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When I reached the Sloane Square station I had to run to catch my train. Halfway down the steps I could hear it rumbling onto the tracks below; the sound set everyone into motion. Like a herd of wildebeest startled by a hunter’s shotgun, we stampeded down the stairs and onto the platform. I hopped aboard just as the doors were closing and quickly moved to a seat at the window.

I looked at my watch. It was about eleven. By this time my brother, Shelby, and his wife, Pat—who was like a sister to me—would have arrived in London after an overnight flight from Texas. The thought of seeing them during the next few days put me in a good mood.

But first, before meeting Shelby and Pat and a group of their friends for dinner that night, I was on my way to read some love letters. The letters were on display at, of all places, the Imperial War Museum.

At first I’d thought it odd, a war museum mounting what the guidebook described as “an exhibition about the special nature of romance in wartime, featuring true stories of happiness and heartbreak, illustrated by love letters, keepsakes, poems and telegrams.” But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. What, after all, heightens the intensity of love more than separation? Particularly when that separation involves danger and uncertainty. And what more intimate way to transcend the terrible, aching apartness than through the writing down of words that carry in each pen stroke the physical presence of the absent one?

At the St. James’s Park tube stop, a well-dressed young man took the seat next to me. After a minute or two he pulled from his briefcase a thin sheet of airmail stationery and began to write in small, precise, straight-up-and-down strokes. As I watched the words take shape, I thought of my father’s handwriting and remembered how as a child, after he died, I would trace the handwriting from his letters over and over again onto onionskin paper, trying to make it my own. Dear Children, I would trace carefully with a finely sharpened pencil, I have just arrived in Brazil, which is a beautiful country.…

Of course what I desperately wanted to trace were not his letters to Shelby and me but the ones he wrote to Mother. She would not allow it. “They are private,” she would say in a firm voice, one that suggested whining or pleading wasn’t going to change her mind. Sometimes, however, I would write down from memory the words I had seen in those letters: My darling Nancy … My dearest wife … How I miss you.

Now, as the darkness rushed by outside the train’s window, I allowed myself to think of another letter, one I’d received earlier in the week and was trying not to think about. But the mind has a will of its own, and I managed to get around the self-imposed prohibition by thinking of Naohiro’s letter as though I were watching a play:

A woman, dressed in a slightly wrinkled gray silk suit and in dire need of a haircut, is leaving her flat one morning when the porter hands her a letter. As soon as she looks at the postmark she turns around and takes the lift back to her flat, where she sits on the side of the bed and, still holding her purse, opens the ivory-colored envelope. The letter consists of two short paragraphs, which she reads over and over again. The first paragraph begins, “I am on the bullet train, thinking of you”; and the second one ends, “I will be in Paris in October. Where will you be?”

In Italy, I thought, trying not to feel sad. But walking the few blocks from the Underground station to the War Museum, I let myself feel the sting of missing Naohiro. Then suddenly the geography of hope kicked in: it’s only an hour-and-a-half by plane from Paris to Venice, I realized, feeling as elated as Penelope must have at the prospect of seeing Ulysses upon his return from Troy.

As I turned onto Lambeth Street and the Imperial War Museum came into view, I thought of the building’s origins. A large, architecturally elegant structure set in the