Darling Rita,
This should be (and is!) a day of great celebration. And celebrate we did! Impromptu parades and rallies and cheering commenced almost in conjunction with the sunrise. What a day. A day for the history books. A day for the ages. I’m sitting here in my nightdress curled up in your sunflower room and I can still hear the people on the beaches with their bonfire celebrations. The smoke and laughter floating in with the night breeze. I can feel it trying to coax me into its wonderfulness.
But it can’t. This day is such a sad day, too. I think that’s what I was feeling all day. Relief, yes. And pride. I’m so, so proud of our fine soldiers and our wonderful country. But I’m so sad, Rita. Too sad to let anyone know about it but you. It makes me feel selfish, this sadness.
Just yesterday I bought the Life magazine with the photographs of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Did you see it? That woman photographer Margaret Bourke-White took them. (Part of the reason I wanted it was because she’s a woman in a man’s world creating amazing things.)
Did I ever tell you that Anna is Jewish? Marie, too. So there I was with it spread open on my lap, sitting in the small meadow that separates my property from Anna’s, and it was surreal looking at those horrific photographs of bodies piled on one another while there I was in real time with the meadow just blooming with clover and sea grass. Marie walked over to me and sat down on my blanket. I thought of hiding the magazine but didn’t have much time, or any hiding place.
“Don’t worry, doll. I’ve already seen it,” she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Just awful,” I said, and wanted to choke on the sterility of those words. Of course it was awful. What was I thinking?
Marie put a hand on my shoulder. “Have you ever heard of tahara?”
I told her I hadn’t and then she explained. It seems that there is this amazing and ancient Jewish tradition, part of a burial rite, actually, wherein women gather and wash the bodies of the dead repeating, “She (or he) is pure, she is pure, she is pure,” and then they drape the body in pure white cloth, like a heavenly outfit. Well, the point is that none of the people who were killed by the Nazis were given the right of tahara. She said it was one of the things that bothered her the most.
I left the meadow after speaking to Marie and felt an aching for the world that I can’t describe. And then earlier today when everyone else was celebrating I was thinking about them. All of those who died in this war. All who will die yet.
Oh, Rita. The absolute injustice of it all. Something must happen from all of this loss. A tide will turn. I’m thinking of things I see in my own sweet town. Hatred of Negroes, fear of the Jewish among us. A misunderstanding of any culture different from what we are accustomed to. I’m thinking of my childhood caretaker Franny...and how if we were in Nazi Germany or occupied by Nazi Germany how many of us would be killed? Would I know the faces in the piles of bodies? Would I be in the piles because I speak out for women’s rights? Would my children be in the piles? Would you be in the piles because of a last name like Vincenzo?
This must be a day of celebration but also a day of reckoning. A day to remember human rights.
I love you, dear Rita. I love you and I pray that someday you come to me, because I don’t think I can do all this work without you. And there is so much work to do in a world that’s gone mad. So many rights to fight for and preserve. I don’t feel like I can do it alone. I need you. I’ll always need you.
And I know, in reality, that you have a full life there in Iowa. So forgive me this moment of weakness. But in all sanity I’m telling you right here in black and white (and on a day that ends in so many ways the beginning of our relationship...) that this room is always here for you. It will be yours forever. And I will always be here, waiting.
Love,
Glory