I love you, Betty.
Jim
Jim’s aunt Margaret came from Chicago to stay with him for a few days.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 9, 1946
Dearest Betty,
[…] My Aunt Mgt has gone to a morning movie downtown—Leave Her to Heaven—oh, God! I might have gone to see The Lost Weekend with her, but oh no … she could see enough drunks in the streets without going to a movie about one. So it is. How right Hollywood and the Ladies’ Home Journal and the rest of them all are. They aren’t negative, not them. I think I’ll be negative to the day I die, I think, when I sound someone like Aunt Mgt on things. What a damn terrible thing this system has done in the years to people. Everybody she ever knew “had a good position” with Armour, with the Pullman Company, with Field’s, with National Biscuit, or was “in business for himself” with a dandy line of mops and ironing boards. And they all, every damn last one of them, had—“nice homes.”
I am like Daniel Boone cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness, the first one who ever didn’t lose himself in a corporation or go into business for himself. I hope — I sincerely pray — you are not making a mistake about me. If you think I’d go along just because you were my wife and asked it, or because we had twelve children who needed milk and bread. You said something last Sunday about how I’d cook with the rest of them. I am not saying I’d poison the children, but you’d better take another reading if you think I can be domesticated and made to like it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not make JF do some things. It gives me a pain to have to say all these things, but sometimes I get to thinking you don’t know me at all, don’t know what you’re getting into, and if you do, you think changes can be made which, as a matter of fact, won’t be made. […]
I trust you can see I am not kidding about all this. I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 17, 1946
Mavourneen,
Sunday, Feast of Patrick, bishop, confessor, patron of Ireland … and I love you. I have just had breakfast: pancakes, bacon, eggs, pecan rolls, tea (tay). It is a good thing, quoth Aunt Mgt, that Betty can cook. I told her you could. I get up in the morning, feeling in an Olympic frame of mind, and the first thing I have to do is argue about whether I want cereal or not, whether we are to have pancakes or not, etc. I trust you will cook our meals and not create problems of that order for me. I don’t care one way or the other, but it is customary, evidently, among Aunt Mgt’s friends for people to talk as though they don’t care when they really do and are being polite and resigned, feeling very strongly on the question of jelly roll and pecan roll and you know the rest.
Now I am getting the menu for tomorrow morning — tomorrow morning and it is not afternoon yet of today. The root of all this planning seems to be: not to throw anything away. To hell with what you want, how you feel, munch away on that dead hunk of cake until it is all gone. Quoth Aunt Mgt: “I never throw anything away.” It is as though, comes the Last Judgment, there will be but one question: Did you ever throw anything away? I hope you don’t read this as spleen. I enjoy having her here very much. I can’t forgo analyzing her, however, the prerogative of a writer, or of a man where a woman is concerned and vice versa. We have been up since nine this morning (Aunt Mgt since eight) and are now patiently waiting for the last drop of rain to fall out of the sky. We will probably go to 12:30 Mass. Amen. […]
Well, Betty, I see I’ve said nothing at length again. I love you. I think of you. I want to take you in my arms, to possess you body and soul, to be possessed by you. But this isn’t the time or place for that. It seems as far away as ever to me, the time and place, and you in your letters farther.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 18, 1946
Dear Betty,
I am writing this in flight at Robbinsdale. I rec’d your letter mailed Saturday this morning before leaving for Minneapolis. I was pleased to see that it went three lines over a page. You should not mind that I scold you about your brevity. It is my prerogative. It seems I am always mentioning my prerogative these days. Look out. […] You know I love you, and so I will not go into that. I am not excited, but that doesn’t mean I am any less happy. I am too old inside to get excited even about the most important thing in the world, which is you and our marriage. You will find me very young outside, however, and by that I mean physically. And perhaps I will become that way inside with you, loving you until we are one and we will not know ourselves apart from each other, at least a certain large beautiful part of our life. Strong words to come out of the rectory, aren’t they? […] And now I think that’s it. I have already said it. Say it to yourself and know I am saying it to you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 27, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] I looked at cars from the window of the streetcar today, cars in lots, and they looked terribly expensive, except one or two that said $125 and they didn’t look very mobile. I had a horrible dream last night, not about you, but about me. I woke up thinking I was surely in hell. I tried the lights (I thought), and they would not work, and I understood that to mean I had died and switches had another function wherever I was, hell, I guess. A man had me by the wrists and was on my back, looking over my shoulder, but I could not get the lights on to see who he was. Finally, I did stumble out into the light, a hospital it was, and found a mirror. I was afraid he would be gone before I could see who he was, but he was still there, looking over my shoulder at me as I was looking at him. It was me, an older, tireder me, and he would not let go. Then he went away, and I guess I was awake then, though I was certain I was awake before that, that it was no dream, that I was dead. Very interesting, the most interesting dream I’ve ever had. I also had clam chowder last night about 1:00 a.m. I think that is enough substance for one letter. […]
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
April 2, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] Do not be too hasty about picking up old furniture from atticks. We do not, as I see it, need very much beyond a table, the bed you have, and chairs. And we can buy what we want, rather than have the place loaded down with monstrosities from an earlier age. But of course I am really stepping out of my province, I suppose, in having ideas about furniture. I do have them, however — having been in very few places in my time which looked livable, unless your taste was governed by Better Homes and So Forth, which mine ain’t so much as by organic need (F. L. Wright). Well, that will be all for today — rather a businessy letter, not? I love you, but I can’t do anything about it and won’t go into it here.
I have asked Fr Garrelts to perform the ceremony. He will. So would have Fr Casey, but it seems I had been wrong in thinking that Fr G. did not want to do it. He does and will. I wish you’d try to iron out whether it is going to be a low or high mass. I think it ought to be high, not just because the local priests want it that way, as they obviously do, but for other reasons. However, if your dad can’t see it that way, it is all right. Just you be around and explain to all 75 people why we always get married at a low mass.