Mom says she will be writing you separately. I hope she is better able to conceal her anger and frustration than I am. Please keep writing, and stay well and happy.
Love,
June 10, 1970
Dear Mom and Dad,
I am writing again the very minute after reading your letter because I don’t want to be accused again of being thoughtless or selfish, as your last letter seemed to indicate. I am fine, happier than ever, stronger than ever, and continually creatively growing. You’ll be very happy to know that I’ve been reading like a fiend, a habit I picked up from Paul, who reads tons of books every week, anything he can get his hands on. As my knowledge of the medium increases, the more stimulated and curious I am. I want to write more and more, and plans are beginning to appear in the direction of my own books which would be based around my travels and new sensitivity to nature and the world.
I am still living on Samos, mainly because it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve had the opportunity to know. Also, because of my increased sensitivity through daily discipline and yoga. I’m experimenting with pressing flowers, and the infinite array of natural prints and composition which I am learning to control. I have been offered a job working in a tavern here, which I have passed up. I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything more about Paul, but that would be betraying a confidence. We’ll still be staying here in Kokkári for another little while before leaving for India.
All my love,
June 20, 1970
Dear Lissie:
India!
It takes an impossibly long time for your letters to reach us, ten days for the last one, and then only to learn the depressing news that you’re planning to move on farther east. Lissie, I hope this decision isn’t a firm one. Mom and I truly feel that the best possible thing for you to do is to finish your stay in Greece, stay there for the summer if you like, and then come back in the fall to continue your studies at Brenner. Lissie, I don’t understand this. I didn’t understand your sudden decision to leave the country in the first place, and now I am totally baffled by what you wrote in your last letter. Why India? For God’s sake, Lissie, India is the opposite end of the earth!
I am making this short because I’m eager to seal the envelope and get it off to you, knowing it will take forever to reach you. Please write as soon as you receive it, and please, Lissie, tell us your plans have changed!
Love,
He had spent almost the entire day with a fashion editor named Lucy Katz, a bright New York Jewish girl who’d graduated with a B.A. from Brooklyn College and who was working her way up to Vogue via McCall’s. She was twenty-four years old, a virtually hipless, titless blonde with Joanna’s blue eyes and a voice not unlike hers, distinctly New York-sounding, with an added flavor of Bensonhurst. They’d spent ten hours together working with a model who’d learned to walk in Skokie, Illinois, shooting take after take of her in a fall wardrobe, and finally quitting at 9:00 P.M., with the promise, or threat, of an 8:00 A.M. shoot ahead of them tomorrow. He’d called home to tell Connie he’d have to stay in the city that night, and then had accepted Lucy’s contrite (“It’s the least McCall’s can do for you”) invitation to dinner. Sitting side by side in the restaurant booth, commiserating about the shlock model who was getting seventy-five an hour, he startled himself by calling Lucy Lissie, and then — because the wine was good and the hour was late — he told her all about his daughter’s phone call from Venice, and the way he’d mishandled it, sending her a prepaid ticket instead of the money she’d wanted, which was maybe why she’d cashed the ticket in, after all, because he simply hadn’t trusted her enough with the cash.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “this was in September of 1939 — I was thirteen years old, my father was still alive — these three older kids and I cooked up a great idea on how to spend our last weekend before going back to school. We wanted to go fishing. We were all city kids, and none of us knew one end of a fishing pole from the other, but this was the end of summer, the Labor Day weekend, and we decided we’d ride our bikes up to City Island, and go fishing from the dock there...”
His father had been sitting in the kitchen washtub, taking his nightly bath, when Jamie came home to tell him about the plan. He was a giant of a man, and his knobby knees came to just under his chin as he soaped himself in the narrow boxlike tub and sang at the top of his lungs. He was singing “Now’s the Time to Fall in Love,” a Depression song about potatoes and tomatoes being cheaper; Jamie could to this day remember the song his father was singing on that September night in 1939. Before the Depression, his father had been a typesetter on the old New York World, had lost his job when the paper was purchased by Scripps-McRae in 1931, and had since held a series of odd jobs, doing whatever kind of work he could get. He’d started working that summer for the ice and coal station on Second Avenue, making deliveries for them all over Manhattan. When he got home each night, filthy with coal dust, he’d strip naked in the middle of the kitchen and climb into the washtub alongside the sink. He was in the tub that night, singing about the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, when Jamie excitedly unfolded the plan to him.
His father said no.
He had a lot of good reasons. It would take them forever to get to City Island by bicycle. The roads would be packed with traffic on the Labor Day weekend, and therefore dangerous. Where would they get fishing poles, did they have money to rent poles, did Jamie think money grew on trees? And how could they fish from the dock there, where seven hundred other people would be trying to do the same thing, seven thousand other people. They would have to rent a rowboat, did they have money for a rowboat, did Jamie think money grew on trees? And what did they plan to use for bait, and what ungodly hour of the night did they expect to get home, and on and on his father went, the wet coal dust streaking down his face, the washtub filling with blackening suds, his knobby knees poking islandlike out of the water. “The answer is no,” he said, and went back to singing about this being the time to fall in love.
“I keep thinking,” Jamie said now, “that maybe I’ve said no too often to her, that if maybe I’d said yes once in a while, she wouldn’t be in Greece today, and planning to move on to India. If I could relive that phone call from her, I’d do it in a minute.”
“You really do love her a lot, don’t you?” Lucy said, and gently put her hand on his arm, and suddenly he recalled the woman in Louisville who’d said, “You’re really a very genuinely deep nice man, aren’t you?” and the way Joanna had later mimicked those words.
“But you mustn’t blame yourself, really,” Lucy said, her voice very much like Joanna’s, higher-pitched but with the same cadences and lilt. “I wish I had a nickel for every time I gave my father a heart attack. It’s part of growing up,” she said, seemingly unmindful of the fact that she herself was only twenty-four, “something we all go through,” her hand touching his arm again, resting there, “but we all get over it.” She smiled, withdrew her hand to lift her wineglass, smiled over the glass as she sipped at the wine, put the glass back on the table again, and then rested her hand on his arm again, the fingers widespread.