Varieties of Disturbance (3 page)

It's his turn to take care of the baby. He is cross.

He says, “I never get enough done.”

The baby is in a bad mood, too.

He gives the baby a bottle of juice and sits him well back in a big armchair.

He sits himself down in another chair and turns on the television.

Together they watch
The Odd Couple.

The following is a study of twenty-seven get-well letters written by a class of fourth-graders to their classmate Stephen, when he was in the hospital recovering from a serious case of osteomyelitis.

The disease set in after a rather mysterious accident involving a car. Young Stephen, according to his own later report and a brief notice in the local newspaper, was returning home by himself at dusk one day in early December. He stepped into the street, preparing to cross, and was hit obliquely by a slow-moving car, not with great force, but with enough force to knock him to the ground. The driver of the car, a man of indeterminate age, stopped and got out to see if the boy was all right. Ascertaining that no great harm had been done, the man drove on. In fact, the boy had hurt his knee but said nothing about the accident at home, out of embarrassment or a perception that he was somehow to blame. The knee, untreated, became infected; the osteomyelitis bacteria entering the wound; the boy became seriously ill and was hospitalized. After some weeks, and worry on the part of his doctors, family, and friends, he recovered, thanks in part to the recently developed drug penicillin, and was discharged.

At the time of Stephen's hospitalization, his parents put the following notice in the local paper in an attempt to locate the driver of the car. The notice was headlined
PARENTS SEEK TO TALK TO DRIVER OF CAR IN ACCIDENT
. It read:

There was no response to the notice.

After the Christmas holidays were over and his classmates returned to school, the children's teacher, Miss F., assigned them to write Stephen a get-well letter. She then corrected the letters sparingly but precisely and sent them in a packet to Stephen. This was a school exercise clearly intended, if we may judge from the number of consistent features, to teach certain letter-writing skills.

The School

The school in which these letters were written was a large brick building dedicated to use by classes from kindergarten through eighth grade and situated in the heart of a pleasant residential neighborhood. The streets were lined with mature shade trees, and the houses were for the most part roomy and comfortable but unostentatious middle-class homes with modest or, occasionally, generous yards planted with lawns and a variety of trees, shrubs, and flowers. Most of the children lived in the immediate neighborhood of the school and walked to and from school by themselves or with friends on sidewalks that were well maintained but here and there cracked or buckled by the roots of the large trees. Stephen himself, along with his neighbors Carol and Jonathan, lived one street over from the school. At the corner of the street on which the school stood was a small store owned and presided over by a matronly woman with a rather forbidding manner. It sold candy and a limited range of groceries, and was heavily patronized by the children after school. Across from this store, a street descended steeply toward a broad, shallow river in which the children were not allowed to swim because of effluents from the factories upstream. The school building was surrounded by a large asphalt playground lacking climbing or swinging equipment. The classrooms were well lighted, with natural daylight coming in through large windows.

General Appearance and Form of the Letters

The letters are written on lined exercise paper of two different sizes, most of them on the smaller, 7? by 8 ½?, four of them on the larger, 8? by 10 ½?. Although the paper is of a low grade and was manufactured nearly sixty years ago, it has remained supple and smooth in texture, and the letters are still clearly legible, some students in particular having borne down heavily to make very dark and distinct lines. They are all written in ink, though the ink varies, some blue and some black, some dark and some light, some lines thin and some thick.

The penmanship is for the most part quite good, i.e., the script slopes at a fairly consistent angle to the right, most letters touch the line, the letters are evenly spaced, the uprights of the letters do not touch the line above, etc., though the variations in thickness of line and formation of letters, as well as the wavering lines, betray the tremulous hands and labored efforts of the novice script-users. Some of the capitals, however, are very elegantly formed, with a handsome flourish.

There are twenty-seven letters altogether, written by thirteen girls and fourteen boys. Twenty-four of the children's letters are dated January 4, evidently the day on which the teacher set them to work as a group; two are dated January 5, and one January 8, implying that these children were absent on the day the exercise was initiated.

The letters all carry the same heading, obviously prescribed by the teacher, on three lines in the upper-right-hand corner: the name of the school; the town and state; and the date. They are ruled by hand in pencil down the left margin to provide a uniform indented guide for the beginning of each line, with the exception of the January 8 letter—this latecomer evidently was not given the instruction or did not hear it—and those written on the larger sheets of paper, which bear a printed rule down the left margin. The hand-ruled lines vary: some are thin and straight, others thick and slanted, and one trails off at an angle at the bottom, the pupil having evidently reached the end of his ruler before he reached the bottom of the page.

The salutations are all the same: “Dear Stephen.” The closings vary within a narrow range: “Your friend” (5 boys and 10 girls); “Your classmate” (3 girls and 2 boys); “Your pal” (4 boys); “Sincerely yours” (1 boy); “Love” (1 boy); and “Your pal of pals” (1 boy: this was Jonathan, a close friend). It should be noted that only the boys use the colloquial “pal,” whereas nearly twice as many girls as boys use the more formal “friend.”

The teacher has inked in corrections on some of the letters, in the darkest ink and a smaller hand. She has added commas where missing (most frequently after the salutation, “Dear Stephen,” the closing, e.g. “Your friend,” and between the name of the town and the state) and question marks where required. She has corrected some misspellings (“happey,” “sleding,” “throught,” “brouther,” and “We are mississ you very much”). In one case she has, surprisingly, had to correct the spelling of a child's name, reducing “Arilene” to “Arlene.” She has supplied two missing words. Several errors have escaped her notice. On the whole, the letters are spelled and punctuated correctly; the teacher makes, on average, only about one correction per page, and most of these are punctuation corrections. Either the students have learned their lessons very well or, perhaps more likely, these are fair copies of rough, corrected drafts.

Twenty-two children sign their full names, first and last. One signs “Billy J.” and the remaining four sign only their first names. (For reasons of confidentiality, only the initial letter of the children's last names will be retained here.)

Length

Excluding the salutation and closing, the letters range in length from three to eight lines and from two to eight sentences. None of the boys' letters is longer than five sentences, whereas, of the girls, one each has a letter containing six, seven, and eight sentences. Although the girls number one fewer than the boys, they are overall more communicative, contributing 84 lines versus the boys' 66, and 61 sentences versus the boys' 53.

Not all of the girls, however, are communicative. Two write letters containing only three lines and three sentences. One is the gloomy letter by Sally quoted below. The second brief letter, by Susan B., includes what may be an envious reference to a box of candy. In general, the length and content of the shortest letters appear to connote depressive or apathetic states of mind in their authors, while the content and length of the longest give the impression of being the products of the more cheerful and outgoing temperaments. Those in the mid-length range variously express stout realism (broken branches and fallen snowmen), bland formulae (see Maureen's letter below), or strong feelings and personality (Scott's “I'd yank you out of bed”).

Overall Coherence

There is a tendency toward non-sequiturs in the letters: one sentence often has little to do with the sentence that follows or precedes it (e.g., “The temperature keeps on changing. I can't wait until you come back to school”).

Some letters, however, develop one idea with perfect cogency throughout: e.g., Sally's grim letter, Scott's enthusiastic, somewhat violent letter threatening to “yank” Stephen out of bed, and Alex's informative letter about sledding, which names the location of the sledding and notes progress from last year: “We had some fun over at Hospital Hill. We went over a big bump and went flying through the air. This year I went on a higher part than I used to.”

Sentence Structures

The letters overall contain a predominance of simple sentences (e.g., “There was a big snowball fight outside”), with now and then a compound, complex, or compound-complex sentence.

Compound Sentences

The shortest letter (two sentences) is written by Peter. He is the same boy whose ruled line is thick, slanted, and bent at the bottom. However, he is also one of the few students to form a compound sentence, and in so doing uses the rarer and more interesting conjunction
but
: “We are having a very happy time but we miss you.”

Another who uses
but
is Cynthia, one of the realists in the class: “I have made snowmen but they have fallen down.”

Susan A., another realist, uses
but
to modify her description of fairyland, as quoted below.

Other conjunctions used in the letters are:
until
(2),
because
(2), and the most common and inexpressive or neutral:
and
(7).

One girl, Carol, using the conjunction
because
, forms two compound sentences in a letter which is only three sentences long: “I hope you will be back to school very soon because it is lonesome without you” and “New Year's Eve your [little] Sister slept at our house because your Mother and Father and [older] Sister went to a party.” Because she employs more elaborate sentence structures, her letter is one of those containing the most lines (8) yet the fewest sentences (3).

The most common, and least expressive, conjunction is
and
(7 occurrences), as in Alex's sentence: “We went over a big bump and went flying through the air.” One girl, Diane, forms a compound sentence out of two imperatives: “Hurry up and come back.”

Complex Sentences

Aside from the frequent formulaic complex sentences beginning with “I hope” (e.g., “I hope you get better”) and “I wish” (e.g., “I wish you saw it”), there are relatively few instances of complex sentences:

Fred: “Well I guess this is all I have to tell you.”

Theodore: “I beat the boys who were against me.”

Alex: “This year I went on a higher part than I used to.”

Susan B.: “Jonathan A. told me that he send [
sic
] you a big box of candy.”

Kingsley has two complex sentences in succession: “What do you think you are going to get for Christmas?” and “I got every thing I wanted to get.”

Compound-Complex Sentences

Van, the boy who admits to being uninspired and writes one of the briefest letters, is also, however, one of the few pupils to construct a compound-complex sentence, though he omits two words and contradicts himself (see his use of
think
): “I think that is all to say [
sic
] because I just can't think.”

Jonathan also constructs a compound-complex sentence. His is more cheerful but uses a less expressive conjunction: “I hope you liked my box of candy, and I can hardly wait until you will be home again.”

Susan A. uses the more loaded conjunction
but
: “When it was over everything looked like a fairyland but some trees were bent and broken.” She follows this sentence with another compound-complex sentence, using the strong conjunction
so
and including an imperative: “We are very sorry that you are in the hospital, so get well quick.”

Verbs

Some of the children's verb tenses are unclear.

Apropos a movie, Theodore writes: “I wish you saw it.” It is unclear whether he means “I wish you could see it” or “I wish you had seen it.”

Billy T. writes: “I hope you will eat well.” It is not clear when or where Stephen should eat well.

Joseph A. writes: “I hope you have fun.” It is not clear when or where Stephen should have fun. Both Billy and Joseph probably intended the meaning conveyed by the present participle forms “are eating well” and “are having fun.” It may be noted that Joseph is the only child to associate Stephen's stay in the hospital with having fun.

The most vivid verb is Scott's Anglo-Saxon
yank
.

Imperatives

The only instances of use of the imperative (4, one softened by “Please”) are found in the letters of girls. This may imply a greater inclination to “command” or “boss” on the part of the girls than the boys, but may also be statistically insignificant, given the small number of letters in the sample.

Style

The style of the letters is for the most part informal, i.e., neither excessively formal nor extremely casual or colloquial. Occasionally, the diction becomes conversational: there are two instances of
Well
as openings of sentences (both omit the comma that should follow). There is a vivid conversational verb,
yank
, in Scott's letter. It is worth noting, however, a conspicuous formality common to most of the children on at least one point: given a choice, as they seem to have been, most of the children sign their full names to their letters. Also, in the two instances in which children refer to other children by name, they use the full name, even though Stephen would have known perfectly well from the context which child they were talking about. It may be that in the school setting, first and last names were so commonly used inseparably by the teacher in calling the roll or in reprimanding, that when writing in school, in any case, the children profoundly identified each other and themselves by first and last names both.