In 1960, Carole Catherine Atwood was a twenty-six year old mother of a seven year old and a two year old, both boys, and she was pregnant.  She and her husband rented a Victorian home in Melrose, a Boston suburb.  The house resembled the New England dream she had read about in books:  Clapboards.  A small front porch.  Solid steps climbing up from a sidewalk that wound easily to an elementary school.  The homes were all different but also alike; the oldest were built in the 19th century for a white middle class emerging out of industrialism, and the later were built for white families rebuilding after World War I.  Melrose was not Wellesley or Dover, but it wasn’t Lynn.  

Carole worried about money.  She worried about another baby, and she worried about her marriage.  She was lonely, but she had always been lonely, even in the large Baltimore house full of relatives who raised her.  

She didn’t speak until very late as a child but her older sister, Marilyn, translated her meaning for everyone else, including their mother.  

But Carole also understood that even Marilyn didn’t really know her.  She didn’t know herself.  There had always been a well of emptiness inside her that she knew she was closer than even her beloved Marilyn, and this would always make her feel hundreds of miles away from others.  

The walk to the Elementary School to pick up her son, Jonathan, was short enough to draft a letter to Marilyn in her mind, if Bradford, the child in the stroller- with his scroll of unwinding questions -  slept.  Writing to Marilyn in her head like this was a good way - for a while - of holding back that other loneliness that long hours with small children invited in.  At the same time Carole gravitated to children, maybe because they didn’t require answers from her beyond “what’s a star?” and “where does the wind start?”  

The neighborhood children seemed like their own tribe.  Carole was friendly with some of the mothers, but she could identify most of the neighborhood children from blocks away peddling a tricycle or balancing small feet, one in front of another, down the curb.   

Carole went home that day after picking up Jonathan.  Dinner and bedtime happened.  WIth her husband Jack not home yet, she copied the letter she had drafted in the afternoon that seemed so long ago.  Except then Jack came home, and needed dinner.  The letter remained unfinished.   The paper slipped into a PTA binder she was supposed to return to school the next day, and the letter disappeared for sixty- three years.  

Carole was pregnant with me then.  Recently, one of the children from that 1960 Melrose sidewalk, Ron Volpe, reached out to say he had found this unfinished letter in his parents’ belongings when he was clearing out their home.  It was still in the PTA binder.  It took him eight months to find me; when I asked him why he didn’t just throw the letter away, he said, “I just really wanted to find out who these people were.”  

I read the letter knowing how the story ends, which was a complex equation emotionally. Endicott Peabody, the senior partner on the law firm letterhead, would become the Governor of Massachusetts in three years.  In less than two years he would advise Carole to “get as far away as possible from Jack Atwood,” his Junior Partner. My mother told me this when I was an adult.  She would be ordered by Jack to scrub the lipstick stains from his shirt collars. She had already left Jack once, but would leave for good, returning to that family home in Baltimore, before I was two years old.  

Jack Atwood went into practice alone, and became one of the state’s most successful divorce lawyers.  He married at least three more times; I lost track.   I knew him only as someone who scared us all, and I stopped communication with him around the age of sixteen.  

Like any letter from the past, this one provided me with a vision of my mother from a time I never knew, in a voice I never heard - young.  I collaged everything together here:  what I knew of my mother, what I heard in this letter, and what I saw on the streets of Melrose, through which I recently drove. 

My mother had a predilection for the peculiar, but peculiar wasn’t a vision a woman could comfortably have in the 1950’s. 

She had a swirling creativity inside her, which reflected in what she read - Proust. And she was always eager to grab my paints when she came to visit me in Boston. She had encouraged me to become an artist, not someone with a job that could pay bills. She once said she wanted all of her grandchildren to be poets.  To me, her voice seemed more and more inauthentic as the years passed, as if she was trying harder and harder to bury the creativity her life ultimately never made space for.  She lived in a time when to win as a woman meant that small Victorian house on a street in Melrose, and if it took marrying someone like Jack Atwood to get it she would do that.  I don’t think she ever recovered from that bargain.  

This is the daydream I created from all of this:  Ron Volpe - the same age as my brother, Bradford - was one of those toddlers my mother would have kown in a stroller.  I imagine her greeting his mother on the sidewalk, leaning down to meet the child’s small face, and - in the movie script - saying to this child, “tell my daughter I love her someday.”  

That didn’t happen, but this letter makes me love my mother more than ever.  

Thanks, Ron Volpe, for finding this letter, allowing all those who loved Carole to hear the charm and spark of her young voice after all these years.  

Thanks to your parents for keeping the binder. This story certainly proves the theory of relativity, how time is not a straight line but an accordian crushing in and expanding out. The 1960’s feel weirdly close, as if nothing has changed, but then we are not small children and those young parents have passed away. Another twist in this theory is that Ron Volpe’s father became a committed artist,

and now his Melrose painting table sits in my house ready for me to make up a palette.

Thanks, Ron Volpe, for allowing us to thread the future back to the past. I, too, am trying to learn who these people were.

Dear Marilyn,

Or should I say Princess Radziwell.  Thank you so much for your expression towards Jack’s good fortune.  It is truly great for it means a promise of better things to come.  However, for the present, as always, financially speaking, it is hard to see the way clear, for it means borrowing $5,000 to put into the firm.  Perhaps next year I can have my cleaning woman one day a week.  

As for my trip to Baltimore I am hoping that it will be the end of this month.  The problem of where we will live tomorrow always exists, but for the present I shall sit tight on Ashland St.  It shall be so wonderful to be able to talk to you again.  Baseball reigns as the topic of conversation in this household.  Jonathan comes home from school - “Who won the game?” Jack comes home from work - “Who won the game?” Apparently I am supposed to know.  Bradford even states in his imaginary play with his “Daddies,” “You guys are out.” 

The “neasles” as Brad refers to them have ended their siege.  Brad has been confined to the house and yard for almost a month for fear of exposing other children.  Whether it is a result of this or not, he has become increasingly demanding of me.  It becomes very trying.