by Tom Braden
I would not have given David the money to take a trip around the world, even though it was very little money for a trip around the world.
I would not have given Joannie an allowance that summer when she looked as though she hadn’t bathed and was running around with that boy whose hair was so long that everybody wondered if he had a face.
I would not have put money in Mary’s bank account the year she was at the University of California, rioting against the Bank of America.
It has taken me four children out of eight to learn the secret: which is, the moment they become animals, cut off the money supply.
Cut it off totally. Don’t have any money when asked. Don’t send money to the college, or to the college bank. Demand the exact change for sudden departures from the norm, like “Dad, I need money for a haircut,” or even, “Mother wants me to go to the grocery store. Do you have some money?” Get the grocery store receipt and measure it against the change you receive. Every dollar you can possibly withhold will make the change from animal to human being more rapid and certain.
But the advice must be taken absolutely literally. You must not deceive yourself into thinking that by the proper expenditure you can bring about the change, as I deceived myself, for example, with David.
Sometime during the summer after he graduated from high school, David decided that he did not want to go to college. I was disappointed and expressed my disagreement from time to time, listing the reasons why I thought college essential and asking for reasons why he had decided against it. “College,” David replied, “is your bag, Dad.”
But he never told me what his bag was, and it is only now, in retrospect, that I realize that what David really wanted to be was a hippie. I do not use the word in a wholly derogatory sense. I understand the political implication of refusal to join a society mobilized at the time to beat up a lot of poor farmers in Vietnam. I understand the social implications of choosing passive observation of that society rather than participating in it. I am even prepared to imagine that there may be something quite beautiful about being freaked out on dope, not bothering to wear shoes, letting one’s hair grow, and simply not caring at all.
But I do not understand the economics of it. After David decided to be a hippie, he came home from school, put on a pair of blue jeans, took his shoes off, and sat around the house. He didn’t need much money; in fact, he needed so little that I didn’t notice that he needed some.
I worried more about his doing nothing, and that was how I fell into the trap of permitting him to be a real, organized hippie, banded together with other hippies. He said he’d like to go around the world, and I, thinking that to do something was better than nothing, reflecting that he knew two languages and might put them to account, reflecting also that seeing the ancient monuments, or the art museums or the terrains of foreign lands might stir curiosity to learn, decided to come up with the money.
So David departed on a trip around the world, by which I mean that with unerring instinct he headed straight for those parts of the world where other teen-age boys and girls with long hair and no shoes sit and smoke dope and stare, and feel the proper vibes with each other. I don’t think he ever saw an art museum or looked at an ancient monument. That would have been “my bag.”
Nor did he ever really get all the way around the world. He ran out of money and worked for a while in a vineyard in France. He “had it made” for another while with a matron twice his age who picked him up on the road. He contracted pneumonia and spent some time in a hospital in Iran. He learned the names and ways of the streets of Kabul. He bought and sold rugs with marginal success.
I envied his experience. I reflected that I had never had a similar one and that now it was too late—I had missed the action. I wondered, when David came home, what would he do?
And I was not long in learning. He came home wearing a pair of French work pants, heavy work shoes and a silk turban which he wound around his enormous growth of bushy red hair. He made himself comfortable in one of the bedrooms. And he sat.
After a while, I said, “I thought you would mature.” He said, “You want me to mature in the way you think is mature. I’ve matured in the way I think is mature.”
It was then that I hit upon the only weapon left in my arsenal. It was then that I cut off the money supply.
Oh, I suppose there is a stronger weapon. David was twenty-one. I could have kicked him out of the house, forbade him a meal. And I suppose that in the short history of the war between hippie children and straight parents, it has somewhere been done. But it must be a terrible experience, casting a pall upon the years to come, destroying family and affection and shared pride.
My way was less dramatic and there was no confrontation. I simply didn’t have any money when asked—no money for cigarettes, no money for gasoline, no money for beer, no money for a movie, no money to go to the places where a silk turban is much admired.
And so, David has a job now. He gets up at six, works hard, and earns substantial pay. He looks better. I think he feels better. He has abandoned the silk turban and he ties his hair in a tight knot behind the neck, as in portraits of the young Thomas Jefferson.
I enjoyed having him around the last summer he was with us. And his friends too who worked with him on his construction job. Sometimes they would come over to our house on Saturday nights and sit in the living room and play records and talk.
It gave me a pleasant feeling. It’s the good life. I would walk into the living room and say, “Hi, everybody, would you like some beer?”
The Garden of Eden
Like a lot of my contemporaries, I grew up thinking that the sex role of a man was to chase a woman, and I am jealous of my children, who know better.
A girl, in the lexicon of my generation, was to be protected. So a girl had a room of her own; a girl didn’t call a boy on the telephone; a girl’s dormitory was carefully guarded by large-bosomed, old ladies in large hats, and there were strict rules about visitors and about signing in and signing out.
But, of course, sex implied that the defenses were overrun, that the protection failed. Therefore, sex was a chase and an assault. “Dartmouth’s in town again; run girls run,” I learned as a freshman and in a society of men which—except for unfulfilled desire—was self-sufficient and quite happily so, the word “girl” was made subconsciously synonomous with the word “victim.”
It was the same in the army. One heard the lectures about the dangers of gonorrhea and syphilis and accepted the issue of protective equipment. For the attack, of course.
I was in my mid-twenties before I learned that chase and attack was not the sole prerogative of the male, and I remember where I learned it. It was at the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street in London. The Cavendish was a pretty rundown place during World War II, barren and dusty, staffed by surly pensioners, containing in some of the rooms occasional mementos of a bright and glittering past. The famous Rosa Lewis, mistress to Edward VII, proprietress to rich British and American escapists between the wars, sat in the front parlor, her feet upon a cushion, her dog, Kippy, at her side. Rosa dressed in the 1910 style, ankle-length skirts of good cloth and much lace at the throat. Often she slept, and often when she awoke to greet some son of a World War I guest, she would awaken and her ashen and ancient cheeks would suddenly glow with the excitement of a memory imparted by her dream. The blue eyes would flash: “We took off all her clothes,” Rosa would chant, “and covered her all over with toothpaste. Now, let’s all have some champagne.”
Rosa did not like “hussies,” as she called the unrichly dressed girls who made the mistake of coming into her front hall at the invitation of some never-to-be-forgiven guest. “Hussies,” she would say, “I don’t want hussies here.” They would giggle embarrassedly and leave, the cheap furs around their necks jiggling, as in feigned disdain they turned to exit through the swinging doors.
But to be a lady at the Cavendish—ah, that was the place to let your hair down. And it was a lady
who taught me that the chase could go the other way.
“The Lady Ann” I shall call her, because that was not her name and the important word in the title she bore was the article “the.” Lady Jamison would have connoted marriage to a peer but “The Lady Ann” meant that the blood flowed direct.
And in this instance, strong. The Lady Ann took me by the hand (I think there was some pretext of carrying her bag to her room) and sat me down in front of one of those blue-flamed gas fireplaces with which the old Cavendish was equipped. Leaving me there for a moment, she retired to another place and when I heard the words, “Take your clothes off, please,” I looked up from my chair astonished to see that she had removed all of her own.
The Lady Ann was an extremely good-looking girl, tall, slim, black hair tumbling to the shoulders with good legs and a well-proportioned figure. She stood there before me, confident, unembarrassed and strong. I wish memory afforded me a similar assessment of myself. Alas, I was frightened, embarrassed, awkward and ashamed. I rose, excused myself with a stammer, and fled.
Even now, there is something sad and painful about the memory of this episode. The feelings of guilt at the time, and the next morning when we encountered each other accidentally in the Cavendish lobby, the questioning, not only of one’s manhood, but of one’s mores. Who taught me that it was I who must attack? Who told me that it was unmanly to be propositioned, unfeminine to propose?
Was it every novel I’d ever read—Hemingway, Dreiser, Lewis? Was it those four years at college among people who talked about “Wait until I get to Northhampton”? Was it my sister with “her own” room? Was it all those silly politenesses—waiting for a girl to go in the door first, or out of the elevator first? Was it offering the seat on the bus? (I still do that because my mother told me I had to.) Was it years and years of getting out from behind a steering wheel, going around to the other side of the car and opening a door for a girl whose strength would surely not have been taxed if she had done it for herself?
I do not know the answers but my children will never have to ask the questions. Take Susan, for example, who likes a boy named Mark. Susan is a hiker and back-packer and hard tennis player, a fine short-stop and a left-handed passer. My friend Eddie Williams, who owns the Washington Redskins, says she’s a very good left-handed passer. What he really says when he sees Susan throw a football is “My God!”
But Susan’s relationship with Mark is one of casual equality. I don’t know whether they sleep together. They might; they’re very good friends. But if they do, I am certain that Mark does not attack. Attack is out now, along with show girls, striptease, pink lampshades and finishing schools.
Or take Mary, whom I noticed the other night swimming naked in the pool with two friends, both boys, both naked also. I could never have done it. Shyness would have overwhelmed me. Indeed, it overwhelmed me when I saw Mary. Tommy said, “Golly, that Mary—no pants,” and I said, “What do you mean?” And Tommy gestured toward the pool and there she was, and there they were. But I resisted an impulse to shout my protest across the yard.
What harm was being done? If they were unselfconscious, why should I embarrass them? Only, as I say, I never could have done it when I was her age. The serpent which brought shame to Adam and Eve, causing them to don clothing, passed that shame through all the generations unto me and then suddenly, the serpent’s will did not work any more. This generation dwells in the pre-serpent garden of Eden, and it must be a very pleasant place to dwell.
No guilt. No shame. No worry. No calling up parents to say “it” might have happened. Sex is not only free but, as far as I can see, grounded in total equality.
How easy it is. No role of the proposer for the boy; no role of the consenter for the girl; no chase; no attack. Just easy.
But I have worried about Elizabeth, Tommy and Nicky, the three youngest children, who don’t know anything about sex and whose ignorance I have some possibly illogical desire to preserve. I tell myself that it’s wrong for them to see boys freely entering their sisters’ bedrooms. And then I argue with myself: “It’s all so natural. They’re listening to records.” And then I argue back: “What if the records are just a cover for something else?” And again, “Well, what if they are?” So what should I do? Bang on the bedroom door and say, “What are you doing in there?”
I tried a compromise. No boys upstairs at night. I don’t know why that rule seemed to bridge the time gap between the old and the new. Or avoid the issue I was posing to myself by its suggestion that with the younger children asleep in their rooms, record playing should be prohibited at night. But it did. And it works, more or less.
Except the other night Joan and I got home about eleven and coming up the stairs I ran into David’s friend Patrick and his girl coming down. Patrick is an awfully nice Irish boy with an extremely winsome smile, and his girl, whom I call the painter, is very pretty and paints very well. Patrick smiled and said, “Hello, Mr. Braden.” And I said, “Patrick, you two know you’re not supposed to be upstairs at night.” And then, by way of explanation, I added, “I’ve got eight-year-old kids up here.” Patrick smiled again. “Mr. Braden,” he said, “we’re not interested in eight-year-old kids. We’re only interested in each other.”
It’s Not My Fault
As I said, guilt about clothes I inherited from Adam and Eve. I like to wear clothes and am embarrassed when other people do not wear them.
Moreover, I find logic in this view beyond everyman’s inheritance. My experience is that there are very few people who do not look better with their clothes on than with their clothes off. Clothes on, it is possible to imagine a well-formed person. But most people are not well formed. The old limerick
Breasts and bosoms I have known
Of various shapes and sizes
From poignant disillusionment
To jubilant surprises.
offers hope, but there are not really very many jubilant surprises. If there had been, streaking might have become an important institution instead of an overnight fad.
And yet the guilt overrules the logic, as I discovered that summer night when Joan and I came home late to find all five girls standing around naked by the swimming pool. None of them are poignant disillusionments. All of them are very good-looking girls. The fact did not assuage my sense of shock.
“What in the world,” I said, addressing Mary as the oldest, “are you doing?”
“We are,” she said, “having a swim.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “That’s not it. I mean what are you doing standing here naked? Someone might easily come through the gate and into the yard. Someone could see you from the street. Now, all of you,” I continued, still addressing Mary, “get upstairs and put some clothes on.”
And Mary looked back at me, coolly. “What’s the matter with you, Dad,” she asked, “do you feel guilty?”
The answer, obviously, is yes, I do. And afterward I asked myself, “How did I ever bring up five girls who think it’s all right to stand out by the swimming pool in a suburban community without any clothes on?” Granted, it was dark. Granted, there is shrubbery. I still felt guilty.
There are other kinds of guilt, just as deep-seated and impossible to set aside. Why, for example, does Elizabeth tell stories? Why does she tell stories so guilelessly, with such innocence of appearance, such sweetness? If the stories she concocts were as good as her manner of telling them, it would be impossible ever to pin her down.
“Thank you for your note asking that Elizabeth be excused from school next Wednesday,” was the way the letter to Joan began, and since Joan had not written any such note, it was necessary to confront Elizabeth. Elizabeth said it must have been a mistake on the part of the school. She would find out.
When you have eight children, it is impossible to do all the little chores you might do if you had one. I suppose that if Elizabeth had been an only child, Joan or I would have gone to the school, asked to see the note, and confronted Elizabeth with the forgery.
But there was enough to do. Tommy had to be driven to school that morning and so did Nicky, and Joan had an early appointment at the office. So we did not go out and collect the evidence. We waited.
Elizabeth had to be reminded of her promise about looking into it. And then she was ready with the following story: “Some of the kids wanted to try out the new principal, just to see how he’d act, you know. So they wrote him a letter excusing me from school and signed Mother’s name to it.”
A likely story. A story neither of us believed. We told Elizabeth we didn’t believe it. But we did not take the trouble to prove the case to her. So I feel guilty about Elizabeth’s stories and guilty that I have not converted the fault. How long will Elizabeth go on like this? Mary used to tell stories when she was younger, and she used to pocket things too. I remember the time I turned around at the restaurant to see if I’d left anything behind and there was Mary, a pretty little girl of nine in a blue dress, looking sweet and pocketing the tip I had left for the waitress. She doesn’t tell stories or pocket any more. Maybe Elizabeth will grow out of it too. I tell myself so. And yet I avoided the embarrassing confrontation, and so I go on feeling guilty. I hate confrontations because they usually leave me feeling guilty too. There I was, sitting on the back porch and not paying much attention and Joan was telling Nancy she couldn’t spend a weekend on a motorcycle with her love affair. And suddenly I heard Nancy shout at her mother, making frequent use of a four-letter word. So there I was with a confrontation. Anger rose, I struck Nancy. Doubtless she deserved it. Nevertheless, I felt guilty for days. Now that I recall the incident, I still do.
The only way I know to avoid guilt is to pay no attention. Go about your own business and tell yourself, when suspicion dawns, that it’s better not to know. But then ugly fact is forced upon you—the fender of the car is dented, the dollar you put in your desk drawer is not there. The suspicion you felt at the time was justified and you should have done something about it when you felt suspicion and not waited until when there has to be a confrontation. Guilt again.