James Hargrove’s letters to Eleanor were sixty years of a man learning to tell the truth.
I read them over two weeks, carefully, with the attention they deserved, which was the full attention, because they were the record of something specific and valuable and they had waited seventy years in a trunk under an attic window for someone to understand what they were.
They began in 1925 with the stiffness of two people who have been placed together by arrangement and are being correct with each other because correct is all they have access to yet.
James wrote about business. About travel. About the weather in cities he was visiting. He wrote with the efficiency of someone reporting rather than communicating, the letters of a man who understood letters as a logistical necessity of distance ra
