Love Across the Ocean

06 Monday Dec 2021

Tags

adoptee, adoption, Anniversary, China-Burma-India (CBI), longing for children, love letters, separation, WWII

Lt. Richard L. Beard in his WWII army uniform, before he became my Dad

D-Day is a time for remembering, and today’s post is a tribute to my adoptive Dad. Note: When I was five, my foster child status changed. I’ve been incredibly fortunate for someone who began life as an orphan. I was adopted by a college professor and his wife, literally going from rags to riches. One of the best legacies my Dad left me was a treasure trove of letters. Below, one of my favorites.

During the later years of WWII, my adoptive dad served in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater of operations as clinical psychologist at the 142nd General Hospital in Calcutta, India. Just when I think that the “Forgotten Front” has faded from public awareness, I meet someone who not only knows about WWII’s CBI arena but who is still honoring the memory of those who served in what General Vinegar Joe Stillwell called “a theater of uncommon misery.”
Yesterday I was making my way up a snowy slope to buy my lift ticket and enjoy a day of skiing. Leaving the ski area was an attractive couple in their 50s or so. They were not dressed to ski but seemed to be sightseeing. This was not so unusual, as many visitors to my hometown of Santa Fe like to come up to the ski basin just for a look around.
What was unusual was the CBI insignia on the man’s leather bomber jacket and the emblem on his armband. How often does one see honoring of the CBI, and of all places at the ski hill? I admired his jacket and

The CBI was known for the Ledo Road through Burma and the “Flying Tigers”

we talked briefly about “the forgotten front” and those who’d served there. He also had a relative, now deceased, who’d been stationed in that remote corner of the world. Thus the inspiration for today’s post, which is all about love across time and miles. Once again, I’m posting a letter from Lt. Richard Beard to his wife Reva written early in what would turn out to be an 18-month separation.

1944                                       At Sea
   Dearest Wife,
   This is written in commemoration of our 7th wedding anniversary, Reva, and will inadequately express my sincere happiness and good fortune in being married to you. I should prefer to look into your eyes for a moment and then kiss you to express those feelings; since that is impossible, will you accept this letter?
I was too moved to write on July 3rd, instead I sat for hours watching the waves slip past the stern of our ship. I ran over our wonderful experiences: I thought of our hard times and the troubles we have encountered; and then I reflected upon the almost perfect peace and comfort which is ours when we are together. How our eyes light, and how solicitous we are of one another’s welfare.
It is necessary, darling Reva, to refer to last summer and our second honeymoon. Perhaps six years of living with you had to fade into history before my love matured sufficiently to leave no vestige of doubt. You are my fate, dear, and I am content.
This war is but a passing shadow, Reva, in our lives. If it should prove more, and I am not to see you again, then if there is any eternity, forever you are engraved on my soul’s substance. But optimistically, I plan for the future, and I want you to do likewise. I hope that you will have a baby boy or girl waiting for me when I come home. If not then, together we shall secure the blessing of children in a family.
I love you, my girl wife, and each passing day confirms how engulfing my love is. Even now I look into your lovely face, and with blurred eyes, pledge to you again my everlasting devotion.

Your husband, Dick

My father inspired me to travel to and write about India, one of the many gifts he gave me.

Mom and Dad have been gone many Decembers below, but lately I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I’m convinced that they adopted my brother and me mainly because of their deep love and devotion to one another. A powerful reminder. Whether they are formed in the traditional manner or forged from adoption, families make us who we are.
It’s really all about love.

Love Across the Ocean

31 Monday May 2021

Posted by elainepinkerton in Adoption

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

adoptee, adoption, Anniversary, China-Burma-India (CBI), longing for children, love letters, separation, WWII

Lt. Richard L. Beard in his WWII army uniform, before he became my Dad

The CBI was known for the Ledo Road through Burma and the “Flying Tigers”

Your husband, Dick

My father inspired me to travel to and write about India, one of the many gifts he gave me.

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by elainepinkerton in Adoption

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

adoption, China-Burma-India (CBI), Gratitude, Letters, Love, reunion, WWII

I’m working on a new edition of my WWII book of letters, From Calcutta with Love, to be published in 2019 by Pajarito Press. Herewith, one of my favorite epistles. My adoption history begins with a 1930s love story, that of my adoptive parents Richard and Reva Beard. They’d been teenage sweethearts in Findlay, Ohio, they married in 1937, and they put off starting their family until my father-to-be earned his doctorate from Ohio State University.

For six years, while Richard earned his PhD in clinical psychology, Reva taught elementary school. When it turned out that they were not able to have children, they decided to adopt. The outbreak of World War II, however, further delayed the formation of a family.

Richard was drafted and sent to India. He served as a clinical psychologist in charge of a neuropsychiatric ward at the 142nd General Hospital in Calcutta, part of the China-Burma-India theater of the WWII. For 18 months, my future adoptive parents were separated by 6,000 months. My mother-to-be lived at home with her parents in Findlay, Ohio. She continued to teach school and inquired into adopting a baby. Without a dad in the home, however, adoption proved impossible.

Devoted to one another for a lifetime, Richard and Reva exchanged letters every day of their wartime separation. Sometimes they alluded to adopting a child; Always they reaffirmed their strong love and devotion for one another. My divorced birth mother attended college where Richard was a guidance counselor. As far as I can tell, she asked him to help her by taking my brother and me. I was five and my brother nearly two.

Years later as I read through my parents’ wartime letters, I was moved and inspired by the depth of their love. Of all the confessions of love, this is the one I most cherish…

Calcutta, India
May 29, 1945
Dearest Reva,
You asked why I had white roses delivered to you on May 16. It was a sentimental and romantic gesture in which the traditional meaning of the colors of flowers was invoked. But to my way of thinking I could as well offer a white rose upon the altar of my love for you each day. Purity is as much a lovely characteristic of your being today as it was the first time I touched your hand in 1930. By some miracle, your contact with life—with me— has not coarsened you. I reflect upon you and me in the car under the moonlight, in the front room listening to “Moon River,” and in the bed we have shared, I am aware that I have approached you each time as a man who knows his love for the first glorious union of body and soul

Waiting for the war to end, Reva lived for letters from India.

How much our separation has meant to me I dare not put on paper. Perhaps, just before I sail for home, I may try. But rather by far that I be permitted to demonstrate in a real way what I mean. You will not have to cling to me, you are me.

Perhaps in all this I am idealizing, but I think not. this low, weary year has given me time to consider many things, the significance of which has been blurred in the past. Clearcut, sharp and pure, etched against the certificate of our union as a palm tree silhouettes against the blue of a late Indian evening, is the world-crashing, world-engulfing, between-you-and-me eternal fact: I am so glad that you married me.

Goodnight, precious Ritter. I’ll help moisten that pillow soon, from which I have so often seen your large brown lovely eyes watching me. They are looking down on me now, Reva.

In devotion,
Dick

I’ve recounted my adoptive parents’ story in From Calcutta with Love-The WWII Letters of Richard and Reva Beard. Their love for each other became a gift of love for me.

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Join Elaine for reflections on adoption, writing, hiking and life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Your comments are invited.

Homeless and a Vet

18 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by elainepinkerton in Adoption

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

142 General Hospital, Adopted daughter, adoption, Alzheimer's, Calcutta, China-Burma-India (CBI), homelessness, memories, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, University of Virginia, Veterans, World War II

An icy wind chilled the March day. Dressed in torn jeans and a threadbare blue parka, the tall, blond beggar kept watch at the grocery store entrance. In his gloveless hands he held a crude cardboard sign that read, “HELP.” At his feet was a second sign, “HOMELESS VET – Will work for food.” Exiting, I handed over a few dollars from my wallet. The man smiled, thanked me, and asked, “Do you have an extra blanket? Someone stole mine last night.”
“No,” I replied, “but I’ll try to bring one next time I shop.” Of course he probably wouldn’t be there, I thought ruefully. The man’s face though young, was deeply etched with worry lines. A handsome face, old before its time.
I cried as I drove home. The cold spring day was a carbon copy of the time I opened the dusty box of my father’s World War II love letters. He had been a proud veteran, and in a way he had become homeless, and now he was gone. I blamed my melancholy on the homeless man, but it was deeper than that. The tears were for my father Richard, who had died of Alzheimer’s Disease decades earlier. At the end of his life, he was sentenced to the dementia ward of a nursing facility, shut away from my mother, his children, and all he’d known. Like the hapless grocery store sentry, he also was “homeless and a vet.”
We like to think that those we love will pass away quietly and with dignity. Certainly my father did not deserve such a harsh ending to his exemplary life. Richard, so dutiful and devoted during World War II, a distinguished college professor, was now a man without a country. Mentally alone and bewildered, he might as well have been back on the streets of Calcutta. Renamed Kolkata, that teeming city was where he’d served for 18 months as a clinical psychologist in the 142nd General Hospital. He wrote to his beloved Reva, my mother, every day. Years later, I would turn those letters into a book. Unlike his overseas stint during the war, however, this isolation could not be relieved by writing letters.

My father documented his Calcutta experience by writing daily letters to mom.

As a light snow began falling, I somehow managed to get home and put the groceries away as I pondered my father’s leaving. With Alzheimer’s Disease, we lose our loved ones before their physical deaths. Triggered by the homeless vet, my thoughts travelled back to the last semi-lucid talk I’d had with dad.
For years, I flew every spring from New Mexico to see my parents in Virginia. On the morning of this particular visit, I found my father Richard dressed to go to the UVa School of Education. For 35 years, he’d been a professor. Prepared to teach his classes, he wore slacks, coat and tie, nice-looking oxfords, and on his balding head, a dapper felt hat. Only there was something wrong with this picture. My father had retired eleven years earlier.
In the bizarre manner of someone no longer in touch with reality, he sat in a livingroom chair, staring into space. As the saying goes, “all dressed up and nowhere to go.”
My beloved dad was a shadow of himself, a hollow mockery. Mostly silent and confused, he expressed an occasional insightful comment. My heart aching, I sat before him, hoping to communicate. He did not know the Me of now but remembered the orphan I’d been when he and my mother decided to adopt me.
“I remember you as a little girl,” he said. “You were running around and around, like a wild pony.”
Memories have it in their power to hurt or heal us. This recollection cheered me. I was five years old when I first saw the man who would become my father. After World War II ended, my brother and I were shuffled from foster homes to relatives, a haphazard arrangement at best, and we were officially “up for adoption.” Apparently sensing that I could trust the kindly man who’d come to the unwanted children’s home, I put on my best “Please Adopt Me” act. Reva’s health was fragile, and they’d planned on one adopted infant rather than two older children (My brother Johnny was 17 months old.) I imagined Richard, his heart full of love, sweeping aside his misgivings and agreeing to take us home.
Later during that same Virginia visit, Reva said that Richard liked to go for walks but needed accompaniment. Outdoors we went, but soon it became clear that he couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards. As we sat to rest on a wooden bench, he began talking about Calcutta and his work with rehabilitating soldiers suffering from shell shock.
I wanted to shout, “Dad, it’s me, your daughter Elaine.” I wanted him to be there with me. But he was too far away and I was too late. We walked very slowly back to the retirement home, our arms locked. He had, it seemed, grown smaller. He felt light as a child.
A character in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust says “…one has to be very determined to withstand – to stand up to – India. There are many ways of loving India, many things to love her for: the scenery, the history, the poetry, the music, and indeed the physical beauty of the men and women. One should never allow oneself to become softened like Indians by an excess of feeling, because the moment that happens, the moment one exceeds ones measure, one is in danger of being dragged to the other side.”
My father was on the other side, floating further and further away from me. I could not bring him back.
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Elaine Pinkerton’s From Calcutta with Love – The World War II Letters of Richard and Reva Beard was originally published by Texas Tech University Press in 2002. Currently, the book is being acquired for republication by Pajarito Press. You’re invited to comment and to share your adoption stories on The Goodbye Baby website.