Dear Sylvia

By J.P. Donleavy

I am writing this letter, you know why. It wasn’t that your mother ripped the curtains down but that she was attacking me with a lethal weapon which, if nothing else, shows she’s got no respect for me and I am, after all, your husband. I would have hit my own mother under similar circumstances, God rest her soul.

I think you overlook the fact that I am a college graduate who majored in chemistry and it’s not that I’m trying to blow my own horn but you ought to remember that I’ve got more brains than your whole family of farmers. You sent for them, not me. If it were to have been a little family chat that’s all right, but to be beaten up in my own house that’s another thing. Something worse could have happened than a mere broken hip. What was I expected to do against three, especially when they had your key and planned to get me in bed, defenseless. Putting vaseline over the floor was not the act of a coward but a strategist. Admittedly I never dreamed it would work so well.

Right, so they’re going to sue me for damages but I want to know how your father is going to explain coming into the apartment with a hay rake, fifty miles from the nearest field. Rake up the grass in our window boxes? So you see I’m not in the least worried. And remember this, when your brother slipped and broke his hip, the red bowl you bought last year in the village had just left his hand, which he claimed, rather prematurely I thought, was the arm that pitched eight no hit games for Erasmus High and of course he promptly pitched on his backside courtesy my vaseline. It was only his screams of agony which prevented your brother Tim and father from beating me up although with greasy feet they too might have ended up in the hospital.

And don’t forget to tell your father’s lawyer that I, as the occupier of 4-F, don’t have to warn parties who are trying to murder me in my bed that they are open to risks inside my door. Which makes me call to mind the nasty references that were made to the number of my apartment during the war. To imply that I was classified as 4-F and unfit for service is a slander on my physical health which has always been, if I do say so myself, superb. I was prevented from active duty by the nature of my work at college and I don’t care if you never believe me. There were some people who did more to win the war back in the States than a thousand like your brothers who as far as I can gather were charging every bush and stump in Hawaii with fixed bayonets which in the end were used only to open beer cans.

But this is not a letter of recrimination. Far from it. I just want you to get the facts straight and understand my side of it. I’ve never held anything against your family except that remark about my parents being ignorant immigrants. They were hard working, clean living, good people who saw to it that I got the opportunities they never had and slaved and sacrificed so I could be what I am today. Even so, sometimes my dear Sylvia, I can’t help feeling a little relieved that I’ve only been one generation in this great land.

But as I’ve said, this is not a letter of recrimination. Although your constant accusations that I was cheap, tightwad and the rest never helped matters. This business of the sun shade for the car is a fad and just because I don’t want to get one doesn’t mean that I am a tightwad. You ought to realize that people who really have something don’t go around advertising it to everybody. Sure, laugh at those old guys riding bicycles around Boston but every time you make a telephone call that rings up a little something on their dividends.

And this is something I really mean I’d like to be friends with your brothers and it’s not because I’m scared of them. I studied jujitsu in a course at college and was recommended for further training. But for my part I’d like to forget everything. However, none of this would have happened if your mother had minded her own business in the beginning. Offering me a job feeding pigs is no way to talk to someone who was in the top half of his class right through college. And then to come into our apartment and call me a red because of the color of the curtains is going too far.

I’ve had my say and have set out the facts in a broad-minded way and as far as I’m concerned the whole incident is a thing of the past. If you want I’ll meet you at Grand Central, seven, Sunday and we could have meat balls and spaghetti at Joe’s Alone.

Your loving husband,

Hugo