The Lesson

Between Two Sheets of Paper

may be found any number of curious things. And this is the magic of an envelope, to seal away an idea and give it direction; it is sent from one place to another, from one person to another, and either of them, or neither one, may be alive at the time that it is read. Or perhaps one is, and the other is not. That is likely to be the most interesting of the various possible scenarios. Imagine for instance, that I was a general, and I wrote a message and sealed it, asking another general for help. Send troops, I might say. We are hard pressed. Immediately thereafter, we are all killed. I myself am killed in the very tent where I wrote the message, sitting in the very chair where I sat when I wrote the message. It would have been a lovely and most precise tent — of canvas and wood, with a pallet for snatching what rest I could. The flap to the tent would fly open and the colors would be wrong. I would see immediately that the soldiers entering were wearing uniforms terrible to my eyes. Then I would be bayoneted and the trinkets would be stripped from my body by the fierce enemy. My head would be cut off and hung from a cavalryman’s saddle. Some hours later, in some other part of the landscape, the general to whom I wrote, an old friend, would receive the note. He would see my hand, for I would have written to him many times during my life, and he would remember it with fondness. Why, of course, he would say. Even though I have too few men for my own purposes, why, of course, I will send them. But then the news would come that my head has been posted on the gates of this or that city. Can you imagine the sentiment with which he would behold my message, reading it then for a second time?

Yes, Loring was a letter writer, and she had written many letters in her life, both to the living and to the dead, to famous figures, and to, when she herself was famous, obscure jumpers-up. She had cried onto the paper of some, bled onto others in camps and wartime hospitals. She had hidden letters in cans, and buried them, just over enemy lines where they could be reclaimed by partisans, or at the very least, she had imagined doing so. Oh, she was familiar with the letter in a way that we can scarcely know it.

And so I say, that when she sat down to write out her plan in a letter to her deceased husband, about her deceased husband, in his incarnation as a child who was now her living student, it may be understood that she was fully in possession of all the equanimity that might be had in such confusing circumstances. The letter follows.