The Letters

       The letters have languished, long unread, piled in a two-tone lavender shoebox, hidden in the back of one closet or another. It’s been nearly 40 years since they were opened, absorbed, and put in a drawer.  My father wrote them to me when I went away to college, when long-distance phone calls were three-minute, major budget items and stamps cost a nickel.

         I went off to Boston to get my degree – the maximum 200 miles my father would tolerate – and promised to write frequently. My parents did likewise. Mom wrote to me perhaps four times during my freshman year, but Daddy made up for her lapses. I received letters from him at least once each week, often, more frequently than that.

         I had left the house on Victory Boulevard. knowing I would never return to live there. Family life was difficult with my brother and parents fighting almost all the time. Stevie’s 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 pained my father. I believe that it also affected my parent’s marriage. Somehow, most likely because there was no other safe outlet, 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 his son. He encouraged my going away to college, but was clearly worried about paying my college tuition.

         The letters he wrote to me during my first and second years away at school were filled with these concerns, interspersed with gossipy tidbits about family friends, movies and plays he and my mother had seen, and a smattering of political wisdom. I kept them all, along with the rare few from my mother, in a bottom drawer of my dorm desk. On the nights when I couldn’t sleep, when the homesick beast hovered too close, rereading them comforted me.

         In June, after my sophomore year, my father died a tragic, but maybe not-so-accidental death. I grieved as much as I would allow myself, put the letters in a Capezio shoebox and hid it on the back of a closet shelf in my mother’s apartment.  Some years later, Mom suggested throwing them out when she moved to a new condo. “You don’t want these old things, do you?”

         I grabbed the shoebox from her hands, angry at her suggestion. “Yes – of course I do. That’s all I have left of Daddy.” I took the letters back with me to Boston and stored them, pushed way to the back on shelves in closets wherever I lived. The lavender box took a beating, and I taped its corners tight. Finally, the letters landed in their present home. They’ve been stored on a closet shelf in the house I live in with my husband and where we brought up our daughter, not far from where I went to college. I’ve never looked at them, but knowing they exist has comforted me. That is, until one dreary summer day, five years ago.

         My daughter came home from college and, in a moment of weakness she decided to help me tackle some chores I had been avoiding for years. “Let’s go through all your old pictures and junk,” Perrine said to me one rainy morning.

         I sighed heavily, “Really? Are you sure you want to do that?” She did.

         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 1966 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 blue ballpoint ink, were filled with my father’s rushed, but legible penmanship, written at quiet times in his “place”, neither a proper office, workshop or atelier, but a little bit of each. I read them aloud.

         They were eerily alike. Phrases like “today was a good day” or “we had a tough time last night” describing what went on with my brother, were repeated frequently. There were references to my father’s jewelry business limping along. The trendy popularity of costume jewelry turned 47th into a glittery wasteland of forgotten precious metal, where one-man operations like his, were taking a beating.

         Since money was tight, in one letter he suggested that I limit my calls home to once a week. “The last phone bill I got”, he wrote, “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, to the war protesters he supported, and to Lyndon Johnson’s rocky 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 struggled so with Stevie 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 lavender shoebox disintegrated sometime ago, and I placed them back 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 walk down Victory Boulevard. “It’s getting dark. Mommy will worry. We should get back.”

         These aging letters, a few old Kodak pictures, and the stories I tell her, are all Perrine will ever know of her grandfather, Peter – a man who has always been hovering in the background of her life and of mine.