Everything I was, I owed to Mother. She made me what I am. But I was played out as a student of history; I was the family failure, the goat, the rotten egg. Raymond still wrestled gleefully with nuclear physics, with Heisenberg and Schrödinger and the others. Mark gloried in his fast ball and his slider and his curve. Paul daubed canvas merrily in his Greenwich Village flat near NYU, and even Robert seemed to take delight in keeping books.
Only I had failed. History had become repugnant to me. I was in rebellion against it. I would disappoint my mother, become the butt of my brothers’ scorn, and live in despair, hating the profession of historian and fitted by training for nothing else.
I was graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, a few days after my twenty-first birthday. I wired Mother that I was on my way home, and bought train tickets.
It was a long and grueling journey to Wisconsin. I spent my time thinking, trying to choose between the unpleasant alternatives that faced me.
I could attempt duplicity, telling my mother I was still studying history, while actually preparing myself for some more attractive profession—the law, perhaps.
I could confess to her at once my failure of purpose, ask her forgiveness for disappointing her and flawing her grand scheme, and try to begin afresh in another field.
Or I could forge ahead with history, compelling myself grimly to take an interest, cramping and paining myself so that my mother’s design would be complete.
None of them seemed desirable paths to take. I brooded over it, and was weary and apprehensive by the time I arrived at our farm.
The first of my brothers I saw was Mark. He sat on the front porch of the big house, reading a book which I recognized at once and with some surprise as Volume I of Churchill. He looked up at me and smiled feebly.
I frowned. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Mark. According to the local sports pages the Braves are playing on the Coast this week. How come you’re not with them?”
His voice was a low murmur. “Because they gave me my release,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded. “I’m washed up at twenty-one. They made me a free agent; that means I can hook up with any team that wants me.”
“And you’re just taking a little rest before offering yourself around?”
He shook his head. “I’m through. Kaput. Harry, I just can’t stand baseball. It’s a silly, stupid game. You know how many times I had to stand out there in baggy knickers and throw a bit of horsehide at some jerk with a club in his paws? A hundred, hundred-fifty times a game, every four days. For what? What the hell does it all mean? Why should I bother?”
There was a strange gleam in his eyes. I said, “Have you told Mother?”
“I don’t dare! She thinks I’m on leave or something. Harry, how can I tell her—”
“I know.” Briefly, I told him of my own disenchantment with history. We were mutually delighted to learn that we were not alone in our affliction. I picked up my suitcases, scrambled up the steps, and went inside.
Dewey was cleaning up the common room as I passed through. He nodded hello glumly. I said, “How’s the tooth trade?”
He whirled and glared at me viciously.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“I’ve been accepted by four dental schools, Harry.”
“Is that any cause for misery?”
He let the broom drop, walked over to me, and whispered, “I’ll murder you if you tell Mother this. But the thought of spending my life poking around in foul-smelling oral cavities sickens me. Sickens.”
“But I thought—”
“Yeah. You thought. You’ve got it soft; you just need to dig books out of the library and rearrange what they say and call it new research. I have to drill and clean and fill and plug and—” He stopped. “Harry, I’ll kill you if you breathe a word of this. I don’t want Mother to know that I didn’t come out the way she wanted.”
I repeated what I had said to Mark—and told him about Mark, for good measure. Then I made my way upstairs to my old room. I felt a burden lifting from me; I was not alone. At least two of my brothers felt the same way. I wondered how many more were at last rebelling against the disciplines of a lifetime.
Poor Mother, I thought! Poor Mother!
Our first family council of the summer was held that night. Stephen and Saul were the last to arrive, Stephen resplendent in his Annapolis garb, Saul crisp looking and stiff-backed from West Point. Mother had worked hard to wangle appointments for those two.
We sat around the big table and chatted. The first phase of our lives, Mother told us, had ended. Now, our preliminary educations were complete, and we would undertake the final step towards our professions—those of us who had not already entered them.
Mother looked radiant that evening, tall, energetic, her white hair cropped mannishly short, as she sat about the table with her thirty-one strapping sons. I envied and pitied her: envied her for the sweet serenity of her life, which had proceeded so inexorably and without swerving towards the goal of her experiment, and pitied her for the disillusioning that awaited her.
For Mark and Dewey and I were not the only failures in the crop.
I had made discreet inquiries during the day. I learned that Anthony found literary criticism to be a fraud and a sham, that Paul knew clearly he had no talent as a painter (and, also, that very few of his contemporaries did either), that Robert bitterly resented a career of bookkeeping, that piano playing hurt George’s fingers, that Claude had had difficulty with his composing because he was tone deaf, that the journalistic grind was too strenuous for Jonas, that John longed to quit the seminarial life because he had no calling, that Albert hated the uncertain Bohemianism of an actor’s life—
We circulated, all of us raising for the first time the question that had sprouted in our minds during the past several years. I made the astonishing discovery that not one of Donna Mitchell’s sons cared for the career that had been chosen for him.
The experiment had been a resounding flop.
Late that evening, after Mother had gone to bed, we remained together, discussing our predicament. How could we tell her? How could we destroy her life’s work? And yet, how could we compel ourselves to lives of unending drudgery?
Robert wanted to study engineering; Barry, to write. I realized I cared much more for law than for history, while Leonard longed to exchange law for the physical sciences. James, our banker-manque, much preferred politics. And so it went, with Richard (who claimed five robberies, a rape, and innumerable picked pockets) pouring out his desire to settle down and live within the law as an honest farmer.
It was pathetic.
Summing up the problem in his neat forensic way, Leonard said, “Here’s our dilemma: Do we all keep quiet about this and ruin our lives, or do we speak up and ruin Mother’s experiment?”
“I think we ought to continue as is, for the time being,” Saul said. “Perhaps Mother will die in the next year or two. We can start over then.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t die?” Edward wanted to know. “She’s tough as nails. She may last another twenty or thirty or even forty years.”
“And we’re past twenty-one already,” remarked Raymond. “If we hang on too long at what we’re doing, it’ll be too late to change. You can’t start studying for a new profession when you’re thirty-five.”
“Maybe we’ll get to like what we’re doing by then,” suggested David hopefully. “Diplomatic service isn’t as bad as all that, and I’d say—”
“What about me?” Paul yelped. “I can’t paint and I know I can’t paint. I’ve got nothing but starvation ahead of me unless I wise up and get into business in a hurry. You want me to keep messing up good white canvas the rest of my life?”