Letter

CO-2441 Kelsey, Vera. [Carta] 1941 Dec. 16, New York, NY [para] Maria Portinari, Washington, D.C. 2 p. [inglês][datilografado] Dear Maria, I was so glad to receive your Christmas card and know that you were still here. So often I have thought of you and wanted to write but I swore I would do nothing about anything until all my books were finished. Now they are and just yesterday I turned in the revised manuscript of Maria Rosa so Mrs. Lesser will probably be write you or coming down to Washington soon. So much has been happening that I simply did not get a minute to finish it till last [ilegível]. The story is very different now but I hope you and Portinari like it and I am sure that when he puts the final touches on it, it will be a beautiful book. Everyone is interest of Dakota in the Travel Bureau of Pennsylvania station, the man who was arranging it for me took a memorandum of it and is going to secure it first thing for his four youngsters! Isn’t that amusing? Perhaps by this time you also have the contracts for the Brincadeiras book. I read it over carefully and it looked all right to me. I am going to North Dakota for Christmas and perhaps for two months more. I am simply dying for snow and ice and really cold weather and also I have an enormous amount of work to do on my 1942 contracts. I had hoped to return to sail for Brazil in March or April but I don’t know now whether or not that will be possible. If it isn’t for me, it won’t be for you either so we might get together and do the Brincadeiras book while we are all in this country. Oh, you will be amused to know that Cavalheiro went to California to spend the winter in the sunshine and now must remain there forever. For Cavalheiro is a young lady!!! And the pygmy monkey she went to visit, Ivan the Terrible, is madly in love with her and as soon as she is strong and well again they are to be married and to live together in one big house happily eve after. They can’t be separated now for then both would pine and die. But how I miss him and the first thing I do when I return to Brazil is to get another. My address until further notice will be care of Hotel Dacotah, Grand Forks, North Dakota I’ll be looking forward to having a real letter from you one day; if you don’t feel like writing English, write in Portuguese. I read it as easily as English though I do speak it so badly. Do give my best wishes to Portinari; I have met several people here who have mentioned seeing him hard at work in the Library. And that reminds me the editor of two of the Red Cross magazines is very interested to do a story about him. In the next issue or one of the magazines, they are reproducing the murals used as end papers in Seven Keys to Brazil. If she has not already done so, she will probably be calling on you one day soon. Her name is Brown. With all may good wishes to you all for a good Christmas and always, Vera