Through the Children's Gate Read online

  “Tell them to move to the suburbs,” a friend at the office says flatly, shrugging it off. My indignation, which is real and absolute—children have a right to be children, especially good ones like ours—wars with my liberal guilt, or at least with my liberal urge to see everything from two sides: Just how loud are the children's footsteps? (The liberal always asks if he might be wrong, on his way to asserting that he knows he's right. This is better than being a radical, who asserts his righteousness without asking if he might be wrong, but the cash value is about the same.) When we left New York, it was the rats in our loft, as much as anything, that helped drive us away. Now we are the rats, and I see things from the rats’ perspective: We are here and will remain what we are. It is our nature.

  Shaken by the conflict, we raise it with the other neighbors, with other friends. Everyone has a noise dispute story. People sue each other; they measure the neighbors’ racket in decibels with noise meters. The cartoon image of the city deep inside everyone's mind is that of the man with the broom banging on his ceiling, which is his neighbor's floor—and this turns out to have actually happened to our friends the Ws. Their boy ran across the floor, and a neighbor, right on West End Avenue, started banging their floor, his ceiling, with a broom. We were stunned to hear it, the cartoon made real, as though, after having paid his taxes, someone was actually obliged to walk down Third Avenue in a barrel.

  Noise is the New York issue, yet why should it be so? Surely all cities are equally noisy, but I have never heard anyone in Paris complain about the noise, and in San Francisco, my sister's family seems to thrive unnettled by other people's noises. Yet Paris is as loud as it gets: the streets with traffic, the families with dogs; and in San Francisco, they play the stereo all night long. Noise in New York is, must be, a symbol, a referred pain, for something else. It is an issue on which no compromises seem possible. The anger comes from elsewhere, even if (as they claim, and as we refute at length) the noise comes from upstairs.

  As our neighbors complain about the children's footfalls, I think of saying to them, “We will teach them to fly!” Because we will. The kindergarten production in Luke's class is to be Peter Pan—the full musical, complete with the wonderful Moose Charlap music. They do it every few years, apparently, with incredible aplomb, under the direction of the saintly, energetic, all-seeing teacher.

  The entry-level musical is a tradition at Artists & Anglers, as I'll call it, the school where we have enrolled Luke. In a move that is no surprise to his mother, though extremely puzzling to the other mothers, Luke has been cast as Peter. But the other children have all been given good parts; there are, as we point out tumidly, no really bad parts in Peter Pan—a five-year-old Hook and a six-year-old Smee and several Wendys, to share the uplift and the nightgown. But soon our more or less common parental pleasure turns to anxiety. For how will they fly?

  “This year the children have to fly,” said one of the businessman fathers, and he meant business. In previous productions of Peter Pan, we were told, the children had flown mostly by assertion, as in Elizabethan theater: They said they were flying, so they were (as people in Shakespeare travel to Bohemia: “Here we are in Bohemia,” they say, and there they are). Their parents clapped, but they clapped alone, within an otherwise silent gym. So this year we are determined to make the children fly: to lift them physically off the ground, however briefly, out the nursery window, to hover for a moment above London.

  Some of this urge, this insistence, is, I think, due to the general buoyancy of the age—everything else is flying, stocks, real estate prices, why not the children?—and some (given the cast of characters, a lot) is due to the competitive nature of New York parenting: We'll show all the earlier, earthbound parents.

  But some of it, too, comes from a genuine desire to please the children. They had seen dinosaurs walk and roar and toys talk, by someone's so potent art. Why couldn't they fly? We formed an ad hoc flight committee. When Martha told me about it, I imagined it as one of those political lobbying groups with a misleadingly wholesome name, the Committee to Make Our Children Fly. At Artists & Anglers, the parents fall into two groups, those who make symbols and those who price them. There are writers and dancers and media people, one painter and half a sculptor (he sculpts part-time these days), and then there are people—the copyright lawyers, book publishers, agents, and computer software programmers—who traffic in the little bits of equity that can be wrung from all that raging creation. Each class seems beautifully devised—a core of creative people's children, a sample of richer children, a frosting of minorities.

  When we were brooding about what to do with our lives, we decided to come back to New York in large part because of Artists & Anglers. Although Luke's school in Paris had been just fine, there were everywhere suggestions of the sterner French schools yet to come—dark shadows of an education with its frowning absolutes and frigid hours were looming all around the boy, and he knew it. The New York school seemed, by comparison, like heaven. The children's band played Bernstein, and the second-graders illustrated the books of E. B. White. There were absurdities; the children have to take an entrance exam, an SAT for four-year-olds, but it all seemed worth it, more than worth it, a paradise where curiosity and self-fulfillment would be welcomed. A public school kid myself, I balked a little at the thought of sending them to private or “independent” schools. But Martha was firm, it is what people do here, and though I believe that the best possible law that could be passed in the city would compel everyone to send their kids to public school, that law has yet to be passed and the ancient dilemma of the first mover reigns.

  And then the school is so good. After his first day, I asked Luke what he thought.

  “The teachers are too nice,” he said, a little frightened. “What do you mean?” I asked. “The teachers are too nice, ” he repeated. “I drew a picture of me on my scooter, and I got it all wrong—I made the ears too big and the wheels too small—but they said, ‘It's perfect! We're putting it up!’ They're too nice, Dad.” Nothing in France—nothing in life—had prepared him for the embrace of American progressive education.

  “What would they have said in France?” I asked him.

  “Oh, you know. N'impone quoi, n'impone quoi…” “Whatever. No matter what, you do it wrong.” In the French philosophy, all education begins in the recognition of perpetual error; here it begins in the recognition of universal good, or at least universal niceness. Now Luke is in a place where, no matter what, you do it right, and even are supposed to fly while you are doing it.

  Martha meets and e-mails the other parents on the ad hoc committee, and methods of flight are scrutinized. It is Kitty Hawk and Hogwarts, wizardry and aeronautics joined, with knowing nods to invisible wires and vague hopes of helium. Many proposals come our way (or rather, Martha's way, as she is the point person for child flight, since I am away most of the fall, traveling from one bookstore and lecture hall in America to another to keep the kids in these schools, in flight to let them fly).

  The first and most obvious idea, she tells me, was to attach the children to ropes on pulleys and hoist them up. The look of delight on the faces of the “creative” parents at this notion was equaled only by the flush that spread like a contagion, like a bobbed apple being passed from chin to chin, across the faces of the lawyers. Pull them up to the ceiling—and then let them drop and dangle them there? Legal history might be made; little Sophie sure isn't covered for that.

  Another idea was a limited, modified hanging. The children might be put on a high ladder—or why not a series of ladders, one for each to climb?—to give, through the fact of loft, the illusion of flight.

  “That won't give the illusion of flight. That'll give the illusion of their being housepainters,” one mother said. Then someone else proposed (brilliantly, I thought) having grown-ups, dressed in black clothes and masks, whisk onstage at the key moment and lift the children up; these are kindergarten kids, after all, not Kate Smith. A mother who has been doing
her yoga and Pilates could lift even the larger ones right up over her head for a moment.

  But someone else pointed out that having unknown grown-ups with their faces covered run out and grab the children would cause panic and fear. “Emma can't deal with clowns at birthday parties, much less with ninja assaults,” one mother said.

  Someone else proposed building a riser on the stage that would slowly move up, bringing the children aloft on a platform. The hydraulics and mechanics of the riser haven't been worked out, but the magic words “Oh, put them on a riser” had for a moment held everyone taut.

  Martha also reports—and this is the interesting, unexpected thing—that everyone, symbol makers and symbol pricers, is good at this: The parents are all would-be carpenters and scene painters and lighting designers. No one suggests, as they would in a bad movie about New York schools, that we ought to hire someone, pay someone else to do the job. The willingness of New York parents is bracing compared with the aloofness of French parents, or even of earlier generations of American parents. They will do anything to make their children fly.

  But do the children really want to fly? This is kindergarten, after all; they're doing well just to tie their shoes and use the bathroom. Is the whole elaborate apparatus we construct “to keep from disappointing them” for us or them? Will they be any happier, or wiser, or less likely to turn on us in fifteen-year-old rage—“You never let me do anything I wanted to do!”—if we make them fly? Or will they turn on us anyway: “You made me fly, and there I was, so happy on the ground.”

  The flying children haunt us; we see them hovering overhead at night, free of wires and entanglements, launched without obvious trickery or cheap effects. We see them aloft, above. They are flying, off above—London, in this case. Unlike us, they are free to fly, while we remain below in the sublunary city, arguing about the noise and just who made it.

  Ah, the children, the children! Has any place ever been better contoured to them than Manhattan is now? We take them out on fall Saturday mornings—Paul Desmond saxophone mornings, as I think of them, lilting jazz sounds almost audible in the avenues—to go to the Whitney or the park to look dutifully at what remains of the avant-garde in Chelsea, or to shop at Fairway, a perfect place, more moving than any Parisian market in its openness, its joy, a place where they have cheap soap lets you taste of six different olive oils. I prefer Fairway to any Paris market: its openness, its ironic self-consciousness—great coffee! ugly as hell packaging! reads a sign—its democratic mixture of six kinds of goat cheese and six kinds of discount toilet paper, for the way that suspicious elderly immigrant men in cloth caps bump elbows, carts, and temperaments with starting couples and four-part families. A fugue of appetites rather than a counterpoint of classes. Even the implicit rules, as well understood as those about crossing streets and hailing cabs, are beautiful to observe in action. The endless lines waiting for the cashiers are broken in half to give people space to get by. The first three in line wait by the cash register; everyone else waits back in the aisle behind, with the interrupted intersection between. In Paris, a rule this instinctive and complex would be debated, doubted, deplored, transgressed, and enforced only by a sign saying THIS RULE WILL BE ENFORCED; here, everyone enforces it not through goodwill, exactly, but through suspended ill will, through glances of mutual suspicion. The line at Fairway, like the city, is ultimately self-forming and self-regulating. Regulated not by forces of the free market, exactly—you couldn't pay a premium to break the line—but by a cumulative force of bare repressed mutual suspicion. Keep the line and we'll keep our peace; break the line and we'll break you.

  We have formed a club, the children and I—or a klub, rather, the Krispy Kreme Klub. We meet on Saturday mornings, sneaking out of the house before their mother has woken up, and going—one scooting, one walking, one being pushed—to the Krispy Kreme donut shop on Third Avenue. We buy three Classic Glazed and sit at a table in the window, staring at the early risers on the weekend avenue and the health food store across the street. (When we get home, we tell Mom, “We've been out to breakfast on Third Avenue near Eighty-fourth—you know, where the health food store is.” The children think that this is hilarious, as does their quietly unfooled mother.) The donuts are even more intensely sweet than all the other American commercial food we are getting reaccustomed to, and a small moment of regret, of longing, for a Paris café and a strong cup of coffee and a sober tartine crosses my mind. But not for long, really. The abundance of this place, and the generosity of its sweetness, a kind of American optimism, fills the little franchise as much as does the smell of frying donuts coming from the elaborate Rube Goldberg donut machine kept behind glass in the rear of the store. New York is so easy, so fresh-baked yet funky: You can walk around in your jogging pants and baseball cap, and no one will look at you twice, or funny.

  Olivia, just one, watches the donut machine soberly. She could stay here for hours. When the squads of donuts come down from the fryer on their automated conveyor belt, one or two always fall to the side, and she gasps. She identifies with the abandoned donut, empathizes with the circle of yeasty dough that has lost its way.

  Other children come in with other weary, early-rising dads and moms. They have a city of their own, whose map we are learning, with the American Museum of Natural History as its St. Peter's and the countless places where birthday parties are held as its chapels. Yet we see already that the attention deadens—that they risk losing the alert light one sees in the eyes of French children, the sensitivity that comes from recognizing that there are unappeasable powers in the world who must be placated and avoided. The art of child rearing, of parenting, is to center the children and then knock them off center; to make them believe that they are safely anchored in the middle of a secure world and somehow also to let them know that the world they live in is not a fixed sphere with them at the center; that they stand instead alongside a river of history, of older souls, that rushes by them, where they are only a single small incident. To make them believe that they can rule all creation, while making them respect the malevolent forces that can ruin every garden: That is the task. (It crosses my mind, blasphemously, that this was exactly the dilemma, the twin task, of that greatest father of them all in his one unfortunate episode in parenting. He didn't manage it that well, either.)

  I had thought Martha was a crazed lunatic when it came to her children, only to discover that in New York, she was a completely normal mother, that a constant obsessive-compulsive anxiety about the children—their health, their future, the holes in their socks, and the fraying of their psyches—is taken entirely for granted here. Child obsessiveness is a substitute for status obsessiveness, to which the mothers seem quite indifferent. Clothes, bags, shoes, all of that Capote and Dawn Powell stuff seems to have vanished from them, as martinis and prime ribs have largely fled from us, their husbands. (The martini drinkers now are the ironists downtown.) They love these things, of course, but they love them as recreation or escape, not as elements of their own. Child possession itself is a form of status, some anthropologist or novelist might argue, but it produces exhaustion so quickly that the ritual game is over by the time you have made the opening move.

  And then there is something so beautiful about the lists of children's names posted outside the classrooms, children who didn't even exist six years ago—the mix of Celtic, Hebrew, African, with the proviso that the Celtic names are likely to belong to the Jewish children and the Jewish names to the Asian ones. We have a beautiful slant-eyed Noah and a Dylan who looks like my cousin—well, like that other Dylan, the generational bard.

  Money and power are everywhere, and the sense of a bubble, a perfect glass dome that extends over the city, is palpable—one can almost see its highlight, its gleam. As we walk through the park, sharing a muffin, Kirk Varnedoe—who seems well again, thank God, after cancer and chemo—talks about the speed with which money came together for the new building for the Museum of Modern Art, the institution he oversees. He has
the Times in his hands as we leave for breakfast, and he says with wonder, “Somewhere, somewhere in these pages, there's the little piece of news that will end all this—some story about a virus or an oversold Internet stock that will precipitate the crash. It has to happen. It always has. But the amazing thing is that we don't know which page that piece of news is on, and we can't know.”

  When it comes to grass and gardens, Central Park remains another kind of miracle. I always knew this, but in your twenties, parks and trees are just part of the decor, like the backgrounds in an Astaire musical. Now I walk to work through the park and am amazed by it all over again, the retreat of it and the liberal illogic of it. In Paris, I had idealized it: its liberal open-endedness, its absence of grand allées, its endless adaptability. Now I take Luke on long walks there, and we look at Belvedere Castle, where the dealers used to congregate, whispering, “Smoke, smoke,” and I tell him the castle in the park once belonged to a great king who dominated the city when Central Park was a separate country, who invented brunch and flew his flag from the top of the Belvedere battlements. The king was lost, and ever since, Central Park has been without a leader. But the king of Central Park will return someday; it could be any one of us. Luke watches and listens with his serious squint, his mother's almond eyes.

  Then, on his scooter, he swoops down the hills above the Ramble and disappears, he is lost to me in a second, as the path takes an Olmstedian romantic bend. I have never lost him before! After years of watching him trike down the straight allées of the Luxembourg Gardens, I am in a liberal parent's panic. Having identified the paths of Olmsted with the free play of liberalism, I am its typically panicked victim. People vanish in this park! Their identity is unstable! Where the hell has he gone? The children are free here—too free, they whiz around corners, and they're gone. They know so much. They get away too soon in this country. People are too damn nice here. They sing, and they are praised for their singing. They draw, and they are praised for their drawing. They scoot. They fly. And they are gone—I call out his name …