THE AUTHOR ON HER WORK

The story of Henry and Ruth has two origins. The first is a news story in late 1997 about an elderly couple who went missing while driving home to Iowa from Thanksgiving at their child’s home in Chicago. I was living in Iowa City at the time, finishing graduate school. I never did find out what happened to the couple, but I began to wonder what they might have done for themselves if they had planned some kind of adventure or mystery trip. Furthermore, I wondered, what past events would motivate two octogenarians to disappear for a little while? I am sure I missed the small capsule report that described the couple’s discovery in good condition; I did try and go back and find it on microfilm several months after the fact, but to no avail.

At the same time that I was thinking about this couple, I was reading several reams of letters that my paternal grandfather wrote to his first cousin on a daily basis in the late sixties and early seventies, around the time they both lost their spouses. My grandmother died in June 1972, four months after I was born, and so I never knew her yet grew up very aware of her absence in my grandfather’s and father’s lives.

Grandfather and “cousin Mary Catherine” grew up as near-siblings, the only children of sisters who lived on the same block of Seminary Street in Greencastle, Indiana. Mary Catherine eventually settled in Easton, Pennsylvania, while Grandfather stayed in Indiana. Grandfather’s letters were both surprising and familiar; the letter that described his delight in a new soap, Irish Spring (he loved all things Irish), and its healthy lather jibed with his giving his grandchildren boxes of the soap to take home and the ever-present smell that it exuded in his two bathrooms. I also knew he loved raw onions but felt awe at the three-line-long letter that described only his lunch of “onions with butter on crackers, and a glass of milk” one day in the week after Grandmother’s death.

And so I was considering how much one cannot know about grandparents, what gets lost between generations, even if a general sense of things—such as my child’s generalized sense that Grandmother’s death destroyed my grandfather—is carried along. I thought of the distance between children and parents, too. Though parents and children know one another in ways no one else can, parents and children also miss critical things about each other, too. Children, especially, never got to know their parents as children, or even young adults. Half a parent’s life, often, is a mystery to children.

Now shift to my maternal grandparents. My maternal grandfather, Opa, began to fly in 1928, when he and his brothers ran an auto repair shop in Oak Park, Illinois. A man offered to give my grandfather flying lessons in exchange for looking over his airplane engine. When Opa fell in love with a girl who lived on a farm in distant southern Illinois, his flying lessons came in handy and he flew down and landed in her cornfield to court her. Gradually, my grandfather combined a career on the Chicago-Northwestern Railroad with a passion for flying, and he bought and developed Pal-Waukee Airport in suburban Chicago until it became one of the largest private airports in the world. When I was little, Opa used to take me flying in little Cessnas and Pipers and he’d ask casually, fifteen hundred feet up, “Did you lock the door?” He’d work the pedals and give me the illusion that I was actually taking off and landing the plane all by myself. Select elementary and middle-school holidays, I’d go into the office with him and “work” by answering
the phones (“Priester Aviation, may I help you?”), sharpening pencils, making copies, and taking a long lunch in The Hangar restaurant,
eating a BLT and a chocolate shake in dark leather banquettes beneath picture boards of Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, watching little jets and planes descend overhead and kiss, then hug, the runway.

My maternal grandmother, Oma, died when I was ten, and I watched Opa’s world, like grandfather’s, become defined by his loneliness, by his widowerhood, by all the objects and random slippers and canned fruit stored about that had been hers. As the years went by, I wondered about Oma in the same way I wondered about Grandmother: What had she been like beyond a ten-year-old’s view of her? What had she been like when she was young? What were her passions? And what would life have been like for her if she had been more passionate about flying than her husband?

From these various autobiographical pieces, but with no part of any real person (apart from my sense of my grandmothers as very strong, independent women), rose Henry and Ruth. I started with the image in my mind of a young wife, saying good-bye to her husband in a cornfield as he climbed into a plane and flew away. I then combined the idea that this same couple would disappear without explanation for a “mystery adventure” sixty years later. Ruth and Henry, and their disappearance, were born.

I suppose that it seems obvious and logical that letter writing would find its way into the story—but they were not part of my original concept. I began them after researching Anne Morrow Lindbergh for a while—reading her diaries—and coming to feel that Ruth would find Mrs. Lindbergh a kindred spirit and an admirable woman. In Ruth’s intense loneliness, I thought, she would find solace in writing to Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Do you find Henry and Ruth’s trip understandable, or unfathomably selfish?

  2. How would you explain Ruth’s breakdown?

  3. How do you think baby Ruth Anne dies?

  4. Why do you think flying especially captures Ruth’s imagination?

  5. To what extent is Ruth a product of her time?

  6. What are the barriers to Ruth’s happiness?

  7. What role does Philippe play in the book?

  8. How would you describe Henry’s affection toward Philippe? Does he feel the same way that Philippe feels about him?

  9. What is the significance of Dean Cilek?

10. How would Ruth’s letters have seemed different if Anne Morrow Lindbergh had never replied?

11. Do you think Margaret will eventually come to a clearer understanding of her mother? Does John have any advantage or disadvantage over Margaret in this respect?

12. How much has the world changed for women since the 1920s? How much has it stayed the same?

13. If you were to take a trip along the lines of Henry and Ruth’s trip, where would you go?

14. Would you want to read a cache of your mother’s most private letters?