May 19, 2020, The Broader Picture
San Francisco, California
After subjecting readers to small snippets of our garden for the past 63 days, it seems only fair to provide a broader picture. This photo was taken this morning about halfway from the back of the garden to the house, just where the patio ends and the more shaded paths begin behind me. If you look closely in the upper lefthand window of the house, you will see reflected a corner of the apartment building I manage to avoid capturing in my photos, the monstrosity that looms over us and which we (mostly) manage to ignore. Sometimes it’s best to tell the whole story, from every point of view.
I appreciate the warm response to the first two thirds of my parents’ love story during the war. We all see parallels to today - the pain, the fear, the isolation, the sacrifice, the love and yearning. In the past 24 hours, John and I have re-examined it from both my parents’ points of view, knowing what we know about who they were and how they lived their marriage. Neither of their actions, it turns out, were out of character: my dad insightful but self-absorbed, my mom fiery and self-protective.
In my family, this was always my mother’s story to tell until Alzheimers took it away from her. As she described Dad’s homecoming, he’d shrug slightly, and give us a sheepish grin. We never saw the letter itself until both of them were gone.
“Absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” was the only line Mom quoted as she launched into the world of hurt that letter caused. Everything Dad wrote was true - she had attended college while he was fighting, enjoyed dances and parties, rode horses, celebrated holidays with family, haunted all the old haunts. But Mom had felt lonely, too, and worried about Dad and about the future that had not been settled but implied. She had volunteered as a nurse and counted the casualties among her friends and family. Most of all, Mom had waited. And just before her worries were over, he dropped the honesty bomb and then got on a ship.
“It wasn’t a terrible thing [for him] to do,” she explained years later, “but it was hard to be on the other end. I wanted to put [our meeting] off …In the first place, I was crushed. I just sort of thought oh, my God, I’ve been writing these letters and, you know, how has he been receiving them? And then it was a question of everybody expecting him to come home, and me to rush up and all that kind of thing. And I wasn’t about to rush up,” she laughed, still defiant after all these years.
For his part, Dad had hesitated to head directly for Mom’s school in Virginia because he thought it might imply more of a commitment than he was ready to make. Still, she was his first phone call, after waiting in a long, long line. “I was cool as a cucumber,” she said when he asked her to come north to meet him. She said no and hung up, so he counted out his change and got back in line. In the third call, she reluctantly agreed to meet him in Chester, Pennsylvania, a middle ground, close to their home town.
By the time she snuck out of school and got a local train to Washington, Mom had missed the connection they’d agreed to, so she jumped on the next available train to Philadelphia, hoping Dad would wait. The train was standing room only - soldiers, mostly - and it wasn’t until the conductor saw her ticket that she learned the train made no stop in Chester. “We’re not even on the same track,” the conductor said, “but don’t worry,” and he left her to do just that. It was a long and anxious ride, knowing that Dad would already be waiting with no idea why she wasn’t there. Then, as it approached Chester, the train slowed down and the conductor returned to help Mom gather her belongings. “You didn’t really think we’d let you miss your young soldier, did you?” he grinned, helping her down from the train in an empty yard miles from the station. “Don’t worry. We’ll stay here until you’re safely across the tracks and have gotten over to that little grocery store across the way.”
It was nearing midnight. “Here’s this huge train,” my mother recounted, “filled with people, because there never were enough seats in those days during the war. And the whole train waited.” Picture Edward Hopper — dark night, an empty train yard, a single lighted storefront, a young girl clutching her bag, hesitating at the door. “The little conductor then waved his light at me and I waved back at him, and went in. But I still didn’t know, you know… He didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where he was.” Inside, she managed to call the Chester station. “Is there a GI wandering around, and he has a big red 1 on his shoulder, and looking like he’s upset?” There was. “And the end of the story is,” my mother continued, “that for all our ups and downs, he got off way down at the end of the block - off a bus or something - and I was still standing in the store. And I came out the door and he started to run… And that was the end of that…. Almost,” she said and laughed.
Dad fell in love with Mom three times in his life that I know of: first, in high school when he was football captain and she was head of the cheerleading squad; second, after the war under that light by the train tracks; and, finally, when Alzheimer’s took over her life and memories - even this one. “The disease strips you down to who you truly are,” my father once told me, “and your Mother is such a good, kind person. It sounds funny to say, but I’ve fallen for her all over again.”
And so, the broader picture today is simply this: love triumphs in the grander scheme of things. Even in war; even in pandemics. We want to understand and forgive. Or so we can always hope.
— thanks to Lauren de Moll for her meticulous research and transcriptions, and to Hans Buetow for having the foresight to interview my parents when they could still tell this story together.