Modulate Your Voice, Please

It is a late Sunday morning in the fall of 1946. My father and I, wearing matching leather jackets, are visiting Nay Aug Park Zoo in Scranton, Pa. The air is thick with the smell of straw and animal droppings and roasted peanuts. The zoo is a dirty, dreary place with cramped cages and listless animals who evoke more pity than wonder. But that is an adult view, formed by visits over many years. I can no longer recall how I felt about the zoo as a child. Did I laugh at the chattering monkeys? Did I clutch my father’s hand in fear at the snakes coiled behind the glass? Or did I feel some sympathy for the aging lion, staring blankly out at us, his face pressed against the bars?

As a writer, I want to fill in these lost details because I need to set the scene for what I do vividly remember about that Sunday. I want to convey how much I adore my father and how thrilled I am to be with him, even though he is probably paying more attention to a neighborhood friend who has accompanied us to the zoo. So I imagine that he lifts me up to throw some peanuts to the monkeys and that he continues to hold my hand after we pass by the boa constrictor, and that he buys me cotton candy to eat as we walk back to the car.

The car is new--our family’s first--a black Pontiac sedan purchased a few months earlier. I remember my father driving it triumphantly home from work as I waited for him, as I did each evening, at the front window of our apartment. But now, when we reach the place along the road where he has parked, the Pontiac is no longer there.

Stunned, we look down the hillside. The car has plunged down the steep slope and come to rest in the brush and rocks 40 yards below. For a moment everyone is speechless. Then the neighbor sucks on his pipe and says to my father, “You didn’t put on the hand brake, Norman.” The look on my father’s face acknowledges that he is right. He stares at the car in confusion. Other people stop to gape or laugh. I am not sure exactly what is happening, but I know they’re making fun of my father. The man I eagerly watch for every night at the front window looks helpless, lost. I want to come to his rescue, but I don’t know how. I begin to cry. . . .

After 45 years, why does this memory still haunt me? As a 5-year-old, how much of this experience had I language to express? A conceptual framework with which to understand? And what of that Sunday morning did I really experience as a child, and what have I invented later? As a writer of children’s books, these questions are ones I constantly confront in my own work as I shift back and forth between a child’s and an adult’s perspective in an attempt to understand the formative experiences of childhood.

Children--and adults as well--don’t have to understand the significance of their experience to be profoundly affected by it. Although I could not have articulated it at the time, I saw something that Sunday I had never seen before--my father’s fallibility. The accident revealed him in a new way, one that was painful for both of us. I understood that he was to blame for the car’s slide down the ravine and that he was ashamed because of it.

Yet, thinking about it now, I wonder if I also recognized the contempt in our neighbor’s voice, realized the extent of my father’s humiliation. Even now, I’m not sure why our neighbor was so contemptuous of my father’s mistake. Had my father driven him to the park to impress him with our new car? Also, why did my father suffer his contempt in silence? Why, in fact, did he feel so defeated by what, after all, was such a minor accident? A tow truck came a short while later and pulled the car up the slope and we drove home. In retrospect, my father’s paralysis, his helplessness, seem out of proportion to what prompted them. Perhaps, because I sensed, but could not voice all this as a child, I’ve kept coming back to it as an adult to try to clarify its impact on me.

Recently I asked my parents about what they remembered of the incident. My mother, who was not there that Sunday, remembered it as the neighbor’s car which had rolled down the ravine. My father acknowledged that it was his Pontiac, but he blamed the accident on the failure of the car’s brakes.

Our differing recollections of that day are another reason, I believe, that the memory of our car at the bottom of the culvert has remained such a powerful image for me. In many ways, this event, and its aftermath, crystallize my childhood. And, like most writers, my childhood has strongly influenced the kind of books I write.

When I was growing up in Scranton, our family was considered a model in the community. My father was a successful lawyer, my mother an energetic housewife, my sister and I bright, well-behaved, honor students as well as Curved Bar and Eagle scouts. But like many American families our emotional lives were very constricted. My family’s denial of the events that occurred that Sunday at the zoo were typical of the way we processed painful experiences.

Many of the feelings I had as a child were considered either unjustified or improper. Anger, for example, was not considered to be polite. Angry people had poor breeding. My parents rarely raised their voices. If they were angry at each other, or at us, they often expressed it by not talking.

This repression of feeling--the avoidance of messy emotions like anger, resentment or grief--is characteristic of many families in our society. My parents’ repression was relatively benign. “Modulate your voice, please,” my mother would say when we showed the first signs of anger; or “You don’t smile enough,” she’d tell my sister when she was sad. Other families shame or punish their children for displaying the same feelings. We can all cite familiar examples: “Stop that whimpering or I’ll give you something real to cry about.” Or when a child is shy or fearful. “Quit being such a sissy.” Or what a mother told a friend of mine whenever she was angry. “Look at that face. Nobody will want to marry you with a face like that.”

As children we all want to please our parents, retain their love, as limited as it may sometimes be. We quickly learn to suppress feelings they can’t tolerate, to ignore perceptions they don’t want to hear. Parents often call this process maturation. “He’s growing up into such a nice boy,” meaning: He’s responsive to all their cues and has accepted both their spoken and unspoken rules of social behavior.

Most children experiment with both approaches. As a child, I came up with my own solution. Since displaying grown-up traits was so important to my parents I tried hard to please them and began, at an early age, to act far older than my years. The cost of adopting this pose was high, though, and to make room for all those other unacceptable emotions, I created three imaginary brothers--Morris, Neal and Bruce, all of whom were much bolder and more daring than I. Morris was very outspoken and used “bad language.” Neal had a violent temper that got him into so much trouble that he frequently had to be locked up in jail. And Bruce was a lady’s man. He kept getting married and divorced.

My imaginary brothers appeared in my life some time around the age of 2 and lasted until the birth of my sister when I was 5. Then they disappeared. My parents thought they vanished because there was now another child in the family, another companion. That may have been part of it, but I think my brothers disappeared because the feelings and perceptions they had allowed me to express were becoming more dangerous and unmanageable. Not even Morris was brave enough to bring up my father’s humiliation at the park.

Five was also the age I learned to read and began to take refuge in books. Books are still one of the most important ways children can test their beliefs and perceptions without having to defend them against disapproving peers or parents. They also allow children, and all of us, to extend the range of our experience, to indulge in, if only vicariously, emotions not possible in our ordinary lives.

The books I write naturally reflect my own upbringing and experience. The children in them are usually struggling to be grown-up. Often this means coping with adult problems, such as divorce or homelessness, problems created by adults, but whose consequences children have to suffer. The children in my books often feel that if only they could just be good enough, do everything expected of them--or more--they could make things right again, restore their parents’s marriage, get them jobs and homes, live happily ever after.

Yet, even though my protagonists may still cling to these magical childhood beliefs, they often see more clearly than the adults around them. As innocents, children can speak truths which adults--knowing the consequences of such candor--are reluctant to admit even to themselves. In my 1985 novel “Confessions of a Prime Time Kid,” Meg wants to tell what it’s really like to be a child actor. Her agent is firmly opposed to the idea. “Writing your memoirs at 13 is in extremely bad taste,” the agent warns. “If an actress is going to be rude enough to write her autobiography, she should at least have the good grace to wait until she’s in her 60s and all the people she’s gossiping about are dead. When you’re too old to get any more good parts, then you can tell all.”

Following in the literary tradition of other child heroines, Meg goes ahead and speaks her mind anyway. Writing in the guise of a child provides authors a wonderful cover for impertinence. The punishment for juvenile offenders is much more lenient than for adults who commit the same crime.

The conflicts between honesty and hypocrisy, truth and fantasy, reality and magical beliefs, are at the heart of many coming-of-age novels about 12- or 13-year-olds, the literary age that seems to mark the demarcation of childhood and adulthood. My protagonists struggle with these issues as they try to reconcile their astute perceptions of the world with their desire for happily-ever-after endings. It’s a sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating process, but, in the end, my characters usually reach some resolution--however tentative--that offers them hope for the future.

On my desk is a picture of my father and me taken in the fall of 1946, sometime around our visit to the zoo. We are posed in front of our house in our matching leather jackets. My father stands behind me, his long, slender fingers resting lightly on my shoulders. He wears a tie underneath his jacket and his smile is stiff, composed for the camera. His eyes, behind his rimless glasses, are shadowed, hidden. There is a softness, a vulnerability in his face. (Can others see this? Or is this just my own projection?)

I, on the other hand, look up brightly from beneath my cap at the unremembered photographer (perhaps my mother). My eyes are wide, my eyebrows lifted, my mouth half-open, my whole face alive with a child’s eagerness to please.

I go to the mirror and study the face I see there now. I squint a little, and yes, despite the graying beard, I can still glimpse a little of that boy’s eagerness and wonder; but also more of the father’s pain than I would like to acknowledge.

I look at the boy in the photograph, his freshness, his innocence, and I want to protect him, shield him from all that I know is coming. I want to speak to the father too, to tell him to be stronger, more assertive, that he doesn’t have to let people treat him so contemptuously, that if he expresses his anger more it would be easier to stand up for himself, and that I love him even though he doesn’t. I think if I could have told him that when I was younger, or even later, it wouldn’t have been so hard to say the same things to myself and to believe them. But the boy and his father are frozen in time.

So I write children’s books instead, continuing the dialogue that Morris and I began as 3-year-olds, trying to reconcile a child’s feelings with an adult’s understanding, in an on-going debate that I suspect that I am not alone in waging.