Promised Land by David Stebenne

Author:David Stebenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

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The Sindt and Perkins families in their own ways experienced the fallout from those trade-offs, as well as the disconnect between the ideal and the real in mid-1950s America. Beatrice couldn’t understand her two daughters’ resistance to her focus on getting them married early to high-status men who could guarantee their security. She was similarly frustrated by her kids’ lack of enthusiasm for the mainstream religion that played such an important role in her own life. Beatrice had sent her daughter Carol to the local Episcopal high school as a day student, hoping that would help the girl get a fine education, entrée into the world of high-status people in the Davenport area, and a daily dose of mainline Protestant religious instruction. But Carol didn’t go for the country-clubish young men her mother envisioned for her. They tended to like cocktails—Carol was a teetotaler—and they were too forward for her taste. Carol also found religious worship at school much too formal and intimidating. Although a rebel in her own way, she was so morally traditional that she saw little need to go to church to get that kind of message, or to watch Norman Vincent Peale or Fulton Sheen on TV, as her mother liked to do.

George Perkins also came up against the beginnings of what would eventually become known as the generation gap. His son, George Jr., whom everyone called Bud, had a reckless streak totally unlike anything in his father’s personality. The Korean War broke out in the year Bud turned twenty, but rather than allow the draft to put such a daredevil in harm’s way there, George Sr. persuaded him to enlist in the Rhode Island National Guard, whose units were generally sent to Europe. Even that sensible plan backfired when Bud volunteered to join a bomb-demolition team in Germany, for both the high pay and excitement. Although never seriously injured, Bud still got into trouble. He quarreled with his commanding officer and briefly went AWOL, before reluctantly giving in to heavy pressure from his father to return to duty and apologize. By the time Bud came home from Europe, he had lost interest in settling down in Providence and going to work for the state, as his father had wanted. Instead, Bud married his childhood sweetheart, and the two of them promptly decamped for Denver, where the GI Bill and his new bride helped put Bud through college.

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