CHAPTER 2

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

THROUGH EARLY CHILDHOOD INCIDENTS

When I was four years old my tonsils and adenoids were removed in a New York Hospital. I remember the trips to the doctor and the ominous news that I would be "totally deaf" if the operation were not done. I still have a slightly sick feeling when I think about the slick ball with elastic that I was given as a present to cheer me up. My mother had prepared me to do whatever the doctors and nurses told me to do. As they took me on the gurney to the operating room, I remember thinking that they were acting as if I was going to resist, but I knew better.

After I got home, I argued at length with my brother Paul who wanted to tell me that they had put a knife down my throat, but I insisted that all they did was put a sieve with a funny smell over my face. A couple of days afterwards I hemorrhaged quite frighteningly, and I can see my mother and father and the doctor beside me through the night, and lots of blood on the white coverlet.

I must have been 5 or so when I discovered the velocipede in the attic. I had wandered up to the 3rd floor quite innocently on a cold day in the middle of December. There was a most beautiful shiny new tricycle. Somehow I sensed that I must keep it a secret, but I was hoping that it was meant for me for Christmas. Christmas morning we had quite a ritual of marching in to see the tree. Sure enough, there was the tricycle, but it was for John, with an added note that he was to give Carol a ride when she wanted it. This was a time when I had to swallow all my feelings one could not express negative things about Christmas, but I never felt any pleasure in the velocipede and I never remember John interpreting the instructions as I did.

"Going for a drive" meant a leisurely spin in the car at about 15 to 20 miles an hour and was one of the new wonders of living in the "modern world". The ultimate in recklessness was represented by my Uncle Roy who once got his car to go 40 miles an hour! A drive might have a destination such as making a call on family friends or doing an errand, but more often it was considered as a special treat in itself. The earliest car I can remember had to be cranked,seven years old. I knew that perfectly well of course. Then she said that little children sometimes couldn't tell the difference between the truth and lying. But when you got to be seven you were big enough to tell the difference. For instance had I really seen the rabbit on the drive last Sunday? I began to hem and haw, "well I wasn't sure..."

That was what was good about Mother. She didn't punish me. She didn't humiliate me more than I needed to be humiliated just to know that she knew was enough. She took the time to let me think it through, and helped me see that I had a choice. I never cheated at cat counting again. And I never forgot the lesson.

That same summer when I was seven was spent at "Twelve Oaks" in Point Pleasant. Twelve Oaks was the home of my Great Grandmother Havens. After the death of her husband, she lived there with her unmarried daughter, Aunt Dora. Aunt Dora dressed in gray and Great Grandmother in black. They both seemed stifled in multiple layers of clothes, as if respectability were determined by stiff outergarments, as impenetrable as possible. They also seemed equally ancient, although Great Grandmother seemed less formidable to me than Aunt Dora. Their deaths were the first I remember. My main emotion was one of disappointment that my great grandmother had not reached l00. But then that was what happened to really old people.

Now that the house was vacant, my grandparents invited our family to spend the summer there. The best part was that Point Pleasant was a summer resort. The ocean and river sports were both available. This was 1923. It was a time of relative prosperity. Twelve Oaks was more than big enough to house our family of six and my parents invited their good friends the Barlows to stay there for part of the summer too. They had two children, Bobby who was Paul's age, and Anne who was younger than Molly, but who liked to be paired off with Molly rather than with me. Then there were my Havens cousins. There were four children in their family and they were fascinating for several reasons. First they were all considered very handsome with "naturally curly hair" and raw good looks; and second because they seemed a lot more sophisticated and worldly. They lived cross lots from Twelve Oaks in a large new house with a tennis court.

But there was always a slight cloud in our relationship. Their mother was a large Danish woman with high coloring and beautiful blue eyes. She believed in having a good time more than in keeping house or raising children. The children were Roy, Jean, Margaret and Evelyn. Margaret and Evelyn were both older than I, but they were the two with whom I played . They were indulged but neglected. They never seemed to have regular meals whereas in our house meals were quite formal. They taught me all the dirty words and jokes I ever knew as a child. How quickly one senses what is "wicked" and how attractive it seems!

Mother was obviously aware that they lacked supervision and limited the amount of time we could spend together. I've often wondered thinking back how it could have been handled differently. Mother's reaction to "bad influences" was to say, "When bad cats come go away..." I was no better in raising my own children years later. Why should I knock myself out to give them good values, and then let some older kids take over and undo everything? Yet I've admired families who, along with their own offspring, have adopted or raised older children with frightening problems.

1923 was the summer of Barney Google and "Yes we have no Bananas". (I always thought my brother Paul had written that because he was the first person I heard sing it.) He and Bobby Barlow made a surf board named SPARKPLUG, painted in red letters on a white background. My father and Mr. Barlow had to work during the week, but they came down by train every weekend. There were bay parties and events John and I were too little to be allowed to go on, but I did get to go on one bay party on a motor launch. The rented motor launch was called "The Onaway". A second cousin, Paul Swain Havens, was one of the guests on the upper deck. How he charmed me! He must have been in his early twenties (later he became President of Wilson College), but he was kind enough to humor a little girl. I would take his hat when he wasn't looking and he would act surprised. After a bit mother called me over to her and told me that I mustn't do it any more, that he was being polite, but I was rude. Indelible lesson

things are not always what they seem.

Another time when I had to stay home with a pretty black servant as a baby sitter, she took me into her room and showed me the dress she was making for herself. It was made of pieces of scarlet and black satin and I had never seen anything lovelier. The only other thing I remember about her is that she left the iron on. In those days an electric iron was a luxury (replacing the sadirons that had to be tediously heated on the stove). But there was no such thing as an automatic turn off. If you left the iron "on" and walked away, it would got hotter and hotter until it burned the house down. By the time the iron was discovered it had scorched through the ironing board. That was frightening enough.

"Hare and Hounds" was a favorite game that summer. The sandy pine woods across the street was the starting point. The "Hares" had a head start, and, with a piece of chalk, were required to draw arrows on trees or sidewalks to leave a trail. The game I remember best included Aunt Dot. She and Paul were the hares, and the rest of us hounds pursued them through a maze of woods and streets, past Macon's Bakery with its delicious aroma of cinnamon and cocoanut buns, until we ended at the soda fountain where we discovered the hares having strawberry ice cream sodas! Dot treated the hounds to ice creaam cones I had never had a soda, but it seemed the height of luxury.

The end of summer came and a return to Englewood where there was the goldenrod of late August, and soon the raking of leaves into huge piles that we could roll in to our hearts' content. And we could play Follow the Leader with a variety of somersaults and games in the soft leaves. For several years the Tuttles, our neighbors in the big white house across the street brought us a rich collection of shells from their Florida winter vacation, and we played games with them in the sandbox.

Hut building was another basic game there were two kinds: above ground and below ground. The former consisted of dragging stuff off the wood pile or cleaning out the chicken coop, but, after a few days, the momentum usually collapsed for lack of roof material. Digging to make a hut was something else. Fortunately my mother accepted digging as being a good part of every child's education no matter how dirty we got. (However, she drew the line at mud pies, which we were never allowed to make.) The first few feet of digging were always full of euphoria, and imagination projected us to an underground palace, or even a shorter route to China. By the time the muscles gave out, the most I can ever remember achieving was a somewhat damp and cool hideaway with enough boards stacked above to make it barely possible to sit inside.

I remember triumphantly deciding that now was the time to have an available set of edible provisions stored in our hut. I got an Ivin's Jumble tin box and stowed away some crackers and a beautiful pear. By that time the hut craze was waning, and by the time I remembered to retrieve my secret store, the pear had produced a labyrinth of mold in a variety of colors that almost filled the box. The mold horrified me rather than awakening any scientific interest.

Next door to us lived the Campbells a postmaster and his wife. There was never any love lost between our two families, for Mrs. Campbell made it very plain that she would not tolerate any small children cutting across her lawn. My mother naturally considered her children obedient and responsible, without Mrs. Campbell's anticipating trouble. Then there was something about the Campbells' putting up a fence on the east boundary of our property, only it was a foot or two inside our property. Anyway in my small mind the Campbells became ogres to be avoided at all cost. Much later my mother became more relaxed about the situation but that was after the children ceased to be a threat.

Freddie Warner was a boy about my age who lived two doors away. Looking back I think we were always encouraged to feel vaguely superior to the neighbors in that house too. Freddie seemed very colorless and not particularly memorable except for the fact that he took me out behind the garage every day to demonstrate how he could urinate. When my mother discovered him in the act she scooped me up and forbade Freddie to play at our house any more that day. I got the message.

Later when the Warners moved away, the Greens and their small boys replaced them I remember Dellie the best. Still later a wonderful family named Wentworth moved there from Canada. They were so nice that I often wondered what became of them.

On the other side of our house, to the west, was Augustus and beyond that an unused church. Some of the older boys discovered how to get into the basement and I remember an initiation ceremony that my brother Paul, Duart McClean, and Hobie Flanagan were involved in very scary for me. The "little kids" to be initiated were taken individually into the cold, totally colorless, damp underpinnings of the church all I can remember is primitive and abandoned plumbing arrangements. There was the vague threat of being guided blindfolded, the dank smell, opening one's eyes to what seemed like dark holes and barriers, and finally being let out into the light of day with a vague sense of escape or accomplishment.

I remember once sitting on the back stoop with several friends discussing who we were more afraid of our mother or our father. I think my sister was with me I know there was at least one sibling besides myself and we were not very old perhaps I was 8 or 9. I remember that we, my siblings and I unanimously agreed it was our father, while our friends said they were more afraid of the discipline of their mother. I remember thinking in my heart that it was more complicated than that. Actually my mother was more harsh in her discipline of me but it was my father's presence that seemed more powerful or ominous because it came less frequently and more finally. The funny thing was that I came to see my father as much more easy for me to deal with as the years went by. And certainly we never sensed conflict between our parents when it came to discipline.

But the point is that it was discipline through approval. To be in the sunlight of my parents' love was enough of an incentive with no need for spankings. The most severe punishment was being "put to bed", or even worse "to be put to bed without any supper" though I can never remember the latter being enforced to the point of no food. Nor can I ever remember ANY physical punishment. My father never struck my mother or any of us children; my mother never used spankings or slappings with one exception which I remember feeling at the time was sort of earned.

She had been cutting my brother John's hair in the upstairs hall, and I was sitting on the steps that led to the third floor, snivelling and complaining. Finally I whined and cried to the point where in desperation she slapped my face and said, "There, I'll give you something to cry for..." I wouldn't remember it I'm sure except for the fact that I was shocked into realizing how desperate she was with me, and the fact that it was a unique occasion.

Perhaps the worst thing mother ever said to me was at a time when I was feeling sorry for myself. No doubt I had driven her to a point of exasperation. Finally mother said rather fiercely, "You have no business feeling so despairing. There'll be times in your life when much worse things happen to you. You don't know what it is to feel really terrible..." I don't know whether it shut me up or not; I do know that for years I had a suspenseful attitude toward what she had said. Worse things have happened to me, but I still don't think I've ever FELT worse than I did at that moment.

Years later my sister and I suspected that the pressure of our parents to make us conform was unfairly strong even though it was all psychological. At times I remember saying, "I wish we were punished by being spanked rather than sent to bed, because then it would all be over with." Sometimes I was disciplined for what I thought was unfair. I had a way of building up resentment over real or imagined injustice, and then it would spill over in a sort of tantrum.

The word "oppression" as used by Feminists would never have occurred to me in connection with my family. I think of my mother as a very "liberated" person. Grandma liked to talk about "household engineering" as being a better expression than just "housework". (I think my father suspected her of enjoying the phrase more to put him down than to elevate the distaff side of the household chores.) My mother liked the basic relationship of having the male as leader. But she was certainly as much the final arbiter in family decisions as was my father. They were a team. She passed on to me a sort of "wisdom of the ages" in believing that men and women are complementary. There was almost a divine joy in the harmony of functioning well together. She never made any secret of the fact that their sexual life was of prime importance. But she also felt that part of this joy came from supporting the male ego. She wouldn't have called it submission. But she was free to say, "It's a man's world..."

Chores were accepted as having distinct gender. My sister and I invariably waited on table, a task that was to be done correctly and silently, never removing more than one plate at a time no piling up or casual loading. We also had our turns at cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, dusting, and mending. It would be hard for my daughter laws to imagine what a pile of mending accumulated in a week where cotton and woolen socks must be darned and patches applied to fabrics that had no added synthetic strength. The boys, on the other hand, were expected to chop wood, make fires, tend the furnace, shovel snow, and mow lawns. Washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after meals were not so rigidly defined. There was no feeling that any job was "beneath" you. I've mowed lawns and tended the furnace and I know my brothers helped in the "female" jobs. But it was a handy division of labor.

So many of the jobs are much easier now. When the Depression settled in, I remember hating to wash handkerchiefs by hand. There was no such thing as Kleenex. A large family with winter colds exhausted all the handkerchiefs and carefully torn rags as well. They must be soaked in cold water first and it was horrid and tedious to get them all clean. And of course they must be hung out on the line, sunned, sprinkled, and ironed.

I think I resisted some of the dogmatic rules that were laid down while being brainwashed by others. I resented the fact that I wasn't allowed to go to Hermione Meyer's birthday party when I was in the 7th grade, "because my mother didn't know her parents". Hermione was a nice German girl who had much nicer clothes than I did and I'm sure her family lived better than we. Her friends were all "the best kids in the class". My mother was wrong not to let me be a part of MY class, MY generation. Later she seemed to realize that she had lost the battle and I did make my own friends. In fact both my mother and father were good about not asking too much about my personal life.

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