Part 3 (2/2)
There was no mistaking the underlying message in this suggestion, which was that Martha, despite a basically peaceful, patient year, was still being doubted, still somehow in need of further training. Throughout the afternoon's errands, Martha tried to find a way around what she knew was tantamount to an order. Buying the week's groceries. Taking her old tan pumps to be resoled. At Hamilton's, she stopped to look again at the new Hoover. ”For every woman who is proud of her home,” the poster beside it said, and Martha was was proud of her home, as half hers and half real as it might be. She had gone to these sorts of conferences before and had enjoyed rubbing shoulders with her counterparts from other programs. But this was not the right moment to leave the practice house. Perhaps, she thought, she could explain to Dean Swift the effect that Betty's departure was bound to have on the schedule. Perhaps, she thought with even less hope, she could appeal directly to Dr. Gardner. proud of her home, as half hers and half real as it might be. She had gone to these sorts of conferences before and had enjoyed rubbing shoulders with her counterparts from other programs. But this was not the right moment to leave the practice house. Perhaps, she thought, she could explain to Dean Swift the effect that Betty's departure was bound to have on the schedule. Perhaps, she thought with even less hope, she could appeal directly to Dr. Gardner.
Martha walked through the pale, warm afternoon, besieged by the sounds of summer: music coming from open doorways; the jangly car horns, which seemed louder than usual; the shouts of liberated children; and the gentle metallic grating of their roller skates on the pavement. It suddenly seemed to Martha, in fact, that children were everywhere: their Mercurochromed knees and unkempt hair and untied hair bows and their bicycles with the limp red, white, and blue streamers dangling from the grimy beige handgrips.
How could she leave Henry now, so soon after Betty's departure?
How could she ever leave Henry?
EVEN BEFORE MARTHA CALLED MATSON to register for the conference, she knew the main topic was bound to be Dr. Spock, whose book-length ode to permissiveness had become only more ubiquitous since Connie had first brought her copy into the practice house. Late that night, Martha forced herself to read, for the first time, what everyone had been talking about. Spock's first section was t.i.tled ”Trust Yourself,” and his first sentence was just as ridiculous: ”You know more than you think you do.” In Martha's experience, most people in most endeavors invariably knew considerably less than they thought they did. And what was true in most endeavors was doubly true in the raising of children.
She could hear Henry fussing downstairs now, as he often did when he was with Connie, who remained the most indulgent and least effective of his mothers. It was heartbreaking to overhear them sometimes, especially his crying, which was the simple result of Connie's having given in to his crying before. If a child knew that crying would get him attention, the child cried. If a child knew that crying didn't work, the child stopped crying. She supposed Dr. Spock would say the crying meant meant he should be picked up. But Martha's teaching depended on believing that a child was something to manage, not to be managed by. She read: he should be picked up. But Martha's teaching depended on believing that a child was something to manage, not to be managed by. She read: Every time you pick your baby up, even if you do it a little awkwardly at first, every time you change him, bathe him, feed him, smile at him, he's getting a feeling that he belongs to you and that you belong to him.
Belonging, Martha thought. Since when did belonging belonging matter? matter?
THE MEETING ROOM AT MATSON was warm and wood-paneled, glittery with old silver and good crystal. Everything was perfect, the tea cakes laid out symmetrically, the doilies fresh, the tablecloths not overly starched. It was exactly what one would expect at a convocation of domestic experts, and the undergraduates who were serving were eager and polite. The mood was festive. Like other areas of American life, academia had found new energy since the end of the war, and in her welcoming speech, the president of the National a.s.sociation of Child Experts virtually exulted at the convention's unprecedented number of partic.i.p.ants.
Over the next two days, Martha took part in seminars on toys, influenza, and finger painting. She attended lectures on speech development, toilet training, and genetics. Sitting in a darkened lecture hall, enveloped by the slightly burnt smell of the Kodaslide projector and the wheezes and clicks of the dropped slides, she looked on, utterly engrossed. She felt, at once and all over again, that these subjects and systems mattered. The use of schedules. The maintenance of charts. The parsing of children's needs and impulses. She glanced down the row of rapt women, whose gold Omicron Nu pins gleamed identically from their necklaces and lapels. The home economics society had never meant more to her, and amid the comfort of note taking, she had to admit to herself that she had allowed Henry to blur her focus. What was the practice house, after all, if it wasn't a testament to the belief that women could replace the mysteries of child rearing with mastery?
For a moment, Henry became not the child she had always wanted, or even the one she was trying so hard not to love, but rather the tenth of ten children whom she had started on their way. She conjured a mental picture of the baby journals on her shelves, and the children they represented, raised according to time-tested methods. Methods that women had trusted, long before they'd been set loose by Benjamin Spock to trust themselves.
RUMORS AND UPDATES of Dr. Spock's whereabouts preceded his movements around the Matson campus. Wilton had had its share of famous visitors too, but Martha could not remember any who'd been received with such giddy enthusiasm. She did not get to see Spock's face until late the last afternoon, when, along with the approximately forty heads of child-care programs, she attended the most selective seminar of the weekend.
Sitting at an enormous conference table just a half dozen seats from the famous doctor, she found it hard to look at him. There was an intense kind of solicitousness about him, as if he was so used to listening to people's symptoms that he viewed all statements made to him as clues to something else. Martha didn't want to be a.n.a.lyzed. She didn't want to be diagnosed.
”Has that been your experience?” he kept asking when people made their opinions known. There was nothing even slightly nasty in the way he asked the question, but somehow it still seemed to be an accusation.
Spock was disarmingly modest. He appeared to be almost shyly surprised by the success of his book, whose very ”Trust Yourself” message seemed so self-effacing. He was the anti-expert: Some Midwest common sense, some reasonable rules, some sensible behavior, and children would be just fine.
”So what do you say to Holt and Watson about baby's schedule of feedings and eliminations?” one woman asked.
”Well, different things may work for different types of children,” the doctor answered congenially. ”In my experience, it causes more harm than good to try to keep children to strict schedules.”
”Is there anything, then, that you disapprove of in an infant?” another woman asked.
Spock smiled benignly. ”Well, let me ask you this,” he said. ”What infant behaviors do you you find objectionable?” find objectionable?”
”Thumb sucking,” Martha said. She hadn't realized she was going to speak until the words were out of her mouth. The women at the table all turned in her direction, like the members of a choir looking for their cue.
”It's a dreadful habit,” Martha continued, ”and apart from the fact that it's unsightly and unsanitary, it can do permanent damage to the teeth and the jawline.”
”Is it safe to a.s.sume, then, that you subscribe to traditional methods to deter this?” Dr. Spock asked.
”Yes,” Martha said.
”And may I ask which of them you have found to be most effective?”
”Well, it varies from child to child,” Martha said, aware that several of the women were now looking at her exactly as they would if she had just stepped onto a train track at the commuter hour. Her hand moved nervously to adjust her scarf and necklace, but she overcame the impulse. ”Sometimes,” she continued, ”I've found it effective to be vigilant about offering a toy as a distraction. Sometimes I'll combine that with bandaging the thumb, or putting on a scratchy mitten. In the most extreme cases, I've employed a celluloid cuff.”
She watched some of the partic.i.p.ants look down, as if in pity.
”And please don't all of you pretend you haven't done the same,” Martha said. ”This has been the accepted practice among educated child-care providers for the last forty years. Surely you'll acknowledge that, Dr. Spock,” Martha said.
”Of course,” he answered quickly, with a twinkly, avuncular smile that made Martha cringe. ”But in my experience, restraining a baby physically only frustrates him.”
”Of course it frustrates him,” Martha said sharply. ”How can any habit be broken without it causing some frustration?”
Spock nodded his agreement and then, as if offering a perfectly made, neatly trimmed tea sandwich, laid out his belief: that thumb sucking, like so much else in infant behavior, was the reflection not of habit or will but rather of simple need.
”A baby sucks because it needs to suck,” Dr. Spock said.
”I wasn't suggesting, Dr. Spock,” Martha said archly, ”that a baby sucks because it is one of Satan's minions.”
That brought a much-needed laugh from around the table.
”I don't have much patience for people who soften at the slightest sign of resistance,” Martha continued. ”Of course it's disturbing to upset an infant, but I always tell my students that if they think about the long-term benefits, they'll be able to withstand the feelings of the moment.”
”And do you have children of your own?” Dr. Spock asked.
”That's not the point,” Martha answered, perhaps a bit too sharply.
”I wasn't trying to make a point,” the doctor said. ”I was just curious.”
”I have helped raise ten babies over twenty years in the home economics program at Wilton College,” Martha said, finally adjusting the scarf around her neck, fingering the Omicron Nu pin beneath it.
”I just wondered whether you yourself had ever experienced these kinds of emotions,” Spock said.
”What emotions are those?”
”The emotions of being a mother.”
”Have you?” Martha said. And apart from whatever facts and figures they took away from the conference, the impertinence of this moment was what most of the partic.i.p.ants would long remember, and what Martha, in her fervor, would think about with pride.
But the liberation inherent in Spock's message, which in essence was love over law, was for Martha as inescapable as it was secretly welcome.
7.
The Center of the World
All the way back from Matson on the bus, Martha savored her moment. Martha Gaines and Benjamin Spock. She had told him what she thought. She had stood up for the program she was going back to reclaim. The summer world slipped by, alive with flowering bushes and flowered hats, children playing on swing sets and running through the rainbow spray of sprinklers. There was something cool and comforting in the act of pa.s.sing these lives by: not at all unlike the role she had played for all those practice house children. They existed, in her memories, as if on a series of front lawns, waving at Martha as she rode by. There had been many. There would be more.
But the clear, impartial, professional path became instantly muddied, and nearly obscured, as soon as Martha walked back into the practice house that afternoon. Ethel was lying, fully p.r.o.ne, on the living room rug, a camera in her hands as usual. Henry, wearing only a diaper, was standing against the couch: beautiful, hopeful, and irresistible. He was looking at Ethel, wobbling a bit, and seemingly unsure about what to do.
<script>