The Child Matures

1. The Child Matures
THE STORY about a child growing up, getting his first taste
of reality, awakening to new potentialities within himself...
A certain small town had been electrified by the escape of
a group of convicts from a nearby prison. At first, unusual
precautions were taken. But then a week passed, all but one
prisoner had been recaptured, and most of the townspeople
considered the danger gone. Not so one young boy. One day
he starts off on a solo hiking trip along the railway tracks,
thinking hard about what it would be like to run up against
the convict, what he would do and say if he did. Before long,
at an especially lonely stretch, he comes on a man crouching
in a little recess near the train tracks.
From the suspicious, hunted air and disheveled looks of the
man, the boy is immediately certain that he is the missing
convict. The boy overcomes his impulse to bolt and instead
walks confidently up to the man and naively asks him if he is
a hobo. The convict remains suspicious and silent, but the boy
keeps up the chatter to allay the man's fears. The boy tells
the convict that the engineer who runs the train which will
soon come along the train tracks is his friend and will stop
the train if the boy flags it down. The boy offers to halt the
train so that the convict can jump aboard and eventually get
across the border into Canada where the boy assures him he
will be able to get work.
The train comes along, the boy flags it, and the convict
jumps on. The boy tells the engineer, after a moment's
hesitation, about the convict, and the engineer makes arrangements
at a water stop to have the train met at the boy's home
town by the police. When the boy finally sees the convict
forcibly removed and sees the look of hate and contempt on
the convict's face, he is ashamed of having tricked him. The
boy knows his name and picture will be printed in newspapers,
that he will be acclaimed as a hero, and for the first
time he realizes that the world very often will reward individuals
for being dishonorable.
Anyone who thinks this story tame and reasonable
doesn't know the slicks. In the field of popular fiction, this
is raw meat. Implied and almost stated is a Swiftian condemnation
of many aspects of life, if not of life itself. Revealed
are the two sides of fame and worldly recognition.
(Suppose the writer were similarly to reveal the two sides
of the average marriage, of wartime patriotism, of business
success, or any of the other of the most sacred American
institutions. What would he have? A "quality" story.)
If child-maturing stories like this one are painful or
merely sad and poignant, there is always the long-term
compensation that the experiences they describe are necessary
to the development of the child and leave him better
prepared to face the world. Were an adult character to
have the moral carpet thus pulled from under him, what
would be gained? Disillusionment in no way serves the
slick advertiser, editor, or reader.
The one story outlined is, of course, an extreme case. It
is given here to indicate the lengths a writer may go to in
portraying dramas of childhood. More in line with the
usual stories of this type is a piece about a young girl just
reaching her adolescence.
She is still a tom-boy, and her parents feel it is about time
she evinced some signs of femininity. To this end, they insist
that she put on a fancy dress for the annual fashion showing
to be held at the country club. She gives in to the pressure and,
once at the club, the manager of the show chooses her to be
the one local belle to join the professional models in the
fashion parade. She resists, but is dared into it. The woman in
charge of the dressing room gives her a few pointers on
carriage and facial expressions, and the girl turns out to be
the hit of the show.
She is overwhelmed at the attention and adulation she gets
for playing the part of a woman. And her parents, watching
her, realize that she has taken the first irrevocable step in
growing up, in becoming a lady. She will never be the unself-
conscious tom-boy again. They have achieved their purpose
more fully than they expected, and their success mixes
sadness with their pride.
As a rule which has many exceptions but still which
holds often enough to be a rule, the maturing experience
of girls consists of realizing and surrendering to their own
femininity, while boys mature, usually, through developing
a sense of responsibility or self-sufficiency.
An eighteen-year-old boy comes home from his first year at
college, quite taken with his own importance. His mother asks
him to work at his father's office for the summer, or at least
implies that his father would be pleased if he wanted to. The
boy doesn't particularly go for the suggestion. He feels, rather,
that he should stay free to indulge any whims he might have.
Then the mother tells the boy that his father doesn't have long
to live and she wants to see that what will probably be his last
summer will be the happiest possible. The boy who had
always taken his family for granted begins to appreciate his
parents and begins to act like an adult.
Stories like this have no suspense, in the usual sense. At
the opening, there is merely an atmosphere of impending
change. Only at the story's end, when the change occurs,
when the child has had the maturing experience, does the
story show its intended direction. The piece has achieved
a kind of retroactive suspense. Since there is rarely an
urgent problem for the story to "work against," the writing
often feels "loose" until the very end of the piece. To cotnpensate,
the details and business of such stories usually
have more color and feeling than stories which can capture
interest with a simple problem.
category:plot lines
Category: transformation.