Pull up a chair and get comfy. There are 12 pages of letters today – long ones from each of the young lovers.
Dart’s first letter of the day is a quick one-pager. He didn’t write last night because he and a couple of guys went into town to celebrate. The reason for the celebration will be revealed in the following paragraph. Instead of getting drunk, they went slumming. “We didn’t do anything bad, but oh, Brother! What we saw! It defies description in genteel terms.”
His test scores were (surprise!) better than he expected. He’ll leave it at that and say no more on the subject.
He reports that he’s making progress in swimming. He finds the crawl to be exhausting, but he must qualify using that stroke for at least some of the required distance.
He must march to class now, but requests that she send him the phone number at the Miller’s house – just in case.
His second letter of the day begins with an almost desperate plea – desperate enough for him to send an airmail letter. He refers to Dot’s letter of August 30 which she ends with a nonchalant comment about his letters seeming different lately. She sounds as worried as he is. “Please, Dotty, please tell me what seems different about them. I’ve been worried myself lately that I wasn’t keeping my letters up to par, or that I wasn’t getting as close to you in my letters as I feel in my heart. I know it now, but I still can’t seem to find out why. I certainly wish I knew what to do about it.”
He suggests that maybe he’s been loafing too much, wasting too much time and going out on liberty too often. “Seems to me I wrote some hurried letters a couple of weeks ago and perhaps that was what you were referring to.” I agree there’s been something amiss in his recent letters. There have been a few that struck me as being rather self-focused. He wrote about his classes, his swimming challenges, his liberties, letters from his friends, his grades and his back. Somehow, his declarations of love, squeezed into the final lines on the last pages often seemed almost rote. As mature, romantic and thoughtful as he is prone to be it’s easy to forget that he is a 20-year old kid with lots of responsibility, too much free time and he’s homesick, too.
He writes that although his swimming classes are having a great impact on his progress, he’ll never shine in the sport like Dot does. He’s learning to have fun in the pool, but manages to get a snoot full of water while doing the back stroke. He expects that he’ll drown himself tomorrow during the abandon ship drill. They are required to jump from a 10-foot ledge, fully clothed into the deep end of the pool. There, they must remove their pants, knot the legs and create a flotation device out of them. For someone with the knack for sinking like a stone, that could be a frightening challenge. Imagine what it would be like in the open sea!
He describes his most recent liberty, taken with another guy from his class who had the same “good fortune” as Dart concerning test scores. The first thing they did was shop for a first anniversary card for the other guy’s wife, who had their first baby the day he got to Treasure Island. Then the boys ate at Dart’s favorite waffle house that reminds him of the Mayflower back in Cleveland. They cruised Market Street “looking for some devilment that wouldn’t cost us too much or get us drunk.” They decided on a movie that had been panned by the public but highly endorsed by sailors. “One of those movies which is advertised in such lurid terms as ‘Daring’ or ‘Educational’ about the dope racket.” (“Educational” is lurid?)
After swearing Dot to secrecy, he confesses a dirty little secret. On Sunday when he was answering so many letters to friends and relatives, he based each one on four carefully constructed paragraphs, with minor variations in each letter. By the time he got to Dot’s letter and the one to his folks, he was so tired of writing the same thing that he was kicking himself for not being more original.
He writes about how envious he is of El for being able to spend an entire week with her beloved Don. “Why, all the time I’ve spent with my best girl hasn’t amounted to a week since I met her a year ago.”
After seven pages, he still has the urge to stay up all night writing to Dot, but he owes his folks a letter because “they’re awfully lonesome.”
There was a jackpot of four letters awaiting Dot when she arrived home from New Hampshire. She certainly hopes her mother is wrong about there being no more for a few days.
She was happy to read that her package made such a hit with Dart. She enjoys sending him things, so when he has another request, he should remember how much pleasure it gave her to shop for it.
Hearing that Burke has started back to school, she’s a bit envious. She always claimed she didn’t really like school, but now that’s it’s all but over for her, she misses it. She’s still considering what college to attend next year and has been thinking about a junior college. Instead of studying retail, she might switch to physical education.
Her job at the Miller’s starts tomorrow. She’s confident they will give her a few days off if he can manage to get to Greenwich. She admonishes him to stop saying things like “If I survive.” What makes him think he won’t, she asks. After all, math can’t be that difficult, says Dot. I wonder if she was naive enough to think he was talking about failing his classes or if she was being intentionally obtuse.
She’s still wishing she could have taught him how to steer a canoe. She could have used his help this weekend on the lake. She was out by herself when the wind picked up and she had a devil of a time controlling the craft. In fact, she says he nearly had one less correspondent on his list!
She’d like to tell him about her lovely dinner with a charming companion, but she hasn’t had any. She’s glad he was able to enjoy such an evening in San Francisco. She did, however fall asleep on a man’s shoulder on the trip back from Sunapee. “It wasn’t my dad, either, and I hardly consider Doug a man. I wasn’t feeling well, but, believe me, he made me feel lots better. (Probably ‘cuz I pretended it was you.)” Wait! What? Who was this mystery man? No word on that from Dot. Perhaps I’ll ask her and see if she remembers.
She liked his story about the “sweet potato” orchestra. The other day, she saw a tall, thin sailor playing one in the Greenwich park and nearly had heart failure.
She’s never been in an airplane, but would like to justify the expense when she returns to Cleveland for graduation in February.
Again responding to his letter, she asks if she is the reason he might need to go to night school. If so, less letter-writing is in order. She also addresses his “genius” in a sweet passage. “I’ll be just as happy, if not more so, if you aren’t one. And I wouldn’t care if you’d flunked kindergarten at 15; I’d still love you.”
Dot launches into a mock scolding, calling Dart the most suspicious man she’s ever met. “Whenever I write you anything that might be taken two ways, you always take it the wrong way.” He suspects that El had a hand in Dot “winning” the bridal shower game which presumed to predict the next bride and how many children she’d have. He also suspected that Dot was hinting at something when she wrote a silly little code in a letter a while back. “Honestly, Dart, I have to think an awful long time before I write anything for fear you’ll figure it to mean something I had never intended.”
She’s concerned about his back and urges him to check it out with a doctor in case it is something that should be attended to now.
