LETTERS from James & Orpha: contents
mad in pursuit home
Postmarked
Thursday 7.1.26, from Orpha in Glens Falls NY
It is twelve o'clock — I have your letters, have read and reread them.
Mom has been on a case for a week, coming home at 7:30 P.M., sleeping here and starting out again at dawn. She is tired and nervous when she comes home. She likes me to talk and play cards and sing. I have little time to myself, for during the day I try to help Dad by taking over most of the responsibility of housekeeping.
This morning Randy and I played tennis for two hours, as a result of which I was nearly exhausted and felt a slight, oh ever so slight, pain. The racket does nobly, but alas! I do sadly. Randy won two sets today!
This is only an entr'acte — an interlude. It cannot even be called a mood, for I am vacuous tonight, so tired and ill at ease and restless. There is much, much to say — I shall write you a satisfactory reply to all you have presented, tomorrow.
When I told you I would write each day, I was not playing on words, mon Jacques, I sincerely meant it — but think! I'd never have dared shower you with six even before you'd sent me one little note!
Thank you ever so for "Chimes" — it seems promising — and for the Alumni News, incidentally. Dare I take hope from your chance phrase "Keep it until I see you"?
Oh! so many days, so many bursting hours of thinking, screaming, calling to you — wanting you to know all that I am thinking, seeing so clearly now — and having to force back to perhaps permanent oblivion — even little sentences I read, or tiny flaky clouds, or a tiny pond and a tree near it swaying to gaze on itself in the quiet mirror below — I cannot live. But, I must not say — you admire restraint , do you not? — and yet, you love abandon, whole-hearted, uncertain, youthful-like abandon, and if that were all, and if the world were like a world you and I can create in dreams, and if there weren't a lot of the Forsyte in us all, and if we weren't all compromising a tiny bit our individualism by the very act of living in this world — then you would know, for I have told you in my message last, that business and prestiges and financial successes are all hateful to me — and you would know without once asking which of the alternatives I should choose.
Orpha
NOTES
Orpha's mother was a private duty nurse and supported the family. Her father was disabled, possibly with a tubercular bone disease.
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