Читать книгу Our Miss Boo - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 4

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What we wanted, really, was a house, and not a baby.

But the architect drew her into the plans. He kept saying, “We’ll have these broad steps inside, twice as wide as usual, and six-inch risers instead of the customary eight-inch.”

“That’ll be nice,” we said vaguely.

“It’s much more gracious looking. Besides, it makes it so very nice for children.”

“Children?” we said to ourselves. “Maybe we ought to explain to him.”

He kept right at it, through the back-of-the-envelope-sketch stages on through the blue-prints, and when we found the land, our own marvelous rolling land, with shelves ready to accept our house which was to be built up and down hill on five levels, he said:

“What a woods for a child to grow up in!”

We kept talking about the rocks and the trees, and he kept talking about the child.

But the climax came while we were in Europe, leaving him with the earth and the blue-prints entirely in his hands. (He says he never did have such satisfactory clients. There is nothing that so harasses an architect giving birth to a house as the presence of the prospective owners. Much more bother, they tell me, than an expectant father, for he has to take what he gets, but owners keep thinking up bright new improvements.)

Well, anyway, he sent us a cable, saying that for so-much he could build a charming child’s suite in an otherwise wasted space at the top of our house.

So the sensible thing, of course, was to take advantage of this fine inspiration.

“Besides,” we said, not fooling each other one bit, “we might want to sell the house some day. And the next owners might like a child’s suite.”

When we came home and saw the house—not quite finished, but incredibly beautiful, like a boast made manifest—we saw exactly what the architect had meant. Everywhere you looked there was a place for a child, for a child of all ages progressively.

So, of course, we had to have Miss Boo.

That’s the story we tell her sometimes, and she loves it.

“And there I was, off somewhere waiting for you to make up your minds,” she says. “Waiting and waiting.” And I can see she pictures herself pacing up and down behind a closed door wild to get started on the exciting business of living.

Funny thing about a child that you’ve had with you for a few years. You can’t describe her. When you try, the little pictures of her all run together in what the movies call a montage. You can see her yellow high chair, and the photograph you had taken when she was six months old (when you honestly believed she had hair, until you realistically face the picture now). And you can remember how her solid little body felt, and the way she sat bolt upright and never would lie down in your arms and be a Madonna’s baby. You can remember her at one, and two, and three, and five, and to-day ... but you cannot describe her, for she is not one but a hundred children.

She is all children. She is the eighteen-year-old girl I saw to-day, buying a piece of luggage with her mother. She is the infants I shall see in 1959.

They themselves know this. They know, until we dwarf their knowing, that all space belongs to them ... and all time ... and all people.

“Strangers,” Miss Boo said once, “are just your friends that you don’t know yet.”

Once you’ve loved a child, you love all children. You give away your love to one, and you find that by the giving you have made yourself an inexhaustible treasury.

So, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll not try to describe Miss Boo. I’ll tell you about her, a little, and you’ll have to see her for yourself. I hope you’ll see her many places, and in many children, your own, and others, whom you also need.