The Love Children

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“French continues to write about the inner lives of women with insight and intimacy.”

“ Marilyn French is brilliant . . . full of life and passions that ring true as crystal.”

—THE
WASHINGTON POST

“French brings a novelist's eye, a scholar's sense of detail and a feminist's worldview . . . [this is] a novel for women with a progressive perspective on gender bias and an old-fashioned fondness for discussing the curveballs life lobs.”

—
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

 

 

“No history you will read, post-French, will ever look the same again.”

—MARGARET ATWOOD

“One day, no history will be written without the female half of the world. Until then, we have the unique scholarship of Marilyn French in
From Eve to Dawn
. No home or library or hopeful reader should be without it.”

—GLORIA STEINEM

“[Marilyn French] still knows how to keep the pages turning.”

“In four ambitious volumes under the title
From Eve to Dawn
, [French] surveys world history from a staunchly feminist perspective. . . . Readers can profit greatly from her brisk and passionate prose.”

—
MS.
MAGAZINE

The Women's Room
The Bleeding Heart
Her Mother's Daughter
Our Father
My Summer with George
In the Name of Friendship
The Love Children

 

The Book as World: James Joyce's Ulysses
Shakespeare's Division of Experience
Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals
Women in India
The War Against Women
A Season in Hell: A Memoir
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World
Volumes One-Four

When I was fourteen
, and still in junior high, we read a Hemingway story in English class that opened, “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” It was a sad story, and that line stayed in my head; it felt like my own truth. War had always been present in my life, although I never went to it myself. Before I was born, my father joined the air force, during World War II, when he was seventeen years old. I giggled when he told me about it—I was a little girl then—because he had to get a note from his mommy and daddy the way I did when I was absent from school. He didn't like my giggling. It was serious, he said. He went to officer candidate school and learned to fly bombers, but because by then the war was almost over, he never left the United States and didn't see combat. This was his tragedy. He wanted to be a hero.

My father was proud of being a Leighton and proud that Leightons had served in every war this country had ever fought. He thought the country began in the 1620s, when Leightons first arrived here. They landed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1623, not on the Mayflower, but on another ship. I thought Cambridge must have already been a place, because Indians lived there, but Daddy said it wasn't. He said it was a wilderness. I adored Daddy and loved the times he let me sit by him. When he told me about his tragedy, I said that it was important that he had been in the
war, not where. I knew he was also in the Korean War, but about that he was bitter: just his luck, he said, that he was too young for World War II and too old for the Korean War, where he was assigned to jockey supply planes to Seoul, and bring the wounded back to California, a job he said was equivalent to driving a bus. He wanted to drop bombs.

When I was fourteen, Daddy and Hemingway merged into one person in my imagination, both of them dashing flyboys in visored caps and handsome uniforms, standing in bars sipping martinis and exchanging dry ironic repartee while jauntily braving death. War was tragic, but underneath, it was glamorous.

As the years went on he talked less about the war—maybe because my mother had different ideas about warfare in general. They didn't disagree openly until I was in my teens, when war meant Vietnam, which also began before I was born. American soldiers were “advising” the French in Vietnam in 1950, when the United States began sending soldiers there. I was born in 1953, and as I grew up, Vietnam was always in the news. I'd hear about it after my TV programs,
Captain Kangaroo
or
The Mickey Mouse Club
, ended. When President Kennedy was assassinated, I was ten years old and we had fifteen thousand troops in Vietnam. The next year, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, intensifying the war, and by the time I was twelve and had put my dollhouse on a high shelf in my closet to make room for my new portable typewriter, the United States had more than one hundred and eighty thousand troops in Vietnam and people were arguing, even shouting, about it at dinner parties. My mother and father's arguments became vicious. I tried to blot out their rage, but the war was never not in my consciousness.

By 1967, it had moved right to the center of my brain. Kids in school had begun to quarrel about it. Most of us were probably echoing our parents. Some of the kids were intensely pro-war. I envied them their certainty, but I disliked them—they seemed
so smug denouncing “gooks” and “Commies.” They were the same kids who were delighted when Robert Kennedy was assassinated; they were laughing—“Two down, one to go.”

When I dared to argue, it was as a pacifist; I was against killing anyone. I was pro-McCarthy, shocked by the Democratic convention and devastated by the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.: I felt that we were murdering all our decent leaders, leaving only wild-eyed crazies and dullards to run the country. But I was young and didn't have much knowledge, just lots of emotion.

In 1968, the year I started senior high school, we had more than a half million troops in Vietnam, killing with abandon and dying like flies—we learned in biology that flies have a lifespan of twenty-four hours; the lifespan of a new ground soldier in Vietnam seemed to be about the same. War had come to mean something to me. I read how army sergeants bullied and harassed young boys and taught them to hate the enemy. And when I read history, it seemed as if wars didn't really accomplish anything. They might make one man a big deal for a few years—like Alexander the Great or Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin—but he always died in the end, and his empire always fell apart, and meanwhile millions of people had died for him. Half the time warring countries ended up friends, like the Catholics and the Protestants in Europe, after hundreds of years of disemboweling each other's babies and burning each other to death. War meant a lot of people getting killed or dying of disease or starvation and houses and schools and churches or whole cities getting burned down. I thought that the man or group who wanted power enough to go to war should do the fighting in a bullring, and leave the rest of us out of it.

 

Mostly I didn't think about war, though. I lived in a dream of a happy life. I painted a set of pictures of it when I was six: in the
first, a little blonde, blue-eyed girl dances toward a woman with brown hair and wearing an apron whose back is to the viewer. Then the girl hands the woman a garland, which she tries to hang on the barren branch of a tree under the eye of a savage sun. My mother framed my pictures and hung them in the kitchen.

I gleaned my sense of happiness from books, especially from the pictures in them, and from glimpses of my own family at charmed moments, like when my father spoke with love in his voice or my mother made an affectionate gesture toward him. Such things filled me with as much happiness as drinking a glass of chocolate milk. But by the time I was nine or ten, my father was in a rage pretty much all the time—at least when he was home. Willa Cather quoted a French saying about husbands and fathers who were “Joy of the street, sorrow of the home.” That was my father: always amiable in public but a horror at home. He did have an occasional moment of lightheartedness; he might be full of jokes at Christmas or after a trip to New York. Because these occasions were rare, they were always a surprise, and a relief. Mom would get silly with pleasure. He won gold stars just for being pleasant.

Most of the time, though, his voice hurled through the house like clanging metal. He harried Mom over some glance she'd dropped, some word mislaid, creating a complex weave of betrayal and infidelity. Or he would yell at me for some terrible sin I couldn't remember committing—putting my hand on the wall or using the wrong fork. Then Mom, trying to deflect him from me, or just trying to shut him up, would yell back, and the two of them would be off, the house reverberating with curses and yells, their fury bouncing off the walls.

When that happened, I was grateful for my books. I retreated to them, lying on my bed submerged in the tales of Mary Nor-ton's Borrowers series, about tiny people concealed under the floorboards, or thrilled by Edith Nesbit's
The Enchanted Castle
,
eased by the healing beauties of Rumer Godden. I was especially enthralled by the harmonious family life and salubrious hard work of Laura Ingalls Wilder's families. I read all nine of her Little House books, reread them, lived them.

Besides books, I had friends. I always had friends. I'd stick to one girl, cling to her, my life raft in the heaving ocean of childhood, with its huge pull of Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy had friends and seemed to always know what to do and be able to do it: I was just an offshoot. But when I was with my friend, I was almost myself. I wasn't allowed to cross the street or leave the block or go anywhere exciting, such as a candy store or ice cream parlor, so having a friend was a kind of declaration of independence. I took friendship seriously and always thought my present friend would be my friend forever.

I was ecstatic with each step I took toward some vague horizon I could not even see—crossing the street alone, walking to the ice cream store on Broadway, walking to school alone, and eventually, going to the movie house on Brattle Street with my friend. I savored each revolutionary event as a major rite of passage into the state I longed for: adulthood. I resented being a child; it was outrageous that I, who had a perfectly good mind and will, should have to obey other people just because I was small! It was an indignity to have to get permission, or hold someone's hand, just to do what I wanted to do.

Sandy Lipkin was the first friend I could be completely—almost completely—independent with. By the time we met in tenth grade, we were fifteen, we had some money, and could go to the movies. We both had driver's permits. The only thing remaining was to earn money on our own, and that would happen soon. We were very proud of ourselves. We wore our hair long, forgetting to comb it, and never wore anything but blue jeans. We felt as new sprung as Botticelli's Aphrodite from sea-foam, but no modest virgins we, using our hands to conceal our
pubes; no, we were part of the new world, the miracle of a chosen generation, which made us miracles too. We were proud of our pubes. Well, we wanted to be. Well, we knew we would be when we were grown up.