“There’s no one here for me to talk to,” she whined.
“What about the ladies you sit with in the dining room? They seemed pleasant,” I said.
“They don’t understand. I need to talk to you.” I could hear the frustration and agitation in her voice. She seemed to be missing our chat sessions but for very different reasons, drinks and cigarettes included.
“Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow and we can talk.” I crossed my fingers my pathetic response would ease her anxiety, a tactic that had worked for me sporadically in the past. Right now anything was worth another shot.
“Okay. I’ll like that. I love you.”
I heaved a sign of relief and before I could say I love you too, the phone went dead. This pattern of anger and docility had become June’s new normal. I never knew which I would get when I spoke to her and I never knew what I said to switch her from one to the other.
The town Richard and I moved to is called Viera, a Slavic word for faith. After conversations like this one, I took a deep breath and relaxed in knowing I had found my faith here. My mother raised us in a Presbyterian church, which gave me a foundation but not a faith. I had to find that on my own and God saw fit to introduce me to it here, in Viera. That’s why I found it so difficult to go back to a place and a life where that didn’t exist for me any longer.
After a week away, a stack of bills waited for me in my office alongside the things from June’s home, I dumped there. I sliced open envelope after envelope of bills needing to be paid and neatly stacked them in the corner of my desk. I ripped the junk mail in half, and filed away the property tax notice without even looking at it. I crammed the trash into an overflowing wastebasket.
All that was left for me to do now was discover the contents of the infamous yet unassuming box with my name written on the top. After all I saw in June’s closets and cupboards during the past week, I wanted to feel June had run out of surprises for me. An unpleasant gnawing inside me thought she saved the best or maybe the worst revelation for last.
“Richard,” I shouted. “I’m going to go through the box. Don’t bother me for awhile.” Diet Coke in hand, I steeled my nerves to take the plunge.
“I won’t. Shut the door,” he replied.
I told Richard about the box during a frequent phone conversation while I was away. He was more curious than I, but knew the box was hands off for him until I had the courage to share it. I heard the telltale sounds of a baseball game playing on the television in the other room.
Sitting on the floor, I tried to make myself comfortable which was impossible. My back ached and my knees creaked no matter what position I put them in. I stared at the box for a good long time before mustering up the courage to lift the lid. After taking a long deep breath, I slowly removed it waiting for a snake to crawl out or a creepy Jack in the Box head to pop up and scare the daylights out of me. I ended up only to be confronted with that distinctive June smell, not of a sweet perfume but a musty, moldy odor finished off with a dose of stale cigarettes. The headache that had released its grip somewhere on the turnpike between Boca Raton and Ft. Pierce instantly returned.
Greeting cards of every size, shape and color lay scattered in front of me. I reached for a black one on top of the pile.
With Sympathy, it said in fancy cursive silver letters. I reached for another one.
Thinking of you during this difficult time.
My heart skipped a few beats and my head felt dizzy. She saved all the sympathy cards and letters she received when my father died twenty-five years ago and had put them in a box for me. I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat. The sickening feeling I carried with me the day of Dad’s funeral had returned in full force.
I shuffled a few more cards out of the pile to reveal some letters. Several were in my mother’s handwriting, one from my grandmother and a few from my sisters. On others I recognized the return addresses of my Aunt Mary, my father’s sister. Some envelopes said “Paul” written by June. At the very bottom, I uncovered my parent’s divorce decree and Dad and June’s marriage license.
I could no longer hold back the force of the tears welling in my eyes. Pushing the precious letters aside, I reached for a tissue not wanting any teardrops to fall on the paper that had been cared for all these years and saved for me. Why? I now had to find out.
I opened an envelope and began to read.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” - Sir Walter Scott
Chapter Seventeen
Monday, January 2nd 1967
Dear Mr. Wright
The time is growing close…and somehow I can’t let you leave without some kind of a letter…I wouldn’t be “true to type” would I? I want to wish you all the good things of life.
I’ve been so happy for you, that I have put my own feelings in the background…and now…that the day is almost here, I find a lump in my throat, and the inability to be articulate or even to say “Au Revoir”.
It’s been a good five years with you…in a big Store…where I never could have survived without you…without your understanding or your perceptive awareness. You are refreshing this world of Cold Corporate Thinking…sort of like a signal of Hope, and as you go from one plateau to another, carrying people on your shoulder all the way up, the last stop can only be at the very top of the ladder.
Your humble quiet strength, your homespun, fun-loving humor, your compassion…your brilliant strokes of creative and imaginative thinking…your priceless chuckles…your long range vision…your loyalties…and your Golden Rule Philosophy by which you live…all of these have warmed our hearts and especially mine.
Your worry and concern for us when occasionally we “lose our touch”…your courage to stand by us through rough days…never once succumbing to panic, never forsaking your principles, for immediate rewards…your integrity.
All of these things are the “Measure of a Man.”
And so… Good Luck, Good Health…and God Bless you.
Marguerite
Mixed in with the sympathy cards, was a tattered brown envelope labeled ‘Divorce Papers’ written in my father’s handwriting. Attached to it was this typewritten letter from Dad’s secretary at the May Company in Cleveland, Marguerite. We knew her, heard her name often. She loved to fuss over us kids too whenever we came to the office to visit.
It caught my eye because of the math calculations in red ink Dad had done on the back of the envelope. He might have been figuring out the amount of his last paycheck, subtracting the child support he owed for that month of January or he might have been figuring what he had to pay his divorce lawyer. Those numbers say to me, he didn’t feel remorse about leaving an employee who clearly loved working for him. He had a new job and a new life to start in Seattle and he wanted to move on. That was my father, waste no time and get going.
The overstuffed envelope behind the secretary’s goodbye contained legal documents, all typewritten on onionskin paper, a kind of paper I hadn’t used since high school. The see-through crinkly paper showed its age, freckled with brown spots around the edges. The words, however, were clear as the day the secretary typed them on her Royal manual typewriter.
I could see ink and handwriting through one thin piece. I hadn’t seen anything written by Dad’s hand in years but his big loopy ‘P’, long tail of a ‘y’ and fat ’t’s crossed at the very top, were easily recognizable. I felt comfort in knowing he had touched these papers and they were now mine regardless of the painful topic of divorce.
A wave of uncertainty washed over me. Was I intruding? Did I want to go to a place I pushed out of my mind decades ago? I believe a marriage belongs only to the two people in it. If that union is unsuccessful, it’s not the result of any one else’s actions and that includes the children. Did I need to know after all these years the secrets I might find inside these crinkly, yellowed pages? I hesita
ted before unfolding the delicate paper. It was a letter written by my father to the court in Cleveland.
March 15, 1967
Common Pleas Court
Dept. of Domestic Relations
Cleveland, Ohio
Dear Mr. McCay,
This is to confirm our telephone conversation of Wednesday, March 15, 1967 concerning your card to me in regard to a divorce action under case No. 937487.
I am not contesting the divorce and do consider the plaintiff a good mother.
Yours very truly,
Paul H. Wright
Years ago, I lost interest in the stress and long hours of working the in the retail business. The structure of the department store had changed dramatically from the one Dad and June knew and had groomed me for. Over my working years I’d been banished from fashion lines, not having much of an aptitude for it, and sent to the hard lines section of the department store, china, crystal, and small appliances. In the early 1990’s I went back to school and got a degree in accounting before taking and passing the exam to become a Certified Public Accountant.
As I read this first letter, my analytical accounting mind kicked into high gear. Dad left The May Company and Cleveland in January. In March, the divorce wasn’t yet final. The day my mother delivered the news Dad and June were married was in May. The next document I read turned out to be the official legal divorce decree with the raised seal of the court. I unfolded the stiff legal document.
First and foremost the children’s complete names were listed along with our ages. I was always last, a position I’ve grown used to over the years. I’m still the little sister and sometimes even the baby sister, which grates on me like nail on a chalkboard. Even my last name starts with a “W”, which in school put me at the end of the line. Used to being last both alphabetically and numerically, I learned to practice a life of patience. To this day, waiting at the doctor’s office or at motor vehicles, or the Wal-Mart checkout line, doesn’t bother me. I’ve spent a lifetime being last. Not letting the order of things bother me, I kept reading.
According to the legal papers, my mother received $500 a month alimony, which dropped by half each time a child entered college. She also received $150 per month per child in child support. Each child’s portion was eliminated when starting college. This was a large sum of money each month in 1967. Once I graduated from college it all stopped.
Many things in my parent’s divorce hinged on me and me growing up as soon as possible. Susan was in college, so her half of things dropped off before the divorce was final. Martha, a senior in high school heading to college, would be contributing her reduction of payments in a few months. Steve and I were the holdouts because we hadn’t even made it into high school yet.
Next came the visitation rules, three weeks in the summer and a week to start after Christmas Day. Dad got to claim all four of us as dependents on his tax return. He quit claimed deeded the big house in the suburbs of Pepper Pike to my mother, a house he paid $60,000 in 1961 when he took a job at the May Company and we moved from Minneapolis. Along with the house, Mom got Dad’s 1964 Ford, the one she drove to pick up June for dinner all those years ago.
What suddenly struck me was how my parents both followed these instructions to the letter. At least they did from my perspective. Steve and I flew to wherever Dad and June lived at the time, for exactly three weeks each summer. Once he moved to New York, we spent the week between Christmas and New Years tromping around the big city in the snow and slush. Mom never complained his check was late or forbid us from speaking to him on the phone whenever he called. It took a long time for Mom to move on with her life emotionally, but neither of my parents ever held us kids as bait against the other. For that I’m grateful.
I looked for the date on the final divorce decree. April 27, 1967. My father hadn’t wasted any time marrying June in May.
The revelation of the close proximity of dates between Dad’s second marriage to June and the date of the final divorce bubbled up another unpleasant memory of being in New York and cleaning out my mother’s apartment after she moved to a nursing home permanently.
The week in New York with my sisters, my brother and his wife had been grueling to say the least. Susan, as the oldest, insisted she knew best about everything. I had spent the most time in New York City while I lived with my mother during my college years and knew my way around. I was still the baby sister and incapable of making any proper decisions in the others eyes.
We spent the week arguing over who should get Mom’s china or her favorite painting of Canadian geese which hung over the sofa. No one wanted the professional high school graduation photos Mom had framed and hung on the wall. Other than that we didn’t agree on much.
So when Susan, Steve and Karen left early to go home to Dayton, Martha and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“Where do you think Mom’s Christmas ornaments are? I’d like to have some of those old glass bulbs we put on the tree as kids,” I said. “I know they’re still here somewhere.”
“Did you look in the closet?” Martha asked.
I stuck my head in the hall closet still jam packed with coats, boots and boxes. I didn’t see anything labeled ‘Xmas’ so I started taking lids off boxes, watching the thick layers of dust swirl beneath my nose.
“Martha. Here’s some old letters. See what you find in there,” I coughed.
My fascination with hand written correspondence started years ago. Whenever Dad went on buying trips to Europe, Mom would buy the flimsy, blue airmail stationery at the post office for us to write to him. I crammed every last available inch of paper with an accounting of everything I did in school or Girl Scouts. He would send us back fancy French greeting cards. The thrill of finding these exquisite envelopes in the mailbox sent me over the moon as a child. I couldn’t pass up looking through this old box of faded letters belonging to Mom.
I handed the sagging brown box to Martha and continued the search for the decorations. I finally hit pay dirt in the far corner of the closet under several boxes of old clothes marked ‘Goodwill’. That was my mother, always putting off until tomorrow what should have been done five years ago. Whatever we left in the apartment was headed to charity anyway, we made those arrangements to lessen the headache of disposing of furniture and clothing we had no use for.
Brushing the dust from my hair, I carried the Christmas stuff out to the living room where Martha sat reading a letter from the box.
“You might want to read this,” she said wide eyed while gasping for breath. She handed me an old faded envelope addressed to Mom at the big house in Cleveland where we lived pre-divorce, written in my father’s hand.
The only few snippets I remember on the page were first, “You teach the children good hygiene habits but don’t follow them yourself.” My mother’s desire and ability to care for her physical body started long before she grew into old age. That’s another reason all her children were embarrassed by her presence. She didn’t know how to dress herself, brush her hair or have the energy to brush her teeth. What we didn’t know in our younger years was she suffered from depression that went untreated for most of her life. Back then depression wasn’t a popular buzzword like it is today. Mom suffered physically and we could only see her as a mother we were ashamed of.
The second and most powerful line on the page was “I want you to know, I’m not a philanderer.” I can still see the words written in my father’s script.
Martha looked at me and I at her and at that moment we decided to destroy the letter my mother had saved for over thirty years. Nothing good would come out of anyone else reading it or from saving it.
After all these years that time and place came rushing back to me. In a second I put together a timeline I discovered in the contents of the box June left for me, that my father was not the same man who drilled the Golden Rule into his children’s heads. Do unto others, as you would
have others do unto you. The vision I carried of him in my mind shattered. He was a liar. Maybe he didn’t lie to his children, but he did to my mother to pacify his own ego.
What other secrets lived inside this box of letters June wanted me to have? She loved Paul and I doubt she set out to destroy him in my mind. June met me as a little girl and must have wanted me to decide as an adult how the actions of others created the relationship of trust we grew into together. I pulled out another envelope.
“Forget what hurt you, but never forget what it taught you.” - Anonymous
Chapter Eighteen
December 7, 1974
Dear Hath,
I have a couple of Christmas “presents” for you. I hope you’ll accept them; they are all I have at the moment.
One - Linda will be home on the 13th. We are going to Detroit the 20th until the 25th, but feel free to have her with you whenever you wish. She’ll be working as a file clerk while she’s here - but her evenings and weekends are yours, if you want them.
Second - I’ve been saying for several years that our divorce was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I really mean that!!! For you, now, I say thank God you had the courage to make the break. I never could have and we probably both would have lost.
I love it here in New York. Life is lovelier for me than it has been for many, many years.
Thank you. My best to you and June and a Merry Christmas.
Sallie
As I read this letter from my mother to my father that June had kept all these years in my box, I felt I was being used as a piece of property to be given or taken away at will. A child’s view of his or her parent’s divorce is a far different thing than that of anyone else. Stepping back into this time through the words of my mother opened up wounds I kept stitched shut for decades.
As I sat on the floor of my warm and cozy office space in a spare bedroom, memories flooded forward and overflowed until I couldn’t hold them back any longer.
A Bittersweet Goodnight Page 12