I have a new grandson with the admirable name of Nicholas Charles Epstein. Nick Charles, moviegoers will happily recall, is the name of the suave detective played by William Powell in the Thin Man movies. A friend, when told of my new grandson’s name, said she hopes it won’t be long before he’s sitting around in silk pajamas and a Sulka robe, sipping martinis. I look forward to that day for him, too. I only hope — for reasons I shall go into presently — that my son has the good sense, in fact the decency, never to tell the boy the facts of life.
A few years ago I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York with three intellectual friends, chatting away, as befits members of the chattering class, about this and that, when in the vagaries of conversation the fact arose that none of us, as kids, had been told the facts of life by our fathers. We were all of a certain age — beyond, that is, 50 — and hence born in a less psychological time than the one in which we now live. Yet three of the four of us had sons, and we each admitted that we hadn’t told them the facts of life either.
To do so, we all agreed, was so awkward as to be quite impossible. I thought about telling my sons the facts of life, but could not imagine taking them off into a room and, illustrated book in hand, starting to talk in a vocabulary that included such words as “pudenda,” “labia,” and “seminal ejaculation.” These boys had been trained in humor, light-irony division, and they would, I fear, have laughed their old man out of the house.
Sex education was no part of my public education. In my high school we had something called hygiene that was part of gym class, in which we were taught – – I use the word “taught” very loosely — the evil effects of alcohol and nicotine and the rudiments of first aid. In first aid, we were given large cloth bandages, which we used not for slings or tourniquets but to bind and gag one another in the back of the room. Meanwhile, sex education went on down the hall in print shop, where vocational students produced something called “eight-pagers.” These featured familiar comic-book characters in brief pornographic melodramas. “Take it easy, baby,” I still recall Moon Mullins more than forty years later exclaiming in an eight-pager, “I wanna use this joy stick again sometime.”
I wonder if my father ever considered telling me the facts of life. I rather doubt it. He was a busy man. The only advice I can remember his providing on the subject was his invocation to “Be careful.” I believe he told me this one morning on the way out of the house. It was a little unclear what I was to be careful about. Venereal disease, perhaps. Maybe pregnancy. In any case, I didn’t have to worry too much about being careful. What I wanted, of course, was to be as un-careful as possible. The problem was that the girls I went out with in high school turned out to be more than careful enough for the both of us.
I can scarcely imagine my father’s father telling him the facts of life. He was a scholarly man, interested in Hebrew education in Montreal. He had had ten children, which makes me think that no one had told him about the facts of life either. He was a very elevated gent, who always wore suits with vests, a watch on a gold chain, and a prettily groomed goatee. He dispensed philosophy, not sexology. Difficult — impossible, really — to imagine him instructing his eight sons in the intricacies of female anatomy.
I hope, as I say, that my son will not make the mistake of sitting my grandson down and filling him in on the facts of life. In our family, after all, we have a tradition going back four full generations in which the men have been autodidacts in these matters, and traditions must be preserved.
Perhaps not everyone knows about the Hungarian countess who asks her husband if he has yet told their fifteen-year-old son about “the birds and the bees.” The count replies that he has indeed forgot, but will do so forthwith. The next day he is walking through his estate with his son. “You know, Anton,” he begins, somewhat tentatively, “the time has come for me to tell you about the birds and the bees.” “What about the birds and the bees, Papa?” the boy asks. “Well, Anton,” the count continues, “you will recall that two weeks ago when we were walking along this same path we passed two beautiful young peasant girls.” “Yes, Papa,” says the boy. “Well, my boy,” concludes the count, “what we did with those two girls — it seems the birds and the bees do it, too.”
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
