by J. F. Powers
I am like Daniel Boone cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness, the first one who ever didn’t lose himself in a corporation or go into business for himself. I hope—I sincerely pray—you are not making a mistake about me. If you think I’d go along just because you were my wife and asked it, or because we had twelve children who needed milk and bread. You said something last Sunday about how I’d cook with the rest of them. I am not saying I’d poison the children, but you’d better take another reading if you think I can be domesticated and made to like it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not make JF do some things. It gives me a pain to have to say all these things, but sometimes I get to thinking you don’t know me at all, don’t know what you’re getting into, and if you do, you think changes can be made which, as a matter of fact, won’t be made. […]
I trust you can see I am not kidding about all this. I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 17, 1946
Mavourneen,
Sunday, Feast of Patrick, bishop, confessor, patron of Ireland … and I love you. I have just had breakfast: pancakes, bacon, eggs, pecan rolls, tea (tay). It is a good thing, quoth Aunt Mgt, that Betty can cook. I told her you could. I get up in the morning, feeling in an Olympic frame of mind, and the first thing I have to do is argue about whether I want cereal or not, whether we are to have pancakes or not, etc. I trust you will cook our meals and not create problems of that order for me. I don’t care one way or the other, but it is customary, evidently, among Aunt Mgt’s friends for people to talk as though they don’t care when they really do and are being polite and resigned, feeling very strongly on the question of jelly roll and pecan roll and you know the rest.
Now I am getting the menu for tomorrow morning—tomorrow morning and it is not afternoon yet of today. The root of all this planning seems to be: not to throw anything away. To hell with what you want, how you feel, munch away on that dead hunk of cake until it is all gone. Quoth Aunt Mgt: “I never throw anything away.” It is as though, comes the Last Judgment, there will be but one question: Did you ever throw anything away? I hope you don’t read this as spleen. I enjoy having her here very much. I can’t forgo analyzing her, however, the prerogative of a writer, or of a man where a woman is concerned and vice versa. We have been up since nine this morning (Aunt Mgt since eight) and are now patiently waiting for the last drop of rain to fall out of the sky. We will probably go to 12:30 Mass. Amen. […]
Well, Betty, I see I’ve said nothing at length again. I love you. I think of you. I want to take you in my arms, to possess you body and soul, to be possessed by you. But this isn’t the time or place for that. It seems as far away as ever to me, the time and place, and you in your letters farther.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 18, 1946
Dear Betty,
I am writing this in flight at Robbinsdale. I rec’d your letter mailed Saturday this morning before leaving for Minneapolis. I was pleased to see that it went three lines over a page. You should not mind that I scold you about your brevity. It is my prerogative. It seems I am always mentioning my prerogative these days. Look out. […] You know I love you, and so I will not go into that. I am not excited, but that doesn’t mean I am any less happy. I am too old inside to get excited even about the most important thing in the world, which is you and our marriage. You will find me very young outside, however, and by that I mean physically. And perhaps I will become that way inside with you, loving you until we are one and we will not know ourselves apart from each other, at least a certain large beautiful part of our life. Strong words to come out of the rectory, aren’t they? […] And now I think that’s it. I have already said it. Say it to yourself and know I am saying it to you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 27, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] I looked at cars from the window of the streetcar today, cars in lots, and they looked terribly expensive, except one or two that said $125 and they didn’t look very mobile. I had a horrible dream last night, not about you, but about me. I woke up thinking I was surely in hell. I tried the lights (I thought), and they would not work, and I understood that to mean I had died and switches had another function wherever I was, hell, I guess. A man had me by the wrists and was on my back, looking over my shoulder, but I could not get the lights on to see who he was. Finally, I did stumble out into the light, a hospital it was, and found a mirror. I was afraid he would be gone before I could see who he was, but he was still there, looking over my shoulder at me as I was looking at him. It was me, an older, tireder me, and he would not let go. Then he went away, and I guess I was awake then, though I was certain I was awake before that, that it was no dream, that I was dead. Very interesting, the most interesting dream I’ve ever had. I also had clam chowder last night about 1:00 a.m. I think that is enough substance for one letter. […]
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
April 2, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] Do not be too hasty about picking up old furniture from atticks. We do not, as I see it, need very much beyond a table, the bed you have, and chairs. And we can buy what we want, rather than have the place loaded down with monstrosities from an earlier age. But of course I am really stepping out of my province, I suppose, in having ideas about furniture. I do have them, however—having been in very few places in my time which looked livable, unless your taste was governed by Better Homes and So Forth, which mine ain’t so much as by organic need (F. L. Wright). Well, that will be all for today—rather a businessy letter, not? I love you, but I can’t do anything about it and won’t go into it here.
I have asked Fr Garrelts to perform the ceremony. He will. So would have Fr Casey, but it seems I had been wrong in thinking that Fr G. did not want to do it. He does and will. I wish you’d try to iron out whether it is going to be a low or high mass. I think it ought to be high, not just because the local priests want it that way, as they obviously do, but for other reasons. However, if your dad can’t see it that way, it is all right. Just you be around and explain to all 75 people why we always get married at a low mass.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
April 5, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] You said nothing about the ring in your letters yesterday, and so I suppose it is still on the way. Well, there won’t be anything like that again, Betty. Old JF may not have this business sense, but he knows what happens to letters that come in the three-cent mail, how they are put aside and forgotten, and likewise orders which don’t come airmail. Are you still wearing your gloves to cover up your finger? I am sorry. It is in part my fault for waiting on Don so long. But of course the system, the good old system you don’t know about yet, is mostly to blame. I am closing now. I love you. Write.
Jim
By the way—whenever you want me to come, you’d better enclose train fare. I will need it then.
Father George Garrelts exerted a strange power over Jim. It sprang from his gargantuan personality, from his having been a member of Jim’s inner circle in their halcyon high-school days, and, not least, from his being a priest. He had nixed Jim’s other great love, Ramona Rawson; he pressed for writing collaborations with Jim; and, in time to come, he would push Betty to the side, most gallingly in a trip to Scotland that he, Jim, and Betty made together. Even before her marriage, Betty felt vaguely hostile toward Garrelts, beginning, perhaps, with a feeling that his initial disinclination to perform the marriage ceremony meant he disapproved of Jim’s marrying. She came to believe that Garrelts intended to intrude on their life as a couple—as, indeed, he had with the Humphreys.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
April 17, 1946
Dear Betty,
Wednesday,
and your letter. Very nice letter, except one paragraph which is probably the worst thing I’ve ever heard from you, causing me to think back to the time a similar sentiment was expressed by a true love of mine and it was the last time I ever saw her. I quote it so you will know what I mean:
Who said Father Garrelts was going to come and spend his vacation with us? I hope it’s not you. We have absolutely no place for him anywhere, either at the lake2 or in our house when we have it.
Now, so far as I know, Fr Garrelts has no intention of spending his vacation with us, and I am damned sure he would not care to spend even a little time with us ever if he knew about this. I am sorry if you did not mean to sound the way these words sound. They do sound, however, and I won’t be able to forget.
When I think of how well I know Fr Garrelts, what a wonderful friend he has always been to me, and I think of what Mary Humphrey and her enemies (also Christian), between them, are doing to Fr Garrelts, I am afraid I can think of nothing but a lot of people who had a lot to say about one man none of them knew a long time ago, and it was Holy Week too. As yet Fr Garrelts has had nothing to say. And the comparison is not as strained as you might like to think. Now, you can either accept my evaluation of Fr Garrelts, and enjoy peace, or spend the rest of your life sharpshooting to make an impossible point.
I assure you the Blondie-Dagwood myth, which is held in such deep esteem generally, will never be true of us. I think it better to let you know this now—though I had thought it was pretty clear—before we are married, for afterward such a hard paragraph as this one and yours might easily qualify as the reality and our love as the illusion. Both are real, and one does not exclude the other, although either one, in this case, could kill the other if the truth were not told. Now I shall try to pick up the pieces and get to work. […]
You did not ask if I loved you, but in case you doubt it after reading the above, let me say I do, very much, I do.
Jim
Fr G. did ask me several weeks ago to find him a cottage near St Ben’s for a couple weeks in June, but I had never considered renting yours to him, or moving him in there, hard as that may be for you to believe. He had wanted to work with Don at carving, etc. I will now make it plain that Wisconsin is preferable. He was getting the cottage primarily for his mother and his stepfather, both of whom incidentally would be accepted where he never would be, both of them having done the right things all their lives and amounted to nothing unless you call 40 or 50 years switching trains something.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
April 19, 1946
Dear Betty,
[…] It is Friday morning, Haskins is here (shaving now), and in a few minutes we’ll eat breakfast and then out to Calvary Cemetery, I think, to see Fr Kelly’s grave. I want to get a look at it; there may be something significant. Last night I, or we, got a cable from Osaka, Japan, from my friend Weinstein, to the effect that the Japanese love us, that the cherry blossoms are in bloom, that we should be happy, and he signs it Lafcadio Hearn, whom I daresay you never heard of. He was an American writer who went to Japan to live about fifty years ago and died there, a good writer. It is not clear from the paragraph you write about Fr Garrelts how you came to say what you did, but it is all over now and perhaps ought to be a lesson to both of us. I think that is all. I am not very happy about things in general, outside of you. I mean my folks not coming according to schedule and so far as I can see the general failure of my relatives to remember the occasion tangibly. I would not mind if I did not know that even if you are above making comparisons, the others are not. I love you.
Jim
Jim and Betty were married on April 22, 1946.
KERKER QUINN
150 Summit Avenue
April 26, 1946
Dear Kerker,
[…] I was married last Monday. Please tell Chuck in case he wants to offer up a litany or two for my wife and me. It will be rough and tough on both of us, no doubt.
Pax,
Jim
6
Something seems to be missing, and you say it’s me
Memorial Day 1946–April 3, 1947
Jim, the 1931 Chevrolet, and Stearns County
Upon his marriage, Jim left the Marlborough and St. Paul and moved with Betty into her parents’ summer cottage on Big Spunk Lake in the little town of Avon, Minnesota (population approximately 880). The Wahls—Art, Money, Pat, John, and Tom—took up summer residence on Memorial Day weekend. Jim and Betty decamped to a small boathouse, an outbuilding of the cottage. The situation, with its constant family activity and common meals, was not a happy one. Betty and Jim were waiting for a house that was being built for them—by Art’s workmen—on land bought by the Wahls for the couple as a wedding present. It was in the Avon woods, some three miles from St. John’s.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Avon
Memorial Day 1946
Dear Chuck,
Very glad to hear from you and that the stories are all right.1 […] I am sorry to be so reticent about my wife, about getting married, if I have been. I automatically figure it’s unimportant to other people. […] Well, we are living in a cottage owned by my wife’s folks. They are moving out here in a few days, however, and we will move 20 steps nearer to the lake, to this little 10 x 15 house I’m writing in now. It has a big window on the lake, which is called, amusingly enough for any reader of Joyce, “Big Spunk.” Now, Big Spunk, it seems, was an Indian chief, but I never think of him so much as of Molly Bloom when I hear a native pronounce the name. I get out on the dock and cast for large fish, using one of those plugs which always struck me as spectacular and incredible in Illinois. To date I have caught one fish, not counting bullheads (that I call catfish, after the fashion in Morgan County, Ill.) and two perch, a four-pound black bass. He was out of season, so I had to toss him back, thus creating the illusion that I am now a law-abiding citizen. The truth of it was I thought him too beautiful to cut up and eat. I guess that takes care of my private life and the local color. […]
Gratefully,
Jim
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Avon, Minnesota
July 15, 1946
Dear Chuck,
A note to let you know I am still here, did not come to Chicago after all. It will be later, I think. My reason for deserting this seeming paradise was that days go by and I get nothing written, being too occupied with the little body politic, the trials and tribulations of living too close to too many people. […] I do not fit into the pattern of life I find here. There is too much to deal with all the time: meals, dishes, company, humor, all the product of another unit, my wife’s family, on whose good graces we seem to presume, and their time is not my time, nor their ways my ways. We have no open difficulty. It is just that I constantly fail to come up to their idea of a son-in-law. And inside me there is a constant dialogue that never gets spoken aloud. Once I would have tried to cut a path through them. Now, no more. I retire. They think I am physically ill. I say, going along, I feel a little better now, each time I’m asked. […]
Pax,
Jim
Jim and Betty (who was expecting a child in March) traveled to Brewster, on Cape Cod, and lived in a house belonging to friends of Harry Sylvester’s. They intended to remain there until January 1947.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Brewster, Massachusetts
October 8, 1946
Dear Chuck,
[…] So far Brewster has been very much to our liking. We have had clams, mussels, and oysters from the bay, and I like all those. The worst thing is not having a car, making us dependent on the Sylvesters, even for milk (nobody will bother to come down here where we are). The next worst thing, now more under control, is the fleas. The people who own the house have a dog, and the dog has fleas. The people and dog are gone, but the fleas are always with us.
[…] Pax,
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Brewster by the Shore
Tuesday,
November 19, 1946
Dear Father Egan,
Rec’d your letter some time ago and very happy to have it, to know we are missed, and not in the usual way, in Minnesota. […] Betty is fine. You knew, I think, from reading a letter from Harry last summer, in which it came up, that she is to have a baby in March. Should we call it Harvey or Savonarola? I guess with the war over, and Russia the bête noire again, Dr B. is having a field day with his pamphlets and addresses to the dear ladies. I hope you are still on his list. I see from The New York Times Book Review (which we read avidly here, being authors, all of us) that “Our Sunday Visitor described The Scarlet Lily as ‘a bang-up, gripping word picture of Mary Magdalene.’”2 Bruce is also publishing a “thought provoking book for everyone interested in the future of America”—After Hitler Stalin? Or Blessed are the Peacemakers Defenseworkers and Those with Deferments. That’s what I like about us Catholics, books like that, coming like now. Enough for now. Pax.
Jim
Any rumors about who’s taking over Ray’s job with the Saints?3
Betty suffered a miscarriage on December 12 and returned to Minnesota by air to stay with her parents at their home in St. Cloud. Jim spent a few days in New York, then traveled to Washington, D.C., to visit his friend John Haskins before going to Chicago to stay with his parents. He spent a couple of weeks, including Christmas, there.
BETTY POWERS
4453 North Paulina Street, Chicago
Christmas Eve 1946
Dear Betty,
It is about ten o’clock, and all through the house not a creature is stirring except me, Mickey, and my grandmother. The tree is lit up and going; there is a red candle burning in the window; the presents have been opened; and my brother is out and also my parents. I have written two notes to people. Now you, after much sitting and staring into the tree, wondering how it’s going with you, if the presents are opened there, if you are having refreshments (eggnogs and toddies unlikely, on consideration, probably coffee). It is another sad Christmas for me, the third or fourth in a row, and I no longer know why, only think I’ve seen my last merry one. Oh, yes, my grandmother insists that I tell you she has not forgotten you but can’t get out and shop, a fact which is manifest but which puzzles her nonetheless. […]
