A few days before Christmas 1968, 11-year-old Mary Bell sat in a British
courtroom and listened as the jury foreman pronounced her “guilty of
manslaughter because of diminished responsibility,” first for the killing
of Martin Brown, a blond and “sturdy” 4-year-old, and second for the killing a few weeks later of Brian Howe, who was just
3 years old, still pink-faced and cherubic when his life met its
grisly, unprovoked end.
Mary was a pretty girl, slight of frame, with blue eyes and a heart-shaped
face. Unlike Norma Bell, the anxious, cowering 13-year-old neighborhood friend (no relation)
who was accused but not convicted of the crimes, Mary had given a
bewildering performance in court — keeping her back straight and her face
alert; yielding to paroxysms of delight when, for example, the judge
appeared in his formal red coat or the barristers bowed solemnly in their
funny wigs. Two toddlers were dead, two families were shattered, a
neighborhood grieved openly, and there sat Mary Bell with her
perfect posture and her brightly lit eyes, hardly showing a flicker of
remorse. She was a monster, in the minds of most. A bad seed. Evil
incarnate. She was sentenced to detention “for life.”
Among those present in the courtroom that day was Gitta Sereny, a reporter
who did not then and would not ever succumb to the opinion that Mary Bell
was a soulless freak. “From day one,” writes Sereny, “with her obvious
lies and fantasies, her puzzling but indicative movements with her hands and
fingers, her strange intelligence, her stillness and isolation, she appeared
to me nothing so much as a horribly confused child to whom something
dreadful had at some time been done.” Sereny went on to write a book about
the trial, then acclaimed biographies of Nazi war criminals Franz Stangl and Albert
Speer. She became known for her decidedly anti-Augustinian (and certainly
anti-Judith Harris) view that human beings, at birth, are intrinsically
good, that they are pure vessels that subsequently become whatever their
environments (and parenting, to Sereny, is crucial) conspire to make them. Three
decades passed, but Mary Bell continued to haunt Sereny’s mind.
In 1995, Sereny was given the chance to do what she had longed to do for 27
years: sit down with the notorious child killer. Mary was 41
years old and a mother by that time, a woman in a stable relationship with a
man. She’d lived through 12 years of detention - first in a locked
educational establishment (where she was the only girl among some 20 boys),
then in a maximum-security women’s prison. At 23, “like most adolescents
sent to adult penal institutions,” she was granted conditional freedom,
subject to a recall upon re-offending. Sitting down with Mary, Sereny
believed, would bore a beam of light through the thick wall of darkness that the trial had not penetrated. It
would give not just the writer but society the evidence that is needed to
change the way children accused of terrible crimes are both perceived and
treated.
“Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell” could have been
just another titillation on an already burdened shelf of crime-as-spectacle
books. But this is Sereny at work, and she has a purpose — and as absolutely abhorrent as her subject is, she reels you in. Not with
fancy language, and not with subtlety, not with much more than transcript
juxtaposed against fact. Sereny reels you in by bringing Mary — her horror,
her revelations, her torment — to life, by putting you right there with the
inexpiable thing that she did. How did Mary kill, why did she kill, what
could have saved the children she murdered? What did she become in the
aftermath of her crime? How does she live within the knot of guilt and
shame? If you want to know, Sereny says, listen and listen well, as the
child killer bares her soul.
“Cries Unheard” quickly became both a bestseller and a hugely controversial book in England, not just because Mary was
paid an undisclosed sum for her participation in the book’s making but also
because any book that delivers a victimizer’s monologue necessarily silences
the victims and their families. As Sereny’s book sweeps us into
Mary’s sordid childhood and her mutilated psyche, taking us across a threshold into Mary’s aching adult
self, we are brought closer and closer to the stuff of Mary, until Martin
Brown and Brian Howe and their incurable gone-ness somehow fade from view. One has to wonder if reading this book and thereby entering Mary Bell’s mind is a betrayal of the very children whose voices can no longer be heard.
Still, as adults in a world in which childhood violence spirals ever upward, we are accountable — are we not? — for wrestling with the confounding issues that Mary’s story raises. How profoundly does a child understand the finality of death? At what age, and by whose teaching, does she acquire the concepts of right and wrong? How much should we know about the criminal herself before we stand in judgment of her crime? Sereny doesn’t just leave us with these questions. She answers them, with near-alarming assurance: “For children, for whom there is a wide separation between what they should know or are believed to know and what they do feel and understand, the evidence that proves their crimes, once obtained, should become almost irrelevant. The only thing that should count is human evidence — the answer to the question ‘Why?’”
“Cries Unheard” is ostensibly about the consequence of not paying attention
– about what happens when too many people look the other way, or do not
look at all, at a precarious family structure; about what happens when a child repeatedly sends up unheeded flags that she is not just in danger but a
horrific danger herself. Mary Bell was the product of a most heinously
abusive mother — a young (16 when Mary was born), volatile prostitute who not only “tried repeatedly to rid herself of this unwanted child” but forced her young daughter to service her clientele in
the most despicable, unimaginable, horrific fashion. While Mary’s physical life
was saved by a concerned posse of nearby relatives, the sexual abuse went
undetected, sending her emotional life into a tailspin. No one heard Mary
cry out.
Moreover, in the weeks surrounding the two murders, Mary, often in Norma Bell’s company, “either behaved conspicuously or actually offended the law” 13 separate times. She threw her 3-year-old cousin John over an
embankment. She was accused of attacking — indeed, trying to strangle — three girls at play in a sandpit. She was heard screaming, after Martin’s death, the bone-chilling words “I am a murderer.” But again and again, her trips to the police amounted to little more than knuckle rapping, with John’s
precipitous fall decreed an accident and the sandpit incident going
unsubstantiated and the self-declaration of murder chalked up to the stuff
of childhood games. “Children are always squabbling around here,” a social worker explains the laissez-faire stance to Sereny. “We have to be very careful not to intrude too much on families. It is easily resented and then we can do nothing with them. We need their trust.”
Finally, Mary Bell, once arrested, tried and convicted, was not given a
safe, therapeutic environment in which she might venture to tell the
truth, either about the crimes visited upon her by her mother or about the
crimes she herself had committed. Mary made a career out of denying that
she had killed Martin Brown and insisting that her role in Brian’s death was
secondary. She never, for fear of maternal repercussions, admitted her own
history of abuse. The “who” of Mary Bell was left unexplored by a system
solely intent upon the “how” of the crime and the housing of the criminal.
Nothing, Sereny contends, was ever done to give the child her voice, to
enable her to grow into an accountable, self-knowing adult. “To leave
children who have gone through the trauma of committing serious and often
horrific crimes without the opportunity to confront what they have done
seems to me synonymous with ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment,” Sereny, who is decidedly pro-psychotherapy, declares.
Children, Sereny says, are brought to a breaking point, and it is not
their fault but ours. “The uncertainties of our moral and — yes — spiritual
values have caused a fracture in the bulwark of security with which earlier
generations protected children from growing up prematurely,” she says. “Far too few parents now accept the necessity for children to grow up slowly, nor do they realize their own pivotal importance to the development, which only they can nurture, of the child’s self-image. It is, I think … the
interference with the creation or, worse still, the corruption or
destruction of this self-image in the early years of childhood that plants
the seeds of serious troubles.”
Self-image is one thing. Understanding the eternal consequence of
death is another. Sereny believes that before punishment can be attached to
child murderers, their ability to comprehend death’s abiding finality should
be scrutinized and assessed. Sereny “helps” Mary recall her own confusion
on this point. “I didn’t understand the concept of death [being] forever,”
Mary sobs. “It was unreal, incomprehensible. I had nothing against Martin or him against me. I didn’t mean to kill him forever … I think to me it was: You’ll come around in time for tea.” All of this sounds plausible, of course, until one remembers Brian Howe, killed nine weeks later, when Martin clearly had not come around for tea.
It is Mary - intelligent, guilt-stricken Mary - who
consistently leads the conversation toward the thicket of its true
complexities. What made her so buoyantly enamored with the idea of finding, with her best friend Norma Bell, the “most dangerously naughty things” that could be done? What made Mary take Martin, a child she just simply happened upon, and “press … press … press” her hands against his throat? What made her show up at Martin’s door four days later and, with a giggle, ask to see the boy in his coffin? What made her not only strangle her neighbor Brian Howe to death, but return to his body and, with deliberate care, razor-blade a letter “M” across the skin of his stomach, clip his hair, cover his body with grasses and little flowers? What made me who I am, Mary wants to know. What made me capable of evil?
It’s the mother, Sereny insists. The mother, Betty Bell, who — with her
misfitting blond wig covering her pitch-black hair, her tall heels clicking
against the courtroom floor, her histrionics exploding throughout the
proceedings — was the most conspicuous member of the trial audience. Betty Bell, who left her daughter a documented emotional mess following sporadic visits through the detention years. Betty Bell, who kept the tabloids fed with stories about her daughter long after the case had been closed. Betty Bell, says Sereny, is the “why?” of this story. Betty Bell triggered the murder of innocents.
Over five months of intensive grilling, Sereny stokes the fires of memory,
taking Mary, Sereny believes, closer to the flame, forcing Mary to acknowledge the childhood abuses that “forced” Mary to become the monster she was. But the more Sereny pushes, the more Mary’s mind starts blanking. The more Sereny insists, the more Mary holds out, wondering: “It’s one of the things I worry about now. I think that what I felt then and remember, and what I’ve been told since, is mixed in my head and I wonder whether that is what is meant by ‘selective’ memory. How can one know this? What is memory? I’m trying to tell you and to find in myself the truth, about … about … about a hundred things. But what is truth, if it is mixed with truths about fantasies?”
Sereny’s conviction that children are the helpless victims of their
environments, that Mary was led to her crimes by factors outside her
control, disables her from taking this discussion where it needs to go. In
the 1990s, according to Sereny, 910 American children between the
ages of 9 and 15 have been tried for murder. Every day, in every
schoolyard, meanness finds its target. A cat gets drowned, for the sake
of a dare, in a neighborhood creek. Or a child lies. Or a child cheats. Who led these children to the trough? Who made them do the cruel things they do? Who sullied their innocence? Where can we shuffle the blame? And weren’t the adults Sereny faults for all of this once, themselves, children, too? When did they cross the line from blamelessness to blameworthy? When did their backlog of personal childhood demons no longer become relevant to their misdemeanors, their bad decisions, their impulsive moments, their crimes? Where does the chain of accountability begin?
From the instant we find our way onto this planet we are at risk for a life
of collisions, bad choices, irreconcilable instincts. To suggest, as Sereny
does, that children are empty vessels that merely become what others make
them, that “why?” is the only meaningful line of inquiry in the face of
reprehensible behavior, is to negate the power of personality,
predisposition, character. It is to go frustratingly deaf to those who
suggest that evil, like goodness, is a force - palpable, devastating, real.
It is to ignore St. Augustine and the concept of original sin, to sidestep
biology and genes. It is to trivialize the larger debate by declaring, de
facto, that any child raised by the most noble cast of characters would never take a moral misstep, throw a self-centered tantrum, aggress for the mere sake of aggressing.
Pure is not who we natively are. Nor are we, categorically, bad seeds. The very child who tucks his sister in at night is the child who the
next day taunts a classmate. The boy who pulls the legs off the frog is the
boy who stays awake all night to comfort his dying father. The neighborhood girl who brings you gentle poetry is the not-yet-a-teen suspended for selling drugs. We are tormented souls. We soar and we sink. But most of us do not systematically and with glee go about rending the whole cloths of others.
Maybe what disturbs me most about Mary Bell and her crimes is her behavior after the fact. She was all denial and delighted horror, eager to pin her crimes upon others. Had she not been caught, it seems, she no doubt would have done it again; “naughtiness” was the stuff that Mary lived for. Denial became a way of life — not until she was an adult with a child of
her own would she come to terms with the magnitude of her crimes. And even though Sereny provides an explosion of explanations for why Mary could neither admit to nor mourn the killings of Martin and Brian for so very, very long — Mary was afraid of her mother’s reaction, Mary was deprived of good therapy, Mary was only a child when the crimes occurred — it is difficult to see Mary as a victim and nothing more.
There were, after all, other influences in Mary’s life. There was her
stepfather, Billy Bell, who, though a thief, was a loving presence, a man
who Mary remembers for his gentleness, his devotions, his comforting touch.
There were Betty’s mother and sisters — also loving, consistent, lifetime and
courtroom presences, who shielded Mary as best as they could from
Betty’s physical neglect and abuses, who were, Mary remembers, “desperate
for me and probably about me, too.” There were Mary’s siblings, whom Mary treasured and loved. Later, in detention, there were those who showered Mary with unconditional love; who gave her every fair chance, a room full of books, an education, an opportunity, safety.
There were, in other words, forces of good in Mary’s life, vessel shapers
of another variety. While I do not in any way intend to discount the
devastation that comes with living with a mother like Mary’s, I do mean to suggest that “why?” is not the only relevant matter here. Mary Bell destroyed two families. Finding sympathy for her own sordid circumstance, crafting therapies to bring her peace, giving her a shot at moral regeneration is simply not enough.
Mary Bell’s remorse for the murders of Martin Brown and Brian Howe is clear and ever-present. No one reading this book will fail to acknowledge the
extent of her despair. As an adult who needs the world to be a safe haven
for the daughter she is (by all accounts) impeccably raising, Mary Bell
knows now the magnitude of her actions. “That was a time when it all came at me, I couldn’t stand it,” she says toward the end of the book,
remembering a “terrible spell” in 1993. “Martin and Brian were on my mind every day, any day, any ordinary day, something would just trigger it off, anything: the sun, a beautiful evening, the word Gillette, my feeling about being a mother and what about their parents, what had they felt because of me, oh God … It will never be enough, it will never change … the
weight of it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry … sorry … But it’s words … isn’t
it? Just words …”
But if Mary’s burdened conscience makes her a far more attractive criminal,
it should not distract us — or Sereny — from the question this book puts before us: Why do children kill? An answer has been promised by Sereny’s
self-assured subtitle, but I’m not convinced that an answer has been found.
If it is because children, even those approaching adolescence, do not understand right from wrong or that death is forever, what are we to make of the murder of Brian Howe, dead nine weeks after Martin? If it is because children, intrinsically good, are broken by their environments, what are we to make of Norma Bell, the little girl with whom Mary shared her darkest fantasies and who apparently egged Mary on during Brian’s murder, yet who grew up in an admirable household of truth-tellers and love? If it is because Betty Bell made Mary who she was, what are we to make of Betty’s other children, who remain conveniently in the shadows in “Cries Unheard,” but who are not accused, so far as we are told, of any crimes? Even Mary herself seems to protest Sereny’s rush of excuses and explanations. “There are many unhappy, very disturbed kids out there who don’t end up robbing families of their children,” she observes.
Gitta Sereny has brought us an important, aching, soul-searching book, but
she has not brought us an answer. Maybe that’s because the madness and the meanness that once were Mary Bell are ultimately impossible to explain.
Two-thirds of the way through “The Nurture Assumption,” author Judith Rich Harris breathlessly puts us ringside at her Very Major Moment. “Except for the dog, I was alone in the house,” she remembers, no detail here being too small to spare. “I was sitting at my desk on a dark winter afternoon, reading an article about adolescent delinquency. It was January 20, 1994.” Shortly, without due warning, a fiery inspiration pierced Harris’ skull and seized her brain — an insight so startling and effulgent that even she felt staggered by the light.
“Teenagers aren’t trying to be like adults: They are trying to distinguish themselves from adults!” Harris recounts her thinking. “The thought blossomed like a magician’s bouquet. Within a few minutes I had the basic outline of group socialization theory — the theory that children identify with a group consisting of their peers, that they tailor their behavior to the norms of their group, and that groups contrast themselves with other groups and adopt different norms. Only after I had gotten that far did I realize the full implications, and then I had to go back and reconsider the evidence before I was willing to accept the second half of my epiphany. ‘Hey, it’s not the parents! It’s not the parents at all!’”
It’s hard to settle on the more confounding factoid — that Harris actually felt she’d entered original terrain by recognizing that peers play a role in children’s lives, that Harris could justify tying this “conceptual breakthrough” to a noncategorical statement of “fact” regarding the overall value of parenting or that Harris’ thesis could be taking media types by storm — plopping her center stage on TV shows and magazine covers, earning her folk-heroine status in some circles and sending her book into multiple printings.
It’s enough to make a person shudder. Closer inspection of Harris’ work further exacerbates one’s shaken spirits. “You’ve followed the (advice givers’) advice and where has it got you?” Harris presumptively exhorts. “They’ve made you feel guilty if you don’t love all your children equally, though it’s not your fault if nature made some kids more lovable than others. They’ve made you feel guilty if you don’t give them enough quality time, though your kids seem to prefer to spend their quality time with their friends … They’ve made you feel guilty if you hit your child, though big hominids have been hitting little ones for millions of years. Worst of all, they’ve made you feel guilty if anything goes wrong with your child. It’s easy to blame parents for everything; they’re sitting ducks.”
- – - – - – - – - -
Forgive me for quoting ad nauseam. It’s just hard to find a better argument against Harris than Harris herself. For what do Harris and those center-staging her “theories” take us for: fools? Does she — do they — really believe that thinking parents are guiding their every decision by the latest guilt-mongering or guilt-free book to hit the shelves? That our own sense of accomplishment or joy, as parents, is dictated by so-called experts? That we are tossed, like spores in the wind, from one set of values and behaviors to the next — unwilling, unable to draw a few conclusions of our own? That all we’re after, in every sense, is absolution, abnegation, supremely unaccountable lives? Was a consensus reached when the rest of us weren’t looking that today’s generation of parents is devoid of instinct and intuition, basic common sense, ideas about how to raise the children they live with, a desire to help them become their very best selves?
One would like to think that there’s something redeeming about Harris’ motivations, but read on. “I want to tell parents that it’s all right,” Harris told the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. “A lot of people who should be contributing children to our society, who could be contributing very useful and fine children, are reluctant to do it, or are waiting very long to have children, because they feel that it requires such a huge commitment. If they knew that it was OK to have a child and let it be reared by a nanny or put it in a day-care center, or even send it to a boarding school, maybe they’d believe that it would be OK to have a kid.”
Here — and can it really be disputed? — Harris has entered the theater of the absurd. Few, I think, would argue that our tortured, wrinkled, fragile planet is short plastic diapers, bottles, baby gear. Few stand up and cheer every time another gorgeous landscape succumbs to the burgeoning human species or another highway clogs or another sacred water supply grows infested with squirmy little germs. Few are lobbying for more kids in day care, more pressure on classrooms, more stress on the Social Security system. Few at-home parents are banging the drums, fervently praying for more unsupervised teens with which their own children might play.
So, why, in fact, do we have children? Why do we increasingly use every technology at our disposal in pursuit of parenthood? It’s a nettlesome question made that much more prickly by those, like Harris, who suggest that once we have them and we’ve dressed them and we’ve fed them and we’ve paraded them, we shouldn’t much fret over how we parent. Our job is virtually done. But is it? And is parenting a job, in the end? Should we, indeed, be congratulated for bringing children into this trembling world only to then proclaim our independence from their nurturing?
It’s a no-brainer to assert that parents pass their genes on to their kids; that personality is innate, not environmentally determined; that a child will be influenced by his or her friends. But it is also a no-brainer to recognize — once and for all — that parenting matters. Children will and do remember who was there when they were bleeding, intimidated, embarrassed, anxious, sick. Children will and do look for consistent boundaries, a moral compass, companionship, friendship, encouragement, reason, a few bright, shining, guiding lights. Children want stories read to them and dads to go on field trips and moms standing on the sidelines during baseball practice not because of what all this does or does not presage about their future psycho-standing, but because they are living in the here and now, because it means something — right this second — to be a valued, supported human being. Like the rest of us, children want to know that they matter. They want to believe that they are worth caring for.
Children will be who children will be. Nobody’s suggesting that genes or peers are immaterial. What some of us are saying, however, is that our children are more magical, more mysterious, far more precious than the reductionist equation “genes plus peers.” We are saying that the answers to life’s questions aren’t inscripted in our children’s chemistries; that choices are not made in genetic or peer-group vacuums; that dinner conversation, codes of conduct, the organization and revelation of a parent’s true priority all add up to something, in the end. We are saying that, despite the hard and proven reality that the best of parenting yields less than perfect results, despite the fact that there are never guarantees, despite the fact that intuition remains the most stunningly effective tool in a world increasingly hell-bent on how-to’s, we brought our children into being because we believed that they would make a difference in our lives. The least we could do is try to make a difference in theirs.
Can we? Do we? Vanquish the theory and the data and look around. Look at real life. Do you think it matters to the little boy who is the last one always to be picked up from school? Do you think it matters to the little girl whose parents fail to show for the choral recital? Do you think the neighborhood bully, or the child struggling with math, or the little boy who is the target of merciless cruelty, is better off for having parents who have utterly checked out — fingering genes, shrugging their shoulders, telling themselves and telling others that there’s nothing anyone can do? Do you think the world will be a better, safer, more moral, more comprehensible place for those who decide that life is solely and miserably about self-fulfillment, that children won’t remember the weight and shape of their own childhoods?
Not so long ago, I overheard a mother defending her son. The little boy appeared to be 9 or 10 years old, and he had, I could surmise, a long, fierce track record of poor behavior headlined by name-calling, tripping, punching, biting, pulling down a whole slew of children’s pants — a record exacerbated by the fact that his mother, an apparent daytime TV fan, was rarely around; no discipline had been exerted. The boy, it seemed, had terrorized an entire playground, and one of the infuriated mothers of one of the little-girl victims was finally letting her frustrations be known. In as calm a voice as I imagine she could muster, the mother of the girl related her concerns, her fears, her issues, ultimately asking the mother of the boy if a solution might be found. “My son has one job and one job only,” the boy’s mother retorted, while he stood there, listening, gleaming, at her side, “and that’s to tell on another child if harm has been somehow done to him. If he has done that today, then he’s done what we’ve taught him. I don’t need to hear about these other goings on.” And then they turned and strode away, the boy and his mother, arm in arm. Lesson giver and lesson taker, triumphant.
Who, I had to wonder, will that little boy grow up to be? Will his genes or peers alone be accountable for the behaviors he’s already learned to justify? How much will others suffer because his conscience has been left a void?
They bring him to me just after dawn. I turn, and he is there. They show me how to bend my arms so that I can take him down toward my heart, and there is nothing else to say. The nurse leaves. I fall profoundly, madly into love, peel the aftermath of birth from my son’s black-haired crown, try to slow down the shifting of his well-lashed eyes. Hey, little guy. Over here. It’s me. I’m your mom. He is as light as that part of the dream that, come morning, slips away and slips away again. I bundle him tightly in the blankets provided and stare without comprehension at the nurses, who have now returned with instructions on the care and feeding of newborns. I don’t believe that I will ever learn what they are trying to teach me, and I ask them quiet, obedient questions until my husband comes to rescue me and I can lobby for a quick release from the hospital.
Soon I’m being conveyed home in a rusting white Ford Mustang whose only defense against the persistent July heat involves my fiddling with the windows, cracking them just wide enough apart so as to whip up strong blasts of air. It is the hottest day of a long, dry summer, and Jeremy, one day into life, is blanketed and behatted in the car. His head keeps rolling around above his shoulders, though my husband is driving old-man slow, and I feel criminal exposing him to the heat and potholes like this, make him a promise I will never keep: “Hey, after this, no more cars. We’ll walk the world.”
We sleep in the same room. We lie, most of those first nights, in the same bed, my husband and I curled like parentheses around our son, barricades against the dark. There is nothing to do but to feed him when he cries and study him when he sleeps, take turns tracing the architecture of his bones. He is, for sure, a half-Latin child, so much black hair on his head that I have to snip away the sideburns, a delicate operation that seems to take me hours. It’s a misconception, I’m certain, but time itself has come unscrewed. Everything is a still-life drawing; we are complete, we are immune. We sleep whenever Jeremy sleeps, and in the intervals we make formal introductions: this is yellow, this is the moon. My husband constructs a black-and-white mobile and we dazzle Jeremy’s vision with bull’s-eyes and swirls. When he cries, we walk up and down the hallway reciting T.S. Eliot; he concedes to the hushing persuasion of poetic anesthesia. It is all a held breath until my parents, our friends, our in-laws, distant aunts, and neighborhood children eagerly arrive and toast this child of ours to the highest of heavens. I retreat when I can to the back of the house and feed Jeremy until he seems satisfied.
After the first three weeks of Jeremy’s living are concluded, after it is just me and my baby in the house and there’s no one watching eleven hours every day, I begin to teach my son the only thing I know that counts: how to stand in the pulse of a song and feel it tremble. I choose my music carefully. I pillow Jeremy up on the antique rocking chair, stand but a few feet from his two new eyes, and surrender to the avalanche of sound. I call it dancing. I call it color, texture, energy, light. It is everything he’ll need to know if he’s to plunge into the possibility of his life. “This is music,” I tell him at the start of every song. “And this is how it looks to crawl inside it.” I tell him that it’s reasonable to catch music with your fist. I tell him that you can wear it like a shirt. I tell him that it wasn’t until I learned the trick of song that I myself could feel halfway safe upon our planet.
We find our patterns. We construct scaffolding for the days. We spend more and more time on the antique rocker, whose story I tell Jeremy between songs. I tell him how I found the chair in a thrift store on Main Street and carried it all the way home. “I was nine months pregnant and out to here,” I confide. “And every few feet I plunked the damn thing down in the middle of the walk and rocked until I felt ready for more hoisting. You would have thought that someone would have stopped to help, now wouldn’t you? Jeremy, wouldn’t you? Or maybe passersby thought me insane.” Jeremy looks at me with his more in-focus eyes, and I wonder what he’s thinking, if he forgives my impulsive side, if, when he grows older, he will take me in his stride. In the midst of staring at him intently, holding him, loving him, I schedule time with a formal portraitist, but the photography session does not go well; Jeremy will have nothing to do with the bald man and his clucking tongue, his lightning-like lens. He yawns a monstrous yawn and falls implacably asleep. I pay the photographer for his time and we agree that he will not return, and then I take Jeremy out of his fancy suit and photograph him for hours in casual tees.
Jeremy reaches the ten-week mark, and his head is now independent on his neck. He can look from left to right whenever he pleases, and he can try to look down and touch his toes. I check with the doctor, then I hang him from the ceiling in a Jolly Jumper that was sent down from a friend. He takes right to it. Propels himself up into the air with his toes, his fist in his mouth like a microphone, his whole body cued into the beat. I stand before him, and we’re partners in dance, his head not even skimming my knee. In between songs he hangs perfectly still, waiting for his next instruction on life. “Isn’t this great?” I ask him. “Don’t you love rhythm?” And he throbs and he bobs and he picks up the cadence while he gnaws on his fist with his great toothless mouth.
He starts to sing, increasingly makes sense of this thing called voice — producing small, hesitating channels of sound, creaking and capsizing melodies. As the house begins to swell with his currents, we retire the elderly alarm clock in favor of his song, silence the car radio in deference to his solos, allow him greater latitude over the patterns of our days. A tornado storms into town: merciless. Yanking the paint off houses, hanging trees by their very necks, uprooting backyard tents and gardens, foiling wires and plans. Neighbors who did not know one another before are thrust into perfect friendships — thrown into the streets with candlesticks, anecdotes, laughed-off fears. From the shoulders of my husband, Jeremy watches the wet asphalt, the giddy collision of personalities, the terror of the skies giving way to an exhibition of strange and wonderful cloud forms. To the mayhem Jeremy begins to sing, knotting the fragments of the hour so tight together that when the tornado is later called back to memory, it’s the songs that remain in my mind’s eye, a mental picture of Jeremy sitting high in the sky calming the winds with his sweet, high humming.
And then there is the day that we board the train for the city, our first such adventure, a bit of spice. It is midday, an unpopular hour for train travel, and the only other travelers journeying with us are seven distinguished black women, all of them smartly attired, each of them bearing the unmistakable aspect of dignity on her face. Outside the train, the scene goes from pleasant to morose: neat plots of yard and well-dressed buildings shifting into sunken stoops and scrambled rooflines. The thin skin of heat in the roof of the passenger car begins to descend. The proud backs of the seven women sink low beneath its weight. But from the back of the train comes the voice of my son, plaintive and full-hearted with song. One head, crowned with a proper pillbox, turns to see. Another follows. Another, until the faces of the heat-broken, city-suited women rim about him like a rough-hewn horseshoe. Hands on the sticky orange seat back before him, legs planted firm on my lap, Jeremy sings a melody of his own making, deposits from his riverbed of verse. The women straighten, lean toward us. Their noble faces betray nostalgia. Fingers tap and encourage. The heat lifts up like a sheet in the wind. “Jeremy,” I say, “look what you’re doing with your song,” and of course he doesn’t know a thing. He’s just singing to these strangers on the train.
- – - – - – - – - -
Weeks go by. Months. We celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. We kiss him on the forehead at twelve precisely, New Year’s Eve. It is February now, and now it is March, and five days out of every seven, Jeremy and I are alone until dinner. Just Jeremy and me, his skin against my skin, his curiosity and intellect bursting. I breathe him in until my green eyes tear with the burn of too much loving. We rock in the chair. We walk through the house. We read. We fall within the thrall of music. We go outside, if the weather’s fine. We make daily trips to the train station, begin to pursue long lists of distractions. If there is anything larger than the two of us, then this eludes me. Jeremy is sacred and so is this time, and I cling to it, selfish and greedy.
And yet there is, I admit, that point in the day when I lay Jeremy down for two hours. This is when he dreams — his eyes only partway shut; his fist stabbing the air; his body, a tender motor, purring. My cat slept this way, stretched out on the sill. I remember putting my hand where I thought her heart might be and understanding that it was smaller than my palm. Jeremy’s sleep breaks the trance I’ve been in; all of a sudden I remember my deadlines. I’m a ghost writer of sorts for corporations and magazines — an honest enough profession, strictly anonymous. No one ever sees me, I emphatically see no one, and yet now every day I’m on the phone, listening to strangers tell stories. They talk about fraud and insurance, property casualties, risk management, fire and shipwrecks. They talk about equitable solutions, ratios and calculations, sleights of hand. Words go back and forth; I write them down. Later, in the middle of the night when my half of the hemisphere is sleeping, I walk through the charcoal-colored hallways of my house, flick on my amber work lamp, and polish first drafts until they’re reasonable. No one ever suspects just where the words come from, and that’s fine by me; it’s a living.
I have begun thinking that maybe an extra pair of hands a single day a week would help lubricate the gears. Jeremy could work off any schedule he pleased, and I wouldn’t have to walk around gray-faced. One day only, and I wouldn’t leave the house. I could hold my son when he cried for me, and touch the silk of his head when he was sleeping. I could do both at once — be a mother and work — if only I could find the right person. So far the few friends who’ve occasionally offered their help have distressed Jeremy somehow, thrown him headlong toward terror until he was back in my arms.
My husband and I don’t like the one with the short hair and shorter skirt. She’s fifty-five years old and should know better. We like the Korean girl, but she’s in high school and plays piano; the earliest she could get to us is five-thirty, and that would be irrelevant unless I started working another time zone. There are other options, but we dismiss them summarily, and then we remember a woman we’ve seen; she spends three days a week with a child a few houses down. She’s solid and pleasant and she takes good care of things. I have always, albeit secretly, admired her.
She knocks on our door and settles into our sparse front room, and the good impressions hold. We ask her the questions that come to mind, though in truth there aren’t that many. “Will you be good to my child?” “Will you be gentle with him?” “Will you never usurp me, take my place?” Nods. Nods. All around nods. “One more thing,” I remember to tell the applicant, lowering my voice out of shame. “We’re not really people people, if you can understand what I mean. We hardly go out. We haven’t done much socializing, in the proper sense of that word, since our son was born, and so it’s possible that adjustment will take time. Will you mind if Jeremy’s not immediately friendly? Not hold it against him? He’s an angel at heart.” Nothing’s a problem. Anything will do. We agree on a price and plan for Monday.
And Monday comes. Before the appointed hour, I find myself all distraught with housework, all disrespectful and hysterical with lists: clean the bathroom, clean the kitchen, prepare company food, what would that be? Jeremy’s crying and I know that he needs me, but I keep winding up his swinging chair. Twenty minutes, forty minutes, sixty. He must be seasick by now; I release him. Now Jeremy’s in one hand and a dish towel’s in the other, and I am trying to sing nice quiet songs, except Jeremy is smarter than that. He knows I’m nervous. He knows my body. The melody is a ruse. “Okay, little guy,” I say. “I admit it. I’ve got the shakes. But how long has it been since we’ve had company over, and I do want everything to go just right.” Jeremy looks at me through the haunted blacks of his eyes. I realize the commotion I’ve caused. “This is wacky,” I tell him. “Mommy really is the worst.” I throw the rag in the sink and take the two of us down the hallway to our rocker. We go back and forth and back and forth until we find our rhythm again. Jeremy’s tensions dissipate after a while. He fits the feather of his skull under my chin. My head’s lolled back by the time the sitter arrives. I can hardly remember why she’s here.
Then it begins. With the armory of confidence that the sitter carries with her, she reaches both arms for Jeremy and waits for him to lean in her direction. He does not. He leans most assuredly closer in toward me, pulls my hair with his fist, and screams loudly. “Hey,” I say. “Hey. Mommy’s right here. Not going anywhere.” I turn my back to the sitter to give Jeremy the view, but he recoils in an instant, hides in my shirt.
It’s awkward. I’m mortified. I’m so glad Jeremy prefers me. Still, I’ve got a sitter in my house and she’s standing in my front room and it’s too early to offer lunch, so I say, “Coffee?” She looks at me, decides I’m worth a second chance. She follows me and my trembling little boy down the hallway of overhead lights and fuzzy carpet.
Now I make coffee. I make it even though I’m a klutz in the kitchen, though it embarrasses me to be studied, if only slightly, by a woman who has probably mastered such trivia, could keep house, stock a refrigerator, brew a pot of coffee in her sleep. I try to make some small talk, but I’m the poorest of talents — launching into the plot of a recently read book until I realize that the sitter’s fixed her stare at middle distance. “Oh well.” I finally decide to hit the issue square on. “We’ll all just sit together for a while and give Jeremy a chance to get his bearings.”
That a while is an hour. It is two hours. It is us sitting around a paltry kitchen table until any hostess would agree: it’s time for lunch. I go and get some, Jeremy strung around my neck with a vengeance while the sitter patiently waits. Several times I’ve tried to turn Jeremy to face our company, but he has proven himself stronger than me. He pulls at my shirt, mourns from the bottom of his soul, refuses to dig his head out of my chest, and clings.
I’m getting spooked. There are three hours left on the sitter’s clock, and Jeremy’s not budging. He won’t eat his carrots, but he slowly agrees to juice — agrees, that is, if I hold the bottle at an angle that quashes any view of our lunchtime visitor. The sitter is now telling me stories about her children, about her grandchildren, about kids in general: none, in her experience, quite like my son. I am thinking about the work I have to do, about the trouble I’ve stirred up, about how rude I’m being, about the backward part of me that had this notion in the first place. We were doing fine, I hear the words in my head. We were managing. We were happy. What’s a lack of sleep compared to this? Then I look at the sitter and feel a flash of empathy for her condition. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I really am.”
“You could help yourself, honey,” she tells me, not unkindly. “Remember who’s in charge here. You’re the mother. He’s the child. Go take a walk. I’ll set things right. Give him to me.”
It sets me reeling, puts me right on the edge of a knife. Clinging so hard to my son isn’t healthy, but leaving him? I can hardly fathom it. “Go up and down the street,” she suggests. “And put him in my arms. He won’t get adjusted with you hovering.”
I know that’s true. I know she’s conveying all the common sense in the world, and if I don’t go, it shouts loudly: I don’t trust you. And that’s not it. I trust her, I do. She is an incredible woman. But how can I subject my son to what I know will shake him deeply? I made him a promise a while ago: I’m not going anywhere. And yet I do.
Down the street. Up and down, a sprinter’s pacing, running outright when I hit the midsection near my house, because I can hear Jeremy howling. Half crazed with worry, I finally fly up the steps, open the door. “Listen,” I report to the sitter, out of breath, “I’ll pay you now. Consider it a bonus for a hard first Monday, and I’m sorry, I really am. We will get better at this. You know he’s my only one.” I’m pulling Jeremy out of her arms as I speak, giving her an envelope of cash, yanking the doorknob, nodding her out. “I’ll call you,” I say. “You know I’m sorry about this.” Maybe she understands, but it doesn’t matter. She is walking away and she knows she did not err; all of the trouble stemmed from us.
I’m in the rocker. I have music on. I’m easing Jeremy back and forth, slowing the tempo, stroking his crown; he is exhausted. He is, despite everything, nestling in toward me, shivering the anxiety out of his heart, letting his muscles go loose. His whimpers turn to sighs, and then he doesn’t have a choice: he sleeps.
