The Letters
Page 2
You asked me to write back (aren’t you sorry?), so that’s what I’m doing. He was so dear and tender. He loved the outdoors, but never as much as you wanted him to. He wanted to save the world, but why couldn’t he have waited to graduate and then done that here in Maine, or New Hampshire, or Arkansas, or Texas, or any of the places Teach for America would have sent him? Why did he have to choose the most remote place on the globe?
Please don’t let’s keep this up. I can’t bear going back and forth with you on this; I hear myself seeming to blame you and realize that’s just what I’m doing. We loved him more than air. And we buried him. He’s gone, Sam—and you being there does nothing to change that.
Have a drink with Gus, and turn for home. I’ve decided I don’t want the house. You can have it—I’ll tell Charlie, and he can work it all out with your lawyer. I really do like it here. The winter might be tough, but I don’t care. The first snow fell last week, and I climbed up to the attic and stared at it falling on the harbor.
Hadley
P.S. If you’re going to write again, send letters to me at
3 Lupine Hill Road
Monhegan Island, Maine 04852
You know I don’t agree with you on any of it—it’s your quest, not mine, I never wanted you to go. So I give you permission to ask why I’m replying in the same way, overnight express. The truth is, I don’t know. Perhaps I just want to do my part in playing out this last act of ours.
Be careful. I didn’t say that before.
But please, can you be careful up there? We may be apart now, but that doesn’t mean I want both of you dying in that wilderness.
I have to run to catch the boat, to get this off to you.
Hadley
November 12
Dear Sam,
I can’t decide whether fate has taken a hand in the timing of our correspondence. You’re writing me at home, and in spite of the strange magic of getting the mail back and forth from Alaska at warp speed, it’s still delayed, so your letters continue as if you haven’t received my replies. It’s almost funny because you’re being so nice and I’m being so not. What is that song from the Sondheim musical—“Send in the Clowns”? It’s about bad timing, missed opportunities—Judy Collins sang it. You made fun of me for liking it. But then again, you always did think I was too sentimental, that I saw life as a Hallmark card waiting to happen. Not anymore though, right? Not after what happened to Paul.
So. You and the woodstove. You kept her going all night. I have to admit you were right—my hackles went up (the only time I ever even think of hackles is with you, which has to say something…) when you wrote about lavishing all that tenderness on that stove. Maybe it’s even seeing the word “tenderness” on a page written by you.
I’m used to seeing your dispatches from the ring—or the field, or the mountain, or the surf break—whatever story you’re covering, whatever extreme athlete you’re writing about. I think of your work as muscular and rigorous, hard-hitting and incisive. That piece you did on Brooks Robinson? You could have been writing about yourself. So…tenderness…I’m so not used to seeing it flow from your pen.
The way you described the fire.
You know, it’s a cold night here. Lots of fog. When a fog bank rolls in off the Atlantic, it slams into the high seaward-facing cliffs, then covers the island. You’ve never seen fog this thick; when I walk outside and look down, I can’t see my feet. I want to paint on the rocks, to take my easel out to the bluffs, but it’s been too wet. I feel soaked through. So reading your letter…Sam, I lit a fire in the fireplace.
It’s burning now.
I guess it makes me feel connected with you. I don’t know why I’m writing that. I’m sure I’ll mail this letter and then want to take it back. But what you wrote…about tending the stove, and the heat you felt, and the Hudson Bay blankets…it made me long for warmth. I’ve been so cold.
Are the blankets those beautiful white ones, with the colored stripes on top? Narrow bands of color—red, blue, green, yellow. Those blankets? Remember when we went to Nantucket that time, way before Paul was born, so you could fish for stripers? And I grabbed a blanket to wrap around us at the beach? It was one of those…Hudson Bay, I’m sure of it.
That memory of me. Why did you decide to tell me about it now? We’re half a world apart, and Charlie’s calling what’s your lawyer’s name to tell him I’m giving you the house, and I’m finally painting again. I had to leave you for that to happen, Sam. I had to stop thinking of Paul. So here I am with the ghost of an old lady painter, feeling almost happy for the first time in I don’t know how long, and you say “tenderness” and you write me a memory of me.
Maybe it’s the fire, and maybe it’s the tea—yes, I’m drinking tea. Still. Seventy-nine days. But I remember the first time I saw you, too. You were sitting at a table at Penguins, that funny little café on Thayer Street. There were some girls from the Brown writing program at the booth behind you, talking about Robert Coover in that worshipful way students always talked about him.
You seemed oblivious. You were just sitting there, writing in a black notebook. Your head was down, and you were concentrating. You wore a thick green sweater, and jeans. You wore boots. I took all that in, because you looked out of place. Even before you glanced up, I knew you’d have a beard—and you did. You had sharp, piercing eyes that looked at me as if—I swear, this is how it felt—I were a refugee from a war-torn land, and it was your job to tell my story.
Actually, I was about to write “it was your job to save me,” but I think, to you, they’re the same thing. You looked older than the other students, as if you’d seen too much already. Little did I know you were a sportswriter; in spite of that, you were—and are—an old soul.
I stared at you, because I wanted to draw you. Well, I wanted to know you—then draw you. I thought if I could capture the intensity of your stare, if I could get that down in charcoal, it would nail my life-drawing grade. Forget the nude, forget the draped chair—those eyes, your eyes were the essence of life.
I should have known then, Sam—I couldn’t capture anything about you. Not in charcoal, not in oils, not with my heart, not with my love. So you and your tenderness—I don’t want to hear it. You’re in the wild, where you’re happiest. On the edge of the world and the extremity of life. Maybe you write about sports, outdoor activities, but you go after the internal landscape of your subjects—as well as your own—with something of the war correspondent. Everyone’s always risking everything. Surfers surfing eighty-foot waves at Ghost Tree, climbers clinging to the Eiger with nothing but air between them and oblivion. And considering the collateral damage of Paul’s plane, you’ve made your way to another war zone.
Let me tell you something…and I really do say this as someone who knows you. I know you’re there to save someone. It’s what you try to do in your writing, it’s what you think Harper’s pays you for, what you think those awards are about. You’re up in Laika Star with Gus and the stove and The Three Musketeers, and you’re feeding the fire, and you’re dreaming of something so long past…and you’re there to save someone.
You know he’s gone.
All you have to do is reread your letter to know. Ice brought the plane down. That’s what you said; it’s there on the page, in your handwriting. Do I have to remind you he wasn’t one of your professional adventurers? He was up there to teach. To help others. He wasn’t trying to break any records, be the daringest. Our boy wasn’t trying to tempt fate—he was just trying to help others with so much less than he had escape theirs…fates of poverty and hopelessness. He was there to help people get out of that wilderness. Don’t you know that?
Sam, let him go.
And let me go, too.
We have to live again, and it’s not happening. Not yet. We’re both frozen. Paul’s plane went down, and we’re in the glacier. So if there’s any saving to do, save yourself.
Stop this.
Hadley
Hadley—
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Dogs, dogs, dogs! (Sorry to have been so gloomy in my last.)
I’ll write this up quickly, then throw it in the mail. Gus informed me that the special mail carrier, a bush pilot named Dixie, will swing by soon. She won’t wait for anything, so we must have our letters ready.
I don’t know where to begin. Gus took me over on a snowmobile to Martha Rich’s “Dog Driving School and Adventure-Staging Platform.” What a name! And what a woman! She is tiny, to begin with. When you meet her you think, well, this can’t be right. But when you check her resume, you realize she has been to the north and south poles, both by dog team, and she was profiled by the BBC when she led an all-woman team up Mount McKinley. She is forty-five, maybe, and has reddish features and hair, a kind of Irish colleen only shrunk down and made more pocket-sized, and more dense and firm, and determined. She had a tight handshake, a steady eye, and she took me immediately to see the dogs.
And when you see her with the dogs, then you understand.
I read a long time ago that when Mother Teresa passed among the poor, she touched them. Every one of them. Her hands never stopped. I know it’s a strange connection to make, but that’s what came to mind when I saw Martha Rich among her dogs. Beautiful dogs. She runs only Eskimo dogs, an indigenous breed that goes back, literally, to the Stone Age. They are short, stocky animals, but possess blazing eyes. She introduced me to them all, or at least as many as I could see, and each one had a personality and a presence.
She told me a thousand things and I can’t repeat them all here, or remember them, but the long and short of it is that it shouldn’t be a hard passage. Five days in, five days out, she figures. Honestly, I think she sees it as a training run for some of the dogs. She will bring two sleds, ten dogs each, and all the equipment. (She doesn’t trust anyone else’s equipment, by the way, so she discarded 97 percent of everything I brought. This is not her first rodeo, as the saying goes, so I simply nodded and took her advice.) She wasn’t short or nasty about anything, but neither did she tiptoe around or mince words. I liked her. She knew exactly what she was about.
When we arrived back at Laika Star, Gus told me that Martha sews her own tents, blends her own dog food, designs her own stoves, and a dozen other tricks of the trade. She is probably one of the top ten polar explorers alive today. I knew some of this, but I didn’t know it all, and now I feel privileged to be traveling with her.
Okay, I have to hurry and get this in the mail. Whether we go forward together or not, I love you. Write to me if you can. I will tell you more about the dogs soon.
Sam
November 13
Sam—
Martha Rich? Hand-sewn tents?
What are you doing?
Hadley
P.S.
Look. Be careful. You’re crazed, do you realize that?
Comparing Martha Rich, whoever she is, to Mother Teresa—Martha Rich’s hands touching the dogs, never stopping, the way Mother Teresa’s hands touched the poor, never stopping. Jesus, Sam!!
You know, my faith died the day Paul did. I didn’t want to hear about the saints or the faithful, or people who believe in God and His mercy, His infinite mercy. But you know what I just read? Just a few weeks ago, in someplace ridiculous, like People magazine or somewhere, that Mother Teresa was a fraud. Okay, maybe that’s too strong. But they found some letters of hers, or a diary, and it turns out she stopped believing in God decades ago—she was tormented with love for someone she no longer believed existed. She had a crisis of faith, stopped believing for a time, continued to question her belief and life’s choices. And you know what? That made me like her.
She faked the last fifty years of her life. Wearing that habit, receiving the archbishops and cardinals and the Pope himself, and all those people who set her up on a pedestal, seeming to pray and believe in the Lord, and in Jesus the Savior, and in all the angels and archangels. Boy, did she pull a fast one! All that time, pretending to go along with the dogma, she was wracked by doubt. There must have been anguish, hidden behind her veil.
Dark night of the soul, baby. Me and Mother Teresa. And Jesus, for that matter. “Help thou mine unbelief.” The only line in the Bible I can stand.
So whatever this Martha Rich person has to offer, I hope she gets you where you want to go. Two sleds, twenty dogs, you and she on the tundra. What a story that will make…I have this strange, clear image of you going. As in going someplace, yes, but also leaving. You’re leaving by dogsled.
And what are you leaving, Sam? I guess I could ask myself the same question: what are we leaving behind and why? A lot of love, that’s for sure. There was so much love. There had to be, to explain the crash—not the moment Paul’s plane fell from the sky, but the aftermath. What happened to us afterward. What we did to each other…and to ourselves.
We were so solid for so long—or were we? Now I’m questioning all we had, everything we seemed to be. Weren’t we the perfect couple, the ones everyone looked at to figure out how we did it? Our house, the orchard…those were the outward trappings. But the inside stuff was pretty great, too. The way we talked and laughed, the way I’d pull you away from your desk and make you take me for a ride. I’d love those times in the truck, when no one could get to us. Not even Paul…It was just us.
But who were we? That’s what is tormenting me now. If we were so great, why did we fall apart just when—you’d think—we needed each other most? I was an idiot, and I admit it. But you were so rotten to me. I never felt you’d ever forgive me ever. Ever. I keep picturing a beautiful sweater, like the ones I knit for you and Paul when I was on that Icelandic kick. Remember? That gorgeous ice-colored wool, shades of white and gray, spun from the fleece of arctic yaks or some such creature. I’d be knitting a sleeve and find a bramble caught in the yarn and know it came from a sheep tramping through the great north beyond.
Those sweaters always seemed so sturdy, so durable. Nothing could ever happen to them. But all it takes is a pull—one little snag on a nail or a branch—and one stitch comes undone. Then another, then more, and suddenly you have a ladder of destruction, the whole thing falling apart. A sweater, sure—but us? That’s what I feel happened to you and me, to us. Hadley and Sam, good old solid us. One pull, one stitch—a big one for sure, but still. We could have picked up the stitch, couldn’t we have?
Why am I talking about sweaters? It’s all so sad and stupid. We’re done, we’re over, those old sweaters are in mothballs if they still exist at all. Who knows what you did with yours, and I can’t remember seeing Paul’s after he left for Amherst. Lumps of wool, a big pile of dust. All of it.
November 13 late
(I feel I’ve been writing you all day…)
Dear Sam,
Okay, that was the longest P.S. in the history of the written word.
Cooler heads always seem to prevail, but only after the mail boat has left. I feel like a twenty-year-old, writing letters, having second thoughts, running to get them back—only to discover it’s too late.
I’m sorry, Sam. My words have been harsh, and I don’t mean them to sound that way—well, mostly I don’t.
I’m in such a beautiful and fragile place. The island, I mean…but maybe also my spirit. You know I broke in half after Paul…he fell from the sky, and so did I. Knowing that you were going to the place where he died—Sam, I can’t tell you what that made me feel. A combination of terror, shame, and gratitude.
Terror that the same thing might happen to you, shame because I’m not there with you, I can’t find the strength to lay eyes on the spot where it happened, and gratitude—I tell you this reluctantly, because I don’t want it to spur you on, don’t want to make you go somewhere you otherwise wouldn’t. The more I think about it, or rather, dream about it, the more I’m glad that you’re there to be with him. With Paul.
Because I know where we buried his body, Sam, but that place you’re heading is where his spirit lives…In the place he died. I believe that. It gives me peace of sorts. His body�
�that wasn’t him. We couldn’t see anything of our boy in what came back to us. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t even looked. The memory of what I saw at the funeral home that day drained my heart. The most hope I’ve had in so long has just started to come from thinking of you going to meet him—to connect with his beautiful spirit. There was light snow last night, and it dusted the pine boughs…Here’s a drawing of what I can see out my window right now, to thank you for going to Paul.
I found out the name of my ghost. She’s Annabelle Frost. Sutton told me that she was eighty-three, a member of the Boston Art Club and American Watercolor Society, and the Society of American Artists. She was the real deal. She divorced Sutton’s father, fell in love with a man who lived here on Monhegan, moved to the island to be near him. She died right in this house, last December.
Sutton was afraid to tell me—that I’d be spooked and want to leave. But I feel the opposite. It comforts me, makes me realize she’s nearby. I know her spirit is right here, Sam—just as I know Paul’s spirit is near Ukallatahal. So it soothes me, in a way I’m just beginning to let myself feel, to know that you will be near him.
Annabelle helps me realize this…
Don’t think I’m going round the bend. I swear I haven’t been this sane in years. Eighty days without a drink, for one thing. There’s a little church here on the island, and I’ve been going to AA. I know you think I’m not an alcoholic—in fact, I noticed how you wrote about the alcoholism of the Eskimos, wondered how you’d feel knowing your wife was one, too—but I am. I’m not sure when I crossed the invisible line; I imagine it was sometime during that year after…There was before, and there was after. I started drinking to black out after. But you know all that…