he had taken great care with the sentences. He wrote in a meticulous print, and I was pleased by the balance of his words, their measured emotion: "There's nothing more sad than the silence of this place without you," he wrote from New London. "I can't wait for the end of this silence and the beginning of our life together." They were full of private references that weren't difficult to decipher: "Sorry I'm so camera shy when you're so beautiful," he wrote on one note that must have accompanied a photograph. "Twelve days, seven hours, thirty-five minutes away," he signed off on another, dated May 1959, just before their wedding. "Now I know why they call it the blue, blue sea," he had sent, by Western Union telegram, from the South Pacific.
I was searching for his long dispatches about Navy life, as a kind of warm-up to his eventual work as a journalist. They would read like a special report in serialâa peacetime look at the naval apparatus, full of observations and history and keen insightsâbut none of those letters was here. For the most part, when he wasn't telling my mother how much he missed her, he was describing his mates or generally lamenting the tedium of his daily life.
My mother, on the other hand, had written long, rambling letters in loopy handwriting, full of florid passages, that I could only glance at before feeling embarrassed and moving on to the next. "I am thinking now of how, when you drive, you rest one hand at the top of the steering wheel and every so often lift it to glance at one of those gauges. What do they call them? Speedometer? Odometer? RPM? Always keeping watch."
Often, she would stop in the middle of a long reverie and step back to note how silly in love she was: "You must forgive my carrying on. What would the other fellows think of you if they were to catch a glimpse of this wonderful mush you get in the mail?
"The mush is everywhere and I surrender to it. I see it before me and I must plunge in. And it's all your fault, darling. You're the one who turns me to this. I try to put my feelings into words, to say how much I miss you, how my entire life begins in May 1962, when we'll be together forever, but at the end of my words there are only more words. Have I told you this before?"
In the summer of 1961, my father was posted at a base in the Marshall Islands. He loved the New York Yankees, having come of age in the era of DiMaggio, and he couldn't stand that he was out of the States during Maris and Mantle's chase of Babe Ruth's home run record. My mother, who admitted she didn't like baseball, would nevertheless listen to Yankee games on the radio and report back long descriptions in order to keep my father up-to-date. "Maris's 53rd was on a low outside pitch in the seventh inning. The count was two balls and two strikes," she wrote in one of the letters. "It was a line drive that cleared the left field wall by ten feet, giving the Yankees a 4â2 lead."
Interspersed with her game summaries, she imagined herself joining my father in the South Pacific. She wrote of them walking the beaches of Fiji, sailing a sloop over an archipelago, setting up camp on empty lagoons. In later letters, when he had returned to the States and she was in her last year of college, she fantasized about crossing the country on a motorcycle and riding down the coast with him to Florida. I couldn't help smiling at the image of my mother on a motorcycle, or even of my mother in love. She had always simply been my mother. It was strange to imagine her as anything else.
She never dated after my father died. At least not so far as I knew. She had suitors, but only the most self-abasing kind, men who sought out rejection. I remember meeting one of them, a furry little geology professor named Alvin Bosky, who had been begging her for months to have dinner with him. We were at a cocktail party after the Missouri Awards, the biggest event of the year at the journalism school, and I'll never forget the
I was searching for his long dispatches about Navy life, as a kind of warm-up to his eventual work as a journalist. They would read like a special report in serialâa peacetime look at the naval apparatus, full of observations and history and keen insightsâbut none of those letters was here. For the most part, when he wasn't telling my mother how much he missed her, he was describing his mates or generally lamenting the tedium of his daily life.
My mother, on the other hand, had written long, rambling letters in loopy handwriting, full of florid passages, that I could only glance at before feeling embarrassed and moving on to the next. "I am thinking now of how, when you drive, you rest one hand at the top of the steering wheel and every so often lift it to glance at one of those gauges. What do they call them? Speedometer? Odometer? RPM? Always keeping watch."
Often, she would stop in the middle of a long reverie and step back to note how silly in love she was: "You must forgive my carrying on. What would the other fellows think of you if they were to catch a glimpse of this wonderful mush you get in the mail?
"The mush is everywhere and I surrender to it. I see it before me and I must plunge in. And it's all your fault, darling. You're the one who turns me to this. I try to put my feelings into words, to say how much I miss you, how my entire life begins in May 1962, when we'll be together forever, but at the end of my words there are only more words. Have I told you this before?"
In the summer of 1961, my father was posted at a base in the Marshall Islands. He loved the New York Yankees, having come of age in the era of DiMaggio, and he couldn't stand that he was out of the States during Maris and Mantle's chase of Babe Ruth's home run record. My mother, who admitted she didn't like baseball, would nevertheless listen to Yankee games on the radio and report back long descriptions in order to keep my father up-to-date. "Maris's 53rd was on a low outside pitch in the seventh inning. The count was two balls and two strikes," she wrote in one of the letters. "It was a line drive that cleared the left field wall by ten feet, giving the Yankees a 4â2 lead."
Interspersed with her game summaries, she imagined herself joining my father in the South Pacific. She wrote of them walking the beaches of Fiji, sailing a sloop over an archipelago, setting up camp on empty lagoons. In later letters, when he had returned to the States and she was in her last year of college, she fantasized about crossing the country on a motorcycle and riding down the coast with him to Florida. I couldn't help smiling at the image of my mother on a motorcycle, or even of my mother in love. She had always simply been my mother. It was strange to imagine her as anything else.
She never dated after my father died. At least not so far as I knew. She had suitors, but only the most self-abasing kind, men who sought out rejection. I remember meeting one of them, a furry little geology professor named Alvin Bosky, who had been begging her for months to have dinner with him. We were at a cocktail party after the Missouri Awards, the biggest event of the year at the journalism school, and I'll never forget the
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