My Parents' Airmail 1959-1960

 

I come from a family of letter writers. My mother Shirley and her sister Charlotte swapped letters every week. They remembered their mother Eva writing to her parents Esther and Lehman in the 1920s.  And she expected me to carry on the tradition when I left for college. The rule: No letters, no tuition payments.

Long after my mother died of cancer in 1984, a cousin sent me a stack of airmail letters she found that my mother and father had exchanged. They are from 1959 and 1960, when my parents had separated. My father, Mark, was in France, where my parents had moved after their 1955 wedding; my mother had returned stateside with my baby brother Cooper and me to Tyler, Texas, where Aunt Charlotte and her family lived.

Mom saved all the letters from Dad and made copies of some of her typed responses. Reading them 60 years after the fact, I truly recognized her plain-spoken eloquence.

Let’s start with the marital context. My father’s letters echo the browbeating tone that sounded so familiar from my visits to him as a teen, when he lived in Manhattan. He alternated between trying to hustle money for his dubious business ventures and berating Mom for her personality, her post-childbirth appearance and her baffling need to work. 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.”

My mother’s letters start with a wistful, affectionate mood. June 7, 1960: “When I married you it wasn’t for your money or your good looks—call it love if you like. . . You have many good traits and I still love you. I would like nothing better than to be with you again and have our family together.”

But she turned to a steely determination to move on as a divorced working mom. No, she would NOT attend charm school (he really did suggest that!), hock her wedding ring, sell her late parents’ stock investments and return to France. I broke the following paragraph from November 28, 1960 into poetic lines,

“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.

Maybe later when you get your problems worked out

 and get a job where you can take care of your family

 you will come courtin’ again, until that time it is quits for us.”

Hearing my mother’s Texas accent in every line, I thought, “She could have been writing songs for Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette.”

Dad returned to Texas, they divorced, he soon remarried a retired ballet academy owner and moved to New York. Cooper and I saw him one weekend in 10 years.

Mom and I exchanged hundreds of letters while I was in college and then a writer in Brooklyn. I saved all her letters, and typed mine on carbon paper so I have all my replies.

And she still had things to say about Dad. In November 1983 Cooper had visited me. I tried to get us together with our father, but that didn’t happen. She wrote, “I know you all enjoyed being together. Too bad Mark is such a stinker and didn’t get to be with you all. It was his loss.”

The last letter from her was December 27, 1983, two weeks before she died. I was trying to support myself as a freelance writer in Brooklyn. Her final thoughts:

“Wanna buy the Dallas Cowboys? We don’t have to worry about watching them anymore this year. I hope ’84 will be a good year for you, may even find a job. Love, lots of kisses, Mom.”

After Mom died, I continued to write weekly to Aunt Charlotte until she died, 13 years later.

What to make of this? Mom had an authentic voice. Chatty, earthy, absolutely honest. She could capture a mood in a few phrases that left no confusion about where she stood. I can only aspire to that. What a legacy. If any of you have letters from friends and family, treasure them. And write some yourself—folks will be shocked to get them and will express their delight when they email you a note of thanks. Shirley and Charlotte would be mighty pleased with you all for doing that