Once the war was over, and we were again home in Sacramento, this laissez-faire approach continued. I remember getting my learner’s driving permit at age fifteen-and-a-half and interpreting it as a logical mandate to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe after dinner, two or three hours up one of the switchbacked highways into the mountains and, if you just turned around and kept driving, which was all we did, since we already had whatever we wanted to drink in the car with us, two or three hours back. This disappearance into the heart of the Sierra Nevada on what amounted to an overnight DUI went without comment from my mother and father. I remember, above Sacramento at about the same age, getting sluiced into a diversion dam while rafting on the American River, then dragging the raft upstream and doing it again. This too went without comment.
All gone.
Virtually unimaginable now.
No time left on the schedule of “parenting” for tolerating such doubtful pastimes.
Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Judith Shapiro, when she was president of Barnard, was prompted to write an op-ed piece in The New York Times advising parents to show a little more trust in their children, stop trying to manage every aspect of their college life. She mentioned the father who had taken a year off from his job to supervise the preparation of his daughter’s college applications. She mentioned the mother who had accompanied her daughter to a meeting with her dean to discuss a research project. She mentioned the mother who had demanded, on the grounds that it was she who paid the tuition bills, that her daughter’s academic transcript be sent to her directly.
“You pay $35,000 a year, you want services,” Tamar Lewin of The New York Times was told by the director of “the parents’ office” at Northeastern in Boston, an office devoted to the tending of parents having become a virtually ubiquitous feature of campus administration. For a Times piece a few years ago on the narrowing of the generation gap on campus, Ms. Lewin spoke not only to the tenders of the parents but also to the students themselves, one of whom, at George Washington University, allowed that she used well over three thousand cellphone minutes a month talking to her family. She seemed to view this family as an employable academic resource. “I might call my dad and say, ‘What’s going on with the Kurds?’ It’s a lot easier than looking it up. He knows a lot. I would trust almost anything my dad says.” Asked if she ever thought she might be too close to her parents, another George Washington student had seemed only puzzled: “They’re our parents,” she had said. “They’re supposed to help us. That’s almost their job.”
We increasingly justify such heightened involvement with our children as essential to their survival. We keep them on speed dial. We watch them on Skype. We track their movements. We expect every call to be answered, every changed plan reported. We fantasize unprecedented new dangers in their every unsupervised encounter. We mention terrorism, we share anxious admonitions: “It’s different now.” “It’s not the way it was.” “You can’t let them do what we did.”
Yet there were always dangers to children.
Ask anyone who was a child during the supposedly idyllic decade advertised to us at the time as the reward for World War Two. New cars. New appliances. Women in high-heeled pumps and ruffled aprons removing cookie sheets from ovens enameled in postwar “harvest” colors: avocado, gold, mustard, brown, burnt orange. This was as safe as it got, except it wasn’t: ask any child who was exposed during this postwar harvest fantasy to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ask any child who saw the photographs from the death camps.
“I have to know about this.”
So Quintana said when I found her hiding under the covers of her bed in Malibu, stunned, disbelieving, flashlight in hand, studying a book of old Life photographs that she had come across somewhere.
There were blue-and-white checked gingham curtains in the windows of her room in Malibu.
I remember them blowing as she showed me the book.
She was showing me the photographs Margaret Bourke-White did for Life of the ovens at Buchenwald.
That was what she had to know.
Or ask the child who would not allow herself to fall asleep during most of 1946 because she feared the fate of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who on January seventh of that year had been kidnapped from her bed in Chicago, dissected in a sink, and disposed of in pieces in the sewers of the far north side. Six months after Suzanne Degnan’s disappearance a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago sophomore named William Heirens was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Or ask the child who nine years later followed the California search for fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan, who vanished while walking home from her Berkeley junior high school through the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel, her customary shortcut, and was next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in California’s most northern mountains. Five months after Stephanie Bryan’s disappearance a twenty-seven-year-old University of California accounting student was arrested, charged with her death, and within two years convicted and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Since the events surrounding the disappearances and deaths of both Suzanne Degnan and Stephanie Bryan occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered. The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous. To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did.
Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.
Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century — Fox.
“This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end.” So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. “I had to read it when my parents weren’t around as they didn’t think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.”
As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.
Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.
I have to know about this.
One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me.
How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her?
I used to ask that.
Now I ask the reverse:
How could she have even imagined that I could take care of her?