Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 26
WHAT are you going to do with a boy who won't wear a necktie? Not with a boy that just makes a fuss and then weakly gives in but a boy who just simply won't wear a necktie? You can ignore what is happening, or you can make a case of that sort of parent lèse majesté known as disobedience; but still it's inglorious to make all that fuss about a necktie.
You have another alternative and a weak one—you can say it's a phase and that it will wear off. Then your child meets your friends, meets his relatives, meets his grandmother. One and all they clamor when they see you next:
"What a manly looking little fellow Robert's getting to be. But so absent-minded! I saw him to-day on the street without a necktie!" That's what happened with Robert. When they asked him what was the matter he simply explained:
"I don't like neckties." When they tied them on for him, sooner or later they found it thrown on the ground, over the back of a chair, anywhere, except around Robert's neck.
It grew to be a nuisance; it grew to be a mystery. It challenged them at every meal. It made question marks at them every time they encountered Robert. It asked them all the time if they were really conscientious parents would they let such a state of things go on? It asked them when they had almost made up their minds not to let such a state of things go on if they had no sense of humor. Robert maintained a complete and obstinate silence.
The scene with Laurie which occurred one Saturday morning ended with her saying she would leave, and Robert announcing that he would burn all his neckties. Directly after breakfast Alice saw him making his way to the garden. He was necktieless, and in his hand were some bright colored objects—neckties, all of them. He disappeared in the shrubbery. Then Alice saw a little spiral of smoke arising. As in all well-regulated households, matches were forbidden to children in the Marcey family. By the time Alice got there there was no Robert, nothing but a little heap of scorching and smoldering neckties. She stared at them, and then she sat down beside them and thought:
Children are generally so good that an open act of rebellion or a maliciously destructive act leaves us gasping. We don't know how to meet it; we are so used to only minor protests from them that anything else takes our breath away. This was not naughtiness; Alice realized some moral issue was at stake in Robert's mind. She realized that here she was face to face with a supreme protest. She realized, moreover, that he had trumped all their tricks; in other words, he had forced them into making a row that no necktie was worth—or else into letting him alone.
Swiftly Alice made up her mind. She buried the neckties. When she went up-stairs to her own room Robert had returned by some circuitous route. Through an open crack in the door she saw him standing before the looking glass in the spare room. In his hands he had a straight piece of rag. Over and over he was trying to tie a necktie with it. Then suddenly, with a flash of insight, that is so common in fiction and so rare in life, she understood what was the matter.
Robert was no baby to be tweaked around by nurses and half choked while his necktie was put on him. Until he himself could adjust a necktie he would wear none that had been tied by any one else's hand. He wasn't old enough to say this, but he was old enough to feel it. He was old enough to defy his family in his fight for personal dignity.
One afternoon Alice saw him leaving the house. About his neck was a brilliant strip of color. It hung below his shirtwaist midway between his thigh and knee. Alice recognized the flamboyant necktie as one of her husband's which he had found too brilliant to wear. Not only was Robert adorned in this magnificent cravat, neatly tied—but his hair was brushed; he looked washed. He looked all the things that were so rarely accomplished without a suggestion from some older person. As he started off, Alice felt that she had not for weeks seen him look like such a little boy—they never look younger than when they are aping their fathers' ways. It was Laurie who snatched her from this comforting reflection.
"He's going to see his girl!" were the words she spoke
"His girl!" Alice echoed stupidly. Not eight years old and going to see his girl, with his father's necktie dangling almost to his knees!
"Who is his girl?" Alice inquired next. "Does he tell you?"
"Oh, yes, indeed, ma'am," said Laurie, "he's quite confidential about them. He's got two. One is Phyllis Bennett and the other is Marion Riley."
"He's not going to see that one now," piped up Sara. "He's going to see a new one! He's going to Gwendolyn!"
"An' I've a beau, too," said Sara. Alice had not known a moment ago that Sara knew that there were beaux in the world.
"My beau is Laurie," Sara went on, hugging her nurse around the knees.
"An' mine, too," echoed Jamie from the floor.
"An' when we grow up we're both going to marry Laurie, aren't we, Jamie?" pursued Sara.
Then with gratitude in her heart that she still had two real babies, and that manly dignity had not yet come to trouble Jamie, Alice kissed her two younger children.