Dart’s is a playful letter, talking a lot about photos. First, he mentions the cunning bathing beauty photos of Dot’s, including some “leg art.” Then you realize he’s describing the photos she sent of herself as a very young child. He says he’s learned to be more specific in his requests and ask for recent photos of her.
He rebuked his folks for showing her all of his baby pictures and then learned from his dad that the one he feared most that Dot had seen remains hidden from her view. (Only because Dart senior couldn’t find it while Dot was in Cleveland.) Dart, Sr. has dubbed that photo “The Famous Grand River Nude.”
He wonders if the pictures she sent had been taken at Lake Sunapee. There’s a torpedo man named Martin on the Haggard who lives near Blodgett’s Landing on the lake. He says the name of Chamberlain is familiar to him, but he can’t place it exactly. Is Dot’s family’s place near Sunapee Harbor and Indian Cave Lodge? (Note: Hal Martin and Dart stayed friendly for years after the war. Mom and Dad often visited with Hal and his wife when they were at the lake.)
Talk of yet another photo makes it into Dart’s letter – the street picture Dot and Helen had taken in Cleveland. Helen has not sent it to Dart yet, so he’ll ask her to do so. “If it’s as bad as you say, I’ll hide it and look at it only in secret,” he teases.
In a recent letter, Dot commented that Greenwich begins to collect moss after 9:00 PM. Dart asks if she was disappointed because she’d been trying to get into mischief then. He writes a cute, illustrated paragraph about the gnomes who roam Cleveland, beginning at 11:00 PM, rolling up the sidewalks and storing them underground. He’s definitely in a playful mood, despite the fact that the surgical incision on his back is flaring up and becoming quite sensitive again.
He’s not being so playful in the plaintive closing paragraph when he talks of how desperate he is to begin their life together. He fears the war will drag on for a very long time. He can’t know it now, but the war will be over for the Haggard much sooner than anyone could guess.
This is the day Dot promised – the one when she writes him two letters to make up for a skipped day last week. She even throws in a bonus note from her boss, Mr. Goldstein.
Today is Betty and Gordon’s second anniversary. Although Dot can’t believe they’ve been married that long already, it’ not a marriage she envies. “Personally, I think it would be kinda nice to have my husband around after I marry him. Perhaps I’m queer, but that’s how I feel.” Betty’s day started with three dozen roses being delivered to the Chamberlain household; two dozen red and one dozen yellow. Gordon even planned ahead enough to send the card to the florist in his own handwriting, to attach to the flowers. Betty was over the moon!
Things are very slow at work, so she’s able to start this letter during the day. She thinks the store won’t get busy again until just before the next holiday, and she hopes to be gone by then. It’s so slow today that even Mr. Goldstein takes time out to write to Dart.
Temperatures in Greenwich are expected to drop to 30 degrees tonight and Dot fears that all the beautiful blossoms that decorate the town will be lost. “It’s days like this that make me wish I were a hermit with absolutely nothing to do but enjoy the beauties of nature. Ah, what a life! Ah, what a lazy loafer I am and would like to be more of.”
The family just got word that Dot’s cousin Walter, a lieutenant in the Naval Air Corps, is on his way home from the Pacific! He’s coming for some rest, having been involved in the long bombing raids of Iwo Jima and other places.
She closes the first letter of the day by saying she’d love to go for a long walk in the country with Dart by her side. She proposes they take a rain check and add this to the growing list of things they’ll do when he returns.
By the time she begins the second letter of the day, she’s received another one from Dart.
She says again how great it would be if he could meet Gordon while “over there.” The whole family likes to talk about how nice it would be if these two men could meet. Somehow it would make them both seem closer. She knows it will do no good to ask, but she wonders if he’s been in on the invasion of Okinawa. Surely if he writes “yes,” or “Your hunch was right,” the censor will let it go. She’s intensely curious to know where he is.
Like Dart, she will forever be grateful that Johnny passed on to Dart the fact that Dot would like to get a letter. She poses the question of whether he would have ever written to her if he’d not received that hint. She thinks that some way or another, they would have gotten to know each other because they both wanted that so badly. She certainly likes the way things have turned out.
