Love letters revisited

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Mom stowed Dad’s love letters underneath their bed in a Dayton’s hatbox. I discovered them after he died and we were packing up Mom for her move into assisted living.

Each letter was handwritten in Dad’s precise cursive with dark blue ink on unlined, off-white official United States Armed Forces stationary. Each one was precisely folded and still in its airmail envelope.

There were 470 letters. I know how many because my always businesslike father had numbered them in the upper left-hand corner of the first page.

Mom told me Dad had many times made her promise she wouldn’t let anyone, even her jealous girlfriends during that time, read them. “But I don’t think he’d mind if I let you read them now. Go ahead.”

I did.

Who would have thought that this soldier, U.S. Army Cpl. Arnold Schwartz, the author of these 470 gorgeous love letters, was our mild-mannered redheaded wire-rimmed workaday discount shoe salesman dad? He whom my then-teenage sister called “Deadpan Dad” and likened to a “cold herring”? She, who in a fit of anger or frustration, once berated our mom: “You married a man who’d rather read the boxscores than talk to you!”

“Don’t you worry about me,” Mom said. “Your dad’s not the cold herring you think he is.” I remember how she whispered some things to Sister and they giggled and how afterward Sister had to explain to me what was so funny.

Fast-forward to the mid-1960s. Many of us boys had entered that stage when sophomoric machismo collided with our rookie romances. Unable and unwilling to voice our intimate feelings about anything, some of us thought we might be good at writing love letters to our “steadies” instead.

Mine was Kathy. Naturally, I thought my letters to her were suave and titillating. Of course, they were awful. Heartfelt? For sure. But schmaltzy, cliché-filled, run-on-sentenced “I-really-like-you-a lot-do-you-like-me” babble scribbled with No. 2 pencil on spiral notebook paper. To make matters worse, they’d end with that desperate-sounding, “P.S.: Write back!”

On the other hand, I couldn’t understand how our mild-mannered math whiz buddy, Harold, could pen such seductive, romantic letters — in exquisite cursive to boot. I knew this because he let me read them. And I knew his steady — “Sugar Bear,” he called her — was smitten by them because he’d show me her emphatic “I’m-yours-forever!” responses before he filed them in a three-ring notebook labeled “From My Sugar Bear” that he stowed in a padlocked toolbox in the trunk of his Corvair.

Many years later, as I was sifting through Dad’s letters years later, Mom told me Dad once told her how writing his letters “saved his life.”

In Stefan Dziemianowicz’s “The World’s Greatest Love Letters: 800 Years of Literary Romance,” we read letters from heavyweight love letter writers like Lord Bryon to the Countess Guiccioli, Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn (before, well, you know), Ludwig van Beethoven to his “Immortal Beloved,” someone named Maria Fitzherbert to George IV and this one from Percy Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin:

“Praise my forbearance — oh! Beloved one — that I do not rashly fly to you … . All that is exalted and buoyant in my nature urges me toward you, reproaches me with the cold delay, laughs at all fear and spurns to dream of prudence … .”

Pretty good. But read it alongside Cpl. Arnold Schwartz’s letter #318 to Sylvia, his bride, and well, you decide:

Letter #318

Good morning, Beloved of Mine: … [My buddy] Al caught me deep in thought and wanted to know what I was thinking of. Lover girl, I don’t have to tell you what was on my mind … . So many times during the afternoon I found myself just staring into space and thinking of you. Honey, those are not exaggerated words, believe me … .

I must be the last guy in Minneapolis coming home … . Darling, we will get a hotel room for at least a week … . Start planning for our trip … . You go ahead and buy whatever clothes you need. I want you to be the sweetest, most lovely looking girl on the train … . Goodnite Darling, and God bless every beautiful part of you. Goodnite sweetheart. I love you so much, Darling, so very much.“

And there’s Harold’s letter to Sugar Bear, probably long lost now, except for one perfect expression of his love I’ve grown old remembering. It rang true way when he let me read it back then — and still does: Harold wrote:

“When you’re sitting beside me when I’m driving, my life makes sense. I love you.”