Chapter 1
My mother back then was ‘MJ’. At least that is how everyone I met said her name, remembering their younger selves. Recalling her older sister, my Aunt Charlotte would get a faraway look, a glint of light in her eyes from sixty years past. “Oh, yes, ‘Emjay’ did love that…” and then she’d smile. Others would say it that way, too: “Emjay,” brightly, like they were remembering the name of a songbird.
I remember being dragged to the beauty parlor and met by a chorus of women calling, “Mary Jean! Mary Jean, how have you been?” I remember the ugly sulfurous smell and the hairdresser stooping down and exclaiming, “There’s my favorite little one in the whole wide world! Mary Jean, he’s the spittin’ image,” and she’d try to pinch my cheek like I was a baby. I remember thinking, “I am a boy, so how on earth could I look like my mother?” We both had curly hair; though at the time, I hated mine. Those women at the salon were friendly, but not really close friends. Pretty much everyone who knew her well called her MJ.
In New Mexico, at my sister’s house, I read a cache of two dozen letters my mother wrote home when she was nineteen and twenty, her first two years in college. “With all my love, MJ” was the way she signed every one.
“Have you read these?” I’m leaning over the letters spread out on the dining room table and my sister is chopping vegetables and mixing sauces across the massive marble island that my youngest says is more like a continent than an island. “Of course,” she replies.
“When did you first see these?” My mother had died over ten years ago, in 1995 and I was shocked to know the letters existed. “Oh maybe a couple years after she died. I thought I told you about them.”
“No. They’re amazing. She’s so young.”
Rebecca just smiled and nodded, adding garlic to a simmering pot, “yeah, I thought you’d like them.”
I was shocked a bit by how open and joyful they were, to hear her clear voice again in my head through these letters, but this time as such a young woman.
For an Iowa farm girl, the daughter of a preacher, going to college in Ohio hundreds of miles to the east must have seemed like the discovery of a whole new continent. Rain that fell on their fields in Iowa eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico, just like the rain in Ohio. But looking back now, college was a million miles away for her, a terrific adventure to be released from all the responsibilities she’d had back on the farm. At last, without feeling guilty, she could take the time each day to read and write and talk. Sure, it took her a while to stop worrying about missing out on morning chores when she woke up in her dorm room but her younger sisters back home were old enough to pick up the tasks she’d had to do, including the household laundry. At college there was a laundry service that cost just fifty cents a week. She decided to use it. Everything came back carefully folded and ironed; it was astonishing.
She wouldn’t miss having to milk the cow and collect eggs, or try to boss the pigs back to their pens. Nor would she miss the vegetable and fruit canning. That is to say, she would be missing all these chores, but happy not to have to do them, freed from hours of cleaning and chopping, scrubbing and boiling. At college her world consisted of classes, tests, and papers, but her free time was all her own for the first time in her life. In her letters written to her family back in Iowa there is a sense of this new-found freedom. “I have so many choices to make this week. I can’t decide if I should put off the swimming requirement to the winter. They have an indoor pool, and offer it year-round, but everyone has to take it and pass….The cafeteria has so much food to choose from – every night there are three different main courses and mountains of desert!” And though you weren’t allowed to take food back to the room, you could eat outside on the lawn. “Marly Dewey calls it taking ‘low tea’, since we all sprawl out on a blanket near some pine trees with mugs of tea and fruit and biscuits from the cafeteria.”
She hoped conveying her new delight would allow her dad to live a little vicariously. She understood how much he’d sacrificed to get her to college.
These weekly letters home during 1942 and 43 from her desk in the dormitory, or her other favorite spot, a third floor window seat in Laird Hall, are surprisingly full of news about spending time with young men. In that year many men knew their time in college was likely to be short. One young man she met joined up just a month into the term. “I was with Hank when he decided to telephone his father in St. Louis. I could hear his mother crying, and so I cried too, a little.” But then no more mention is made of Hank. Other boy’s names come and go, but really they mostly go. By November, 1942 the draft was lowered to include 18 year olds.
“Dottie, Marly and her friend who sang in the Lamplighters show have all invited me to go with them next week to Milton’s for a social, don’t know if I should but it might be fun. They’re calling it a ‘last draft’ party, and say they’re going to ‘lay low for liberty’ whatever that means!” They would double or triple date, though dating was never the word she used for these outings. They’d go to hear a “Faculty of Music” concert, or splurge on a movie at the Bijoux. Fury, a dark Fritz Lang film, gets a mention in October of 1942. “Really makes you think about mass hysteria, and how some of what goes on abroad could happen here too if people don’t stop and think!”
Milton’s figures again in an early November letter discussing her rather complicated plans for getting home for Thanksgiving in time to help with the cooking. MJ arrives at Milton’s with some Tom or Richard, but then we never set foot inside. Later, I learned the name of the place was actually “Milton’s Ale House” though it never appears by its full name in her letters. One must imagine a rather rough and sudden building on the edge of town where the young men would drink and the girls would mostly not. Accordion music alternating with Tommy Dorsey records. Writing back to her abstemious father and teetotaling Aunties in Indianola, Iowa she’d leave out any mention of drink.
MJ had suitors aplenty it seems, but she set high standards. “Helen you were right about Jack. He didn’t have the gump to ask me to see him off in Chicago, after all the trouble he’d gone to last month. So that’s farewell and goodbye, I suppose.” Her prose is lively, even daring which shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. One week later she writes, “Dear Homefolks, Before I forget again, thank you, thank you! Thank you for the swim suit. I can stop borrowing Sally’s which didn’t fit me at all. I don’t really know why we can’t just take a test instead of the 25 hours for this swimming requirement, they keep saying they’ll fix the heater but the water is frigid as can be. Sally says each week it’s like we reenact the sinking of the Titanic. Flaying about in water about as cold as the North Atlantic, fifteen of us all doing the backstroke at once, making such a noisy job of it – I can hardly hear the matron’s whistle to stop.”
Later on, in the same letter, she is amused by one of the “Chicago girls” asking for her to help fix a dress. The reputation of MJ’s needle skills, “spread about by Marly, no doubt”, were taking up valuable time. “I should’ve been studying instead of sewing, but she was desperate for me to help raise the hemline, show off her legs to the young men, or one young man in particular I imagine! She is a tall looker by golly. When I’d finished, she liked the look of it so much she offered to pay me. I didn’t take any money, of course, but maybe I should start charging!”
I can only imagine how the dour Maiden Aunties must have been scandalized by my mother’s frank appraisals.
“Dear Homefolks, it’s December, 7th 1942, One Year to the Day that will ‘Live in Infamy’ as our President said….Tomorrow night there will be a vigil in the quadrangle to pray for all the American boys now fighting in the wars in the Pacific and the Atlantic.” A sobering reminder of the times, but then this in the next breath: “Marly says the older boys are throwing a party for one of the seniors who is headed East for officer training next week. I have much too much work for my Shakespeare class but she’s insisting and such a hoot to be with. I’m sure it’ll be a good time, and I’m told the older ones will behave themselves.” In that first year of college stepping out and keeping company with boys was easy, and if the letters are any indication of the truth, in the fall of 1942 my mother went out a lot.
In between the lines it’s easy to imagine that she’s hoping for someone a bit daring, not too sweet, but certainly not brutish either. Someone intelligent who could make her laugh. Someone handsome, dreamy, and smart. High standards, but then, a son might hope so. In the end, I think, there were really only three serious possibilities. Three men, she believed, could extract her from Iowa and give her the adventure she desired. In hindsight, all this time later, what direction her life took appears largely determined by the three choices she had by the fall of 1943. The first was Bill Oshima.
There’s a black and white picture I remember seeing a couple times when I was a boy. It was my mother from her college graduation in 1945. But she’s not in cap and gown. She is 21 years old, wearing a low cut dress that shows her figure and her bosom to considerable degree. In this photo she, too, is a “tall looker by golly”, which seemed so extraordinary to me when I was younger. Sixty years after they were written, in these letters I discover her again: my mother not yet an adult, writing to her father, younger sisters and Aunties back on the farm, and it astonishes me, much as that photo did so many years ago.
“Rebecca, did Mom ever tell you about the guys she dated, before Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“I mean do you wonder about Lee Dewey, or these men she talks about in these letters. I mean they were all going off to war in those years.”
“Yes, Lee was in the war, wasn’t he?”
“But they are so revealing. She was so young!” I realize I’m repeating myself.
“God, she was. What nineteen? She describes so much of her life, though I’m sure she has to keep other stuff hidden since she was writing home to her dad and the Aunties, and god knows who else back home read them...We know they kept them, like treasure.”
“Do you remember her talking about Bill Oshima? Is he in here?”
“Yes, he’s there, at least I think so. Yeah, she really liked him, boy.”
He was in these letters, she was right, but what surprised me was how he vanishes. He’s a lightning bolt. And I wanted to know why. The letters from MJ as a college girl were not enough. I have had to fill in the story here and there, gathering details from others, and from letters written by others when possible. I also include what I just supposed must have happened. I hope the reader can make sense of it all. I’ll try to be as accurate, but sometimes the past is difficult to capture, and, in fact, the past itself seems to change each time we look back.
