Books |
As Always, Jack
Emma Sweeney
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Memoir
I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I’d like to meet. With only one plot, so I don’t have to remember who’s who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive.
Not an easy book to find.
So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short — 179-page — book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew.
The 45 letters tell of Jack’s courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii.
What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child — Emma.
It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died — and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation.
These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn’t I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that’s happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe’s letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it’s like to be on the receiving end of these letters — you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy.
Within five months, he’s closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe — people who believe that when two people are married, they’re the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn’t laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did.
The letters pile up, then stop abruptly — for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack’s return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956 when he died.
Emma reads through the letters, and does some digging, and finds out one fact that her mother had never revealed to her. It will make you cry — sudden, hot, brief tears. And you’ll cry again when you read Jack’s "last letter", written just a few days before his death. Which is just as it should be. A love story with a sad ending, and then a new chapter with a little girl….that’s classic material.
I read such stylish, sophisticated, brilliant books. I stretch to understand them, to be worthy of them. And here is this slim volume, so simple, so tender. The point couldn’t be more obvious. And yet it too is a stretch. Maybe a bigger one. Maybe a much bigger one.
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