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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Sep 20 min read

Excerpted Inspirations #143


[Continued from last week. Lester reflects on why his job left him so little time with his children, why Stephen felt unable to confide in his mother about not wanting his Teddy bear washed, and how else the toy could be disinfected if it had been exposed to a contagious disease.] That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unaware upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sick-room, he set himself to try to understand what it meant. So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been. But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep up such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word. He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had tried to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth. [...] If anybody had had the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did.... But nobody had! And that was the point. He saw it now. Nothing turned on the question of whether Teddy should or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter good have been arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody that there was anything to arrange. The question was why it had not occurred to anybody. What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension. And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the concept into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence. Why had Stephen so shut himself up? The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity. It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way. But even a sullen stronghold of badness was better than that dreadful breakdown of human dignity. Lester felt he could never endure it again to have Stephen look into his face with that slavish, helpless searching of his eyes. No self-respecting human being could bear that look from another. Could there be human beings – women – mothers – who fattened on it, fought to keep that slave’s look in the eyes of children? ... With a heat of anger, he told himself that at least he could start in to make Stephen feel, hour by hour, in every contact with him, that he, even a little boy, had some standing in the world, inviolable to grown-ups, yes, sacred even to parents. He breathed hard and flung out his arm. For the first time he desired to get well, to live again. -Dorothy Canfield, The Home-Maker (1924), pp. 176-179

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