Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but no, our plans have not changed, that is what we still plan to do. And whereas India may seem very far away to you, it does not seem far to us, sitting here on Samos, where we can see the mountains of Turkey right across the bay, right across the sparkling water. Please don’t worry, the situation is in control, and we will make our travel plans well in advance before moving on, which won’t be for some time yet.

And please be assured that I will carry you with me wherever I go, and will be proud to carry that luggage. You are in my heart and soul and you will always be. We have all had beautiful lives together, and we are indebted to each other for a large part of it. It’s funny how much I miss you both. I send my essence to you every day and wish you all the best of luck and strength. I know the feeling is reciprocated. We all need each other, but separate paths we must take. I dedicate a prayer to our old age and the force which keeps us striving and experimenting. I miss you very much and of course love you as I love myself.

July 7, 1970

Dear Lissie:

Eight days this time, which I suppose is something of an improvement. And, at least, the reassurance that you won’t be moving on to India for “some time yet,” whatever that means. I hope it means you’ll be giving the idea further thought and reflection, and eventually will decide against it. I don’t know what you think is waiting for you there in India, Liss. I don’t understand any of this too clearly.

I only know that I love you and miss you, and worry about you constantly. I do not know this boy Paul, I know nothing about him. It pains me to think that you are living with a stranger. It pains me to think that the last time we had a conversation of any real substance was when you were in San Francisco, and then in anger over a boy I didn’t know, who seems to have passed out of your life to be replaced by another boy I don’t know. I would not like to believe that the angry words we exchanged on the telephone had anything to do with your decision to run off to Europe. I would not like to believe that your decision to go on to India has anything to do with any anger you may be feeling now.

Lissie, I wish you would decide to come home. I miss you terribly. Please write again soon.

Love,

July 14, 1970

Dear Lissie:

We have not heard from you since your letter of June 29, and even accounting for the usual postal lag, we are beginning to get very worried. We tried to phone you in Greece yesterday, but it turned out to be impossible to reach you. We finally left word with someone in the post office there, or tried to leave word, but we were talking English and he was talking Greek, and I’m not sure he got the message straight. But there are telephones there on Samos, Lissie, we found that out after all our frantic attempts, and I wish you would call us collect as soon as you receive this to let us know that you are all right.

Love,

4-027712E107002 07/20/70 ICS imppmizz csp nvnb

1 203 784 8072 mgm tdmt rutledge ct 07–20 1243 p est

TDMT RUTLEDGE CT 07–20 1243 P EST

MELISSA CROFT

POSTE RESTANTE

KOKKÁRI, SAMOS

GREECE

MOM AND I WORRIED AND CONCERNED. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? PLEASE CABLE OR CALL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. LOVE, DAD.

They had still not heard from her by the night of Jamie’s birthday party. He was born on July 23, but that fell on a Thursday this year, and so Connie had planned the party for the following night. He knew there was going to be a gala celebration for his forty-fourth birthday; no one could have kept as a surprise the workmen hanging Japanese lanterns in the trees bordering the river, the caterers arriving to set up tables and chairs, the three-piece band (not rock, thank God!) who arrived looking bewildered at a little past seven, the leader complaining they’d been up and down the street twenty times already, searching for the mailbox. What Jamie hadn’t realized was that Connie had planned a party of such magnitude.

Taking her cue from Jamie’s own hanging of Lissie’s pictures each year in December, she had festooned the living room with pictures of him taken at various stages of his life, pictures of him as a somewhat scrawny little boy, and later as a tall and slender teenager; pictures of him in his Army uniform and on the Yale campus; pictures of him on their honeymoon, pictures of him holding the infant Lissie in his arms, even poster-size blowups of the pictures he’d taken for the first Life essay, so that the living room was a visual history of Jamie Croft from the first shot of him as a baby lying on a furry robe in a commercial photographer’s studio to a picture Connie herself had taken only two weeks earlier, a candid shot of Jamie at his desk, typing a letter to Lissie in Greece.

But she had also (and here she acknowledged her debt to Ralph Edwards) invited not only half the town of Rutledge and most of the people Jamie worked with in New York, but also many people Jamie thought he would never in his life see again. There was his closest friend from when he was a kid on Eighty-sixth Street (Jamie’s mother, who had helped Connie with the selection, stood by beaming as Jamie embraced the man), now a bit pudgy and going bald, an accountant in New Jersey. There was his old Army buddy, a rangy kid from Maine who’d trudged through the jungle by his side, and who’d once saved Jamie from an exploding grenade by tackling him and knocking him headlong off the machete-hewn trail; he was now a farmer, still living in Maine, married to a shy woman in her late thirties, who stood by uncertainly as Jamie and her husband reminisced about sudden death. There was Maury Atkins, his roommate from Yale, who had first warned him to stay away from Constance Harding, and who admitted jovially now that he’d almost made the biggest mistake of his life, embracing Connie, and surprising Jamie (Maury was now a banker in Bridgeport) by kissing him on both cheeks. There was Connie’s roommate from Lake Shore Drive, the bored-looking brunette who’d been sitting with her the first time he asked her to dance at that Yale mixer, the one who’d taught Connie to swear like a sailor. There was the couple who’d lived across the hall from them when they were renting their grubby little apartment on West Seventy-eighth; he’d been a dental student at the time, and his wife had worked for an insurance company; each night, as he’d pored over his textbooks and made his drawings of molars and bicuspids, she’d listened to the radio, wearing a headset and shaking her hips in time to the music as she washed and dried the dishes. There was the man who’d been the department head at the school where Jamie had taught photography three nights a week while waiting for his big break. There was the young, soft-spoken blond (now no longer young, his blond hair sifted with gray) assistant editor at Life , who’d murmured over and over again, “These are very good, these are very good,” before picking up the phone and asking someone named Charlie to come in and have a look. There was, under the Japanese lanterns on a surprisingly cool, clear night (it had been raining a lot this July), a steady parade of people from the past and the memories they evoked, and Jamie realized all at once just how long and how hard Connie had worked to reconstruct for him not only his own history, but the history they had shared together for so many years now.

In bed later that night, the partygoers gone, the Japanese lanterns extinguished and swaying in the treetops on a faint breeze that blew in over the river, the water trickling below their bedroom window, always a faint whisper in July, never the rushing torrent it became in March, she snuggled close to him and asked, “Did it make you happy, Jamie?”