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

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

November 15, 1945

Dear Betty,

This is Thursday, and as I compute it, I should have had a letter from you today. Anyway, I got up at eleven this morning, in case it should be in the morning mail, and again at 2:30 this afternoon in case … and so already I am beginning to worry about you. I am standing on this corner, and you do not come. I do not think you are sick, and of course what I really know is that perhaps I could not reasonably expect to hear from you until tomorrow, even if you wrote on Wednesday, as you said you would. I have already had two dreams of you, not what you might think, but along Zane Greyish lines: someone is always getting in the way who has to be destroyed, and what happens then, when the happy ending should begin, I never know.

I also test you in this way: I think at all hours of the day do I want to marry you now. I do this when you might (or I might from my past experience) think the answer would be no, as in the morning, when many of my best-laid plans have stacked up to nothing, ideas and lines for stories written the night before. But the answer is always Yes. It is a little surprising to me each time it is, though a little less each time, of my having taken such a hard view of myself and the idea of holy matrimony for so long. So that is the way it is … if you are as you were and have not changed your mind or come to your senses — having seen through me and what a stinker I am, which happened to be one thing I admitted to, as then it always means the opposite. I am not sure of you. I remember looking at you and feeling that I could almost see you making and unmaking up your mind. I don’t know why, in either case, granting the other. I ask myself what I would do if you did change your mind, and I know that it would probably not be disastrous, unless you call living one’s life out as I have so far, a bachelor, disastrous. In this event I am glad I did not get to know you any better than I did, which incidentally required a deal of restraint on my part, which restraint you may not appreciate in the nature of things. But which you would have if it had been missing and one of those little nuns had come upon the scene with her head full of wholesomeness.

I have been out buying oysters and milk and rolls, and now, with the warmed-up coffee from Ted’s lunch, I will eat. It would be good to raise oysters, mushrooms, and cranberries on a farm. Ted and Harrigan (editor, Catholic Digest ) have just gone to Harrigan’s for a farewell dinner. Ted is leaving tomorrow night. Our relationship has been blissful since my return. I think he was actually glad to see me. I told him about you, and he was glad about that (he read the first chapter of your novel and your piece on Catholic education which the Digest considered for republication and maybe still does) in a way I find curious. He is of the opinion I need someone like you, believing I will go wacky otherwise, meaning what he regards as “perfectionism” in writing leading to that. But now I think I’ll leave this letter where it is for today, hoping for tomorrow.

Saturday. I am up again this morning, and how very, very glad I was to get your letter (and how could I write to you when I hadn’t your address; but I did write to you, as see the foregoing, only not mailing it). […] But now there is your letter, and you say you love me, once directly and once, at the end, glancingly, and I am very happy about that. No, it is twice directly. That is better. I have read your letter four times already. HG, I am given the light to understand now, is Holy Ghost. At first it puzzled me. I am, descending to the level of important things which really don’t matter, but are better the way you say they are, happy your family is losing its peculiar antagonism to me.3

I love you, Betty. It is the first time, I know now, I ever loved anybody. But even if I’d never met you, this I know: I had never loved anybody the way one is supposed to. So you are the first one. Do not catch pneumonia and die. God is against these things; for some reason really known to him and the cause for much dull absurdity on the part of the theologians, he does not want them to last. But, God, I say, this is different — and not just different in the ridiculous way I knew people thought their affairs, because theirs, were different. This is different, I feel, in an absolute sense. […]

I want you to do two things in this letter: (a) send me your telephone number; (b) send me a dime store ring which fits you. I am going to get Don Humphrey to make a ring. I am going to Robbinsdale4 tomorrow to see him and Fr Garrelts. I will tell them, as I know I’ve told too many already, Sylvester in Guatemala among them, that we are to be married. When, at the very earliest, could you come to St Paul? Ma mere is coming next week. I was thinking last night, providing you still loved me, we could go to Chicago maybe in Jan. or Feb. Tell me.

I love you, Betty.

Jim

MARIELLA GABLE

150 Summit Avenue

November 17, 1945

Dear Sister Mariella,

I have put off thanking you for everything in writing because I remember you were to be in two or three places and very busy this week or the one coming or both. I had my first letter from Betty today — after meeting the mailman for two or three days. It was a very nice letter, and I have read it too often already. […] I have told everyone I’ve seen or written to since my return how you do things at St Benedict’s. I use the poetic method. For instance, I tell my mother you scrub the kitchen three times a day and two nuns went blind making St George and the Dragon. […]

Fr Egan has invited me over for Thanksgiving: it will be interesting to see what kind of table Detachismus sets on that day. I must tell him about St Benedict’s and Betty. I called Fr Garrelts (tomorrow I’m going to Robbinsdale), and I actually felt sorry for him, as I do for myself, as I was … before Betty. […] Pax — Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

November 20, 1945

My dear Betty,

[…] Summer is terrible here, and my job is worse (I sweat lakes), but with you it will be like being ten years old again. And we can plot our getaway for the months we’ll have to stay here. It is two blocks to the cathedral. There is Summit Avenue to take walks on. I have no friends in St Paul, but in Robbinsdale is Fr Garrelts (Fr Egan is in St Paul; you will like him) and Mr Chapman (who shuddered the other night when I saw him at the way the Irish are talking up Spellman for pope—“a terrible farce”). Fr Garrelts wants to see you, and so does Don Humphrey and his wife. Don will make the rings. It may be a funny engagement ring, as I do not think I can buy a stone and wouldn’t if I could at a jeweler’s. […]

November 20. 8:00 p.m. I was supposed to be taking a nap for the last hour. I find it easier to be up with the lights on. I see things around the room to pick up, records, pipes, the typewriter. In the dark I see you. But you are not there. So it is very discouraging and in the long run promises to be an ordeal. I am glad that you suggested an earlier marriage. It will be like getting out of jail sooner. […]

November 21, […]

9:30 in the evening. I have just finished the rough draft of the story I mentioned yesterday. It will be short, 3,000 words; I had the basic idea from Sr Mariella. I will dedicate it to her, but only as SM, as it would probably fix her for good. I call it “The Lord’s Day,” and it is about nuns who have to count the collections on Sunday afternoon in the priest’s house.5 Do not say anything about it to Sr Mariella. I promised her I would write it, but I did not think I’d get at it so soon. I am thinking of you all the time. I do not know whether I’d get more done if you were here or not here. In either case you are an obstacle to work. […]