LETTERS from James & Orpha: contents
mad in pursuit home
Postmarked Tuesday 8.17.26, from James in Lynbrook NY
I’ve had no word from you since I left – I wish you could have written or dictated a few lines to tell me how you are. Please be careful to rest and avoid the atmosphere of incessant hysteria.
A great deal of rain has slowed our work, but things have gotten on
quite well – the foundation is ready to have some boards put on it.
Thursday night I succumbed to your erstwhile vice – went to the movies
(!) and saw “A Tale of Two Cities.” It was really a fairly creditable
reproduction of the book, with very few breaks into second rate
sentimentality. If all movies were as good I’d become an addict, but
unfortunately they aren’t.
Let me know your September plans. Mom will make out a list when I hear what you plan to do – if you are going to send announcements we’ll have quite a list – if invitations, we’ll submit only five or six names. Invitations definitely require a present, of course, while announcements do not, so that if your plans involve the former the list will include a couple of uncles, an aunt or two, and my grandmother. If the latter, we can send announcements to such friends as the Larkins and the Roess’, also sundry cousins and the like.
Suggestions clamoring for utterance must be silenced, but I guess you know how I feel about it all. Write me specific and definite directions.
Please assert yourself and have the wedding as you want it – I’d rather have it as you want it than as I want it; it is yours, so don’t have it as neither of us want it just to gratify your relatives’ desire to arrange things as they should be arranged.
Friday and Saturday nights I spent making changes, I hope improvements, in the plans. Sunday night, just as I wanted to start writing to you, a couple of boys from Long Beach came to see me, and kept me until midnight conversing, sending a cablegram to London for one of them, and taking them home.
By midnight I was so tired (6 sets of tennis in the afternoon) that I could only flop into bed and sleep, to sally forth with hammer and saw at seven-thirty.
Now it is pretty late, so I’ll try to get some sleep preparatory to getting something done tomorrow.
James
NOTES
A Tale of Two Cities: He must have seen the 1922 silent version, produced by H.B. Parkinson.
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