Dear Beth, you can’t imagine how you’ve shocked me!
I walked into the foyer yesterday after work, fingers stained with ink, hair in all directions, and found—sitting on the mantel by the door—your letter. It may as well have been Bluebeard’s treasure, I was so surprised to see it—it’s been so many weeks since I heard from you. And then I read what was inside.
You! Engaged!
I nearly fell off my feet.
Who is this man who’s swept you off your feet so unexpectedly? You barely say anything about him. I’m thrilled of course, but I need more. What does he do? Where will you live?
You asked me to tell you how I’m doing. Everyone says remarkably well, given the circumstances.
Mother says the best cure for grief is to keep busy. I wish she’d take her own advice. I avoid them all as much as I can: Hubert and Gordon in black suits all the time, Vera and Ruth moping around the garden, Lawrence riding Star around the estate like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. All any of them talks about is TeddyTeddyTeddy.
Only Father and I have stayed sane. We go off to work together and walk home together, and Teddy never comes up. Though Father has gone and bought the biggest memorial stone you’ve ever seen, to replace the one we had on the grave temporarily. Hubert says it cost a fortune, but I suppose we made so much money in the war that it doesn’t matter. Remember how we used to be rich? Now we’re ten times that.
Will the suffocating gloom ever lift from this house, Beth? I feel like Rapunzel, locked up in my tower by a witch, only the witch is everyone’s sadness. I know if you were here, you’d save me. Without you, I’m trying to save myself and doing a poor job of it. The house is a tomb, and I am buried inside.
Compared to so many people, we’ve had it easy. (Mrs. Douglas lost all three sons. All of them, Beth!) Vera says that kind of logic doesn’t matter. She says that since Teddy was closer to me than anyone, I should be feeling the loss the most. But I refuse to let the sadness sink me like it’s sunk them.
The only thing, and I’ll admit this only to you, is that I don’t sleep well. And every once in a while I feel like I’m not myself. Things like: I look at my own hand and can’t believe it’s attached to my wrist. Or I sometimes feel like everything I see happening around me is a film instead of real life.
Otherwise, life is slowly returning to normal in Forest Row. There are things to buy in the shops now, and plenty of food, though not as much as before the war. I do payroll and administrative work at the factory, and being the boss’s daughter pays well, which means saving money for my ticket to America. (I haven’t given up the idea, Beth!) You’d laugh, watching me take orders. You always said I was good at giving them.
I’ve started taking long walks again. The other day I went looking for our Cave of the Cup—where you used to tell me the Holy Grail was buried, remember? But it must have grown over with thorn bushes because I couldn’t find the way in.
I kept following the creek until long after I knew I must have passed the opening and I kept going and going. I never found it, but I did find something that took me by surprise.
It’s a stone house—or what’s left of one. And it’s old: stone floors and stone walls, half crumbled in. A collapsed stick roof. I can’t tell how recently, but it’s clearly abandoned now. It’s shrouded in bushes, which is why you and I and Teddy must have missed it all these years on our walks.
I went in, pushing the cobwebs and branches out of my way. There was an old table, half standing, and a bowl and a plate set as if some person years ago had just gotten up and left right before dinner. There was a mantel above the fireplace, still intact, chimney and all.
If we were still little, we’d say it was haunted by the ghosts of dead Germans and claim it for our hideout (Teddy would sneak around and throw things in through the window to scare us). Now it’s just an empty house.
As you can tell, there isn’t much to do. At first when someone dies, you feel so surrounded by everyone telling you how sorry they are. Then that all fades away and you’re left—not with all that noise and activity anymore—but just with one less person in your life than you used to have.
Don’t worry, Beth, when I finally make it to you in New York, I’ll be the girl you remember. I won’t let the war and everything that went with it crumple me up. I’ll live next door to you wherever you end up, and help with all your babies when you have them. It won’t be quite what we used to picture as children, where we get married in a double wedding to famous actor brothers, but it’ll be good enough. I promise you, I won’t change.
P.S. Here’s the book I promised you, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the one we scribbled all over, though I’m a little nervous putting something so sentimental in the mail in case it sinks on the way over. Also just to prove we’re grown-ups, I’m sending Dubliners, though I only half understood it.
P.P.S. Did I ever tell you that sometimes I look east and imagine that, if there were no trees and no curve on the Earth, I’d be able to see you? Do you ever do silly things like that?
Send more news when you can.
MARCH 16, 1919
Dear Beth,
I was so excited to get your letter! I can’t believe you’re moving to Kansas. People say you can plant anything in the ground in the American West and it grows. I have to admit, I never saw you as a farmer or a farmer’s wife, but I’m very happy for you.
There’s a parade in town today, to remember the soldiers. I decided to stay home . . . for one because I have something strange to tell you, and for another because I can’t take another parade where everything centers on the dead and we all act as though we may as well be dead too, even though we’re not.
On Sunday we had several families from around the village over for a dinner. Mother said it’d been too long since we’d all gotten together, but really I think she sees any gathering as a chance to marry us off. Matchmaking is the only thing that stirs her to life anymore. Maybe if we were all permanently out of the house, she wouldn’t have to get dressed in the morning. She wouldn’t have to breathe. She could lie down at Teddy’s headstone and never get up.
The boy she picked out for me (for some reason, she focuses mostly on me) was too boring to even write much about. He’s a coward, for one thing. He watched all his friends join up before he finally got conscripted when boys like Teddy were joining up first thing. And he was so unforgivably serious: I’msorryforyourloss this and that.