5
April 22, 1946: (left to right) Zella, Art, Money, John Haskins, Pat Wahl, Betty, Jim, Jim
After quitting his job at the hospital, Jim paid a week’s visit to his parents in Chicago. Living with them were Michael, the dog, Jim’s grandmother Tilda, and his brother, Dick, who was something of a rogue at the time.
BETTY WAHL
4453 North Paulina Street, Chicago, the I Will City
St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1946
Dear Valentine,
I am at home, sitting in our living room. It is a wonderful room, very dear to me, scene of many a long night and early morning of writing. My books are all here. The phonograph. My family. My dog, Michael, who is sitting in the window now watching the janitor shovel snow away from the Fourteenth Church of Christ Scientist. It snowed like hell for the last miles into Chicago and must have been going here quite a while. I […] sat in the smoker for most of trip as the windows open better to the country. Very memory provoking, looking at the Wisconsin hills, the frozen streams, the farmhouses, with each it seemed sporting a dog who would break into a run when we went by, but at a great distance so that it was like an old print. I wish that you had been with me, except that you would have been tired. I read a paper edition of The Grapes of Wrath. And smoked until the pipe got bad-tasting. A letter from Shattuck waiting for me. He expects to see the crime wave rise now that I am free. […] My folks were disappointed that you didn’t come. I have promised you to them now. So keep that in your head. And this in your heart: I love you.
Your
Jim
CHARLES SHATTUCK
4453 North Paulina Street, Chicago
February 14, 1946
Dear Chuck,
I’m in Chicago now and have your note. Evidently, you are looking for the new Bluebeard in me. I think I’ll disappoint you. I am a simple citizen only, made in the image and likeness of Harry Truman, which is plenty for me, and if you weren’t one of them stuck up professors, it would be plenty for you. You may count on me Monday next. I’ll take the 9:05 a.m. out of Chicago. It will be a nice alibi as, if everything works out right, my draft board will perish mysteriously that afternoon. I may bring George Barnett with me. He is returning to Chicago to eke out. He has been in New York doing basal metabolism. He wants to outlaw the atomic bomb. I know a priest who wants to popularize it; he says look what small arms did for Ireland. Pax. How is Falstaff these days?
Jim
BETTY WAHL
4453 North Paulina Street, Chicago
February 20, 1946
Dear Betty,
Here I am still in Chicago. Wednesday afternoon. I am leaving either tonight or tomorrow. I am staying by special request of my folks. I am anxious to be back in St Paul, to read letters I expect to find there from you and to begin writing. Sunday night—to give you an account of my stewardship—I met Nelson Algren, whose two novels I like very much but which are probably too rough for someone as nice as you. Then Monday morning I went to Urbana and stayed with the Shattucks. That meant a lot of beer, more beer than good conversation, as a matter of fact. Some of the erstwhile editors of Accent, back from the wars, came over, and I met them for the first time—the Carrs and Hills. […] I am loving you.
Your
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
February 25, 1946
Dear Betty,
Monday, 4:30 in the afternoon, Fr Garrelts here for lunch and now out for a walk with Fr Egan. Fr Egan brings bad tidings about Fr Burner.1 It seems St Paul and Minneapolis are boiling on account of it. I can’t determine why exactly. Fr Egan says it doesn’t do any good and probably does a lot of harm. He holds it isn’t a purely parochial reaction, but I am still inclined to think that is what it is, nothing else coming to light on it. Newsstands are asked for Accent. Copies are at a premium. I should be happy about it, I suppose, but I’m not. It will blow over, I suppose. […]
When are you coming to see me? When am I coming to see you? I won’t feel like it until I turn out a couple of these stories. I think that’s all for now. I love you of course. Do not get upset about the wedding. I seem to detect the beginnings of hysteria already. Stop trying to finish your book on a weekend. No good comes of that.
I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
February 26, 1946
Dearest Betty,
Tuesday morning before I get into the day’s work. Did I tell you, I think not, that the barber suspected you when I told him the other day that I wanted it left rather long? He took special pains after that, he said, as he was cutting it for two people now. I thought at the time, what will I ever do in Stearns County for haircuts? You will have to learn how to cut my hair. I would not trust one of the agrarians (farmers) with it, not that I am particularly vainglorious. […]
The maid says the beer bottles must go and she hopes I won’t be mad at her for telling me, like they got downstairs (Dr Ruona). The exterminator man says it’s the bottles that draw cockroaches. I have a small fortune in bottles, beer and milk, which I intend to expend for a wedding gift for you. Well, today you have moved the date up to the 22nd of April. Why don’t you concentrate a little harder and make it the day after tomorrow? Then we can both settle down to our work, you calm in the knowledge that I married you for your literacy virtues and business sense, me calm in the knowledge that I married a “cold” woman who thought a husband was something every growing girl ought to have. […]
I must write Harry Sylvester and tell him I am now a public enemy myself. I am referring to the clerical forces now allied against me on account of Father Burner. I suppose it’s a healthy sign. Joyce had the same trouble in Dublin with his stories. Fortunately, I don’t think they can touch me. I am very glad that Sr Mariella approved of the Doubleday deal, but wonder what she means when she says that’s the only way I’d ever be able to make it, as though it were not all right that way. As for living off money I haven’t earned, that’s silly. When I write the stories, it’s earned then and there, and when they’re published is something else. Someday I’ll gather all you Teutons into a single classroom and lecture you a little on True Economics, a course I’m famous for. […]
I love you, Betty.
Jim
Jim’s aunt Margaret came from Chicago to stay with him for a few days.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
March 9, 1946
Dearest Betty,
[…] My Aunt Mgt has gone to a morning movie downtown—Leave Her to Heaven—oh, God! I might have gone to see The Lost Weekend with her, but oh no … she could see enough drunks in the streets without going to a movie about one. So it is. How right Hollywood and the Ladies’ Home Journal and the rest of them all are. They aren’t negative, not them. I think I’ll be negative to the day I die, I think, when I sound someone like Aunt Mgt on things. What a damn terrible thing this system has done in the years to people. Everybody she ever knew “had a good position” with Armour, with the Pullman Company, with Field’s, with National Biscuit, or was “in business for himself” with a dandy line of mops and ironing boards. And they all, every damn last one of them, had—“nice homes.”
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