The Box
There was a cardboard box in our attic for over 20 years that my mom told me not to open until she died. Well, she actually told Mary. When my mom remarried Ray and moved from her Evanston home to Wheaton, I'm pretty sure she didn't want him to see it. She gave it to us to take home. It wasn't some beautiful keepsake box that looked like it held family history. It was old cardboard, beat up and taped together, with her handwriting on it: “RLB RAB. John’s Attic. Do not move to Wheaton.” I don't even remember carrying it upstairs, but somehow it got put in the attic and, surprisingly, I did exactly what she told me. I didn't open it.
My mom died in 2011. Even then, I didn't immediately go up and get the box. I don't really know why. It had been sitting there for so long that it had almost become part of the attic. I knew it was there and knew what she had told us, but there wasn't this great need to finally find out what was inside. More years went by before I finally brought it downstairs and opened it.
The first thing I found was one of my mom's nightgowns. I picked it up and could smell Chanel No. 5, the perfume she always wore. It smelled like her. My dad's robe was in there too. They had both been gone for years, and suddenly I was holding their clothes and smelling my mom again. I also wondered for a moment why these particular two pieces of clothing were so important. I had a couple of thoughts about that which I quickly dismissed and have no intention of revisiting.
Underneath the clothes was paper. A lot of paper. There were hundreds of letters, handwritten notes, typed pages, carbon copies, Valentine's cards, Western Union telegrams and things they had saved from places they had been. It was probably a two-foot-high pile once I got it all out. I sat on our bed surrounded by it and started slowly going through everything.
At first I thought these were letters from my dad that my mom had saved. Then I noticed something that didn't make sense. There would be a letter from my dad to my mom, and behind it was her response to him. Then his next letter, followed by hers. My dad almost always put a date on his letters. My mom, who was never very good with dates, wasn't nearly as helpful. But somehow these letters had been put back together in chronological order.
I started thinking about what had to happen for that pile to be sitting on my bed. My parents were writing to each other two or three times a week at times. They were at different colleges, taking jobs and traveling around the country. A letter from my dad would travel to wherever my mom happened to be. She kept it. She would write him back, and he kept hers. For years these were two separate collections of letters living in different places. At some point they had to come back together, and somebody meticulously put them in order.
That's when I realized this wasn't just a box of old stuff my mom couldn't bring herself to throw away. It had been curated. I don't know if my mom did it herself or if she and my dad did it together. I would love to think they did. What I do know is that somebody went through an enormous amount of work to put this conversation back together. Then my mom gave the box to us and specifically told us not to open it until she died.
She wanted Paul and me to read it.
Once I understood what I had, I couldn't stop. For consecutive nights I sat on our bed and read one letter, then the response, then the next one. Some were difficult because they were written in fast cursive, but I kept going. There was something strange about following a conversation that had taken place more than sixty years earlier and knowing the two people writing it were my parents.
Except pretty quickly they stopped feeling like my parents. They were Ruth and Roger.
I had a wonderful relationship with my parents. Paul and I sometimes get crap from guys we know because our childhood sounds almost too good when we talk about it. I thought I knew my parents really well. My dad was a minister. My mom, who very strongly did not want to be a minister's wife, had her own career and eventually became a vice president at Frank B. Hall in New York. They had a strong marriage, but they were also very independent people. That was simply who Mom and Dad were.
What I had never known was how hard Ruth and Roger had worked to become those people.
For starters, there was Bill.
My mom was dating somebody else. (I discovered this year from my daughters that she actually had dated many guys as she would show them photographs.) I found myself reading letters in which she told my dad about going out with Bill, spending time with him and even being kissed by him. She wasn't sure what she felt about Bill, and she wasn't completely sure what she felt about my dad either. It's a strange experience to sit on your bed at sixty years old and discover your mother was trying to decide between your father and another guy.
Then I read my dad's responses and became even more interested. He didn't tell her to stop seeing Bill. He didn't tell her to choose him. He actually told her that maybe she really was in love with Bill and that she needed to figure it out. They went back and forth about it, sometimes for pages. My dad could take a fairly simple relationship question and turn it into a couple of single-spaced typed pages with underlining, rebuttals and handwritten additions. Apparently there was no feeling that couldn't benefit from a little more analysis.
The more I read, though, the more I realized Bill wasn't really the big issue. My mom was trying to figure out who she wanted to be. She wanted to get married and have children, but she was worried about losing herself by becoming part of a couple. My dad worried about that too. They wrote about remaining independent, about careers, about children they didn't have yet and about how two people could build a life together without either one giving up who they were.
This intrigued me because, when I thought about it, it wasn't something I ever worried about before Mary and I got married. We jumped in with both feet. I don't remember thinking that becoming part of a couple meant I might lose some part of myself, and I don't think I ever did. I asked Mary about it, and she didn't feel that way either. Yet here were my parents, long before I knew them, spending page after page, sometimes almost tirelessly, trying to figure out something that was obviously very important to both of them.
It also made me think about the marriage I grew up watching. My parents really did have separate lives. My dad would sometimes go to Wisconsin to see a female friend who was also a minister. I remember asking him once why he went without my mom. He said it gave him something to talk about when he came home. If they were always together, what would they have to tell each other? My mom had her own world too. She traveled to New York on business and told me her best deals were made when she went out with the “boys” after seeing a Broadway play and having a few drinks.
I had always thought that independence was simply who they were. Now I was holding the letters from when they were trying to figure out how to have it.
There was plenty of normal stuff in the pile too, which may be what made reading it so addictive. They wrote about jobs and money and people they knew. They made plans to meet in New York. Dinner parties they were planning to go to and who was coming. There were cards and telegrams. My dad once wrote out an itinerary for a Chicago visit almost hour by hour, including campus tours, lunch, a television studio, dinner, Bughouse Square and scheduled time to rest and wash up. I had no idea dating required this much project management, but apparently Roger came prepared.
Then, mixed in with all that ordinary stuff, I would run across things a child could never possibly have known about his parents. My mom wrote about the children she hoped to have someday and not wanting them to be “smothered by unwise love.” She wrote, “I don't want insurance that everything will work out.” My dad wrote about missing her. They talked about love in ways I had never heard my parents talk about love because, of course, why would they have talked to me about any of this?
That may have been the strangest part of reading the letters. I knew what was going to happen. I knew the ending. Ruth and Roger didn't.
I knew she wasn't going to marry Bill. I knew she was going to marry Roger. I knew they were going to have Paul and then me. I knew about the careers and houses and family and grandchildren that were still decades in front of these two people trying to figure out whether they should even be together.
As I worked my way through the pile, their language slowly started to change. It wasn't one big moment where suddenly everything was settled. There was just a little less questioning and a little more planning. My mom started talking about their salaries and how much they might save and eventually referred to putting money away for “our offspring.” That one was a little weird to read knowing I eventually became one of them.
My dad became less ambiguous too. In one letter he told her, “I do miss you so very, very much!!!” He signed it “Affectionately & with much love — Roger,” then apparently decided he hadn't made himself clear enough and added another postscript at the bottom: “I LOVE YOU!”
After many nights, I eventually got to the last letter. My dad was driving to Asheville to marry my mom.
I sat there holding a piece of paper my father had written while he was on his way to marry the woman who would become my mother. After all those years of letters going back and forth, all the discussion about love and careers and independence and Bill and whether they were right for each other, I had finally caught up to the beginning of the story I knew.
And hilariously, the last part wasn't some great romantic declaration. They were dealing with addresses, transportation, tickets, shoes and who was arriving when. After spending years figuring out whether they were going to build a life together, they had gotten down to actually doing it.
I left the box next to my bed, where it has stayed for the last couple of years. I've had a hard time figuring out what to do with it. I still don't know. I just like having it near me. My mom could have left Paul and me twenty beautiful love letters. She could have thrown away the arguments. She certainly could have gotten rid of Bill. She could have given us the cleaned-up version of how our parents met, fell in love and got married.
She didn't. She kept the uncertainty. She kept the parts where she questioned my dad and questioned herself. She kept the letters that showed how much they loved each other right next to the ones showing they weren't sure what they were doing. Then either she or the two of them together meticulously put the entire conversation back in order. Years later she put her nightgown and my dad's robe in the box, gave it to us and told us not to open it until she was gone.
Somehow, after she died, my mom found a way for me to know her and my dad better than I did when they were alive.
I just wish I could call her and ask a few follow-up questions.
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About Greenland Sharks
Greenland Sharks is a Chicago men's group who value friendship, experiences, and the long swim. Just a crew that shows up. No speeches. No name tags. No nonsense.
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