The summer after David was born was about the hottest summer I can ever remember. We had no air-conditioning, so I put Lin and John in bathing suits in the yard. The wading pool had an inch of water in it and I figured they could cool off a bit while I fed David. Within a few moments the phone was ringing. It was our next-door neighbor, a church member, as it happened.
“Katherine,” she said in an obvious state of shock, “do you realize that your children are running around naked in the backyard?” My mental response, which, you’ll be glad to know, I did not utter out loud was: In this heat anybody with any sense would be running around naked. I simply thanked her, sighed, put the baby down, and went out and wrestled the suits back on the children.
There was another morning that summer that I set up the two-sided easel in the yard with beautiful pots of primary colors and big brushes, figuring that art work would keep them busy while I gave poor David a little attention. I thought I was keeping an eye out the window, but the next thing I was aware of was an ungodly shriek and my husband’s anguished cry of “Katherine!” I hurried out to see what disaster had occurred to find John holding his beloved children tightly. It seems that Lin and little John had had a wonderful time decorating not the newsprint on the easel, but each other with the crimson paint. As their father got out of the car, he saw his beloved toddlers racing toward him covered in blood.
When they got to school age, the children were often out playing in the small park a few steps up the street when he got home for supper. His invariable question when he walked into the house would be: “Where are the children?” And my invariable answer would be: “They’re fine. They’re up at the park playing. Children need some freedom. If I watched them every second we’d all be neurotic in no time.”
It was many years later that I heard exactly what those boys were doing when I was assuring their father they were just fine. We had moved to Norfolk and I with two writer friends was going back to Washington for a meeting. Teenaged David wanted to go along to visit some of his Takoma Park friends, and he was riding in the backseat with Stephanie Tolan. I abruptly aborted the front-seat conversation when I realized that David and Stephanie were talking about things they had done when they were young that they wouldn’t want their mothers to know about.
It seemed that on more than one occasion when I was sure the boys and their neighborhood gang of friends were playing at the park just above our house, they were actually exploring the sewers beneath the city of Takoma Park. Now I can laugh. I can even imagine another answer to my husband’s daily query about his children’s whereabouts. “Down in the sewer, where else?”
They all survived the benign neglect of their mother. They slogged through years of public school and graduated from college. Eventually they married and presented us with matchless grandchildren. I did plenty wrong along the way, but they forgave me and survived to become delightful, imaginative human beings, and if my hair is almost white—well, it’s the price of having been a less than ideal mother of four. In my defense, I did two things right. I loved them a lot, and even if I didn’t spend nearly enough time cleaning the house they lived in, I made it up in countless hours of reading aloud.
Me and C.C.
Pets
Every pet the children had is a long story in itself, and we had almost every legal pet known to American life before we were through, but some of them were more memorable than others—notably Frank. On an excursion to DC’s Rock Creek Park that neither parent was a part of, the boys came home with a native black snake—all black except for a tiny white chip on the right side of his lower lip. The argument they gave me was that Frank would be a companion to Sam, the baby boa currently in residence. In retrospect, Frank should have been named Francine, as there were unfertilized snake eggs to be found whenever Frank escaped his/her cage. And Frank made more escapes than Houdini. No matter how secure we tried to make the cage, Frank would find a way out, only to be found days later. Once, in the middle of the night, I met Frank coiled around the sink stand in the bathroom. Fortunately, I am not afraid of snakes.
I was at the time a part of a committee reluctantly appointed by the Montgomery Country Board of Education. Those of us in the poor east end of the county needed some of the perks that were being lavished upon the richer west side, and we were trying to come up with creative ideas to get our share. That particular evening the meeting was held in our living room and all of us were seriously struggling with an approach to parity for our children, when I spied Frank, who had been missing more than a week. Behind the glass front of the old secretary, I could see dark black loops.
“There’s Frank!” I cried, startling my fellow committee members. “He’s in the desk.” The boys heard me and came running. But yanking an unwilling snake who has managed to wind himself in and out of the cubby holes of an antique desk is no simple matter. I think the committee gave up before we did and quietly adjourned themselves behind my back.
After the beloved Sam died, I suggested that Frank wasn’t really happy in our home. He had no reptile companion, live mice were pricey, and besides, if he were content, why was he always escaping the cage to roam the house?
Reluctantly, the boys agreed. We made a real ceremony of it. All six of us went to Rock Creek Park to return Frank to the wilds from which he had come.
Some months later, David came racing into the house after school. “Guess who I saw today?” he cried.
“Who?”
“Frank!” he said. Their class had gone on a school field trip to the nature center in Rock Creek Park and there, in an enormous cage, was a “Native Black Snake” looking very sleek and basking in all the attention.
“How do you know it was Frank?” I asked. Coincidences on this order only appeared in Dickens.
“It was Frank all right. He had that little white chip right there on his lip.”
The dogs were always my favorite pets, but we did have one very memorable cat, Charlie Chaplin, for his little black mustache, but always known as C.C. At the time that C.C. came into our lives we had Blossom, the springer spaniel, as well as other assorted creatures.
One late Friday afternoon when their father was away on a short study leave, John came home carrying a pasteboard box. On the outside of the box, in black marker, were the words “Free to a good home,” and inside the box was the tiniest, most pitiful-looking kitten I had ever seen.
“Can we keep him?” John asked.
“No,” I said firmly. “If your father comes home and finds I have let you all have yet another animal, he’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”
“But he was just on the picnic table at the park. If I take him back, the dogs will get him.”
He had me there. There were a lot of neighborhood dogs who had never known a leash and who would undoubtedly be in the park that night. It was late Friday afternoon. The SPCA would have closed for the weekend. Besides, I was being picked up in a few minutes by friends to have a rare dinner out. There was no way I could deal with the pitiful little creature that evening. So I sighed and told John to get the poor thing some milk. I would deal with it in the morning.
Morning came and it was obvious to me that the kitten was on its last legs. I called the vet to see if they were open on Saturdays. They were, so I took the kitten over. Whatever the SPCA would do with it, I didn’t want it dying on my watch.
I explained all this to the receptionist—that I was only trying to keep the thing alive until the humane society opened on Monday. Many dollars later I left the vet’s, only to return that very afternoon, sure that this time the kitten really was dying.
When I paid another, for me, enormous bill, the receptionist was not even trying not to laugh. “Now, are you going to keep that kitten, Mrs. Paterson?”
I assured her I was not, but, of course, by Monday, we had all fallen in love with the piteous little creature who was almost too weak to meow. By the
time John Sr. got home, and, as predicted, thought his wife had lost her mind, he had five of us pleading for C.C.’s life. Ironically, or perhaps because C.C. was a very clever cat, it was John Sr.’s lap he chose to sit on and purr. John softened, and many years later he said to me, “You know, if we were ever to divorce, I get the cat.”
There is a postscript to this story. Long after C.C. had lived a happy life with us and departed peacefully, young John, now out of college and working in New York City took a course in creative writing at the New School. I was curious to know about the course and he told me the first assignment was to write a story from one’s childhood. “So I wrote that story about how we got C.C.”
There was something about the way he said it that made me inquire further.
“Oh, you know, the neighbors down the street had all these kittens they were giving away, but I knew that if I brought one home and told you where it came from you’d march me right back to return it, so . . .”
I was incredulous. “So you made up that whole thing about the box in the park?”
“Yeah, I told you that. I got a box and wrote ‘Free to a good home’ on it. I told you that years ago.”
“You did not.” Apparently, it was another of those things you did as a child you wouldn’t want your mother to know about.
I was fond of C.C., but it has always been the dogs that I have loved most.
First there was Manch. He was my consolation after the miscarriage. He was half dachshund and half Manchester terrier. That may sound awful, but actually with the longish legs of a Manchester and the sweet face of a dachshund, he was a very handsome little fellow. And fellow he was. We hadn’t realized that we should have had him neutered, and so he became the Don Juan of the canine world. Bolting out of the house whenever the door was cracked open, he sometimes was gone for more than a day. He often came home from these jaunts in wretched shape but he would heal to head out another day. Coming into my life when he did, he was utterly spoiled. A young German pastor, who lived with us while working for the summer with John, couldn’t believe how spoiled Manch was—I treated him as though he were human. Win was flabbergasted when he heard me say to the dog: “We don’t put our paws on the table while folks are eating, Manch.”
“No wonder he thinks he’s human with that name!” Winfred said.
“What?”
“Mensch!” he said. “It’s the word for ‘man.’”
But, then, to Manch’s distress, we began to have children at a rapid rate. With each child he grew more jealous of all the attention being lavished elsewhere that used to be his alone. Finally, when David was a toddler, he decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. As soon as David could reach the knob, Manch taught him how to open the door, and one day that door got opened and we never saw Manch again.
For years, while I was out driving, I would think I saw him and slam on the brakes to make sure. But it never was.
Manch is memorialized in a book I started when John Jr. was an infant. Standing at the window one snowy day, I watched Manch bounding through a foot of snowfall and thought: I wonder where he’s going in all that snow. I wrote a couple of chapters, but I didn’t know how to write a book and before long Lin arrived and I really forgot about my attempt to write about Manch. Many years later Avi asked me to contribute a serialized story for the newspapers in his Breakfast Serials project. Writing a newspaper serial is unlike any other kind of writing. Each chapter has to be three to three and a half double-spaced pages with the final page ending in a cliff hanger so patrons can hardly wait to buy the newspaper the following week to see what happens. You move from that opening to another cliff hanger at the end of that chapter and so on for twelve to fifteen chapters.
Aha! I thought. That’s how I can write Manch’s story. I dug my abandoned few chapters out of my messy files and they became The Field of the Dogs in the newspaper serial. Sally Daugherty, who edited the story for Breakfast Serials, then brought it out in book form at HarperCollins. The book opens with the words: I wonder where he’s going in all that snow. The setting is no longer New Jersey, it is Vermont, and the problems of the boy are different, but the hero dog is Manch as I remembered him.
Blossom was a gift from my parents. My mother had never liked Manch, probably because of his promiscuous ways, so she could hardly wait until he had disappeared to announce that they were going to give us a proper dog—a thoroughbred English springer spaniel. They had close friends who bred springers and we were to have one. I thought I needed a bit more time—what if Manch were to miraculously return?—and even not, I needed to mourn for him. What was all the rush? But our designated puppy was ready to be brought home right at Apple Blossom Festival time in Winchester, so the six of us went to get her. She was adorable, a tiny liver-and-white bundle who waddled on her short legs. We all fell in love at first sight. On her American Kennel Club registration she has a more dignified name, but we lost those papers years ago. The only name she ever knew was “Blossom.”
Looking back, it’s hard to remember Blossom ever doing anything wrong—well, that is, except when she ate the lightbulb, and she was hardly more than a puppy at the time.
I went into the den one night to find on the floor a chewed cardboard wrapper for a lightbulb, but when I looked for the bulb there was none—not even any glass—just a metal screw end. I was alarmed. My beautiful Blossom had eaten the bulb. I had read that if a child or an animal ate glass, you should feed them bread to keep the shards from cutting their innards. Fortunately, we had just been to the day-old bread store and had several two-pound loaves on hand. I fed Blossom an entire loaf, and was halfway through the second loaf when she let me know she’d had more than enough.
She seemed all right when I went to bed, and the next morning I was busy getting everyone off to school. It wasn’t until after my husband had left for the office that I realized I hadn’t seen Blossom all morning. I called and looked and finally located her in the dining room, tucked between the hutch and the wall corner. She looked at me sadly but didn’t emerge. I tried to tempt her out with a piece of bologna. She didn’t move. I put a hot dog just out of reach, thinking she’d surely come out and get it. She stretched her nose in that direction, but she only whimpered.
I had no car at the time, so I called John. “You’ve got to come home and take Blossom to the vet,” I said. “She won’t even come out to get meat.”
John pulled Blossom out and carried her to the car and then into the vet’s waiting room. She simply lay across his lap in a semi-comatose fashion. A woman came in carrying a sick cat. At this point in Blossom’s life, she hadn’t had a close personal relationship with a cat, and she was visibly alarmed. She began to shake so much that John, fearing she would fall, put her gently on the floor. She squatted and laid an enormous pile right on the pristine floor of the waiting room. Whereupon she stood up, tail wagging, completely cured.
The receptionist scurried to get cleaning equipment, and the vet appeared to see what all the commotion was about. John explained about the lightbulb, the bread, and her deadly appearance until this moment. The vet began to laugh. “Poor thing. She was so constipated from all that bread your wife gave her that she couldn’t move.”
Blossom grew more regal by the year, and then along came Princess, the least regal dog we ever owned. We had moved to Norfolk, taking only Blossom and C.C. with us, but, somehow, David was dissatisfied. He was very homesick for Takoma Park and, feeling friendless, brought home a little wild duckling from the bank of the nearby river. This was a very bad idea. The duckling agreed and immediately died to prove it.
“If you have to have another pet,” I said, “you may have a puppy. We will go to the humane society and you may have the smallest dog there that isn’t a Chihuahua.”
We went, as I recall, the very next afternoon. In the stories, a puppy leaps out and licks the face of her rescuer, showing that it truly belongs. The puppy
David chose hung to the back wall of the cage and didn’t move. David reached in and pulled her out. Her pitiful state was, if anything, worse than C.C.’s the night he arrived.
“Are you sure?”
He was sure. He named her Princess. I never asked, but I suspected in honor of Prince Terrien in Bridge to Terabithia. My sister Helen’s family came for a visit that first week. When I warned her in advance that we had a new puppy, she was appalled. She says that her first reaction was that I was crazy to let the children have another pet, but when she saw Princess, she thought: Oh, well, it’ll be dead in a week.
But Princess thrived. She and C.C., who was larger than she was for quite some time, roughhoused like fond siblings. Occasionally, Blossom would go over and put her nose between them as if to say, That’s enough, children. You keep at it, someone’s going to get hurt. When Princess was rebuked or unhappy she would stick her back paw in her mouth and suck it exactly as a child will suck his thumb. It was a habit she never broke and she lived to be fifteen years old. If I don’t confess it, my friends will wonder why not, but the fact is, once the children left home, Princess loved very few people. We warned every visitor not to pet her, but we have many friends who love dogs and were sure Princess could not resist them. They’d never met a dog who could. “See? She likes me,” they would say, stroking her lovingly. At just about that moment Princess would snarl, and occasionally nip the startled visitor. It was very embarrassing, as dogs, they say, take after their owners. But we couldn’t just get rid of her. She wasn’t Frank that we could return to the wild. So we loved her and were loved in return by her until she died peacefully and is buried in our backyard.