Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [59]
“Would you let go of me, please,” Vinnie exclaims, her voice tight with revulsion and, it must be admitted, fear. The street is almost empty, the clouds low and unpleasant.
“Mary had a little lamb—”
A dread of hearing what will come next gives Vinnie the strength to pull her coat away. Breathing hard, not looking back, she walks off as fast as she can go without actually running.
Back in the sanctuary of her pleasant warm flat, with a pot of Twining’s Queen Mary tea on the table before her next to the bowl of white hyacinths, Vinnie begins to feel better. She is able to pity Mary Maloney for what must surely be a tainted and deprived background, a premature exposure to all that is synthetic and filthy in popular culture.
It might be possible, she decides, buttering the second half of her cinnamon bun, to exclude those last two texts from her study. After all they are not, to paraphrase her projected title, British Rhymes of Childhood, but rather rhymes of a precocious and corrupt adolescence. Besides, she never got Mary Maloney’s age; very likely she is older than she looked, undersized like many slum-dwellers, maybe fourteen or even fifteen, not a child at all.
All the same she feels a nagging unease. Mary Maloney remains in her mind: the skinny white gooseflesh legs, the flat dirty face, the chipped teeth, the matted acrylic hair; the pressure of her greed and her need.
It also occurs to Vinnie that in a sense the girl was right: she will get more than tenpence for each rhyme in her notebook when her study is published. And more still if, as she hopes, Janet Elliot in London and Marilyn Krinney in New York agree to print a selection of her rhymes as a children’s book; negotiations for this project are already underway. And what would her Marxist friend say to that? Depending on his mood, which is highly unstable, he might say either “Well, we all have to live” or “Capitalist bitch.”
Of course if she doesn’t use Mary Maloney’s contribution she won’t be exploiting her. No; she’ll only be exploiting the scores, hundreds even, of schoolchildren who for thirty years have told her their rhymes, stories, riddles, and jokes for nothing. But to think this way is ridiculous. It is to condemn every folklorist who ever lived, from the Grimm brothers on.
Yes, Vinnie thinks, she will forget those rhymes, as she prefers to forget much of adult folklore. A scholar, of course, cannot afford to be prudish, and over the years she has recorded a good deal of off-color material with hardly a quiver. Children are given to bathroom humor:
Milk, milk, lemonade.
Around the corner fudge is made.
She has even (without the accompanying gestures to parts of the body, of course) used this verse in her lectures as an example of folk metaphor, demonstrating the young child’s undifferentiated pre-moral pleasure in both food and bodily products.
But some of the jokes told by grownups and collected by other folklorists really gross Vinnie out, as her students would say. They are not only filthy, they emphasize an aspect of the relations between men and women that she prefers not to look at too closely. However carried away by sex—and at times she has been carried far—Vinnie always returns with a slight sense of embarrassment. Intellectually she considers the physical side of love ridiculous at best, certainly unaesthetic—not one of nature’s best inventions. The female organs seem to her damp and cluttered; that of the male positively silly, a pink unnatural toadstool sort of thing. As the only child of modest, even rather squeamish parents, Vinnie was six years old before she saw a naked human male—a friend’s baby brother. Because she was a polite child she made no comment on what appeared to her a kind of unfortunate growth on the baby’s tummy, a sort of large fleshy wart. Subsequently, through contemplation of public sculptures and her parents’ art books, it occurred