“Another day, another month closer to the day we say ‘I do.’ … Each second is an eternity…like waiting for a leave, or my discharge, but with more longing.”

Dart is disgusted that he couldn’t shake that “Oh, to hell with everything” feeling today. As a consequence, he didn’t get much done, and now he can’t drive his mother out to visit Pop tomorrow. Part of his self-directed anger is because his mother will now have to take two streetcars and spend twice as long in transit when she goes out to the hospital tomorrow.

One of Dot’s lovely letters came today, including a paragraph about her lying in bed and wishing her were there to give her a back rub. He can’t explain how paragraphs like that get to him.  As with so many of his letters of late, this one consists mostly of very intimate thoughts. It becomes increasingly obvious that these two young people really need to be together and married. For so long, their letters served a valuable role in each of them getting to know the other. Now, there’s nothing new to learn except that which must come from being together on a permanent basis. The letters now seem to focus on assuring the other that their love and longing continues, unabated.

I surmise that Dot must have shed a tear on her letter which smudged the ink. Dart writes, “I’ve kissed that tear ’til it’s almost greasy. I’m a sentimental cuss. I can’t help it if our culture makes sentimentality out to be a ‘feminine’ trait, I’m sentimental just the same. I know lots of fellas who are sentimental, too, so I’m not alone.”

Dot’s correct in thinking he and Homer haven’t been spending too much time together lately. He’s not quite a s busy as Dart with classes, job, homework and extracurricular activities. Friendships suffer when other things crowd out time.

The 1947 Chevy 2-door that Dot described sounds like a beauty. He tells her to go ahead and buy a raffle ticket. He’s been tempted to buy tickets for cars in Cleveland raffles, but he suspects such things are corrupt in his town, so he’d only be throwing his money away. He thinks it would be swell if she won that car!

He sends blessings to Mrs. McCully. I think Dot must have written something about this family friend who has offered to pay for the flowers of the Chamberlain double wedding, and mentions how nice it is to have wealthy friends. He asks if that that means he’ll have no say in what the flowers look like.

There is an awkwardly frank section in the letter where Dart agrees with Dot that it’s too late to do much about her shape before the wedding. He continues “But please, Dottie, please don’t let it run away after we’ve been married a few years. Having children doesn’t need to make girls fat anymore. But we can work on that over next year. Frankly I don’t like the prospect of you spending your afternoons eating pints of ice cream.” He goes on to say that he believes a lot of her form is muscle rather than fat because she is so active and athletic. He hates to say such things because in the past, when he’s spoken honestly, she acted hurt. He assures her that he loves her just the way she is. Wow. Words fail me. Never once was I aware of Dad nagging Mom about her weight, questioning her food choices, or teasing her about her body.

There is a cryptic sentence about not letting the fitter get away with anything like the last one did. Did the person altering her wedding gown make some hostile remark about her form? I wonder if Mom remembers.

In further response to her letter, he tells her he was unaware of her skill in reading blueprints.

He also makes the case, contrary to Dot’s belief, that writing or talking about Jane does help with the pain of her death. “Jane was a grand person. Thinking about her, and talking about her , while it might make us very sad, will help to ease our aching hearts and help us to remember her better.” He tells Dot that he hopes they will always be able to talk about their painful feelings with each other, and in sharing them, may be able to help ease some of the pain. This paragraph shines a light on just how hard Dot must have been hit by the sudden death of her dear friend and cousin at such a young age.

In closing the letter, he once again tells her all that he looks forward to when they’re married. He begins with a wide range of physical pleasure he anticipates, but moves on to less sensual, but equally personal things. “I want to have you by my side as I say to the world, ‘This is my wife, Dorothy, and I love her more than anything in all of Creation. Look, she’s mine, and I’m hers, and I thank God for our love and for being together.’ I want to help you raise a Christian family for all the world to esteem. I want to be the father of your children. I have so much love for you that it has to overflow for those children and for all the good world.”

Dart’s shift at work tonight provided a wild ride. The Plain Dealer was keeping busy with its three “disaster” stories – none of which was a really big deal. The stories were: a grade-crossing accident, an explosion in Chicago, and a fire at a Standard Oil refinery. “All were being handled in the course of events, and we were fairly busy on all of them for  new material was coming in all the time. No sooner would we get a story set up in type and almost ready to go into the paper then we’d get some new development on it and have to change it.”

Because Cleveland radio stations provide no news coverage on Sunday nights, news of the Sohio refinery fire was slow to spread.  The first new deadline for the early edition is at 9:30.  At 9:15, the switchboards lit up. Apparently, on his national radio program, Walter Winchell had announced a fire at an oil refinery in Cleveland. “We were getting new info on the Chicago explosion and the grade-crossing fiasco, and the fire was giving us some trouble of our own, and Winchell hadda go and open his big, fat mouth.”

It seems that Winchell had lied, or exaggerated. He’d announced that the fire was threatening a huge tank of high-octane gasoline which was in danger of exploding. “He scared the heck out of half the city. To be sure, it was a ten-alarm fire, as spectacular as they come, but at no time was there any danger. It burned itself out just a few minutes before deadline. The paper came out at 10:00, right on schedule.”

Dart notices at this point in the letter that his typewriter ribbon is nearly worn out. He hopes a replacement doesn’t cost too much, nor is it on the shortage list.

His mother reports that Pop is up to 111 pounds and is doing much better. He’s still a bed patient, however. He thinks he’ll be discharged in a couple of weeks, although no doctor has said any such thing to him.

He wishes he had the words to write another letter like the one he wrote last night, but he doesn’t. “I do love you very much, Dot. I’m waiting for a certain day in June to begin proving it.”

No letter tomorrow.

With just 20 minutes until dinner, Dart gets started on a letter by trying out his new typewriter ribbon. This small thing that used to cost between 35 and 50 cents now set him back 85 cents. He wishes he’d paid more attention to Mr. Schmidt at work when he showed Dart how to reverse the ribbon to squeeze a bit more use out of it.

His Spanish test yielded a very poor 77. He’ll need to pull out all the stops if he hopes to bring that grade up to a B.

At his teeth-cleaning appointment today, the dentist discovered a small cavity and a loose filling. Repairs are scheduled for April 25.

Much later that night, he reports that his psychology and Spanish work is done and he can turn his attention to his favorite activity of the day – writing to Dot.

He fears she can look forward to a shortage of letters written on Mondays and Wednesdays. In addition to those being big class nights, he must also prepare for English the following days.

“Speaking of English, I talked the registrar into listening to me to me long enough for me to convince her she should look up ‘Technical Exposition’ in the Case catalogue and re-evaluate the course. It turns out she never did evaluate it in the first place, so I now have three more credits, for a total of 85. Senior status begins at 90.”

This week has brought three chance encounters with three friends from high school. The biggest news is that Fred is no longer seeing Bettie, to whom he was engaged just a couple of months ago.

Several times in recent letters, Dart has mentioned that he’s enclosed some box tops for Dot. Today he tells her that he has two boxes of Ralston cereal which he’ll hurry up and eat so that he can send the tops to her. He gives no indication what Dot plans to do with these items, but thrifty Dot will surely make good use of them somehow.

He thinks the cards she sent for his folks we very cute and a nice gesture. He agrees that Nancy can surely come out for a visit in August. Maybe she can help them paint their apartment, if they’re not done with that job by then.

He finds himself in a bit of a stew. He needs the Plain Dealer money very badly, but he has an even bigger need for more time. He loathes the idea of giving up a class or an outside activity, so he’s in a tough spot. He thinks the best idea would be to get a day job on Friday and/or Saturday, freeing up his weekend nights for study. He finds he does better work during the late hours than trying to fight daytime distractions.

He’s been trying to budget his earnings to buy more shirts and to pay to have them laundered to save his mother the trouble, but if he gives up that job, he’ll also have to abandon the plan. I find it interesting that the idea of washing his own shirts to save his mother the effort never entered his mind! This was the guy who had to do all his own laundry when he was under the care of Uncle Sam and the US Navy.

It’s too bad that Dot feels embarrassed when friends of Eleanor’s think they must give both brides an engagement present. After all, Dot’s been engaged for quite some time and had her moment in the limelight, but evidently, some folks feel they can’t give El a gift and ignore Dot. When he learned that one of Dot’s Andrews friends named Columbia will be a bridesmaid, he said he thinks he remembers her. He asks if she is the “gem of the ocean, or just Lake Erie.”

Time seems to be flying by until the wedding. (Almost down to 100 days!) One of the women on the Skyline staff said that they should all give Dart a bachelor party. The only thing he can think about is the time pressure he’s under. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to relax again.

“It’s late, honey. Come on, let’s trade back washes and back rubs and a million kisses and caresses, and go to bed. Here – snuggle up and we can sleep this way. Good  night, Darling.”

No letters tomorrow.

In spite of Dart’s neglect of her, he received two great letters from Dot today. He hopes she’ll “keep ’em comin’.”

Skyline came out today and the staff is slightly more pleased with it than the last issue. Still, Dart thinks much of the content smells.

Pop called tonight. He sounded good and announced that he’s up to 117 pounds. Dart and his mother hope to see him on Sunday, but their roomer Kathleen has complicated their plans. She wants to go see him too, but her high-pitched inane chatter drives Pop batty in short order. They may suggest that because visiting hours are short and he can have only two visitors at a time, perhaps she should wait until  a time when either Helen or Dart can’t go.

Dart worries that the doctors may send Pop home to soon. They really haven’t done anything for him except to enforce complete bed rest. Dart fears that an early release will mean a quick return, and he’d rather they actually cure his dad while he’s there the first time.

Burke just sent a masterpiece of a letter, thanking Dot for her gift of kippers. Dart says he wishes he could maintain his humor under pressure like his brother seems to do.

Helen told Dart that there are two telephone operators in her sewing class. They said the phone company would be happy to accept Dot’s seniority if she transferred to Cleveland after the wedding. They gave Helen their phone numbers so she can call them when she arrives in town in late June.

“I see I have an imposing list of stuff to do this weekend, including searching for the ghost of our old Hoover, which gave up the ghost a few days ago. Any coincidence between that and my rewiring job is accidental and may prove to be embarrassing.”

He loved  her swell letter, especially the long rows of X’s and O’s. He can’t wait until he can collect on the real thing. He also hopes he didn’t go too far on that “real warm” letter he wrote a few days ago.

This four-page letter carries no news. It is merely a long lament of loneliness. Dart is discouraged at his weak time management abilities. He needs someone to complain to, but his mother is never home at the same time he is. Besides, the person he most wants to talk to lives far, far away, in Connecticut.

“I’ve come to the place where I’m willing to do anything other than my assigned work, and that’s bad. Maybe it’s from lack of rest, or lack of recreation, or from just plain restlessness, waiting for our wedding. It’s such a long time till June!”

“My traits of not facing things get me down sometimes. Tonight, for instance, when I should have come straight home from Skyline, I went to Little Ted’s with the gang. The people left, one by one, until four of us fellows remained. I have work enough this weekend to stun the average elephant, yet I stayed there over my coffee until almost one. I no sooner get caught up on necessaries and ready to start on extras, then I waste some hours and the necessaries are once again mountains in the distance. I’m afraid I just don’t have the courage to face what must be done.”

When he gets into this state, even sex loses its importance. What he wants is the patience and compassion only Dot can give him.

“Good night, my Darling. These last few months are a nightmare. Marriage won’t change either of us much, but it’ll help us be what we are: two people who love each other and need each other’s attentions and companionship and physical relations. I’m afraid after talking so big about getting the third floor started, that I won’t be able to do a thing. I wish I had stick-to-it-iveness like other people. Please excuse my blue letter. Good night again, Dot. I love you.”

Even as I get a little exasperated with his focus on himself, I have sympathy for Dart. He faces financial pressures every day, compounded by the worry about his frail father and his over-worked mother. I suspect that college has been a bit of a rude awakening for him, too. He was an academic star in high school, known especially as a gifted writer. He had strong math skills. Even in his Navy training classes, he competed near the top in a very difficult class. He hasn’t seen that kind of easy success in college. His writing is good, but not stellar. Two of his magazine submissions have been rejected by his peers. When he was on the engineering path at Case, his very capable high school level math skills fell far short of the demands of a top engineering school. Suddenly, he is doubting his worth. I think a situational depression, brought on by worry and impatience to begin his life with Dot has settled over him like a heavy net. That’s all combining to divert his focus and energy away from what he should be doing. Worry leads to depression which results in procrastination, which adds to the pressure he feels. It’s a cycle that can be broken with some academic successes under his belt and the fulfillment of his greatest need – to be married to Dot.

Dart’s mood from yesterday persists. He’s swamped with regular school work plus impending tests to study for, but tonight, he decides to pen a 13-page letter to Dot instead.

Judging from her response to his steamy letter from last week, he fears he went too far. He had misgivings about sending that letter, but he had something to say, and he said it. It has made Dot worry that they may have crossed one too many boundaries on her last night in Cleveland. He occasionally shares her concern, but mostly only when she second guesses their activities.  He has heard from several married men that there will probably be times after their wedding when they second guess their decision to marry, but that passes as the couple works through the misunderstandings that brought them to the state of questioning.

He reasons that their intense love for each other drives their need to get “better acquainted, which in turn increases their desire for each other. He feels strongly that  if they were living, unmarried, in the same city, one of two things would happen. They would either cross the line that neither of them wants to cross prior to marriage, or they would control themselves to the point of controlling the love right out of things.

As he thinks about their wedding night, he believes that the steps they’ve taken to “get to know each other” have served several valuable purposes. First, they have taught each of them so much about giving and receiving pleasure. Secondly, they have acted as a sort of steam valve, relieving the pressure that, if allowed to continue, could ruin the long-anticipated wedding night because of nerves and stress. Being newly married is bound to be an emotional strain, and if they had to start from square one in consummating the marriage, they would surely crack under the pressure.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! These are two adults, very much in love. I think the fact that they haven’t jumped each other’s bones in a fit of passion shows remarkable restraint.

Dart finally boils it down to this: Neither of them is either wholly angelic, nor wholly diabolic. There are advantages and disadvantages to the closeness they have experienced, and perhaps they’ll have it all figured out by their 50th wedding anniversary.  If they’re lucky, they’ll have it figured out in time to be completely frank with their own children.

“Even though we are miles and months apart, I feel as though I both own you and belong to you. You are the half of me that’s not here. I’m the half of you that you gave to me when we exchanged our love.  We can bring those half-people together, and by patience and work, we can build two complete people out of the pieces. Those two people won’t be Dot or Dart, but Dot and Dart. If we work long and hard enough at it, Dot and Dart will be so mixed up with each other that they can’t be separated. It’s partly that way now.”

He tells her that one of the things he loved most about her letter today was that she said she wants to turn to him first when she has troubles.  “Oh Dot, you’re the sweetest, finest girl a fellow could ever have. You scare me sometimes.”

Yes, he agrees that they should talk about kids. He wants them, and he knows she wants them very badly. He’d feel their marriage might be a mistake if he were unable to give her children, but she knows of his “dark shadow.” (He fears he may have lost his fertility with his bout of mumps while in the navy hospital.) He strongly believes that if either of them proves incapable of having children, then they should waste no time in adopting. “If we can’t have children of our own, our marriage can’t be a mistake if we give love and tenderness and good lives to children whose lives would be without them, otherwise.”

“Oh, how can I soften what I said? Please let’s have children. Ours, if God wills it, others’, if He wills we be their caretakers.”

It’s hard to imagine that after writing 13 pages last night, Dart still has eight pages left in him, but he does. His letter last night only served to make him feel more lonesome. He’s also concerned that he may have said some things that will hurt her, but his faith in her is so strong that he believes she’ll understand that he meant no harm. “You’ve understood me before when I’ve said things that were tactless or unusual. That’s one of the many things that make you so dear to me.” I love how he can identify attributes that are uniquely Dot’s that add to his love for her.

He reflects for a page about why he misses her so much after he’s been driving. “We’ve driven so many miles in complete harmony that a long drive always seems as though it should include you.”

A visit to Pop brought the news that chest X-rays reveal there is still a large part of one lung that is not functioning. As soon as that clears up, doctors say he can go home. Dart worries that they still haven’t addressed his issues with insomnia.

On the way back from the hospital he stopped at the Plain Dealer to let them know he couldn’t work tonight. He hasn’t heard from them today so he hopes everything will work out okay.

As he listened to the midnight news tonight, he had a lovely thought. Maybe they could have a radio by their bed and on some future Sunday night they could fall asleep listening to beautiful music. “I think of so many lovely things to talk about when soft, pretty music is on. We wouldn’t even have to talk.”

“I imagine us lying there in each other’s arms, not cramped as we are on the davenport, but not taking up much more space than we do there, just murmuring our thoughts to each other. Maybe murmurs wouldn’t even be necessary. They haven’t always been, have they?”

Because all they have right now is memories, he likes to bring up each special one and examine it with love. “Remember the night of that bad storm here, when we stood in the vestibule? … Storms surely make us feel closer, don’t they? There’s something fierce and passionate about a storm. Something that makes us feel the same way. I like storms. Remember the other stormy night, when we drove to Kent and back to get your clothes? That was a storm!”

I recall many times when I was a child, sitting on the couch in the living room with one or both of my parents and a sibling or two, watching a violent storm raging outside the bay window. It seemed to me at those times that the louder and more ferocious the storms were, the cozier I felt, sharing the spectacle with my family. To this day, I’m warmed and energized by a great Midwestern thunderstorm!

He also recalls a night when Dot slept on his shoulder when she was feeling sick. “I loved you as tenderly and passionately that night as I do tonight. It made me feel wonderful that you confided your very personal secrets to me, and that I was, in some little way, helping you over the tough hours.”

Returning to his thoughts of music, he remarks that their love feels like music to him: Full of variety, fire, and rhythm; full of tenderness, laughter, and a few tears; full of great heights and dismal, lonely depths. Yes, he likes the idea of them listening to music together, under a single sheet on hot summer nights, or  “under fluffy blankets in winter, our breath hot on each other’s air-cooled cheeks.” He claims he’s so lonely now that he never wants to sleep again until he can fall asleep touching her.

He has temporarily written himself out. There are no letters tomorrow.

Dart’s writes one heck of an 12-page letter today, most of which I will not share. It covers a long and detailed description of his American lit test, as well as Dart’s assessment of the professor, a philosophical diatribe as to what makes a poet “great,” as opposed to simply “important,” and an elaborated system of guesses about how he performed of this test. I think I may have dozed off in the middle of those pages.

It then moves to a wordy and repetitive dissertation of the concepts of “right vs wrong” and “good vs bad.”  I must admit, I couldn’t follow it to its conclusion, so I don’t feel qualified to comment on it here.

At long last, the final page turned more toward the sort of talk that I suspect young Dot loved to read. “It gives me nice little chills when you write of buying things for us. Thanks for the $5.00. Next time I go to the bank, I’ll drop it in. Just thinking about snuggling up together to caress each other for an hour or so before we go to sleep gives me butterflies, too. Gee, it almost seems that I’ve been whispering this tonight, and now that we’re all talked out, we can lie back and enjoy ourselves.”

Dart begins, “Your letter of Sunday evening and that beautiful little poem you wrote Monday arrived today.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t write tonight, but the coincidence of our Sunday letters is amazing. I’ve kissed your lip marks till they’re almost worn off, my darling. You said you kissed the gardenia petals, so I kissed them, too, and it was like kissing your lips, your your cheeks, your neck, your breasts.”

He continues, “No wonder we were both so lonely Sunday. Each of us must have felt the other’s loneliness, thereby increasing his own. I felt both your nearness and your distance very keenly that day. When I put the kiss in the envelope, I hoped you’d kiss it. When you put the kiss in your envelope, probably at just the time I was doing the same, you must have felt as I did.”

For two pages he expounds on the wonders of their love. He feels deep pity for those who say that deep love is not possible. He is profoundly grateful that God has seen fit to place them together in such love. How gray the world must look to those who have not been blessed by the joys of a love such as theirs. Knowing you, loving you, having the supreme flattery of your unfailing loyalty and devotion, are the greatest gifts of my life. Good night, my darling, Sweetheart, my own dearest love. You are my highest waking thought, my deepest desire, the beautiful dream of my sleep.

How Dart wishes he could frame the letter he got from Dot today! He wishes it were possible and advisable to tell the world why she is the most wonderful girl in the world.

Tonight he finally got started on the outside reading required for his English class. After much stalling and ignoring, he forced himself to read 3/4 of The Scarlet Letter. He stopped there so that he could dash off a quick letter to his beloved.

He received a funny surprise from Cleveland College today; a letter advising him that because of his outstanding performance last semester, he is officially off academic probation and he “may now engage in outside employment, and extracurricular activities.” He’d never been told that such things were prohibited for him! “The very wording of ‘hearty congratulations on  your outstanding record’ inserted into an obvious form letter made me laugh. Who do they think they’re kidding?”

If he were to answer her letter, he’d be up until dawn, telling her all that is within him. “Come, sleep with me. Let us see if the ecstasy of our embraces is as beautiful as the thought of them is. It must be, Darling. It’s within us to make our life in bed, and out, as beautiful as anything ever was.”

It’s been such a passionate week of letters that Dart must take a breather. He’ll be back on the 15th.