Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 9

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I was listening to the radio the other day, alone in a hotel room, when a young woman began singing “Come On Out, Edward, I Know You’re in There,” which may or may not be as depressing as “Open the Door, Richard” of some years back. I don’t know, because I hastily twisted the knob, hunting for normal human companionship, and found it on a five-minute program on WOR called “It’s Your Baby.” The narrator of the program, a man named Dan McCullough, was broadcasting helpful hints from young mothers, and I arrived just in time to learn about “the thunder game.” This ingenious diversion, invented by the mother of a little girl, is intended to allay a baby’s inherent fear of the loud noises accompanying electrical storms. “When there was a clap of thunder,” narrated Mr. McCullough, “she [the mother] imitated it with her hands, crying ‘To-Roooomba!’ Soon her child was doing the same, and instead of being afraid of thunder, she looked forward to the next rumble.”

Always wary of the tendency of our time to oversimplify problems, especially where little girls are concerned, I began to pick flaws in the thunder game. I have never heard anyone imitate thunder very well, and I doubt if even Paul Douglas could bring it off, because there is a lot more to it than “To-Roooomba.” In a first-rate electrical storm, the lightning flash is usually followed by a tremendous splitting sound, as if the house next door were being riven in two, and there is no way to imitate this unless Mama begins smashing the furniture. Babies are born with a love of destructiveness, to be sure, but they learn early to associate it with Daddy. Mother represents, as we all know, the Great Security, and there is always the danger, if she lets herself go in any kind of wild abandon, that Baby will begin to identify her with the powers of darkness.

I have had more experience with dogs in thunderstorms than with babies, but I have never owned one silly enough to be enticed into making sport of the growling monster of the menacing skies. My female French poodle, now going on fifteen, is as terrified of thunder as she was in 1941, and so, come to think of it, am I. She wedges herself under a bed when the rumbling starts, and if I went “To-Roooomba!” and clapped my hands, she might never come out again. I made a couple of hasty mental notes on the thunder game, and went back to Mr. McCullough. He was now describing another, much more involved pastime for mother and child. “Then there was a mother whose baby would cry violently if she attempted to leave him at home while she went out,” said Mr. McCullough. “This is a fairly common baby fear. Baby thinks Mother, his closest link to security, will never return. This mother played the game of ‘bye-bye’ with her baby. She left the room, and when Baby became fearful and was about to cry, she made her reappearance with a big smile. Doing this many times, with longer periods between leaving and coming back, made Baby realize that Mother would eventually return with a happy greeting for him, and his fears disappeared.”

Surely even the merriest baby must tire of a whole morning or afternoon of bye-byes and greetings, and the smarter tot might conceivably gain the disturbing impression that Mama’s rocker is not as sound as it should be. This game reminds me of an old Joe Cook routine in which that famous comedian, dressed in white tie and tails, attempted to say good night to his butler before going out to some formal function. As I remember it, it went like this: “Good night, Harkins,” “Jolly times, Joe,” “Jolly times, Harkins,” “Good night, Joe,” “Good night, Harkins,” “Jolly times, Joe,” “Jolly times, Harkins,” and on and on, in a memorable series of frustrated exits.

The bye-bye game has other faults, which might turn out to be not merely tedious but serious. Both mother and child might learn to like the period of separation better than the period of reunion, and this could give Mama ideas about the advantages of playing the game on a more adult, if not more mature, scale. I can see Alice, let us call her, suddenly saying “Bye-bye” to her husband, George, during one of his political harangues in the living room after dinner, and going upstairs, to be gone five minutes, and then ten, and then twenty. George, who loves to hear himself talk, gets more and more adjusted to these disappearances, and so, when she doesn’t reappear at all to listen to his analysis of the 1960 quandary of the Democratic Party, he begins to realize that he doesn’t actually need her. Upstairs, meanwhile, his spouse, having made a similar discovery, is quietly packing a bag. Of course, she is going to have to take Baby with her when she slips downstairs and out the back door, and this may not be as easy as it sounds, especially if Baby gets the idea that Mama wants to play the bye-bye game again. I am not a pediatrician or a child psychologist, but I should not recommend the bye-bye game or the thunder game to every mother and child. In the case of the latter game, it has suddenly occurred to me, Baby might quite naturally begin to believe that her parent was able to cause the jolly thunder at will, and I need not diagram the tearful dilemma that would follow the infant’s cruel disenchantment. Let’s face it, mothers: there is no dependable method of making life with Baby a heaven on earth.

Twenty years ago (to change the focus but not the subject), I knew the father of a two-year-old girl, knew him very well, and I vividly recall what happened to the poor chap when he was left alone with his daughter one evening and had to give her her supper and put her to bed. All she would eat was the ice cream he had recklessly promised her for dessert, and his efforts to sell the yum-yum game to the little girl were disastrous and pitiable. He got himself full of whatever glop it was the child was supposed to eat, and his gorge set a new high as a result. The little girl was not only willing but delighted to let her father clean up the banana squush, or corn moisties, or whatever it was.

A worse ordeal was still ahead of the stricken fellow, who had never before tackled the formidable task of getting his small daughter into one of Dr. Radway’s magical one-piece sleepy-time nighties, or whatever the hell they were called. He still remembers unfastening something and beholding the garment fall to the carpet, where it lay like a great, complicated dead butterfly. “Lie down on that,” he said to his daughter desperately. (He had once tried to put the tire chains on his car by spreading them out on the roadway and trying to back into them, and the little girl may have remembered the consequences.) “You don’t do it that way,” she said scornfully. He broke down completely at this. “Come on, for God’s sake,” he wailed, “be a sport. Lie down on that thing.” She just stood there. Her father finally got her into one of his own clean shirts. It came down around her ankles and proved to be a great success and a wonderful solution of a knotty problem, although it must be admitted that the child’s mother didn’t think very highly of it. It also had what could be called a disturbing aftereffect, for when the little girl got into her teens, she was more interested in wearing her father’s shirts than any garments of her own. He sometimes accuses himself of having started this fad, for fad it has become, on a national scale. All teen-age girls, I understand, would rather wear their fathers’ shirts than the ones actually created for them by manufacturers. Why they insist on wearing them outside their blue jeans, nobody seems to know, but the fashion has the nation in its grip, and nothing can be done about it now.

“It’s Your Baby,” so far as I know, gets no helpful hints from fathers, but I shall pass one on to Mr. McCullough for what it may be worth. I learned about it from a young mother who lives in Bermuda. In order to keep her little girl occupied for an hour or so around dawn, so that she could get a little more sleep herself, this parent hit on the idea of spreading twenty graham crackers, in five rows of four crackers each, in front of the child in its crib. In this way, the baby can have its game and eat it, too. A diet consisting, in part, of some seven thousand graham crackers a year does not seem to have had a bad effect on this baby, and the National Biscuit Company will probably love the idea of the cracker game.

Mr. McCullough, to get back to our narrator, ended the program I was listening to as follows: “And this is Dan McCullough advising mothers never to lose their sense of humor; like the mother who was trying to make her stubborn child eat. She ran out of patience finally, and said, ‘Look, honey baby, eat. Make believe it’s sand.’ ” If your own baby prefers caterpillars to sand, or some other tidbits, such as buttons or small pieces of coal, these can, of course, be substituted. As simple as that, Mother.

Some of us senescent students of the domestic scene worry about Mama’s plans to rid the infantile consciousness of even the most natural anxieties, the very roughage of mental diet, and replace them with fake and gaudy reassurances. We are afraid that America may become a nation of tranquillizationists, living in a fool’s Euphoria, with an incantation for every sorrow, and a magic wand for every menace. Already we have multiple miracle pills for most of the darker states of mind, and if we don’t look out, our children may reach the end of life by detour and bypass, quit of scars and tears, the badges and honors acquired by going through it the hard way.

It is better to let Junior and Baby learn that farewells are sometimes sad, and that thunder growls and doesn’t chortle, and flashes a dagger and not a smile. It won’t hurt Mama, either, to face the challenging difficulties of explaining the true nature of the perils that beset us. I am glad that I am only a husband, father, and grandfather, whose job it is to win the bread. At least I escape the far harder task of demonstrating that Santa Claus does not exist even though you can see him, and that the wolf at the door is real even though you can’t see him.