abnormality, who had supervised her first tests. Watching her precise and accurate lineup of the pegs in the holes of one of his office toys he could not, he said, think she was retarded. It could — he paused. It could be something else. If it were psychological — that he knew nothing about.
And neither did I.
I knew only that my fourth child was not like the others, who needed me and loved me, as I loved them. The fairies had stolen away the human baby and left one of their own. There she moved, every day, among us but not of us, acquiescent when we approached, untouched when we retreated, serene, detached, in perfect equilibrium. Existing among us, she had her being elsewhere. As long as no demands were made upon her, she was content. If smiles and laughter mean happiness, she was happy inside the invisible walls that surrounded her. She dwelt in a solitary citadel, compelling and self-made, complete and valid. Yet we could not leave her there. We must intrude, attack, invade, not because she was unhappy inside it, for she was not, but because the equilibrium she had found, perfect as it was, denied the possibility of growth. We had not demanded; now we must. We had accepted; now we must try to change. A terrible arrogance, for what had we to offer her? Which of us could call ourselves as content as Elly was? The world we would tempt her into was the world of risk, failure, and frustration, of unfulfilled desire, of pain as well as activity and love. There in Nirvana, why should she ever come out? Yet she was ours as well as her own, and we wanted her with us. If what we had to offer was not enough, we had nothing beside Confronted with a tiny child’s refusal of life, all existential hesitations evaporate. We had no choice. We would use every stratagem we could invent to assail her fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce her into the human condition.
2. Ourselves
Elly only seemed to live in isolation. In fact she lived with us. There were five other human beings in her house. We passed, we spoke, we touched, we provided. It is time to introduce ourselves, the family that should have made up Elly’s world.
Elly’s father is a professor. He learns, he teaches, he writes. His work is varied, demanding, and in the main satisfying. The college is small and very good. Professors there are teachers as well as scholars, and their students (note the personal pronoun) learn not merely by watching them operate at a distance but by working with them. It may be an exaggeration to say that these professors work here in this isolated valley instead of at one of the exciting intellectual factories for which their abilities qualify them, because they believe with Forster than ‘the personal is all that matters’. Yet most of the faculty is here by choice, and the choice has involved some such factor. My husband and I have spent almost all our lives in one school or another. Deep inside us, unspoken and unanalysed until Elly made us analyse it, is the conviction that all good learning is at last a matter of what is now called, with a show of scientific objectivity, ‘interpersonal relations’. We believed this, but we could not have guessed how deeply we were to test our belief.
We are a very academic family. My husband is a professor’s son; my mother was sent north to college from a small, provincial Southern town long ago at a time when to educate one’s girls at all was by no means the conventional thing to do. I, who tell this story, was when Elly was born a typical college-bred housewife, of the sort that forms the backbone of the League of Women Voters all over the country. I had had a fine education; I even had an M. A. , picked up at the same university where my husband did his graduate work, but I had gone no further. When David completed his Ph. D. we had been four years married, and although I enjoyed academic work and did it well I had no clear goals of the sort that would have been expected of me if I had been a man. As David entered on his professional life, it seemed reasonable for me to do what almost every other woman my age was doing — to start having babies. Before Elly came I had had three. Sara was seven when I learned Elly was on the way. Rebecca was six, Matthew three. It was a rounded, well-planned family, two girls and a boy.
There are thousands of families like us in this happy land. We live in a big house in a homogeneous community where neighbours are friends, wide lawns run into each other, and children find it safe to roam — a woman’s magazine daydream which happens to be true. Our town is an ideal place to rear children, if an ideal place is one which is free from insecurity and danger. Within two hundred yards of our house were fifteen or twenty children for Sara and Becky and Matt to know. A selection of these streamed steadily through our house, depositing balls, gum wrappers, and anonymous pieces of clothing; our children streamed correspondingly through the houses near by. These children were attractive and alert, brought up with care and considerable success by mothers like me, the mothers of the forties and fifties for whom Dr Spock had replaced the conventional wisdom. Of professional ability, most of us, we had made motherhood our profession. We read, we discussed our problems with each other. We were very knowledgeable. If I was unusual in anything, it was that I was less educated than most in the theoretical ins and outs of the infant psyche. Having studied no psychology in college, I eschewed the more recondite writings on the subject, lost patience with Gesell's heavy detail which never seemed to describe my own babies, and stuck to the common sense of Spock, freely corrected, as time went on, by my own. But I was like my friends m putting my full resources of intelligence and intuition into e task of bringing up my children. Every mother her own Piaget. I had observed, fascinated, their first approaches to language: how one small consciousness would begin with nouns, another with verbs — and speculated on what significance this might have as a key to their orientation to the world. I had watched their first slow movement from the domain of people and objects to the making of primitive abstractions. When Becky, at two, responded to her lot of low man on the neighbourhood totem-pole by remarking, ‘Sara bang me — Johnny bang me,’ and then, slowly and philosophically, ‘
If I were to describe them this would be the place to do it. Their separate characteristics, the weaknesses and strengths of each one of them, are part of Elly’s story. But it is a part that must remain incomplete, even at the risk of unreality. Our children have put up with a lot of things because of Elly; they will not have to put up with reading their mother’s summation of their personalities printed in a book. I set down only what is obvious, what is attested by teachers, friends, and neighbours. It is all that is necessary here. Our children were intelligent, responsive, and adaptable. They were also — quite irrelevantly — beautiful, with a pink-and-gold beauty which seemed to belong not to the real world but to the illustrations of old-fashioned story-books. I luxuriated in their beauty; it seemed to me that I had unaccountably given birth to two princesses and a prince. As I looked at them, remembering my own bespectacled childhood, they seemed a special and continuing miracle. It is our eyes that we believe. Irrationally, it was their beauty, with which I had had nothing whatever to do, that summed up my pride in them. It shone around them, an astonishing, almost palpable fact, as if to symbolize their less superficial successes — their intelligence and their affection.
That year, the year of Elly’s beginning, a friend had visited us, one with whom we had long been out of touch. A man with a gift for intimacy, he formulated a single question to bring us close together again: ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what have you done in the past five years of which you are most proud?’ He, a man of considerable attainments as a scientist, was proudest of his successful psychoanalysis. I was proudest of my children. Clearly he, a married man childless by choice, was astonished and unsatisfied by my answer as I was by his. To each his own achievement, and his own pride in it. I was terribly proud to have produced three such children. But it was my thought that the job was nearly over. Like my husband’s, it had been demanding, varied, and in the main satisfying. I had done it well. Now I would grope my way back towards some of the other things I knew how to do.
I had begun to discover, in the long hours of fragmented attention while I listened to small people’s chatter, what I had been too dim and too timid to perceive in a graduate school. I was no natural homebody. I had the stirrings of a vocation. I had done some teaching while I was at the university — pickup work, freshman composition in the years of the great postwar teacher shortage. I was sure now of what I had only suspected then — that this was what I wanted to do. I had spent seven years teaching little people, with some success. Now I
