by Tom Braden
I parked the car outside the hospital and got buckets of water from a nearby filling station and bought a sponge and washed the car. It takes just about as long to wash a car by hand as it does for Joan to have a baby. That was Susan’s birthday. But the day I remember best, a much colder and gloomier day was the day Elizabeth was born. Everything about that day was full of ugly portent, as though on Julius Caesar’s ides of March, a lioness had whelped upon the street.
It was not Joan’s fault that Elizabeth was the fifth girl in a row and it was not Elizabeth’s fault. Besides, I was not really depressed that she was the fifth girl in a row and I liked the bright red hair I saw on the top of her head. And yet, the whole event seemed irritating and tense; I paced the floor in nervous desperation as Joan and I chatted, until at last she said, “Why don’t you just go home?”
I think Joan had the impression that she had been a failure. I had said something offhand as I bent down to kiss her. “Gee, another girl.” It was not the thing to say. You have to be very careful about Joan when she has a baby. You have to say that it is the most beautiful baby ever born, even more beautiful than the last. And that the baby has the most beautiful mother. You have to say the nightgown Joan is wearing and which she has bought especially for the occasion is a particularly beautiful nightgown, and you have to say it in such a manner as to suggest that you wish to get into bed with her at once, which of course, you don’t, knowing how weak and sort of dopey from Demerol she is, and seeing that tiny, vulnerable thing lying there alongside. What if you rolled over on it? It’s a sexless moment but you have to pretend it isn’t—that is, unless you want Joan to burst into tears.
Which is exactly what she did on this occasion and with every good reason. I was, as she said, “cross.” I was abrupt; I paced the floor; I said things like “Well, I guess I better go now.”
This last was particularly insensitive. Joan and I had a thing we always did in honor of newborn babies. We always had dinner together in the hospital room for as long as she was there. The first night, it was something I went out and got for myself to eat. On the first night, Joan ate the hospital’s food, whatever the doctor ordered. But after that, the meals got better. Nothing from the hospital, that was our rule. I would go out to a good store and buy things fit to eat—things like sliced roast beef and homemade bread and consommé, which I would take home and then bring fresh from the refrigerator. Sometimes I would buy half a bottle of champagne, and once, a tiny tin of caviar. We made a party out of having babies.
But not with Elizabeth. I said, “I guess I’d better go now,” and Joan cried, not loudly nor complainingly, but softly and all alone.
I know now why I was the way I was—nervous and impatient and unable to sit down or think about anything for very long, even about staying in one place for very long. It was because I had stopped smoking.
A man should never stop smoking when he is having a baby. The effect upon him is nothing out of the ordinary; the well-known list of tortures: inability to relax; inability to work; inability to carry on a consecutive conversation; temper tantrums; loss of self-confidence; shyness; constipation; a tendency to acne … But these are nothing to the effect which stopping smoking has upon a man’s wife. I was not myself, and so Joan was not herself and as a result, the birth and the first few days of the life of Elizabeth were traumatic.
At first, I did not know how traumatic they were. Only Joan knew, and she had been exposed to knowledge I did not have. Until shortly before Elizabeth was born, Joan had been serving on one of those essentially decorative government commissions which abound in Washington and which afford free travel and hotel rooms for the hinterland laity to visit their capital city and “advise.” Before we moved from Washington to California, Joan had been executive assistant to the first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, a bright and beautiful woman named Oveta Culp Hobby. When Joan resigned, Mrs. Hobby appointed her as one of the public members of the Neurological Advisory Board of the National Institutes of Health.
This is not the place for a critique of the system by which the government pays people who know nothing about the subject to come to Washington to hear about it from those who do. Maybe the system of public membership on scientific Boards is the edifice which we Americans erect to our faith in the common sense of the people. Joan did not know anything about neurological diseases, nor, to the best of my observations, did any of her fellow public members on the Neurological Board. But four times a year they came to Washington to hear doctors who did know about neurology tell them why they wanted to spend their money the way they wanted to spend it and why they needed more.
It was at one of these meetings, the most recent one, that Joan heard a lecture and was shown pictures of how children behaved when they had such diseases. She says she told me about this—described it in detail—not only before Elizabeth was born, but afterward and often. My attention must have been elsewhere. If you want to get the attention of a man who has stopped smoking, you have to say or do something unusual. And Joan finally did.
At three one morning, during that first week after she got home from the hospital, I awoke to hear the sound of bare feet pacing up and down the long hall outside our bedroom door. Joan was carrying Elizabeth in her arms and crying. I called gently from the bed. “Anything wrong?” No answer. Standing now in the hall in my pajamas, and blinking at the light, I asked again, “What’s the matter?”
Joan was walking slowly up and down, the tears pouring down her cheeks. As she reached the point where I stood blocking the hallway, she suddenly pressed herself against me, and I held her tight. “There’s no cure,” she said softly, “there’s no cure for cerebral palsy.” The thought struck like a blow and somewhere deep under my stomach, the blow hurt. I disentangled myself, holding Joan out at arm’s length so I could look at her. “Cerebral palsy?” I repeated, “What about cerebral palsy?” “Look,” she replied. She held the baby out before her at arm’s length. It was a very tiny baby with red fringe over the ears and a very light red fuzz on top of the head; and the moment she was held straight out before her mother, her head fell forward.
I stood there under the bright bulbs in the hallway and tried to be calm and sensible. I took the baby from Joan and held her in my arms. She was sleepy but did not cry, and I patted her gently. Then, ever so softly and slowly, I moved my right hand downward from the back of her neck as she lay in my arms and, taking her with both hands at the waist, I held her out in front of me. At once, the head fell forward … Joan looked at me, forlorn and suddenly seeming very small and defenseless in her new nightgown. “You see?” was all she said.
It was necessary to take hold. Bluster is better than crying. “Now, look,” I said, “this is nonsense. I don’t know a damned thing about cerebral palsy and I don’t think you’re an expert after one lecture and a movie. Get to bed. Get to bed right now.” “I’m going to call Dr. Harvey,” Joan replied. “No,” I said. “It’s four o’clock in the morning and there’s nothing he can do about it now. Get to bed.”
I lay down and touched my feet to hers, which I always do because her feet are always cold. For a long time we lay there, not talking. Then Joan spoke, in a whisper. “Tom, what if she does?” I sat upright in bed. “We forget about her,” I answered. “We put her somewhere and we never go back and look. She was never in our life until four days ago, and if she has cerebral palsy, she never will be in our life. Now quit worrying about it and go to sleep and we’ll find out in the morning.”
It was a dreadful thing to say about Elizabeth, now that I look back on it, and not a very bright thing to say to Joan at the time. I don’t think either one of us slept. At eight, I called Dr. Harvey. “I think you’re talking a lot of foolishness. That’s the kind of thing I’d have noticed. But bring her over now.”
So, there we were in the tiny office and Stub took the baby and held her out in front of him and her head fell forward and he laughed out loud, turning his bright, twinkling eyes upon us as
we stood there watching. “What did you think? You have to hold a baby’s head. Elizabeth hasn’t got enough muscle to hold it straight up all by herself. Joan, you’re tired. I’m going to give you some quiet pills.” Then, turning to me: “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. After six babies, you ought to know more about babies’ necks than you do.”
Elizabeth is fifteen now and has a fine neck, which I notice once in a while when she pins her red hair up high just to show off or to look grown up. She always carries her head very high and it is a singular mark of gracefulness in this singularly graceful girl.
So there was never anything wrong with Elizabeth and never anything really wrong with Joan. A new mother is entitled to unnecessary worry, to periods of depression, even to hallucination.
I was the one who was wrong. I had disturbed her peace by the way I had behaved in the hospital. Sometimes when I think about Elizabeth I feel guilty and am glad that I can blame my conduct on the fact that I had stopped smoking.
Animals I Have Known
In the spring of 1974 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld, in the case of Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, a zoning ordinance on Long Island. Rather surprisingly, the majority opinion was written by William O. Douglas, who had for several years usually been heard in dissent.
I do not “reach,” as judges say, the merits of the Douglas opinion, which ordered six students in Belle Terre to vacate a one-family dwelling on the grounds that they were not, in the words of the town’s ordinance, “related to each other by blood, adoption or marriage.”
But there were some words in Mr. Justice Douglas’ opinion which made me wonder whether this extraordinarily conservative view was wholly unrelated to his experience with Elizabeth’s sheep.
Mr. Justice Douglas was sitting in our dining room one summer evening having dinner when suddenly the door opened and in came Elizabeth’s sheep. The sheep came straight for Justice Douglas, nudged him a little, and then, brushing hard by, got under the table in front of his chair, folded his legs front first, and stiffly, as sheep do, lay down under his feet.
I think Mr. Justice Douglas was surprised, but he evinced no displeasure and nobody said anything about it except Elizabeth, who remarked that the sheep’s name was Worthy.
However, the Justice later commented upon the encounter in conversation with friends, and remarked upon the singular fact that the sheep’s entrance had gone unchallenged. He called it—and I think he called it accurately—“strange.”
I remember the incident well and I recall my extreme annoyance when Worthy walked into the room. But I knew better than to try to do anything about it. I don’t know how long it had been since Mr. Justice Douglas dealt with a sheep. Once in a dining room, a sheep is exceedingly difficult to dislodge. A sheep does not come when called, will not take directions by gesture, is fast and clever at dodging, and if caught, can adopt a virtually immovable stance.
My point is that the reason nobody in the family said anything when Worthy got under Mr. Douglas’ feet was that everybody knew there was nothing to do. To try to get Worthy out of the room while the table was laid—and with the good tablecloth Joan had bought in Ireland reaching to just above the floor where Worthy lay—would have made a scene much worse than that which Mr. Douglas had witnessed and perhaps more disruptive than judicial temperament might tolerate.
So we said nothing and did nothing, and I can see why the Justice thought it was “strange.”
Anyhow, in the case of the Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, Mr. Douglas—joined for the first time in many a month by unaccustomed concurrences from such as Burger, C. J., Blackmun, Powell and Rehnquist—spoke approvingly of the police power to lay out places where, as he put it, “the blessings of quiet seclusion … make a sanctuary …”
Then came the clincher. The Justice quoted: “‘A nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place—like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard!’”
It was vivid, almost explosive language for an opinion of the Court and maybe it is only lingering embarrassment which suggests that the author of the opinion may have had a sheep under the dinner table in mind.
Worthy was named from the Bible, and if there was sacrilege in the name, it was at least exact. For Worthy was the lamb when I brought him home for Elizabeth one Christmas Eve and Elizabeth fed him warm milk from a bottle for a week or more, and he lay on a pillow near her bed.
Everybody loved Worthy very much and put up with the long baas which issued from the basement during the winter months before it came time for him to be turned out of doors to gambol in the spring. Inevitably, passers-by took great interest. “Woodrow Wilson kept some on the White House lawn during the war,” an old man told me. “Saved labor.”
We gossiped for a while. One advantage about having a sheep is that you get to know your neighbors. Policemen stop too, and one of them paid a call to point out the regulations in a thick book he carried. The regulations forbade “the keeping of livestock,” and he and I talked about whether a single lamb constituted “livestock.” We decided that maybe it did and maybe it didn’t but that Worthy wasn’t bothering anybody, and so he went away.
Worthy never did bother anybody except me and maybe Justice Douglas, and the reason was that he refused to think of himself as livestock. As the old man had pointed out, “That one doesn’t seem to like grass.”
He didn’t. He did not go out on the lawn and clip like Woodrow Wilson’s sheep but hung around the back door with the dogs, looking for a handout. He ate like the dogs (scraps of lamb, I once noted to my horror). He ran to the fence with the dogs to mark the passing by of other dogs, and most irritatingly, he came into the living room with the dogs whenever someone left the door slightly ajar, so that he could shove it open with his black nose.
It is well-known, I suppose, that unlike a dog, a sheep cannot be housebroken, and Worthy’s passing through the living room was always marked. As a veteran cleaner of rugs, I must admit that the marking was relatively easy to repair. Still, like all such markings, it was susceptible to being stepped upon, and then, of course, there was hard work to be done.
For many years, while the children were young, it fell to me to do this work. The younger children were incapable of doing it well, and Joan expressed such horror as to incapacitate her altogether. It occurs to me now that perhaps she wasn’t really as horrified as I thought; perhaps I was tricked into showing her that a man was not afraid to get his hands dirty.
As the children grew older, they took over the load; sometimes reluctantly and slowly; sometimes with insufficient application of soda water and salt; always with much argument about which animal was guilty and whose animal that animal was.
With Worthy there was no argument. But neither was there any remedy. In short, Worthy was a mistake, perhaps the worst mistake I have permitted, though not the only one.
I have never been able to figure out what to say to a child who brings home one more dog, or cat, or bird—or, to recall another mistake—one large boa constrictor.
Susan didn’t actually bring home the boa constrictor. One night after dinner, there was a knock on the door and two boys, high-school classmates of Susan’s, entered, carrying an enormous cage. It was hand-hewn, I could see at a glance, and sturdily constructed, with crossbars and heavy wire screening.
There were white pebbles on the floor of the cage, and the boys spilled a little as they made the sharp turn to get up the stairs to Susan’s bedroom. I stopped to pick up the pebbles from the hall rug, and that was when I noticed that inside the cage was an enormous snake, somewhat thicker than my forearm and about eight feet long.
“It’s a boa constrictor, for Susan’s birthday,” said Andy, the most polite as well as the sturdiest of Susan’s friends. “It won’t bother you any.” A lot of work and money had obviously gone into Susan’s birthday present. Should I protest?
Anyhow, in this event, Andy turned out to be right—for a while. Ben Boa was a very good and well-
behaved snake. Throughout that spring (Susan’s birthday is in May) and summer, he lay in his cage, occasionally twining himself around the crossbar and was no bother at all.
I confess that I did not like to see Ben Boa eat. Once a month Susan would ride her bike to a pet store and purchase for a dollar a small white rat, which she would insert into Ben Boa’s cage. I saw what happened the very first time and after that I did not watch any more or wish to hear about it from the younger children who not only liked to watch but enjoyed reciting detailed descriptions thereafter.
But aside from eating once a month, which is, after all, a pet snake’s due, Ben Boa was no trouble until Mrs. Long-worth took an interest in him and after that, he was a great trouble indeed.
Mrs. Longworth heard about Ben Boa at dinner one evening, and it reminded her at once of a pet snake she had kept in the White House, which she had christened Mabel, and which had annoyed her father, President Theodore Roosevelt.
“Only, he couldn’t really complain,” Mrs. Longworth told the children with that wicked narrowing of the eyes which she adopts when she is describing a victory, “because he had told all the younger ones in the family to love animals and he had given them all permission to bring home a pet.
“So what could Father say when I went out and bought a garter snake?
“But I knew he was awaiting his opportunity. One day when I was sixteen I was invited to a party aboard the Iselin yacht, and I wore Mabel around my neck. Of course, the press got ahold of it and it was in all the papers. Father sent me a telegram: ‘Alice, I told you to love animals. I did not tell you to love publicity.’”
When Mrs. Longworth heard about Ben Boa, she insisted at once on seeing him; not only that, but upon having him out of his cage and wrapped around her waist, a procedure which she described as “warming him.” The children took up the idea, and from that time, Ben Boa was frequently out of his cage, being warmed.
