On top of a box of garbage awaiting pickup on a Florida curb, I spotted a tattered copy of an old novel: John P. Marquand’s “Melville Goodwin, USA” (1951). Seeing it suddenly took me back to one of the most tender love stories, and quietly thoughtful acts of kindness, I’ve ever come across. I once knew the family at the center of it. Dudley Chamberlain had been a newspaperman in the small Ohio town of Marietta. In 1951 his wife, Julia, was dying of cancer and in intense pain.

Source: Wall Street Journal February 09, 2020 20:03 UTC