57. The Complex Truth – Carmen Radley
When I first read these letters, I thought, The epic love story—that was a lie.
My great-grandparents’ joint obituary headline was “Couple lives and dies together.” Ernest and Ruth were born on the same day, twelve hours apart. They married young and together raised four sons, worked at the family business, then spent their retirement gardening and taking trips to their ramshackle beach house. When he died, she followed just twelve hours later. That they had trod the Earth for the same duration seemed like something destined.
Then a few years ago, I discovered some letters Ruth wrote to Ernest—13 of them, all typewritten—in the fall of 1942, and a very different story emerged. In this version, Ernest had had an affair with a woman at the office, and when his bosses learned of it, he quit his job and took another as a lineman for an oil company, which sent him to work out of state. In the wake of this, Ruth was not angry, but simply bereft. She wrote to him in tenderness and desperation, urging him to take a defense job in the nearby shipyards—to do anything but stay away. “Love and kisses and please come home,” she wrote. “Do not let this thing completely wreck us.” Again, this time in all caps: “PLEASE COME HOME.” A few days later, he did.
When I first read these letters, I thought, The epic love story—that was a lie. I remembered Ruth as the small woman with a pinched face who hoarded bread bags and served flat Dr. Pepper when I came to visit. Ernest had always seemed gentle and generous and good, and that he’d loved her so patiently made him that much more of a saint. But the truth was that he was a cheater and a hothead, and she was the saint, steadfast and adoring. I felt foolish for thinking so much of him and a pang of regret for thinking so little of her.
Eventually, though, I realized that there was no one story—and that in fact, these could all be true: that he was as gentle and generous as she was miserly and rigid; that he was a temperamental philanderer, and she was an adoring wife; that they were the couple who lived and died together. Letting these stories sit side by side made room for the multitudes that humans contain—for the way they caused each other anguish and the way they brought each other joy. Or as Ruth wrote to Ernest in one of those letters: “Gee, but I would like to mug you. I would not even grumble if the whiskers scratched.”
– Carmen Radley
