The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

I’ve always wondered if she resented you at all, how close you were to Guy and all the time you spent with him in those years you were with each other more than you were with your spouses.

I certainly did not see this coming—caring for husband and son as if they were toddlers or less until the end of time.

I think most people spend the workdays watching the clock and living for the weekends, but that wasn’t the case for me. There was a lengthy stretch of my life when I lived for the work. It was a haven for me, getting to the office and into the work, and so much of that was because of the partnership with Guy, so thank you for allowing us to have that, Liz.

Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone.

Ah, yes, doesn’t Jimmy resemble this great-great-grandfather Mick, and continue to turn the page, and so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations,

the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will know nothing of YOU.

isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It’s all the same. I had some notion of this from as far back in my life as I can remember, and I’ve been writing letters out into the world since I could form a sentence with a pen (age nine).

Postscript: A good punch line is a good punch line regardless if delivered by a man or a woman.

Why should her son present to us on matters of real estate? It has nothing to do with gardening whatsoever, and furthermore, I cannot think of a single one among us who gives a rat’s ass about the real estate market. None of us is moving. Debbie wants to parade her son out like a dog at the American Kennel Club because she thinks he’s God’s greatest gift to the world (do you remember how intolerable she was when he got into business school at Harvard, save me) and I’ll tell you a point of fact: that child has one thought in his little money-grubbing birdbrain, and that is old rich women and waterfront real estate.

I bet Debbie is in on it! She’s no idiot, you know, she had a prenup before anyone knew what prenups were.

Maude is eighty and she’s been smoking two packs a day since 1970, BUT she owns three acres just on the expensive side of the Naval Academy Bridge with a view of the steeple—I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you, Alice.

Furthermore, how embarrassingly paltry of Debbie to discuss “overthrowing” the secretary of a garden club, why if it isn’t Napoleon Bonaparte herself—warm

Your handwriting is improving. Well done. It makes very much of a difference in your letters. Not only are they more easily readable, but they seem more dignified.

How old is he?

As a matter of fact, I wrote a letter to a child named Nathan Briggs pretending to be the vice president of the United States and threatened to put him in prison if he didn’t leave Felix alone—he bought it! Never bothered Felix again.

That's So sad.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a musical artist who lives by a saying, which is: “F_ck the haters.” That is a filthy word; however the sentiment in such forceful simplicity is rather catching.

Is it a vine rapper?

I was an English major in college, and a pretty good writer. Not knowing another direction to take that would marry writing with something practical and lucrative, I became a paralegal and after a few years of that, went to law school at the University of Virginia. From law school I went into private practice with that old judge who just died, that was before he was the judge, and then when he became judge I went with him to be his clerk (now that’s me breezing over something like 30 years of day-in-day-out work). These days I might have been a judge myself, but back then it wasn’t popular for women.

There is no good explanation for our enduring friendship other than that your father is a smart, funny individual and he won me over with terrible jokes and sandwiches from a deli a block north of the courthouse.

Haha

My mother grew up in Arizona and my father in Maine, and furthermore, I was adopted at fourteen months. As you can see, your simple question does not have a simple answer. I did have three children, as it is in your family, but the second one passed away when he was eight years old. His name was Gilbert.

I am no longer married, you’re correct, but my husband did not die. We divorced. He lives in Bruges, Belgium, where he is from.

Would love to know about that.

watchful. I remember always finding it odd the way people had of speaking around and around a thing rather than directly to the thing, and I was often punished for insolence and rudeness.

I guess I was considered somewhat odd. I wasn’t a cheerful, frivolous little girl interested in dolls and drawing. I was serious and rather grave.

I didn’t have many friends. I read a great deal. I was reading all the time. I remember that. And I wrote a great many letters as a child. Writing letters was easier for me than speaking; it still is.

Did I ever tell you that when I was about nine years old my parents gave me a short letter that had been written by my birth mother when she handed me off? The letter was written to them, not me, but Mother (my adoptive mother) felt I ought to have it. As a child I was tormented by the matter of my adoption. I asked questions about it openly, read books about orphans, imagined an alternative life for myself.

I think my parents regretted having told me when they did, though it was so obvious I wasn’t related to them biologically.

I loved that Mary Poppins conducted her own life, and the lives of the children Jane and Michael, in such a controlled, even military, manner.

but as a child I imagined this lovely secret, that Mary Poppins was my real mother and that one day she would float down into my yard on the handle of an umbrella and declare I was her daughter,

He was gracious to welcome me to campus, and I sat for EN305 South Asian Literature. It was tremendous, my first foray into Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses. In the following years, I have audited a variety of courses (Seventeenth-Century British Poetry; Irish Literature; South Asian Literature; Eighteenth-, Nineteenth-, and Twentieth-Century American Literature; and others), and after Dick came Henry Dougherty, who also welcomed me.

Please let me know if there are certain courses you think might be a better fit than others. I am unable to attend evening classes, as I have to drive to and from my home just outside Annapolis, and additionally I would rather avoid poetry, if at all possible. I find poetry terrifically dull.

Rude.

He’s been diagnosed with colon cancer that’s already spread up into his intestine and stomach. They’re going to be starting with treatments and he’ll have a surgery for discovery later this week to see how far it’s progressed. He sounded like the same old Daan, calm and optimistic. He said Lina is very upset (of course she is). I know I’m not supposed to, but I feel sorry for her.

I brought out a photo of them from our wedding, wondering if seeing a younger version of his brother might jostle his mind to remembering a bit.

No need to return the tin. I find they are useful for storage of things like buttons or bolts when the cookies are gone. In addition, I noticed you’ve changed your hair. It’s very elegant. Your neighbor, T. Lübeck

Observant.

I suppose Mother and Dad knew less about my birth situation than yours—and I know you expended a great deal of effort to find information about your birth family, an effort you felt compelled to put forth because of the complexities of that whole situation—but I am not like you. I have been content.

But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that? These are thoughts I’ve had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I’d press on every once in a while.)

I have always felt we had a certain understanding. What was he thinking? They were all rather smiling, and Fiona, who hasn’t shown a speck of interest in me in a decade (I almost wonder if it was Fiona’s idea; it seems like something Fiona would concoct), was going on about finding out a bit about where I came from, as if I am an alien life form.

I’m very close to the end of my life, Felix, almost there, and I don’t want to muck it up more than I already have. It was presumptuous of them to assume I would want to know. I do not want to know. I am perfectly content.

I will come have a look in spring and maybe again in summer, and I hope you think of me outside your house and it disturbs you.

Crazy!

I went to college in Dallas, where I met my first wife, Wendy. We had one child together (my son, Amos) before she divorced me. I married again, too quickly I admit, but we did not have any children together because she didn’t want children (turned out that was a good plan), and we divorced several years ago. I’ve been happily on my own since.

I was gunning for retirement for my whole career, and then I did it, and at the end, damn it, I find myself bored! Terrifically bored.

My ex-husband (his name is Daan, he’s Belgian) is dying with cancer. We divorced nearly thirty years ago, and with our children grown we have no cause to maintain regular contact. However, there’s a strange loophole, and that is my best friend Rosalie is married to Daan’s brother, so I do hear things from time to time. It was Rosalie who told me about the cancer.

We had a good marriage. Daan is a gentle, intelligent man. His soft nature is the opposite of mine, but we balanced one another and we shared a great deal in the realm of our thoughts. He was an avid reader of all things and we used to sit up nights just chatting on. He loved to read nonfiction on the history of Europe.

He was a high school teacher (one of the only people I’ve ever met who always, without fail, places a comma correctly—EVERY TIME—and English is his third language) and he did some translating, although with his intelligence I always thought he could have been much more. When Gill died I went very far inside myself, and I suppose Daan was doing the same thing, though it was Daan who continued to raise the remaining children, while I rather disappeared from the family for some time.

Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.

I used work as an excuse. The research, finding answers to every problem, no matter how convoluted, the making sense of it and writing it all out into a sensical and watertight opinion.

I couldn’t cut myself away from Bruce and Fiona, but I could cut the stay to Daan, and I did. I knew exactly what I was doing.

A while later he left and Fiona went with him and finished out high school there. I still loved him, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear him.

Do you have some kind of emergency contact record? If I should die in the midst of this, with my personal information including my DNA off in the cyber world, would you be able to send the information to my brother?

If I decide not to go through with it, can you please send the refund to my son, Bruce Van Antwerp, the idiot who purchased this elaborate system of torture for me as a Christmas gift.

Postscript: I found your English to be quite passable, a cut above what you usually hear from foreigners, so crack on wherever it is you are over in the east.

You don't just say that to people.

Dear Ms. Van Antwerp, I do not live in India and I am not Indian. I have lived here in California with my wife and two children for three years. I moved to the US from Syria when my home was destroyed. I have an advanced degree in engineering, but I work at the moment in customer service for Kindred out of necessity because my degree is not enough to prove me in this country.

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