by Kerr, Jean;
I liked her for that.
Then they were leaving. Dorette, for that was Anatole’s wife’s name, had forgotten her gloves, and I admit I felt a pang of jealousy as I noticed the intimate way that Anatole threw them to her.
Now Banal and I were alone. As I suspected, Banal was stormy and full of suspicion. How I hated him when he got this way. He kept asking me, again and again: “Are you sure, Monique, are you really sure that you have never seen the sea?”
But when I assured him, what was the truth, that I never had, he seemed comforted and became once more the sunny, smiling, handsome young man I found so repellent.
We were in Anatole’s open car. Overhead the sky was blue as a bruise.
The gleaming white road slipping under our wheels seemed like a ribbon of cotton candy. As I realized we were nearing the château, my heart turned over once, quickly and neatly, like a pancake on a griddle.
Anatole’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“Bored, darling?”
I turned to him.
“Of course—and you?”
His answering smile told me that he was.
And now we were running up the long flight of steps to the château hand in hand like two happy children, stopping only when Anatole had to recover his wind.
At the doorway he paused and gathered me into his arms. His voice, when he spoke, was like a melody played sweetly and in tune.
“My darling,” he said, “I hope I have made it perfectly clear that so far as I am concerned you are just another pickup.”
“Of course,” I whispered. How adult he was, and how indescribably dear.
So the golden days passed. Mostly we were silent, but occasionally we sat in the twilight and spoke wistfully of Dorette and Banal and what suckers they were.
And who could describe those nights? Never in my relationship with Banal had I felt anything like this. Ah, how rewarding it is to share the bed of a really mature man. For one thing, there was the clatter and the excitement four times a night as he leaped to the floor and stamped on his feet in an effort to get the circulation going. My little pet name for him, now, was Thumper.
The last day dawned cold and bright as a star. Anatole was waiting for me out in the car, so I packed my few belongings, ran a nail file through my curls, and joined him.
What shall I say of the pain of that ride back to Paris? In one sense, we were, both of us, precisely as weary as ever. Yet for the first time it wasn’t a shared weariness.
We pulled up to my front door, and then the blow fell.
‘‘Monique,” he said, “little one. I have been bored with you. Nobody can take that away from us. But the truth is, and I know how this will hurt you, I am even more bored with my wife. I’m going back to her.”
He was gone. I was alone. Alone, alone, alone. I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple story, prosaic even. And yet somehow I knew I could get a novel out of it.
Snowflaketime
I’ve been hearing that overproduction and high costs are killing the theatre, but I don’t know that I actually worried about such things until I saw Snowflaketime, the third-grade Christmas play at a school in Larchmont. Then it all came clear to me.
Here was a dazzling production with a chorus of sixty angels in pink gauze, who sang “The First Noel” three times. There was, in addition, a chorus of sixty angels in white gauze, who handed tinsel stars to the angels in pink gauze. There were twenty toy soldiers in red felt uniforms with gold rifles, of whom nineteen were able to march backward. There were 120 dancers “from every land” but mostly from the Balkan countries. There were two scarecrows who had taken tap-dancing and twelve jack-in-the-boxes.
Oh, the whole thing was a “triumph,’’ a “visual delight,” and a “stunning success.” But of course it will never pay off. Even with a 35-cent top and a capacity house (the house seats 600, with each mother seating one or two extra depending on the width of the mother), they’re going to have trouble getting their money back.
Our eight-year-old, who was wrapped in tissue paper and red ribbons and was supposed to be a present, was very distressed because two of the toy soldiers waved at the audience. As my husband remarked, that’s the kind of thing they could have cleaned up if they had taken the show to New Rochelle for a couple of weeks. But I imagine they were afraid of those out-of-town losses.
When I was in third grade we didn’t gear our productions to the tired business boy. We eschewed extravaganzas. Well, it wasn’t so much that we eschewed them; we’d never heard of them. We did the “great” plays—Nahaliel, the Shepherd, The Shepherd’s Gift, and The Young Shepherd Boy. We did them on a shoestring, but with the sense of doom and dedication of some movie actors doing a revival of Ibsen.
I always played the tallest shepherd. I wore my father’s old dressing gown and I said, “Full many a moon have I watched on yon hill, and ne’er saw I such a star as this.” In an effort to suggest great age, I used to make my voice creak and crackle like a short-wave receiver. All the shepherds were very, very old (the mystery is how they were ever able to watch any sheep), except for one shepherd boy whose characterization changed from year to year.
Sometimes he brought his flute, his only possession, and laid it in the manger. Other years he was lame and brought his crutch. He never came empty-handed and he always had a big scene in which he sobbed and said, “I, Nahaliel, have naught, naught save only this flute [or crook or crutch or whatever it was that year], but freely do I give it to THEE.” Then he threw himself down in the straw.
There was a part for an actress. I finally did play Nahaliel, but I started at the bottom. Actually, the first thing I played was part of the scenery. No one was allowed to nail anything to our stage floor, so all the scenery had to be held up by the students. On this occasion I stood behind a large balsam tree and with my free hand shook Lux flakes on Mary and Joseph as they passed, the while making low humming sounds to indicate the inclement state of the weather. My family regarded this triple accomplishment with mixed emotions. As a matter of fact, I don’t think my father’s were too mixed. I recall his inquiring bleakly, as the evening of my debut approached, “My God, do you mean we’re going to have to get dressed and go all the way up there to see her stand behind a tree?”
Our audiences, generally, came prepared for a profound emotional experience, which may explain why certain locations, directly behind pillars, were in great demand. We always had standees at the rear of the house, even when the auditorium was half empty. But we were proud, and the overhead was low.
Nowadays you hardly see a shepherd at all. As far as the school in Larchmont is concerned, I sensed a shift away from the serious theatre even before Christmas. Some weeks ago our oldest boy came home with the information that he was appearing in a Safety Play. His costume was to be very simple. He was playing a back tire. I asked him what his part consisted of, and he said, “Oh, mostly I just blow out.” What I want to know is, will this equip him to play the great parts like Lear or even a front tire? At that, I can scarcely wait for him to play Lear. It’ll be so much easier to make the costume.
I suppose that, for the untalented, all costumes are hard. John (age four) came home recently with a yellow slip pinned to his sleeve announcing that his nursery school was going to present Frosty, the Snowman, and John was playing—oh, the wonder of it! and why wasn’t there a phone call from Sam Zolotow?—Frosty.
“You can make the costume out of a worn sheet and an old top hat from the attic,” wrote his teacher. The note concluded with the inexplicable statement: “In the first scene Frosty is supposed to be half melted.” (Why tell me? As I explained to Johnny, it’s the actor’s job to characterize. I just make costumes.)
Johnny plowed upstairs ahead of me to find an old sheet in the linen closet, and the next thing I heard was a sob of anguish. “Mommy”—it was the cry of Oedipus on the heights of Colonus—“our sheets are GREEN!” And so they were. In a burst of whimsey some years ago I h
ad purchased all colored sheets. When I think of those Pepperell people, so full of loud talk about the myriad wonders that can be wrought with colored sheets! I’d like to see them try to make a snowman costume sometime.
But never mind the sheet. What old top hat? What attic? We don’t keep old top hats in our attic. We keep academic gowns, white Palm Beach suits that are bound to come back in style, and three storm windows that evidently belong to another house.
When it came right down to it, though, there was nothing to making that costume. By giving up lunch I whipped the whole thing up in less than a month. And finally the day arrived. Johnny was a superb Frosty. His was an exquisitely conceived, finely wrought performance—limpid, luminous, tender. When he took his bows there was tremendous applause, in which he enthusiastically joined. I could just hear him in Congress, forty years from now, referring to himself as “the able Senator from New York.”
This production ended, however, in a short tableau that said to me that the day of economy and sincerity was not wholly past. A small redheaded boy in a brown toga, with dirty sneakers showing briefly beneath, escorted a tiny girl in white dress and blue veil across the stage. He stopped suddenly and said, in a voice of piercing sweetness:
“Oh, Mary, ’tis a cold, cold night.”
Mary turned and said simply: “‘Tis.”
It won’t make a nickel, but it’s a great audience show.
How to get the best of your children
When I see lists of the great women of history, I always want to add the name of a woman who was a neighbor of mine in Washington. She crept into my heart forever one very hot day when, as I was passing directly under her window, I heard her say, in a quiet, musical voice, “Michael dear, Mommy doesn’t like you to drive your bicycle into the piano.”
That’s character. That’s forbearance. Now if it had been my piano and my Michael—well, we won’t go into that, there’s too much senseless violence in print already. But here we get to the nub of the problem.
The Everest of my ambition is to teach my children the simple precepts of existence—“Keep your fingers out of the plate,” “Don’t wear your underwear to bed,” “Keep out of Federal institutions”—and somehow arrive at golden middle age with my larynx intact.
No matter how I struggle to keep my voice out of that piercing upper register where, I am told, only dogs can hear it, my boys can always discover the one little chink in my armor of control. For instance, when it is my turn to get them up in the morning, I spring down the stairs (after three hours’ sleep), jaunty and adorable in my husband’s old dressing gown.
I brace myself against the dazzling sight of all those eager, ill-scrubbed faces. I tell myself that it is quite natural for children to be cheerful at seven o’clock in the morning. I further resolve that I am going to remain calm. Calm, do you hear—calm. As I see it, I’m not strong and I owe it to myself to maintain peace and—this is laughable—quiet. Discipline can come later when we are all up to it.
So I find three lost shoes, put a new cover on Colin’s speller, comb the entire house for thirty-two cents milk money, and untie Gilbert, who has been strapped to a chair with a cowboy belt while I was looking for the money. All this while I’m exuding such syrupy good cheer that the children are downright awed. I hear myself saying, in the cool, improbable tones of Betty Furness discussing a new icebox, “Just because he ate your crayons is no reason to hit him on the head with a coke bottle.”
When they are finally seated at breakfast, I watch the twins spell out their names in butter on the plastic place mats—but I refuse to get riled. When they all decide to make sandwiches of boiled egg and puffed wheat, I remind myself that after all they’re just Little Boys and we can cope with this sometime in the future.
Then I notice Christopher stirring his orange juice with an old pocket comb. At this point everything snaps and my wild, sweet soprano can be heard in Mamaroneck.
When I was younger and full of Dr. Spock I used to make the common mistake of trying to be “fair” with the children. At the peak of every crisis I would summon the entire brood from the four corners of the television set and ask stern, equivocal questions like “Who threw the calendar in the toilet?” Naturally, nobody did.
Now I rely on blind instinct. After assessing the evidence and asking myself a few routine questions like who was in the bathroom last and who is sopping wet, I seize the probable culprit, give him a little whack, and announce flatly, “So, you threw the calendar in the toilet!”
This undoubtedly leads to an occasional injustice, but you’d be surprised how it cuts down on the plumbing bills.
Another distressing aspect of disciplining young children is that somehow you are always left with the flat end of the dialogue—a straight man forever. It’s not just that you feel idiotic. The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old. Let’s say you hear a loud, horrifying crash from the bedroom, so you shout up:
“In heaven’s name, what was that?”
“What?”
“That awful noise.”
“What noise?”
“You didn’t hear that noise?”
“No. Did you?”
“Of course I did—I just told you.”
“What did it sound like?”
“Never mind what it sounded like. Just stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Stop it anyway!”
“I’m brushing my teeth. Shall I stop that?”
Obviously, this way lies madness. Personally, I knew I had to win this battle of dialectics or seek psychiatric care. I don’t promise that my solution will work equally well in all cases, but it does nicely around here. Nowadays when I hear that crash I merely call up, clearly and firmly, “Hey you, pick up your pants.”
I am, of course, operating on the absolute certainty that whoever it is will have at least one pair of pants on the floor. And the mere motion of picking them up will distract him, temporarily at least, from whatever mayhem he was involved in. As far as that crash is concerned, I never really wanted to know what it was. I just wanted it to stop.
Incidentally, the worst thing you can do when reprimanding children is to indicate the nature and the degree of your desperation. For instance, you accomplish nothing by throwing yourself on their mercy and asking piteously, “Are you trying to drive your poor mommy smack out of her mind?” Of course they are, but do you think they’ll admit it?
I find among my friends many examples of the insecure or “hit-and-run” type of disciplinarian. Little Kathie has deliberately thrown an unopened can of evaporated milk at Mother’s ear. So Mother responds by spanking Kathie’s behind with a bedroom slipper. (These are excellent for the purpose because, while the noise produced is awesome, the damage is negligible.) However, at the first sign of that golden tear trickling down Kathie’s cute little nose, Mother melts, clasps the little fiend to her breast, and murmurs, “Mommy didn’t mean it, Mommy’s a mean, mean mommy.” And so forth.
I will admit that on one notable occasion I had to fight against that impulse myself. When the children were really small we had a little game. I would say, “Are you my friend?” And they would answer, “I’m your good, true friend.”
Well, one night when the twins were about three I deposited the two of them in the bathtub while I put the baby to bed. As I was changing the baby on his table, I could hear the sloshing and splashing of what appeared to be an Aquacade in high gear. I called in several times, warning them to stop all the horsing around. Eventually I had to dump the baby in the crib and dash into the bathroom, where I smacked every fanny that was available (and you’d be astounded at how many fannies a pair of twins seem to have).
Then, as I beat my retreat back to the bedroom, there was an eerie silence—broken at last by Johnny, who announced in cold, sinister tones, “Well, she’s just lost tw
o good, true friends.”
I confess that the enormity of my loss did give me pause. I was unnerved for days.
Even at that, the pangs you get after you punish children are nothing compared to the problems that arise before you punish them. One day recently, after Christopher had left for school, I discovered that he had used my brand-new lipstick to draw a pirate’s treasure map on the floor of the garage. I was just waiting to get my hands on him when he arrived at four o’clock, all smiles and snatches of song.
And I was just starting to call to him when I heard him ask his father, “Hi, Dad, where is La Belle Señorita?”
Now what do you do in a case like that? Damned if I know.
Where did you put the aspirin?
I’d be the last one to say a word against our modern child psychologists. They try, they really try. I know that. So I am prepared to swallow a number of their curious notions, including even the thought-provoking statement that “children are our Friends.” This premise may be open to question, or even to hysterical laughter, but it probably does contain a germ of truth.
What I have no patience with is the growing tendency among psychologists to insist that children are really people, little adults—just like the rest of us, only smaller. Really, the impression you get in some quarters is that the only difference between children and grownups is that children don’t drink, smoke, or play bridge.
Come, come, men. We all know better than that. Children are different—mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively, and furthermore they’re all a little bit nuts.
Take a simple matter like going to bed. An adult will say, “If you want to sit up all night watching an old George Raft movie, okay, but I’m turning in.” And he turns in, and that’s the end of him until tomorrow morning.
