by Tom Braden
Mother’s Rule
Every summer since David was old enough to read, I have prepared children’s book lists for vacation reading. On the whole, the effort has not been successful, and I find myself doing it today out of habit and hope rather than confidence. Some of the books get read by some of the children, but the fact of an official list turns what might be fun into avoidable duty.
A better idea, it seems to me, is to go out and buy a lot of books—all the classic children’s books—and put them on the shelf and say nothing about it. Don’t say they are on the shelf or brag about what you have done. Say nothing.
Then later on—a year or so later on—you give Tommy a job, like mowing the lawn, and he says he can’t do it alone and you say, “Tom Sawyer knew how to get a fence white-washed.” You can tell from Tommy’s eyes that he knows that story.
Or Elizabeth, far too young to drive a car, says she wants to drive a car. You say, “You remember what happened to Toad in The Wind and the Willows?” Elizabeth laughs and you know that Elizabeth knows. You may gloat.
But if there is some book you feel a child must read, a book you consider absolutely essential to his learning and upbringing, you must follow my mother’s rule.
“All classics and ‘good’ books were ruined for me,” my mother wrote at the age of seventy-seven. “To this day I have to force myself even to read anything about a book like War and Peace. The ‘good’ books we force upon the young in contravention of our knowledge that the purpose of the young is to contravene. Therefore, learning must be secret and illegal. If you really want a child to read something, there is only one way: Hide it.”
My mother insisted that nobody had ever tried her rule. But I have. It works. I hide the “good” books, or I put them on the highest shelves. “These books up there are very personal,” I say, as I do so, “I wish you wouldn’t touch them.” It is a sure way to get a child to read anything you want him to read, from the Iliad to the Bible.
The opposite works too. Are there any books you do not want the children to read? Do you have any “dirty” books? Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Justine? Memoirs of Hecate County? Do not put them on a high shelf or in an out-of-the-way place, or warn any child not to read them. If you do, they will.
Mother’s rule works for other things than books. It worked, for example, in the case of the visit of Mollie Parnis, the New York dress designer, whose kindness to my daughters embarrassed me greatly until I thought to apply mother’s rule.
Mollie Parnis came to spend a weekend with us in a recent spring, and this in itself was mildly disconcerting because, as one of the world’s most accomplished and successful dress designers, Miss Parnis has long been able to accustom herself to comforts I cannot provide.
But she is such a genuinely friendly and warm person that I might have been able to put out of my head such worries as how she was going to get along in the spare bedroom with dogs and cats walking in and out most of the night, and a baseball game likely to start outside her window at 7 A.M. on the Saturday morning of her rest had it not been for the gifts she brought when she came.
Mollie arrived in an airport-rented limousine, explaining that she had to have a chauffeur bring her “because of the boxes.” The boxes were dresses; one for each of my daughters, five in all, and they made an imposing stack on the hall rug, once the chauffeur had set them down.
Opened, in the living room thereafter, they made me nervous. They were beautiful dresses. Some were simple, long, sleek and clinging; some were short and gay with pink ribbons and a certain swash. I knew, moreover, that they were expensive dresses. Three hundred dollars each? Five hundred? Naturally, I didn’t ask. The moment was coming, I knew, when the price of the dresses would cross Mollie’s mind.
For, of course, there was no way to get out of it. The girls must come down and try them on. Mollie had estimated sizes carefully, but as they trooped into the living room in their bib overalls and boots, and I heard her say, “It doesn’t really matter; if someone likes someone else’s, they can be altered, you know.” My heart sank.
For there they were, standing there, all five of them, as I say, in their bib overalls and boots, dressed as though for going fishing, but also—I knew and I knew Mollie did not—they were dressed as they wanted to be dressed, and as they thought it right and proper to dress.
I must say in their behalf they were good about it. They emitted minor exclamations as they opened the boxes, and they did actually take out the dresses and hold them up and most of them tried one on for size. I thought they looked great in their dresses. All of a sudden they had legs—quite good legs—and breasts—quite good breasts.
But they didn’t think they looked great and you could see they didn’t. By the time it was time for trying on the other dress, or time for Mollie to suggest more specifically the minor alteration she had noted, they had all sort of drifted off, and Joan and Mollie and I sat before the piles of paper and the half-empty boxes and the dresses draped on chairs, and felt suddenly alone.
I was profuse in my thanks and so was Joan. For that matter, the girls had all said “Thank you.” But somehow, I knew that Mollie knew, and I knew she must have been disappointed. We had a good weekend. Tommy did not get up a baseball game outside Mollie’s window and the girls all went off to swim at a quarry they know about in Virginia and were home in time for dinner and were pleasant at the table. But nothing more was said about the dresses.
Until after Mollie left. And then I asked Nancy, who happened to be there, and I asked in an understanding way. I asked, “Can’t you girls wear any of those dresses Miss Parnis brought for you?” And Nancy looked at me, a look that said “This is very secret,” and then she wrinkled her eyebrows. So I knew.
And then as if to spare my feelings, Nancy said, “Some people might, Dad. You know, the kind of people whose mothers dress them up or something. But it was nice of her.”
And so the Mollie Parnis dresses were put away, upstairs in the attic, in what we call the enormous room, a room full of Joan’s old clothes and shoes, by far the most expensively furnished room in the house. And I tried, with some success, to put the failure out of mind.
Until one day, just this past summer, when it occurred to me to try out Mother’s rule.
As I think I have made clear, all my daughters wear either blue jeans or bib overalls or old pairs of pants, and all wear them at all times. I think I have not mentioned the exception. They wear them at all times, except when you would expect them to wear them, such as to a barn dance.
For a barn dance, they go to their mother’s closet in the bedroom and take her most expensive dresses, showing a preference for those which have been newly cleaned and are wrapped in cellophane for the next occasion on which Joan wishes to wear them.
Partly because she works hard all day at an office, Joan is never quite ready to go out to dinner when the hour comes. I stand downstairs and say, at first calmly and then, as five-minute intervals elapse on my watch, with increasing annoyance, “Joan, are you coming?” And she calls back, “Yes, I am coming. Just a minute.” But sometimes she varies this routine. Sometimes she appears in person at the top of the stairs, without her dress on and she says, “Do you know what they did? I had my good white dress cleaned and ready and I just put it on and it has a spot and a dirty neck.” And then she adds, “It makes me so cross I can’t stand it.”
Joan never swears, never takes the name of the Lord in vain; very seldom gets angry, always understates her own emotions. But when she says she is “cross” she means she is about to go up the wall, and she is almost never “cross” except when one of the girls steals a dress.
One day last summer when Joan was out of town, I heard about the barn dance. I heard it from Susan, who said her friend, Mary Adams, was giving a barn dance and they were all going—Susan, Nancy, Joannie, Mary, even Elizabeth. Nothing was said about clothes, but I knew.
I also knew there was nothing I could do to prevent it. If I said, “I hope you wo
n’t take your mother’s clothes,” they would tell me that Joan had said they could; or that they were going to wear one of the old dresses put away in the enormous room. But something would go awry with that plan. The old dress would not fit, or would have “a big tear,” and this having been discovered at the last minute, there would be really nothing to do but to go to the bedroom and get one of the new ones.
I had been through this before. I knew what would happen. And then I bethought myself of the Mollie Parnis dresses. I wondered if I could find them.
It was very hot in the enormous room, and the dresses hung thick and close together, separated once in a while by some little boy’s suit that Tommy or Nicholas or David had worn once or twice or perhaps not at all.
But I found what I thought were the Mollie Parnis dresses, or at least some of them, and I took some downstairs the morning after I had talked to Susan and hung them in Joan’s closet—not all together, but interspersed among Joan’s clothes.
I was not there when the girls left for the barn dance, and I had been long asleep when they returned. But two adults whom I saw later in the week described my daughters as “knockouts,” and Joannie said to me on the next morning, which was Sunday, “Dad, four people told me I was beautiful.”
I said, “Congratulations. What dress did you wear?”
“Mother’s,” Joannie answered.
“Which one?” I asked in casual disapproval, and I looked up from the newspaper I was reading in bed. “Show me.”
Joan’s closet is right across from the bed, and it was open, and all her dresses were visible. So I did not have to strain to see the dress to which Joannie pointed. “Pretty, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Very pretty, but you shouldn’t have worn it.” I could hardly wait until she left the room to get out of bed and go look at the label. Mother’s rule had worked again.
One must not push Mother’s rule to the point of expecting that everything the rule entices a child to read will be something the child will like. I think, for example, of A Treasury of the Familiar, a book I like because it contains much of what I’d read as a boy, none of which my children read now.
Not that “Paul Revere’s Ride” is great poetry, nor “Old Ironsides” nor “The Last Leaf.” Nor that Webster wasn’t florid nor Tennyson imperialist nor Longfellow sentimental.
But it does seem to me that children ought to know some of these speeches and poems which their fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers knew by heart; not necessarily to like them, but to know they exist. Is it sentimental of me to think that children might want to know? My children ask me, “Dad, who was Oliver Wendell Holmes?” or “Who was Ralph Greenleaf Whittier?” They have run across the names in some social history of the United States. They have read Yeats, Frost, Stevens. But they have never read Longfellow, Bryant, Coleridge or Wordsworth.
My friend Stewart Alsop gave me A Treasury of the Familiar not long before he died, and I used it as bedside reading for a number of weeks. Having concluded that it contained things the children ought to read, I put it, when I had finished, on the highest shelf in the back bedroom—a shelf too high for me to reach without a stepladder. It was the same shelf and in the same spot where I had once attempted to hide De Sade’s Justine, a book I later found at David’s bedside. Joannie was the first to bite on A Treasury of the Familiar. I found her looking through it one evening while she was listening to records and I was preparing for bed.
“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise, “that’s the book Stewart Alsop gave me.”
“Yes,” said Joannie, “there’s an awful lot of bullshit in it. Listen to this: ‘The mossy marbles rest / On the lips that he has pressed / In their bloom.’”
I was a trifle saddened. Maybe she’s right. Maybe, I reflected, everything I ever thought romantic when I was young was bullshit. But I was not altogether downhearted. At least Joannie would not again ask, “Dad, who was Oliver Wendell Holmes?”
Our Rules
There are rules for living with eight children which I have found to stand the test of time.
Rule One: Nobody can go to the bathroom. I speak, of course, of trips in the car across the country or on weekend drives of length and duration. I speak also of the dinner table, and in particular of the dinner table at a public restaurant. A child of between five and ten who insists on having to leave the table in order to go to the bathroom is probably bored, and this may be my fault. It is at least worth the effort of trying to engage him in conversation and it is surprising, once this is accomplished, how often he quickly forgets that he wanted to go to the bathroom.
A child between ten and, say, fifteen who insists upon going to the bathroom from the dinner table usually goes in order to smoke a cigarette. Below the age of sixteen in our family it is forbidden to smoke. I don’t say the injunction has always been obeyed. But it still stands.
Obviously the bathroom rules cannot be enforced to the point of cruelty or embarrassment, but if the rule is mentioned frequently enough during the early years, it takes hold and need seldom be mentioned again.
Rule Two: Everybody eats the same thing. At home, of course, this rule merely states reality. It is abroad that it is necessary. Try going into a Howard Johnson’s sometime with eight children, each of whom wants a different main course and none of whom can quite make up his mind about dessert or “beverage,” as waitresses in Howard Johnson’s say.
I invented the rule at a Howard Johnson’s during a trip across the country. It was early evening. We had a little farther to go, and so, perhaps, did everyone else who had stopped at Howard Johnson’s. The place was packed, the waitresses overbusy, and everyone seemingly in a hurry.
The menu was, as usual, full of choices, and a children’s menu made choice more complicated. Eight different main courses had been ordered and six different flavors of ice cream and Tommy had decided to switch his order from the children’s menu to the adult because on the children’s menu you only got vanilla ice cream. Through all, I forebore and thought it was at last over and then, as an afterthought, the waitress said, “And what kind of dressing would you like on your salad? Roquefort, French, Thousand Island or Italian?” And Susan said, “What’s in Italian?” and I made up the rule.
From that time on, we enter the restaurant, we sit down, we look at the menu and we have a short discussion. I assess the various points of view and then the rule comes into play: Everyone eats the same thing and I’m the one who says to the waitress, “We’ll have ten.”
Rule Three: Lay Not Up Treasures. This is a rule I dislike a lot and I wish I did not have to hold to it. But over the years I have found too many of my children in tears or rages about the loss of their treasures to their brothers and sisters to come to any other conclusion than that with eight children, property cannot be hoarded.
This is not to say that there can be no property: Tommy’s bicycle is Tommy’s and does not belong to Nicholas. Susan’s dress is Susan’s, not Joannie’s. But it is Tommy’s bicycle or Susan’s dress only so long as it is in use by its owner, can be defended by its owner, or complained about if borrowed. What we have learned over the years is that we cannot hoard or store or put away.
As the oldest, David has suffered most from this rule, and suffered before it was a rule. I was as outraged as he when he discovered, after six months’ absence in Venezuela, that the possessions he had put away in his room had been rifled, his books dispersed, his pocket knife gone, his baseball glove and the football which was “Official NFL.” I made a scene about it. I said, “Can’t anybody in this house put something away and expect to find it when he gets back?”
The answer to that question is “Not if he has seven brothers and sisters.” As further experience buttressed the answer, it was necessary to prevent future shock by laying down the rule.
I don’t know whether I ought to be embarrassed about this, or whether it is a tribute to pragmatism. The children do not think of themselves as stealing from one anot
her. If Susan’s bicycle is down in the basement and she is away and will be away and cannot use her bicycle, why can’t Nancy ride it?
Maybe another way of stating the rule is that in a large family, all property is tainted by commonality. Things are to be used. If your brother or sister is not using a thing, use it.
Rule Four: Your Turn Next. Joan and I say those words a lot, often in response to the question: “When do I get to go?” But it works in many other situations too. It is strictly enforced because it is self-enforcing, both ways. I can’t buy four or five bicycles at Christmas, so I buy one. “It’s your turn next,” I say to him or her who doesn’t get a bicycle, and there is no doubt that I shall be reminded.
Rule Five: Let’s Let Nicholas Talk. It used to be Tommy and then Elizabeth and then Susan and so on up the line. The youngest in a large family has a difficult time getting to say anything because other voices are larger and more authoritative.
But not necessarily more conducive to the enjoyment of a meal. Nancy said one night at dinner that in the event Nelson Rockefeller ever ran for President, he would lose because of his record as Governor of New York. “Attica?” I ventured, referring to the controversy still going on about Rockefeller’s conduct of the prison riot. “No,” said Nancy, “I mean the laws he put through about penalties for possession of drugs. They’re horrible, and they haven’t done any good.”
This provoked vigorous discussion around the table and when it had subsided a little, I asked Nancy why, even supposing that the Rockefeller laws were as bad as she said, they would cause him to lose an election.
“Because all young people will vote against him,” she answered. Right away the discussion became generational, Joan and I maintaining that the average voter was middle-aged; Nancy holding that the near unanimous desire on the part of the eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds for retribution against Rockefeller—that and the righteousness of their cause—would carry the day. It was an argument that got nowhere. Nancy was growing angry. The other children were taking her side. We were facing the kind of blow-up which is not uncommon at our dinner table.
