William Marvel: Letters

One long closet in my house is walled with bookcases containing some of the spillover from my library, and with several trunks that came home filled with my father’s uniforms when he retired from the Navy. I used to paw through the trunks occasionally, trying on the cap or the voluminous greatcoat, and I was probably not yet a teenager when I pulled out a banded cube of letters about three inches square.

Some were printed V-Mail. Others were written with fountain pens on thin sheets of light-blue paper that folded into their own envelopes. I may have spent an hour deciphering my father’s backhanded script, but none of the contents stuck with me except one reference to a particularly unpleasant posting, along with a few terms of endearment that seemed uncharacteristically tender for the stern and stoic mainstay of our household.