The letters have been languishing unread, piled in a lavender shoebox, hidden in the back of one closet or another for over 40 years. My father wrote them to me when I went away to college, when long-distance phone calls were a major budget item and stamps cost five cents each.
When I went to Boston for college – the maximum 200 miles my father would tolerate – I promised to write frequently and my parents did likewise. My mother wrote to me perhaps four times during my freshman year, but Daddy made up for her lapse. I received letters from him at least once each week, often more than that.
I had left the house on Victory Blvd. knowing I would never return to live there. Family life was difficult with my brother and parents fighting almost all the time. His problems – anger, hyper-activity, anti-social behavior, drug-use – were not things that my middle class Jewish parents understood. Oh, they tried. They sought answers from the school, from doctors, from psychiatrists, but got little comfort. Today he would probably be diagnosed and put on meds, but in the 1960s, that was not the protocol.
The troubled relationship with his only son caused my father much pain. I believe that it also affected my parent’s marriage; and somehow, during my teenage years, I became my father’s confidant. He knew enough to shield me from the most intimate of his worries, but on long walks with him after supper, he would talk about his sadness and feelings of inadequacy in not being able to help Stevie.
The letters he wrote to me during my first and second years away at school were filled with his pain along with gossipy tidbits about family friends, movies he and my mother had seen, and a smattering of political wisdom. I was homesick and kept all his letters along with the rare few from my mother in a bottom drawer of my dorm desk. On the nights when I couldn’t sleep, rereading them comforted me.
In June, after my sophomore year, my father died a tragic, accidental death. I grieved and put the letters in a shoebox that came with me to whatever apartments I called home and finally to my present house, not far from where I went to college. I never looked at them. That is, until this past summer.
My daughter came home from college and, in a moment of weakness decided to help me tackle some chores I had been avoiding for years. “Let’s go through all your old pictures and junk,” she said to me one rainy morning.
I sighed heavily, “Sure, let’s do it.”
We came upon the letters and I explained that they were from Peter, as she always referred to the grandfather she never knew. One by one, I opened the yellowing pages, written between 1964 and 66 while Daddy had a few free moments at work. He scratched them out on six by twelve inch pads of scrap paper a printer friend dropped off when he visited. The letters, in ballpoint ink, were filled with my father’s rushed, but legible penmanship, written at quiet times in his “place”, neither a proper office nor atelier, but a little bit of both.
They were eerily alike. I read aloud phrases like “today was a good day” or “we had a tough time last night” describing what went on with my brother. There were references to my father’s jewelry business limping along – these were the years when the ascendancy of costume jewelry turned women from wearing the 14k gold pins and rings manufactured on 47th St. to stuff made by Monet and Trifari.
Money was tight and in one letter he suggested that I limit my ‘
calls home to once a week, since the last phone bill he had received was for an astronomical $7.00! He counseled me to be selective about dating boys who often had “other ideas” and reminded me to study hard in preparing myself for a career as a teacher. Along the way, there were references to the loss of his hero, JFK, and Johnson’s presidency.
“Mama, you’re crying.”
“Not really – It just makes me sad that you never met him. You know, I never truly got what he was saying in all these letters. He must have struggled so with Steve and with money problems. And he missed me so much! I was too young to understand it.”
I finished reading the packet of letters and refolded them all. The shoebox disappeared sometime ago, and I placed them in a heavy manila envelope. I don’t know if I can ever read them again, but they are a part of who I am. In some other-worldly way, I feel my father’s presence in my life. I can almost hear his voice again reminding me as we walked down our street. “Mommy will worry, we should get back.”
These, a few old Kodak pictures, and the stories I tell her, are all my daughter will ever know of Peter – a man who has always been in the background of her life and of mine.
