by Tom Braden
When you think about your children, guilt runs deep. The time you didn’t spend; the toys you should have bought instead of those you did buy; the tennis court you could never afford; the music lessons not given; the dancing classes ignored, and ignored despite your knowledge that Elizabeth wanted to go to them, and is naturally an extremely graceful girl, and acrobatic as well. All those other talents and interests you forgot to push, or didn’t have time to push, or money to push with.
And the moments which may have been or may turn out to be crucial—moments when courses in college were chosen and you promised to consult and didn’t. Why is Nicky the only child in the family who can’t really swim, who never learned to make a stroke but only how to duck and tumble in the waves? Because you never taught him to swim, that’s why. You taught all the others and ignored Nicky because you were too busy at the time when Nicky should have learned to swim.
And if you didn’t spend enough time, you spent too much time. Why did it take David so long to go to college? And why is he so diffident about it? Because you pushed college at him so hard and so often and with such vigor that college began to terrify him, that’s why, and if he never gets an education, it’s your fault.
“It’s your fault,” is a sentence frequently used in a house containing eight children. It is used when the milk gets spilled and the glass gets broken and the lawn mower is left out in the rain and the shoes are lost and the phonograph records are left on the floor and the car is damaged. My son, Nicholas, at nine, has developed a defensive statement of the facts as he sees them. He goes about all day, repeating to himself, in singsong manner, “It’s not my fault; it’s not my fault; not my fault.” Nicholas emphasizes first the word “my” and then the word “fault,” as though he were trying out in his mind which manner of saying the sentence “It’s not my fault” rings the more solidly or gives him the greater satisfaction.
It occurred to me the other day that maybe there is logic and peace of mind in Nicholas’ discovery. Joan and I were talking about Nancy and the love affair and David and college and we were feeling guilty as usual and asking each other what ought to be done, and suddenly Nicholas’ favorite sentence came to mind. And I said to myself, why not? I have, I said to myself, provided a roof and meals and a place to play. I have provided schooling. I have provided advice. I have provided transportation. I have provided books. I have provided vacations. If I skipped the tennis lessons, I nevertheless provided riding lessons; silly, maybe, but that’s what they said they wanted. I skipped some other things. But I did the best I could. Not the best of all possible worlds, but the best I could do.
So if somebody doesn’t want to go to college; if somebody insists on a silly and premature love affair; if somebody is not going to turn out the way I think he or she would like himself to turn out; if, indeed, every one of them wants to say “The hell with it—I won’t do what I’m supposed to do,” and it all ends badly and someday I wake up to news that one of them is in jail, and I ought to be ashamed, you know what I’ll do? I won’t feel guilty. I’ll imitate Nicholas. I’ll go around saying to myself, “It’s not my fault.”
I said that to Joan and it sounded pretty good when I said it. “Damned if I’ll ever feel guilty,” I said. But, of course, I know I will.
The Go-Girl
Once upon a time there was a girl who did everything right and was not a goody-goody. She was good looking but never had to run the dangers of being thought beautiful. She was a good athlete but not a tomboy; a good student but not a grind; responsible but to common sense; not a stickler for rules; brave but accustomed to fear. In everything she did, she made an effort and therefore everything she did she enjoyed doing.
This girl was named Susan and I wonder what happens to such girls. Do they marry a John Adams, like Abigail, and influence history in ways which scholars eventually discern? Are they the unknown stalwarts who, according to the Talmud, uplift the world on their shoulders? Are they the Sarahs of the world like the one in the Bible who was remembered because she was cheerful?
Or does the world eventually twist these Susans who greet it so fully and with such steadfast mien, misshaping their spirit, poisoning them with such meanness and cruelty as the world can bestow?
I ask the question because experience tells me that there are more Susans at fourteen than there are at thirty and more at thirty than at fifty. Something must happen to them along the way, some accident, some husband, some bottle of gin. And sometimes, of course, they get through. We all know a few Susans, but not, I think, very many.
In the meantime, however, it is very pleasant to sit back and enjoy them. What is Susan doing now? She is playing hard tennis; she is speaking Spanish; she is waterskiing; she is playing second base on a team in which the other positions are played by eight boys; she is out running the mile; she is correcting her father’s temper, saying, “Dad, you’re being ridiculous”; she is reading history; she has gone to Mexico.
It doesn’t matter what she is doing because if Susan is doing something, it is worth doing and she is doing it well and cheerfully, and with enough effort to learn from doing it. Or, if she is going somewhere, she is going responsibly and gracefully, taking pleasure in the going and she will get back when she says she will.
I worry about Mary, Nancy and Elizabeth being out late for many reasons. I worry about Joannie being out late because Joannie is so little and so sweet and so kind that she stirs up my protective instincts and I fear she may have met some circumstance she cannot overcome and that I ought to go at once and help. I never worry about Susan being out late because it gives me pleasure to think that she must be having a good time.
People say—Nancy sometimes says—“Susan is Dad’s favorite.” It is not true. I have no favorites. What is true is that I hardly ever disapprove of Susan, and the reason for that is that she seldom does anything to deserve it. Nor is she the object of jealousy from her brothers and sisters. It is hard to be jealous of somebody who is always up and doing. Logic says, “If I am jealous, why don’t I be up and doing myself?” Or, as Joannie puts it, “God, that Susan!”
I wish I were equally sure of the reason for Susan. Why do not all people know that the fun is in the trying?
“You ought to tell her not to apply to Dartmouth,” a friend told me. “Her SAT’s are very low, and she’ll never make it.” So I broached the subject. “I’m not worried, Dad,” said Susan. “Those Dartmouth guys think they’re such big shots. I can do anything they can.” “All right,” I said, “but what if you don’t make it?” “Then I’ll do something else,” she answered. “And the only thing I’d be sorry about is that I didn’t have a chance to try.”
So she applied and was rejected and she took it pretty well but I knew she was hurt. “Those damned SAT’s.” I felt that way, too. I hate SAT’s. First Mary, then Joannie, then Susan had gone through high school, often to more than one high school, getting good grades—A’s and B’s, and mostly A’s—and then gone off to some testing center to be rated as a dummy by the SAT’s.
Seven-hundred scores is what colleges look for in the SAT, or six hundred at the least, and my children were coming home with scores in the five-hundred range and in tears. I remember standing out in front of the house one day, picking some weeds out of the pachysandra and the car came up and Joannie got out, running into the house as fast as she could and she was crying uncontrollably. I caught up with her and held her tight and tried to get her to stop and all she could sob out was “I can’t, Dad. I can’t. I try and try and I can’t.” Joannie took SAT’s three times and three times she failed. And Nancy. The best grades in the family. Straight A’s right through high school. Top of the class. Low SAT’s. I think the SAT’s are responsible for Nancy’s decision to stay out of college and go off to Alaska with the love affair. Oh, I know the testers who make up the SAT would not say she failed. But for a child with good grades and ambitions for college, a score in the four hundreds or low five hundreds is a failure and I think I do
not exaggerate when I say it must blight some of them for life. For it says to them at a very early age, “There is not much point in your trying. You are not very bright.”
And I’m not sure that’s true. Professor Banesh Hoffman in his book The Tyranny of Testing says it isn’t. The really bright student, he says, does poorly on the SAT’s because the really bright student is stumped by the ambiguity of the multiple choice questions. He knows too much. I like some of Hoffman’s examples of this ambiguity: “George Washington was born on February 22, 1732. True. False.” As Professor Hoffman points out, anyone with a superficial knowledge of George Washington will say that the statement is true and “true” is the correct answer. But anyone with more than superficial knowledge might choose “false” as the answer because anyone with more than superficial knowledge knows that Washington was born under the Julian calendar, which reckoned that the date of his birth was February 11.
Or again, Hoffman points to the following test question: “‘Emperor’ is the name of: (A) a string quartet; (B) a piano concerto; (C) a violin sonata.” An average student answers (B) because an average student knows about Beethoven’s piano concerto. But more well-informed students are stumped. They know about Beethoven’s concerto but they also know about Haydn’s quartet. So they wonder: Did the man who wrote the question know too?
But my favorite question among those which Dr. Hoffman uses is about the wind. It is my favorite because it seems to me totally ambiguous and I would have no way of deciding which answer was right and which wrong: “If we cannot make the wind blow when and where we wish it to blow, we can at least make use of its: (A) source; (B) heat; (C) direction; (D) force; (E) atmosphere.” The correct answer is (D) but I do not see why a student shouldn’t with equal logic choose (C), and Hoffman points out that a scientifically minded student who knows that “source of the wind” implies the combination of the heat of the sun and the rotation of the earth might well choose (A).
I don’t say my children are really bright students. But Mary got A’s and B’s in high school, a mediocre SAT score and A’s and B’s in college.
I have talked to college admissions officers about this correlation and they all tell me that, of course, SAT’s don’t measure effort or initiative or patience or determination. They admit too that SAT’s can’t measure a person’s ability to express himself clearly or forcefully or gracefully or even to reason excellently. An incorrect conclusion, Hoffman points out, arrived at by excellent argument, often has greater merit than a correct conclusion arrived at by appalling illogic or simple memorization of the professor’s lecture. SAT’s take no account of this truth.
But, the college admissions officers say, they only use SAT’s as “one factor” in determining college admissions. The letter from Dartmouth that Susan got said that too. But it said that in this instance, the one factor was determining because the average SAT scores of Dartmouth’s entering class would be in the high six hundreds and Susan’s middle five hundred was “out of range.”
There wasn’t anything I could do about it, I explained to Susan. “If it were some other college,” I told her, “I’d try. But Dartmouth is special to me. I went there. I’m on the board there. The man who wrote you that letter is an old and valued friend. This is the one time and in the one place where I can’t help.”
Susan understood. My wife did not. Joan arched her back like a mother cat whose kittens are under siege. I was to go to Dartmouth’s President Kemeny, Joan said. I was to insist that a mistake had been made. “I can’t,” I explained. “You are asking me to go over the head of an old friend who has made a decision he thinks is correct and which he very much wishes he didn’t have to make, and you want me to tell his boss that he is wrong. I can’t do that.” “Tom Braden,” Joan replied, “you are wrong.” “No,” I answered, “I am not wrong. There are some things you can’t do for your own children and this is one of them.”
And so we left it. And one afternoon while Dartmouth’s trustrees were seated around their table discussing affairs of moment to the college, Joan walked into the office of President John Kemeny and left a note of moment to Susan.
I didn’t know about it at the time and when I discovered what my wife had done I was embarrassed. I called my friend, the admissions officer, and I apologized. I felt guilty the next time I saw Dartmouth’s president. I thought maybe the other trustees were looking upon me as one who had let down the side. Honorable men, all of them. I was sure they would not have taken advantage of their position. Moreover, I remarked to Joan, I was sure they had greater control over their wives.
I felt these things deeply, so much so that I found myself skipping the next trustees’ meeting. I would have felt as though they were all looking at me.
Moreover, as Kemeny pointed out to Joan—or so she told me—what Joan did might be harmful to Susan. Not being admitted was a painful blow but flunking out would be more painful. He had wanted Joan to understand the implications of the decision she was making. If she was willing to accept those implications, he was willing to reconsider.
So I worried about the implications and I worried about what Joan had done and I worried about my friend, the admissions officer, and my relationship with him, and I worried about the fact that the whole episode left me feeling guilty. And then Susan’s first grades arrived in the mail one morning and there it was again—A’s and B’s.
Maybe another thing that SAT’s don’t measure is whether the girl who takes them also takes the advice of her father—as Susan does. I don’t mean on the tests, but in general. I told Susan she was a fool if she started to smoke. I told Susan she’d be better off to read a good book or improve her tennis than to hang around during the summer with a gang whose object appears to be to hang around. I told Susan that the great mistake most people made in all of life was not to try. I’ve told all the rest of my girls these things too, but they don’t pay quite so much attention.
Every morning during the decade of the sixties I got up in our Oceanside house and went down the steps and ran a mile along the beach. And one morning, I looked back a couple of hundred yards and there was a trim six-year-old racing along behind me. We kept that up, Susan and I, for years, and sometimes others came along, Nancy particularly, but not every single morning, rain or shine, summer or winter, as Susan did.
After a while, Susan was no longer catching up with me, but I was working hard, ploughing through sand, trying to stay in step with her. I reminded her of that fact not long ago and she laughed and said, “Go, Dad. Go.”
That’s the way it is with Susan.
Help
My friend Joseph Alsop says that “help” is a nice-nelly word and refuses to use it. “‘Servant,’” Joe says, “is accurate and objective, while ‘help’ is not quite accurate because it is subjective, indicating the obeisance of him who is served to the great god of egalitarianism.”
Joe may be right for himself. He is wrong for me. I have hired a lot of people over the years to help Joan and me bring up eight children. Some of them have helped and some of them have hindered. But by none have I ever felt served.
I don’t mean that I haven’t been grateful. I think for example of Beatrice. Beatrice was born on a Maryland farm and she is still a country girl at heart, honest and open and trusting. I am sure she thinks of herself also as help and not as a servant. And, perhaps partly as a result of how she thinks of herself, Beatrice is a friend who has been steady as a rock in times of crisis and is always reliable, always there.
I pay Beatrice, and pay her pretty well and I should, because she comes in every morning surely and leaves late. But throughout many long days, I don’t remember Joan and me ever giving her an “order.” In our family we cope and Beatrice knows we are coping and she helps and we are grateful.
Beatrice and I are the joint keepers of the keys, that is, we both have a set and she lends me hers when I have mislaid mine. Therefore, we are both authority figures. Our keys unlock the liquor closet, the laundry room
, and a small room in the kitchen in which I presume some former owner of our old house sheltered his fine silver. Beatrice uses it to shelter anything that is impossible to preserve in the open.
Thus, Beatrice’s closet hides Triscuits, cigarettes, vases, the good napkins, a spare corkscrew and peanut butter.
The Triscuits are for Joan, who likes them and could never have them if they were put in the kitchen because the children, who don’t really care what they eat after school so long as they eat, would wipe them out daily. The cigarettes and good napkins are also hidden against children, particularly Elizabeth, who pretends she doesn’t smoke, and against Tommy, who has used good napkins to clean up dog messes. The spare corkscrew is for me and is hidden against guests of the children who bring in bottles of wine, consume them in upstairs rooms, and ditch the bottle and the corkscrew under the bed.
The vases are hidden against the wagging tails of dogs, and the spare peanut butter means there is only one jar of peanut butter in the kitchen at any one time, whereas, if there were two or three, the children—for some reason I have never fathomed—would open them all.
I know a man who has three well-behaved and well-cared-for children and who has said of me and of my family, “Those Bradens are gypsies.” His remark was reported to me, and the reporter, I think, was surprised that I took no offense whatever. I think the description is accurate, and Beatrice’s closet helps to prove it. It contains the gypsy hoard.
The laundry room is also locked, not in order to hoard clothing but to preserve the machinery, and to try to bring some order to the washing and ironing of clothes. We got along all right with an unlocked laundry room until the children were able to wash their own blue jeans. You’d think this stage might be a welcome one to a large family, but it is not so. As everybody knows, the thing to do with a new pair of blue jeans is not to wear them but to wash them—a hundred times and more—before you think of putting them on. “That washing machine is gone already,” Beatrice reported one day in September, speaking of a washing machine we had acquired the previous Christmas. “It’s been done in by overalls.” When the children washed their blue jeans, the clothes which Beatrice was washing were put aside by each successive blue-jean washer and successive blue-jean washers usually left the dryer on too, with a pair of tennis shoes bouncing around inside.
