Roadside billboards are intentionally eye-catching, seeking to gain the one or two seconds of attention a driver has as he zips by on his way to work or an errand. I’ve seen some pretty shocking billboards over the years, but the one I saw while driving the other day reached a whole new level.
This billboard wasn’t shocking for the image it contained—two toothbrushes sitting in a cup. Instead, it was shocking because of its—pardon the oxymoron, but it’s the best way I can think to describe it—subtle overtness. “Conserve energy,” it said, and then, “Shack up.”
In the Communist Party, Chambers writes, marriage was a loathsome institution, regarded as a “bourgeois convention.” Instead of traditional marriage, communists “sanctioned and, in fact, favored” something called “party marriages,” an apparent euphemism for what our billboard above now crudely terms shacking up. In other words, promiscuity was par for the course in the Marist/communist circles of the time.
Because of this attitude, two young ladies who ran with Chambers’ communist crowd, but were not communists themselves, were mocked “for their inviolable ‘prudery,’” meaning that they did not follow the promiscuous communist lifestyle. One of these was Esther Shemitz. She eventually became Chambers’s wife, but not without resistance from those in the Communist Party.
It was a good thing for Chambers—and all of us—that the Party didn’t win out and prevent his marriage, for their union proved a source of strength and encouragement for the many trials he encountered in the years ahead. And in the hints Chambers drops about his wife throughout his 700-page tome, we see some practical elements of love and marriage that each of us can take to heart and apply in our own lives.
In Esther, Chambers found a wife who could make a home regardless of her surroundings. Before marrying, Esther lived with her roommate in a little house in a New York tenement district. Despite the fact that these dwellings were labeled “tuberculosis traps,” Esther and her roommate were “clever with their hands and had remodeled the interior of the little house so that, when the fire was burning in the living-room fireplace, it was like a cozy farmhouse in the heart of the slum.” Esther also disregarded her poverty, working diligently and living frugally in order to make ends meet.
Once the two married, Esther became a supportive wife, willing to follow her husband wherever he went, even when they and their two children were forced into hiding when Chambers left the Communist Party. She also refused to leave him in later years even when the pipes froze in the car, the furnace was smoking, and all they could do to keep the children warm was pile blankets and coats on them.
Such support, however, did not mean she was a quiet mouse who never expressed her opinion. She did the latter when Chambers was offered a position in the communist underground in their early years of marriage, begging him not to take the job, but promising not “to stand in the way of anything” he thought was right. She also defended him, even when Chambers took his high-pressure stand in the Alger Hiss trial, seeking to expose the communist infiltrators in the U.S. government.
“Dearest Loved One,