Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [82]
“Sweetheart,” the boy writes, “if you should be taken away from me, I don’t know what I’d do. Do you know that you mean everything to me? A fellow can do most anything, dear, if he has a little girl like you to back him up. With you backing me up, I feel as if I could go through the seven fires of hell and come out rather cool.…”
“I love you every second,” the girl responded. “I love and adore you. There couldn’t be anyone else in the world for us but each other … it was ordained from the first that we should be together. I have always known it. You will never, never know how I love you … you are everything in the world I hold dearest. If anything should happen to you, I think I should go insane.…”
“Dearest, I’m the most fortunate man in the world, and I can’t see how I deserve it at all,” the boy wrote after landing in France, bound for the trenches of World War I. “I am so happy in knowing that you are mine, that I seem to be walking on air. You’re the only one I could ever marry and to think that you’re mine is wonderful. It’s us for the rest of our life that is going to be the happiest that ever was.”
“You are as necessary to me as air and water,” she wrote on the eve of her wedding day. “I love and adore you.… I have now and since the first time I saw you a feeling of absolute security whenever I think of you. I know that whatever happens, you’ll always be there to help me, and you know, dearest, I would move the world for you.… I am absolutely yours and you are mine. I don’t think the ceremony will be necessary as far as we are concerned, for we are honestly married as two people could be. It was ordained from the first that we should be. I have always known it and so has everyone who has ever known us.…”
There are scores of these letters, passionate and brimming with love, all written by my mother and father.
Like other things in life, what people glean from their words will vary according to their own experiences, values and prejudices. I do not find these letters moving, but I have read them searching for answers to what went wrong in their lives. I have spent almost seven decades examining every aspect of my life trying to understand the forces that made me what I am, and while I never expect to find the final answer, because I realize it is impossible to be objective about oneself, I’ve tried to reconcile the sweet, hopeful, passionate people in these letters with the parents I knew—one an alcoholic whom I loved but who ignored me, the other an alcoholic who tortured me emotionally and made my mother’s life a misery. I mourn the sadness of their lives while looking for clues to their psyches and, by extension, my own.
My father, the letters tell me, was kicked out of the University of Nebraska for drinking, and when she was away at college in New England my mother wrote him, “I drank half a quart of whiskey with ginger ale, smoked six cigarettes, drank port wine and more whiskey.… I’ve been sick ever since.… I wanted to get stewed once to see what it was like. I wouldn’t do it in public and I couldn’t at home, and I wouldn’t when I was married because if I ever thought you’d see me in the state I was in last night, I’d get under a bed and stay there for the rest of my natural life. Dearest, that’s one thing we’ll never, never do is get stewed. I think it’s horrible.”
Is there a clue to why my father behaved as he did in a letter written to them by one of his aunts on the eve of their wedding? “Marlon,” she wrote, “be the boss. Dodie will be happier for having someone who makes her do the thing as it should be done, and don’t think that giving in to her is an action of love, for it isn’t.…”
Clues, but no answers.
After my mother left New York, she reconciled with my father, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous they both stopped drinking. They then had almost ten years together. I bought them a ranch in the sand hills of