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

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

March 27, 1946

Dear Betty,

[…] I looked at cars from the window of the streetcar today, cars in lots, and they looked terribly expensive, except one or two that said $125 and they didn’t look very mobile. I had a horrible dream last night, not about you, but about me. I woke up thinking I was surely in hell. I tried the lights (I thought), and they would not work, and I understood that to mean I had died and switches had another function wherever I was, hell, I guess. A man had me by the wrists and was on my back, looking over my shoulder, but I could not get the lights on to see who he was. Finally, I did stumble out into the light, a hospital it was, and found a mirror. I was afraid he would be gone before I could see who he was, but he was still there, looking over my shoulder at me as I was looking at him. It was me, an older, tireder me, and he would not let go. Then he went away, and I guess I was awake then, though I was certain I was awake before that, that it was no dream, that I was dead. Very interesting, the most interesting dream I’ve ever had. I also had clam chowder last night about 1:00 a.m. I think that is enough substance for one letter. […]

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

April 2, 1946

Dear Betty,

[…] Do not be too hasty about picking up old furniture from atticks. We do not, as I see it, need very much beyond a table, the bed you have, and chairs. And we can buy what we want, rather than have the place loaded down with monstrosities from an earlier age. But of course I am really stepping out of my province, I suppose, in having ideas about furniture. I do have them, however — having been in very few places in my time which looked livable, unless your taste was governed by Better Homes and So Forth , which mine ain’t so much as by organic need (F. L. Wright). Well, that will be all for today — rather a businessy letter, not? I love you, but I can’t do anything about it and won’t go into it here.

I have asked Fr Garrelts to perform the ceremony. He will. So would have Fr Casey, but it seems I had been wrong in thinking that Fr G. did not want to do it. He does and will. I wish you’d try to iron out whether it is going to be a low or high mass. I think it ought to be high, not just because the local priests want it that way, as they obviously do, but for other reasons. However, if your dad can’t see it that way, it is all right. Just you be around and explain to all 75 people why we always get married at a low mass.

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

April 5, 1946

Dear Betty,

[…] You said nothing about the ring in your letters yesterday, and so I suppose it is still on the way. Well, there won’t be anything like that again, Betty. Old JF may not have this business sense, but he knows what happens to letters that come in the three-cent mail, how they are put aside and forgotten, and likewise orders which don’t come airmail. Are you still wearing your gloves to cover up your finger? I am sorry. It is in part my fault for waiting on Don so long. But of course the system, the good old system you don’t know about yet, is mostly to blame. I am closing now. I love you. Write.

Jim

By the way — whenever you want me to come, you’d better enclose train fare. I will need it then.

Father George Garrelts exerted a strange power over Jim. It sprang from his gargantuan personality, from his having been a member of Jim’s inner circle in their halcyon high-school days, and, not least, from his being a priest. He had nixed Jim’s other great love, Ramona Rawson; he pressed for writing collaborations with Jim; and, in time to come, he would push Betty to the side, most gallingly in a trip to Scotland that he, Jim, and Betty made together. Even before her marriage, Betty felt vaguely hostile toward Garrelts, beginning, perhaps, with a feeling that his initial disinclination to perform the marriage ceremony meant he disapproved of Jim’s marrying. She came to believe that Garrelts intended to intrude on their life as a couple — as, indeed, he had with the Humphreys.

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

April 17, 1946

Dear Betty,

Wednesday, and your letter. Very nice letter, except one paragraph which is probably the worst thing I’ve ever heard from you, causing me to think back to the time a similar sentiment was expressed by a true love of mine and it was the last time I ever saw her. I quote it so you will know what I mean:

Who said Father Garrelts was going to come and spend his vacation with us? I hope it’s not you. We have absolutely no place for him anywhere, either at the lake2 or in our house when we have it.

Now, so far as I know, Fr Garrelts has no intention of spending his vacation with us, and I am damned sure he would not care to spend even a little time with us ever if he knew about this. I am sorry if you did not mean to sound the way these words sound. They do sound, however, and I won’t be able to forget.

When I think of how well I know Fr Garrelts, what a wonderful friend he has always been to me, and I think of what Mary Humphrey and her enemies (also Christian), between them, are doing to Fr Garrelts, I am afraid I can think of nothing but a lot of people who had a lot to say about one man none of them knew a long time ago, and it was Holy Week too. As yet Fr Garrelts has had nothing to say. And the comparison is not as strained as you might like to think. Now, you can either accept my evaluation of Fr Garrelts, and enjoy peace, or spend the rest of your life sharpshooting to make an impossible point.

I assure you the Blondie-Dagwood myth, which is held in such deep esteem generally, will never be true of us. I think it better to let you know this now — though I had thought it was pretty clear — before we are married, for afterward such a hard paragraph as this one and yours might easily qualify as the reality and our love as the illusion. Both are real, and one does not exclude the other, although either one, in this case, could kill the other if the truth were not told. Now I shall try to pick up the pieces and get to work. […]

You did not ask if I loved you, but in case you doubt it after reading the above, let me say I do, very much, I do.

Jim

Fr G. did ask me several weeks ago to find him a cottage near St Ben’s for a couple weeks in June, but I had never considered renting yours to him, or moving him in there, hard as that may be for you to believe. He had wanted to work with Don at carving, etc. I will now make it plain that Wisconsin is preferable. He was getting the cottage primarily for his mother and his stepfather, both of whom incidentally would be accepted where he never would be, both of them having done the right things all their lives and amounted to nothing unless you call 40 or 50 years switching trains something.

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

April 19, 1946

Dear Betty,

[…] It is Friday morning, Haskins is here (shaving now), and in a few minutes we’ll eat breakfast and then out to Calvary Cemetery, I think, to see Fr Kelly’s grave. I want to get a look at it; there may be something significant. Last night I, or we, got a cable from Osaka, Japan, from my friend Weinstein, to the effect that the Japanese love us, that the cherry blossoms are in bloom, that we should be happy, and he signs it Lafcadio Hearn, whom I daresay you never heard of. He was an American writer who went to Japan to live about fifty years ago and died there, a good writer. It is not clear from the paragraph you write about Fr Garrelts how you came to say what you did, but it is all over now and perhaps ought to be a lesson to both of us. I think that is all. I am not very happy about things in general, outside of you. I mean my folks not coming according to schedule and so far as I can see the general failure of my relatives to remember the occasion tangibly. I would not mind if I did not know that even if you are above making comparisons, the others are not. I love you.