Letters from home

It’s hard to know where to start, hard to explain it all to other people when I’ve got such a good handle on the matter. A handle it took a long time to acquire, and time is key here. Nevertheless, I’ll do my best to tell the story, because I am painfully aware that I am the only one who can actually tell it and because it’s worth being told.

*****

The box contains letters of the sort that no longer are written: in pencil, on something like air mail paper, sometimes ten pages in the most elegant cursive imaginable. If I had that penmanship, as they used to call it, I would want to show it off to anybody who’d look at it. The author of the letters in the box was anything but proud of the noble handwriting and never really thought about its utter elegance and the fact that it had been learned well before the age of sixteen as compared to the fact that high school graduates can no longer decipher anything written by hand. 

Thus, there is an enormous presence of time, not only in the worn colors and paper on which the letters are written, but also in the use of a pencil to write long letters in longhand. Use your own memory to calculate when this practice would still have been observed. How often do you yourself write anything by hand besides jotting down some numbers and adding them up? Do you know how to write? (I realize it’s impolite to ask.)

That’s getting a bit off track. Apologies. Here’s another consideration:

Who nowadays gets enough letters from a single person to put them all in a cardboard box for safekeeping? Who refers to them enough times and with enough reverence to leave an indelible mark on listeners? Why do special listeners know of the odd storage place for the letters: on the low rung of a sideboard in the dining room? Why do listeners understand that reverence as a strong deterrent to anyone who might not respect the box and its contents? A reverence of intimacy, but even more so, of time.

She knew what was in the letters, of course, since she had read them all, probably more than once. Now she was unable to open even a single envelope, although occasionally she would bend down to get the box, open the flaps, and pick up one or two. If her attitude was reverential, the words read years before and never again were sacred. Because the letters’ author was no longer around, the words were in the language of a ghost. Written by a ghost. 

She never cared to explain where her own letters were, although she had probably written as many as had been received. She must have known that they no longer existed, that her replies had been lost or sacrificed, too heavy to carry. Her correspondent had been gone for several years and had traveled to a number of countries. He had seen so much, had met quite a few people. Some of them he had liked and others he had despised. He had worked so hard. Much of the time he had no opportunity to get a regular meal, but grumbled little. There was so much work to do.

Sometimes she would quote snatches of letters, or would paraphrase them, never offering them to anyone else to read. The author’s voice had become hers, her mind went back to find his, and then censored it as she smothered page after unopened page in memories. Oddly enough, nobody violated the cardboard sanctuary. The important thing was to have faith in the importance of the papers that had traveled far. It was a miracle they’d ever been written, a miracle they’d been delivered to a residence in the eastern United States, a miracle they hadn’t been vandalized.

Gold, that was what the box held. The gold of long epistles describing the geography without adjectives, perfectly and sparsely. Passages depicting long hikes, arrivals in new places, dark nights, and homesickness. Letter after letter that had arrived unscathed, had come home before it was home, before they were enshrined on a tiny cardboard altar. 

She had been tempted a few times to reconstruct a few of her own letters, thinking she could recall that time in her life quite clearly. She certainly could describe walking to work because she had no car, or going shopping for groceries, even going out with friends occasionally. There was nothing extraordinary going on in her life, but her simple days must have been so appealing to him. Her boredom and loneliness were counterpoint to his job obligations and his loneliness.

She even considered making letters up, writing the things she’d never written because she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. He might worry, and she wanted to spare him that above all. He had enough on his mind, enough responsibilities as it was. Still, she reproached herself for not being a little more lively with her descriptions. She could have described a film or a new song that had just become popular. She could describe an especially good meal at a local restaurant or one she’d made herself.

She did not do this. The time to track down her own letters was long past. Her job then had been extremely boring, and she did not want him to think she was enjoying her mundane existence. She remembered everything, even Sunday excursions by car, but she didn’t want to put it into words. Not now. That was was closed. That grave had been filled.

Oh, just one last glance at the headings that included the date and place. Once in a while, the time was indicated, as if a letter in cursive on paper were stamped like an email is with that information. An email might have specific information like that, but it cannot show the dings and smudges of time nor the scars from the moment of writing - the scratch-outs, the creases, the hand writing above or below lines rather than sitting neatly along one. 

When the letters were written, they had blanks and lies. Deliberate, all of them. He had not wanted her to know some things, he simply could not tell her. She had to guess, and she was not good at that. She had traveled little, and couldn’t locate many countries on a map, even the ones her world traveller correspondent had been visiting. With no photos, color or black and white, she could only imagine the space through his eyes and heart. He was far away, but she never doubted he’d come back to her. Never doubted they would get married. Was never ever jealous. She was wearing an engagement ring, after all.

Epilogue of sorts

I wish I could say I listened well when the letters were mentioned. Wish I’d asked to see the letters, to read them. There was always that same feeling, though, when we sense something is enormously precious. We fear our gesture, our request, might shatter what has been protected because it is sacrosanct. 

I wish I had opened up every letter, looked at its date, and placed them in chronological order, so I could piece the time of the epistles together and do what I should always have done: read between the lines. Yet I never read any of the lines except for one or two pages, after which I stopped. You see, they aren’t mine although I like to think they were left to me because I would understand their importance.

It never occurred to me to ask my mother if she cared whether I read the eighty letters written between 1941 and 1945. Ask her if she knew (remembered) the travel route her husband-to-be had followed, starting in Britain, maybe going to Scotland, then Tunisia, Sicily and somehow France, followed by Belgium and Berlin. She hadn’t been able to admire any colorful postage stamps on the envelopes because they had special stamps affixed by censors.

All she had managed to store in the box that was almost a surrogate tomb for the writer of the letters was a heart as big as a world war - without any gory details - and her moist eyes as she looked at it. I never dared tug too hard on her for words; it wasn’t fair. And since I never had such a heart-wrenching love, I kind of feel I don’t deserve to have those letters, much less read them. I too am remembering what they contain. I too stood on one of the sites that was silenced in those pages. I too want him to return. Four years is too long to be apart.

One consolation: the letters still exist. They are in my closet. A miracle.

Another consolation: I am wearing that ring. It has one diamond in the center and two tiny ones on either side. I never plan to take it off. 

I may read the letters some day. If time doesn’t weigh too much when I finally get around to it. I fear their reality may crush me, like German tanks and Italian bombs.