I rolled my chair backward, rested my elbows on my knees, and knitted my fingers together as the word “Ravensbrück” glowed above me on the screen. Thoughts battled inside my head. How could I finish the font knowing it was based on the handwriting of someone killed in a concentration camp? But, after all these years, could I abandon the project? Could the font be a testament to Marcel? Was that even appropriate? Could I finish the font and not identify the source?
I stood up, closed the file, and walked out of the office.
Hoover lay on the living room floor; I stretched out beside him. His tail began to drum the floor as I stroked his silken ears. He was still big and strong, though he rarely chased squirrels or rabbits out of our yard anymore. Instead, he offered dramatic sighs when we disrupted his naps, and grumped disapproval when treats or walks were delayed. But our sweet boy still gave us more love than we could measure.
“Let’s go see Daddy,” I whispered. Hoover jerked to his feet and trotted to the kitchen door. I slipped on shoes and grabbed one of Aaron’s old plaid flannel shirts off a hook on the wall.
The scratchy play-by-play of a baseball game radiated from a radio perched above Aaron’s garage workbench. When he saw us walking toward him, he turned the volume down and pushed a metal stool my way. I sat down, wrapping his shirt tight around me.
We chatted for a few minutes, then he turned his attention back to his project. Occasionally, an excited outburst by the announcer filled the void, though to me, his words were like static. I did not tell Aaron about the battle that waged inside my head. The font was my project—my problem—to sort out. Not his.
A numbed sadness filled me for days, though the sadness was confusing. Marcel wasn’t family. And intellectually, whenever I bought old handwritten letters, I understood, if not assumed, the person who had written them had long since passed. Perhaps it was because of where he died, but the unexpected, complicated grief that was unleashed after learning his fate felt like a lead weight slowing down the beating of my heart. Fifty million people died in World War II; why did I think Marcel would not have been part of that statistic?
I needed to see the listing of Marcel’s death again to convince myself it was true in the way someone might need to read a medical diagnosis over and over before accepting the result. I returned to the website, which was a registry of Protestants persecuted for their faith. After staring at Marcel’s record, I scrolled through page after page of other names. The registry contained exhaustive detail, and once I better understood how the document was organized, I was surprised to realize no children had been listed for Marcel and Simone. It seemed like a significant oversight that Suzanne, Denise, and Lily were not included. (After rereading both letters, I had begun to doubt whether Jacqueline was one of Marcel’s daughters; it seemed more likely she was a member of the Gommier family.)
The registry listed Marcel’s birth year as 1897, which meant he had been forty-eight when he died—years older than what I had expected. I ran a quick calculation: knowing people often got married younger decades ago, if Marcel had been twenty or twenty-one when he got married, then if they had children right away, and if the girls were twelve or thirteen—old enough to fetch milk on their own—Marcel might have only been thirty-four.
Maybe—just maybe—between the age difference and the fact daughters were not listed, this was a different Frenchman named Marcel Heuzé. My heart soared at the possibility.
My Marcel might have lived!
My Marcel. The corners of my mouth curled into a smile when I realized I had thought of him as my Marcel.
I smiled even more as I realized this was a second chance to search for—to hope for—a happy ending for my Marcel.
Chapter Four
Wisconsin—Texas—Minnesota
1980 to 2011
When I was just ten or eleven, one of my uncles made this suggestion: “When you grow up,” he said, “you should get a job at a museum inking tiny inventory numbers onto dinosaur bones.” I gazed up at him in wonder. I had never seen a dinosaur bone before, but I liked the idea if that meant people would notice my tidy handwriting.
I had always been fastidious about my handwriting. Posters and class projects would be carefully penciled before I ever dared trace over the words with a marker. In math class, columns of numbers were always precisely aligned. Sometimes I copied English assignments over and over until my longhand looked just so.
For my twelfth birthday, my parents gave me a Ken Brown Method Calligraphy Kit. The kit included eight chisel-tip markers filled with a variety of colored inks, practice pages with angled guidelines, and thick sheets of gold and white parchment. The instruction booklet outlined the fourteen individual pen strokes required to master proper Chancery Cursive lettering: vertical and horizontal strokes, top curves used on letters such as a or o, bottom curves used on letters u or c.
The words ELEGANT WRITER were screen-printed onto the barrel of each marker in Ken Brown’s masterful scrolled lettering. To me, those plastic markers were like magic wands, and holding them in my still-growing hands made me feel ennobled with the gift of beautiful writing. Evenings, after schoolwork was done, and after the ducks and geese and our three sheep were fed and penned for the night, I would sit at our plastic-covered dining room table and compose words using the fourteen pen strokes combined with “swift uplifting movements” for the flared finishing details.
Despite diligent practice, the curves and lines of my letters were never perfect. Or never perfect enough. The felt tips of Ken Brown’s markers lacked precise edges, which could result in rough curves and wobbly lines. Often I would write a letter or two, maybe a word, then furiously scribble through the flaws. Other times, I completed a few lines before crumpling the paper and starting over on a fresh sheet. Even at that young age, an unforgiving drive for perfection could rear its ugly head.
For my thirteenth birthday, I received a set of Schaeffer pens with interchangeable metal nibs and disposable ink cartridges. The pens came with an entirely different instruction book, so for months I studied Schaeffer-style lettering. I expected the metal nibs would allow my letters to be smooth and perfect. But they weren’t. Imprecision always haunted my curves and lines, and every flaw felt like an amplified reflection of my own imperfections.
The summer before my fourteenth birthday, we butchered the ducks and geese and sold our sheep. My parents traded our home in rural southern Wisconsin—an idyllic place surrounded by vast cornfields and rolling pastures dotted with thick groves of oak trees—for a split-level home in a sprawling suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. The impossibly cool things in my huge new school—designer jeans and big hair—trumped hand lettering. The Ken Brown Method Calligraphy Kit, gold parchment paper, and the Schaeffer pens remained inside a box tucked underneath my twin bed in the room I shared with my older sister.
Lettering did not cross my mind again until college.
“Letterform” was a fundamental course for graphic design majors. It was the equivalent of a pre-med student studying anatomy, a science major studying calculus. If Letterform students did not show interest in, or sensitivity to, proportion or scale, or could not be bothered with craftsmanship, it was a warning sign they might not be cut out for the graphic design program.
We began by studying typefaces designed by the fifteenth to eighteenth-century masters: Claude Garamond, William Caslon, John Baskerville, Giambattista Bodoni. We learned to identify the surprisingly anatomic-like parts of letters: arms, legs, ears, eyes, tails, shoulders, feet, spines, hairlines. Perhaps that was no coincidence; to a person who loved typography, every nuance in a letter’s shape could be as beautiful and as individual as a human body.
After studying classes of typefaces—sans serif, slab serif, Didone, Humanist, Blackletter—our professor sought to reinforce lessons on shape and proportion by having us replicate letters in that style. We would begin each assignment by penciling a grid onto an oversized sheet of thick white paper. Then, we constructed letters, payi
ng exacting attention to the subtleties of curves, the thickness of stems, the lengths of serifs, the vertical placement of crossbars.
The tiniest wobble in a curve, the slightest mismeasurement in the width of a serif, or any inconsistency in the width of a stem were flaws that would incur demerits from Professor DeHoff. He was not being captious—he wanted to share his passion for letterforms. He wrote detailed notes on assignments to help us understand the imperfections: “This is a hair too flat; push the curve a tiny bit more,” “Hairlines should be a bit thinner,” or “Slim down the stresses.” He encouraged keen observation by noting, “Do you see how this O looks in comparison to the C?” or “The spine angle in the S is a bit off—look again.” He ensured we respected the personality of each typeface with notes such as, “This is an elegant face, keep that feeling as you work.” And he gently reinforced class lessons with notations such as, “Remember, swells should be a little heavier than normal stems.”
As the semester progressed, grades were based not only on the shape of individual letters, but on the placement of letters in relation to other letters. Letters that were too close together or too far apart would disrupt the rhythm of the letters and destroy the visual harmony of a word. To revise the spaces, every letter had to be reconstructed and redrawn. Assignments were tedious, time consuming, and maddening.
Even though I earned an A in Professor DeHoff’s class, it never crossed my mind to design a font. That seemed to be the purview of long-dead European masters and foundries who cast type from molten metal, not nineteen-year-olds attending college in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Besides, my focus was on advancing through the graphic design coursework so I could enter the emerging world of desktop publishing.
The first years of my career were spent at a prestigious graphic design firm in downtown Minneapolis. My boss, Tim, had a reputation for exacting craftsmanship, and as we designed annual reports, marketing brochures, and corporate identity systems, we researched and tested typefaces, then spent hours detailing type to ensure aesthetic harmony. A dog-eared, sticky-note-filled copy of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style became my bible.
One of my favorite projects from those years was the design of an annual report for an environmental organization preserving vast swaths of Northern Tallgrass Prairie. Spectacular photos of bushy magenta wildflowers, wild grasses bending in the breeze, and yellow coneflowers reaching skyward accompanied pages of carefully set type.
To help tell the story of what the prairie looked like one hundred and fifty years earlier, the annual report’s cover featured a journal entry from June 1840, written by a pioneer named Eliza Steele. “We passed whole acres of blossoms all bearing one hue, as purple, perhaps, or masses of yellow or rose; or narrow bands, as if a rainbow had fallen upon the verdant slopes. When the sun flooded this Mosaic floor with light and the summer breeze stirred among their leaves, the iridescent glow was beautiful and wondrous beyond anything I have ever conceived.” Eliza’s journal had been written with indigo ink on mottled, off-white parchment paper. A flourished signature decorated the bottom of the page, and splotches and stains seemed to prove the rugged conditions of her cross-continental journey.
The scratchy old handwriting, lyrical words, and expressive longhand seemed to throw open a window to Eliza’s soul, and it brought her to life to such a degree people were thoroughly convinced she had been a real pioneer writing by lantern-light in the back of a covered wagon. But she wasn’t. Tim and I conjured Eliza from our imaginations. Her name had been invented. Her words had been carefully copy-written. And the lettering had been completed by a man in Florida named Jack.
But what Eliza—what the project—did was this: the handwriting’s expressive individuality reawakened the thirteen-year-old inside of me who had had a passion for handwriting. And for the first time in a decade, I took out my Schaeffer metal-nib pens and began to play.
Aaron did not say a word as he slid the heavy envelope across the table. He did not have to tell me what was inside; the thickness revealed the answer. He had been accepted. Months earlier, he had traveled from Minneapolis to Dallas to interview for a trauma nurse fellowship at Parkland Hospital. The fellowship was a career-altering opportunity for him, and after working for Tim for four years, I was ready for a change. We packed a U-Haul with hand-me-down furniture, clothes, books, and the television we purchased with the money we were given at our wedding eleven months earlier.
“It will be an adventure,” Aaron promised as we drove nine hundred miles south.
I took a job as an art director at an advertising agency. I developed concepts and layouts, then production artists completed the work. After a project was passed to the production department, I rarely saw it again. A handful of times, the final product made my heart sink: type had been horizontally scaled to accommodate a last-minute addition, or the space between lines had been reduced to squeeze in an extra line of text. I offered to detail the type, but was told it was not my job. It felt as though every skill I honed while working for Tim was roundly dismissed.
In less than a year, our grand adventure felt like a failure. Our bicycles were stolen. Our apartment became infested with rats, then with fleas. Aaron and I squabbled about money, and I was furious he had not disclosed the enormity of his student loans—loans that came due shortly after our move. For a while we shared one car, which meant as soon as I got home from work he left for the hospital. We struggled to communicate, and I did not know how to tell him I felt abandoned.
I grew up in a family that kept emotions and opinions strictly in check. We did not yell or fight. Confrontation was avoided. We were loved, though love was not openly demonstrated. We were typical farm-background Midwesterners: proudly stoic, practical, industrious. Never too excited, never too sad. In contrast, Aaron grew up in a family that could hurl insults with the force of baseballs. So when Aaron and I argued about money, the car, yet another rat, or one of the hundred other things we had to figure out those first years, he yelled. I hid in the bathroom.
Aaron was contractually obligated to remain at Parkland Hospital, but I did not think I could stay. One lonely evening I walked through the apartment and made a mental list of how we might divide our belongings. I would take my books and clothes. He could keep the new television.
Yet my need to stay was greater than the compulsion to leave. Aaron made me laugh. He coaxed me out of my shell. His irreverence was oxygen to my suffocating sense of decorum. And Aaron claimed my calm demeanor helped him realize he did not have to react to everything with anger. It was the first time he had ever felt that way. We were good together.
We killed the rats and fogged the fleas. We chipped away at the loans. We learned how to talk to each other and tried to embrace all that Texas had to offer. I cooked tortilla soup and baked pecan pie. We drove meandering rural roads seeking explosions of wild bluebonnet or Indian blanket. We went to a rodeo and to a dance hall with a saddle-shaped disco ball.
It was during those months of trying to embrace Texas that I learned about Thomas Jefferson Rusk. One hundred fifty years earlier, the stern-looking Rusk had been a major general in the Republic of Texas militia. He was an advocate for annexation, and after Texas became the twenty-eighth state, Rusk was elected one of Texas’s first US Senators.
Some of Rusk’s original letters, which were archived at the University of Texas at Austin, caught the eye of graphic designer Brian Willson. Brian used photocopies of those handwritten letters to design a computer font that captured the varying thicks, thins, and rough irregularities of Rusk’s nineteenth-century ink-on-paper handwriting. I was awed at the font’s rustic beauty and enamored with the way the letterforms seemed to scratch and dance across the page. The font, named Texas Hero, seemed to bring Rusk’s words to life.
Prior to seeing Texas Hero, I had never made the association between handwriting, type design, and what could be made with the new font design software. My reaction was immediate. Unequivocal. I’m going to do that somed
ay! I’m going to design a font based on old handwriting! The proclamation was similar to someone gazing at a far-off mountain and, without owning a map or hiking boots, knowing with absolute certainty they would someday climb it.
But I did not equate the effort required to design a font with the effort required to climb a mountain. I thought designing a font would be a quick side project. In fact, I assumed a font based on handwriting would be the perfect first project because irregularities in writing would provide a certain amount of wiggle room for imprecision. How hard could it be to scan someone’s writing and trace the letters?
Years later, I read an interview with Brian Willson where he admitted he underestimated how difficult it would be to design a font based on connected cursive handwriting. The biggest challenge, he explained, was ensuring that individual letters flowed together.
If I had read that interview the day I saw Texas Hero, I might not have started designing a font at all. But by the time I read the interview, I had been working on my font for years. And often, designing a font felt less like hiking a mountain and more like scaling a cliff wall, knowing that at any second an avalanche of technicality might sweep me off my feet.
Dallas never felt like home. Once Aaron completed his fellowship, we packed another U-Haul and returned to Minnesota. Aaron took a job as an emergency room nurse, and I joined the in-house creative team at a large financial services company. I was not enamored with the job, but I accepted the offer because of the ebullient woman who would be my boss, Kathy. She radiated positivity. I wanted to work for her.
Aaron and I bought a small house in White Bear Lake, a suburb north of St. Paul. The house was one of thousands of nearly identical single-level ranch homes built in the early 1950s for booming postwar families. The house’s interior was pink when we bought it: pink scalloped shades, pink blinds, pink paint, pink wallpaper. Aaron said it was like moving into a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. In the first week, we covered nearly every surface with paint. The house was reborn in tones of caramel, sage, and denim blue.
Marcel's Letters Page 3
