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

"I have an interview with an insurance company tomorrow," John told me when he reached our fourth-floor room one evening. Selling insurance wasn't what he wanted to do, but after knocking on publishers' doors for four months and the baby due in five weeks...

John took three days of tests and was offered the job over some two dozen other applicants.

"It's only a stopgap," he told my parents the following weekend when we took the train out to Scarsdale. The four of us were at the dinner table. "Just for a few months, till we start sending pieces from Europe again."

"Stopgap?" My father set down his fork. "A long time ago I took a stopgap job..."

He'd been twenty years old, Daddy went on, living with his family in New York City, where his father was preaching against Wall Street. As usual the pews emptied swiftly, and it fell to Daddy and his brother Raymond, the two oldest boys, to see their younger brothers and sisters through school.

"Like you," Daddy said, "I was going to be a writer..." A piece of his past I'd never known. "I'd even sold a couple of stories."

Then on the opposite side of the country occurred a cataclysmic event. Just before dawn on April 18, 1906, the city of San Francisco was rocked by a massive earthquake. Eighteen hundred people died, thousands of buildings collapsed. With gas and water mains ruptured, fire broke out, raging unchecked for three days and destroying many more buildings.

Insurance companies in New York, facing ruin in the wake of the disaster, recruited a small army of investigators. Their task: to sift through four square miles of fire-charred rubble, determining in each case whether a structure had been shaken apart by the quake and only afterward burned -- an "act of God" for which the insurer was not liable -- or whether it had withstood the shocks and collapsed as a result of the fire, for which the company would have to pay.

Daddy and Raymond joined scores of young men boarding trains for San Francisco with a list of downed buildings to locate. "That job was a stopgap measure, too," he said. "Just till my writing earned more."