Growing Up

Front matter

Growing Up

By Mary Heaton Vorse Author of "The Prestons"

Printed in the United States of America

Prologue

THERE was a time when being a parent was a simple thing, if not always an easy one. Parents in those days knew exactly what was good for their children. It was good for them to obey their parents implicitly. It was good for them to believe their parents infallible. Parents were to be honored—the Bible said so. The parental will was to a child as the will of God to a true believer. If a child failed in obedience, then, too, one's course was clear—one did the awful thing known as breaking the child's will, and one did it with a clear conscience.

Children in those easy days were considered little lumps of clay to be molded by their parents into definite and approved patterns, and their minds were looked on as empty pitchers, to be filled by the wine of wisdom poured in by parents and teachers and others in authority.

While Tom and Alice Marcey were more modern than that in their beliefs, for the first two years and a half that they were parents they lived wrapped in complacency as in a garment. If they had not hidden the fact that they thought they were pretty nearly the only perfect parents living, no one would have stood them a minute.

They thought in their hearts that Robert was so good and well because they were unusually wise people. They were so sure of this that they spent many agreeable evenings thanking God that they were not as other parents.

They criticised the way their neighbors brought up their babies. Gladys Grayson was not made to eat her meals with unbroken regularity. The Alden twins were having their nerves destroyed by being played with far too much. Indeed, during this time—when Robert's teeth were there and his personality had not yet popped out on them—one would have thought, to hear them, that there were exactly two wise and consistent parents in the world, and their names were Tom and Alice Marcey.

As Alice's mother listened to them her smile was touched with compassion. Older women often smile this way at their sons and daughters, saying to themselves: "Strut while you can, and while you can believe that you are a good father and mother. Soon enough you will find yourselves out." She would have kept still always, except that one day Alice stung her beyond endurance by saying:

"How well I remember when I used to be made to eat oatmeal and soft boiled eggs! And when I think how I suffered all for nothing!—for oatmeal as you cooked it isn't a suitable food for children—"

Her mother at last spoke:

"Alice," said she, "you will find as time goes on that you will make mistakes—many and many of them. All that any mother can do is the best she knows. But I can tell you that the way to do the best she knows is not to be sure of herself. If she's sure she's always right she has even less chance of understanding her children than most parents."

She underscored the "even less," and it gave Alice food for thought, although it didn't seem possible that she or Tom would fail Robert in understanding.

Robert seemed the most easily understandable child in the world. Fearless, full of laughter, walking the earth triumphantly, and passing secure through the pitfalls which lie in wait for children. Alice did not suspect that he was growing a character after his own pattern, the design of which she had no more to do with in the choosing than the color of his eyes or whether he was to be a boy or a girl.

She thought that the hardest part of being a mother was behind her. Teething was over. They had passed that dark spot which in the eyes of anxious young mothers is dotted with small white gravestones and which is known as the Second Summer. Yet there was Robert, hatching a plot that was to kill her complacency forever. He diverted her mind from what he was about by having infantile ailments; by getting weaned, by changes of diet, by learning to walk, growing his personality behind his mother's back.

In the back of her mind she knew that she had been begging the question, and that for a long time this definite personality had been looking at her level-eyed. She had made excuses to herself about it. When the personality showed itself unpleasantly she had explained it with, "Robert isn't feeling well to-day." It flickered in and out of her range of vision, like a will-o'-the-wisp, now staying for half an hour, now vanishing and leaving behind the good baby that regular training had made Robert.

If Alice had wanted to look the fact squarely in the face, she could have seen for some time past Robert was no longer a little mechanism. His conduct had become like bacon, now fat and now lean. Only the other day he had sat down beside the road, and when Alice had told him to come along, he said with his disconcerting tranquilliity:

"I like it here." When Alice had asked him if he would come walking like a man or be carried like a baby, he replied without hesitation that he would be carried like a baby. At that when she tucked him under her arm and carried him off bodily, he roared. But it was when the goldfish came that Robert's character popped out of hiding for good, and it was then that Alice and Tom Marcey started on the Parents' Progress which must begin with humility if it is to end in understanding.

Chapter 1

THE Marceys' education began by Tom's mother leaving the goldfish at the house when she went away on a visit. She was a voluminous and stately lady, and try as she would, Alice could never link her up with Tom. It could never seem to her as if she was his mother. There was something about her vaguely Victorian. She belonged to another time and another way of looking at things, and her elegance was that of another generation. She lived alone on the top of a hill, and when she descended, her flowing draperies around her, she looked august as a Thackeray Dowager.

She had two mongrel dogs alleging to be terriers, which Alice had to feed in her absence. It was the second day after the elder Mrs. Marcey's departure, that Alice flew down the hill as though in the wake of disaster.

Usually she liked this walk. From her mother-in-law's big house you could see the whole wide valley spread out below you, through the chestnut trees. Alice knew half the people who lived in the houses she passed by; pleasant houses, they were, of a well-to-do New York suburb; houses with children in them, and with flowers growing in the little gardens; neat little houses, white with green blinds, set down in the midst of big trees, looking as if they had strolled in at random.

Sue Grayson, Alice's chum, called to her—"Come in for a minute, what are you in such a hurry about?"

"I've got to get back," said Alice, and hurried along. Things, she felt, were not right at home. She felt she couldn't get home quickly enough. She wanted to know the worst. She wanted to know if Robert had disobeyed again. She didn't trust Laurie,—what do nurses of Scotch-Irish ancestry know about discipline—no matter how long they've been with you. Alice didn't trust anybody to watch Robert in this emergency; she didn't even trust Tom.

What had happened was that the Mooted Question which sooner or later comes into the lives of all parents had come to cloud the life of Tom and Alice Marcey. This question goes:

Should we spank our child?

Before the question of To Spank or Not to Spank, the question of To Be or Not to Be pales into mere philosophical sniveling. For while you are discussing being, you Are; and while you are discussing Spanking, your child runs down the path ahead of you, turning to you his unsuspecting rear, which has never been defiled by what is euphemistically known as "Corporal Punishment," and when you have gotten to the point of discussing whether you shall apply it or not, something has gone wrong.

What sort of parents are you if you must resort to violence? What moral bankruptcy it shows when you have to become a terrorist to make your two and a half year old child mind?

In this fashion the question had spread its dark wings over the lives of Tom and Alice Marcey. They lay awake nights discussing it; they stopped talking about whether they should send Robert to a technical school or to college, they had even put aside the question of whether he had better go to public school or whether he had better be registered right away for one of the best private schools.

Instead they discussed such questions as: Is it good for any children, ever? or are there certain things that all children must learn, even at the cost of a spanking? Is spanking an unpardonable crime against childhood, or is this extreme view a sentimental weakness? They argued it back and forth as have thousands of other unhappy parents ever since the old ideas on the bringing up of children softened, and the simple theory, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," gave place to these heart-burning midnight discussions. Like other parents they couldn't bear to face the awful deed. They learned the tragic inwardness of the old joke: "It hurts me more than it does you."

The question came to them as a dark enigma—

"Your child," it said, "has defied you. At two and a half he sets up his will. What are you going to do? Are you going to let him catch his grandmother's gold fish, which were confided to your care? How are you going to stop him? All your theories have failed. Moral suasion is bankrupt. He wants those goldfish. Meantime I am here."

Thus the question stood waiting to be answered. No parent having answered it can ever again be quite as sure again of his judgment.

Whichever you answer, you will forever ask yourself, "Have I done right?"

It was on account of the Mooted Question that Alice could not stand the thought of stopping to talk to Gladys, no such question had ever darkened Sue Greyson's life, there was not a single crack in her friend's complacency, nor had any such disgraceful decision, she was sure, ever confronted the parents of the Alden twins who were just now turning out of their yard. A low stone wall separated the garden from the street. They were preceded by their Dandie Dinmont and they were followed by their austere English nurse. No fear that things had ever gotten to such a pass in that family that a spanking would be required.

No fear that the Alden twins would be overcome by an irresistible impulse to fish for goldfish with their bare hands. It was these goldfish that threatened the complacency of the Marceys. They swam around and around in a large globe; their scales flashed in the sun, their tails flapped them along with ease. Robert put his hand in the globe with the intention of taking one of the fish out. Alice remonstrated with him.

"Those are your grandma's fish," she told him. To which Robert replied:

"I want 'em."

She led him away and interested him in other things. He was always easily turned from one amusement to another, and he was so well balanced that he had concealed his personality under an impenetrable mask of good nature. Now it came to the surface. He intended to catch a fish. You might lead him away. He would go with you, bide his time, and return. If you asked him if he intended to mind Mama he replied with firmness:

"I want 'em." If he was asked if he wanted to hurt the poor little fish he still replied: "I want 'em." He was irritatingly serene, and he was equally definite and straightforward.

With a sense of disaster growing upon her Alice hastened her footsteps. Everywhere were flowers, everywhere children were playing. She could catch sight behind the vines of the voluminous Mrs. Painter who was chirruping to a cage of canaries.

Alice turned up into her own yard. Robert was nowhere in sight. The front hall, in comparison with the sunlight, seemed dark, but shining in the midst of it was the rear of Robert's unsuspecting white rompers.

"How's my sweet baby?" Alice began, with treacherous sweetness. He ran to her and clasped her around the knees. She ran a perfidious hand down over the sleeve of his romper, the cuff was soaking wet.

"Oh, Robert!" she cried, "you disobeyed mother, you've been fishing again, Robert!"

He nodded three times, in confirmation, looking at her fearlessly. He was so little, she was so big, and yet he had shattered her complacency. Alice Marcey, the complacent parent, had ceased to exist.

Chapter 2

WHEN Tom Marcey came home that afternoon, they agreed that something had to be done. "That child has got to learn to mind," Tom asserted.

"I can't bear to think of spanking him, he is only two and a half. He was always a perfectly reasonable child until the goldfish came," said Alice hotly.

"Mother's fish are only the immediate cause," Tom argued. "He's always had the germ of this unreasonableness."

They walked together into the library. Between the windows stood the globe. Before it, absorbed as a scientist, was Robert. His yellow head was as shining as the goldfish. His fat hand was clutching in the water, while the desire of his heart forever eluded him. He did not even turn at the sound of his parents' footsteps. He had not learned fear. He had decided to catch a fish, and he didn't care who knew it.

Something indeed had to be done.

"Robert!" said Tom.

He looked around, a frown on his face.

"I couldn't get him," he told his father.

"You disobeyed father!" Tom began.

"Oh, Tom! Don't do anything rash! I hated my parents every time they spanked me. It never did any good. Oh, if you make Robert hate you2"

"See here, Alice," said Tom, "he's got to understand, hasn't he?"

The object of this discussion stood before them. He looked with his usual magnificent calm from one to the other. He seemed but mildly interested.

"Come," said his father.

Alice cast one glance at his gallant retreating rear and ran up-stairs with her fingers in her ears.

They faced each other, father and son. The son was calm, the father nervous. The son smiled reassuringly. The father tried piteously to echo the smile. He didn't know how to begin. He was deeply embarrassed. The first words he spoke were not those he had meant to speak. They were:

"Hang it all, your mother ought to do this!"

This was a wrong opening. He covered it up by: "You ought not to touch your Grandma's goldfish. We have told you time and again not to touch your Grandma's goldfish. You must mind your father and mother. All good little boys mind their fathers and mothers."

Robert looked at him unblinking and said nothing.

"Now," said Tom, "see what you've done. I've got to spank you so that you won't touch those fish again."

He felt in a false position. He was angry at the world, especially as all Robert did was to say dreamily:

"I like a goldfish."

"That may be," his parent replied. "You can't have them. Now I've got to spank you. Do you know why I've got to spank you, Robert?"

"Because I like a fish," replied Robert.

For the first time Tom understood why people in ancient times beat their breasts under the stress of emotion. "I'll get this over," he thought. He laid Robert over his knee. Robert was unresisting. His fat legs hung down one way, his fat arms hung down the other. He lifted his head up like a turtle and looked inquiringly at his father.

"This is awful!" thought Tom. On that plump and trusting rear he administered three half hearted taps, at which Robert wept, not loudly but heart-rendingly, and climbing up on his father's knee he ducked his soft canary-colored head in his father's neck, turning to the author of his discomfort to be comforted. They always do this when they are little—they are so accustomed to have you kiss them and make them well. It would be easier if they didn't.

Alice was upstairs crying. She turned her red eyes on Tom and asked in a whisper, "Is it over?" And Tom, whose nerves were overstrung, snapped:

"One would think that Robert had been having a major operation. Now he knows what will happen if he does it again. Next time you'll have to Do It."

"Next time?" Alice quavered.

"You've got to see it through, you know. It's only fair to him," said Tom, leaving for the office.

Alice knelt down in front of Robert and pleaded with him. She held him in her arms and begged him not to make Mother spank him. She looked at him searchingly, expecting to see in his eyes temper or humiliation, but neither was visible. He replied with his usual engaging ardor to her kisses, but on the subject of the goldfish he was silent. From time to time Alice paused in her work to find Robert, to kiss him, because the brutal hand of his father had been laid on him in punishment. Robert himself seemed unmoved.

Happily, Alice was having friends to lunch next day, so that she was too busy to dwell morbidly on the crisis through which they had passed. They were half through their luncheon when from the other part of the house came sounds of strife. One could hear the voice of an older person raised in remonstrance. One could hear the voice of Robert. Then came the sound of feet running, and Robert, flushed and tearful with the excited tears of victory, stood before them. In one hand he held a flapping goldfish. He advanced on his mother and lifted up his skirts indecorously around his fat legs, turning his back to her.

"Spank me now," he gasped. "I got it!"

Chapter 3

WHAT are you to do with a child who measures the thing it wishes to do with punishment, and finding the price of punishment small deliberately makes his choice? There's not much to be done, is there? Tom got out of it this way:

"If we spank him he will look upon our punishment as revenge." And when Alice asked: "Well, if he wants to do something that will hurt him, what are you going to do then?" Tom answered with a finality that did not hide the weakness of his position:

"We shall find some better way of reasoning with him. This steadfastness of his, is a splendid thing if rightly directed."

When Alice asked how he proposed to direct it rightly he left for the office. Meanwhile Robert sat smiling serenely. His calm mouth was shut with a firmness that must always have been there and that Alice had never before noticed. He had an unshakable quality, a determination that defied them. Nothing but annihilation could subdue him. He was tiny, but he was stronger than they, for he knew exactly what he ought to do in life, and they, poor things, were uncertain.

Because of such trivial things as his Grandma's goldfish, Robert had already shown them that when it came to a show-down he held the trump card of independence.

The complacent look went from their faces. They no longer talked evenings of how badly other people brought up their children. For they began to realize the truth on which all the wisdom of parenthood is built, that the supreme thing which matters in the bringing up of your children is not following this theory or that. The thing of deepest importance is for you to try and find out as soon as possible who your baby is, for if you do not do it yourself he will make you. But it takes more than one child to teach this lesson, just as it takes more than one child to give a parent humility.

Chapter 4

IT took Howling Sara to give perfect humility to Alice and Tom. She was born when Robert was three.

"Now," thought Alice, "I will correct all the mistakes I made with Robert. I know how to be a better mother now."

Tom, also, believed he had learned a little about being a father. When Sara was a little baby they spent no time in talking about what good parents they were. They had gotten to the point when parents talk about Development, and Spontaneity, and Co-ordination. This was all very well, except that they made plans again without allowing for X, which one may let represent Sara's personality. Robert gave them the first lesson concerning it. He was at closer quarters with it and no theories dimmed the clearness of his observation.

There was no doubt about it, Sara cried more than Robert had—it would be more strictly true to say she howled more. She acted as the book said babies didn't act when they were well. She howled over nothing. She had moments of sheer unreasonable howling which nothing would stop. If you picked her up she howled, and when you set her down she howled more. When on one of these occasions Alice in anguish asked the nurse:

"Oh, what do you think is the matter? Why do you think she's crying?"

"She's just mad," Robert explained. "When she's mad she yells. When she stops being mad she stops yelling."

There you had the reason. For no other cause on earth but temper—eating well, sleeping well, no excuse in life for it—Sara for two or three days would fill all the earth with her clamor. Then the storm would go by and the nursery would again be pleasant with the sweet noises of happy children. It didn't happen often, but these "spells," as her grandmother called them, would come with the suddenness of tropical storms. They often speculated "Where she got it from," but though she had red-headed and hot-tempered ancestors there was no one who had had this cyclonic quality. There was nothing one could do; no way to please Sara. If the storm happened in mid-street you could but hurry her home, so that at least she might do her howling in private. Leaving her alone to cry it out did no good. Humoring her did no good. When she began to talk, reasoning did no good. Scolding her did no good. Nothing did her any good. Robert told her what he thought about it when she was two years old.

"She's a bad girl," said he, "and ought to be spanked."

"Mercy, Alice!" said Tom's mother, "don't spank the child. Violent as she is, she'd be liable to break a blood vessel, crying."

"Of course I sha'n't spank her," said Alice.

The Mooted Question had been answered forever for the Marceys. No spanking in that family. It humiliated the Spanker. It degraded the Spankee. There wasn't anything the Marceys could say bad enough about spanking. It was the resort of the weak. It was a confession of failure. Children needed spanking only in homes where there was no true discipline.

Here we come to a dark page—one without a moral, one that holds even an immoral in its somber web.

It had been a terrible afternoon. Laurie was out. Sara had been howling for two days. When she was a little baby one could stand it. Now that she could talk it seemed unbearable. If asked what was the matter, she screeched with rage. When Alice washed her face she screamed. Alice had left her on the bed a moment and told Robert to watch her. When she came up-stairs again she heard Robert saying:

"There, darling, there," in the tone of a dove, while Sara, her face red, her curls bobbing, her finger pointed at Robert, screamed at him,

"Go! Go!" and this because he was keeping her on the bed, as he had been told to. Then Sara leaned forward and slapped Robert. She slapped him twice. Robert turned a patient, smiling face toward his mother.

"She does this when she gets mad," he explained. Red anger arose in Alice.

"You're a bad, naughty baby," she said, and here for good and all did Alice Marcey lose her complacency, for she picked up the screaming Sara, put her over her knee and spanked her smartly.

She did the unpardonable thing. She spanked a little helpless child in anger.

The howls of Sara subsided. She sobbed a little, pathetically and limply. Then she murmured:

"Sweet Mother." She kissed her mother. "Sweet buddie," she murmured, "sweet Bobby." She kissed Robert. She was a reformed infant. She wanted to kiss all the world. She swam in a sea of benevolence. When Alice dressed her and took her out of doors she fell to picking little nosegays of wild flowers, which she presented to Laurie and then to her mother. She was sweeter than honey in the honeycomb.

In the domestic life figs do sometimes come of thistles. Alice had struck her child in anger and, lo, an angel was born on earth, nor did Sara howl again—not for months. And when she howled again Alice spanked her, humbly, not knowing the why of it, only knowing that for some mysterious reason Sara would howl until spanked, or until "the spell" wore itself out.

Chapter 5

IT was things like this that made them reserve judgment about Jamie who was born not long after. By the time he was two and a half, Alice had become a humble parent. She had changed from her attitude of the beneficent providence in the home, to an observer. Instead of saying "Let there be Light!" in a grand way, or "Let there be Order!", or "Let there be Clean Faces!", she tried to understand the why of things. She began to understand that children aren't like plants. The same course of treatment doesn't get the same results.

You can divide parents into two classes—the humble and wistful ones, who like Tom and Alice wonder how much they can find out about their children; and those around whom still lingers the assumption of Divine Rights of Parents.

Some mothers, as soon as they come near their children, pounce on them and set about, as briskly as possible, making them good. Indeed, there are still a great many mothers who spend all their time making their children over into different kinds of persons from the sort they were born. This is hard on both of them, and the only thing that happens is that the child grows a shell to keep his mother out, and grows up inside it in peace, but not nearly as nice and big as if he hadn't any shell—shells are cramping things at best.

Not all parents do this, but there is hardly a parent living who does not greet his children with:

"Good gracious, child, how dirty you are!" There are some babies who walk hesitatingly forth into the understanding of speech only to hear, "Oh, what dirty little hands!" It must be a disappointment if you have been eagerly listening and listening to find out what your mother meant by the words she spoke.

Indeed, if it were not for tooth brushes, soap, hair brushes, baths, and table manners, parents and children might often have a wonderful time getting to know each other; but these things stand between them until the children are as old as their mothers and fathers, and then generally it is too late. For when you've spent fifteen years, or twelve years anyway, hardly being able to get at your parents except over a rampart of tooth brushes, and shoe blacking, the doors of communication get rusted from disuse. I often wonder children don't turn on us with:

"Now, I don't want to hear you say 'tooth brush' to-day," or, "Any parent that speaks of hand-washing, or hair-brushing, or eating fast, has got to leave the table."

There are, however, a few mothers who are forever wondering what their children are really like. They wonder this so hard that they sometimes even stop talking about baths and going to bed so they can watch. These mothers are forever on the alert to catch some word or sign sent to them from the place where the children live. For the moment parents are out of the way, children's talk is different; their very voices, their words, their looks, all change.

Alice was always snooping on the edge of this place, straining her eyes to see what went on. At night when she tucked the children in she was especially watchful, hoping to surprise a confidence as it scuttled past her. She gathered up stray words they dropped and put them away carefully; and then she would spend afternoons trying to put together the words and all the things she had learned in a sort of pattern. If one learned enough about them she thought one might really begin to be a good mother.

She learned after a while that every child's mind is a wild, trackless place, with little trails wandering about it, down which thoughts can walk. But as thoughts make different kinds of tracks in different children's minds, learning to find your way about one will help you hardly at all with another. The only thing to do is to sit quiet and watch, as one would for shy wild things in the forest. Then, if you make no grown-up noise at all perhaps some day you will see a thought from The Other Side come out. You may even have the good fortune to see them come out singing and dancing like motes in the sun. Some un-grown-up mothers have even got to know by sight the mysterious playmates that come to children from The Other Side. For want of a better name this was what Alice called the place where children live their real lives.