Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page B

Mrs.
Ingraham, speaking more than twenty years later.
     
    “ I really don’t know why Miss Monroe tells
these terrible stories about us. And people print them, whatever
she says. We don’t have to give the
children any work assignments. We have a staff of twenty-one here,
including a housemother for every ten children. We have a staff in
the kitchen fully capable of attending to the dishes. But we do
give the children small jobs and pay them for it. We do this
deliberately to give the child a feeling of being useful, of her
own importance, and to give her money to spend as she wants to
spend it. Now this story of Marilyn’s that we made her wash dishes
three times a day is just plain silly. It would take a child four
hours to wash that many dishes. How would Marilyn have had time to
go to school and do homework and be in bed by nine, which is
lights-out time, if she was washing that many dishes three times a
day?”
    “ How many dishes did she wash?”
    “ Oh, she never washed any dishes and she
never scrubbed toilets. The most she did was to help dry the dishes
an hour a week, one hour. That’s all. She had to make her own bed
and keep her section of the girls’ cottage tidied up, is
all.”
    “ How much did you pay her?”
    “ It wasn’t really payment. It would be
much easier for us just to give the children a dime a week and let
it go at that, because it actually makes it harder for us in the
kitchen when we have them helping out. They get in the way. But
it’s our theory that giving the child five cents a week, which was
what Marilyn received, is good for a child’s morale. She feels she
has a place in the world. No institution can ever take the place of
a family or a good foster home. We know that. We know the children
here do suffer from feelings of rejection. The idea of having them
do little tasks and giving them money is to make them feel proud of
themselves. We do it even now.”
     
    While the children did have to go to public
school together and return together and were thereby marked by
other children as from the Home, still they wore no uniforms —
Norma Jean had a plaid skirt and a sweater. And if they were
obliged to live in a dormitory, there were large windows for air
and sunlight. They all had their own beds and chests of drawers.
There were five acres to play on, swings, seesaws, exercise bars, a
sandbox. Zolotow even mentions a swimming pool! Inside were toys
and games, a radio and phonograph, an auditorium and stage. The
sense of plastic surfaces, communal living, and indifferent mass
food is probably worse in any student union in any American
university today — at least any union that has recently been built.
(In fact, Norma Jean’s orphanage consisted of several buildings
that were not without a little bit of architectural distinction.)
If there was cruel and unusual punishment, it was in the brute fact
of the orphanage itself — the emptiness at the core of every tender
sensation. One housemother for ten orphans — how can an institution
afford more? — and yet what competition to get the fragment of good
feeling available in a woman who must divide that small pie of her
working heart into ten slices. How little can be there, yet for the
children what huge and ruthless elbowing to get up under her nose
for award, often by telling the most skillful lies, all the while
knowing the most complete loneliness if one is to the rear. The
real horror is that slowly, progressively, the child loses all
sense of inhabiting even the fair volume of its own body. Since it
is existing on the lowest levels of social significance,
supervisors tend to look through the child as if it is to a degree
invisible. The volume it inhabits is without
importance . Indeed, one of Monroe’s wittier remarks concerned
people being rude: “I guess they think it’s happening to your
clothing.” At its worst, in the orphanage one was nothing but an
item recognizable by its garments. Given this diminution of