Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  There’s a word for this kind of judgment. The word is “reprehensible.”

  I remember being thirteen. I remember how my mother would say “How was your day?” and I would think she was prying. No kid of that age should be pressed into service as a poster child. After years of lunches and train rides and shared beach houses we never learn so much about our friends as we do when we know their kids. Children are surely a character issue. But it’s wrong to turn them into a campaign device. Remember thirteen.

  A MISTAKE

  April 21, 1991

  I put my notebook on the kitchen table and pointed to the top line of a page.

  “Who’s that?” said my husband, looking at the name scrawled in my handwriting.

  “The Central Park jogger,” I said.

  There were many of us in the news business who knew that name, and there were others in the financial community in New York City, her co-workers and classmates and clients, who knew it, too. I sometimes thought as many people in this big city knew that name as could populate a small one—say, Palm Beach, Florida. And we all had our reasons for not revealing it: some because they loved her, some because they respected her, some because their newspapers forbade it.

  I fell into that last group, but I had another reason too. I did not use her name when I wrote about her because I thought it was the right thing to do. She had lost her balance, her memory, and, finally, on the witness stand, her anonymity. I thought that was enough. And I believed the reader lost nothing at all by not knowing.

  Rape inspires very personal passions and this will need to be a very personal column, because it is also about The New York Times. Last week the Times made the decision to print the name of the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith, the nephew of Senator Edward Kennedy, of raping her at the Kennedy family home in Palm Beach. Editors at the Times said the use of her name on an NBC news broadcast took the matter “out of their hands.”

  Her name was printed in a profile that contained the allegation by an unidentified acquaintance that she had “a little wild streak,” what we in the trade call an anonymous pejorative, as well as the fact that her mother was named as the other woman in the divorce of a wealthy man she later married.

  It included information about the seventeen traffic tickets she has received in the last eight years, as well as an anecdote about a restaurant chef who fixed her pasta after closing time, then was “disappointed” when she went to a bar with him and struck up a conversation with other men.

  I imagined one of the editors for whom I have worked asking, “How does all this advance the story?” The answer is that it does not. It is the minutiae of skepticism.

  There is a serious argument to be made about whether journalists should follow society or anticipate it, whether our refusal to print the names of rape victims merely perpetuates the stigma, or whether changing the policy would merely thwart prosecutions and shatter lives.

  If we were to change diat policy, there could not be a worse case in which to do so dian this one. For NBC to change it in a case involving one of America’s most powerful families inevitably suggested diat the alleged victim had lost her privacy because of the Kennedy prestige. For The New York Times, a paper that has been justly proud of taking the lead on matters of journalistic moment, to announce that it was forced to follow was beneath its traditions. To do so in a story that contained not only the alleged victim’s “wild streak” but the past sexual history of her mother could not help suggesting that the use of the name was not informative but punitive.

  In the face of what we did in the Central Park case, the obvious conclusion was that women who graduate from Wellesley, have prestigious jobs, and are raped by a gang of black teenagers will be treated fairly by the press. And women who have “below average” high school grades, are well known at bars and dance clubs, and say that they have been raped by an acquaintance from an influential family after a night of drinking will not.

  If we had any doubt about whether there is still a stigma attached to rape, it is gone for good. Any woman reading the Times profile now knows that to accuse a well-connected man of rape will invite a thorough reading not only of her own past but of her mother’s and that she had better be ready to see not only her name but her drinking habits in print. I hope that the woman in Palm Beach, whose name I will not, need not, use, had some sense, however faint, of the pressures she would face. It could not have been a fully informed decision. I have been in the business of covering news for all my adult life, and even I could not have predicted this. Nor would I have wanted to.

  KIDS AND ANIMALS

  W. C. Fields hated to work with kids and animals; he said they always stole the spotlight. It’s different for a writer, particularly one who has kids and animals just hanging around the house waiting to be scrutinized. It never occurred to me not to write about my children when I started doing a column called “Life in the 30s” in 1986; first of all, I was writing about my own life, and second of all, they were all I had to work with. When I was tending a twenty-month-old and nursing an infant, I wasn’t exposed to much on a regular basis except bib overalls, diapers, toilet training, and monosyllables. Hell, it was a big day when I combed my hair, much less thought about NATO.

  But even I began to worry when I leaned over to my eldest one day, after he’d said yet another cute kid thing, and asked, “Can I use that?”

  Because I retired from column writing with the birth of our third child, our daughter, Maria, some readers had expected the column I began in 1990, “Public & Private,” to be “Life in the 30s II—the Daughter Also Rises.” It turned out to be something different, more public policy, less personal life, and I know I disappointed a fair number of readers by avoiding my children for large stretches of time. In print, that is. In real life the opposite was true. One day the editor of a very prominent magazine wrote to say that she found me difficult to track down for lunches and panels and other hoopla; why, she wondered, did I have this need to shun the spotlight, to be alone? I replied that I was almost never alone and that the rearing of three small children did not allow much time for socializing. It barely allows time for two columns a week and the occasional long shower.

  Although some of the readers were eager for me to reprise the kids, the dogs, and the husband, I was not. There were many reasons—I think columnists, like sharks, have to keep moving or die—but one of them was maturational. Two of my children can read now, and I do not want them to feel embarrassed by seeing themselves discussed in print for the edification of the public. I once talked to Phyllis Theroux, the wonderful essayist who has written regularly about her adolescent children, and she said that it’s not what you think—that you write an entire column about puberty and your fourteen-year-old daughter gets upset that you described her wearing leggings when no one wears leggings anymore. The photographer Sally Mann has said that her kids do not mind the exposure, even when they are nude. Like Ms. Theroux, she said the greatest concern is looking like geeks.

  But I didn’t want to take the chance. Leery of exposing my three-year-old in print, I knew I couldn’t do it to my teenagers someday. I remembered hearing my mother say “Good morning” and thinking about how vile was the invasion of privacy. And I liked my mother.

  Which means, not that I have stopped writing about children, but that I write about them in a different way. They interest me more generally now, in the way society treats them and the protections they allegedly enjoy. When I hear about a little boy who has been beaten to death by his mother, I respond on many levels, but one of the most important, and the truest, is as the mother of litle boys myself, litle boys whose injuries routinely break my heart. When I consider abortion, I think of it in part as the mother of a daughter. The day the Supreme Court handed down its landmark 1992 decision affirming Roe v. Wade but upholding certain state regulations, circumstances dictated that I read the opinion sitting on the front stoop with Maria blowing bubbles beside me. At one point, overwhelmed by the eloque
nce of the sentiments about the freedom of women, I turned to her and said, “Honey, no matter what, you’ll know your mom did what she could to keep women free.” Three years old and full of herself, my daughter replied, “Oh, Mama, don’t be silly.”

  Because they still say things like this, sometimes I still write about my kids, in ways that I hope will not embarrass them now or later. When I was pulling together a collection of my columns some years ago, I said I was worried about that, that the clippings would yellow and crumble but hardcovers were forever. I will always be grateful to my husband for his response. He said that our children would be lucky enough to be able to revisit parts of their lives through my work. And he said that one of the most mysterious things for many children was the question of how their parents felt about things, about sex and love and drugs and bigotry—not the broad outlines of their positions, but the nuance, the thought process, the history, and the background. He said that he thought it took most kids a long time—until they were adults, really—to figure out who their parents were aside from their position as personal adjuncts. “But it’s all right there for our kids,” he said, holding the galleys of the book.

  I write about kids differently now, but for the same reason I did when I wrote about weaning and sibling rivalry instead of parental leave and abortion notification statutes. I write about kids for my own sake, so that someday I can tell my own that I did the best I could to enjoin those who clobber the defenseless and disregard the concerns of the young. I write about them as the surest way to find out what I’m really made of, just as having diree children taught me that day by day, minute by minute. And if the collateral effect of that is that someday my children will read my words and think that I stood up for them in public as well as in private, I will be happy with what I’ve done.

  THE DAYS OF GILDED RIGATONI

  May 12, 1991

  Breakfast will be perfect. I know this from experience. Poached eggs expertly done, the toast in triangles, the juice fresh squeezed. A pot of coffee, a rose in a bud vase. A silver tray. I will eat every bit.

  Breakfast will be perfect, except that it will be all wrong. The eggs should be a mess, in some no-man’s-land between fried and scrambled, the toast underdone, the orange juice slopped over into the place where the jelly should be, if there were jelly, which there is not. Coffee lukewarm, tray steel-gray and suspiciously like a cookie sheet. I get to eat the yucky parts. I know this from experience.

  Today is Mother’s Day, and the room-service waiter at the hotel is bringing my breakfast. No handprint in a plaster-of-Paris circle with a ribbon through a hole in the top. Nothing made out of construction paper or macaroni spray-painted gold and glued to cardboard. This is a disaster. Any of the other 364 days of the year would be a wonderful time for a woman with small children to have a morning of peace and quiet. But solitary splendor on this day is like being a book with no reader. It raises that age-old question: If a mother screams in the forest and there are no children to hear it, is there any sound?

  It has become commonplace to complain that Mother’s Day is a manufactured holiday, cooked up by greeting-card moguls and covens of florists. But these complaints usually come from grownups who find themselves on a one-way street, who are stymied each year by the question of what to give a mature woman who says she has everything her heart desires except grandchildren.

  It has become commonplace to flog ourselves if we are mothers, with our limitations if we stay home with the kids, with our obligations if we take jobs. It’s why sometimes mothers who are not working outside their homes seem to suggest that the kids of those who are live on Chips Ahoy and walk barefoot through the snow to school. It’s why sometimes mothers with outside jobs feel moved to ask about those other women, allegedly without malice, “What do they do all day?”

  And amid that incomplete revolution in the job description, the commercial Mother’s Day seems designed to salute a mother who is an endangered species, if not an outright fraud. A mother who is pink instead of fuchsia. A mother who bakes cookies and never cheats with the microwave. A mother who does not swear or scream, who wears an apron and a patient smile.

  Not a mother who is away from home on a business trip on Mother’s Day. Not a mother who said, “You can fax it to me, honey” when her son said he had written something in school and who is now doomed to remember that sentence the rest of her miserable life.

  Not an imperfect mother.

  The Mother’s Day that means something, the Mother’s Day that is not a duty but a real holiday, is about the perfect mother. It is about the mother before she becomes the human being, when she is still the center of our universe, when we are very young.

  They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That’s why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a sheet of small handprints executed in finger paint.

  Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. Hassle city.

  The little ones do not forget. They cut and paste and sweat over palsied capital letters and things built of Popsicle sticks about which you must never say, “What is this?”

  Just for a little while, they believe in the perfect mom—that is, you, whoever and wherever you happen to be. “Everything I am,” they might say, “I owe to my mother.” And they believe they wrote the sentence themselves, even if they have to give you the card a couple of days late. Over the phone you can say, “They don’t make breakfast the way you make it.” And they will believe it. And it will be true.

  SUICIDE SOLUTION

  September 20, 1990

  It was two days before Christmas when Jay Vance blew off the bottom of his face with a shotgun still slippery with his best friend’s blood. He went second. Ray Belknap went first. Ray died and Jay lived, and people said that when you looked at Jay’s face afterward it was hard to tell which of them got the worst of the deal. “He just had no luck,” Ray’s mother would later say of her son to a writer from Rolling Stone, which was a considerable understatement.

  Jay and Ray are both dead now. They might be only two of an endless number of American teenagers in concert T-shirts who drop out of school and live from album to album and beer to beer, except for two things. The first was that they decided to kill themselves as 1985 drew to a close.

  The second is that their parents decided to blame it on rock ‘n’ roll.

  When it was first filed in Nevada, the lawsuit brought by the families of Jay Vance and Ray Belknap against the members of the English band Judas Priest and their record company was said to be heavy metal on trial. I would love to convict heavy metal of almost anything—I would rather be locked in a room with one hundred accordion players than listen to Metallica—but music has little to do with this litigation. It is a sad attempt by grieving grown-ups to say, in a public forum, what their boys had been saying privately for years: “Someone’s to blame for my failures, but it can’t be me.”

  The product liability suit, which sought $6.2 million in damages, contended that the boys were “mesmerized” by subliminal suicide messages on a Judas Priest album. The most famous subliminal before this case came to trial was the section of a Beatles song that fans believed hinted at the death of Paul McCartney. The enormous interest that surrounded this seems terribly silly now, when Paul McCartney, far from being dead, has become the oldest living cute boy in the world.

  There is nothing silly about the Judas Priest case—only something infinitely sad. Ray Belknap was eighteen. His parents split up before he was born. His mother has been married four times. Her last husband beat Ray with a belt, and, according to police, once threatened her with a gun while Ray watched. Like Jay Vance, Ray had a p
olice record and had quit high school after two years. Like Jay, he liked guns and beer and used marijuana, hallucinogens, and cocaine.

  Jay Vance, who died three years after the suicide attempt, his face a reconstructed Halloween mask, had a comparable coming of age. His mother was seventeen when he was born. When he was a child, she beat him often. As he got older, he beat her back. Once, checking himself into a detox center, he was asked, “What is your favorite leisure-time activity?” He answered, “Doing drugs.” Jay is said to have consumed two six-packs of beer a day. There’s a suicide note if I ever heard one.

  It is difficult to understand how anyone could blame covert musical mumbling for what happened to these boys. On paper they had little to live for. But the truth is that their lives were not unlike the lives of many kids who live for their stereos and their beer buzz, who open the door to the corridor of the next forty years and see a future as empty and truncated as a closet. “Get a life,” they say to one another. In the responsibility department, no one is home.

  They are legion. Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. There’s a new product on the market I call Parent in a Can. You can wipe a piece of paper on something in your kid’s room and then spray the paper with this chemical. Cocaine traces, and the paper will turn turquoise. Marijuana, reddish brown. So easy to use—and no messy heart-to-heart talks, no constant parental presence. Only $44.95 plus $5 shipping and handling to do in a minute what you should have been doing for years.