Good parents made bad citizens. That was Charles Braithwaite’s opinion, a common
one in Morningside Heights. The neighborhood was populated with conscientious
liberals, people who admitted their own flaws-unashamedly, as Anne Braithwaite
liked to point out. Anne could see how she and Charles were a little bit that
way themselves. These socially concerned men and women tended to undergo a moral
shock when they first held their newborns in arms. They would look down into the
grumpy little faces and strabismic little eyes, and suddenly their hatred of
cruelty and injustice would morph into a bloated sense of parental obligation.
From then on, they orphaned all other causes and devoted themselves to cosseting
their own children. Sometimes they comforted themselves with the thought that
the children would go on to change the world-maybe just by existing, so obvious
was it that their intense parental investment would pay off.
The youth of Morningside Heights took no drugs. After earning high SAT scores,
they attended desirable colleges and entered the professions, the arts, or the
academy, where they made substantial contributions. Eventually they formed
stable relationships and went on to become parents in the mold of their own
mothers and fathers. There may have been one or two who once or somewhere got
into serious trouble, but offhand, no one can think of an example.
Which is not to say there weren’t difficulties. Their reliable academic and
professional successes aside, the children of these doting, hyperinvolved, and
better-than-optimal families included quirky kids and problem kids in addition
to the usual all-around super ones. Parents all too often experienced a moral
aftershock when life confronted them with the unwelcome facts: that great kids
can also be odd or troublesome and surprisingly hard to live with, that their
fathers and mothers may someday see them off to college with guilty joy, and
that sometimes a happy family produces a spectacularly unhappy child.
The Braithwaites were a case in point. They enjoyed the worldly blessings of
health, money, and honor in a sustaining environment of mutual love and respect.
Their quarrels and differences, free from the infection of malice, did not
fester. But the eldest Braithwaite child was miserable, and her misery
threatened the peace of the others both because they loved her and because she
wanted to make them suffer.
Charles and Anne were musicians in their mid-forties. He was an operatic
baritone who sang at the Met, mostly in secondary roles, and she was a fine
pianist who had given up a performing career to teach and raise their four
children: eighteen-year-old Jane, their unhappy daughter, who already showed
promise as a soprano; Ellen, a precocious, caustic schoolgirl of thirteen; and
two boys, aged nine and five. Both boys were musical and multiply talented, but
the older one, Stuart, had a troubling tendency toward suspiciousness and
eccentricity-due, in his parents’ opinion, to the fact that he was quite small
for his age while Gilbert, a genial, trusting boy, was unusually tall. This
unequal endowment, with its profound consequences for the brothers’ psyches,
felt unjust to Stuart and also to his mother and father. But that was one of the
dangers of marriage between the short, like Anne, and the tall, like Charles.
“If we’d both been short,” Anne said, “there’d have been no problem. Isn’t it
strange?” “Or if we’d both been tall,” Charles pointed out.
The family’s history paralleled that of their neighborhood. Anne had grown up in
Morningside Heights, raised according to its long- standing tenets to invest her
energies as deeply in liberal causes as in music. Indeed, she was an outstanding
exemplar of what local parents yearned to produce-as good a progressive as a
pianist (and as a pianist she had actually had a Carnegie Hall debut) but
ultimately more interested in motherhood than either social progress or music.
When she and Charles settled in Morningside Heights in the 1980s, they were
typical residents of the shabby enclave of academics, writers, musicians,
librarians, theologians, theater people, social workers, and film technicians
who had always lived around Columbia University, to the north of Manhattan’s
West Side. Through a series of oddments and accidents, they evolved into equally
typical residents of the richer Morningside Heights of 2004. The transformation
was unusual. Most of the moneyed people in Morningside Heights had moved in, and
the hard up had been pushed out. The Braithwaites were uneasy living the same
luxurious lives as the rich invaders who, by bidding up the neighborhood, had
cost so many friends their homes and worlds and left the Braithwaites
themselves, along with others who had weathered the calamity, to stand as false
proof that it had not happened. Newcomers spoke fondly of this likeable but
somewhat peculiar family of musicians, along with other remnants of the old
neighborhood-the people who managed to hang on and the institutions of learning,
music, and religion they clung to-as part of the appealing local color that
they had moved here for.
Despite the brutal economies that had emptied the neighborhood of so many poor,
elderly, and old-style middle-class people, the twentieth- century culture of
Morningside Heights was not entirely obliterated; Morningside Heights propagated
ideas as successfully as it did children. Old-fashioned progressive views on
child rearing survived the rent rises and exorbitant co-op prices and wove a
subtle retro pattern into the postmillennium social fabric. Child worship and
the dream of transforming society through the rearing of virtuous children were
inspirited, not destroyed, by money and competition. So central did child
rearing become to upper-middle-class ambition-both moral and worldly-that
childlessness came to be considered one of life’s major tragedies, and parental
feelings grew so tender that one of the first rules of social intercourse
prohibited public gloating over a child’s successes.
“I told Rebecca’s mother all about Jane’s troubles,” said Anne at the breakfast
table, when the four Braithwaite children had gone off to school. “But she could
smell the nachas anyway. I felt terrible, spreading gossip about my own
daughter.”
Rebecca’s parents were a banker and a lawyer who had moved into the
Braithwaites’ building in 1996, when Rebecca and Ellen were both five. Rebecca’s
mother had taken in Anne’s mothering of the Braithwaite children with the same
emulous hunger with which poor girls absorb the fashion sense of rich ones. She
had imitated Anne so closely that she had been forced to quit her job after a
couple of years. Otherwise it would have been impossible to match the standards
of the Braithwaite household.
“What gossip?” Charles asked, bristling.
“About Stephen, the suspension-among other things. I had to because when she
found out that Ellen made all the honors classes, she went snarky. Poor Rebecca
tried so hard, and she didn’t get in any. So I sacrificed Jane.”
Charles relaxed. “I guarantee she already knew all about Jane.”
“Yes, but now she knows just exactly what we said in the fights, and about how
they recommended the shrink and the Ritalin and all, and …”
Charles grimaced but had no remonstrances for his wife. To sacrifice some degree
of family privacy to mollify Rebecca’s mother, whose virulent envy had led her
to cause difficulties between Ellen and Rebecca in the past, was reasonable.
“How that woman raised Rebecca,” he said. “How can it be that the child is so
good and sensitive when the mother is such a lunatic?”
They considered the mystery. It was the kind of frustrating subject that tended
to come up at this unpleasant, in-between time of day, after the children had
left for school but before they managed to put thoughts of them aside and turn
to work. They brooded over bowls of cereal-flecked milk and bite-scalloped
crusts of toast.
“She may be pathological, but somehow she’s raised a super kid. And if we’re
such great parents, why are all our kids so quirky?” Anne asked. “All right, I
could see maybe one or two. It happens. But all four-that’s no accident.”
“Absurd,” said Charles, offended. “Ellen isn’t a bit quirky. Neither is Gilbert.
Stuart’s a bit of a problem, but-”
“Well, I guess there’s my answer,” said Anne, “if you can’t even see it. You
wait till Ellen has a boyfriend. You’ll think Jane was a conformist.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with Jane except your mother.” Helen preferred Jane,
her first grandchild, over the others and in Charles’s opinion spoiled her;
that’s why Jane had become impervious to criticism and correction. He would have
been surprised to know that many people thought Charles and Anne themselves were
at fault. They were too invested in this girl’s unusual musical talents to see
her for what she was. Or so people told each other, in the firm, didactic tones
they used to condemn obvious parenting errors-but only when the parents were not
around to benefit from the lesson.
Charles’s reference to Anne’s mother was an invitation to quarrel; they had been
arguing about Helen and Jane for more than ten years. But Anne only gave him a
look that accused him of breaching their truce on the subject. “I’m just hoping
this obsession with Stephen will subside,” she said, “now that she’s a senior
and college is on her mind.”
The previous spring, Jane, then seventeen, had fallen for Stephen Delacort, a
bright, troubled boy who lived on the East Side and attended a prestigious
school that often shared activities with Jane’s prestigious school. They met in
the course of a joint production of West Side Story in which Jane played Maria.
“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” Charles said, more hopefully than confidently.
“At a certain point, the romance of his problems is going to wear off, and
they’re just going to be problems.”
“Yes, but until she gets to Juilliard and meets boys with interests more like
hers, he really may be the best out there. I have to admit that sometimes I can
see the attraction to Stephen, especially when she brings home anyone else.”
Jane had had only three involvements with boys that her parents knew of, none
satisfactory. Her first boyfriend was the profoundly depressed son of a Queens
dry cleaner whose freakish math talent had earned him a scholarship to an elite
private school. There, relegated to the sad society of the marginal, he stewed
daily in a broth of social disregard and contempt until he fell to pieces. Jane
comforted him in his torments for at least six months, until he had his
breakdown, dropped out of school, crawled back to Queens, and disappeared. The
second boy, like Jane herself, had great musical talent, but he was so peculiar
that Anne and Charles regarded him as disturbed, perhaps slightly autistic.
Jane, intolerant of her own family’s smallest failure of understanding and
empathy, accepted a complete lack of these qualities in this boy and exercised
her own capacities for them on his behalf so earnestly that after three months
she fell out of love owing to exhaustion. Jane’s relations with girls were even
worse than her relations with boys.
Charles knew that his own judgment, where the children were concerned, was often
skewed by a lifelong sense of grievance that grew out of his own unhappy
childhood and frustrated ambition. He had married Anne for her blithe
hopefulness and good-natured insight, her tender, understanding heart, and he
still loved her for these virtues. But he disliked her habit of sharing them
outside their own family, especially with troubled people like Stephen. Anne
made a specialty of empathizing with demented people, in Charles’s opinion.
Obviously, Jane imitated her. If the kids were quirky, Anne’s accepting attitude
toward offbeat and misshapen minds probably had as much to do with it as
anything. Charles refused to see anything good or attractive in Stephen Delacort
and despised him wholeheartedly.
When they were juniors, Jane and Stephen had been suspended from their
respective schools after disappearing together in the course of Jane’s class
trip to Boston. Stephen had shown up at the Museum of Fine Arts in the middle of
the tour, and Jane had sneaked off with him, whispering to classmates to tell
Ms. Liu and Mr. Fein that she’d see them later. The outrage of Jane’s teachers,
who felt obliged to inform the police, as well as that of her classmates, the
school officials, and her parents, was boundless-no matter that she showed up on
time at the hotel for dinner, or that she had thought she was reachable by a
cell phone that had in fact gone dead. Their behavior was grossly inconsiderate,
selfish, and immature.
For several weeks after Jane’s three-day suspension, Charles had refused to let
her see or call Stephen. He neglected to forbid computer contact, however, and
the two of them had spent the entire period messaging and e-mailing. Even so,
Jane had been unable to eat during the separation and, having been fashionably
slender to begin with, grew so extremely thin that her parents were alarmed. In
defeat, they went to her room for the last in a series of tense showdowns and
agreed that for the next two months she could go out with Stephen once a week,
if she was home by ten, and could have him over once a week. After that, they’d
see.
Jane, at least, had had sense enough to be sheepish about her misbehavior, if
not genuinely remorseful. But Stephen seemed indifferent to the disapproval
heaped on the two of them. When Charles tried to talk seriously with him, he
didn’t apologize, didn’t even say he was sorry that people had worried. Charles
detected something jeering in his eyes, something snide in the very angle of his
hip as he stood there in front of him. More or less, he was laughing in
Charles’s face. This was all the more frustrating because the boy had no parents
whom Charles felt comfortable calling and complaining to, for both of them were
workaholic lawyers who had effectively abandoned their son except to appear at
school to defend him fiercely in his frequent jams. Yes, the kid had problems,
but his solutions were shallow, Charles told Anne.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Anything for Jane
by Cheryl Mendelson
Copyright © 2007 by Cheryl Mendelson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2007
Cheryl Mendelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-50838-7
