A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
~Fawn Weaver
It had gone on for years and years, and it always seemed to be about the same issue. Dad would receive some letter or package with a postmark from an exotic location, and Mom immediately wanted to know what he received. As a child of nine years of age, I remember some good-natured wrestling between the two of them. If it was a letter with a postmark from somewhere in Africa — although it was obviously from an acquaintance of Dad’s from one of his far-flung forays into God-knows-where — Mom had to see what it was, who it was from, and what it said. She couldn’t help herself. In hindsight, I think she may have been a little jealous or insecure. Perhaps she thought Dad was having an affair with the Queen of Sheba or some goddess from the Nile basin.
If the postman made a delivery while Dad was at work, he would invariably come home to find that whatever had been delivered had been opened and read. I personally loved the things Dad received from everywhere because my stamp collection was growing by leaps and bounds.
“What’s that?” or “Who’s that from?” Mom would ask every time one of those letters or packages arrived.
“None of your beeswax” would be Dad’s standard reply.
So, this went on year after year. Letters and packages were received and would be opened by the time he walked in from work, or there would be a wrestling match to see who could maintain control of the thing.
One day, I saw the postman’s red lorry turning off South Road and into our circular pebble driveway. He drove counterclockwise around the driveway and stopped in front of the house. He carried several letters in his hands, as well as a box covered with heavy brown paper and tied with string.
Since I was outside already, I took the items and carried them inside. Mom didn’t come on the run, but as I placed the items on the coffee table in the television room and was eying all the exotic stamps from India that had been affixed to the brown paper covering on the box, Mom appeared quietly at my side. She picked up the box, shook it next to her ear, sniffed it, and then put it back down. She then looked at the letters, walked over to Dad’s little study next to the enormous bay window, and placed the letters carefully on top of the green felt writing surface. Walking back to me, she picked up the box again and hurried off upstairs.
I didn’t think too much about it and knew that Dad would be setting aside those great Indian stamps for me anyway. It was nearly 7:00, and we were getting ready to sit down for dinner when Dad finally arrived home from work. He greeted everyone and hurriedly made his way into the little first-floor bathroom before walking into the study. A couple of moments later, he came into the dining room and was uncharacteristically quiet.
Dinner went along pretty much as normal, with two or three conversations going on simultaneously. By 8:30, we were getting ready to be excused from the table. I went into the television room and turned on the BBC, but quickly turned down the volume when I overheard the row coming from the dining room.
Mom and Dad were going at it. Apparently, the box contained an ornately designed sculpture and was to be a gift to my mother as part of their upcoming anniversary. But Mom had opened the package and then tried to reseal the box as if it hadn’t been opened at all.
She should have consulted me because I had become an expert at the opening and resealing of things. The previous Christmas, or should I say several weeks before Christmas, I had practiced daily with the Daisy BB Rifle that Dad had purchased for me and would have it resealed every afternoon within its red Christmas wrappings. On Christmas morning, I feigned surprise and delight as I opened the gift for what was probably the twentieth time. Dad was upset because the hundreds of BBs that were supposed to be in the box were somehow missing. But Mom didn’t consult with me when she opened Dad’s package, and the results were that he immediately recognized her handiwork.
The upshot from all of this was that Mom finally promised to never, ever open anything of his again, as long as he would never smoke another cigarette in his life. She was great at diverting attention away from the main issue at hand or changing the subject matter entirely. Dad didn’t believe her and was out to prove his point.
The problem for her was that Dad knew people. He knew lots of people from all walks of life and from all over the world. And he knew the folks working at the mid-Atlantic weather advisories section for Pan American in the Azores. Every morning, rain or shine, those good folks would inflate an enormous weather balloon from their small weather reporting station, and send it aloft carrying a package of instruments designed to measure wind currents, air pressures, and temperatures at various altitudes. All that daily information was vital to the transatlantic flights operated by the airline.
Dad had one of the balloons sent to his office at Heathrow. Deflated, it came in a square cardboard box about three feet by three feet and was quite heavy. The box contained only the balloon and the cylinder of gas to inflate it, but not the extremely expensive atmospheric recording instrument package. As soon as it arrived, Dad had it taken into one of the maintenance hangars, and he and two of the men who worked on the airplanes went to work. They figured out a way to have the initiator cord attached to the lid of the box so that if it were to be opened, the balloon would inflate immediately. He then had the box carefully re-wrapped and sent to a colleague in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He spoke to his friend on the telephone and instructed him not to open the box, but instead to send it to Henry H. Elliott at Longridge, South Road, Weybridge, Surrey, England, and to make sure the words “Private,” “Personal” and “Confidential” were emblazoned on all six sides of the box. There was to be no return address affixed to the box, and it was to be wrapped and secured in the heavy brown paper and string. Dad sent along a sum of money to cover the cost of shipping.
Three weeks went by, and things were going along quite well. I remember that Dad received at least one letter from someplace in Asia because Mom held it up to the light to see if she could see what was inside. But seeing me standing there, she cast me a sidewise glance and hurriedly put it on Dad’s desk.
A few days later, that box from South Africa was delivered right to the front door. I was in school at the time and didn’t see it being delivered, but learned later that the postman carried it inside for Mom and left it in the middle of the television room floor. It was a Friday. The next day, I was off for the weekend, and Dad was scheduled to return from his business trip in Brussels, Belgium, by the afternoon.
Friday night, we were watching television, and that box was sitting in the middle of the floor. South African stamps were all over the top of the package, as well as several customs stamps that I collected. There it sat, untouched by human hands, at least until Saturday morning.
My sister, Mimi, was off riding Matilda, her horse, which was kept in the corral Dad had built at the back of the garage. My brother, Mike, was attending boarding school at a military academy. I think my sister, Sherry, was upstairs playing. I was outside in the hothouse doing some of the important things that needed seeing to — at least, in my mind, they were important.
It was mid-morning, and it was quite warm inside the hothouse. The scream that emanated from the house shook me back to reality, and I thought someone had just been murdered. I ran from the hothouse into the kitchen while yelling for my mother. The commotion was coming from the center of the house. As I approached, I noticed a thin, wispy cloud of a fine white powdery substance floating in the air, quickly spreading throughout the first floor. Slowly, I walked forward into the ever-thickening cloud of smoke.
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed my mother from the television room. “Oh, my God!”
I went from the kitchen into the pantry and heard my mother struggling against the forces of some unknown evil presence. The wispy white cloud of smoke or dust, whatever it was, was becoming thicker, and as I walked from the pantry into the foyer, I could see the entrance to the television room off to my left. There was the unbelievable sight of an opaque white, rubbery sphere quickly and dramatically becoming larger by the second, filling the room. And there was the loud hissing noise as the gas from the cylinder very quickly inflated this enormous balloon. Within seconds, it was bulging from the television-room doorway and protruding into the foyer.
“Mom?” I heard myself yelling.
“Ugghh,” came the muffled response from somewhere inside the TV room.
The hissing stopped, and the balloon stopped inflating. It was impossible to walk into the television room because the enormous rubbery shape was applying an airtight seal to the door.
“Mom?” I yelled again.
I could hear some struggling from within the room, and the faintest movement to the stretched skin of the balloon could be seen. I ran to the kitchen and quickly retrieved a steak knife from the top drawer. Running back to the room, I plunged the knife into the side of the shape, but nothing happened. I attacked it again and again, but still nothing. I thought of one of my guns, but they were secured above the closet inside the room I couldn’t get into. I ran back to the kitchen, retrieved one of my mother’s carving knives from the wooden block near the window, and rammed it into the side of the shape. Again, the rubber just seemed to absorb the shape of the knife, and nothing happened.
Then I remembered that my father’s sword from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis was in the closet at the end of the hallway on the second floor, so I ran upstairs. Returning a moment later, I pulled the sword from its scabbard and successfully penetrated the side of the balloon all the way up to the sword’s hilt. The sound of the escaping gas was not really a hiss, but more like a loud, long sigh. Within a few seconds, it had deflated to nearly half its original size, and I was able to push my way into the room.
“Your father is going to get it!” she yelled. She sounded just like Donald Duck from the helium-gas mixture she had inhaled deeply into her lungs, and I started to laugh in that cartoon character’s voice as well. She had been forced into a sitting position by the power of the balloon and fought the quickly deflating rubbery skin as she struggled to stand. She was covered from head to toe in that fine white powder and looked like some strange figure of a ghost.
I stood in the midst of the carnage, sword in my right hand, as the front door opened and Dad walked in. He dropped his suitcase on the floor and, stepping over the remains of the nearly deflated balloon, walked into the TV room. Through all the years I can remember, that was the loudest and longest I have ever remembered Dad laughing.
“Henry!” yelled Donald Duck. “We have to talk!”
By late that night, most of the mess had been cleaned up, and I had several new South African stamps to add to my collection. And that was the very last time I ever remember my mother even taking a second look at any of Dad’s letters or packages.
~John Elliott
