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

Having settled that we should marry before Christmas, a question arose as we pedaled down the mountainside that day. How would our two sets of parents feel about this? We'd known each other exactly six weeks. Wouldn't both families, reasonably, want us to wait awhile?

"We'll write them," John said. "Explain the travel situation."

And so our first completed joint writing project turned out to be a letter. They were bulky envelopes by the time we sealed them -- one addressed to the Sherrills in Louisville, one to the Schindlers in Scarsdale. Inside each one were twelve pages, six written by John, six by me, covering what we believed was any conceivable question a parent could ask. They were prodigies of polished prose, written and rewritten on our typewriters, then copied out by hand.

Together we biked to the Bureau de Poste and stood hand in hand at the window grille as the two momentous envelopes were weighed, stamped, postmarked "3 Octobre I947," and whisked from view. Nothing to do now but wait for our families' reactions to so much good news.

It was only on our return to the States a year later that we heard the drama of the envelopes' arrival. It had never occurred to us that mail from Europe reached New York a day sooner than it got to Kentucky. . . .

My mother was surprised one noontime, she related, when she opened the envelope with the Swiss stamps, to see unfamiliar handwriting on half the pages. The water in which she was hard-boiling eggs burned away as she stood in the front hallway reading. She smelled the scorching pot, snatched it from the stove, and telephoned my father in the city.

It took Daddy only ten minutes to cross the street to Grand Central and catch the 12:46 to Scarsdale, where Mother met him at the station. He read the letter as she drove home, went to the phone without taking off his coat, and got the information operator in Louisville.

"Wait till this evening," Mother urged as he wrote down the Sherrills' number. "You're upset now and I'm sure they are too. Why, Mr. Sherrill's probably at work. Let's give us all a few hours to think about this."

"I can't think about something I know nothing about." He tossed the letter on the sideboard and mixed a rare midday Old Fashioned. "You say his father's at work-what kind of work? We know nothing about these people in Louisville. There are precious few facts in all those pages."

And so there were, I know today, rereading them. Not the kind of facts parents want. They were our facts -- ecstatic descriptions of one another's looks, talents, brilliance. Glowing plans for our future as travel writers.

Daddy's agitation, Mother knew, came in part from the hard lessons of his profession. A large part of his practice involved not headline-grabbing murder cases, but behind-the-scenes marital inquiries. Parents dubious about the "count" a daughter had met in some foreign country. Wires