It felt as if we'd unearthed a long-buried treasure.
A box had sat forgotten in my sister's basement for decades. Tucked in a folder inside were 43 letters from clearly smitten servicemen who'd met my mother at Red Cross dances in Rome in the final months of World War II. Plus, to our astonishment, comment cards Mom had written about each guy.
If she hadn't long since passed away, Mom would've hit the century mark this year, meaning that she got some of these letters when she was just 19. And the soldiers writing her would mostly have been about that age, too.
Gossip-worthy? Emotionally fraught? No way to know without reading them, so my sister Juanita, her husband, Mark, and their sons Forrest and Aaron, gathered in my dining room to dig in.
The first thing we noted about the letters, written on super-light airmail paper, is that by today's standards, these Greatest Generation guys were practically calligraphers — swirling cursive script, lines straight even on unruled paper. Beautiful penmanship, without necessarily writing skills to match.
One guy, Frank, begins every letter by hoping it will find my mother "in the very best of health." Then he tells her where he's writing from — the mess hall, say — and what the weather's like.
Others are more fun. Ed, for instance, begins one missive by joking about Mom's first name. She was born in Panama, and "Omah" must have momentarily thrown him when they met. "Dear Homaha," he writes, following up with, "bet you didn't think I could remember how to spell the above."
Rifling through Mom's comment cards, my sister searches for his. "Edward," she reads. "Met him at the APO. A very nice boy. We always have discussions of some sort though. He's 28."
That was old. Most of her correspondents were more like James, who she noted, "will be 20 in October."
Romance at Red Cross social clubs
Rome had been liberated by Allied forces just months earlier, and the Red Cross, where Mom worked, was sponsoring clubs for servicemen — table tennis and dances nearly every night. Mom was young, raven-haired and unattached, and she seems to have had plenty of suitors, some smooth like Charles: "I do hope to see you again," he wrote, "but until I do, do you mind if I fall in love with you?"
Others, including James, were less smooth. "Wonder how many times I would have to ask you before I got a date?" he writes plaintively.
Seriously sweet, these guys, and full of surprises, even in their signatures. Tommy, for instance, loops the "y" when he signs and puts a smiley face in the loop.
"He was ahead of his time," grins my nephew Aaron, amused by the family history lesson. "I'm not just skimming through," he beams, "I'm really enjoying."
He's not alone. This is a mom of whom my sister and I had no inkling. When I asked our brother Steve what he knew about Mom during World War II, all he could come up with was "she played pingpong?" — which makes sense because in family lore, that's how she met Dad. But she met Dad in New York, years later. And she died before Forrest and Aaron were born, so this is a mom and grandma we'd never known, viewed through her interactions with guys she'd never so much as mentioned.
My sister picks up a comment card and giggles. "Ohhh, Sgt. Bob," she reads, with a quick glance in my direction. "I think I love him. Winky, hot, Bob, cutie-pie."
I have so many questions.
Rated on dancing and pingpong skills
As Mom was meeting these guys at dances, what she mostly kept track of was their Fred Astaire potential. Of Ricky, she notes, "when he dances, he likes to dip." She also cataloged their prowess at table tennis. "Guy," she writes, "plays ping-pong, but I beat him."
This loss seems to have gotten under Guy's skin because a few days later, he wrote to her, asking for a rematch: "Anytime you feel lucky, just come on down and we'll settle it once and for all. This time, I'll forget, temporarily, you're a lady. P.S. Seriously, I think you're a pretty good player, but don't you think I'm just a little bit better!!!!"
"Better to have loved and lost ..."
Mom saved one letter that was more serious. It's dated "two days after Christmas" and was from a Commander, which means he'd have been at least 35 or 40.
"Someone, somewhere once said that there was no fool like an old fool," he begins, "…and I once said I was never going to fall in love again. I did pretty well too, in holding to my resolution, until last July. That was when I first came to Rome…. Three weeks later, on my way to my new assignment, I stopped over to get another look at the girl I couldn't get off my mind."
Over the next few months, he came back again and again, he writes. They met. He had a silversmith make cameos he thought she'd like. She gave him "medicinal" cognac when he had a cold. He goes on for three pages about how he debated telling her how he felt, but thought doing so would be selfish. So, he kept going back to the front without saying anything…in anguish.
"I was so much in love with you," he writes, "that I couldn't sleep at night and took food as a matter of course only."
Deciding to be selfish this once and speak his mind, he returned on Christmas Day, 1944, to see her.
"But this trip to the club," he writes, "was where I tripped up. I saw you with the background of all those boys your own age looking so admiringly at you. And the Sgt. who worshiped you. And how happy you were among them. Well…I pinched myself to wake up from my dreams."
He quotes a bit of Tennyson – "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved," – and says he's giving her "back to your own generation." Then, he asks her to forgive him for slipping off to Naples without calling on her, saying, "I just want to see you as I was dreaming, not in farewells."
The war ended a few months later, and by the next Christmas, Mom was at Barnard College in New York, where she met a Columbia law student about her age named Tony Mondello — at a pingpong table.
And yes, he could dance — that was probably the clincher. As we were growing up, when Mom and Dad headed for the dance floor at parties, their friends always stepped back to watch.
So in a way, I guess we did know the mom these guys were writing to – just didn't realize, or remember after all these years.
Isn't it just like a mom to leave her kids a reminder.
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