When Grace received word of her brother Joe’s death, Jim was in Richmond, working on his doctorate. In her letter to him, Grace seems to waver between yearning for Jim to be at home with her and urging him on. August 1944: “Dearest Jim, I can hardly stand it without you to lean on, but I’ll manage if you won’t worry. Somehow I knew all the time that Joe wouldn’t come back. He was just in too much danger. It’s terrible for Mother and Daddy; they have lost their oldest and youngest sons now. Be sure and write me soon. I can hardly see how I can get by these few days until Mother and Daddy come.”
A few days later, Jim left Richmond for several days of travel on his own. Grace wrote, “Now you are in New York and I have been trying to imagine what you have been doing all day. I am glad you went and I shall be interested in hearing all about your doings. I notice you plan to stay until Monday p.m., and I am glad you can stay that long.
“Josephine left his morning…I took her to the station and then came back and visited awhile with Daddy and then took him to catch his train. We have managed to regain some of our composure, but it has been hard. There is such a vacant feeling and somehow I don’t even want to see a newspaper. Thanks for the nice cards — shows you are thinking of us, too. Have a good time, darling.”
A couple of days on, she writes of how much she’d like to be with him in New York — a city Grace will later delight in and describe in delicious detail. Here, her references to their different tastes in travel feel discomfiting: “Dearest Sweetheart, Well, I feel almost like I had been to New York, thanks to your most interesting letter. I think you have had just the kind of trip to the Big City that you have always yearned for — no female along to make you stay at a place you couldn’t afford, nor slow you down in your marathon trek around the pavements, nor make you eat at a strange place where you had too little to eat and it cost too much! I confess I still wish I had been along, especially to walk on Times Square early in the morning and to ride atop the bus and go to Coney Island. Think of your having done those things! It’s hard to believe here in my everyday existence of baby baths and potty sessions.
“I feel very lost and forlorn this morning. Mother left at 5:30 A.M. and I was sorry to see her go. I haven’t been able to settle down to anything I need to do. I’ll write to you instead. I’d much rather. Don’t think too much about us but go ahead and have a good bachelor time while you have a chance. Next February or thereabouts you may wish you were there again. Family troubles are a burden, remember. And now’s your opportunity to give way to that submerged desire to ‘be single again.’” It’s hard to know what to make of this seeming selflessness. It doesn’t bode well.
A few months later, Grace writes to Jim’s parents: February 1945: “The Overholser fortunes are at the lowest ebb in history, except for some of those red, red days early in Blytheville. Early in January we decided that it would be best to figure out the Income Tax and send our check at that time instead of waiting until the 15th. Shortly after that, we had to buy our automobile license, and that took $20 just like that. We were beginning to see that we must go deep into our reserve pantry, which consists mostly of beans and tomatoes and jellies and preserves which the congregation gave us. Then Jim had his final appointment with the dentist and what do you suppose the bill was — $172.80!! Well — he had saved the Christmas money planning to pay that bill with it, but all he had was $100. He wrote a check for that amount and cleaned us out. All we had at home was enough to buy the baby’s milk for the remainder of the week. It was then just after the 15th and no more money until Feb. 1. Well, there was my nice little amount I had saved to buy a washing machine. We ‘borrowed from it’ and paid everything we had to, and bought only groceries we needed from the two places where we have accounts.”
October 1946, Grace writes to her sister in California. Josephine is newly pregnant. “I am sure you know that we are speaking from the heart and from experience when we say how happy we are for you. There are many things that will be different for you now; Jim has always said, ‘When a child comes into your home, peace flies out the window.’ And being married and living in a home without children is not the same as marriage with children. You can’t expect a child to fit into your home just like something else new does, adding variety and beauty and interest and charm. A child changes a home because everything has to be fitted to his needs.”
Well, maybe not everything. “Lately we have been doing some interesting reading in the new anthologies of modern British and American and French and Italian poets. Robinson Jeffers (who lives in Cal. at Mt. Carmel-by-the-Sea) is one of the interesting. Also John Crowe Ransom, Ezra Pound (I wonder what the U.S. will do to him?) and the tragic Hart Crane. About 11 o’clock some night, read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Renascence’ again. She certainly wove a spell with her words.”
Finally, Grace writes, “we have lately devoured travel books because we have the traveling urge again, and no telling where we’ll go, once given the chance. But we will take our family with us and enjoy it with them and let them enjoy it through our help
In fact, Grace and Jim did have a big trip coming up — a trip on which they would decidedly not be taking the children. Before that, though, there’d be yet another move — and one more baby.