The Hat Box
A Personal Essay The hat box sits on the top shelf of my dead brother’s walk-in-closet. It has been there for the 30 years my brother lived here, given to him after our mother died and our father remarried. When I lift the box from the shelf, it is like holding my mother in my hands. Her hatbox sat on a shelf in my parents’ closets in all four of our childhood apartments. David and I were forbidden to open the box. ‘It’s private,’ my mother always said. ‘You heard your mother,’ my father always said. The box’s grey background is sprinkled with single roses with faded green stems and leaves. A narrow deep rose-colored velvet ribbon circles the lid. It is now coated with dust. I wipe off the dust, climb down from the step-stool, and sit on the floor in David’s bedroom. I remember the many times we took the hatbox down from our parents’ closet when they were not home. We were brave enough to open the box, but never enough to take any of the hundreds of letters out. Now, as I open it all these years later, my mother speaks to me, ‘They’re private.’ This time I answer, ‘Why are they still here, if no-one can read them?’ No response. I don’t take any letters out, then, but I put the hatbox in my car and bring it home with me to Maine. Now, I look at the hatbox every day. It sits not in a closet, but on a chair in my kitchen. Today, I open the box and sort through the letters. As I put them in chronological order, I picture my mother in 1943, 22-years-old, and my father, 21, a private first-class in the Army Air Force, stationed in Kentucky. I see them exactly as they looked then from their wedding picture, taken the day after they eloped during my mother’s first visit to the base. They are young, handsome, and smiling. They could not know how their lives would unfold, the challenges and joys they would share. They could not know that my mother’s life would be too short or that one day their 72-yearold daughter would lug their letters from Connecticut to Maine and debate for months whether to read them. I convince myself that there is a reason my parents kept those letters, that my father passed them on to my brother, that they sat on that shelf in David’s closet all those years. Those letters were waiting for me. I begin. I remove the thin sheets of paper from their airmail envelopes with trembling fingers. I am a young child again, fearful that I will be caught spying on my parents. After reading a few, the fear recedes and my young, newlywed parents appear before me. The letters speak of almost nothing but their love for each other, their longing to be together, their dreams for the future. They give only a few clues that the country is at war. Will this change when my father is ordered to the South Pacific? I read faster, skipping pages of declarations of undying love. Even knowing how their story ends, I want to know all the steps in between, before my brother was born, my mother on her own after his birth, my father at war. I know the story of my father’s homecoming. He arrives home three or four days early on Thanksgiving day, 1945. My mother is bathing at her parents’ apartment, where she and my infant brother live while my father is at war. I always believed that this is the night I was conceived, an idea my mother never discouraged. I return to the letters, but my questions will never be answered. The last letter in the hatbox is dated February 10, 1944. My parents know my mother is pregnant. They choose names, David for a boy, Jackie for a girl. My father waits in Kentucky for his orders; my mother experiences morning sickness nearly every day. Then, no more letters. There must have been more, at least the letters from my father, even if he could not keep those sent to him after arriving in the South Pacific. I am wracked with guilt. Were those letters in another container? One of the many boxes of papers in my brother’s closet? I had rifled through those boxes hurriedly, emptying David’s condo after his death. They contained his old sermons, newspaper clippings related to his career, diplomas, letters back and forth between David and our parents, between David and me. Did I toss out the rest of the love letters? I speak out loud, ‘Where are they, Mom? I know there were more.’ My mother answers, ‘They’re private, Jackie.’
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By Jacquelyn Jacquelyn is a social worker began writing retiring and to Maine. Sh participated i ing workshops several accom Maine authors the auspices o the Maine and Publishe ance or the Senior Colleg work. She writ ative nonfictio personal essay
