Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  There are third homes, too; in order to ski, and avoid the crowds or disappointments associated with motels, families purchase condominiums near a particular ski resort, or own their own lodges. In the upper three New England states, in Colorado and northern New Mexico, and Idaho and Utah and northern California, and recently in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee, a winter social and even cultural life centered around the “slopes” has developed and steadily grown. Shops, moviehouses, even educational programs cluster near ski tows; so do an assortment of restaurants and bars. Private planes struggle to land amid winter weather that closes small airports; the alternative, going to a particular city’s jet field, annoys the passengers, who would like ideally a lot of snow on the ground, but in any case clear weather for landing, for the departure of Lear jets or more old-fashioned prop jets. Sometimes a family is torn: to ski at Christmas or to go to the Caribbean, or Mexico, or Rio de Janeiro, or the warm and fine beaches of Uruguay? Sometimes both desires are appeased — a week in Switzerland, a week in the Caribbean, where a number of well-to-do Americans keep winter homes. The two seasons most likely spent entirely at home (the main home) are spring and fall, though spring skiing or a last fling or two in the autumn at a summer home are by no means unusual. And there is always a fishing trip, a hunting weekend in the autumn or the spring: a cabin up some chain of mountains or in the middle of woods or near a stream — a place where commonly a man and his friends go, leaving behind wives and children, or a place where an entire family goes a few times a year for yet another change of scene and a sustained effort with guns or rods.

  Garages are but one part of a chain of secondary buildings: a shed for bikes and lawn mowers and lawn furniture; a place where barrels are kept; a barn, with horses, hay, grain, saddles; and sometimes yet another building for chickens, maybe a rabbit, maybe some ducks. All that on acres of land not considered a farm, but rather a home in a certain village or town, out of which every day men and women travel to cities (by car, by train) in order to work, to shop, to dine, to attend a concert, the theater, a movie. Hunt clubs or, more informally, weekly hunts pursued through woods delightfully untouched except for the paths themselves, or across rolling meadow lands, are an important part of the social life of certain families: the so-called horse country of Virginia, New Jersey or Massachusetts.

  In the Southwest and West horses have until recently been part of a culture’s mythology as well as the common man’s unpretentious but lively and even passionate enjoyment: the rodeo, the fair, the horse show. In Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona boys and girls alike learn to ride, and not only the more well-to-do. The latter, however, are able to indulge their interests in many ways: ranches with many different kinds of horses and ponies; large stables, and individuals to care for them; trails and paths and grazing land; vans to move horses, employees to do the driving, even as they have filled and refilled water pails or containers for grain, and pitched in hay, and shoveled out manure, and spread out shavings on well-put-together wooden floors or on cement ones or, sometimes, the Western earth. For some children and their parents the care of horses as well as the riding of them becomes one of the most important tasks of each day The “animals” get fed before people do. Even if there are caretakers, and handymen, the children may well go out first thing, talk to their horses, feed them, fill up their water buckets, even groom them a little. Then comes breakfast and “horse talk.”

  On weekends there are rides, races, or a lot of care: the shoes, the coat, the mane, all in need of work. And a talk with the veterinarian. And a discussion: to go here or there by van on such and such weekend? Some Western ranches are justly famous — beautiful horses, immaculately cared for and trained, ridden on stunning paths that lead up hills, across streams, into valleys or prairies a feast for the eyes. In the East all sorts of social tensions and rivalries get worked at or worked out when horses are mounted in particular places on certain mornings. As with golf, there are clubs and clubs, hunts and hunts, horses and horses, stables and stables. Much has been made of Little League baseball — its searing effect on working- or middle-class children, who fight hard to win; so hard, some claim, that any loss becomes a devastating psychological experience and any victory an exercise in arrogant self-congratulation, accompanied, alas, by a haunting apprehension of future defeat. But among certain quite well-off children the performance at a show or on a hunt can be an occasion for fear, self-doubt, and fierce rivalry. Even a successful morning of dressage can end with tears — the gnawing conviction that one ought be better, do better, appear better.

  Sailing, for children of well-off families, also generates strong competitive demands. The relationship between such families and boats in general is at once apparent: canoes alongside garages of winter homes; sailboats anchored within sight of summer homes; motor-boats kept in garages attached to lake-front cottages; and, among the wealthy, yachts of palatial size and equipment. Children take sailing lessons as well as tennis lessons, enter races or regattas, learn every trick they can to pull out front and stay there. Some of those who sail detest motor-driven boats as a noisy, vulgar presence and as the toys of the nouveaux riches. In the inland parts of the country Sailfishes or canoes share less socially conscious company with the fast-moving motorboats. Out West, canoes have their own special place — traditionally and symbolically the pioneer’s means of navigating swift, treacherous rivers.

  A number of children whose parents are quite well-to-do also take an interest in flying and parachuting; a father owns a plane or works in a company that does. Such a family flies privately, perhaps, more than on commercial planes. In the New England states the family finds its way to airports that serve the needs of small planes. There, a spirit of camaraderie exists: families whose planes the same mechanics care for; people who recognize in a way of travel yet another sign of what might be called the apartness that goes with wealth. Among the very rich, there is a pilot, whose work is analogous to a chauffeur’s. Among the modestly affluent the husband has learned to pilot the plane and, these days, the wife, too. They may well fly from one of their homes to another — or to visit friends a few hundred miles away for a weekend. And not rarely their children, as they become older, have their eyes on flying lessons and on parachuting.

  In the “main home” or “winter home” of such families one sees constant photographic reminders of how diverse life can be, given the money and the will: framed pictures of other houses, or of parents and children riding horses, sailing boats, playing with tennis rackets or golf clubs. Other pictures show tourists in strange lands or about to board planes, disembark from them. There are always new lands, continents to visit. Old, worn Persian carpets are valued, among other reasons, precisely because they give just the slightest impression of shabby gentility to homes owned by people determined to indicate how casual and relaxed they have become with their considerable wealth. In other homes one finds magnificent new Oriental rugs — lush Bokharas, sometimes placed on top of wall-to-wall carpeting, the latter especially prominent in the newer homes of upper-middle-class Southern and Midwestern families. In some homes prayer rugs or Navaho or Pueblo rugs hang on the walls. In some homes the rugs are changed by the season. At times a woman may replace one Oriental rug in midwinter with another: a pleasant change of scene for her and the rest of the family.

  The antique market depends heavily on the aspiring tastes of people who regard chairs, tables, clocks, and pictures as important aesthetic objects — and a means of self-definition, self-assertion. Antique shows, auctions, or benefits can be important social occasions. The acquisition of a particular painting, or some piece of Oriental art — jade, a bowl, a tea service — or of a fine old desk becomes, at least for a while, an event in a family’s life. The furniture in a young child’s room may be old, valuable, rare — or quite new and decidedly ingenious, interesting. Sometimes there are mixtures: a nineteenth-century Windsor chair, resplendent yet fragile, next to a two-level bunk bed, equipped with a la
dder, attached lights, pull-out sideboards, and decorated with a patchwork quilt that may have been sewn a hundred years ago and that cost almost as much as the bed itself. Across the spacious room stands a disarmingly “common” roll-top desk, once the unpretentious property of nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century burghers, but now relatively rare to find, as children know and say, echoing their parents’ words. The desk is against the wall and not far from a window. The walls of children’s rooms in upper-income homes are a vivid contrast indeed to the bare and forsaken surfaces within the homes of not only poor but also working-class people. A child sitting at the roll-top desk can lift his or her head and look at attractively decorated wallpaper, at framed photographs, a painting, curtains that nicely set off the room’s windows. The curtains offer their own view — in fact, the room is a room of views, each somehow tastefully connected to the others. And beyond there is the land, there are the trees; everything, it seems, contributes to a child’s sense of place, privacy, property, stability. And beyond too there are others, waiting in readiness to serve, to work, to make things as easy as possible.

  Many of those “others” work in stores that sell “provisions” as well as regular American food, stores that may take great pains to distinguish themselves from supermarkets. Even supermarkets, for all their uniformity, make exceptions, feature special kinds of meat, canned foods, preserves, bread, fruit, and vegetables. The steaks are the best. Lobsters are available, sometimes flown hundreds of miles. Jams and jellies are English as well as American, or indeed French, Swedish, Spanish. Spices and condiments abound; so does the very best of fruit, plentifully available out of season. In many towns or villages there is a cozy “country store,” which despite its name carries all that is convenient and contemporary in packaged food along with various nostalgic offerings — candy in buckets or individually weighed and wrapped; meat specially ordered and cooked; a rotisserie that never seems to stop from morning until evening — indeed, a store that keeps open virtually every day of the year and offers to cater food as well as sell it from the shelf.

  Such a store serves a community of people who may not at all take to the notion of large-scale suburban shopping malls. Yes, if need be, one drives a car to those malls, enjoys what they incontestably have to offer, but they are best located elsewhere. The drugstore in a well-to-do village or town may be deliberately old-fashioned in appearance. The hardware store carries feed for animals. The post office is small and informal. The bank is designed not to stand out prominently. There is often a bookstore, a record store. And maybe there is a pleasant restaurant that responds at various times of the day to quite different customers. A point is being made, though no one has ever got up and made it publicly — and, maybe, few have ever done so in private: the people hereabout want to keep the neighborhood where they shop cozy, informal, even intimate. It is as if a minority of Americans had decided that they want to remove themselves, to a degree only, from the twentieth-century commercial actuality of their country and return to the business spirit of another age.

  The men, women, and children who come to those stores often do so in what other Americans might call “farm clothes,” if not worn-out rags: dungarees, battered khakis, tennis shoes that rarely look white, sweaters with a hole or two in them or at the least well-worn, shirts with sleeves rolled up and not so thoroughly tucked in. Not always, of course; not every successful businessman or lawyer or doctor has the desire to drive a conspicuously old car or wear clothes a garbage collector or factory worker would refuse ever to put on. Nor do the well-to-do always go shopping with little or no money and, at times, no credit cards, either. But in all parts of the country one does see among a significant number of such men and women just those habits and preferences — as if one must act like a nearly indigent farmer, who has barely enough standing in a particular village to secure the necessities of life.

  There are men and women worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of them, who make it a habit not to carry money when they go “down” to a nearby group of stores and make various purchases. They look at a man or woman near a cash register, smile, exchange greetings, and walk out, their arms full of costly items. In some instances even a milk shake for a child gets charged, but never in such a way that the boy or girl sees or hears anything to prove that such a transaction has in fact taken place. Usually the parent doesn’t even have to nod, or look in someone’s eyes, let alone suggest the need for payment. Rather, the owner of the store or an employee in it has learned how to be utterly discreet, never do or say anything that so much as implies acknowledgment of a sale, and talk instead about that old reliable, the weather. If something more serious comes up, especially of a political nature, there may well be a smile, and a brilliantly relaxed kind of noncommittal acknowledgment: indeed, indeed, the times are strange and vexing — on that we all can agree! Meanwhile, the children are there — walking in and out of such stores, hearing words exchanged, noticing who says what to whom, observing their parents’ several cars get filled up, yet never at all observing the gas get paid for, watching their parents take money out of a bank, but not often seeing their parents bring money into the bank.

  The very rich have family compounds, but so do merely quite well-off families — many acres, on which may live several families in several homes, none of which is visible to the others. Sometimes among the wealthy there is the large house of a child’s grandparents, even great-grandparents; then, farther up the road, a “cottage” or two — substantial, even magnificent, homes in their own right, but offspring of sorts to the “main house.” In the “cottages” live a child’s parents, uncles and aunts, cousins. If the original tract of land is large enough to accommodate those families in adequate seclusion, they may decide to deed some land to a village for “conservation,” in the interests of “ecology,” or maybe, recreation. Thus the “character” of many such villages in the East or the South and even in the far West changes more slowly than would otherwise be the case. From the air one sees a cluster of homes, or maybe only one or two, then stretches of woods, streams, meadows, marshes, hills. Or one sees a series of full-fledged farms — belonging to so-called gentlemen farmers, who work in cities and maybe have apartments in them but return nightly or on weekends, at least part of the year, to a cattle farm, or a produce growing one, or both, which an employee (or two, or three, or more) keeps going.

  Small private schools are very much part of the landscape. In the beginning it is a nursery, maybe in the basement of an Episcopal church, or maybe in the home of a person who is not rich at all but has earned the confidence and respect of those who are, and wants very much to work with their children. The nursery teacher’s home may be nearer the center of the village or town — and smaller, though in keeping with the architectural tradition of the surrounding countryside. The children are transported there as much by housekeepers as by parents, and by the age of four are spending not rarely more than a morning away from home. The school may have a special “orientation” — Montessori, for instance. There are relatively few children, compared to the number of adults who work with them. For older children there are the “country day schools” — dozens of them by that name all over this country, and not dissimilar, be they in New Mexico, Texas, Alabama, West Virginia, or on the Atlantic Seaboard. Those schools, too, enjoy an architectural affinity to the prevailing mode of the neighborhood served. They may be quite well endowed, supported not only by tuition but various fund-raising social events. It is in those schools (their playing fields, their classrooms and eating halls) that a small but important number of American children begin to live, for a few hours at least, with others of their own kind, and begin also to get some sense of what the rest of the nation is like. Often the teachers in those schools are the first adults to give the children sustained, clear expression of their own views — in contrast to the fearful or ingratiating agreement of shopkeepers.

  Many upper-income families, however, live in cities and even
in the summer prefer travel to Europe, Asia, the Pacific islands, to a country or seaside life. They live in luxury apartments, occasionally in hotels, or in old town houses — on Boston’s Beacon Hill, on the East Side of New York, in the Garden District of New Orleans, in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C., on the Near North Side of Chicago, on Nob Hill in San Francisco, right smack in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, or on Canyon Road, Sante Fe. Those are all well-known neighborhoods, and of course, some of the people who live in them also have country places, Caribbean retreats, ski lodges. But a substantial number of quite privileged parents prefer to live and bring up their children in the city, even shunning at times the actual ownership of a house or an apartment. Young boys and girls who live such a life can be seen walking in city parks, often accompanied by a governess. They can be seen riding bicycles on sidewalks or using swings or playing in sandboxes, again under the watchful eyes of a parent or a housekeeper. They may live in penthouses that have their own gardens and areas for play. They may live in a town house that has a small, open courtyard, also convenient for the activity of children. Some practically never play outside; instead, they spend time in rooms set up for the vigorous, uninhibited energy of the young. Often such children get to know museums, restaurants, department stores. They learn how to dress more formally, restrain themselves in public, be watchful, careful; they do so because for them life is more “public,” is more connected to the demands of others — and yes, because of the dangers city life presents. A child learns, at five or six, about taxicabs, waiters who expect to be tipped, policemen, elevator operators — not to mention an elevator that requires those who use it to push the right button, or else. And then there are the doormen, who befriend children, keep an eye on them for brief, and sometimes not so brief, periods — and who, for some boys and girls, become important friends, allies, and teachers.