Miss Clavel from Bemelmans’ “Madeleine”
I am driving home to Maryland today after having spent eight weeks with my aging parents in Sewanee, Tennessee. While it’s been discouraging to see my 90-year-old father losing his mobility, I’ve loved reconnecting with them in a sustained way. In today’s post I recount something humorous that happened during my stay. Humorous in retrospect, anyway.
James Thurber’s hilarious essay “The Night the Bed Fell on Father,” Ludwig Bemelman’s children’s classic Madeleine, and a poem from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses for Children provide my framework.
I can’t start my story any better than Thurber does his (which you can read here), so I’ll let him set the atmosphere:
I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.
In our case, the problem was my father falling when he got out of bed. One night he slipped and spent an hour on the floor before my mother heard him calling. A few nights later I heard him banging the trashcan against the toilet after he had fallen off of it. At that point we all agreed that he would stay in bed all night and use a urinal.
But to avoid any repeats, we also installed a medical alert system, activated by pushing a button on a necklace that my father wears around his neck. If he needs help, he is to push the button, which first sounds a loud alarm and then triggers a phone call to a call center. The people there are instructed to first talk with my father and then call our phone number. And then . . . well, you’ll hear in a moment what the next step is.
My father was spending his first night in a new hospital bed we had ordered in place of the downstairs hide-a-bed he had been sleeping in ever since getting home from the hospital. Like the hospital bed in Madeleine, this one has a crank.
A quick digression on Bemelmans’ 1939 classic. In 1952 when I was a two-year-old living in Paris (my father had one of the first Fulbright fellowships to work on his dissertation), I insisted that my mother read me Madeleine over and over until I had it memorized. The opening lines grip me to this day:
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines
In two straight lines they broke their bread
And brushed their teeth and went to bed.
They left the house at half past nine
In two straight lines in rain or shine—
The smallest one was Madeline.
When I was small, I was riveted by Madeleine’s crank and even now find my father’s crank somewhat magical.
He, however, had a less than magical first night. The bed was narrower than the hide-a-bed and so, around midnight, he fell out of it (we hadn’t put up one of the side railings). Suddenly finding himself on the floor and unable to get up, he very appropriately pushed the button.
Voices came out of the box we had installed and my father explained the problem. Then they called the home phone, which is by my mother’s bed.
She, however, has severe back problems and had taken a powerful painkiller. As a result, she slept through the call. I, who was in an adjoining room, also slept through it. And so…
As Bemelmans writes (I quote from memory),
In the middle of the night
Miss Clavel turned on the light
And said, “Something is not right.”
And afraid of a disaster,
She ran fast and even faster.
What awoke my mother was another phone call, this time the Emergency Rescue Squad informing her that they were on their way. At this point she woke me up and we stumbled downstairs just in time to answer the knock on the door. Then we watched the techs give a hand to my father (which of course I could have done) and put him back to bed.
He, who always loves an audience, got into an extended conversation with one of them about his very imaginative paintings, which dot the walls. Which brings to mind Hilaire Belloc’s “Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death.” It’s about a little girl whose false fire alarm brings in the Royal Fire Brigade:
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor;
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse
The Pictures up and down the House,
Until Matilda’s Aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed;
And even then she had to pay
To get the Men to go away!
My mother too will have to pay a $500 ambulance fee. We’ve decided to think of it as giving to a favorite charity.
But that’s not the end of the story. The next night we heard the telephone ring again—I was now sleeping with a phone next to me—and a voice asked us if “Alfred” was all right. (My father’s official first name is Alfred but he only answers to his middle name Scott.) We stumbled downstairs, only to find “Alfred” sleeping soundly. Apparently this time he had rolled over on the buzzer.
So we adjusted the necklace, stumbled back to bed, and then, an hour later, were awakened by another telephone call. The alert center, not having heard from us (maybe they had told me to call back but I was too groggy to get the message), wanted to know if everything was okay.
Not knowing how much more of this we could take, we purchased a baby monitor (correction: night monitor) so we wouldn’t be entirely dependent on an alert center. But we didn’t really know how the thing worked. For instance, when it is set on vibration, it buzzes whenever there is a noise. Like, say, my father tossing and turning. The monitor buzzed all night, at times sounding like R2D2 on steroids. The following day my mother was a wreck.
I think we’ve now figured out all the technology and have turned off the buzzer. My mother can now go to sleep knowing that, if anything particularly urgent happens, she will know. And that it won’t be the ambulance crew informing her.
And so, in the immortal closing lines of Madeleine,
“Good night, little girls,
Thank the Lord you are well.
And now, go to sleep,”
Said Miss Clavel.
And she turned out the light
And shut the door,
And that’s all there is,
There isn’t any more.
