Barbara Holland - When All the World Was Young

IN WHICH THE CHAIRS &
DOMESTIC HABITS OF FATHERS
ARE EXPLORED, & NICK IS BORN

To begin with, there was the chair. Every household had the chair. It was the most comfortable and by far the largest in the house, usually covered in green or maroon leather, with the only adequate reading light and often a footstool or ottoman in front of it, and it was the Father's chair. Neither wife nor child sat there, even when the Father was out of town on business or off at the war. In his absence the chair represented him, stood in loco parentis, and imposed order on the room. Thus did Ulysses's chair wait for him, while Penelope and Telemachus perched on stools.

Oh, maybe for a brief dangerous joke. I can see in memory a small child of three or four clambering up into the chair and, giggling, leaning back and spreading his arms as if reading a newspaper, and then, frightened by his own miniature patricide, scrambling back down and scampering away. The child is not me. Possibly my next-younger brother; I was a girl, and a dismal coward.

When the Father came home from work he sat in his chair and opened his newspaper and was not to be bothered, not that anyone would dream of such a thing. He had had a hard day at work: all days at work were by definition hard days. Nobody had any clear idea what fathers did by day; we might have asked and been given a job title like lawyer or superintendent or bureau chief, but we knew nothing about what this entailed except that it was hard, and beyond our comprehension. Fathers never discussed it, any more than the Delphic oracles would have babbled about their mysteries around the house.

When I went to Cynthia's house to play, we played quietly, like all proper children, in her bedroom. Her mother, like all mothers except my own, would have made up her bed as soon as she got out of it, all sealed up tight and wrinkle-free and the pillow centered, so we weren't allowed to sit on it or even touch it. We played on the small, chilly square of linoleum floor space, jacks or board games or Pick-Up-Sticks, until her father came home. Her mother would put her head around the bedroom door to signal his coming, and I slipped quickly and silently, like the shadow of a child, out the kitchen door as Cynthia's father came up the front walk. I never saw his face.

Fathers used the front door, always. There was no actual rule, at least in my circles, against other people using it, and Mothers rarely went out anyway, but basically it was the Father's door. He came through it, and sat in his chair, and unfurled his newspaper.

Magazine ads sometimes showed fathers among their children. Ads for station wagons showed a father proudly displaying his acquisition to a romping boy, girl, and Dalmatian; ads for the Encyclopedia Britannica showed him in his big leather chair with his leather slippers on, reading aloud from a volume to a boy and girl crouched beside him and a Mother leaning over his shoulder, the whole family laughing with glee. My friends and I had never seen fathers acting like that, but somewhere, perhaps; who knew?

The other Father's chair stood at the head of the dinner table, which is why round dinner tables will never sell and King Arthur's dream of equality faded. The Father chair at the tablepompous manufacturers call it the captain's chairhad, and has, and always will have, arms, the mark of striking power, while the lesser chairs have only legs, or fleeing power. No one but the Father sits in the Father chair. Here he presides over the food and parcels it out, and sometimes stands to dismember a roast or a turkey, and glances around the table, and dispenses it judiciously while the family waits, always with the understanding that, if he chooses, he can withhold it, or eat it all himself.

At the family dinner table then, just as now by the barbecue grill, men commanded the meat, they were the priests of meat, they subdued it and dispensed it. Vegetables and other secondary matters, being female, may be passed around by mothers or the maid, but meat is male and needs a man's hand.

In some houses the Father also had a closed-off space of his own, called a den or study or office, where not even the cleaning woman was allowed, and when a child of the family was called in there for conference it was serious indeed, meaning a truly awful transgression, some life-shaking change, or the obligatory lecture on sex to a son. Sometimes, my friends said, a mother would be called into the study, usually about money matters, while children waited anxiously and tried to eavesdrop.

Basically, of course, the whole house and everything in it belonged to the Father, and he often said things like, "Not in my house, you don't, young man." My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job. The language is rich with contempt for an angry woman, an unnatural creaturetermagant, scold, shrew, fishwife, virago, harridanbut an angry man is awesome. Anger is his badge of manhood. If here and there some child had a Father who was kindly and mild, that child would lie about him and invent terrible beatings, since who would admit being sired by such a limp excuse for a man?

Fathers were the necessary antidote to Mothers, who by their very nature were fond and foolish and lacking in the firmness of character needed to put their foot down. Mothers could never say "no," Fathers rarely said anything else. With girls, it didn't much matter, but a boy who grew up fatherless would be a poor useless specimen, lazy and timid, with fat, soft hands. In some times and places motherly care was considered so toxic to boys that they were sent away very young, to British boarding schools or, in feudal times, to grow up in the household of a neighboring baron, where they could cry themselves to sleep alone until the toughening process took hold.