In a public school in a run-down section of Brooklyn, Mrs. Cavell, under a grant for special projects, was conducting her kindergarten civics class. “What are you?” she would say to her little people, right after the bell each weekday morning. “I’m free,” they had learned to say, as one. On a particularly cold, bleak morning of midwinter, Mrs. Cavell tried a variation. “Today, we are going to say it in our individual voices,” she said. “When I call on you, I want you to stand and say it proudly. All right. Jefferson Adams, what are you?” Jefferson Adams got it. “I’m free,” he replied. “Right. What are you, Franklin Atell?” “I’m free,” Franklin Atell said. Mary Lou Jones had to be asked to speak up, but then she said it firmly, “I’m free.” Up and down the rows of carved and gum-stuck desks in the pre-school classroom, the words rang out, but Mrs. Cavell, a good soul, who had taught for thirty years in Brooklyn, saw a look of somehow disquieting resolution on Billy Martin’s face. “What are you, Billy Martin?” Mrs. Cavell asked. “I am four,” he said.
The Piano. The rich grandmother was always giving her grandchildren presents which had to be put away until the children were old enough to care for them properly. On one birthday, the five-year-old was given his great-grandfather’s pocket watch; his twin sister was given an extremely fragile eighteenth-century doll. As a reward for giving up chewing gum, the seven-year-old — who had reached such an intensely tomboy phase that, although she was constantly on playing fields or in the trees, she refused to change out of a single set of clothes, or to permit them to be washed — was given a strand of pearls. For his graduation from grammar school, the twelve-year-old received shares in a utility. On other occasions, this grandmother bought expensive clothes or gold wristwatches, invariably in her own size, which she gave to the children with the suggestion that they grow into them. The other grandmother, who was poor, took the children to the five-and-ten and gave them things that could be put to immediate use. She was, perhaps unfairly, far the more popular grandparent of their early years. Twenty years passed.
At Christmas, in this country, as before in Germany, the family did not have a tree. Not being at all devout, however, and having grown over the years to a considerable number, including one great-grandmother and seven small children, the family had to make some accommodation to the season. This accommodation became increasingly festive and odd. Christmas was called Christmas, but it was celebrated on any day in December when the entire family could make it, could return conveniently from their separate places to the country house where the grandparents lived. This day seldom, any longer, fell on December 25th. Decorations were eclectic. Presents were placed, in fact, on and under the piano — an old Steinway grand that no one any longer played. Out of a vague conviction that the youngest children ought to be reminded that they were not really quite Christians, their grandmother yearly lighted candles on the eight-branched silver holders, which she had inherited from her own grandparents, and which were polished for whatever day was the designated Christmas of the year. The maid, however, a strong-minded Catholic, felt the occasion was too bleak with just those frail and flickering candles. Yearly, she placed more ribbons, tinsel, twigs, pine cones, and finally colored light bulbs on the piano and around its base. The year she put a painted wooden angel on top of the largest present on the piano, it was thought that she had gone too far. The angel was removed.
The presents were an annual disappointment. The great-grandmother, who approached the occasion with the highest expectations, liked to unwrap, not just her own presents, but everyone’s. Among the youngest children, this sometimes brought tears. The grandfather, who pretended not to care about the holiday, every year, until the precise moment when the door to the study, where the piano stood, was opened and the presents were revealed, became, every year, at that moment, hopeful, eager, even zealous, and then dejected, utterly. No one had ever found a present that actually pleased him. “Very nice,” he would say, in a tight voice, as he unwrapped one thing after another. “Very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” The year his sons gave him an electric razor, he said, “Very nice. Of course, I’ll never use it. I’m too old to change the way I shave.” When they asked him at least to try it, he said, “No, I’m sorry. It’s very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” Everyone in the family, through a run of years, had taken this reaction as a challenge, to find him something, anything. But from the years of the clay ashtrays, through the year in the war when his nine-year-old son somehow bought him an object, at the fair, called a butter stretcher, to the years of things in gold, scrapbooks, and family poems, he was, for his own reasons but like almost everyone else, as saddened by Christmas as though the world had died.
What everyone dreaded was the birthday song. Anthems are sung in crowded halls. You can stand and mouthe. Carolers and singers from the Fireside Book are volunteers. You can stand and smile at them, or go away. But when the birthday song is imminent, the group is small. There is the possibility that everyone will mouthe. Someone begins firmly, quavers. Others chime in with a note or two, then look encouragingly, reprovingly, at the mouthing rest. The mouthers release a note or two. The reprovers lapse. The thing comes to a ragged, desperate end. If the birthday person’s name is Andrew or Doris, the syllables at least come out. Otherwise, you can get Dear Ma-ahrk, or Dear Bar-barasoo-ooh, or a complete parting of the ways — some singing Herbert, some Her-erb, some Herbie, and, if the generations and formalities are mixed enough, Herbert Francis, Uncle Herbles, and Mr. Di Santo Stefano. The song is just so awful, anyway. I cannot imagine, though, from what the double shyness about singing, about being seen not to sing derives. There seems to be no early trauma that would account for it. Someone may accuse a small child of being unable to carry a tune, although I’ve never heard of this; but surely no one then insists that the poor child be seen to mouthe. Then, then, just when the song has faltered to its abysmal close, the birthday person inhales somewhere near the candles of that hideous pastel cake, inhales, perhaps singes his mustache or gets frosting on his tie, gets wax onto the cake or, if it is a she, into her hair, sprays everything with the exhaling breath. Applause. But it may well be that having no respect for occasions means having no respect for the moment, after all.
The onset of the state of mind consisted in a loyalty to objects. She apologized to one egg for having boiled it, to another for not having selected it to boil. Since it was impossible to know with much precision whether an egg prefers to be boiled or not to, she was always in a state of indecision, followed, as soon as she had taken any action, by extreme remorse. Since this is not far from the predicament of most people of any sensitivity or conscience, she passed for normal. It was not immediately apparent that her oscillation between regret and indecision was brought on as much by this matter of the claims and preferences of objects as by more ordinary moral quandaries. When these oscillations began to shatter her sleep and her poise entirely, it became clear something must be done. What we did was to leave her alone. Vlad told us one evening of two patients in a state asylum. One was catatonic, the other melancholic. The catatonic, like catatonics, just sat there. For years. But, also like catatonics, when once, after all those years, he bestirred himself, he did so with enormous energy and force. He tore his iron bedstead apart. He rushed into the next room and hit the melancholic, with tremendous force, upon the head. The catatonic relapsed. But the melancholic, from shock and surprise presumably, recovered. When Jane was mildly struck by a Vespa, her aphasia and craziness went. She was fine.