Paula Routly: Reading My Parents’ Old Love Letters

A romantic missive, written in 1879, is at the heart of a story in this Love & Marriage Issue of Seven Days. Contractors discovered the letter in the floorboards while renovating an old house in Passumpsic. The property owner was intrigued. With just a few details gleaned from the faded document, she tracked down the enamored couple, Sumner Putnam Pinney and Carrie Harriet Noble — through children, illnesses and a second marriage — to their final resting place. Mary Ann Lickteig’s “Finding Love” is a brief but intimate glimpse of a 19th-century Vermont relationship.

Reading it gave me the courage to climb the almost-vertical stairs in my home office to the loft space where I store the belongings of my mother, father and sister, my only sibling — all of whom have predeceased me. I easily found the shiny green shoebox that, until now, I have been unable to face.

Inside are the letters my parents, Angie Catanese and Paul Routly, exchanged in 1950, the year before they were married. They met on a double-blind date at Princeton University, where my dad was a doctoral student in astrophysics. My mom lived half an hour away in New Brunswick, N.J., with her Sicilian-born parents. She worked as an executive secretary at Rutgers University, which is as close to college as she got.

The couple were already serious when Paul learned he would have to spend the fall doing research at the Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, Calif. Separated by distance and slow mail delivery, the epistolary exchange that ensued captured the sweetest period of their relationship, full of concern, anticipation and impassioned requests to write more often.

They exchanged letters at least once a week. My dad’s missives to “Miss Angie Catanese” are tied together with a pink ribbon; hers to him have also been perfectly preserved. Then 25-year-old kids, they would have celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary this year.

How hot are these letters from a time before zip codes? I pulled one of Paul’s out of the middle of the stack and began reading it aloud to my partner, Tim. My dad’s handwriting was always beautiful — he wrote longhand, with a fountain pen — and I quickly remembered how to decipher it.

“Sweetheart Angie, Your two letters this past week brought a great deal of joy to this old tired heart of mine. In contrast to my usual close-mouthed and secretive manner, I shall unhesitatingly tell you that I am extremely dependent on your correspondence, darling. Hearing from you constitutes just about the only high spot in my otherwise monotonous, boring, and exceedingly lonely existence here.”

Her previous letter had apparently included a picture of herself. He waxed, “As usual, you look absolutely radiant and beautiful. I am carrying it about in my wallet so that it will warm up my insides. I rather smiled at your suggestion that I only asked for the picture in order to admire your ‘double chin’ — it is a lovely chin alright, but you seem to have forgotten the presence of something else which is also double and equally as delightful to the eye. Oh, how my imagination wanders these days.”

Dad!

He continued: “And to think that in another two months you will be real — really you and I shall be kissing, not a picture.”

Instead of feeling the “ew” of a child watching her parents be affectionate, I was deeply moved by their back-and-forth, full of revealing quotidian details but also sustained — and restrained! — longing. It was a gentle reminder that our memories are selective and things may not have been as they seemed.

(Also in the box, I found a letter from an old friend of my mom’s revealing the details of a physically abusive marriage that, after two excruciating years, had just ended in divorce. It was postmarked May 1954, three years after my parents tied the knot.)

Love stories are happening all around us via phone, text, email and even public proposals of marriage, but nothing holds that spark — forever — like a letter.