by Robert Coles
Those same children may well learn, even at nursery school age, that they possess passports, that they have Social Security cards, that an income accrues to them by the year. The passports enable travel; and some boys and girls know certain foreign places as well as their native city — to the point that in kindergarten or before they talk about various experiences abroad, often more extensive by far than those of their teachers. The schools are often, to outward appearances, homes very much like those many wealthy families own — town houses made into nurseries or elementary schools. The children walk to school or are driven — by cab, by a chauffeur, in a car pool. Some parents want their boys and girls to learn as much as possible about urban living and so encourage them as they get older to take the bus, the streetcar, the subway. Other parents want no part of that life for anyone in their family. Even servants arrive and leave by cab. Occasionally limousines are called into service, driven by chauffeurs hired for the day: a trip to visit someone in the far suburbs or to an airport. Some families keep a car and a chauffeur all year round, however little they are used.
Children learn to amuse and be amused by servants, and also learn to make do in apartment houses or old, restored town houses. They run races up and down stairs, go on expeditions to the boiler room, open and close doors meant to receive trash, learn to make friends with policemen or janitors, develop a keen sense of the dangers as well as the opportunities city life offers. The foyer to a distinguished apartment house can become a virtual playroom, with the doorman (he may be one of several) a casual and inventive overseer. The network of servants in such buildings — maids, cooks, chauffeurs, and those who keep the heat going, the entrances secure — is for children a source of friendship, assistance, and, not rarely, fear or intimidation. A boy may ask who is on duty at some particular station, knowing that if it is one person the morning or afternoon will be fun, if another then best to think of some other way to pass time. And even in the city, time can be spent ice skating, horseback riding, learning to distinguish between various kinds of birds, even fishing. And there is a zoo or an aquarium. There are plays for children and concerts for them, special magic shows, tours, and lectures, in sum: “everything,” according to one eight-year-old girl who lives in an apartment house on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago.
Her words provide a useful way of describing and summarizing the way other children of quite well-off parents live, however removed from the cosmopolitan life of America’s “second city,” or for that matter, its first city, its third city. “Comfortable, comfortable places,” she once said, referring to her parents’ enormous duplex apartment, a ski lodge they maintain in Aspen, Colorado, and a lovely old New England clapboard home by the ocean toward the end of Cape Cod. She was not bragging; she knew a pleasurable, cozy, even luxurious life when she saw one (had one) and was not at all uncomfortable describing its many, consistent comforts. She happened to be sitting on a large sofa as she offered her observation. She touched a nearby pillow, also rather large, then moved it a bit closer to herself. The pillow had many colors, was soft, blended in nicely with the couch’s covers yet maintained its own authority. In a rather uncharacteristic burst of proprietary assertiveness, the girl said: “I’d like to keep this pillow for my own house, when I’m grown up.”
Children like her have a lot to keep in mind, look after, and, sometimes, feel attached to. At the same time, they may often be overwhelmed with toys, gadgets, presents; and they may wonder why it is that their rooms keep on being redecorated, or whether their family ever stays in one house longer than a year or so. Even within a given home there may be more rooms than a child knows how to make sense of, or come to terms with — at least when he or she is seven or eight. As a result, parts of an apartment or a home become foreign territory, virtually — to be kept at a distance, or entered only with caution and perhaps in the company of a servant or a parent. The same may hold for the surrounding countryside — land that children know to be the property of their parents, but prefer to keep clear of. Better to stay inside; and inside, better to enjoy the “comfortable, comfortable places” — a particular room or two.
There is just so much a child’s mind can easily absorb and feel at ease with. Children can be as acquisitive as anyone else, but they prefer to stake out territorial limits, and they also have a stubborn habit of clinging to the familiar, however old and even useless it has become. So it is that children whose parents are wealthy indeed insist upon holding on to a tattered security blanket, a certain pair of worn pants, a dress that no longer really fits. They come home from school, from a walk or a game outside, from lunch with their parents in a restaurant, and they announce that the living room is theirs — but the sitting room or the dining room or the library is utterly out of bounds. After a vacation spent in the South or halfway up a mountain or on another continent they are especially determined to establish their own sovereignty and indicate thereby the limits of their (contemporary) possessiveness.
These are children, after all, who have to contend with, as well as enjoy, enormous couches, pillows virtually as big as chairs, rugs that were once meant to be in palaces of the Middle East, dining room tables bigger than the rooms many American children share with brothers or sisters, and, always, the importance and fragility of objects: a vase, a dish, a tray, a painting or lithograph or pencil sketch, a lamp. A boy or girl who is just beginning to figure out a dependable rhythm of activity and restraint for himself or herself has to stop and wonder how much of a “comfortable, comfortable world” he or she dares include in various journeys or forays through the house. And how much of that world can the young child even comprehend? Sometimes, in a brave, maybe desperate, attempt to bring everything around under control, a child will enumerate (for the benefit of a teacher or a friend) all that is his or hers, all that goes to make up what an observer might call the “setting,” the background against which a life is carried on. Large trees get mixed up with globes built into tables; a pond is linked in sequence with a library of thousands of books; a Queen Anne desk shares company with a new motorboat that goes so fast the child’s father, no stranger to speed, has begun to have second thoughts about the safety of those who go aboard with him.
Finally, the child may grow weary, abandon the spoken catalogue, and, think of one part of his or her life that means everything: a snake that can be reliably seen in a certain stretch of mixed grass and shrubbery along the driveway; a pair of pheasants who come every morning to the lawn and appear remarkably relaxed as they find food; a dog or a cat or a pony or a pet bird; a friend who lives near a summer home, or the son or daughter of a Caribbean cook or maid; a visit to an amusement park — a visit that, for the child, meant more than dozens of toys, some virtually untouched since they arrived; or a country remembered above all others — Ireland or England, France or Switzerland. Posters that commemorate those voyages are often found in the rooms of such children — elements of fantasy and pleasure, evocations of what was seen, heard, and enjoyed, and, not least, reminder’s of what the child confidently, realistically expects to see yet again. No preliminary sketch of the physical “ground-being” (as both Heidegger and Tillich put it) of upper-middle-class life, or of the habits of the rich, ought to fail to mention travel as a strong influence on a select number of children.
Not that the parents of those children necessarily live uprooted lives; some do, but others have a firm sense of belonging to a particular region and, within it, a given town, village, or city; and those men and women usually try hard to give their children a similar sense of themselves. Boys and girls, when born, get silver cups, engraved with their names and birthdays. Children are shown family insignia, “trees,” lines of descent. If a parent’s picture appears in the newspaper, a clipping is put on a child’s bulletin board, even if he or she is not yet old enough to read the words. Banners that fathers had in college rooms appear in the rooms of their children, as do banners handed down from grandparents or great-grandparents.
The child c
an look at himself or herself as a baby, or as a toddler, or when first going to school, because there are usually many photographs that commemorate moments or events in his or her life. Indeed, there may be photographs that commemorate similar events in the lives of parents and grandparents. Diaries and family letters of ancestors may well have been kept, or published for the general public, or privately printed. An old family home or family compound, long since gone, nevertheless lives in the child’s mind through a photograph. In contrast, of course, are those families that have quite a lot of money but few links to the land or to a region’s history, or indeed, so far as their loyalties or memories go, to preceding generations. But even children in those families are often taught reasons to feel proud of themselves and, just as well, to feel grateful for what their parents may have done on their own, against great odds and with considerable self-sacrifice.
These children learn to live with choices: more clothes, a wider range of food, a greater number of games and toys, than other boys and girls may ever be able to imagine. They learn to grow fond of, or resolutely ignore, dolls and more dolls, large dollhouses and all sorts of utensils and furniture to go in them, enough Lego sets to build yet another house for the adults in the family. They learn to take for granted enormous playrooms filled to the brim with trains, helicopters, boats, punching bags, Monopoly sets, Ping-Pong tables, miniature tea sets, stoves, sinks, dining sets. They learn to assume instruction — not only at school, but at home — for tennis, for swimming, for dancing, for horse riding. And they learn often enough to feel competent at those sports, in control of themselves while playing them, and, not least, able to move smoothly from one to the other, rather than driven to excel. It is as if, for many such children, the various outdoor sports are like suits of clothing, to be put on., enjoyed, then casually slipped off.
Something else many of these children learn: the newspapers, the radio, the television do not offer news merely about “others,” but rather about neighbors, friends, acquaintances of one’s parents — or about issues one’s parents take seriously, talk about, sometimes get quite involved in. These are children who have discovered that the “news,” that events, may well be affected, if not crucially molded, by their parents as individuals or by their parents as members of a particular segment of society. Similarly, parental authority wielded in the world is matched by parental authority exerted at home. Servants are told to do things, are called in, are rung in, are given instructions, or, indeed, replaced summarily. In a way those servants, by whatever name or names they get called, are for these American children a microcosm of the larger world as they will experience it. They are people who provide convenience and comfort. They are people who, by and large, aim to please. Not all of them “live in” there are cleaning women, delivery people, caretakers, town inspectors, plumbers and carpenters and electricians, carriers of telegrams, of flowers, of special delivery letters. Far more than their parents, the children observe the coming and going, the backdoor bustle, the front-door activity of the “staff” teas, cocktail parties, receptions, or just an ordinary meal.
It is a mixed world, a world in which social classes come together, work alongside one another, in ironic ways — a lawyer come to draw up a will or give advice on a business arrangement, being served coffee by a maid, both of them awaiting a child’s father, while the child bounces a ball, walks in and out of the room, and decides to ask that he also be given something to drink. It is a world others watch with envy and with curiosity, with awe, with anger, bitterness, resentment. It is a world of decisions — purchases to be made, bids to be offered or taken up, places to go, people to see. It is a world, rather often, of action, of talk believed by the talkers to have meaning and importance, of schedules or timetables. It is a world responsive, of course, in its own way to the cycles of birth and death, to the seasons, to engagements and marriages, to children and their vicissitudes and triumphs. It is a world in motion — yet, at times, one utterly still: a child in a garden, surrounded by the silence acres of lawn or woods can provide. It is a world of excitement and achievement and eventually inescapably, disaster, tragedy, failure. It is an intensely private world that suddenly can become vulnerable to the notice of others. It is, obviously, a world of money and power — a twentieth-century American version of both. And it is a world in which children grow up, come to terms with their ample surroundings, take to them gladly, deal with them anxiously, and show themselves boys and girls who have their own special circumstances to master — a particular way of life to understand and become part of.
The Children
Defender of
the Garden District
New Orleans has some fine old homes, especially those that belong to the historic Garden District. Some of the children who live in them take for granted what others come from near and far to see: lovely columns, or an especially attractive portico, or trees and shrubbery and flowers (the azaleas, the wisteria), which adorn buildings quite appropriately called mansions. But for James, a twelve-year-old resident of the city, those mansions are of endless interest, as are the city’s cemeteries, one of the most beautiful of which is not far from his home, in the center of the Garden District. The boy has for a long while hoped to be an architect. His own home has been turned modern on the inside, with every effort made to preserve the exterior. He had become (at the age of six) a good friend of the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and painters who worked on the various rooms and from time to time came back to check on things or do an additional job.
The boy’s father is a cotton broker, a man of substantial, inherited wealth. The boy’s mother is an artist whose landscapes have become well known to many residents of the Garden District; she has had several showings in one of the city’s art galleries. A number of the landscapes — the bayou country of southern Louisiana — adorn the walls of the artist’s home and the nearby homes of her friends. Some paintings, as the boy is proud to announce, have gone to “complete strangers,” who have paid “hundreds of dollars.” He adds right away that his mother has given the money to charity. Asked what kind of charity, he is quite knowledgeable and forthcoming: “She has a lot of charities, but her favorite is hospitals. She likes to give money to them, and she said that if she didn’t have her studio and the pictures she makes, then she’d go and do volunteer work in one of the hospitals. She feels sorry for people who get sick, and she’s told us that she wanted to be a nurse when she was a girl, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.”
James can walk down one of the Garden District streets and tell which home is the oldest, which home has been recently renovated or restored, which home belongs to what family. He ignores a few homes, sometimes with barely concealed disdain; a “new” family has moved in, he has heard, and he doesn’t know (or can’t quite remember) their name. But for a year or so he has been more interested in cemeteries than homes; he loves to walk through the former, read what is said about the dead on the aboveground mausoleums. He is not, however, morbid or eccentric. He also likes old watches; he has inherited a family collection, begun by his grandfather, and it is a source of constant fascination to the boy. He is an only son; he points out quite self-consciously and with a touch of boasting that he is also “the last male heir.” He is, in fact, referring to his father’s family; there are several male heirs on his mother’s side, cousins of his whom he sees rather often, because they too live in the Garden District. His father’s people have also lived in the Garden District of New Orleans for a long time — though in northern Louisiana there is a family plantation, and in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, there are several summer “cottages” (rather large oceanfront homes) that belong to his parents and his two uncles.
He is sometimes money-conscious. When he talks about the watches his father and he jointly own and treasure, he makes mention of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the collection is worth. When he points out a home he especially likes, he remembers what he has heard his father say about the value of the place. W
hen he talks about a friend of his, he is apt to call attention to the friend’s parents as well — who they are, what kind of work the father does, what kind of family the mother comes from. He is not, however, overly preoccupied with “society,” not compared to others he plays with or goes to school with. He lives in a city whose upper-income people are quite conscious of where they stand in relationship to each other. The morning newspaper, the Times-Picayune, often devotes page after page to social announcements: teas, coffees, lunches, suppers — honoring people, celebrating occasions, and so on. The boy can echo his parents’ mixture of delight and chagrin as they go through the pages of the newspaper over breakfast: “My mother usually starts. She tells my father that he should turn from the news to the society page and learn all about what is happening to our friends and our neighbors. Dad doesn’t turn; he asks her to tell him. She does, and then they’re both unhappy because a lot of the time there’s a conflict. They can’t be in two places at the same time. They don’t like to go out too much. They have to pick and choose. My father has a bad back, and my mother tells him never to tell anyone that it’s better. She writes her ‘regrets’ notes, and she likes to mention Dad’s back pain! Sometimes they both agree that they’re going to try to accept every invitation they can, because they like to go out. But Dad gets tired; and my mother says that even now, after all these years, she’s still a little shy with people, and so she likes to be at home at least some of the time!”