him since. It was written on a piece of old cardboard with some kind of Chinese characters on one side, I could hardly read it. He said he had sold a painting, is that true? It probably didn't help much if he did. I am sorry that he is no longer living at home but you always said it would come to this in the end.
I don't know if I can come home during the holidays. Hermione said something about me spending spring break with her but I don't know if it will come to anything. If I do come home you must have the piano tuned. Last time I was there the lower octaves so out of tune I could barely stand to play it. I am working on some Schubert impromptus for my piano lesson. Miss Plotz says I have talent but have no discipline, and no real technique. She says it may be too late to change my bad habits at my age, even though I am only 14. But she often says mean things like that to get me to practice more.
Tell Maury he owes me a letter. He has only written me two since I've been here and I've written him I don't know how many. Hug Katschen for me--I miss her. I hope her arthritis is better.
Love,
Dorothea
Thank you for the chocolates. I shared them with some of the other girls on my wing. Nobody wanted to eat the kind with pink jelly stuff inside them, but there is a fat girl named Elspeth who will eat anything and I gave them to her. She has asthma and is excused from P.E. class--lucky. Is asthma something you can catch? If you send chocolates again please send Whitman's. Theirs are better than Schrafft's.
Last Saturday Hermione's mother came for the day and invited me to have lunch with them in town. She brought her man friend along. His name is Nicola and he is very good-looking, with black curly hair and very white teeth. Also he is very much younger than Hermione's mother. I asked Hermione if they would get married and she said no, he is just one of her mother's amours--that is the term she used. We went to the restaurant in the hotel in town, the Lockley. You should have seen the waitresses in there when he walked in, they nearly fell all over themselves trying to be the one to take his order. Usually they look so sulky and mean. There is one there with a big bottom and and a tower of frosted hair who is especially nasty. One time she said that Hermione had bedroom eyes already at thirteen and that if she didn't stop looking at the busboys the way she did she was going to end up in trouble, and it was lucky it was her mother was so rich, because she could probably pay to fix it if she did. Even she tried to act nice, and smiled at us. When she did that I could see why she never does smile--she has a big gap between her teeth, which are big like a rabbit's.
Nicola kissed me on both cheeks when he left, like they do in France. He is trying to be a painter. Do you think he knows Alfred? Probably not. I don't think Alfred knows anybody that young. Hermione says she is going to invite me home one weekend to her mother's weekend place on Long Island. There is an old lady who lives there, a sculptor, who gives garden parties on the weekends and Hermione says that her mother will take us. She says that she will lend me one of her dresses if we go--nothing I have is nice enough.
I am clearing the tables in the dining hall in the evening as part of my work scholarship. I do not mind. I have a way of stacking the plates up on the trays so quickly that everyone wonders how I do it. They think I am going to break them, the way I fling them into piles, but I never do. Some girls stay late after they've finished eating to watch me do it. It is fun. The women in the kitchen call me Rita on account of my red hair.
Alfred wrote me a short letter back in the fall but I have not heard from him since. It was written on a piece of old cardboard with some kind of Chinese characters on one side, I could hardly read it. He said he had sold a painting, is that true? It probably didn't help much if he did. I am sorry that he is no longer living at home but you always said it would come to this in the end.
I don't know if I can come home during the holidays. Hermione said something about me spending spring break with her but I don't know if it will come to anything. If I do come home you must have the piano tuned. Last time I was there the lower octaves so out of tune I could barely stand to play it. I am working on some Schubert impromptus for my piano lesson. Miss Plotz says I have talent but have no discipline, and no real technique. She says it may be too late to change my bad habits at my age, even though I am only 14. But she often says mean things like that to get me to practice more.
Tell Maury he owes me a letter. He has only written me two since I've been here and I've written him I don't know how many. Hug Katschen for me--I miss her. I hope her arthritis is better.
Love,
Dorothea
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