I set my pry bar down real slow, because the beam of my light had fallen on something I had not expected, and the cold I felt was not the cold I thought. It was a bundle. A bundle of envelopes, tied in a faded blue ribbon, lying on its side on a little shelf in the cavity as if someone had set it down for a moment and meant to come back. There were more behind it. I counted forty three, each one yellowed, each one stamped, each one addressed in the same slanting blue ink. None of them had been opened. And every one of them, I saw, had been sealed with a postmark from Vietnam.
I called Arthur Doss, the fella who had hired me, down from the fourth floor, where he was measuring a window. He is a retired schoolteacher, seventy years old, thin and stooped, with half moon glasses on a cord. He had bought the old office building in Parkersburg for a song, with some notion of turning it into apartments. He knelt beside me in the dust. The address on the top envelope read, Miss Carol Ann Weatherby, Room 3C, Hartley Building, Parkersburg, W. Va. He read it aloud twice. “This was a boarding house once,” he said slowly. “Upstairs, in the sixties. Girls from the telephone company.”
We took the letters to the lobby and sat on the marble steps. Arthur opened the first one, with the care of a man defusing a bomb, and read it in the quiet of the empty hall. It was dated September 1969. A young soldier named Danny Marsh wrote that he was thinking of Carol Ann every minute and that he had saved her photograph in his helmet. He asked if she would come to the base at Fort Dix to meet him when he came home. He signed it, Yours faithfully, whatever happens. Arthur set it down and took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt.
A brass mail chute held forty three letters that two people waited fifty years to be allowed to read.
It did not take long to understand what had happened. Letter after letter, over eleven months, asked why she did not write back. Danny sounded more bewildered with each one, then hurt, then resigned. The last, from August 1970, said only, I guess you found somebody else, and that is all right, and I hope he is good to you. I will stop writing now. Someone had caught every one of them in the chute behind the brass. Perhaps a janitor. Perhaps a landlord. A hand reaching in through the little door at the bottom, once a week, and setting the letters aside.
“Weatherby,” Arthur said suddenly, and stood up. “Carol Ann Weatherby. I know that name. She ran the library in Marietta for thirty years.” He had a copy of the local paper in his truck. We found her, within the hour, in the phone book, still living in the same small house on Fourth Street, at seventy four, widowed. Arthur wanted to bring her the letters himself. He was not sure it was right to knock on a stranger door with forty three letters from a boy she had never answered. I told him that I had been in the trade long enough to know the answer. It is always right.
She opened the door in a pink cardigan with a dish towel in her hand, and looked at the two of us on her porch, a stooped old man and a sweaty contractor with a cardboard box. Arthur explained as gently as he could. She listened without a word. When he got to the part about Vietnam, she put her hand against the door frame. She took the box from him with both hands, and carried it into the kitchen, and sat down at the table. She picked up the first envelope and held it a long time before she turned it over. “I wrote to him,” she said. “Every week. He never answered. I thought he had forgotten me.”
We sat there for two hours while she read, the box open in front of her, her glasses fogging and clearing. Arthur made tea, awkwardly. I stood by the window and looked at the bird feeder. When she came to the last letter, she folded it along its old crease and held it against her chest. She looked up at us and smiled, and it was the most astonishing smile, a girl of twenty in the face of a woman of seventy four. “He came back, did he not?” she said. “They said he did. He married a girl from Ohio, and moved away. I never knew why he did not look for me.”
Arthur had found him by evening. It took three phone calls and a favor from a friend at the VA. Daniel Marsh was living in a small town in Ohio, a widower now, seventy five years old, a retired machinist. When Arthur read him the first line of the first letter over the telephone, there was silence for so long that Arthur thought the line had gone dead. Then a rough voice said, in a whisper, “Are you telling me she wrote to me too?” Arthur said that he did not know yet. He said that he thought, perhaps, they had both been writing.
The letters from Carol Ann, it turned out, were in the same chute, in the other direction, held by a brass flap on the second floor. Another bundle, forty seven of them, which the same hand had caught coming down. We found them the following week, behind a second false panel. They had never gone anywhere. Arthur drove them to Ohio himself, in the cab of my truck, with a thermos of coffee, because I would not let him go alone. Daniel Marsh met us on his front step in a pressed blue shirt. He took the box and turned it over, and he had to sit down on the porch swing.
They had dinner in the old Hartley Building lobby that Christmas Eve, at a card table with a white cloth, with candles on the brass mail box. Arthur had restored it himself, polished to a mirror. I was not invited, but I peeked through the front window on my way to the truck. They sat across from one another, two old people in good clothes, and he held one of her letters, and she held one of his, and they were reading them to each other, one line at a time, as fast as they could, like two people trying to make up fifty years.
