Evelyn Renold

When I first found the photographs, I thought the woman I was looking at was my mother. She was about my mother’s age and height, and she was wearing the kind of clothes my mother might have worn in the 1960s. In one picture, she poses in a fetching white swimsuit; in another, she wears oversized, white-framed sunglasses, her head partly covered by a thin scarf.

But this was not my mother. This woman had wavy red hair—my mother’s was dark brown and curly--and a somewhat slimmer, more athletic build. In a couple of the photos, the woman is with my father; looking directly at the camera, they’re smiling, hands touching, looking very happy.

I found these photos in my father’s apartment, a few days after his death, in the bottom of an unlocked metal file cabinet. The apartment was in an assisted living facility in Laguna Hills, California, where my parents spent the last few years of their lives. They were married for six decades; by the time of my father’s death, at 91, my mother had been gone for three years.

The filing cabinet was filled with the remnants of my father’s eclectic pursuits. He was a mechanical engineer and an inventor--of everything from ski bindings to high-speed cameras--as well as a pianist and composer of romantic ballads.

But I didn’t find any patents or mechanical drawings or sheet music in the bottom drawer. Mixed in with the photos were letters--dozens of them, in those old-fashioned airmail envelopes trimmed with red, white and blue slashes. Held together with fraying rubber bands, they were all addressed to my father at his old office in a suburb of Los Angeles. The sender was a woman named Tilly, who lived in Manhattan.

Though the postmarks dated back to the early 1960s, the letters still gave off a musky fragrance. Uh-oh, I remember thinking, as you do in those moments when your life is about to change irretrievably.

The letters spanned a seven-year period and created a vivid picture of an ardent long-distance affair conducted by two middle-aged romantics.

The bottom drawer also contained a startling array of mementoes: hotel brochures (“Mountain Shadows, AZ, America’s Most Beautiful and Luxurious Resort Hotel”), matchbooks (Alpine Lodge and Cottages, Mt. Pocono, PA), car rentals receipts and travelers’ checks, florists’ bills, airline tickets, Broadway playbills (Zero Mostel in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”; Jason Robards in “A Thousand Clowns”), and cocktail napkins from iconic New York venues of the time (the Café de la Paix at the St Moritz; the Plaza Hotel). There were even longhand drafts of letters my father intended to send to Tilly.

I recall trying, somewhat frantically, to come up with an explanation that left intact what I knew of our family history. Of course, there was none.

My parents were Viennese émigrés who fled the Nazis in 1938, eventually settling in Los Angeles via England and New York. My grandparents never made it out; and two years before I was born, my parents lost an infant daughter to a heart ailment. I was an adored only child, and though I didn’t understand what my parents had been through —they never really spoke of it—I felt that the three of us were a small, self-contained universe.

When I was growing up, we lived in a modest ranch house in the northern San Fernando Valley. With its wide, sunbaked sidewalks, the air suffused with the sweet smell of Eucalyptus trees, the Valley must have seemed as far away from Vienna as the moon. Maybe that was the point.

My father was a tall, slender man with a carefully cultivated sense of style

--“a real Viennese charmer,” as a friend of mine used to say. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was elegant, his signature accessory a silk cravat like the ones he used to sell in his father’s haberdashery store, across from the famous Vienna Opera House.

Gregarious and improbably optimistic, he loved telling “stories” about his life: how he’d stood on his father’s shoulders, as a small boy, and watched the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef, pass by in a parade; how he’d learned to play the piano in order to escape family bridge games.

His childlike enthusiasm made him a great companion when I was a kid. We used to hike near the Griffith Park Observatory, which housed giant telescopes and a planetarium. My father and I had a ritual: Along the trail, we would dig a hole and bury a penny, then return in six months or so to see if we could find it. Invariably, we could.

My parents liked to talk about how they’d met, in Baden bie Wein, a spa town 26 kilometers from Vienna. My mother was unimpressed with my father at first: “He was a rich boy,” she would say, implying that he was spoiled and a bit of an operator. Nonetheless, they fell in love, though my father only proposed when another suitor started coming on strong.

My mother, who looked a bit like the movie vamp Hedy Lamarr, was warm and loving, but with an undertow of sadness. I remember as a child sensing she was needy, though I wouldn’t have known to call it that. Holding me close, she would whisper, “Mein einziges Kind”—my only child. And as much as I loved her, I always knew I wanted a life very different from hers. She’d given up medical school when she married—such decisions, of course, were not uncommon in her day. But I gave a party for her onetime, when she was visiting me in New York, and some of her old Viennese school chums turned up—women with names like Fritzie and Mitzi and Trudy, all of them doctors. After finding the letters, I felt even more strongly that my mother should have completed her studies—or staked a claim to something apart from my father (and me).

I witnessed heated exchanges between my parents from time to time--my father had an explosive temper--but they were also playful and very affectionate with one another. More than anything, they seemed deeply connected.

At the same time, my father doted on women. When introduced to an attractive female, he would kiss her hand with a courtly flourish. As I got older, I remember thinking he might have strayed on a few occasions during his long years of married life: a crime of opportunity, perhaps.

Once, my father went on a short business trip to Chicago and came home brandishing a cheesy little trophy he’d won in a dance contest. I was maybe 11 or 12, but I remember wondering how he’d wound up on a dance floor and who his partner was.

Many years later, a more telling clue emerged. I’d flown in from New York, to visit my parents at their retirement home; by now, my mother was bedridden, and her mind had started to fail. I was sitting with her, trying to cheer her up, when she looked me in the eye, suddenly clear and focused. “Tell me,” she said, “Does Daddy have a girlfriend?”

That was something my normally decorous mother never would have asked. But even if dementia had stripped away her inhibitions, I knew this had to mean something.

Several years passed before I could bring myself to read the letters from the start of the affair to the finish. When I finally did, I found myself hating Tilly. Yet at times I felt sorry for her. A single woman, she was “nuts” about my father, she wrote, and blind, at least in the beginning, to the obvious pitfalls of their liaison: “Sweetheart, why am I so crazy about you? All other men have become so uninteresting or non-existent.” I was mildly surprised to learn, from the correspondence, that there was nothing “other” about her: She too was Viennese, and my parents apparently knew her when they lived in New York.

Early in the affair, Tilly wrote my father every couple of days, in longhand, on 5-6 pages of onion skin paper. My father must have responded in kind: “You write the most beautiful love letters, darling,” she told him, “and you spoil me, even by mail.”

The passages about their assignations—though mercifully devoid of graphic detail--were the most difficult to read. Following a 10-day tryst, Tilly wrote, “That Pacific Ocean and the motels in San Diego and L.A. are still in my blood…and the sand from the beach, delightfully, still hidden in my shoes.” I also wondered just how my father had orchestrated these illicit holidays, especially the ones so close to home.

Most disturbing were the occasional references to me in the letters -- especially when they involved the possibility of our family moving back east: “You say [my mother] won’t take the girl out of school, does that mean for the rest of her high-school days? I imagine Evelyn has one more year to go after this one is finished. Is that correct?” Reading this cold-hearted inquiry—and all it portended--took my breath away.

Eventually, Tilly’s letters become shorter and less frequent. In one, a note of sarcasm surfaces: “I hope you didn’t make too many fruitless trips to that p.o. box…Don’t we ever get tired of making love by mail?” By this time, the letters also suggest my mother was on to the affair and had confronted my father.

Eventually Tilly says she doesn’t want to see my father anymore, having realized he won’t “cut loose” from his family. Yet it would take another four years before they were done. In a note postmarked September 24, 1969, Tilly announces she’s getting married: “I wish you all the best,” she writes, “good success in your undertakings, health and happiness.”

Good for her, I said to myself—and then, oddly enough, I thought, My poor Dad. He must have been crushed.

By the time I found the letters, I was a grown-up and had been one for several decades—I understood something about human frailty and the complexities of even the most loving relationships.

Still, the letters unnerved me. I wondered if my father might actually have been trying to find Tilly before he died. It also occurred to me that their affair might have pre-dated the letters: Maybe there had been a phantom presence in our cozy little family all along.

At first, I assumed my father hadn’t intended for me to find the Tilly archive. Then I wavered. My father and I had always been close: What if he’d wanted to share this part of his life with me, now that my mother was no longer around to be wounded by it? The secret he’d hidden for decades may have become a burden—and re-reading the letters, as he’d apparently done in his final years (or days), must have been bittersweet. Perhaps he bequeathed them to me both as a confession and a plea to be understood for who he was outside his marriage.

Regardless, I still struggled to understand how my father could have become so deeply involved with this woman. Extra-marital affairs are not so exotic, of course, especially for European men of my father’s generation. But my parents had been through so much together, which made his betrayal seem deeper, more consequential. Perhaps, I thought, he felt a sense of entitlement because of the losses he’d suffered as a young man—or maybe he was unwilling to deny himself something he plainly wanted.

Toward the end of my mother’s life, when my father could no longer handle her rapidly escalating medical needs, we moved her to a board and care—similar to a nursing home, but much smaller. By this time my father was an old man, but he managed to visit her there almost every day.

The women who ran the board and care worried about his driving; one time they made me watch out the window as he drove off, his car listing to one side of the street and then to the other. Eventually, his driver’s license was revoked. My father was indignant, but when he recovered his equanimity, he hired a driver to take him to see my mother.

When she died, we buried her in a hilltop cemetery near the ocean. I sat next to my father at the gravesite, and as my mother’s casket was slowly lowered into the ground, I saw a single tear roll down his cheek.

What is he thinking? I wondered.

My father’s careless duplicity, as recorded in the letters, was a torment to me. But since I am like my father in many ways, I found myself wondering about my own capacity for betrayal. Telling you this story, I suppose, is a form of betrayal too.