Just A Short Note (But Not Really)

July 12, 1952 (To Martha in pencil)

JUST A

Short note to let you know that you may possibly be getting a visitor up your way from India. He is Chris Sexton, who’s parents are here with the British High Commission. He worked his way over to India on a steamer to visit with his folks and was here for several months. He’s a cute boy. I always called him Christopher Kringle. He was always interested in “you Americans” and hadn’t known many Americans before he met us. He went on some of our parties with us. Used to come up to USIS quite often to see Jim Grisby and always stopped in and spent an hour or so talking to me. Very skinny kid, with lank, long blond hair. He is on his way to Canada and the ship he has signed aboard will stop in Seattle. He has your home and office address and the office phone number. It will be a couple months before they arrive, I suppose. He is the one who started the famous sayings around here, “My God, she’s enormous.” We were all playing leap frog and football and doing tricks on the back lawn one day after a picnic to the old amphitheater lake and Chris was going to try and swing me around by an arm and a leg. He just got me off he ground and about half a swing around when my face bit the grass and I went sliding along for several feet face-downward. Poor Chris was horrified at dropping me, and all he could say was, “My God, she’s enormous.”

BUT AS

Long as I’m at it I may as well chat a bit. This is Saturday morning at work. My boss just got back today after a week in Kashmir and he really has a face full of sun. Just now got notice from Embassy that we are to go on different hours, a little longer during the day and no work on Saturdays….and that’s o.k. by me. Just fired my bearer, Sami Lal a week or so ago and have been using Pat Whitney’s bearer, Narayan, to take care of the cleaning, and my clothes, and I eat with Barbara. She did the same thing a month or so back, so I guess we are even. I’m on the lookout for a new bearer. Doesn’t take long for the word to get around and every day a couple of seamy looking characters show up looking for a job. I’m going to be real careful in selecting the next one. It’s practically like picking a husband. You just have to have someone you can stand around all the time. I got so I couldn’t stand Sami Lal, and he was therefore, away from the place most of the time. Poor little guy, I hope he can get a new job. He wasn’t a bad cook, but I had trouble getting him to do certain cleaning jobs which he considered beneath his dignity. I tried to explain that it didn’t matter to me whether he did them or not, just so long as they got done, but they didn’t so he got the axe. I kept him for months with everyone saying, “Why don’t you fire that stupid bearer,” because I didn’t have the heart to let him go. It was surprisingly easy when it finally came down to it. He accepted it with an apathy that seems to be rather general among these people. They have had so darn much kicking around that nothing surprises them. They just accept everything, death, disease, poverty, as a matter of course.

NOW THAT

I’ve almost filled a page and spent a good ten minutes doing it…it’s time to go home. Barbara and I are going to try and bum a ride to the pool and spend the afternoon trying to rejuvenate our tans of a week ago. I haven’t any soul stirring news about the latest Cambellittis developments. He hasn’t missed one night all week coming over to spend an hour or two with me, even though we haven’t gone anyplace or done anything. This is a new development – but doesn’t stir my soul. Maybe he’s just lonesome. Anyway, it’s a habit that I like and one that he had dropped for months and months after our first “new people” months.

HERE IS

The second page already of a short note, and this is Monday morning. My weekend was very quiet. We did go to the pool Saturday and I went crying over to Barbara’s Saturday night when I discovered that Alan, who I hadn’t seen all day, went off to a party without even asking me if I were invited or coming over. I had slept in the afternoon – my charpoy pulled into the middle of the room directly under my big over-head fan, the desert cooler in the window roaring away, so he could have come by and found me asleep – but doubt it. Helen also was invited, and she went with Mannie. Barbara refused to let me slash my wrists with a razor blade so I went home and sat in Helen’s room playing the piano for hours. Barbara and Joe Krene came over to see how I was later, and we ate peanut butter, jam and crackers and sang “I don’t want to set the world on fire,” in high falsetto voices as loud as we could. I stood on my head practicing diving position for awhile and Barbara and Joe engaged in fisticuffs (boxing). Finally, we admitted we were all bored and our frenzied attempts at gaiety weren’t working—so they went away, and I trudged gloomily back to the piano, and sat for another hour playing the black keys only, improvising to suit my mood. Came a tap on the door pane and who stood peering in but Mannie. Since Helen’s door was locked from the outside he came around through mine and flopped on the bed. I went on with my Oriental sing-song playing while Mannie, who seldom drinks and who had too many at this party, went on semi-sleeping. Pretty soon Helen, who had come home with Alan from the party and they stopped at the Club for a dance on the way, came home. There she found me staring into space, fingering the flats, and Mannie conked out on the bed, and neither of us would utter a word. She got some things out of her kitchen and with a “Hundreds of crazy people all over my house,” rushed out. Came back a few minutes later saying that the table at Alan’s was set for four and for us to come over. The suggestion of food brought Mannie to his feet – he can eat more and oftener than anyone I know – and though I was reluctant to go over, I went along. I wasn’t hungry and still in a “purple fog” as we always call it when we are depressed, but I sat on the floor by the bookcases and read “Mouse Maid Made Mouse” from the Indian equivalent of Aesop’s fables. I did condescend to eat four olives – and after their repast I took the dishes into the kitchen off of Mannie’s room and rinsed them off. In due course there followed a dishtowel fight in which fray I was wounded on the leg when Alan, not knowing his own strength or realizing what the flip end of a wet dishtowel can do, displayed an elaborately fancy “touché” in fencing pose. I very bravely concealed my pain and our fight turned into a chase when I ran home. Helen was at the piano as we went by her room, so we pressed our noses to the pane and the strains the French National Anthem wooed us inside. Helen and Alan (with me leaning on the mantle piece listening and drinking in the cuteness of…) and eight verses of “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, and twelve of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Helen looked down and saw my wound and said, “Good Heavens, what happened to you,” and my secret was out. Poor Alan was fraught with despair when he realized what he’d done – but I refused to beat him with Helen’s bamboo pole. I sneaked out when he was moaning face down on her bed and instead of going to my room, I sat in the wicker lounge chair on the veranda in the dark of the shadows to see him go home. My “purple fog” was only a “blue mist”. Pretty soon he came out and came over to my door, instead of turning the other way and going home..so I spoke to him from the shadows and he came over and sat down for a while. Anyway, I was riding a pink cloud with silver lining when I retired a half hour later.

Sunday – the pool again and I nearly killed myself trying a double roll from the high board. Alan wasn’t there but when we got home he arrived about the same time with a five foot banana tree in hand and with lots of advise from the side-lines he and Al Awagain dug a hole and planted the banana tree. His other little itty bitty one had died. Alan is a horticulturist in more ways than one. Loves to dig around in the yard. Mannie too. You should see their veranda and yard…just full of all kinds of palms and potted plants. Mannie has a few little trees he ties up with the strings to train them a certain way and he drags in big rocks from our trips, etc. Many a Sunday afternoon I have sat and watched them re-plant the Wandering Jew and dig around in the other pots. Alan got a hanging basket plant once and hung it from the arch of the veranda and the poor thing was almost beaten to death by the palm tree nearby so he moved it and it still looks mighty sick but we think it will live.

Anyway, the banana tree was planted, and we christened it “Chicita” with nimbu pani’s. After the T.T.P.S. (Taj Tree Planting Society) broke up we took Alan’s and Mannie’s cold chicken, potato salad and cucumber slices down to Barb’s room and we opened a can of beans and Vienna sausages and heated them and sat around on pillows on the reed mat floor and ate. Then we went our separate ways home. I was frustrated, as usual when I don’t have a goodnight chat with H.M. (His Majesty), so I moved the furniture around in my room again, taking out a big long ugly book rack I had putting in a small one that Pat Whitney gave me. Pat came along and I fed her about five cokes and we started talking about bridge. I have decided to learn the game, since I heard somewhere that it is a good idea to try to become interested in the hobbies of the MOTH (man of the hour) and T.B., alias H.M., alias the MM (mad mali – a mali is the man who cuts the grass and plants the flowers, etc.) and sometimes we call him P.E.N. Campbell, meaning Party Every Night Campbell, when he is especially popular for a week, likes to play bridge, or at least is always being invited to dinner and bridge.

Pat Whitney is my neighbor on the right, been in India for years, works in the Ambassador’s office, loves to eat and looks it, big brown eyes that blink and flash, short permanent hair that always stands on end giving her a wild look, a sharp brain that knows a little bit about a lot of things, talks a lot, likes to talk and goes through all kinds of facial contortions as she talks, has two Siamese cats, not too popular but a good hearted soul that is fun to have around for short intervals----knows her bridge, but good. She stayed until almost 1:30 showing me the ropes.

AND TODAY

I’m tired! I’ve even run out of trivia – so I’ll leave this as a short note at that……Don’t expect to ever get a letter from me again until both of you write me one….and a nice long one.      So bye.        AND LOVE,

P.S. All these initials is another latest craze. We initial significant phrases and then let the other guess what we mean. Barbara and I are always going to spend a S.I.N. (self improvement night), etc. Sometimes they guess real funny things.

PPST! I think I’m in love. I try not to think about it too much and I refuse to consider what’s going to happen to me when one more year and two months are gone. It makes me sick….sick I tell you. In spite of all the improvements, I still don’t know how I stand, for sure. I don’t even dare hope, for how could anyone as wonderful and cute and sweet and nice and all the adjectives you can think of that are complimentary ever ever feel the same way about a slob like me. (Typed over this last sentence: I shouldn’t have to say it to myself.)

PSST again. Please keep this a secret.