I don’t know what made me think we could rush through the correspondence. There were sixty-eight boxes full, for one thing, letters from my mother interfiled with those from Dimity in strict chronological order, but it wasn’t the quantity that slowed us down. It was the quality. I had expected the letters to be moving, fascinating, enlightening—and they were—but I had not expected them to be so entertaining. I found myself pausing frequently to reread certain passages, to translate my mother’s handwriting for Bill when he had trouble with it, and to read the best parts aloud.
I also found myself watching Bill. He never caught me at it—the slightest movement on his part would send my eyes scurrying down to whatever I was supposed to be reading—but it happened time and time again. Of all the strange things that had happened that day, his presence in the study was perhaps the strangest. Only that morning I had been ready to throw him out of the cottage, and now he was sitting peacefully across from me, his jacket and tie thrown carelessly over the back of the chair, his collar undone and his shirtsleeves rolled up, calmly stroking his beard while he read his way through this most intimate correspondence, as though he belonged there. With each passing hour, it became more difficult to imagine journeying into my mother’s past without him.
The seeds of the stories were scattered everywhere we turned. I think Bill was even more thrilled than I was each time a familiar situation or setting surfaced. He crowed in triumph less than an hour after we’d gotten started.
“I’ve found Aunt Dimity’s cat!” he exclaimed. “Listen to this:
“My Dearest Beth,
“My cat is terrorizing the milkman.
“You didn’t know I owned a cat, did you? That’s because I didn’t, until a week ago. I do now. The only trouble is that I’m not quite sure who owns whom.
“He showed up on my doorstep last Monday evening, a ginger torn with a limp and a very pitiful mew. A bowl of cream miraculously cured the limp, and after a night on the kitchen hearth, the mew was replaced by a snarl that caused the milkman to shatter a fresh pint all over my kitchen floor. I strongly suspect premeditation, since the cat promptly lapped it up.
“There’s not a plant in the house that’s safe from his depredations and he’s learned to sharpen his claws on the legs of my dining room table. I’ve lost my temper with him a dozen times a day. I know I should put him outside to fend for himself, Beth, but I like him. There hasn’t been a dull moment since he walked through my door, and he keeps my feet warm in bed. Surely that’s worth the loss of a few houseplants. Or so I keep telling myself.
“I have dubbed him Attila.”
Bill chuckled as he jotted the date of the letter in his notebook for future reference. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t close that notebook.”
“Why? What have you found?”
I shushed him and read aloud:
“My Dearest Beth,
“My dear, why do we put ourselves through Christmas? If the Lord had known what He was about, He surely would have announced His son’s birth privately to a small circle of friends, and sworn them to secrecy. Failing that, He might at least have had a large family and spaced their arrivals at decent intervals throughout the year. But no. In His infinite wisdom, the Almighty chose to sire but one Son, thus setting the stage for a celebration only a merchant could love.
“I have just returned from the vale of tears which is London the week before Christmas. Should I ever suggest such a venture again, you are encouraged to have me bound over for my own protection”. Only the weak-minded would willingly enter the holiday stairwells at Harrod’s, of all places.
“Picture a trout stream of packed and wriggling humanity; picture the rictus-grins of clerks exhausted beyond endurance; picture my foot beneath that of a puffing and alarmingly well-fed gentleman.
“And picture, if you can bear to, my chagrin at having survived it all, only to depart empty-handed. [Enter Greek chorus, cursing Fate.] The torch, my sole reason, for braving the savage swarm, was not to be had, and I shall have to make do with candles until March, or perhaps June. Please God, the crowds will have thinned by then….”
“No wonder your mother treasured this friendship,” Bill said. “Can you imagine getting letters like that all the time?”
I told him the date of the letter and kept on reading. It was fun to run across those familiar-sounding passages, but I was even more captivated by the unfolding story of their everyday lives, and by their frequent references to the time they’d spent together in London.
“How do you like that?” I said at one point. “Dimity the matchmaker.”
Bill started at the sound of my voice. “What’s that?”
I glanced up. “Sorry,” I said, “but I just found out that Dimity introduced my mom to my dad.”