Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,21

last spring, and the meeting my parents had in the principal’s office. They had arranged it all then, their scheme to protect me from the corrupting influence of Tim’s letters. But Sister M&M, that crafty old grammarian, had somehow managed to intercept Tim’s letter in the front office so that she could secretly pass it on to me.

I felt silly with happiness. Like a spy, I glanced around the library and snuck the letter into my satchel. I didn’t want to read it in public; I was afraid I might burst out singing. Before I left the library, I slid the volume back into its place on the shelf with a note inside for Sister Mary Margaret: “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

After that, every Friday, I would check the stacks. And more often than not, there in volume 1 of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be a letter from Tim. Sister Mary Margaret and I never said a word about it. But sometimes when I passed her in the hallway, her hands tucked into the folds of her habit, the oversized wooden cross swaying on her chest, she would nod and smile at me in a sly, conspiratorial manner.

• • •

Do you know Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by the way? Do girls read her in high school anymore? In case you don’t, here’s a little background for you, some things I gleaned while looking from time to time through volume 1. You especially, dear Liz, might find it interesting.

When Elizabeth Barrett began her exchange of letters with the famous Scottish poet Robert Browning, she was already forty years old, an invalid living with her parents in London. Their letters led to friendship, which led to love. Elizabeth’s father was so mean and jealous, though, that he wouldn’t accept the idea of marriage for his daughter. And so she eloped, brave thing. One morning in September she stole out of the house with her maid, met Robert in a waiting carriage, and fled with him to Italy, never again to return to her home in England. While in Italy she finally showed Robert her “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” written for him during their early correspondence. I know that at least a couple of lines from one of them are familiar to you. We had to memorize the poem that year in Sister Mary Margaret’s class. It’s addressed from a woman to her lover, but I always thought it could as well be from a mother to a child. This is it, Sonnet 43:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

You could have done worse than to have been named after a nineteenth-century Romantic poet, Liz. Imagine if Sister Mary Margaret had hidden Tim’s letters in a volume of Homer. You might be named Penelope, or Athena, or Clytemnestra.

From his letters I learned that after boot camp Tim had been sent to Fort Devens for advanced training. He had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line before, so everything about New England struck him as novel: the tidy red barns and white churches, the old neighborhoods and cracked sidewalks, the way people walked their dogs on leashes and never said hello, only nodded their heads with their lips pressed shut when you passed them on the street.

At Fort Devens he was enrolled in Intelligence School. “Apparently someone thinks I’m smart,” he wrote. He was studying telecommunications, and already knew more about band waves and signal codes than he ever wanted to. “I thought I finished with books once I left high school. That appears not to have been the case.” Suddenly he found himself in a laboratory with a bunch of guys in eyeglasses trying to decipher circuit diagrams. One of his instructors said he had a real aptitude for electronics. “Like father, like son I guess.” He and his bunkmate put together the wackiest