Friday, February 11, 2011

Lost In Akron: Part II

When we last left them, Mary had told Bill he was the man for her. Given all his passionate declarations of longing to be with her, one would have thought this news would have had him swinging on the edge of the crescent moon. But, no, apparently not. First he waits weeks to reply and then when he does he rambles all over the place. First he says that when he kissed her it seemed that they were to live only for each other. Then--- EEEEEEEEEE! -- the brakes abruptly squeal and suddenly he’s blathering about how a man his age doesn’t seek love anymore, only friendship and companionship. This is in March 1912 – he turned 25 in January! But never mind that -- he forges on with it, intense as a poet, until suddenly a better idea occurs to him, one which might even be viewed as noble.


“I don’t think a fellow has a right to marry unless he has a good income, which I have not. I look around me and see the fellows who are married and what a struggle it is for existence. What right does a man have to ask a woman to slave for him the rest of her life?”

And now for the zinger -- "Anyhow, no future generations will look at your picture as it stands now. Hoping that you will forgive me and think of me kindly.”

Oh, damn it, Bill! By this point I wanted to toss both him and his letters out the back door. Had it not been for the fact that Mary had obviously stuck around given the number of missives left to be read, I might have quit right then and there. Actually, I carried a little grudge clear up until last night when in another flat I found some additional letters, the most informative of which were written by Bill in 1908 to another girl named Jenny. In those days Bill was still back in rural Ohio doing another thing he loved – working with horses. Oh, how he fancied Jenny, but the crankiest horse in the barn gave him more affection than she did. Next came Annie whom he was certain he’d marry, but Annie, too, let him down. Who knows how many others paraded by before he took up with  the cranky Lillian whose ring he’d lost? No wonder the poor guy got so flummoxed. What would make him think Mary would be any better? After all, she WAS sort of cheating on her steady with HIM, wasn’t she?

Time rolls on, change is as constant as the snow of this winter, and yet the same story plays out all over the world as we speak. Why does it matter? Why do these letters matter? I thought about this a lot after finding the new ones and remembered something else Bill said in the kiss-off to Mary. “I’m sure you will destroy this letter.” She didn’t though and a hundred years later a stranger read it. Is it a sort of voyeurism this dipping into the personal lives of long-ago people? Perhaps, but I also think it’s a kind of preservation -- not just of the details of daily life in a particular era, interesting though they are, but of the driving forces that propel people through their days and end up creating singular lives from common stories.

The letters also remind me not to be so quick to judge without remembering the culture of the times. Bill drops ethnic slurs on the page with the casualness of one tossing dirty socks down the laundry chute. Jews, Hungarians and Germans are all referred to by derogatory names, yet the slurs seem oddly devoid of malice. Which brings me to the strangest one he used -- in reference to himself.

After the firecracker of a letter that had to have left Mary reeling there’s a maddening gap which poses enough questions to hold an interrogation. One thing’s for sure though – the silent months were anything but dull. Mary must have worn him down like the heels on walking shoes because by July “Dear Friend” had morphed into “My dear Mary”. On July 13th Bill popped the question during a humdinger of a rainstorm in Piqua and Mary accepted. He planned to write to her father for permission (after the fact) and bring her a ring when he next saw her. Happiness, which in the past had eluded him, now spilled over the page like errant ink from a leaky pen. Yet, even so, his bread-winning capabilities wore heavily on his mind.

”I wonder what your father will think of me. Perhaps he will knock my block off, as I am nothing but a poor ragged nigger and you could have married some rich fellow.”

Whaaaaaat?

Oh!

Wow.

I don’t know whether I was more surprised that Bill was African American, or that he’d used such an ugly epithet to describe himself. Either way, it made me sad, as by now I was firmly planted in Bill’s corner. Who wouldn’t be crazy about a guy who said, ”There’s nothing I would like to do better on earth than help my folks someday, as I love them more than anyone else on earth, but you, Mary.”

Whatever Mary’s father thought about Billl is never mentioned, but the couple married the Sunday before Christmas of 1912. Within a few days Mary took suddenly ill and had emergency surgery at the hospital in Piqua. (Imagine the horror of THAT in 1912!). Once she was out of the woods Bill had no choice but to return to work in Akron where he wrote by the fire every single night of January, 1913 with their new kitten at his feet. By then “My dear Mary” had become my “My Dear Honey Bunch”

There are two last letters, which I also found last night. One is postmarked 1915 and one 1924. In both instances Bill is home in Akron working while Mary visits her family in Covington. She remains always My Dear Honey Bunch.

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