Letter to My Daughter (7 page)

I felt silly with happiness. Like a spy, I glanced around the library and snuck the letter into my satchel. I didn’t want to read it in public; I was afraid I might burst out singing. Before I left the library, I slid the volume back into its place on the shelf with a note inside for Sister Mary Margaret: “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

After that, every Friday, I would check the stacks. And more often than not, there in volume 1 of
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
would be a letter from Tim. Sister Mary Margaret and I never said a word about it. But sometimes when I passed her in the hallway, her hands tucked into the folds of her habit, the oversized wooden cross swaying on her chest, she would nod and smile at me in a sly, conspiratorial manner.

•   •   •

Do you know Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by the way? Do girls read her in high school anymore? In case you don’t, here’s a little background for you, some things I gleaned while looking from time to time through volume 1. You especially, dear Liz, might find it interesting.

When Elizabeth Barrett began her exchange of letters with the famous Scottish poet Robert Browning, she was already forty years old, an invalid living with her parents in London. Their letters led to friendship, which led to love. Elizabeth’s father was so mean and jealous, though, that he wouldn’t accept the idea of marriage for his daughter. And so she eloped, brave thing. One morning in September she stole out of the house with her maid, met Robert in a waiting carriage, and fled with him to Italy, never again to return to her home in England. While in Italy she finally showed Robert her “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” written for him during their early correspondence. I know that at least a couple of lines from one of them are familiar to you. We had to memorize the poem that year in Sister Mary Margaret’s class. It’s addressed from a woman to her lover, but I always thought it could as well be from a mother to a child. This is it, Sonnet 43:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace
.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight
.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise
.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith
.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath
,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose
,
I shall but love thee better after death
.

You could have done worse than to have been named after a nineteenth-century Romantic poet, Liz. Imagine if Sister Mary Margaret had hidden Tim’s letters in a volume of Homer. You might be named Penelope, or Athena, or Clytemnestra.

From his letters I learned that after boot camp Tim had been sent to Fort Devens for advanced training. He had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line before, so everything about New England struck him as novel: the tidy red barns and white churches, the old neighborhoods and cracked sidewalks, the way people walked their dogs on leashes and never said hello, only nodded their heads with their lips pressed shut when you passed them on the street.

At Fort Devens he was enrolled in Intelligence School. “Apparently
someone
thinks I’m smart,” he wrote. He was studying telecommunications, and already knew more about band waves and signal codes than he ever wanted to. “I thought I finished with books once I left high school. That appears not to have been the case.” Suddenly he found himself in a laboratory with a bunch of guys in eyeglasses trying to decipher circuit diagrams. One of his instructors said he had a real aptitude for electronics. “Like father, like son I guess.” He and his bunkmate put together the wackiest hi-fi set you could imagine using spare parts swiped from the radio lab and a chassis they made out of tin cans, forks, and a serving tray from the canteen. “Most surprising thing was, when we turned it on, it worked. We can pick up Casey Kasem on WABC from New York. How do you like that?” he wrote. And so on.

As happy as I always was to receive Tim’s letters, that semester I was also beginning to discover my own aptitudes. At the urging of Sister Mary Margaret I had joined the staff of the school newspaper,
The Beacon
. The first article I ever wrote was an interview with Maddy, the school cook I helped in the kitchen. Maddy was an amazingly cheerful fifty-year-old black woman who had come to work for the nuns when she was just a teenager. I titled the piece “Silent Heroes: Maddy Simms, Thirty-three Years at SHA and Still Smiling.”

My article struck everyone as being supremely principled and humane—which, as I remember, hadn’t been my intention at all, but I welcomed the praise just the same. Girls I had never spoken to, juniors and seniors, stopped me in the hallway to thank me for my bravery in exposing the hypocrisies and racial injustices occurring
right here at SHA—
injustices that, as far as I was concerned, were basic facts of life and had never needed exposing to anybody. But no matter. I clipped the article and set it aside, with the idea that I would add it to my scrapbook for Tim as soon as I found the time.

Because after the success of my first article, I became extremely busy with the newspaper. The editor, Kim Cortney, appointed me as special features editor, which basically meant that I was called upon to write anything, anytime. I began to spend all my free periods in the newspaper office, a cramped four-desk room in a hallway near the gym. I learned how to write a proper lead and how to estimate column length for a mock-up. I also learned that we girls from the newspaper club had a surprising degree of freedom on campus. We could come and go pretty much as we pleased. All you had to do was say, “Got a deadline, Sister,” wave a piece of paper in the air, and they’d let you pass.

“So good to see you mixing with the other girls,” Principal Evelyn said, nodding smugly as she stood watch outside her office door.

One Friday at the end of the semester, the newspaper club was excused from class to attend, unchaperoned, a daylong Scholastic Press Association conference at Louisiana State University. Since becoming a boarder at Sacred Heart I’d rarely left the school, so I was thrilled to be invited. I rode with Kim, who had her own car, a racy, sky-blue Capri with white bucket seats. As she drove she sang along to “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out a crack in her window. I watched from the backseat, awestruck by her cool. On the last chorus she threw her arm out, belting the song melodramatically with the other girls in the car until I had to laugh aloud.

Arriving at LSU, the club veterans took a few minutes to preen before leaving the car. I borrowed a lipstick and brush and did the same. “Boys,” Kim said, checking herself in the mirror of her compact, “don’t really care about how well you can write a lead. What they care about … are your lips. How do I look?”

We spent the day in workshop sessions moderated by passionate LSU journalism students and bearded young professors. They quoted John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, and Hunter S. Thompson, talking about the sacred power of the word, and the beauty of simple, honest prose, and the journalist’s moral duty to uphold the freedom of the press. After the conference was over, we ended the day at an Italian restaurant near LSU’s campus with a bunch of boys from the Cathedral High School paper. We all tumbled into the padded red booths, fired with a newfound sense of self-importance as newspaper writers. Who’d ever thought that what we were doing was so crucial to the well-being of civilization? Who’d ever thought something as simple as words on paper could change the world? Looking around the table at my classmates that evening under the glow of a low-hanging lamp, I imagined I could see in them, like an aura burning around their shoulders, the potential for greatness.

Sitting across from me was the photographer from the Cathedral High newspaper, a boy named Charles Benton—“Chip.” I’d seen him before at pep rallies and school functions, lurking at the edges of the scene with his camera. A fair boy with a goofy smile and tight curly hair that fitted like a bushy helmet on his head, he was almost indistinguishable from half the other boys at CHS, who were, by and large, polite, dull, middle-class Southern teenagers. Armed with his camera, though, Chip became bold and full of purpose.

I’d been so sheltered at Sacred Heart that the last boy to flirt with me was Tim, on the night we’d met at the Freshman-Senior Get Acquainted Dance in Zachary. So when Chip began making jokes at my expense, and overusing my name, and generally acting like a pest for most of the day, I hardly recognized what he was doing.

“He likes you,” Kim had said, pulling me aside during the conference.

“Who? Chip? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Oh my god. He’s nuts about you.”

Now at the restaurant, even before we ordered Cokes, he uncapped his camera and started taking pictures of me across the table. He narrated the whole time, too, as if imagining the captions that would appear under the photos in
Life
magazine.

“Laura Jenkins seen relaxing with her society friends at the world-famous Little Italy in Baton Rouge. Laura Jenkins sips her water through a straw.”

“You’re wasting your film,” I said.

“Laura Jenkins screws up her face in annoyance at the paparazzi who trail her every move.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Laura Jenkins—Hey!—throws a napkin at the hapless young photographer who ducks out of the way at the last minute. Missed me!”

Before the evening was over, and two large pizzas and several pitchers of Coke later, we girls from SHA had made enthusiastic promises to collaborate more frequently with the boys from the CHS newspaper. They would help us, we would help them. Sharing resources, cross-campus exchanges, regular visits to one another’s staff rooms—that kind of thing.

“I am so psyched,” Kim said back in her car. Never mind the newspaper. Visits to the CHS campus were about the most thrilling thing a SHA girl could wish for. “You walk down the hallway between their classes and, oh my god, it’s like you’re Marilyn Monroe or something. The boys positively drool.”

“I’ll send you prints!” Chip shouted from his car as he pulled away in the parking lot. “Signed!”

“You do that!” I shouted back.

“Told you,” Kim said, punching in the cigarette lighter on her dash. “He’s crazy about you.”

•   •   •

I tripped up the stairs to my room, feeling light-footed and happy, like I was drunk from too much Coke and pizza. I thought, in a flush of amazement, that maybe the way I was feeling now was the way high school girls were
supposed
to feel. Did girls like Kim Cortney feel this way all the time? And why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t I as much right as anybody to be happy?

Rounding the corner of the corridor, I ran into my roommate, Melissa, standing at the hallway telephone. She was holding the receiver, looking annoyed.

“Okay, never mind, here she is,” she said into the phone. She thrust it at me. “Finally. He’s been calling every half hour.”

I took the phone. “Tim?”

“Laura? Where you been? Honey. I been trying to call you all night. I got … Where you been?” He sounded upset, or drunk, or both.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I mean, a conference. A newspaper conference. With some people. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m leaving. Shipping out.”

“You’re leaving? To where?”

“Where do you think? Vietnam.”

Vietnam? It seemed too soon. Hadn’t he just started training? What about the intelligence school and all that? The radio classes?