The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 83: August 8

Today I read the letters exchanged between a young boy and his mother in 1930. These letters are not published. They are not public domain. These letters were in an old suitcase discovered in the corner of a rental house occupied by my friends. I had no business reading these letters, is what I’m saying. I read them anyway. I read them using the same logic I use in cemeteries, when my children climb on the tombstones or stick their fingers into the engraved dates or delight over the strange names or dismantle the spooky implications of “Lost at Sea.” These people are dead and in many cases forgotten, but now they are receiving some welcome attention. As a dead person, I would very much appreciate a child climbing on my gravestone, so long as they were respectful and interested, and I can promise that my children are exactly these children. If they were terrible children who topple cracked gravestones and yell and cannot be respectful even to the living, I would probably, as a dead person, be frustrated by my inability to discipline them, but I’m assuming the dead have their ways of expressing outrage, especially on their home turf. I could drop a rock on a toe, or trip a small criminal with those wires that hold fake flower arrangements together. Regardless. I feel when I visit a cemetery as I might feel if I were ever to visit a retirement home. These are the forgotten people, and they have stories, and they just want someone to listen to them.

Such was my rationale when I read the letters I found in the suitcase. That I generated a rationale in the first place was because the people in these letters, though I’d met neither of them, did not qualify as complete strangers. They are the relatives of my good friend (it is through his family connection that my other friends are renting the house). The mother in the letters is my friend’s great-grandmother; the son is his grandfather. The suitcase in which the letters were found was already open when I discovered it in the laundry room. The letters were already spilling out of it. They were already free of their envelopes. They were already unfolding. Still, I hesitated. I had heard about the grandfather and the great-grandmother from my friend, because he often uses his family as a medium by which to practice his considerable storytelling gifts. I thought of e-mailing him to ask his permission to read these letters that described, more or less, events he’d already told me about (in his way), but this struck me as a request he’d probably agree to without my needing to ask. What became creepy was me asking in the first place. Asking would cast suspicion over my mostly innocent curiosity.

I did not e-mail him to ask his permission. Obviously I did read the letters. They were heartrending, or maybe I was just in a mood to have my heart heaved up by letters sent to and by a boy who is dead because he would be over one hundred years old now if he were not. The boy had been sent to boarding school and was, I gathered from his mother’s letters to him, miserable. His mother tried to convince him that being sent away from home was the best and most adoring thing she could do, that it would toughen him up and that in general he had to learn to be much tougher because he was not tough and, as a result, he was a bit of a disappointment. She wrote for pages exhorting him to be tougher and tougher and tougher and then she would slip into the third person and write, “Boo still loves his mummy, doesn’t he?”

Later that day I took my son to the cemetery. He is in a phase where he wears no clothing. He is small enough that, in a cemetery, he might be mistaken for a marble cherub sprung to life, i.e., his nakedness seemed less disrespectful than it did a fanciful extension of the graveyard aesthetic. He stood, naked, in front of the grave of the man who had been the little boy whose letters I’d just been reading (He died at age ninety-three) and who’d once been so lonely at boarding school. I took a picture of my naked son in front of the man’s grave to e-mail to his grandson, my friend. I thought he might find it touching, or funny, or I don’t know what. Like the earlier e-mail asking his permission to read his family letters, this, too, I did not send.