J. Powers - Suitable Accommodations - An Autobiographical Story of Family Life - The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963

Your

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

February 25, 1946

Dear Betty,

Monday, 4:30 in the afternoon, Fr Garrelts here for lunch and now out for a walk with Fr Egan. Fr Egan brings bad tidings about Fr Burner.1 It seems St Paul and Minneapolis are boiling on account of it. I can’t determine why exactly. Fr Egan says it doesn’t do any good and probably does a lot of harm. He holds it isn’t a purely parochial reaction, but I am still inclined to think that is what it is, nothing else coming to light on it. Newsstands are asked for Accent . Copies are at a premium. I should be happy about it, I suppose, but I’m not. It will blow over, I suppose. […]

When are you coming to see me? When am I coming to see you? I won’t feel like it until I turn out a couple of these stories. I think that’s all for now. I love you of course. Do not get upset about the wedding. I seem to detect the beginnings of hysteria already. Stop trying to finish your book on a weekend. No good comes of that.

I love you.

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

February 26, 1946

Dearest Betty,

Tuesday morning before I get into the day’s work. Did I tell you, I think not, that the barber suspected you when I told him the other day that I wanted it left rather long? He took special pains after that, he said, as he was cutting it for two people now. I thought at the time, what will I ever do in Stearns County for haircuts? You will have to learn how to cut my hair. I would not trust one of the agrarians (farmers) with it, not that I am particularly vainglorious. […]

The maid says the beer bottles must go and she hopes I won’t be mad at her for telling me, like they got downstairs (Dr Ruona). The exterminator man says it’s the bottles that draw cockroaches. I have a small fortune in bottles, beer and milk, which I intend to expend for a wedding gift for you. Well, today you have moved the date up to the 22nd of April. Why don’t you concentrate a little harder and make it the day after tomorrow? Then we can both settle down to our work, you calm in the knowledge that I married you for your literacy virtues and business sense, me calm in the knowledge that I married a “cold” woman who thought a husband was something every growing girl ought to have. […]

I must write Harry Sylvester and tell him I am now a public enemy myself. I am referring to the clerical forces now allied against me on account of Father Burner. I suppose it’s a healthy sign. Joyce had the same trouble in Dublin with his stories. Fortunately, I don’t think they can touch me. I am very glad that Sr Mariella approved of the Doubleday deal, but wonder what she means when she says that’s the only way I’d ever be able to make it, as though it were not all right that way. As for living off money I haven’t earned, that’s silly. When I write the stories, it’s earned then and there, and when they’re published is something else. Someday I’ll gather all you Teutons into a single classroom and lecture you a little on True Economics, a course I’m famous for. […]

I love you, Betty.

Jim

Jim’s aunt Margaret came from Chicago to stay with him for a few days.

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

March 9, 1946

Dearest Betty,

[…] My Aunt Mgt has gone to a morning movie downtown— Leave Her to Heaven —oh, God! I might have gone to see The Lost Weekend with her, but oh no … she could see enough drunks in the streets without going to a movie about one. So it is. How right Hollywood and the Ladies’ Home Journal and the rest of them all are. They aren’t negative, not them. I think I’ll be negative to the day I die, I think, when I sound someone like Aunt Mgt on things. What a damn terrible thing this system has done in the years to people. Everybody she ever knew “had a good position” with Armour, with the Pullman Company, with Field’s, with National Biscuit, or was “in business for himself” with a dandy line of mops and ironing boards. And they all, every damn last one of them, had—“nice homes.”

I am like Daniel Boone cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness, the first one who ever didn’t lose himself in a corporation or go into business for himself. I hope — I sincerely pray — you are not making a mistake about me. If you think I’d go along just because you were my wife and asked it, or because we had twelve children who needed milk and bread. You said something last Sunday about how I’d cook with the rest of them. I am not saying I’d poison the children, but you’d better take another reading if you think I can be domesticated and made to like it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not make JF do some things. It gives me a pain to have to say all these things, but sometimes I get to thinking you don’t know me at all, don’t know what you’re getting into, and if you do, you think changes can be made which, as a matter of fact, won’t be made. […]

I trust you can see I am not kidding about all this. I love you.

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

March 17, 1946

Mavourneen,

Sunday, Feast of Patrick, bishop, confessor, patron of Ireland … and I love you. I have just had breakfast: pancakes, bacon, eggs, pecan rolls, tea (tay). It is a good thing, quoth Aunt Mgt, that Betty can cook. I told her you could. I get up in the morning, feeling in an Olympic frame of mind, and the first thing I have to do is argue about whether I want cereal or not, whether we are to have pancakes or not, etc. I trust you will cook our meals and not create problems of that order for me. I don’t care one way or the other, but it is customary, evidently, among Aunt Mgt’s friends for people to talk as though they don’t care when they really do and are being polite and resigned, feeling very strongly on the question of jelly roll and pecan roll and you know the rest.

Now I am getting the menu for tomorrow morning — tomorrow morning and it is not afternoon yet of today. The root of all this planning seems to be: not to throw anything away. To hell with what you want, how you feel, munch away on that dead hunk of cake until it is all gone. Quoth Aunt Mgt: “I never throw anything away.” It is as though, comes the Last Judgment, there will be but one question: Did you ever throw anything away? I hope you don’t read this as spleen. I enjoy having her here very much. I can’t forgo analyzing her, however, the prerogative of a writer, or of a man where a woman is concerned and vice versa. We have been up since nine this morning (Aunt Mgt since eight) and are now patiently waiting for the last drop of rain to fall out of the sky. We will probably go to 12:30 Mass. Amen. […]

Well, Betty, I see I’ve said nothing at length again. I love you. I think of you. I want to take you in my arms, to possess you body and soul, to be possessed by you. But this isn’t the time or place for that. It seems as far away as ever to me, the time and place, and you in your letters farther.

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

March 18, 1946

Dear Betty,

I am writing this in flight at Robbinsdale. I rec’d your letter mailed Saturday this morning before leaving for Minneapolis. I was pleased to see that it went three lines over a page. You should not mind that I scold you about your brevity. It is my prerogative. It seems I am always mentioning my prerogative these days. Look out. […] You know I love you, and so I will not go into that. I am not excited, but that doesn’t mean I am any less happy. I am too old inside to get excited even about the most important thing in the world, which is you and our marriage. You will find me very young outside, however, and by that I mean physically. And perhaps I will become that way inside with you, loving you until we are one and we will not know ourselves apart from each other, at least a certain large beautiful part of our life. Strong words to come out of the rectory, aren’t they? […] And now I think that’s it. I have already said it. Say it to yourself and know I am saying it to you.