Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Soon after Scotty's birth, John did take a stopgap job. At least this one was in the writing field, and it was only for a while, till we could get back to doing travel pieces. In December, with the baby two months old and every mail delivery bringing reminders of unpaid medical bills, John had answered an ad placed by a new little inspirational leaflet called Guideposts.

"A religious leaflet?" I'd asked dubiously when he told me he'd applied. "I know," he said. "Not something I'd want to do for long, even if I get the job."

Applicants were asked to supply samples of their writing, and in January the editor, a man named Len LeSourd, phoned to say that John was their first choice. John had made it clear on his application that he was not a believer. "You know what Len said?" John told me as he hung up the phone. "He said, 'That doesn't worry me a bit. If there's anything to the faith this magazine proclaims, belief will come in its own time."

And so we settled into the routine shared by millions of other young American couples in the 1950s. Every morning John caught an early train into the city while I did the breakfast dishes and hung a row of diapers to dry on the shower-curtain rod. We had a crib, a baby carriage, and a stack of bills. Every cent left over from John's paycheck, we'd agreed, would go into a savings account for those return fares to Europe. But months and then years passed, and there was never anything left over.

Four decades later, in 1990, I attended a planning session for Virtue, a Christian women's magazine, at a mountain retreat in Oregon. The other editors were bright young professional women and mothers; one of them nursed her infant during the discussions. I listened for two days as they spoke of the pressures of juggling family and career, condemned our selfish, materialistic culture, and looked back wistfully at the wholesome world of the 1950s. I remember the startled circle of faces when I broke in at last with an emotional description of what the '50s were really like.

I was startled myself at the force of my feelings! Today's materialism, I heard myself say, is nothing compared to that of the '50s, because then it was unquestioned. In a decade when millions of displaced people in Europe lacked basic shelter, the American woman was praised for attending exclusively to her own little house in its segregated neighborhood behind its white picket fence.