We Are Seven

THE CHILDREN -- Edith Wharton -- Appleton ($2.50).

The Story. They were seven; all ages, all colors of hair and temperament, all genetically termed "the Wheater Children." To sort them out, Martin Boyne, bachelor, 46, by chance their fellow traveler, required many whispered conferences with Nurse Scopy of the iron hand and grey cotton glove. This worthy soul scoffed at his belief that Judith Wheater was the baby's mother--no indeed, Judy was a child herself, for all her motherly ways. Baby Chipstone was her own brother, and her parents' chief bone of contention. Then there were the 12-year-old twins--Terry, a wise boy who longed wistfully for school or a tutor, and beautiful Blanca, a jealous little snob who recognized cruelly last year's Callot model, this year's Chanel. The rest were the "steps" (stepchildren) -- Zinnie, orange-haired little devil with a fiery temperament and exaggerated acquisitive instinct; Beechy and Bun, Italian brother and sister, the one with a tendency toward acrobatics, the other toward hysterics.

Such were the seven who had sworn "on Scopy's book" (an ancient "Cyclopedia of Nursery Remedies") that never again would they allow themselves to be separated and parcelled out to their various undeserving parents. For of parents there were almost as many as children: The Wheaters sponsored Judy, the twins, and after divorce and remarriage, Chipstone, badge of truce. In an intervening marriage to a gaudy cinema star Mr. Wheater begat Zinnie, while Mrs. Wheater retaliated with a decadent Italian prince, and adopted Beechy and Bun, offspring of his earlier alliance with a circus acrobat. When the Wheaters remarried (each other), cinema actress and Italian prince found further unsuitable spouses, all of whom harassed Judy with threats to carry off the "steps." Judy countered by kidnapping her brood, complete with nurses, to the Dolomites where Bachelor Martin was wooing a suave and lovely widow of the old school. Naively Judy demanded Martin's championship versus parents--which is all very well till he falls in love with her. He thereupon escapes to Africa; she and her brood, un-championed, lapse into their hectic scattered existence at smart European hotels, in the feverish wake of this parent or that.

The Significance. With sure instinct for phenomena of "high society" Mrs. Wharton discerns a newish problem--the sad lot which falls to children of selfish modern parents, divorced. Whether it is a sadder lot than falls to children of selfish modern parents, undivorced, is not the question; and fortunately all question is subordinated to the acute analyses of scatter-brained complications of parents, quarrels among sophisticated children, well-bred war between their middle-aged bachelor guardian and the widow of his choice. Falling short of greatness, The Children is an eminently entertaining tragi-comedy of the times. Sinners will ignore, pharisees gloat upon a moral which is happily remote from the common reader.

The Author. Distinguished disciple of Henry James, Edith Wharton fills her pages with lucid psychological analyses. She does so with much of the master's charm, none of his diffuseness, some of his greatness. Like him she lives mostly abroad, and writes of the U. S. Daughter of a Rhinelander, she was brought up to winter in Manhattan, summer in Newport, travel in Europe. Her most brilliant work reflects Fifth Avenue society of the '90s (in her House of Mirth, in her Age of Innocence), but oddly enough her masterpiece concerns the passion and remorse of a New England farmer, Ethan Frame. Author Wharton is the only woman upon whom Yale has conferred the doctorate of literature.