I wanted to read them all but was afraid someone would walk in on me, so I thumbed through them quickly to get an overview. Many were dated from the early 1940s, during Grandpa Portman’s time in the army. A random sampling revealed them to be long and sappy, full of declarations of his love and awkward descriptions of Emma’s beauty in my grandfather’s then-broken English (“You are pretty like flower, have good smell also, may I pick?”). In one he’d enclosed a picture of himself posing atop a bomb with a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Over time, his letters grew shorter and less frequent. By the 1950s there was maybe one a year. The last was dated April 1963; inside the envelope was no letter, just a few pictures. Two were of Emma, snapshots she’d sent him that he’d sent back. The first was from early on—a jokey pose to answer his—of her peeling potatoes and pretending to smoke one of Miss Peregrine’s pipes. The next one was sadder, and I imagined she’d sent it after my grandfather had failed to write for a while. The last photo—the last thing he’d ever sent her, in fact—showed my grandfather at middle age, holding a little girl.
I had to stare at the last picture for a minute before I realized who the little girl was. It was my aunt Susie, maybe four years old then. After that, there were no more letters. I wondered how much longer Emma had continued writing to my grandfather without receiving a reply, and what he’d done with her letters. Thrown them out? Stashed them somewhere? Surely, it had to be one of those letters that my father and aunt had found as kids, that made them think their father was a liar and a cheat. How wrong they were.
I heard a throat clear behind me, and turned to see Emma glaring from the doorway. I scrambled to gather the letters, my face flushing, but it was too late. I was caught.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be in here.”
“I’m bloody well aware of that,” she said, “but by all means, don’t let me interrupt your reading.” She stamped over to her chest of drawers, yanked one out, and threw it clattering to the floor. “While you’re at it, why don’t you have a look through my knickers, too!”
“I’m really, really sorry,” I repeated. “I never do things like this.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder. Too busy peeping in ladies’ windows, I suppose!” She towered over me, shaking with anger, while I struggled to fit all the letters back into the box.
“There’s a system, you know. Just give them here, you’re mucking everything up!” She sat down and pushed me aside, emptying the box onto the floor and sorting the letters into piles with the speed of a postal worker. Thinking it best to shut my mouth, I watched meekly while she worked.
When she’d calmed a little, she said, “So you want to know about Abe and me, is that it? Because you could’ve just asked.”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
“Rather a moot point now, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess.”
“So? What is it you want to know?”
I thought about it. I wasn’t really sure where to start. “Just ... what happened?”
“All right then, we’ll skip all the nice bits and go right to the end. It’s simple, really. He left. He said he loved me and promised to come back one day. But he never did.”
“But he had to go, didn’t he? To fight?”
“Had to? I don’t know. He said he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he sat out the war while his people were being hunted and killed. Said it was his duty. I suppose duty meant more to him than I did. Anyhow, I waited. I waited and worried through that whole bloody war, thinking every letter that came was a death notice. Then, when the war was finally over, he said he couldn’t possibly come back. Said he’d go stark raving. Said he’d learned how to defend himself in the army and he damn well didn’t need a nanny like the Bird to look after him anymore. He was going to America to make a home for us, and then he’d send for me. So I waited more. I waited so long that if I’d actually gone to be with him I would’ve been forty years old. By then he’d taken up with some commoner. And that, as they say, was that.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s an old story. I don’t drag it out much anymore.”
“You blame him for being stuck here,” I said.
She gave me a sharp look. “Who says I’m stuck?” Then she sighed. “No, I don’t blame him. Just miss him is all.”
“Still?”
“Every day.”
She finished sorting the letters. “There you have it,” she said, clapping the lid on them. “The entire history of my love life in a dusty box in the closet.” She drew a deep breath and then shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. For a moment I could almost see the old woman hiding behind her smooth features. My grandfather had trampled her poor, pining heart, and the wound was still raw, even these many years later.