Grandmother's Valentines
My grandmother, Laura Marie Collier, passed away on a cold January morning after a short and sudden illness, and after a well-attended funeral, she was laid to rest in the family plot next to my grandfather, Jonathan William Collier, her husband of more than fifty years. Several days after the service, my mother and I undertook the unpleasant but necessary task of disposing of all my grandmother's belongings and putting her house up for sale.
"We might as well get this over with," I said as the two of us let ourselves into Grandmother's one-bedroom, assisted-living condominium.
My mother nodded her head in agreement, and we began systematically sorting through the contents of the kitchen, living room, bathroom, attic and basement. We kept photographs, family heirlooms and sentimental treasures that would later be divided among the surviving family members. The rest of the things were put into boxes to be donated to the Salvation Army. We put off tackling the bedroom until last. It was so much more difficult to get rid of Grandmother's clothes and jewelry than it was those impersonal items such as towels, dinnerware and Venetian blinds.
"I guess I'll start emptying her bedroom closet," Mother said, with a heavy sigh, wishing she could postpone the upsetting chore but knowing it had to be done sooner or later.
While my mother fought back her tears as she lovingly packed dresses, blouses, sweaters and pants into cardboard boxes, I volunteered to empty the drawers in my grandmother's dresser, armoire and bedside night table. It was in one of the armoire drawers that I found a beautiful satin-lined cedar box with elaborately carved lilacs on the lid. Upon opening the keepsake box, I discovered it was full of greeting cards and letters, the pages of which were yellowed with age. I put the box aside with the papers I had found in her desk and moved on to cleaning out the night table drawers.
Later that evening I sat in my own living room, weeding through old tax returns, canceled checks, bank statements, insurance policies and miscellaneous receipts that my grandmother had deemed worth saving. When I finished with those, I opened the satin-lined cedar box of greeting cards and letters. The correspondence had been placed in chronological order, with the most recent letter on top, and then tied with a lavender velvet ribbon.
I read the oldest letter first. It was dated December 30, 1941, and was written by a young man named James Warren from aboard a United States Navy aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. Apparently, Warren, like so many young men of his day, had enlisted in the armed forces after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
The letter only briefly mentioned the war or his duties onboard the ship. Most of his writing expressed in great detail young James's deep, undying love for my grandmother. I was deeply touched by his heartfelt sentiments and his apparent devotion, but I was greatly surprised when the young sailor ended the letter by expressing his hope that the war would soon end so that he and my grandmother could be married as planned.
"I don't believe it," I exclaimed.
My husband, Chet, who was sitting on the couch reading about the Boston Red Sox-New York Yankees race for the American League East pennant, looked up from his newspaper.
"Don't believe what, dear?" he asked.
"It seems that back in 1941 my grandmother was engaged to a sailor named James Warren. Why didn't she ever tell me about him? I naturally assumed that Grandpa Jonathan was the only man in her life. Why did she keep this Warren fellow a secret all these years?"
"Why should she tell you about her love life? After all, even grandmothers are entitled to their privacy."
"I suppose you're right. After all, I never told you about all the men in my life," I said with a mischievous smile and a playful wink.
My husband chuckled but then went back to reading his newspaper. Apparently, the Red Sox were more important to him than my grandmother's romances.
I returned to scrutinizing my grandmother's love letters. I have to admit my conscience did feel a slight twinge at reading such personal correspondence, but my curiosity urged me to continue. Like the first, each of the succeeding letters was from James Warren. All were filled with passion-filled, loving endearments and optimistic dreams of the future.
Oddly enough, after more than a year's worth of missives, the correspondence abruptly stopped for no apparent reason. I carefully retied the lavender velvet ribbon around the stack of envelopes and reached for the large selection of greeting cards at the bottom of the cedar keepsake box. As I quickly skimmed through the pile, I noticed that the cards were all Valentines, the most exquisite I had ever seen. Surprisingly, there were no birthday or Christmas greetings in the stack, just Valentines.
I opened one of the later ones, expecting to see my grandfather's familiar signature. Instead, I found that it was signed, All my love forever, James. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that all of the cards—almost sixty in number—were sent to my grandmother from James Warren. The first one was dated February 14, 1944, and the last one was just a month before Grandmother's death. In all that time, he never missed a year.
"Look at these Valentine cards, Chet. Why do you suppose a jilted suitor would continue to send such romantic Valentines once the relationship was over? Surely, at some point, he must have known my grandmother got married."
"You would think so, wouldn't you?" Chet replied, somewhat annoyed at having to divert his attention from the Red Sox-Yankees article a second time.
"What puzzles me most is why my grandmother kept them all these years."
"Surely you're not suggesting that she encouraged him or that something was going on between your grandmother and this James Warren fellow all these years?"
"Certainly not!" I cried with indignation. "My grandmother wasn't the type of woman to cheat on her husband."
"I don't think Laura Collier would have been unfaithful to your grandfather in the true sense of the word, but perhaps she still harbored some schoolgirl crush on Warren. In light of those feelings, she might have kept up a secret, albeit completely innocent, correspondence with him over the years, one unbeknownst to her family."
Despite the loyalty I felt toward my grandmother, I could not deny the possibility that my husband was correct.
* * *
"That's strange!" my mother exclaimed when I showed her the love letters and Valentine's cards the following day. "I never heard her mention anyone named James Warren. I wonder who he was and how they met."
"I wonder if he knows that Grandmother is dead," I added.
"We could try to locate him and inform him of her death," Mother suggested with a capricious gleam in her eye.
I smiled, burning with a curiosity that equaled hers.
"Yes, why don't we?"
My mother and I again went through all Grandmother's papers, painstakingly looking for an address for James Warren, but our exhaustive search turned up nothing. Next, we checked both the phone directory and the Internet. Although there were quite a few men named James Warren, none of them was old enough to have served during World War II. Finally, we contacted Grandmother's friends; however, no one we spoke to remembered James Warren. This was understandable since most of her surviving acquaintances had met her after she was already married to my grandfather. It was unlikely they would ever have met the man my grandmother knew back in the 1940s.
"Oh, well, I guess Mr. Warren will just have to remain a mystery," Mother said, reluctantly giving up the search.
The following day the two of us sat at the dining room table in my parents' home and proceeded to undertake one final task. My mother brought out the large manila envelope she received from the director of the funeral home where my grandmother had been laid out. The envelope contained the guest register from my grandmother's viewing as well as the cards that accompanied the floral arrangements that had been sent to the funeral home. With heavy hearts, we went through the register and the cards, making a list of mourners to whom we needed to send thank you notes.
Suddenly my mother cried, "It's him!" as she waved a florist's card in front of my face.
The card that had accompanied one of the floral memorials was signed, All my love forever, James. The handwriting was now familiar to me. I picked up the card's envelope, read the name, address and phone number of the florist and reached inside my handbag for my iPhone.
"Warren, you say? James Warren?" the florist repeated, trying to jog his memory. "I don't remember waiting on anyone by that name myself, but perhaps one of my assistants took the order. Let me check my records."
I was put on hold while the owner of the flower shop went in search of a copy of the receipt.
"Here it is. James Warren. The order was placed on the eighteenth. No credit card information was given, so he must have paid cash. I'm sorry, but there's no street address written on the receipt, only the name of the town. That's the trouble with hiring these young kids," the florist confided. "They only do half the job most of the time."
"What's the name of the town?" I asked, mentally crossing my fingers.
"Pine Grove."
I thanked him and hung up the phone. Pine Grove was a small town about twenty miles west of my grandmother's hometown. However, directory assistance had no listing for James Warren in Pine Grove.
"Perhaps he has an unlisted number," I said. "Or considering his advanced age, he might be living with relatives or in a nursing home."
"There's only one way to find out," Mother concluded. "Come on. We're going to take a trip to Pine Grove."
After a forty-five-minute drive, we arrived at the Pine Grove Post Office. To our disappointment, no one there had ever heard of James Warren. We also checked the town's only nursing home and the municipal building but to no avail. We had apparently come to a dead end.
As we walked back to my Subaru, my mother sighed with disappointment.
"Short of going from door to door and questioning every resident of Pine Grove," she said, "it doesn't look as though we are going to find the elusive Mr. Warren."
* * *
After eating lunch at a nearby diner, we decided to head home. On impulse, my mother suggested we take a detour through Charlesport, the small village where my Grandmother was born and raised. We were not motivated by any hope of finding James Warren there; we only sought to take a sentimental journey to honor my grandmother's memory. I pulled off the interstate and drove down scenic Maple Lane a short distance before stopping in front of the house in which she had grown up.
An elderly lady was filling a bird feeder with sunflower seeds in the front yard of the neighboring house.
She picked up her head, smiled at my mother and called out, "You must be Laura Collier's daughter. You look just like her."
"Yes, I am," my mother admitted. "Did you know Laura well?"
The old woman chuckled.
"I grew up with your mother. After she moved away and married your father, we tried to keep in touch with each other. Neither one of us was very good at writing letters, but every now and then one of us would pick up the phone and call the other."
Then the old woman's smile faded, and her eyes misted over.
"I read in the paper that she passed away. I'm so sorry. Laura was a wonderful person."
"Thank you," my mother said graciously and then grasped for one last straw. "Perhaps you might be able to help us solve a little mystery that's recently come up. Did my mother ever mention a man named James Warren?"
"Jimmy Warren?" the old woman repeated. "Good God! That's all she ever talked about when we were kids. Jimmy this and Jimmy that. Those two were sweet on each other since seventh grade. In high school, they were inseparable."
"I don't suppose you'd know where we can find him?" I asked hopefully.
"Jimmy is down at Pine Grove over on Gloucester Street."
My mother threw me a triumphant glance. Our dogged persistence had paid off! We had finally found James Warren. After thanking the old woman profusely, my mother and I drove off and headed toward Gloucester Street.
"That's where we went wrong," my mother announced. "The florist said it was the name of a town, and all this time, it was the name of a nursing home."
"At least we finally tracked him down. You know, maybe we should open up a detective agency," I said, and we both laughed.
Our laughter stopped abruptly when we turned onto Gloucester Street and discovered that the Pine Grove we sought was neither a town nor a nursing home. It was a cemetery.
After fifteen minutes of searching, we finally found him. His unadorned headstone read simply, Ensign James Warren, born August 29, 1922 - died March 5, 1943.
As my mother and I stood staring at the grave in utter amazement, I remembered the final letter that this romantic young ensign had written to my grandmother. It had been dated just three days before he was killed. In it, he had promised that his love would never die, and for more than sixty years, young Jimmy Warren had kept his promise.
Salem loves Valentine's Day--and every other day he can receive Godiva chocolates!
