Happy Valentine's Day:
"The Love Affair" by Daniel Doan
Introduction by Ruth Doan MacDougall
February 14, 2013
As a Valentine to you, here is a short story by my father, “The Love Affair.”
I had never read it until after he died nearly twenty years ago. Libby, the wife of his Dartmouth roommate and a family friend whom my parents had known since college days, found it amongst her papers and gave it to me. (At that time, she and her husband were divorced; they later remarried. Love is complicated, isn’t it.)
With the story was the covering letter that Dan, my father, had sent her. Dated March 15, 1967, the letter was written in the old white Cape in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, that my parents had moved to in 1964 from the house in Laconia on Gilford Avenue where my sister, Penny, and I grew up after our early years in a Laconia apartment. Dan’s “office” in the Cape was one of the two small upstairs bedrooms under the eaves.
At his desk there he typed to Libby, “In a futile attempt to make room in an overwhelming mass of folders in my files, I came across this story. It almost went out with other obsolete junk. Instead of my putting it in our incinerator, I suggest you read it, get a laugh, see how fiction starts and ends from a small idea and much imagination and rearranging to something entirely different from fact—then start a fire with it sometime in that Franklin stove of yours. I appreciate being able to get rid of it this painless way; I have been able to toss out only the first drafts and absolutely useless stories myself, being some sort of saver of relics. It was written in 1955. [My] agent seemed to like it but nobody else.” He added, “Remember—any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental!”
Obviously, Libby didn’t consign the story to her Franklin stove, thank heavens. Dan’s agent may not have made a sale to a magazine, but it is nonetheless a fine story and even more interesting now from a twenty-first-century viewpoint.
The date of Dan’s writing it popped out at me. 1955 is a milestone year in my memory: Don and I started dating!
In 1955, Dan would have been forty-one. His office in the Gilford Avenue house was off the living room, a small room that under other circumstances could be a downstairs bedroom or a sewing room. The coat closet was in there, so sometimes Penny and I had to interrupt him to get our coats, and it wasn’t otherwise secluded either, so the occasional admonition from Ernie, our mother, was the same as in the Academy Street apartment: “Shh! Your father’s writing!”
Ernie herself had a desk in there, a “secretary” type of desk. I have it now and use it as an office corner in our kitchen. It’s so little I wonder how she ever ran a household from it. Instead of a desk Dan used a wooden table on which stood the big Remington typewriter, heavy enough to be an anchor for the Queen Mary. Dan had taught himself to type, and the result was what you’d expect. Ernie was the skilled typist. After college, she had taken typing and shorthand courses at Bryant and Stratton in Boston; her dream had been to be a secretary to a writer—and it came true.
I’ve now typed “The Love Affair” into my computer, copying the final draft that Ernie had typed on the Remington. When I took typing in high school, I did my practicing on it, and I vividly remember what a lot of strength was required to press the keys. (The Remington lives in our house nowadays, but it’s there for memories, not for use.) Typing lightly along on my Mac, I could see—and hear—Ernie pounding that typewriter, swinging the carriage back, erasing a mistake on the easy-to-erase Eaton’s Corrasable Bond paper and on the not-so-easy carbon beneath.
I didn’t change or update anything as I typed. The fashion is “drugstore” now, but I left it “drug store.” And so forth.
Some other background: Dan’s father was a Unitarian minister, and the family moved around in his youngest years, then settled in Winchester, Massachusetts. This is the inspiration for the town of “Westmoor” in the story, the setting for the happy boyhood in the 1920s. But during those years Dan knew that his true love was New Hampshire. His family returned every summer to Orford, where his grandmother had been born and various branches of the family lived. After his father’s death, Dan moved at age fifteen with his mother to Hanover, near Orford, and he became a year-round New Hampshire resident—no longer, as he used to say, “a summer bastard.”
Dan never worked at a soda fountain, as does the narrator in the story, but I laughed when I saw that he’d used one of his actual summer jobs. During college he worked one summer on a surveying crew in Wisconsin, a job arranged through family connections. He and Ernie were courting by then, and Ernie later maintained, probably correctly, that it was a ploy to distract and distance him from her, because Dan’s family was horrified that she was seven years older than Dan. The ploy didn’t succeed; they were married during his junior year.
One of Dan’s favorite writers was W. Somerset Maugham, and I see Maugham’s influence in this story, the technique of a narrator observing the main characters.
And I see Ernie’s influence in the description of the ensemble the heroine wears to a Harvard-Dartmouth football game; Ernie must have supplied—or at least approved—the details. I’ll bet, though, that Dan didn’t have to think twice about the color when he typed “green” into the first draft. “Dartmouth green” might have been in his mind, but so was something else: Ernie had been wearing a green dress (which she had knitted) when they met, and he never forgot that.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Daniel Doan's story, "The Love Affair" begins HERE.
© 2013 by Ruth Doan Macdougall; all rights reserved.
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