The first mate kept a picture of a bare-breasted woman in his cabin. It was a black-and-white photo that had been tinted. Her nipples were mauve. It was my first view of pornography.
I had seen plenty of nude statues and paintings, but I somehow knew this picture was different and didn’t mention it to my parents. I knew that if they saw it, my visits to the first mate’s cabin would end.
I played on the bridge, went down to the engine room any time I wanted, and appreciatively breathed in the hot oil smell. I wandered all day from stem to stern, scrambling up and down ladders. On the voyage before ours, they had been hit by a hurricane and a huge wave had smashed one of the windows on the bridge. Flying glass sliced open a sailor’s face. The first mate told me about how he stitched up the sailor while getting medical instructions, stitch-by-stitch, over the radio from a seaman’s medical station broadcasting from Rome.
We sailed into New York past the Statue of Liberty.
“We’re home!” said Debby.
Those words didn’t resonate with me. Home was our Swiss village. However, I was excited. America was where most of our guests came from. Each Christmas, we got boxes from friends and relatives. In the boxes were candy corn and “trashy American children’s books”—slick Golden Books—some with characters like Donald Duck, that gave me a little glimpse into what seemed like an easygoing glittering world of entertainment and abundance.
I had a mental list of treats that I had seen or tasted in small quantities and now wanted to get my fill of: candy corn, root beer, TV, if possible, and a comic book. We headed to Pittsburgh, where I was to have surgery at the children’s hospital.
I was taken to a Pittsburgh Pirates game (they won that game and, later, the World Series). I remember the feeling of stepping into the huge stadium in Pittsburgh, and being very embarrassed that I knew nothing about baseball! Was I a real American or not?
Dr. Ferguson was to be my surgeon, and he was going to do a “muscle transplant” to move one less-atrophied muscle (maybe a tendon) from the front of my left leg to the calf where everything was shriveled up. This was to give my foot more mobility.
I remember waking up after the operation as if surfacing from deep under the ocean, and seeing the spreading bloodstain on the heel of my elevated cast. I had the sweet cloying taste of ether in my mouth, nose, and throat and could taste it for days. My leg hurt, in a hot dull way. There were three incisions; a long one from just above my ankle up the side of my leg to my knee, one across the back of my heel, and one along the side of my foot above the arch. I had asked the doctor if I could stay awake so I could watch the operation. The answer was no. On my chart, Mom proudly showed me that in a box reserved for “patient disposition,” the nurse had written “cheerful male.”
After the operation I had to wear a cast for the rest of the summer. We were to stay in America that whole time, three months until the cast came off. Then we would know if the operation had “taken.” Until then I was to
stay off that leg!
I was told that the transplanted muscle was fastened to my heel with a “single stitch” and that under no account was I to walk on my cast because if that stitch came loose, the whole operation would have been in vain.
Maybe this was true, or maybe I was being given extra motivation to stay off that leg. Mom prayed loudly and fervently for that “single stitch, that it may hold, O Lord!” until I could just about picture an angel somehow reaching into my heel and holding the stitch in place. But that didn’t stop me from walking without my crutches and often forgetting to stay off the bad leg and then worrying myself sick about the single stitch.
For most of that summer of 1960, we lived on Long Island with “old Mrs. Johnson,” as we all called her, the wealthy mother-in-law of Dr. Keyswater. The Keyswaters were a family of “real bluebloods,” according to Mom. Dr. Keyswater was a surgeon and born-again. He was a member of our “Praying Family” of supporters and had arranged the operation for me. Some years before, when Susan was seven, she had been visiting their house and had knocked over a four-foot-tall Ming vase and broken it. The Keyswaters had been very gracious about this, Mom said. But I was to touch nothing in the house, because “it is filled with priceless treasures.”
I remember begging Mom not to go out one evening but to stay with me. And she did, much to the Keyswaters’ annoyance, who declared me spoiled and said that they would have to cancel their dinner reservations as a result.
Old Mrs. Johnson lived on a family estate on Long Island near Smithtown. There were mantraps made of tripwires and spikes to discourage the poachers who came to steal trout from a fish pond in the woods. The gardener gave Dad and me a guided tour while apologizing for the condition of the estate, saying that he was the only person who “she hires to take care of it,” so the most he could do was mow the lawns and do some watering. As for the rest of the grounds and the formerly well-stocked fish ponds, well, as we could see, they had “all gone to hell.” I glanced at Dad when the man cursed, but Dad didn’t seem to care. I knew Mom would have given the man a stern look.
John Sandri and Priscilla came to live with us during their summer break from Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. John built a raft for me and floated it down the small tidal river that ran through the property. I discovered gnats and black flies, something shocking to a boy raised in the Alps, where, except
for an occasional horsefly, there are no biting insects. We got incredibly muddy as we made our way up a marshy bank onto some swanky estate’s lawn. A woman in a blue striped dress was very nice and let us hose off and telephoned our hostess to come and get us. John had struggled to keep my cast out of the water and mud, but it had gotten filthy. Debby cleaned it off before Mom saw it. I was sure the single stitch was done for.
At dinner, old Mrs. Johnson would treat Mom like a social equal—but only after Mom cooked dinner and served it and then sat down to join us. When we arrived, Mrs. Johnson had let her maid go, since she was going to let the missionaries staying with her provide the domestic help. Mom, Debby, and Priscilla were treated like servants. We were guests but feeling like a family of illegal immigrants stuck without a car, money, or a means to do anything more than work off the room and board. (Susan, barely eighteen, had been left in charge of L’Abri, an experience she described later as frightening.)
“She has
oodles
of money and could get new dish towels instead of making us use these old rags, and all the sheets have holes in them!” Mom would say. “It’s the way with old money, very stingy,” said Dad.
“She could really do something for the Lord, but this is all she does, lets us live here as her servants! She has enough money so she could buy a whole new chalet for the work if she wanted,
and
keep her maid while we’re here so we could get a
real rest
from the Lord’s work!”
One afternoon my mother asked Mrs. Johnson why there was only one peeler in the drawer after she had tried to find a second one so Debby could help peel potatoes. “Because,” Mrs. Johnson answered, “servants always lose everything and if you have two of anything it just gives them an excuse!” The
summer was broiling. It was my first taste of East Coast humidity, and there was no air conditioning. My cast came up to my hip. The skin began to itch. “Something died in there,” I said after I noticed that when I’d itch my leg—with a knitting needle—I’d stir up quite a stench. At one point, it itched so badly that I tried to scratch my leg by feeding a fish hook into the cast. Debby spent her summer covering up what I was doing to the cast, taping up the heel I’d broken down walking on it and trying to get the fish hook out and worrying about what the doctor would say when he cut the cast off and saw all the added layers of tape.
Debby would also read to me out loud for hours and hold my legs so I could “swim” in the pool by dunking my head and shoulders into the water up to my waist while keeping my legs out. My one great sorrow was that pool. We had a swimming pool at last, and I couldn’t swim in it!
Dad went away on several speaking trips. For once, Mom stayed with us. I was eating my weight in the cereals we couldn’t get in Switzerland and drinking A&W root beer. And I was watching TV! I saw
The Lone Ranger
and other programs that had been described to me by American children visiting L’Abri.
It was on that trip that I got a first inkling that our family was pitied by other people. I learned that Dr. Ferguson, “who is not even saved but has a real heart for the Lord’s work,” donated my operation when he found out Mom and Dad were missionaries. I felt embarrassed.
It was the first time I had met people who said they were believers who had nothing to do with L’Abri. I went along with Dad on several speaking trips to local churches. I was very aware that somehow we weren’t like “them.” They had
ordinary jobs and then were Christians as an added bonus, whereas Christianity was
all
we did. And I would watch how people in “ordinary churches,” as Mom called them, related to us and we to them.
I was discovering that we were second-class citizens, some sort of family of beggars. At the same time, from that visit on, I became more and more aware that we were also snobs. I sensed the frosty distance that separated my parents’ idea of themselves from “these ordinary American Christians.” Unlike them, my parents were aware of culture, good art, and good music. Where these Christians sang hymns that sounded tragically like trashy music, my parents played Bach. We vacationed in Italy, whereas “most of these poor dear simple American Christians don’t have your background and have not even
been
to Europe!”
We took a day trip to New York City and spent the day at the Guggenheim Museum, where—to the horror of the guards—I free-wheeled my wheelchair down the winding ramp. On another day, I was taken to Radio City and loved watching the production of sound effects for a radio drama.
It was an odd mix. We were beggars and yet looked down on the culture and the people who made our life possible. They pitied us, donated a place to stay and a free operation, and talked about how hard it must be to “leave home” and “go back to the mission field.” And we pitied their narrow existence and compared the genteel sophistication of Switzerland favorably to these “simple American Christians.” Sometimes Mom would say “They don’t even have real tea rooms here!”
The overall feeling was that we were somehow displaced aristocrats, former royalty reduced to being dependent on less-cultured strangers, grateful yet resentful, sorry for ourselves
for the sacrifices we were making for a higher cause, yet envious of those people who could lead normal lives and who owned things, got to eat Grape-Nuts every day, watched TV, and made money from everyday jobs where you were paid instead of waiting for a series of miracles.
We were proud that we were different from other people yet craved acceptance. And we craved this not just for ourselves, but for the Lord that we were living our lives for. Because when people accepted and helped us, when they admitted that we were living lives full of meaning and spiritual purpose that they, too, craved, when they complimented Mom on her clothes and said they didn’t know any other Christians who were so stylish, or so smart, or so kind, then we had done our job and had witnessed well for our Lord. But there was also an unintended message that I picked up, which has shaped my life: we were outsiders doing everything we could to be mistaken for insiders, so that we could be accepted by the insiders and then convert them to being outsiders, like us, until
everyone
became an outsider and therefore we got to be insiders forever!
We wanted nothing so much as the respect of the people who found our ideas backward and foolish. In a fantasy world of perfect outcomes, you would write a “Christian book” but have the
New York Times
declare it great literature, so great that the reviewer would say he was converting. And in the Style section, they would say that Edith Schaeffer was the best-dressed woman in the world, so well-dressed that this proved that not all fundamentalists were dowdy and that “we have all been wrong about you Christians.” And if those reporters visited L’Abri, they would say they had never been served so lovely a high tea, and that they had never heard such clever
answers to their questions, and that because of the sandwiches, the real silver teaspoons, the beautifully cut skirt and jacket Mom was wearing, the kindness of the Schaeffer children, the fact Dad knew who Jackson Pollock was, meant that the Very Wealthy and Very Important people all over the world would not only come to Christ, but would, at last, admit that at least
some
Real Christians (in other words, us) were even smarter and better-dressed than worldly people, and that you can believe Jesus rose from the dead, not drink or smoke or dance, and yet be
even happier,
even
more cultured,
better in every way!
What I never heard Mom or Dad explain was that if the world was so bad and lost, why did they spend so much time trying to imitate it and impress the lost? But the single stitch held. And when the fishhook dropped out of the cast as he cut it off, Dr. Ferguson only laughed. God is good.
8
L
’Abri swept up many unique and interesting people. Some stayed for a day or two, others for the better part of a lifetime. Jane Stuart Smith stayed for most of her life.
And
she was a great destination! When you cut across the main road, you were looking right down on Chalet Le Chesalet’s lichen-splotched tile roof. There was a stone retaining wall right behind the chalet that I would climb down sometimes rather than walking by the path. There were lizards living in moss-filled cracks. If you caught one, the tail came off in your hand.
Jane had been an opera singer until she accepted Jesus, stopped singing worldly music, and stayed on to be a worker at L’Abri. She still practiced every day and sometimes, when I was on the way to her house, I heard her singing scales up and down and up and down to higher and higher notes and then sliding all the way to the bottom notes and starting over.