“Centenarians? What’s your expectation of life?”
“A year or two more than yours,” she answered. “Ten percent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can’t earn. But obviously pensions aren’t enough. They need something useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC’s fulfill those needs.”
“It all sounds,” said Will, “suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes.”
“Nothing,” she assured him, “could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn’t run by the government, it’s run by its members. And we’re not militaristic. We’re not interested in turning out good party members; we’re only interested in turning out good human beings. We don’t inculcate dogmas. And finally we don’t take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities.
Whereas in China there’s no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world—better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like—but freedom in a telephone booth.”
“Locked in,” Will elaborated, “(and I’m thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who’d been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr’s appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped.”
“And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you.”
“That’s not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!”
“Not so lyrical! Free, let’s say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman—but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn’t guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane.
So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up. ‘Holy,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘whole’—they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family.”
“Amen,” said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. “What happens,” he asked after a pause, “when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?”
“It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That’s because, fundamentally, they’re very happy at home. I wasn’t, and so when I walked out, I’d sometimes stay away for a whole month.”
“And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?”
“It’s not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that’s being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that’s being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn’t think,” she added, “that it’s only when they’re in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience.
And it isn’t just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights—brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while the mother’s doing something else. Duties as well as privileges—but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer—working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying…” She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald’s mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, “But what about you?” she went on. “I’ve been so busy talking about families that I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last.”
“Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?”
Susila smiled. “You did it to yourself,” she assured him. “I merely pressed the buttons.”
“Which buttons?”
“Memory buttons, imagination buttons.”
“And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?”
“If you like to call it that.”
“What else can one call it?”
“Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?”
“But what did happen?”
“Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn’t we?”
“We certainly did,” he agreed. “And yet I don’t believe I even so much as looked at you.”
He was looking at her now, though—looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.
“How could you look at me?” she said. “You’d gone off on your vacation.”
“Or was I pushed off?”
“Pushed? No.” She shook her head. “Let’s say seen off, helped off.” There was a moment of silence. “Did you ever,” she resumed, “try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?”
Will thought of the small neighbor who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.
“Poor little darling!” Susila went on. “He means so well, he’s so anxious to help.”
“But the paint’s on the carpet, the fingerprints are all over the walls…”
“So that in the end you have to get rid of him. ‘Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!’”
There was a silence.
“Well?” he questioned at last.
“Don’t you see?”
Will shook his head.
“What happens when you’re ill, when you’ve been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you?”
“Who else?”
“You?” she insisted. “You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?”
“Oh, I see what you’re driving at.”
“At last!” she mocked.
“Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?”
“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “That’s a question for a neurotheologian.”
“Meaning what?” he asked.
“Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.”
“And the children?”
“The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups.”
“And so must be told to run along and play.”
“Exactly.”
“Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?” he asked.
“Standard procedure,”
