The Perfect Child
I was raised in a brick dormitory at Dewing College, formerly the Mary-Ruth
Dewing Academy, a finishing school best known for turning out attractive
secretaries who married up.
In the late 1950s, Dewing began granting baccalaureate degrees
to the second-rate students it continued to attract despite its expansion into
intellectual terrain beyond typing and shorthand. The social arts
metamorphosed into sociology and psychology, nicely fitting the respective
fields of job seekers Aviva Ginsburg Hatch, Ph.D., my mother, and David
Hatch, Ph.D., my father. Twin appointments had been unavailable at the
hundred more prestigious institutions they aspired and applied to. They
arrived in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1960, not thrilled with the Dewing
wages or benefits, but ever hopeful and prone to negotiation two bleeding
hearts that beat as one, conjoined since their first date in 1955 upon viewing
a Movietone newsreel of Rosa Parkss arrest.
Were they types, my parents-to-be? From a distance, and even to
me for a long time, it appeared to be so. Over coffee in grad school theyd
found that each had watched every black-and-white televised moment of the
Army-McCarthy hearings, had both written passionately on The Grapes of
Wrath in high school; both held Samuel Gompers and Pete Seeger in high
esteem; both owned albums by the Weavers. Their wedding invitations,
stamped with a union bug, asked that guests make donations in lieu of gifts
to the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson.
It was my father who proposed that their stable marriage and
professional sensitivities would lend themselves to the rentfree benefit known
as houseparenting. The dean of residential life said she was sorry, but a
married couple was out of the question: Parents would not like a man living
among their nubile daughters.
What about a man with a baby? my father replied coyly. It was a
premature announcement. My mothers period must have been no more than
a week late at the time of that spring interview, but they both felt ethically
bound to share the details of her menstrual calendar. He posited further:
Werent two responsible, vibrant parents with relevant Ph.D.s better than their
no doubt competent but often elderly predecessors, who with all due
respect werent such a great help with homework and tended to die on the
job? David and Aviva inaugurated their long line of labor-management
imbroglios by defending my right to live and wail within the 3.5 rooms of their
would-be apartment. If given the chance, theyd handle everything; theyd
address potential doubts and fears head-on in a letter theyd send to parents
and guardians of incoming Mary-Ruths, as we called the students,
introducing themselves, offering their phone number, their curricula vitae, their
open door, and their projected vision of nuclear familyhood.
The nervous dean gave the professors Hatch a one-year trial; after
all, an infant in a dorm might disrupt residential life in ways no one could even
project, prepartum. And consider the mumps, measles, and chicken pox a
child would spread to the still susceptible and nonimmunized.
On the first day of freshman orientation, three months pregnant,
my mother greeted parents wearing maternity clothes over her fl at abdomen,
an unspoken announcement that most greeted with pats and coos of delight.
Mothers testified to their daughters babysitting talents. My father demurred
nobly. Wed never want to take any one of our girls away from their studies,
he said.
When I was born in February 1961, it was to instant campus
celebrity. It didnt matter that I was bald and scaly, quite homely if the
earliest Polaroids tell the story. Photo album number one opens not with
baby Frederica in the delivery room or in the arms of a relative, but with me
age ten days in a group photo of the entire 196061 population of Griggs
Hall. A competent girl with a dark flip and a wide headband, most likely a
senior, is holding me up to the camera. My eyes are closed and I seem to be
in the windup for a howl. My mother stands in the back row, a little apart from
the girls, but smiling so fondly at the camera that I know my father was
behind it.
David Hatch would be a role model before the phrase was on the
tip of every talk show hostesss tongue. He paraded me in the big English
perambulator, a joint gift from the psych. and soc. departments, along the
ribbons of sidewalk that crisscrossed the smallish residential campus, or
carried me against his chest in a homemade sling, which my mother
modeled on cloths observed during her fieldwork in a primitive agrarian
society. In public, at the dining hall, he spooned me baby food from jars,
switching off with my mother she nursed, he fed causing quite the stir
those many decades ago. He was a man ahead of his time, and the
adolescents his grad school concentration noticed. My mother
predicted that Dewing grads, especially Griggs alums, would blame us when
their future husbands didnt stack up to Professor-Housefather Hatch, the
most equal of partners.
We lived our fishbowl lives in three and a half wallpapered rooms furnished
with overstuffed chairs and antique Persian rugs, the legacy of a predecessor
who had died intestate. We had a beige half kitchen with a two-burner stove,
a pink-tiled bathroom, a fake fireplace, and a baby grand piano, which the
college tuned annually at its own expense, presumably in the name of sing-
alongs and caroling. The nursery was a converted utility closet with a crib,
later a cot. When I was seven, my parents petitioned the college to enlarge
our quarters by incorporating a portion of Griggs Halls living room into our
apartment. Noting my birth date, they asked the college to consider
fashioning Miss Frederica Hatch, the unofficial mascot of Griggs Hall, a real
bedroom; it was, after all, her sabbatical year.
The board of trustees said yes to the renovation. Griggs Hall had
become the most popular dorm on campus, despite its architectural
blandness and its broken dryers. The Hatch family had worked out
beautifully; more married couples had become dorm parents. Some had
babies, surely for their own reasons, but also after I was a proven draw.
When I went to college in the late 1970s, to a bucolic campus where dogs
attended classes with their professor- masters, I noted that these chocolate
labs and golden retrievers were the objects of great student affection,
supplying something that was missing for the homesick and the lovesick.
The dogs reminded me of me.
I was a reasonable and polite child, if not one thoroughly
conscious of her own model-childness. Because I needed to be the center of
attention the only state Id ever known I developed modest tricks that
put me in the spotlight without having to sing or tap-dance or raise my voice: I
ate beets, Brussels sprouts, and calf s liver. I drank white milk, spurning the
chocolate that was offered. I carried a book at all times, usually something
recognized by these C-plus students as hard, literary, advanced for my
years. I drew quietly with colored pencils during dorm meetings. I mastered
the poker face when it came to tasting oddball salad-bar combinations
(cottage cheese and ketchup, peanut butter on romaine) favored by
adolescent girls so that Id appear worldly and adventurous.
Over the years, certain objects and rituals became synonymous
with me: the wicker basket with its gingham lining in which the infant me
attended classes; a ragged blanket that my psychologically astute parents
let me drag everywhere until it dissolved; the lone swing that my father hung
from the sturdiest red maple on campus; first a pink tricycle, then a pink two-
wheeler, its handlebars sprouting streamers, which I garaged on the porch of
Griggs Hall, no lock needed.
I didnt exactly raise myself, especially with five floors of honorary
sisters living above me at all times. But there was the omnipresent ID card
around my neck granting me entrance to all buildings and all meals, with or
without a parent. Aviva and David were busy with their classes, their
advisees, and increasingly their causes. Assassinations at home and wars
abroad necessitated their boarding buses for marches in capital cities, but
babysitters were plentiful. I was safe at Dewing, always, and good with
strangers. Tall, spiked wrought-iron fencing surrounded our sixteen acres, a
relic from the days of curfews and virginity.
Between seventh and eighth grade, I grew tall; incoming freshmen
took me for a baby-faced classmate, which was to me a distressing
development. I had no intention of blending in. I wanted to be who Id become,
the Eloise of Dewing College, an institution that others, transients, occupied
only fleetingly.
Looking back today from adulthood, its too easy to idealize my
childhood in an exurban Brigadoon, Boston skyline in the distance and, for
the most part, kind girls in every chair. We hoped Dewing could get better, its
standards higher, its students brighter, its admission competitive, but it
wasnt to be. Smart candidates would soon attend schools that accepted
men and boasted hockey rinks. Housemothers came and went throughout
my Dewing years. There was less intra-houseparent socializing than one
would expect, given the geography of our lives. The older ladies, some
carryovers from the secretarial training days, wore or so it seemed to
me perpetual scowls. They couldnt hide their disapproval of modern Mary-
Ruths in blue jeans, of their unstockinged legs, their gentlemen callers, their
birth control prescriptions. Where were the debutantes of old? The girls who
wore fraternity pins on their pastel sweaters and foundation garments
beneath them?
My outside friends saw my home as the whole of Griggs Hall and
beyond, its acres of campus lawn and flowering trees, vending machines on
every floor, cool and pretty girls whose perfumed copies of Glamour,
Mademoiselle, and Vogue beckoned from open mailboxes for hours before
they were retrieved. They envied my long reign as the charter mascot. Often I
came to school with my hair braided and adorned in intricate ways, courtesy
of a team of boarders who preferred hairdressing to homework.
Eventually everyone, even my unconventional and high-profile
mother (union grievance chairperson, agitator, perennial professor of the year,
and public breast-feeder), faded to gray in the archives of Dewing
houseparenting. When I was sixteen, the college hired the enthralling and
once glamorous Laura Lee French, most recently of Manhattan, maybe forty,
maybe more, to pilot Ada Tibbets Hall, the artistic and wayward girls dorm
next to Griggs. The timing was excellent: I was growing invisible by then, a
teenager rather than a pet, despite the darling Halloween photos of me in
every yearbook printed since my birth. Just as I was craving more attention,
along came Laura Lee, dorm mother without a day job, single, childless, and
ultimately famous within our gates.
We overlapped for two years. It was awkward even for my parents,
unembarrassable progressives though they were. Fearing scandal and
campus glee, we four kept our secret: that Laura Lee French, in the distant
past, had been married to my father.
Copyright © 2006 by Elinor Lipman