In this, the final installment of the Love Triangle Letters, my beloved Texan grandmother drafts a note to the other woman’s husband. It’s exceedingly polite, which she wasn’t always. “Regardless of what Christine has done I blame her no more than the man. I am a great believer in the ‘Single Standard,’” she begins. She urges him to take Christine . . .
Last week I posted the letter my grandfather sent to my grandmother, Martha, after she found out he was cheating and left him. This week’s installment is a letter from Christine, the other woman, pictured next to my grandfather second from left above, who also had a kid and a spouse. According to my mom, Robert married her two or three . . .
My grandmother kept letters documenting the fallout from my grandfather’s affair (with the woman who became his next wife). In this missive (below), he urges my grandmother to leave her parents’ place and come back to him. The language becomes increasingly unhinged and self-pitying; I suspect he was getting progressively shitfaced as he wrote. Some notable passages (typos reproduced from . . .
I left for my Tennessee-Mississippi sojourn sans laptop (R.I.P.), cell phone (forgotten at work), and socks (oops), but I’ve got a camera, and just finished rereading As I Lay Dying, so I should at least get some photos and some Faulkner up. (Did you know the people of Oxford used to call him “Count No-Count“? I didn’t, or had forgotten, . . .