Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  And so I said, “Let’s let Nicholas talk.” And everybody fell silent and Nicholas gulped and said, “Well,” and brushed his hair back out of his eyes and told us about how the Egyptians buried their kings. He described the tunnels inside the pyramids and the routes of the grave robbers who wound their way to treasure nonetheless, and wound up with a dazzling description of the treasure which the robbers found.

  Nicholas had learned about the Egyptian kings that day in school and I found his story fascinating and infinitely peaceful, and now whenever there is an argument at dinner which threatens to test our tempers or to send someone rushing from the table in tears, I say, “Let’s let Nicholas talk.”

  Rule Six: Take an Aspirin and Lie Down. This rule has been enforced in our family for some twenty years, and it is really Joan’s rule. “Take an aspirin and lie down” is her remedy for every illness, and she is proud of the fact that through eight children, she has yet to purchase a thermometer.

  And never really needed one. The only time anybody in the family was thermometer-sick, she really wasn’t. I mean, we all thought little Joannie had had appendicitis. We thought so for many years. And then one day, I was playing golf with Dr. Harvey and we reached the eighth tee of the Oceanside golf course. It is a far-off tee, placed against the stubble of unused fields, and so it is a good tee for confidences.

  Stub and I had been talking casually about his job as a doctor as compared to mine as a newspaper editor, and I asked him whether he had ever made any ghastly mistakes.

  “Not really ghastly,” he answered, and then squinted at me sideways and pursed his lips the way Stub does when he is about to tell a plain truth. “I’ve made a few small mistakes,” he said, “like Joannie’s appendix.”

  I remembered the night of Joannie’s appendectomy. It was one of the occasions when Joan’s rule had seemed harsh and unmotherly. Joannie had been awake half the night with a pain she was too young to locate precisely or to explain and Stub had come and probed with his fingers and tried to establish by this procedure whether the sincerity of Joannie’s cry proved the location of the pain. And at last he made the diagnosis: To the hospital at once.

  “I made a nice incision,” he said, “and there was the appendix and I looked across the table at John [his partner] and he looked at me and we just rolled our eyes. It was as healthy an appendix as anybody ever saw.”

  So they took it out and little Joannie never will have appendicitis. But the point is she never did. The rule still stands. You’re not really sick. Take an aspirin and lie down.

  The Non-Conformists

  At the beginning, there was David, who spent most of his childhood holding a short pole with a string tied to one end and pretending to fish, under the dining-room table, or the piano or whatever roof he could find.

  David grew up to be a very private person, wearing his privacy in public as Mr. Nixon’s men wore their patriotism. The red hair grew very long—down to the shoulders and then beyond the shoulders, and became a badge of privacy that seemed to me to flaunt privacy in the same way that the little American flags in the buttonholes of Mr. Nixon’s men seemed to me to flaunt patriotism. But I have never been able to persuade David that his hair is anomaly to his purpose and that it makes some people angry and frightened.

  Like the policeman who stops him on the highway for tossing a cigarette out of the window; or like the sheriff in Freeburg, Missouri, who greeted him coming out of a restaurant: “My job, boy, is to escort you to the town line. Here in Freeburg we don’t tolerate folks like you.” He may have been surprised to find that the boy with the too-long red hair had a valid driver’s license, and nothing in his pockets to warrant an arrest, but the hair made up his mind. He escorted him. There was a time when David might have had something in his pockets to warrant an arrest. But that is another story and belongs under the chapter heading “The Anti-Saloon League and Me.” David no longer carries marijuana.

  He is quick; he is bright; he is an expert fly fisherman, a good soccer player and skier, a painter, a poet, a lumberjack and a construction worker. He has read all the books my mother told me to read—from Shakespeare to Ben Jonson, from Voltaire to Molière. He has traveled to Crete and to Afghanistan and to Venezuela. He speaks fluent French and Spanish. But David has no formal education. He will not go to college.

  He laughs at me in my gray suit and striped tie and ironed shirt. I should like to get him to conform too, but whenever I think about it, there comes before my mind’s eye a picture of myself and him which makes me ashamed.

  We are on a beach and we are playing touch football; my team against Dr. Harvey’s team. Up above us on the cliff to the left is our house, a gray dormitory of sea-sprayed wood with many windows. To our right is the sea, and the waves crash evenly and loudly. When they tumble, one has to shout so that the team members can hear the signals. These touch football games began as family affairs with Joan and little children—Dr. Harvey’s and mine—participating, and neighborhood kids who would drop over every Sunday afternoon to play.

  But they got out of hand; they got serious and big and the idea was to win. Active recruiting took place from around the town and from nearby Camp Pendleton. One winter, the participants included Princeton’s tailback of two seasons previous, an end from Bowdoin and a quarterback from Seton Hall. But Dr. Harvey and I continued as regulars, and so, by virtue of his relationship to me rather than his size and age, did thirteen-year-old David.

  I have forgotten what the score was—nothing to nothing, I suspect—but I remember that I had cut out left, and I turned to watch the ball arching high. It was a long pass, thrown by the Princeton tailback, and it floated to the corner near a large pile of sharp rocks which marked the imaginary goal line. There was David, racing in the clear, arms outstretched, reaching as the ball came down, taking it. And then, unbelievably, he dropped it. “God,” I said, “you didn’t—you didn’t drop it!” The exclamation is one I have taken back a thousand times in the years that have passed. Was the long hair, the “that’s your bag, Dad,” the iconoclast who was to come—was that a fear of failure, a desire to stand aside, and was that my fault?

  Maybe it would have happened anyhow, by nature or by the fashioning of the times. Maybe I blame myself too much. But I have to blame myself for the one result I know was a result, which was that David never played in those Sunday afternoon football games again.

  I worry about the radicalization of my daughter Mary. She went off to the University of California at Santa Barbara, a sweet, trusting, pretty blond girl with sloe eyes; graceful, and retaining from childhood a distinctive and rather attractive habit of walking upon her tiptoes, as though she were entering a room where good friends were asleep.

  She came back from the University of California at Santa Barbara wearing clod hoppers and blue jeans, hard-eyed, loud-voiced, old-shirted, and above all, angry. Angry, I noticed first, at Henry Kissinger. Casually, on the evening that she arrived home from college for her first vacation, her mother mentioned that Henry Kissinger was coming to dinner.

  Mary’s voice was full of scorn and her lips overactuated, a habit I have since noted, common to people her age who try to make up in exaggeration of expression what they are not sure about in fact. “You’re having a murderer to dinner, Mom? Henry Kissinger likes to kill babies.”

  Joan was shocked. She and Henry Kissinger have been friends for a long time, ever since one of the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller, for whom they both worked hard. “Henry Kissinger is a friend,” Joan said to Mary, maintaining calm. “He is my friend. I expect you to behave as I would behave toward a friend you had invited to dinner.”

  “One thing I will never do, Mom,” Mary answered, “is invite a murderer to dinner.”

  That was during her freshman year. Subsequently, there was a riot at the University of California at Santa Barbara, during which the Bank of America was burned down. As I recall, it was burned down twice. The bank rebuilt its building and the students ac
cepted the challenge and burned it down again. At any rate, the next time I saw Mary I inquired about the bank. “Did you see it happen?” I asked in the sympathetic tone with which one addresses an innocent young person who by accident of circumstance has been forced to witness crime. “Of course,” said Mary, “I was standing across the street demonstrating.” “My God,” I gasped, “you didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?” “Well,” she said, “I didn’t plant the bomb. I’m not even sure I approve of it. If you think of it as a bank, why the bank wasn’t really hurting anybody. But if you think of the bank as representing the system, then, of course …” She shrugged.

  I was thunderstruck. With difficulty, I refrained from starting my rejoinder with the phrase “No daughter of mine …” So I said, instead, “Burning a building is a crime. Burning this building was a mob crime, which is the most dangerous because the most contagious of crimes.” Something like that. I remember that I spoke slowly and chose my words with care. But I shall remember Mary’s rejoinder through the years to come. “I can see,” she said, “how, according to your understanding of society, you would think so.”

  I said nothing. What was I supposed to say? Or do? You can’t spank a nineteen-year-old. Besides, spanking Mary would provide her with precisely the evidence of brutal oppression which she seeks. Take her out of college? Education. A college education, so I was taught to believe, next to earning a living, was life’s major goal.

  Then what? It all seemed so sad. There she was once, I reflected, a nice little girl, getting good grades behind the protective stone walls of the Bishop’s School. And here she is now, still getting good grades … wait a minute. Hadn’t I read that there were professors and instructors at the University of California at Santa Barbara who were also charging the bank and demonstrating in the streets? Good grades. You don’t get good grades if your professors and instructors are displeased. Was my daughter no rebel after all? Was she perhaps a conformist?

  I looked at her again and I thought I saw her as she really was, repeating the political views of the recent Ph.D.’s who were her instructors, many of whom, as Henry Kissinger remarked in conversation, suffered from “occupational guilt” because earning their Ph.D.’s had permitted them to avoid the draft. She was dressed in the baggy blue jeans, the old shirt, the clod hoppers. She was wearing the regulation uniform and thinking the regulation thought. Suddenly, it all seemed clear. Mary was conforming, as I had once conformed, indeed as in my gray suit, my black shoes, my striped tie, I conformed now. “The thing to do with Mary,” I said to myself, “is to wait.” So I am waiting.

  Facing the New Morality

  Lewis Mumford, the historian-critic, told me when I was in college that through thirteen centuries the ethical code of mankind had not changed. I was too unwitting—or maybe too shy—to ask him whether he included abstention from fornication in the ethical code of mankind, but I presume he did. The major ethical works that I now know about prohibit it, and the Bible, for example, waxes extremely wroth on the subject, particularly in the Book of Revelation.

  But the ethical code of mankind must have changed sometime after I left college and before my daughter entered. I can’t place the year; I can only say that the change came to my attention in the fall of 1973, during a conversation with a dean at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

  It was not a satisfactory conversation. “My daughter,” I said to the dean, “is a freshman student at your college and two things happened to her recently which upset her very much. First, she studied late at your college library the other evening, and arriving at her room, she discovered that her roommate was in bed with … yes, that’s right. And the bed was only a foot away from her bed, and it was embarrassing, you see, and so she has a problem here that I don’t think she ought to have.

  “And then, second, she went off to a meeting last Tuesday of one of the clubs on your campus. She arrived a trifle late and opened the door to find a darkened room with a naked girl stretched out on the table while the other girls were sort of probing her and taking flash pictures at close range. ‘Get to Know Your Body’ was the theme of the meeting. My daughter was upset. In fact, she burst into tears while she was telling me about it.”

  I told the dean that I didn’t want Joannie, who was seventeen, to know I had called him and I said I wasn’t exactly complaining but only reporting and asking for information. “What is the policy of Antioch,” I asked, “on the subject of morality?” The dean did not answer my question then and there but said he would like a little time to look into the matters I had reported and that he would then get back to me.

  When I hung up the telephone, I was worried. Would my call embarrass Joannie? Would deans come poking around asking questions of her roommate and banning a campus club? Would Joannie be branded as a prude or a stool pigeon?

  I needen’t have worried. The dean didn’t ask any questions that Joannie was made aware of, either embarrassingly or, for that matter, at all. And he never called me back. I think he thought I was the prude and the stool pigeon, though it was about that time that Antioch’s Yellow Springs campus erupted in a student strike which closed the campus down and it may be that the dean simply had other things to do.

  Moreover, I do not intend to single out Antioch as possessed of more sin than other campuses. Now that fornication can be accomplished with little or no possibility that children will ensue, the words of the Jew of Malta strike a humorous note. “Thou hast committed fornication” is not much more guilt inspiring than “Look not upon the wine when it is red.” Because morals tend to bolster reason and reason tells girls that with the aid of a pill, they can go to bed with impunity.

  Perhaps this new-found freedom has made them assertive as well as curious about their bodies and their sex organs, and perhaps that accounts for the strange rites which Joannie observed in the darkened room.

  Other deans at other colleges have told me that the new morality is giving them fits. I happen to know the dean at Dartmouth, so I called him and asked him how Dartmouth was coping with it. “We no longer try to tell students they can’t cohabit,” he said. “The embarrassment comes when a roommate makes an official complaint. At that point, you have two bitter enemies, or will have when the other one hears about the complaint. So we split them up and move them as far apart as possible. But for the most part, we hope that roommates can make an accommodation on this problem as they do on others.”

  I must say I think this is not good enough. Morality is changing before a scientific discovery and I don’t know what the new morality will be. Will parents tell children they shouldn’t sleep with the opposite sex unless they like them a lot? And in the meantime, there are a lot of still quite young people who came to puberty before science had done its work, or at least before its work was well-known. They must be vast in number. They were taught that they shouldn’t sleep with the opposite sex, period. Joannie was one of them. In her eyes, what her roommate was doing was outrageous. Apparently, it is necessary for her to learn tolerance and to be of good will.

  But must the colleges come down quite so hard on the side of the new code? If fornication is no longer a bad word, if chastity is a joke, if lewd doesn’t mean what it used to mean, what about privacy? Or what about those words of Thomas Jefferson, “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind”? I think the deans of our colleges have yielded too easily. Respect, consideration, thoughtfulness and kindness, privacy and forbearance are still virtues worth inculcating. And when they fall before the strength of the new sexual morality, style loses meaning and, I should think, college dormitories become barns.

  I’m sure I sound old-fashioned. My son, David, brought a girl named Alice home one day and Joan and I, having been given suitable warning, took pains to arrange a suitable room for the guest. She stayed a few days, and she was pleasant as well as pretty. When she and David got into her car to drive back to her school, I said politely that I hoped she had been comfortable “up there in that garret room.”
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  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Braden,” she replied, with equal politeness. “David and I enjoyed it, but the bed is awfully small for two.”

  “Never mind,” I said to Joan, when the door had been closed and we had exchanged a glance of mutual horror, “the point is there was privacy if she wanted it; style was preserved.”

  Security Blankets

  On the inside back cover of an old scrapbook I kept when I was a boy, there is a rudely drawn map in red ink (a substitute for the blood with which pirates signed their warrants in the books I had been reading).

  This map was supposed to reveal the whereabouts of my father’s track medals, which I had taken from his bureau drawer, encased in a cigar box, and buried. “Three steps from box elder tree,” it says, and then, “six steps towards grocery store.”

  Steps in what direction, in what size? Alas, the map and the directions were inexact, as my father and I discovered, when, years later, I summoned the courage, or gained the maturity, to tell him what had happened to his track medals.

  We dug all around and we failed. The map was useless except as a reminder of what children can do to an adult’s security blanket.

  “Never mind,” my father said. “Don’t worry about it,” but I remembered his remembering that one of the medals was for a first place in the hundred-yard dash at the Drake relays and I suspect that I deprived him of a security blanket, something he couldn’t rationally care about but nevertheless did.

  An adult security blanket is important. Suppose that Citizen Kane had kept Rosebud—that sled which turns up in the flames outside the warehouse during the last scene. Suppose he had carted it around with him from one closet to another and one house to another. Wouldn’t he have been spared that lifetime of trying to compensate?