An opening door (2018)
My father was seventeen when he arrived on a scholarship at the University of Chicago. My mother was sixteen. “Clint found her the first day,” one of his roommates told me. “They were never apart after that.” The roommate told me this wistfully. He was a biology professor at Cornell. I was a teenager, a guest in his living room. He talked mostly about my mother and how much he admired her intellectual curiosity and of course how beautiful she was until his wife asked him to stop.
When they met, my mother still lived with her family in a townhouse near the university. Her father was a professor of medicine. Her father’s sister, who lived two blocks away, was married to another professor of medicine. Their father, my mother’s grandfather, was a pioneer of pathology named Howard T. Ricketts who discovered (and died from) a genus of pathogens that still bears his name, Rickettsia. All of the males in my mother’s generation—her only brother and three of her four cousins—became doctors.
The default career in my father’s home was the Christian ministry. They were a southern evangelical family, and both his parents were full-time ministers in the Church of the Nazarene. Some years they preached together in the same church. Other years they each had their own church. Here they are inviting people to worship at a church they pastored together in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Smith Brothers Quarter was four of my father’s older brothers. The message above was printed on the back of a postcard, and the quartet was featured on the front.
As my grandmother left home to serve her congregation, she would stop in the doorway, look back at her eight children, and pray, “Lord, I am leaving to do your work. Watch over these children and help me do mine.” The church in Charlottesville had a sawdust floor and a poverty-stricken congregation. The family wasn’t much more comfortable. The children went to school barefoot, collected food from members of their church, and worked to support the family when they were older. Money was less important than the mission to spread holiness, and their highest value was faith.
The highest value in my mother’s family was scientific research. Here was her grandfather, Howard T. Ricketts, researching pathogens in a laboratory in Mexico.
Truth was the observable facts as confirmed by replicable results. An experiment was designed. Observations were made and recorded in rigorous detail. Hypotheses were proposed, and evidence either validated them or did not. Throughout, the investigator sat outside what was being observed and guarded against any factor that might distort the design of the experiment or the veracity of the data. Emotions were not what you contemplated. They were what you eliminated.
I deeply appreciate the analytical rigor, the attention to method, and the respect for precision that I inherited from my mother. But like any set of professional skills, there are problems it doesn’t solve. In particular, it doesn’t come home that easily. At home in the 1950s, my mother wanted a process and a language for understanding emotion. When she sought it in her family—at least at that time—it wasn’t there. She didn’t find it either in the broader culture. But she found it, like an opening door, in my father and his family.
As the child of two people both called to the ministry, my father grew up in a family fascinated with the spectacle of human emotion. When your mission is to guide people to faith, you focus on their evolving states of mind. As children, being part of their ministry was not simply singing hymns or teaching Sunday school or greeting members of the congregation. It was also noticing who suddenly appeared in church and evaluating how to get them back the next Sunday. One measure of success was the number of cigarette butts outside the church. Although Nazarenes didn’t smoke, success wasn’t fewer cigarettes smoked after the service. It was more, because more meant that more people had come who needed the sermon and the fellowship.
Traveling from evangelical Virginia to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago must have felt like emigrating to another country. When she met my father, at a mixer on that first day, he had just stepped off the boat. My mother had gone to the University of Chicago Lab School since kindergarten and had a small circle of friends who were mostly children of other academics. Without trying to be someone he wasn’t, he fit easily into her group. Yet he also represented an entirely different approach to life. A serious conversation in her world felt serious from beginning to end. Fluid and surprising yet comfortable was how a serious conversation felt with him. He knew when to tease or joke, where to tell a story instead of trying to explain, and how to pass over a detail lightly in order to reach what was most important. Suddenly, she could explore ideas that were hard to explore before, which satisfied her hunger for new ways of seeing and understanding. “Plus,” she said, “he had a delightful way of just kind of being.”
She took him to his first movie (Nazarenes didn’t go to movies). She took him to his first dance. (Nazarenes didn’t dance.) He found his own way to alcohol and cigarettes. When they met, he was caught between the ministry and the deep blue sea. He knew what he didn’t want but not what he wanted to do instead, and college life was enough to occupy him at first.
The townhouse where my mother lived had three floors, an ornate central staircase, and a cook. She had terrific arguments with her parents, up and down that staircase, about marrying him immediately. She was so young. My father was so different. And that scholarship of his clearly hung by a thread. Would he amount to much? It was hard to tell because he also was so young.
When they met in 1951, my mother was actually in high school. The Lab School ended after tenth grade, and she finished her high school degree at the university. She applied to Radcliffe and was accepted. Her parents encouraged her to go. And in 1953, two years after they met, she moved to Cambridge and put almost a thousand miles between them. He remained in Chicago, a junior now and a more focused, successful student.
In my mother’s attic lies a box of letters that she will not let anyone open. Most of them must have been written during this time. She came home on college breaks. He hitchhiked from Chicago to Cambridge and back again. During the summer of 1954, they took separate rooms in the same boarding house in Charlottesville. While there, they toured around Virginia and spent a weekend with an older friend of her family who lived outside of Washington, D.C. The friend wrote my mother a note. “I enjoyed meeting Clint and think he is exceptionally attractive and if you ever need help to convince the family, let me know.”
By the next summer, her parents were convinced. My mother wanted to finish what she had started at Radcliffe, but it was too hard to be apart, and in the end she agreed to finish college in Virginia, where my father would be starting medical school. Separated for two years, they were twenty and twenty one when they were married at last.
