When Shell was nineteen she married Gordon Ritchie Sims. As the announcement in The New York Times specified, he was in the graduating class at Amherst and she was in her freshman year at Smith.
The best man was Gordon’s room-mate, a devout Episcopalian whose banking family was of Jewish origin. He was half in love with Shell himself and dreamed of just such a wife to guarantee and cement his assimilation.
Gordon wanted to be a writer and most of his courting was literary. He enjoyed the fat letters he sent her from Amherst. Every night, after he had done a respectable amount of work on his thesis, he filled his personalized writing sheets with promises, love, and expectation, the passion tempered by an imitation of the style of Henry James.
Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.
Gordon summoned a world of honour and order and cultivation, and the return to a simpler, more exalting way of life which Americans had once experienced, and which he, by virtue of his name and love, intended to resurrect with her.
Shell loved his seriousness.
At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.
He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.
At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”
With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.
They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.
They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.
She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.
She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.
She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.
Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.
But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.
The letters were not mentioned.