Part Two (Chapter Nineteen)
Reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost. —Flannery O'Connor
Chapter Nineteen
In the summer of 1983 Mom took early retirement. She sold the house in Utica and moved full time to the Cape, where she put the West Barnstable house on the market so she could move to a condo five miles away in Hyannis, closer to civilization. I was working as a newspaper reporter in Concord, New Hampshire, about a two-and-a-half hour drive if I timed it right to avoid Boston traffic. I visited Mom as often as I could.
One weekend in late June when I was helping her get the house ready to sell, I discovered a box I hadn’t seen in years. It was bright yellow, with a wide, green polka-dotted ribbon down the center. Brand new it had been filled with all kinds of goodies from Chesebrough-Ponds—Pond’s Cold Cream, Q-Tips, Vaseline—where Dad’s cousin Joan’s husband was a lawyer. I’d always coveted that box and had long wondered what had become of it. Now here it was, pushed to the back of a closet, bulging with letters, its sides pushed out, its top bent and misshapen beyond repair. Next to it was an ordinary blue stationary box, also stuffed full of letters.
I carried the boxes into the kitchen where Mom was emptying cupboards. “What are these?” I asked.
“Letters we got when Dad was missing and after he died,” she said. “I was saving them for you and your sister.”
“How come you never told me about them?” I asked.
“I thought I did,” she said. “Go ahead and read them.”
That was the end of my closet-cleaning. I carried the boxes back to my bedroom and plunked them down on my bed. As soon as I unlatched the hinge on the yellow box, the top popped up and letters began spilling out. I pushed the cover down again, tried to close it to make sure I’d be able to after reading the letters, but it was like Pandora’s box: once those letters came out there was no way they were going back in again, or at least no way they were going back in and staying there with the top sealed shut.
There were hundreds, most dated after April 23, 1974, the day my father’s body had been found. They were from temple members past and present, colleagues of my father’s from the rabbinate and Colgate University, friends of my mother’s and people she taught with, my friends and Amy’s, Jewish youth groups in Utica and across New York state. There were some from people we didn’t know, who had read about what had happened and felt compelled to share their feelings.
They felt horrible for us, these letter-writers. Their prose was filled with flowery phrases of good will and hope, but weighted down by every tragic euphemism imaginable, as well as some I’d never heard. It was a dreadful period of anguish and waiting, an unusual tragedy, a most difficult time and a devastating experience we were going through, they told us. We were suffering, they said, through anxious days, heartbreaking days, a difficult time.
We were keeping a vigil.
“We truly hope you and your family are spared any more sorrow in the future.”
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