Shall I Say A Kiss?: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-1938

Introduction: Before Crossing the Divide

INTRODUCTION Before Crossing the Divide Lennard]. Davis hen Morris Davis, my father, died in 1981, at the age of eighty-two, he had been ill with cancer for ten years. My mother, Eva, had died nine years earlier, at the age of sixty-two, in a traffic accident. Both were profoundly deaf. The last time I saw my father alive, he was barely conscious. I shook him, the way I used to do when I was a child, wanting him to wake up on Sunday morning and play with me. He barely openedhis eyes.I signed "How are you?" Feebly, he replied, "Fine, thank you." By the next morning he had died. After the funeral, my brother and I went to clear his possessions from the apartment in which he had lived. Most of his papers had to do with racewalking. He had held the unofficial American record for walking 25 miles, a record of which he was very proud, and about which he told almost any visitor or passerby. But among his clippings, medals, and trophies, we found a small packet, neatly tied up. It contained a series of letters -mostly from my mother, then Eva Weintrobe-still in 2 INTRODUC1\ON their envelopes and arranged in chronological order. I took these home to look at them more carefully. That night, I settled into my bed and opened the first envelope . The neatly written letter, yellowed with age, was from my mother and was dated August 23, 1936, two years before their marriage. It began, "Dear Morris, It was indeed a surprise for me to receive your card & I shall say a pleasant surprise too." This was the first of many letters between my mother and father. In this first one, the signs of courtship are detectablethe blush of surprise, the pleasure of an interest requited. This beginning was for Eva and Morris, as for billions of other humans , the first instance when affection and even love seem possible . And like so many other moments, it could have gone awry. Indeed, the letters that followed, the letters that I read avidly and voyeuristically for several nights in a row, always teetered at the edge of disaster. Each letter sowed the seeds of their courtship's destruction as well as its creation. Eva and Morris tried, over the course of two complicated years, to understand each other and forge a relationship through letters. Because these two were separated-initially by being in different cities, then by being in different countries -they had to accomplish in writing what most people work out in person. They had their fights, their reconciliations, their declarations oflove and disappointment within the pages of these letters, which flew between the United States and Britain as silent emissaries. My parents were Pyramus and Thisbe, separated by distance but passing notes through a chink in the transatlantic wall. As an English professor who specialized in eighteenthcentury novels, I had read many epistolary romances. I was Before Crossing the Divide 3 used to the slow unfolding that these stories in letters, like Richardson's Clarissa or Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, held in store. But reading my own parents' letters added a different element. Now, the fate of the hero and heroine contained my fate as well. And like the Greeks who experienced catharsis while watching Oedipus, even though they knew how it would conclude, I too winced and shuddered at each twist and turn of fate, although I knew very well the end. When, several times, Eva and Morris decided to break off the relationship, I felt myself begin to evaporate, grow translucent, and fade into nonexistence , only to return to life in the next letter, in which my parents reconciled. I read the letters late into the nights, following Morris and Eva's understandings and misunderstandings, disagreements and declarations of affection, until I reached the last one, written almost two years after the first, in which my mother wrote: "This I think will be my last letter to you before I leave England. I can hardly believe it is true." And with the end of separation came the end of the writing. But in the meantime, I had become that magical third party-the reader, who wants the star-crossed couple to be reunited and in the course to become my parents and create my life. But my collaboration as reader had no willing co-conspirator...