 In The Age of Reason by Marian Birch we experience a period of American life that is not-so-distant and not-so-different from our own time – the Cold War of the 1950s. We see it through the eyes of a wise child. Edith is bravely emerging from the protective swaddling of childish make-believe, where her vivid imagination can transport her out of any difficulties. She then encounters a reality that is complicated, difficult and sometimes frightening.
 In The Age of Reason by Marian Birch we experience a period of American life that is not-so-distant and not-so-different from our own time – the Cold War of the 1950s. We see it through the eyes of a wise child. Edith is bravely emerging from the protective swaddling of childish make-believe, where her vivid imagination can transport her out of any difficulties. She then encounters a reality that is complicated, difficult and sometimes frightening.
the age of reason
Marian Birch
Contents
1. A Mighty Wind
2. Life After Birth
3. The Crying Rock
4. A Birthday Party
5. Hunting Season
6. Nativity
7. Armistice
8. Harvest
9. First Snow
10. Advent
11. I Do Believe in Fairies
12. Easter in New York
13. Dies Irae
CHAPTER 1
A MIGHTY WIND
On the last day of school, Edith got off the bus at the foot of her own driveway. Every other day of first grade. she’d gone to Granny and Pop’s house after school
She marched straight up the gravel drive,. If she had turned her head, she might have seen the old blue car parked thirty yards up the road. She smelled the lilacs that lined the drive. As she passed underneath the branches of an old ash tree, two ravens squawked overhead. She felt her bones tingle with their cries. Her house, covered in weathered gray clapboard the exact color of a paper-wasps' nest, stood on a little hill. The meadow behind it was covered with apple trees that Granny had told her were almost as old as the house. That would make them three hundred years old. But Kitt, as she called her mother, said that no apple tree could possibly be that old. Kitt said that Granny meant that they had already been there when she was a little girl. Today the trees were covered with pink-and-white blossoms and the buzzing of bees.
When she pushed open the sliding glass door into the “new” kitchen, the quiet of the old house surrounded her. To Edith the kitchen didn’t seem new at all, because it had always been there as long as she could remember, but she knew everyone called it that because it had been added on to the house in the 1930s. It had been new ages before she was born. Pop had built it to give Granny Gladys a modern kitchen to cook in. That was before Pop and Gladys moved to the house up the road where, right now, they were minding her little brother.
The icebox purred softly and the big clock on top of it ticked loudly. Everything else was hushed. Edith found herself walking as lightly as she could, like an Indian brave in the woods, trying not to make a sound, as she crossed the fake-brick linoleum and put her schoolbooks down on the kitchen table. She opened the icebox, excited and proud that she had permission to eat whatever she liked. Although what she would have really liked was chocolate milk, her parents never bought the Bosco syrup you needed to make it, like the DeMelos, across the road, did. She made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and washed it down with ordinary milk. Then she headed up to her room.
She had gone up and down the narrow and uneven stairs to her small room at the top of the house so many times, often two at a time, that she didn’t need to turn on the light to know which steps were shorter or taller than the others. Her bedroom was the only room on the third floor under the eaves. Kitt, referred to it a garret. She once told Edith that Raskolnikov had a similar room. Edith had no idea who Raskolnikov was. “Just a crazy Russian teenager,” Kitt explained. Edith’s garret had no door. The ceiling sloped and the room was almost completely filled by Edith’s ivory-painted wooden bed and the sagging jam cabinet with screened doors where she kept her dolls and clothes. The single mullioned casement window, glazed with six small panes of ancient, wavery glass, was propped open with a stick so the room wouldn’t be stuffy. A very gentle breeze blew in.
Edith rummaged through the wicker laundry basket where she kept her dress-up things. She pulled out a threadbare black-velvet circle skirt that used to be her mother’s, a big ivory shawl of fine wool, some phony gold bangles and chain necklaces from Kitt’s college theater days, and finally an old yellowed napkin edged with dingy lace that smelled faintly of camphor.
Then she extracted her blue leather missal from its hiding place under her mattress and leafed through it, looking for the Sacrament of Baptism. The book had to be kept a secret because her parents didn’t like praying. Besides, she had stolen it from the Church of the Holy Innocents a few weeks before, when she went to Mass with her best friend Daniel DeMelo and his family so that Kitt and Arthur, her father, could sleep late.
Today Edith was playing a nun who was baptizing her congregation of dolls and stuffed animals. Her friendship with Daniel DeMelo and his siblings, especially the knowledgeable nine-year-old Betsy, had made her well-informed about Church matters, . She knew that nuns aren’t supposed to baptize and can’t be bishops, but she also knew that, if necessary, in an emergency, anyone can baptize as long as they say the right words and put some drops of holy water on the person they want to baptize. Daniel had learned this in catechism class. When the DeMelos’ youngest, baby Peter, was born last winter, Betsy had told her all about his baptism, so Edith knew just what to do. However, whenever she played 'Baptism' with Daniel she had to let him be the bishop since he was a boy. Now she pretended, I, Mother Edith, must perform the sacrament because it is the middle of a war and there aren’t any bishops here behind enemy lines. In her imagination she could hear bombs exploding not very far away.
Despite the open window in the gable end of her little room, it was still warm and stuffy up here on the third floor. Ignoring her own comfort like a good nun, Edith draped the ivory shawl over her head. On top of it she arranged the velvet skirt and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t have a mirror, so she touched her forehead to be sure the white wimple showed beneath the black veil. Then she put the gold chains around her neck and spread the lace napkin on a footstool. She had brought up a drinking glass filled with water and a shot glass filled with Wesson Oil to be the holy water and the chrism. She liked the sound of chrism. Solemnly she made the sign of the cross and muttered in something she hoped resembled Latin.
In hominy patrice,
Filly-hoo et speary too sank toe.
At the same time she waved her hands over the two glasses just like Mickey Mouse waving over the mop in Fantasia. This was to make the water and oil be holy. Her dolls and her two teddy bears were lined up solemnly on the chair behind the footstool. They were orphans whose parents had been killed by bombs before they could be baptized. She knew the orphans would go to straight to Hell if something happened to them before they received the sacrament. Using two brushes from her painting set, she planned to sprinkle the blessed oil and water on the expectant Cat-a-cue-mens. Wet brush raised above her waiting flock, missal open to the correct page, Edith was distracted by a funny smell. It tickled her nose and the back of her throat. She looked up and saw that outside the window, the sky was now a sulfurous yellow-green that she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, a color sort of like the week-old black-and-blue mark on her arm from when she had walked into the bathroom doorknob. Just a little while earlier, when she’d come home from school, it had been a soft, warm late-spring day, smelling of apple blossoms and lilac, and the sky had been baby blue. Now instead of the quiet of a spring afternoon, she heard a swelling of sound like the train coming into the Worcester station when her mother would take her to New York. But the Worcester station was thirty miles away and there were no trains here in Whitby. There were hardly even any trucks bigger than a farmer’s flatbed truck hauling hay bales on her road. But now she definitely heard a train . . . or something like a train. Could it be Pop using his chainsaw in the woods?
Suddenly, in less than the time it took her to gasp, Edith was sucked—whooshed—by what felt like an enormous vacuum cleaner out the open window into the air above her favorite apple tree, the one she liked to climb. Alongside her flew the glass of water and the glass of oil, the footstool, the neatly seated dolls and animals, and the napkin. Her heart startled straight upward, as if a small bird nesting inside her fluttered, squawked, and soared. Edith’s mind was swamped by her sensations. She felt her skin and her hair and her clothes all being sucked by the warm strong wind. Her whole body felt like her bare feet did when the waves were sucking the sand underneath them at Ocean Beach last summer, but this ocean was warm like a bath. This sucking wind was almost hot, like the air coming out of the back of the Hoover and, though it was very strong and smelled like ammonia, it was also oddly gentle.
Edith floated through the air, her small mouth forming a big O. She floated so very, very slowly that she could see everything below her and around her in remarkably vivid detail, much sharper than ordinary seeing. Usually things were a little bit blurry for her, because she didn’t have very sharp eyes except for things right under her nose, like words on a page or blueberries on a bush. But now everything was sharply etched and clear. Her doll Teddy (the one whose hair she had cut off so she would have a boy, as well as one of her bears were floating alongside her. They all sailed together over the yard and above the very same apple trees whose flowering she’d admired coming home from school earlier in the afternoon, now stripped of every dainty pink-and-white blossom. She floated over the gravel driveway, over the woods, just above the trees, over the pond. Then, very gently, the air dropped her to the northeast of the barn into a small grassy hollow surrounded by blackberry briars. She descended as gently as if she had a parachute. This is just the way, she thought, that Uncle Teddy floated down into a field in France in the war. She landed softly on the long, wet grass. No one shot a machine gun at her like she’d been told they shot at Uncle Teddy. She landed on her bottom. Seconds later, her bedroom window, unbroken, landed upright beside her. She thought, It will fall over, but despite a slight wobble, it remained standing. She scurried on hands and knees like a crab, under an enormous root ball from a fallen maple. Has the wind just knocked that tree over or has it always been here? She found that the ground under the maple’s twisted roots was soft and warm, a comfortable light-brown dirt. She had lost her black velvet cape and her ivory wimple, as well as her shoes and socks and the red-and-brown plaid skirt Kitt had told her not to wear that morning. Kitt had said scathingly, “It swears with that shirt.” Edith now wore only her white Lollipop underpants and her pink knit T-shirt. Through the tangled roots and bittersweet vines above her head she could see that all sorts of things were still flying by overhead; a chair, a wheelbarrow, a bird’s nest, lots of branches, some quilts and laundry were tumbling and flapping in the sulphurous sky. Is that a lady on a bicycle flying by? Or . . . ? The roar of the storm was so very loud that she could hear no other sounds, and yet somehow it was also distant and hollow. She crouched over her bent knees and put her hands behind her head the way Mrs. McKay had showed them to duck and cover for the grade school’s weekly air raid drills. Then she looked through her bent elbow across her little shelter hollow and saw her Teddy and her two best bears sitting in the soft duff, looking expectantly at her, as if they were still waiting for her to complete their baptism. Kitty, her Madame Alexander doll was there too, but upside down with her skirts over her head. When she’d gotten Kitty for Christmas, the doll had a tag that said she was meant to be Jo March from Little Women, but Edith had renamed her after her mother because of her brown hair. She didn’t see her blue leather missal anywhere. Did God take it back because I stole it? Was there an A-bomb? Edith looked at the skin on her leg to see if the plaid pattern from her skirt had been etched onto it by the blast. Arthur had been reading her a book called Hiroshima at bedtime, about the A-bomb, and it had one story about some Japanese ladies. When the bomb dropped on them, it burned the pattern of their kimonos into their skin. There was another war now, in a place called Korea, that the grown-ups talked . They worried if there would be more A-bombs. but she’d also heard them talk about something they called the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of dust in her hollow, so she softly hummed a Woody Guthrie song about the Dust Bowl that Arthur sang to her sometimes.
I been doing some hard travelin’
I thought you knowed
I been doing some hard travelin’
Way down the road
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the roaring of the storm fell silent and the air was perfectly still.
The title of this novel, The Age of Reason, takes a metaphorical name after two historical manuscripts written by Thomas Paine political writing in 1794, and Jean-Paul Sartre's famous novel in 1947, challenging the established norms, ethos, and religious traditions in the 18th and mid-20th century, respectively. It accentuates the era of enlightenment in Europe that calls for rationalism in all subjects, especially religion. Resonant with the similar and counter-philosophical traditions in the early cold war era, the novel tells the story that takes 1953 as a baseline year. The story moves around Brynns. Both Arthur and Kitt, husband and wife, are existentialist ideologues and are professionally associated with teaching. They have Edith as their eldest daughter, along with two other kids. The plot is based on the family's professional, political, and social challenges. It reveals how their ideological leanings, personal imperfections, and family relations are intertwined and affect their young ones' lives.
The exciting thing is how the author has carved out the characters showing their inner feelings and positions while avoiding the extremes. The characters have been painted in a gray shade subject to the reader's interpretation, who may either dislike or empathize with them or do both for their positive and negative personality traits. None of the characters takes purely black or white shade. Likewise, different family patterns have been presented as emblematic of lifestyles based on religious and political ideas and cultural practices, for instance, how Brynns and Demelos have been differentiated. Specifically, the central character of a young child, Edith, is the one with whom the reader can get along the most. Her strong imaginations and responses towards complex realities of life and the effect of her parent's actions and mindset seem to perturb the little soul, presenting her as an emblem of response towards conflicting norms and ethos. The depiction of her feelings by picturizing her imagination and speaking her mind is tremendous. Kitt, her mother, is the most complex character of the story, with different colors. However, her character somehow takes the negative account when we see her as an intellectual woman struggling to strike a balance between her family and professional life and ending up in a mental asylum due to her thinking patterns and life actions.
The author has incorporated the festive and cultural values of American life beautifully. Although the depiction of gender roles and religious and political ideologies do not seem to take sides in the novel, however, the comfort of one kind of life pattern or generation and the complexities and tragic end of Brynns due to their ideological leanings and lifestyle may readers leave with concluding negative consequences for opting between odds. The text is well-aligned and precise. The story that moves back and forth aptly symbolizes the thinking patterns of the human mind and shows the profound observation of the author as a clinical psychologist and a good storyteller. However, it may leave the reader craving for things in sequential order. Likewise, it would have been great to add a few pages on the relationship between Kitt and her mother. It could have given not only a back story of her character but also divulged more on the essence: how the previous generation with established socio-political and religious norms conflicts and coexists with the upcoming generation embracing different ethos and dealing with the associated challenges or repercussions.