yours eternally: love letters found at home

One of many love letters my mother sent my father, which I have only just discovered (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

While sitting at the computer writing my review of Sharr White’s new Broadway play, Pictures from Home, the true story of how photographer Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein) spent eight years taking pictures of his parents, Irv (Nathan Lane) and Jean (Zoe Wanamaker), in order to, in one sense, keep them alive forever, I suddenly decided to organize the many photo albums my nonsmoking mother left behind when she died of lung cancer in November 2017.

Hidden among the albums was an oval Godiva tin that I hadn’t remembered seeing before. I opened it up, wondering queasily if there might still be chocolate in it — Godiva was my mother’s favorite, so it was unlikely — but instead I was surprised to find dozens of love letters my mother, Rae, wrote to my father, Michael, when he was serving in the army at Fort Dix in 1960. I had never heard about these letters; when I called my sister to ask her about them — she and my mother had no secrets, sharing everything — she knew nothing about them as well.

Each one is addressed to Pvt. Michael Rifkin of B Company, Class 7-61, Spec Training Regt. “My love,” one begins. I immediately recognized my mother’s handwriting, which gave me a sweet twinge. “It’s twelve o’clock and I couldn’t sleep. I was awake thinking of you and planning our life together, a wonderful life devoted to each other for eternity. As time passes my love grows deeper and my want and need for you become stronger. You are my love and my life and will be till the end of time.”

My mother was nineteen at the time, attending Hofstra University on Long Island. My father was twenty-two.

Tin containing sweet love letters my mother wrote to my father (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In another letter, after discussing her grades and a difficult math test, she writes, “I sure hope I’ll see you this weekend, hon, ’cause I love you so much and I’m going to marry you A.S.A.P.” They wed in March 1961.

They had what most friends and relatives believed was the perfect marriage, if such a thing exists, but sadly it lasted much less than eternity. My father died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1985 at the age of forty-seven, when my parents were on vacation in Mexico, I was backpacking through Europe with my best friend, and my brother and sister were home in New York.

The afternoon after finding the tin, I was scheduled to see the world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, an epistolary off-Broadway show based on the correspondence between playwright Ruhl (Jessica Hecht) and one of her students, poet Max Ritvo (alternately Ben Edelman and Zane Pais), who had a rare form of pediatric cancer. My father’s father, who was born in Russia and died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of fifty-seven while I was in utero in 1963, was named Max, and in the Jewish tradition I am named after him.

Things got even stranger at intermission, when I switched seats to avoid sitting behind a tall man with a wide head and started chatting with the woman to my left, who quoted Marcus Aurelius to me: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” She of course had no idea that over the years several people have called me “Marcus Aurelius” as a nickname.

My father’s army ID (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

When I told my wife about all these coincidences, she sent me that weekend’s Daily Mystic, which offers “ancient wisdom for your body, mind & home.” It ordained, “We are at the start of a stellar oasis — several days of unimpeded harmonious inner planetary energy amid the broader more evolutionary astro. We must make the most of this! . . . In play till Monday, the Piscean Sun is trine the Moon’s South Node, creating a free flow of memory and desire from the deep past. It’s a mighty strong ancestral tug — you may find heritage and once-upon-a-timelines far more on your mind than usual.”

I’m generally not one for horoscopes and the like — even a broken clock is right twice a day — but I am an avid believer that there’s something more to coincidences than mere chance, that there is something spiritual behind it all. One of my favorite living writers is Paul Auster, the Brooklyn-based, Jersey-born-and-raised author who regularly writes about such occurrences, starting with his first book, 1982’s The Invention of Solitude, about the sudden and unexpected loss of his father.

In an interview with Auster reprinted in his 1992 collection The Art of Hunger, he tells Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, “When I talk about coincidence, I’m not referring to a desire to manipulate. There’s a good deal of that in bad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction: mechanical plot devices, the urge to tie everything up, the happy endings in which everyone turns out to be related to everyone else. No, what I’m talking about is the presence of the unpredictable, the utterly bewildering nature of human experience. From one moment to the next, anything can happen. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. In philosophical terms, I’m talking about the powers of contingency. Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see, they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding. We brush up against these mysteries all the time. The result can be truly terrifying — but it can also be comical.”

I couldn’t agree more with his thoughts on the “utterly bewildering nature of human experience.” In such terrific books as City of Glass, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan, concurrences and conjunctions abound, never merely serendipitous but helping drive the plot.

In the interview, Auster — who I have interviewed as well and who, as far as I know, still refuses to use a computer, instead writing on a typewriter and, perhaps, in his own cursive on paper — goes on to explain, “These are coincidences, and it’s impossible to know what to make of them. You think of a long-lost friend, someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and two hours later you run into him on the street. Things like that happen to me all the time.”

Things like that happen to me all the time. I’m sure they happen to many of you as well.

“Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability theory at work?” Auster asks. “It doesn’t matter what you call it. Life is full of such events. . . . As I see it, my job [as a writer of novels] is to keep myself open to these collisions, to watch out for all these mysterious goings-on in the world.”

In another letter, after talking about friends who had moved away and those still around, my mother writes, “Hon, I love you so much and I miss you terribly. I can’t wait till you’re home for good, ’cause the sooner you get home, the sooner we can start our plans for the wedding. Hon, I love you and I want to marry you A.S.A.P. and spend the rest of my life with you. P.S. Hurry up and call.”

There’s even a letter from my mother’s older brother, Paul, who was my father’s best friend at the time and later worked with him and my mother’s younger brother, Eddie, at the family business, Commercial Tire in Brooklyn. Writing from a 1959 vacation at the Auberge de la Colline in Québec, Paul admits to my father, “I got a peek at parts of some of the letters my sister wrote — boy!”

My mother also wrote from Québec: “I hope you’ve been getting my letters and cards O.K. By now you should’ve gotten my kisses also. . . . I can hardly wait to get home so we can be together again never to be apart as long as we live.”

Wedding photos of my parents taken in Brooklyn in March 1961 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At the bottom of the tin was a small brown envelope from Vassar Studios in Brooklyn, with three black-and-white wallet-size photos from my parents’ wedding. There was also the Macy’s Herald Square appraisal for the engagement ring my father bought for my mother, a 1.9-carat diamond solitaire costing $1,660. My wife assured me this discovery was not “a mighty strong ancestral tug” to buy her larger diamonds; she prefers travel, as did my mother.

Larry Sultan was inspired to begin his “Pictures from Home” project after finding a dusty box in his parents’ garage filled with hundreds of reels of Super-8 film. In going through my mother’s keepsakes, I also found an 8mm reel dated May 1963, shortly before I was born. I haven’t looked at it yet; I’ll save it for after I read more of my mother’s love missives to my father.

In Letters from Max, which includes projections from the actual handwritten dispatches, Max writes, “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is. And that’s all I want — is to know you forever.”

There might never be another Pictures from Home or Letters from Max, as no one writes letters anymore or fills physical albums with personal photos; emails, texts, and smartphone snapshots and videos are just not the same. The next generations will not have the kind of access to the past as we do.

At the end of Ruhl’s play at the Signature Theatre, the audience is invited to sit at tables in the lobby and write their own letter to someone they know who they think needs to hear from them. I picked up pen and paper and wrote to a childhood friend from whom I have recently, and sadly, become estranged, letting him know that I hope we see other soon. I can’t remember the last time I hand-wrote a letter and sent it through the mail.

Auster also said: “The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.”

That’s one of the endless joys of life, whether you believe in destiny or not.

Although there are no letters from my father to my mother, he did sign the first page of her high school yearbook. “To my lady,” he writes on June 12, 1959. “The stars that twinkle in your eyes, the warmth of the morning sun, the splendor of evening are no comparison to the wonder of you. You have brought more happiness into my life than words can ever express. May all your hopes and dreams become reality, and may I be there to share them with you always. Here’s to now and forever.”

In May 1960, my mother wrote to my father, “When you left Saturday night my life stood still and will stay that way until you return to me, for nothing has any meaning for me without you. You are my whole existence. You are my life. Only with you do I live. . . . Yours eternally, Rae.”

Now, through these letters, their love lives once again, preserved for the ages.

[You can follow Mark Rifkin and This Week in New York every day here.]