I love you. […] Pax,
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 7, 1945
Dear Betty,
Friday, noon […]
And, returning to your letter of yesterday, don’t go telling Sr Mariella stuff, even in jest, like you’re going to be a stenographer and let me be great. We have to watch ourselves, else I am never going to be able to redeem myself in their eyes and stop being … a butterfly. I will, as you suggest, watch my greens. I ate an apple this morning, which is a green, isn’t it? I do not have time to be lugging lettuce and stuff like that up here and getting it combed down on a plate. I will wait for you to do that. By the way, since I’ve just thought it, I’ll mention it: I will make you a suit of lettuce underwear, cool, succulent, to match your skin. Your aunt seems to know all.1 All my worries about properly impressing your family are beginning to center on her. If I can get past her, I think, I’m in. […]
I love you.
Jim
CHARLES SHATTUCK
150 Summit Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota
December 7, 1945
Dear Chuck,
[…] I am living on the sixth floor of the Marlborough, once the showpiece of St Paul, on Fitzgerald’s famous Summit Avenue — which he calls Crest in his notes — and it is falling to pieces, but I like it that way, high ceilings, wide doors, everywhere space being wasted, and my window gives me a look at the city, the countryside beyond on a clear day, and I like that too, as I believe I contracted a slight case of claustrophobia that year or so I was out of circulation. I have a phonograph and a coffeepot. I go from Ravel to Respighi to Rimski-Korsakov and back again. I get up when I feel like it, and sometimes when I don’t feel like it, and eat what I care to cook, which means usually coffee, rolls, hamburger, or soup.
I am within walking distance (easy) to the library and post office; spitting distance to the cathedral, the most formidable one I’ve seen; and equally close to the ghosty houses that Fitzgerald was so impressed by and me too. It is a funny thing: 599 Summit, where he wrote This Side of Paradise, is solid smoky vermilion stone like so many of the other old places along Summit, but — and a Freudian could do a thesis here — it is the first place which is cut into several apartments, a hard man would even call them “flats,” and so he was right up against what he couldn’t penetrate, the one colored kid in the schoolroom, and I guess that’s why he was always so acutely aware of the society he was never an integral part of and could write about it as though he were, but which he’d have to have been decayed inside to have been and hence would have lacked the energy to do anything about except yawn. (Take that sentence to the cleaners next time you go.)
Continuing with my report on myself, which nobody asked to hear, including you, I am also in love. I met a girl at St Benedict’s when I was up there a few weeks ago, a girl whose novel in manuscript Sr Mariella had sent me to read. She is a beautiful, simple writer, and I think you would like her writing. […] I expect we will be married in May. In September we expect to retire into the woods in the vicinity of St John’s and St Benedict’s. […]
Pax,
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
Tuesday morning, 4:30 a.m., December 11, 1945
Dear Betty,
I am thinking of you now, so much as in my grogginess I am capable of thinking of anything, I am not thinking of my work, that I know. […] Over the weekend, between Surgery and OB, they get out everything, and I have to sterilize it. I hope I do not die too early a death, or that you will ever have to work at the kind of job most people do. You will lose the nice sense of justice you possess now (which does not seem to be justice to me sometimes when it comes out in you), and you will not be so impressed by order, but will be more intent in stirring up a little chaos of your own. Somebody, Maritain, I guess, says too many people in the church and high places want justice based on order, instead of order based on justice.
So it is here. The hospital runs along pleasantly to the outside eye. But if you know the truth, it is that the floors get mopped and the garbage gets taken out because a sufficient number of men and women have made a mess of their lives and upon that broken rock the hospital runs; likewise the nurses who must go through three years of training in order to be able to earn six or seven dollars a day, and there is nothing they do that might not be acquired in a year easily. […] I love you and want you to love me. […]
Jim
Don Humphrey’s plight was the specter before Jim of a future he feared for himself. He believed his friend was being sacrificed to the “business sense” of those whose privilege it should have been to assist him.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 11, 1945
My dear Betty,
I’ve been rushing around today ever since I got up, and I got up late—3:00, which is because I was tired from last night. It is seven or so in the evening. I’ve just written a letter to Harry Sylvester that I hated to write, asking him to buy the house for Don, at least until he comes in the spring. […]
Your distraction,
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 12, 1945
My dear Betty, and heavy on the “my”:
Well, since I got up two hours ago (it’s now 2:30 in the afternoon), I’ve been writing letters (Fr Garrelts, my friend Haskins2 in Washington — all about you — and Abigail McCarthy). About “business”: I think I told you that I’d written to Harry Sylvester asking him to let Don live in the house until spring if he bought it. I think, on the strength of Emerson’s recommendation, which must precede my letter three or four days to Guatemala, that he will buy the house and that Don will be permitted to live there until his, Harry’s, return. Which will amount to what you so kindly outline, a temporary shelter, but closer to things than the cottages you mention. […] I am trusting then that Harry will buy the house; that Don will be able to move in, say, by the first of January; and that, until spring, he’ll be able to impress the nuns at the college with his work and that finally he’ll be able to find a place, or, better, build one such as he wants.
I find the extant houses around St Joseph’s very undesirable, too high, terrible cracker boxes. Whenever I start hitting Collier’s at $1,700 per, I will have my friend Jack Howe, who slept next to me in the clink (and Frank Lloyd Wright’s right-hand man), draw a house just for us (he will not put a basement in it, however; they abhor basements). And that, I hope, takes care of houses until we hear from Harry and until we have to begin thinking of one for ourselves. (Won’t that be a business?) I am getting confused by the situation. No money, a real need, and distance between us and the field of operations. I have attempted, in today’s letter, to involve Fr Garrelts more … […]
I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 27, 1945
Dear Betty,
[…] Yesterday I went to Robbinsdale, and there were the Humphreys filled with the new life. Today a letter from Harry Sylvester saying he will not buy the house. He believes he is being robbed, among other things, and is looking for someone to blame. I have written to him, offering myself. I hope that I’ll never have any money if it makes me that wary. I tried to call Fr Garrelts, but got Mr Chapman. “Hello, AC. This is JF.” I’ll call again tomorrow. There is no hurry about letting Don know. Harry wrote to Emerson and Sister Mariella too. I hope something turns up.