Approaching Cheyenne, Dart writes, “If I can break out of the blues long enough, I’ll try to get a letter written.”
He tells her that they have a pretty good car for their long journey. Reclining chairs, nobody without seats, soft lights, several congenial companions, including Leffman and his guitar. “We’ve had music and half-hearted comedy all day, and it’s not been as bad as it could be.”
He bemoans the fact that all day, he and Dot have been traveling in opposite directions, getting farther away from each other. He’s not happy with that fact. “I have a vague recollection of having spent a few minutes in Cleveland between trains. Tell me if I’m dreaming or if you had the same dream, too.”
He recalls they took a long drive one night and a couple during daylight hours. He remembers a few precious minutes stopping in Euclid Creek Metropolitan Park and a long conversation in his living room. It seems they had a small water fight and he owes her some ice down her neck.
He misses her.
Having stayed an extra day in Cleveland, Dot writes a chatty letter about how she’s been spending her time with Dart’s family since he left. As she writes, she’s listening to Ohio State whip the pants off Pittsburgh in football. She tells him that she accompanied his folks to the Shaw High School football came yesterday – the first night game she’d ever seen. “The way I yelled, any bystander would think I was a regular inmate at Shaw.”
She took a bus out to Andrews School for Girls to say hello to faculty and friends. The detested Miss Hutton is about to marry a veteran of the the first world war, a fate Dot feels is far too good for her. When she stopped by Mrs. Wall’s classroom, the teacher insisted Dot stand before the class and report on everything she’d been doing since leaving Andrews. “When she found out why I was in town, she rolled her eyes and told the class she had met you and finished by licking her chops. Thus, she got the impression over to the class that you are very easy to look at. ” The girls screamed like they’d seen Sinatra, and they applauded when Dot told them Dart had made second in his class. “I better not get too enthusiastic, I guess, if I want to hang on to you (which I want more than anything in the world).”
Someone named Mr. Kuntz pulled some strings and got her a reserved seat on the train leaving Cleveland tonight. Just a note: I love how the trains have names instead of numbers. Dart is aboard the Challenger and Dot will take the Pacemaker.
“Every few minutes I glance at the clock and think about what we were doing twenty-four hours ago,” she writes. She recalls many of the same memories Dart mentioned, including the “ice incident.”
She’s decided to live by her brother’s philosophy of remembering the past, looking forward to the future and ignoring the present. “That will only hold until the war is over,” she writes. “After that, the present will be too precious to ignore.”
She reminds Dart that they cannot mourn the brevity of his leave, but only be grateful they were able to see each other. In an uncharacteristically romantic passage, Dot says “I wasn’t living ’til I met you and I won’t really live again ’til you’re home for keeps.”
Everyone misses him already, but his family’s longing is a mere trifle compared to how she feels.
In her P.S. she resurrects the silly doll Tonsillectomy, they talked about in their early letters. That doesn’t get any less weird with repetition! If anyone can explain the nonsense verse on the back of her last page, I’m all ears.
