Hot Springs set a high bar; the Memphis years fell far short. Grace missed Hot Springs — its beauty, its diverse community offerings and her starring roles in them. Jim was growing steadily unhappier — with his work, with his life, with his wife. Grace struggled to find her way in the marriage, resentment melding with efforts to understand. Her determined hopefulness helped. So did increasing success in her work.
In February 1958, she writes to her friend Mary Louise that the family’s upcoming move to Memphis was “rather sudden,” but that Jim had been “so anxious to move, feeling for about a year that it would be best to make a change.” In a letter to my sister, now a college freshman, Grace regrets that N. won’t be able to come home to Hot Springs again. “I am sorry, and I ache inside for you and A. and for myself, too, because I love this place and my life here, except for the misery your father has gone through. He seems to think he will be happier and looks forward to ‘a new start,’ and I hope it will work out as he imagines.”
Two months after the move, Grace writes to a Hot Springs friend: “To the unspoken question between us about how things are, I can only say, somewhat better, somewhat worse, sometimes the same. Enigma? Well, that’s what my life was there, wasn’t it? However, I have become more and more convinced that the Lord will work things out.”
As for Jim’s new church — Shady Grove Presbyterian, “At the installation service the minister who gave the charge to Jim avoided the usual clichés and admonished Jim to ‘do something which we all have to do and remember: whenever the going gets rough, whenever a committee or session or diaconate committee or any kind of meeting seems to go in a different direction from what you think is right; whenever people are disagreeing about building or equipping or running the church — at these and countless other times, don’t lose your temper.’”
Grace adds, “His mother was here and she told him the next morning that he should ‘do as that preacher told you to do — don’t get mad so quickly.’”
In a November 1958 letter to Grandmother, Grace writes about some changes she has gone through: “I believe the most important difference now is that I am no longer on the defensive. I can enjoy and appreciate Jim when he is normal and himself; when he is possessed by these demons and tormented by self-doubt and misery, he is not himself. Although I am no angel, I assure you, I have been helped to be far more objective.”
Grace hears a speaker at a downtown event and notes to herself that he helped her “in getting my feelings straightened out. I know how I feel about some fundamental positions in life, but some of them have been buffeted and torn and ridiculed until I had more or less lost my props. Now I can recapture them, but with a difference — a maturity, I hope, born through experience. And no need to apologize or equivocate. They are right for me. No reason to be unyielding or show a lack of understanding for a difference, but just to hold on fast to what I believe.”
She visits my sister at Wellesley, stopping on the way home to see a friend in New York. They went to the Frick and took in “Wild Strawberries.” On Broadway, she saw “Raisin in the Sun” with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and “J.B.” with Christopher Plummer and Basil Rathbone. On the subway, she “admired the clothes and makeup of many attractive people, intermingled with workingmen, sales clerks, newsboys and people-people.” It was, she wrote: “A real New York time.”
Back home, she writes the two grandmothers: “All the kids made all As this past semester except for a B in conduct from Geneva, our thoroughly normal child.” (Now there’s a dubious honor — one that Grace repeatedly confers on me.)
That “great god and worry — money” shadows them. Her letters are full of buying new retreads, repairing punctures, mufflers about to fall off. As for Jim, “He has been more depressed and low than usual and has threatened more often to leave, saying he couldn’t stand it any longer. It’s always ‘if you will change and do better — or rather now it is ‘if you had changed and done better and been willing to submit and be a wife several years ago, we could have made it.’” Men who are not as smart as he have done better, the same men he went to school with have bigger churches. He has difficulties with the session. He says, “Well, if it happens again, I’m just going to resign and you’ll have to take over yourself. I thought of running away but I’ve decided I’ll at least resign; I’ll do it because of my health and I’ll move the furniture anywhere you want it and then you’re on your own.”
She says since her trip that fall she has faced the situation with less emotionalism, tried to quit running away from “conversations in which he indicts me. Either I listen with some sympathy or else try to point out something he has overlooked. “
In October 1960, Mother is offered $4500 to write a series of primary grade church-school books and teachers’ guides. (Jim is making $6,000 a year.) She accepts. Subsequent letters are full of news of this project, how it consumes and engages her.
She offers Dad the money she’d be making from the first unit “to sit down and write something every day” and to buy a ticket to New York and Boston and go to father-daughter day at Wellesley. He says he has “nothing to write, I’m drained, a few years ago I could have, you have ruined anything I could have done.”
May 1960: Grace writes that Jim “has applied to teach in Baghdad, and is now writing to colleges in CA and to Trinity in San Antonio, wanting to teach philosophy. Although I can hardly face another move and feel sick at heart at what may be taking place, I realize that it may be best for him to get out of the ministry because he has never been more miserable.”
April 1961: “Jim’s trip to Ohio was tiring and he came back with a cold and a discontent which has accompanied him all week. He preached a wonderful lecture-sermon today on ‘The Authority of the Holy Scriptures.’ Sometimes when he feels the worst he comes out with the most thoughtful and deepest sermons.”
July 1961: Jim has written 50 schools and colleges and is now talking with one in San Jose about a temporary one-year job. He wants to go by himself. He insists Grace stay there or wherever she wants to go and get a job and “do your writing too of course.” (She says he thinks she can do that after dinner.) “I think it unwise to begin looking for anything until after he has something signed and sealed and I hope and feel I can take and face whatever emerges. He feels he must get away from this church and family responsibilities and from me. I am faced with an impenetrable wall whenever I try to get through to him because he is convinced that I am responsible for almost all of his misery and unhappiness.
”This summer for me has been a most unusual one. I have had more happiness and more unhappiness during these months than at any time I can remember. I find myself searching for deep meanings, going out to meet situations, staying sensitive to what is happening and have a great awareness of life itself and of my own part and responsibility in it than I have heretofore had. Life is so full of many things, life calls to us to live, and I believe that this is part of the meaning of life under the Lordship of Christ — abundant living, fully tragic, happy, deep, searching, moving out.”
The 50 colleges said no. Jim wished he could retire, wished he had money to get away, wished he could get a job in Europe, wished the world recognized his ability and fine mind. He spoke with church officers who talked him out of resigning until my sister had left for Oxford and my brother for Vanderbilt — their “respective fall beginnings.” In August 1961, Grace writes, Jim is “feeling lower than a worm,” but preaching fine sermons. “He is preaching his own search.”
The following year, Jim moves to Jamestown, North Dakota. Grace would not be going.
