Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 4
IT took Howling Sara to give perfect humility to Alice and Tom. She was born when Robert was three.
"Now," thought Alice, "I will correct all the mistakes I made with Robert. I know how to be a better mother now."
Tom, also, believed he had learned a little about being a father. When Sara was a little baby they spent no time in talking about what good parents they were. They had gotten to the point when parents talk about Development, and Spontaneity, and Co-ordination. This was all very well, except that they made plans again without allowing for X, which one may let represent Sara's personality. Robert gave them the first lesson concerning it. He was at closer quarters with it and no theories dimmed the clearness of his observation.
There was no doubt about it, Sara cried more than Robert had—it would be more strictly true to say she howled more. She acted as the book said babies didn't act when they were well. She howled over nothing. She had moments of sheer unreasonable howling which nothing would stop. If you picked her up she howled, and when you set her down she howled more. When on one of these occasions Alice in anguish asked the nurse:
"Oh, what do you think is the matter? Why do you think she's crying?"
"She's just mad," Robert explained. "When she's mad she yells. When she stops being mad she stops yelling."
There you had the reason. For no other cause on earth but temper—eating well, sleeping well, no excuse in life for it—Sara for two or three days would fill all the earth with her clamor. Then the storm would go by and the nursery would again be pleasant with the sweet noises of happy children. It didn't happen often, but these "spells," as her grandmother called them, would come with the suddenness of tropical storms. They often speculated "Where she got it from," but though she had red-headed and hot-tempered ancestors there was no one who had had this cyclonic quality. There was nothing one could do; no way to please Sara. If the storm happened in mid-street you could but hurry her home, so that at least she might do her howling in private. Leaving her alone to cry it out did no good. Humoring her did no good. When she began to talk, reasoning did no good. Scolding her did no good. Nothing did her any good. Robert told her what he thought about it when she was two years old.
"She's a bad girl," said he, "and ought to be spanked."
"Mercy, Alice!" said Tom's mother, "don't spank the child. Violent as she is, she'd be liable to break a blood vessel, crying."
"Of course I sha'n't spank her," said Alice.
The Mooted Question had been answered forever for the Marceys. No spanking in that family. It humiliated the Spanker. It degraded the Spankee. There wasn't anything the Marceys could say bad enough about spanking. It was the resort of the weak. It was a confession of failure. Children needed spanking only in homes where there was no true discipline.
Here we come to a dark page—one without a moral, one that holds even an immoral in its somber web.
It had been a terrible afternoon. Laurie was out. Sara had been howling for two days. When she was a little baby one could stand it. Now that she could talk it seemed unbearable. If asked what was the matter, she screeched with rage. When Alice washed her face she screamed. Alice had left her on the bed a moment and told Robert to watch her. When she came up-stairs again she heard Robert saying:
"There, darling, there," in the tone of a dove, while Sara, her face red, her curls bobbing, her finger pointed at Robert, screamed at him,
"Go! Go!" and this because he was keeping her on the bed, as he had been told to. Then Sara leaned forward and slapped Robert. She slapped him twice. Robert turned a patient, smiling face toward his mother.
"She does this when she gets mad," he explained. Red anger arose in Alice.
"You're a bad, naughty baby," she said, and here for good and all did Alice Marcey lose her complacency, for she picked up the screaming Sara, put her over her knee and spanked her smartly.
She did the unpardonable thing. She spanked a little helpless child in anger.
The howls of Sara subsided. She sobbed a little, pathetically and limply. Then she murmured:
"Sweet Mother." She kissed her mother. "Sweet buddie," she murmured, "sweet Bobby." She kissed Robert. She was a reformed infant. She wanted to kiss all the world. She swam in a sea of benevolence. When Alice dressed her and took her out of doors she fell to picking little nosegays of wild flowers, which she presented to Laurie and then to her mother. She was sweeter than honey in the honeycomb.
In the domestic life figs do sometimes come of thistles. Alice had struck her child in anger and, lo, an angel was born on earth, nor did Sara howl again—not for months. And when she howled again Alice spanked her, humbly, not knowing the why of it, only knowing that for some mysterious reason Sara would howl until spanked, or until "the spell" wore itself out.