When I was younger, though not so very much younger that I shouldn’t have known better, I found myself puzzling over the question: when are you exactly half your father’s age? Working it out longhand, through some trial and error, I discovered of course that it’s when you are the same age he was when you were born. It’s a fact of mathematical beauty that had escaped me until then, but here I rely on the Great Detective’s ignorance of our planetary system; or as my daughter once said in a skit: “My mind is very much taken over.”

This fact was brought back to me the other day when I was digging in my mother’s house and found a packet of letters, postcards, school drawings, mass cards, and assorted paper items on the floor in the back of a closet stuffed with clothes.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asks.
“Wonderful things!” Howard Carter responds.

Or something like that. In addition to a couple of dozen postcards and letters to my mother (and her children) from my grandmother at various stops on her many-visaed 1960 trip to Vienna and the Eastern Bloc to visit her family in Budapest, there were two letters from my father to my mother while he was at Georgetown and she was in Ohio with her sons trying to support all four of us. I was six at the time of the letters, my father thirty-six, or over twenty years younger than I am now.

I won’t divulge the contents of the letters, though they are commonplace. That (right, that) seems an invasion of some kind. But the tone of them was absolutely familiar from a far earlier part of my own life, and a bit sad. It’s a wonder anyone ever took me seriously when I was that way. Apparently more is granted to a father. They included a kind of apologetic yearning, both self-defacing and pleading, and a petulance that I suppose is entirely genetic. It will take some re-readings to absorb the letters, or, rather for them to slot themselves into the spectrum of emotions one carries away from childhood. I suppose the menacing edifice of Father does not expect bundles of letters from his youth to be ferreted out of dead peoples’ closets.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about this very thing. He told me he had dicovered a raft of letters from his father to his mother before they were married and agreed with his siblings to leave them unread. I can completely see that. These seemed more in the nature of reports from a distant city which, in small ways, they were. In the meantime, the ferreting and slotting goes on.