My Parents' Airmail, 1959-1960

A cousin in Texas recently sent me stacks of letters that my late mother saved. After she died in 1984, Mom’s sister Charlotte and other family members preserved them and now they’ve come to me. They are from 1959 and 1960, when my parents had separated. My father was in France, where my parents had moved after their 1955 wedding, while my mother had returned stateside with my brother and me to Tyler, Texas, where Charlotte and her family lived.

The letters come from the era of airmail, before email, texts and WhatsApp obliterated the need for elegant envelopes with multiple stamps. Most were from my father writing in longhand on his stationery. My mother typed her letters on carbon paper so she would have a copy for herself. Twenty years later, I would also make carbon copies of letters I typed to my mother; she taught me well the value of saving communications. 

These letters are a harrowing glimpse into what parents in conflict say to each other. In my father’s letters, I can hear the wheedling, browbeating tone that sounded so familiar from tense visits to him as a teen, when he lived in Manhattan. He alternated between trying to cadge money from Mom for his dubious car-related business projects, and berating my mother for her personality, her post-childbirth appearance and her baffling need to work to support herself. On December 4, 1959, he wrote, “Since you are still sulking in your shell I’ll say a few things, as you can see I am in no position to send you money. . . If you have confidence in me then do what you once proposed, sell everything and come back, or bring the stocks and some money or get a loan on the stocks.”

On January 12, 1960 he wrote, “I only remember before our marriage and that other girl I knew and loved, not the middle aged woman I lived with. So I wipe away the five years because I hardly remember anything happy or pleasant and unhappiness fades away. Now there’s only the boys to show for it and soon they too will lose their meaning to me because I can’t see them grow or help raise them. They are just a couple of boys who have my name.”

What a charmer! And he was true to his word. My brother and I saw him one weekend in 10 years, in 1970, when I would have had a bar mitzvah (I didn't). 

In March he wrote, “There was a lot you gave to your father, [who died in October 1959, six months after his wife died] where is the money from the estate? Anyway, I am super broke.” In other letters he told my mother to go to charm school and made snide comments about their sex life. Oh, and he ordered her to hock her wedding ring for cash.

My mother’s letters start in a wistful, even loving mood, but they soon turned to exasperation and her steely determination to move on with the life of a divorced working mom in Mission, Texas, the hometown she returned to from Tyler in 1960. She would not hock her wedding ring and return to France. 

On November 28 she wrote, “If all your troubles were just plain hard luck I could be sorry for you but I think you brought so much of this on yourself. The day I married you you didn’t have a dime and now you are broke again but badly in debt, this time you work it out alone. I am going on with the divorce—this life is going to get me if I don’t, you know a person can stand just so much.” Over 50 years later my partner Naomi, who met my father numerous times, aptly described him as a narcissist, and I've summarized him as a "naive con man" who, nevertheless, had a huge influence on me. 

These letters are grueling to read, knowing my brother and I were ensnared in them. Admitting he had made mistakes, my father returned to the U.S. in 1960, but my parents never lived together again. He lived near us in Texas, they divorced, he remarried and in 1962 moved to Michigan and then in 1967 to Manhattan. 

If my father skimped on the personal communications, my mother kept up a long family tradition of letters. I have scores of letters she wrote to me when I was in college and starting my career as a journalist in New York. They are much more enjoyable to read than the airmail collection. She remained a salty, engaged mother, sister, friend and letter writer until her death at 63, back in Tyler, where she lived with her sister. 

And my father? He never changed his tone, only his targets. When I was a teenager, he said I walked like a girl. He also waved a check for $100,000 in front of me and declared that would send me to college; he never paid a dime for my education. The worst insult he could throw at me was "you're just like your mother." In my 40s he told me to lose weight. In my 50s he hung up the phone on me when I told him my brother and I wouldn't bail him out of problems with the IRS. In 2017, he asked me to get a copy of my parents' divorce decree from Hidalgo County, Texas, to help him get an increase in his VA pension, and I did that. 

He lived into his 90s, long enough to become a great-grandfather. He showed as little interest in that role as he did in being a father and grandfather.  And why should he be interested? We were just boys who had his name. I know because he put that in writing.

In 2018 I spoke at his memorial service at the VA cemetery in Rockland County, NY. He left no personal effects for me, no summary of a relentlessly unreflective life, to the end a confounding enigma. The airmail collection told me more than I ever expected to learn. 

The Pandemic: The End to a Beginning

I realized how deeply the pandemic has colored my behavior when I realized I didn’t have to wear a mask outside, in uncrowded areas. Since I’ve had my second vaccine, that CDC guidance applied to me. The shock of the new happened when I was walking toward Katonah’s main business street and I instinctively reached for my mask.

But my partner Naomi reminded me I didn’t have to wear a mask. With our second shots done, we’ve moved into a new status.

Evidence of that is growing. One big change: Naomi and I ate dinner inside at an Italian restaurant. Inside! We were amazed at the strange sensation of sitting across from each other, rather than fetching takeout on Fridays and munching at home as cats nosed around trying to get a bite of something tasty.

So we’re transitioning to a new phase. I call it the end of a beginning. This hit home the two times I’ve been to the Westchester County Center in White Plains for my vaccines. Both times I marveled at the semi-religious nature of the moment. I joined hundreds of people streaming into the classical looking building dating to the 1920s. Whatever our backgrounds, we came with one act in mind, to get that Pfizer shot. Inside, the polite, well-trained volunteers kept the process moving smoothly. I didn’t have to guess where to go or what to do. One stage followed another, like a ritual leading to the climax of accepting the vaccine. I entered a small room where two priestesses of the pandemic gave me the shot and updated my vaccine card. I left the sanctum sanctorum and began the gradual return to the rest of the world.

Westchester County Center, White Plains

In White Plains, the return took place in the recovery room. It had dozens of chairs, well spaced apart. People sat, mostly absorbed in their phones. They looked up to check the clock that gave the time. We counted down the 15 minutes until we reached the exit time written on name tags we wore. And then we could leave, into a brighter day.

If the vaccine reminded me of a religious experience, something yesterday on Saturday really WAS a religious experience. I attended an outdoor service of my synagogue, Chabad of Bedford. For the first time, thanks to CDC guidance, we didn’t have to wear masks. I saw complete faces I hadn’t seen in over a year. As I arrived, I put on my tallis, prayer shawl, and instinctively kissed two parts of it. Without a mask, why not? But I thought, “Can I really do that?” Yeah, I could.

Monument of the exit name tags. 

And that was just the start. The service included the weekly reading of the Torah, or Bible, when congregants come to a table, or "bima," to read blessings in Hebrew before and after the reading of portions of the Torah. Going up to read the blessing is called an “aliyah.” In fact, aliyah in Hebrew means "going up." For a year we performed our aliyahs standing far away from the bima. But why was this service different from any other service (since March 2020)? Because at this service, people walked right up to the bima, touched the Torah scroll with the corner of our sprayer shawls, and recited the ancient Hebrew blessings. And I was honored to be one of congregants to have an aliyah. I’ll always remember this electrifying moment.

And there’s more! On the way back to my chair, I could shook hands with other congregants, just as I had with them after their aliyahs. We wished each other “Yasher koach.” Literally meaning "straight strength," the colloquial meanings are “good job” or “more power to you.”

Like I said, this is the end of a beginning. Other pandemic challenges remain. Mutations, booster shots, reopenings, setbacks, all mixed in with layers of social convulsions. Still, I’m looking forward to being on trains and subways, visiting museums and theaters—going places. Where will we go, what will that be like? I don’t know, but I’d rather be in May 2021 than May 2020.

So, to all those tenacious visionaries who imagined and drove Operation Warp Speed and the vaccines: YASHER KOACH.

Leaving the County Center.