I’ve taken stems of lavender from the vase, dried them a wee bit in the toaster oven, and put them under my pillow. Lavender is said to give one sweet dreams, which is what I wish for you tonight.
You are always in my prayers.
With fondest love from—
Your neighbor
Dearest Cynthia,
It is Friday evening, and I’ve just come from a late meeting. This is only to say hello and that I’ve switched on the lights in your bushes.
The fog is as thick as lentil soup, and they give a cheering glow. As they were not turned on during the holy days, I hope you won’t mind a few hours now, as a send-up of my thoughts of you on this wretched but beautiful winter evening.
God bless you and give you wings for your work. Nay, use them to fly to me here in Mitford. I shall watch for you to glide over the rooftop of your little house and eagerly open my window to let you in.
With loving thoughts,
Timothy
Timothy, dearest,
Violet has been invited out to dinner this evening by Miss Addison, who lives down the hall.
The invitation was delivered by the lady’s footman or something—this is a very swanky place—and was for six o’clock, which is when her elderly cat, Palestrina, likes to dine.
Can you imagine?
I have met Miss Addison several times in the hallway or in the foyer, and she is rather old and quite adorable, wrapped from head to toe in furs.
The footman, or whoever he is, came for Violet on the stroke of six, after I’d brushed her until she shone.
But oh, she is wicked! What did she do five minutes before the bell sounded? I was bringing a flowerpot inside when she dashed to the terrace that is forty stories above the street, leapt onto the railing, and stood looking with absorption at the lights of the Chrysler Building.
She will stay until eight, because they are all watching a video after dinner (surely not 101 Dalmatians?).
I went to dinner the other evening, quite alone, and confess it was a bit pricey. The waiter finally came over and asked, “And how did you find your steak, Madame?”
“Purely by accident,” I said. “I moved the potatoes and the peas, and there it was!”
Oh, Timothy, I’m trying so hard to bloom where God planted me. But I am very homesick. I look forward to our talk on Sunday.
Much love to you and to Barnabas. Do tell Dooley hey for me. I should like to see his frank expression and hear his wonderful way of speaking. When I come home, let’s all do something together—like—well, you think of something!
I pray for you.
Warmest regards to Emma and my love to Miss Sadie and Louella.
Sunday eve
Dearest Cynthia,
We’ve just hung up and it seemed so many things went unsaid. Now that I’m sitting down to write, however, I have no idea at all what they were.
I’m delighted that Violet has made a friend, even though her fancy dinner sent her to the litter box throughout the night. Sautéed quail livers with Madeira sauce are notorious in this regard.
As for us, we had our usual Sunday evening banquet. Fried bologna for Dooley with double mustard, and no sermons about a balanced diet, please. This case is beyond me. Unless I’m mistaken, he has not eaten a vegetable in four or five months, and I’m dashed if I know what to do about it. Any ideas?
I forgot to mention that we had a mild, almost balmy day on Saturday. Miss Rose pulled on galoshes and spent the noon hour directing traffic. After a long confinement, it put the bloom back in her cheeks, Uncle Billy says.
Fancy Skinner has nailed me again about my hair and insists I let her give me a haircut. I hesitate to do this to Joe, who, I’m told, may go with his sister to Tennessee for a week. Possibly I could use his extended absence as an excuse. What do you think?
I’ve seen Andrew Gregory, who looked smart as all get-out in a cashmere topcoat, and he asked about you. He seems to think that because you’re my neighbor, I know all there is to know about you. Yet it occurs to me that I don’t even know where you were born.
Well, there you have it. All the urgent things I left unsaid.
Clearly, there’s nothing of importance to tell a famous author and illustrator living in New York, whose cat has a more interesting life than most people.
Cynthia, Cynthia—my face grows red when I think of what you said. I hope you will seriously reconsider that outrageous idea, lest I take you up on it.
With something like amazed laughter, and, of course, love,
Timothy
Sunday evening
Timothy!
You rake in a collar! I positively blush like a sophomore when I think of what you said!
You may want to reconsider that outlandish proposal. What if I should take you up on it?
Or was it my idea?
Oh, well, when two hearts beat as one, who knows? And who cares?
I do love you to pieces. You are so funny and wonderful. I knew it the minute I saw that barbecue sauce on your chin, when I came to borrow sugar after just moving in.
Violet has gone down the hall to play with an electronic mouse while Palestrina, who is too old for such nonsense, looks on.
* * *
Nothing new here except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.
—Abraham Lincoln
* * *
I shall be happy to be home again with people who are ordinary.
Well, almost ordinary.
Much love,
Cynthia
My dear neighbor, it was your outlandish idea, not mine, and please do not forget it! I certainly haven’t forgotten it. Good grief, I can barely keep my thoughts on my duties. And there’s the rub.
I struggle with what old men with measles fear most: not being able to think straight, forgetting their Christian names, wandering in a daze on the street, being late for meetings and early for luncheons, dwelling everlastingly on some woman who only professes to have measles but in truth possesses a case so mild that she can go about her duties as cool and elegant as you please, while the other chap stumbles around trying to locate his shoes or even the very house where he lives.
Cynthia, Cynthia. Be kind. yrs,
Timothy
Dearest Funny Person,
Your wake-up call this morning—how wonderful it was! It was coffee with brandy, it was eggs Benedict, it was a hot shower and a walk in the park! Words fail me, but not entirely!
So glad you liked the pictures, though I’m sure you were being kind. I can be terribly grave in front of a camera, and that fur-lined hood made me look exactly like an Eskimo woman who has spent the morning chewing a piece of reindeer hide.
Dearest, I really and truly can’t come home. I must work some part of each day in order to reach the deadline. If I were to pull up stakes at this point and move home, I should do nothing more than lose time and gain confusion.
Thus far, I’ve been given God’s speed. Now, if I keep going and nevah, nevah give up, I shall come to the finish line on schedule.
And so, I have a question that will make your heart fairly leap into your throat—
Why don’t you come to New York?
You could stay here, and while I’m working, you could read or visit the bookshops or pop over to my little café where they’ve not only adopted me but would take the fondest care of you.
You would have lots of privacy, for this is a very large apartment—and I promise I will not seduce you. Since we’ve never discussed it, I want to say that I really do believe in doing things the old-fashioned way when it comes to love. I do love you very dearly and want everything to be right and simple and good, and yes, pleasing to God. This is why I’m willing to wait for the kind of intimacy that most people favor having as soon as they’ve shaken hands.
But enough of what I shall not do, and on to what I shall!
I shall buy fresh bread and fresh fish and vegetables and all the things you love and cook for you right here, and
you will save hundreds of dollars on pricey restaurants, which you can give to the children’s hospital!
I shall take you to a play with the tickets from my publisher and to the shop with the lighted antique globe, not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library.
Last but not least, I shall give you as much love and affection and happiness as I am capable of giving. Which, I believe, dearest Timothy, is quite a lot.
There. How can you resist?
Your loving Cynthia
from the office
dearest cynthia,
but i am a rustic, a country bumpkin, a bucolic rube of the worst sort—in a word, a hick.
I can see why you didn’t mention this on sunday when we talked—you wanted me to have time to think it over. That indeed is one of the grandest benefits of a letter. it gives one time to reflect, so that one doesn’t shout some impulsive, spur-of-the-moment nonsense like yes i’ll come to new york and fly in a plane and be stranded in an airport and get lost or maimed, or even killed, not to mention buffeted by throngs on every corner.
Nope. i can’t do it. you think i’m kidding, but i am dead serious. I am infamous for my fear of flying—which is chiefly why I hemmed and hawed for twenty years over the trip to Ireland. Large cities are another of my rustic phobias—they literally make me sick—which is the sole reason Kthrn and Wltr and I lodged in the countryside when we went to sligo.
I am willing to take any flailing you dish out—but i cannot come to new york. you’re right, the very thought makes my heart leap into my throat. blast, i am sorry,
with love,
Timothy
Dearest Cynthia,
It is Monday evening, and I have read your letter again, feeling like a heel.
Your bright spirit is the light of my life. When I read the gracious things you would do to make me happy, my foolish limitations and fogyisms are humiliating to me.
I can only hope you’ll forgive me and know that somehow, in some other way, I shall be forthcoming and good for you.
I, too, hate it that you must be there alone. Emma assures me that men in the publishing field are good-looking, enormously successful, and invariably tall, some of them verging perhaps on nine feet or more.
She went on to suggest that if I don’t mind my p’s and q’s, I will surely lose whatever ground I have gained with you, and you’ll be swept away. I would not be surprised if this were true, but I pray it will not be so.
It was consoling to read your brave announcement of what you would not do. No, we have never discussed this, but the time, clearly, was right for you to say it. It is amazing to me that you and I share the same ideal for sexual intimacy, which, needless to say, the world finds exceedingly outdated.
Another consolation is that the world has nothing to do with us in this.
Your openness has widened the door of my own heart, somehow, and I feel a tenderness for you that is nearly overwhelming. I can’t think how I could be worth the care you take with me, the effort you expend, and the ceaseless patience you bring to our friendship.
For this alone, I must love you.
My dearest,
You would be amused if you knew how long I have sat and looked at the two words just above, words that I have never written to anyone in my life. Can it have taken more than six decades for these words to form in my spirit, and then, without warning, to appear on the paper before me, with such naturalness and ease?
Even for this alone, I must love you.
I’ve come across a letter from Robert Browning to EBB, in which he says:
“I would not exchange the sadness of being away from you for any imaginable delight in which you had no part.”
To this sentiment, I say Selah.
I also say goodnight, my dearest love. You are ever in my prayers.
Timothy
Timothy,
I understand. I really do. I could feel the intensity behind your typed note. At one moment, your horror of this place makes me laugh. At another, I wonder what on earth I’m doing here myself!
I feel we should go on as we’re going and try to enjoy, somehow, this process of working and waiting. I know there is wisdom in that! But it keeps escaping me, like the flea I picked off Violet this morning.
Can you imagine? Forty stories up, in the dead of winter—and a flea? Certainly, she did not get it at Bergdorf’s. Which leaves only one consideration.
Palestrina!
I shudder to think what I should do when her next social invitation arrives in the letter box!
I must get something ready for the pickup service that comes at five, so I’ll dash,
with love and understanding,
Cynthia
Dearest Timothy,
When I reached into the letter box yesterday morning, I somehow missed your wonderful letter written on Monday evening. How very odd that I didn’t feel it in there yesterday, but odder still that I would have looked in there again this morning, knowing that today’s mail had not yet arrived.
I so needed your letter with Mr. Browning’s words to Elizabeth and the tender things you spoke to me from your heart. Because, though I honestly do understand your refusal to come, it made me sad that you will not.
I had hoped we could be together here, as free as children from everything familiar. Most of all, I wanted to share what I know of this strangely compelling city and take you ’round and show you off!
But you have called me your dearest. And that is worth any window-shopping at Tiffany’s or tea we might have sipped at the Plaza.
More than that—it fills me with happiness that you were able, for your own sake, to speak to me so.
It wasn’t easy for me to tell you what I shall not do—it was very hard to know when to say it! So, perhaps you can imagine how comforting it was to learn that we agree in this sacred thing—and to find that you are just as silly and old-fashioned as your neighbor.
When Elliott and I were divorced eleven years ago, the first thing my friends did was “fix me up.”
Oh, how I hated being “fixed up!”
Practically the first man I went out with said, “Hello, blah, blah, blah, cute nose, I’m wild about your legs, let’s check into a hotel.”
I wish I could tell you that I poured scalding coffee in his lap! But all I really did was curl up inside in a tinier knot than I’d curled up in before! I refused to go out with anyone again for nearly three years.
The secret truth, dearest, is that I cannot bear dating. I find it absolutely ghastly. I am so glad we have never ever dated and never ever will! You are just the boy next door, which I find to be the most divine providence since France was handed over to Henry the Fifth.
But please don’t think our friend Andrew Gregory was anything less than lovely. He is a prince! Yet, among a variety of other sweet incompatibilities, he is too tall. Yes! When he kissed me on the cheek, hehad to practically squat down to do it, which made me laugh out loud every time! Poor Andrew. He deserves far better.
You and I, on the other hand, are the perfect size for each other. As we’re very nearly the same height, we’re just like a pair of bookends.
I close with sleepy wishes for a riveting sermon at Lord’s Chapel on Sunday. Please make a photocopy at Happy Endings and send it to me. I shall be sitting on the gospel side at the little church around the corner.
Love and prayers, Cynthia
P.S. My work is simply pouring through. I am thankful beyond telling. James writes from France that my zebras fairly leap with life. There’s not a pair of pajamas in the lot. Pray for me, dearest, I shall be home sooner than we think. Love to Dooley. Here’s a bit of a drawing I did of him from memory.
from the office
dear bookend,
i’ll have you know i stand 5 feet 9 in my loafers, while you are a mere 5 feet 2. that leaves 7 whole inches waving around in the breeze above your head, and i’ll thank you not to forget it.
Dooley laughed at your drawing and mus
t have liked it for he took it to school today. That someone would make a drawing of him was a marvel he did not take lightly. Puny thought it pure genius, and i promised to make her a photocopy when i copy the sermon, which, by the way, was less than riveting, though Miss Rose, to my great surprise, pronounced it stirring. she refused to wear the sling-back pumps that Uncle billy ordered out of the almanac. She put them on the mantel in the dining room, instead, as a kind of display. She was arrayed in her Christmas finery. Uncle Billy was wearing a new shirt and held himself so stiff and erect i suspect he had left the cardboard in.
Things are back on schedule on the hill and i could hear the hum and buzz of the equipment as i walked in this morning. emma wanted the week off, so i am quite alone here, half-freezing one minute and roasting the next, as the heater has developed a tic and goes on and off at odd moments.
You sounded strong yesterday, so glad Miss Addison invited you for that swell Sunday tea and that you brought home no fleas.
Again, i enjoyed your books more than i can say. i seemed to find all sorts of meaning between the lines.
Love, Timothy
P.S. Dooley says hey
thnx for telling me when you were born, though I forgot, as usual, to ask where. So there’ll be no forgetting, i have written your birth date on the wall beside my desk, my first graffiti—except of course for the legend, TOMMY NOLES LOVES PATTY FRANKLIN, that i once chalked on the cafeteria door and which nearly cost my life at the hands of the principal, not to mention Patty Frnkln.
Perhaps you entered the world in maine? or was it massachusetts? You are definitely a Yankee, no doubt about it
Here comes harold
Dearest Timothy,
I’ve been very sleepless recently. I wish I could call you now, but a ringing phone at such an hour stops the very heart. It would also set Barnabas “to barking” and Dooley “to fussing.” So I shall have to be consoled with talking to you in this way.