A dad writes what is unsaid

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

He writes things that he would never say in person. Not that they're intimate things. They're not. They're brief statements that come right to the point.

But his written words are different from his spoken ones. He writes from a place he seems to go to only in print, a room he has kept under lock and key for so long that it's only with pen in hand or with a keyboard in front of him that he can enter.

I should have guessed this about my father. I knew it when I was young and I know it for sure about me. I know that writing pries open doors. But I never put us together, not until a few simple e-mails made me remember something.

I was 11 when, poking through my mother's bureau drawer, I found a bundle of old poems and letters. At first I couldn't believe my father had written them, even though the big script was definitely his. I thought he must have copied them. That's what I told my best friend, Rose.

But she said he didn't copy them. Why would my mother have saved them if he'd copied them? she asked.

We sat on the chenille bedspread in my parents' bedroom for a whole Saturday afternoon, reading and re-reading every tender syllable. "I thought while in a foreign land. A place where no one understands. That I could always turn to you. But as this is gone dear, we are through."

How could a man whose favorite show was "The Range Rider" have penned this? And why wasn't this addressed to my mother? Who were all these other women my father wrote to?

"There weren't any other women. Your father wrote those for all the men in his regiment," my mother told me. "They paid him to write letters and poems because he was so good at it."

My father was Cyrano de Bergerac and I never knew.

There were other signs that there was much more to my father than met the eye. There were, in fact, a few giant billboards with flashing lights. But, except for the poems and letters, I didn't see.

My father continually refused to talk about the war. I'd pester and moan and say: "I need to know this for school, Dad. Tell me where you were and what you did."

"It's ancient history," he'd say, which made me believe he never even thought about his past.

And yet he must have because he pasted photographs from the war in albums and wrote down the names of the people he knew and the dates he knew them and the places he went, and if I had peeked into his desk drawer at any time, I would have found all that I was looking for.

My father has chronicled years in photo albums and in daybooks full of facts: "This is where I went and this is what I did and this was the temperature today."

And yet what he has felt he has mostly left unsaid.

People have asked me, "Did you always want to be a writer?" And I have told them, yes, and have talked about my paternal grandmother, the storyteller in our family who created a world with words, a world I grew up wanting to re-create.

I never thought of my father as the storyteller. He never told his tales. Yet they've been there in all the blank spaces between the photos and the facts.

He e-mails me now and it's as if a light is shining on all those blank spaces and you can see that the spaces are not blank at all, that there are lots of stories there.

He writes what he would never say in person. He writes, like Cyrano, the words from his fingers direct from his heart.