Letter To My Mother

PROLOGUE

I inherited my mother’s home in the Oakland, California hills several years

after the disastrous firestorm of 1991. A shifting wind spared the house, a modest

1950s ranch-style with a stunning view of San Francisco Bay, and when the fire

was over, Mother’s was the only one still standing in a two-block radius of

blackened rubble.

In retrospect, it might have been better if the house had burned down; at

least the insurance company would have built her a new one. By 1991, a penchant

for Caribbean cruises and flights to Hong Kong had exhausted Mother's modest

inheritance and the reality of living on a widow's pension that sufficed to buy

designer clothes or maintain the house, but not both, was sinking in. She opted

for Versace, and by the time I took possession of the property, the wooden deck

was falling off, the paint was peeling and the roof leaked. My real estate agent

said the buyers would tear the place down; only the land was valuable.

I set to work getting the house ready for sale. One afternoon, between trips

to the dumpster, I discovered several boxes full of old letters underneath the bed

in my parents’ room. I found two more cartons in the closet under a pile of straw

hats, then four more in the bedroom which was once mine, and then … in short,

my mother had saved all the letters she’d ever received, hundreds of letters,

perhaps thousands of letters, in a correspondence going back more than 60 years.

I was astounded. Why hadn’t I seen these boxes before? And why had my

mother – who was neither sentimental nor a hoarder – saved the letters? I

dragged the boxes to the living room and sat down on the floor to examine them.

Most of the senders I couldn’t identify, and these letters I threw in the trash, but

when I recognized a familiar name, I couldn’t resist the temptation to read a few

lines.

In a letter three decades old, a high school friend of Mother’s wrote that her

daughter was coming home to have a baby while her husband served in Vietnam.

Mother must have been happy to read Vicki’s news, but it brought tears to my

eyes because I knew the Viet Kong shot down her son-in-law’s plane and he never

saw his little boy.

Another friend wrote to say a mammogram had detected a tumor in her

breast, but since the growth was small – thank goodness – the doctor expected

her to recover fully. He was wrong.

Granddad wrote that my grandmother was ill, then that she was worse, and

finally that she was dead.

Dead, all dead. I don’t know why I opened those letters; reading them was

like walking through a graveyard.

But there were happier ones. A small shoebox contained the letters Daddy

sent to my mother in 1935, during their engagement; although the handwriting

was familiar, I didn’t recognize the urbane man I knew as my father in the

author’s awkward prose. In what were probably the first love letters he’d ever

written, the young naval officer described his ship and his comrades; he thanked

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Mother for finding an apartment. And here and there, almost with

embarrassment, he inserted a timid word of affection.

The last box was sealed with heavy tape; I got a knife from the kitchen and

slit it open. To my amazement, the letters inside were mine – letters in a childish

scrawl beginning invariably “How are you? I am fine,” sent from various summer

camps, and others mailed from a boarding school in Spain. At the bottom, tied

with a faded blue ribbon, lay a stack of letters I wrote from college, and in reading

them I rediscovered myself.

Were those letters really mine or was it someone else’s correspondence in

my mother’s box? Was I the girl that wrote about the Paraguayan professor who

invited her to drink wine and listen to folk music in his apartment? I had felt so

sophisticated telling this story. (True, I’d omitted a few details: we weren’t alone,

and after the first sip of Chablis I was seized with a coughing fit).

Was it I who described a joyous day of sailing on Puget Sound with salt

spray on my face and the wind whipping my hair? Was I the one who’d fallen

head over heels in love?

With the passage of time, marriage, work and children, I scarcely recognized

the lighthearted girl of 40 years before in the sober adult I had become.

I looked at the handwriting; it was little changed. And the return address,

yes, it was the residence hall where I lived, but the author, was it really me? I

read a few more of the letters. They were full of joy, exuberant, and bubbling with

life. And they were mine.

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CHAPTER 1

Blaine Hall, Room B102

University of Washington, Seattle

Sept. 11, 1956

Dear Mother and Daddy,

Classes began yesterday and I’m so happy to be

back in school. This quarter is going to be

fantastic! I’m taking the anthropology of Oceania

(the professor has a perpetual blob of mucous or ?

between his lips and when he opens his mouth it

stretches like a rubber band – gross!), primate and

human evolution, twentieth century Spanish literature

and modern European history.

Do you remember my friend Norma Berrigan, the

graduate student in Romance languages? We had dinner

together Sunday at a barbecue place on “the Ave” and

she asked if I’d like to go with her next summer to a

Quaker work camp in Mexico. We’re planning to stop

by the American Friends Service Committee office

tomorrow to get the details; Norma says it costs $125

for two months, plus transportation. What do you

think??

This quarter should be relatively easy, so I’ve

decided to look for a part-time job to help defray

the expenses. Yesterday I went to the campus

employment office and they referred me to a professor

in the biochemistry department who’s looking for a

student to type some manuscripts in Spanish. I feel

okay about the Spanish part, but the subject matter

is a bit daunting. I don’t think I have the

qualifications, but we’ll see. I have an interview

with him this afternoon and must confess I’m a little

apprehensive…

I hurried down a path leading south from the library to my interview with

Dr. Rosenau, nervously curling and uncurling the appointment card in my coat

pocket. In front of the Health Sciences Building I stopped, unrolled the card, read

“L.D. Rosenau, 425 HSB, 3 pm” for perhaps the tenth time, drew a deep breath,

and climbed the stairs. As I exited the elevator on the fourth floor, I looked at my

watch and realized I‘d arrived five minutes too early. I lingered in the hall trying

to kill time; I read the instructions on a fire extinguisher cabinet, paused for a

drink at a water fountain, sauntered past a couple of laboratories, and stopped to

glance at the cars-for-sale and apartments-to-rent notices on a bulletin board.

Toward the end of the corridor a radio was playing and the sound of music

grew louder as I continued down the hall searching for room 425. Finally, at the

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end of one wing, I reached an office with “L.D. Rosenau” written on a nameplate

beside the door. I glanced at the appointment card and then at the glass panel

behind which the frenzy of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain was reaching

its climax. I knocked several times without receiving an answer, then once again

with more force. The music stopped abruptly and a voice summoned me to come

in. When I entered, a tall man in a laboratory coat stood up and extended his

hand.

“Miss Collins? I’m David Rosenau. Won’t you have a seat?” I took the chair

he offered and surveyed my prospective employer. He was in his late forties, I

guessed, with a leonine mane of wavy, black hair, going gray at the temples, a

mouth outlined by heavy creases, unruly eyebrows, and a complexion so dark

that, despite his last name, I thought at first he might be Indian. In repose, Dr.

Rosenau’s deep-set eyes gave him an aloof, brooding quality, an aging Heathcliff I

decided, but his smile dispelled this impression. He was the most handsome man

I had ever met.

The mental picture I’d formed of Dr. Rosenau before the interview bore no

resemblance to reality. I was expecting someone balding and paunchy, an old

man with stained fingernails who reeked of sulfuric acid, and his actual

appearance caught me by surprise; my carefully rehearsed opening speech

deserted me, and I sat down without a word, painfully

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