5

With the stepped-up schedule that had continued at the university through the end of the war and for a while afterward, I had graduated in 1947, three years after I entered as an undergraduate. Then I had gone on to graduate school in Romance languages and embarked upon my thoughtless first marriage.

In early youth everything is untried, and one thing may not seem any more surprising than the rest. I know that when I first found myself at Princeton I did not at once appreciate how incongruous it was for me to be there, of all places. To begin with there was the matter of money. I had none. At Wyoming Seminary I had had an allowance of a dollar a month, which did not matter so much there since there was nowhere to spend it except one ice cream parlor near the school, and ice cream cones in those days cost five or ten cents. At Princeton, in recognition of my new status, my allowance was stepped up to a dollar a week. My mother apparently had conferred by letter with my father about it, and they had arrived at that figure and believed it was adequate, and I said nothing about it. I had grown up knowing that they got by on very little, and it would have gone against the grain for me to ask for money.

Although my father was a Presbyterian minister, he had not finished at any of the schools he attended, from the one-room country schoolhouse in Rimerton, Pennsylvania, to Western Seminary in Pittsburgh. He had begun his ministry at small, rural churches in western Pennsylvania, and when he was thirty-one, a year or so before I was born, he had accepted a “call” to a big church in Union City, New Jersey, on top of the Palisades overlooking Hoboken and the river, with the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop. We lived there until the year I was nine. Union City must have seemed a great step up in the world when he and my mother went there. The First Presbyterian Church (there was only one) was a tall, yellow-brick, turn-of-the-century structure, with two steeples, a rose window, and green carpets down the sloping aisles. But its heyday, whatever that may have amounted to, was already irretrievably behind it. “Foreigners,” as we kept hearing, and Catholics, were taking over the whole area. The congregation that had built the church and attended it was ebbing away, almost gone, and the church’s financial stability with it. By the time my father became the pastor there, everything about the church from the attendance to the condition of the building was in steep decline. He invested in a new glass-fronted poster display-case out in front of the building to announce the services and sermon titles. Then the Great Depression hit. I remember being wheeled through the streets, in the big brown wicker baby carriage, at a different pace than usual, picking up a feeling of urgency and anxiety when I breathed, and stopping to look up, along with a small crowd of people, at the closed, polished bronze bank doors, and hearing crying and voices full of grief and anguish above me, a scene that I did not understand but that would resurface at times as an emblem. We stayed on in Union City for several years after that, through the first years of my childhood. Not long after we left there, the church building was sold—to the Catholics—and a few years after that it was torn down.

The move to Scranton, then, and the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church, was something of a repetition of the earlier step to Union City. Again it must have seemed like a marked improvement in worldly success. The church was a large, imposing building with a square, crenellated belfry tower, and across the street from it was the twelve-room frame manse. My mother was immediately struck by the fact that the manse had thirty-six large windows—she counted them—which would need curtains. A committee of welcomers, made up of church elders and members of the board of trustees, spoke of the church and the city in glowing terms, and delegates talked over plans for redecorating the manse. It was summertime. The streetcars celloed and swung along the tree-lined streets near Elm Park, and the new “call” to Scranton at first seemed to represent a new life.

But Scranton was deep in its own depression, within the national one. The anthracite mines had all but lost their long struggle with the cheaper soft coal from shallower mines near Pittsburgh and in West Virginia. Silk manufacturing, and then the artificial silk industry, which had been the hope of the Chamber of Commerce in the twenties, had collapsed. The church finances reflected those of the region, and before long my father and senior members of the board of trustees were locked in opposition, mostly about money, as far as I could tell. His stipulated salary had been miserably small to begin with—three hundred dollars a month, three thousand six hundred a year—and the trustees’ rancor built until they stopped paying it altogether, a move that led to the matter being carried to the Synod of the Presbyterian Church, which forced the trustees to pay what they owed or have the church closed down. But the deep dissension, the subsequent rift in the congregation, remained there and affected my father’s moods and behavior at home. For months at a time my mother managed the household on almost no money, and the persistent lack of it, along with the unquestioned necessity (as we were taught) of keeping up appearances as “the preacher’s family,” became a condition of life in those years.