Belles on Their Toes (24 page)

It took a little explaining to get across the notion that the boys were planning to teach Jane how not to be kissed. And after Mother had heard what had happened at the dance, she agreed that the instruction wasn’t taking place a minute too soon.

She poured herself a glass of milk, while Fred fixed her a peanut butter sandwich, and she got plates and cut apple cake for everyone. Then, after looking around selfconsciously as if she wasn’t sure but what Tom would return unexpectedly from the hospital, she perched on his table.

“School’s in session,” she declared.

The boys asked Jane how and where it happened.

“We were dancing, and he asked me how I’d like to go out on the porch and look at the moon,” she said. “I squeezed his hand, like you showed me, and said I wouldn’t mind.”

“No wonder you got kissed, you sap you,” Dan moaned. “What did you do that for?”

“You told me to,” Jane replied angrily. “Don’t try to put the blame on me. You said I should try to make all of them like me. How was I supposed to know he didn’t want to look at the moon?”

“Jane’s right,” Mother agreed. “It’s not her fault.”

The boys said that from now on Jane was supposed to shun parked cars and porches, and was to view with suspicion any conversation about planets, satellites, constellations, or the need for a breath of fresh air. They showed her, too, how to sit far over on her own side of the car, coming home from a date, and how to lean forward, or twist around so her back was to the door, if anyone tried to put his arm around her shoulder.

“Now if a boy kisses you anyway,” said Jack, “the best squelch you can give him is to act like a dummy. The kiss doesn’t affect you one way or the other. You’re bored with the whole business.”

“That usually gives them the idea,” Bob agreed. “If it doesn’t, you can wipe your lips with the back of your hand, and look as if there’s something there that their best friend ought to tell them.”

“Never slap them,” said Fred. “A slap just makes them mad. And they still don’t know whether you really object to being kissed, or whether you’re just playing hard to get.”

“You boys,” said Mother, disapprovingly, “seem to know a great deal about it. Where’d you find out about things like that?”

“It’s information,” Fred grinned, “that’s handed down from father to son.”

TOM DIED
a few months later, convinced that pleurisy was the old enemy that finally had laid him low. While he was at the hospital, some of us went to see him almost every day. Sometimes he’d beg to be taken home, where he felt sure he could cure himself in a few days with his Quinine Remedy. But the doctors wouldn’t allow him to be moved.

On several occasions we smuggled bottles of the Remedy into the hospital, hoping that his faith in its curative powers might make him well again. It didn’t seem to affect him, one way or the other.

Tom always had been suspicious of hospitals. He had often told us his belief that doctors sometimes gave the “black bottle”—poison—to patients who didn’t have plenty of money.

Toward the end, when he recognized us less frequently, he refused to take any medicines, even the Remedy.

It could be said that Tom was a man who never amounted to much. By some standards, perhaps he wasn’t even a very good man. He swore a good deal, and in later years he drank more than he should have. But the day he died, twelve people wept for him.

That number may be more than par for the course.

21.
All Alone

T
HE RAISING OF ELEVEN
children had taken a far heavier toll on our house than it had on Mother. Mother still was slim, quick, and erect, but the house was tired and sagging.

The stairs were grooved, and spokes were missing from the banisters. The furnace, never too efficient, now could be coaxed to breathe heat only into the central rooms. The floors had been scuffed beyond repair, and initials had been carved in some of the woodwork. One of the columns of the porte-cochere had begun to rot, causing the roof to angle downward like the tilt of an old rake’s hat.

The year Jane was to go to college, Mother agreed with us that it was time for her to move out of the house. We thought she’d try to sell it, but she didn’t like the idea of other people living in it, and she knew it wouldn’t bring much money anyway. Besides needing repairs, it was built primarily for a family with ten or twelve children. People who could afford to run such a large house didn’t have families that size any more.

Mother called for bids and had the house torn down. She supervised the demolition herself. If she felt any pangs as the workmen stripped off the walls and laid open the interior, she kept them to herself.

The motion study equipment, the files, the double desk she and Dad had used to perfect their original time-saving experiments went to the laboratory at Purdue. The mahogany furniture she had had since her wedding was sent to a cabinetmaker to remove the scars and stains of a generation of children and several generations of dogs and miscellaneous livestock.

Mother’s finances had improved immeasurably as more consulting jobs were offered her. And now she also came into an in inheritance from her family’s estate. With Bob partly through college and only Jane to go, Mother could retire, if she wanted to, and relax for the rest of her life.

After years of working and scrimping, she could have fur coats, a maid to bring her breakfast in bed, even a limousine and a chauffeur, if she wanted them.

Mother didn’t want them, and she had no idea of stopping work. She and Jane moved into a middle-priced apartment in Montclair. The old furniture gave a familiar appearance to Mother’s new living and dining room—except that everything was tidy, polished and re-upholstered. She started using her best silver and china, that she had packed away years before, when Anne was starting to walk and pulling things off of tables.

A cleaning woman came over twice a week, but Mother and Jane did their own cooking. With unrestricted use of her own kitchen, Mother soon became a good cook. If Jane had let Mother have her way, Jane would have been the one who had breakfast in bed. As it was, no matter how early Jane got up, her eggs and toast appeared on the table about the time she walked into the dining room.

Then Jane left for college, and Mother was alone. None of us liked the idea of that. We thought that anyone who had raised eleven youngsters always needed children in the house. Besides, it seemed only right that, after all the years she had looked out for us, we should start looking out for her.

We hadn’t had a meeting of our Family Council for years, but when Anne next came to Montclair from Cleveland for a visit, we called a meeting of the Council to discuss Mother.

The Council had been one of Dad’s ideas, and he had patterned it after employer-employee boards in industry. The Council had decided matters of policy, such as the size of allowances and the apportionment of house and yard work. Dad, as self-appointed chairman, had his own set of parliamentary rules, and wasn’t above launching a one man filibuster or bottling up appropriations bills in committees. But for the most part, the majority ruled.

We didn’t want Mother to know about the meeting to discuss her, so we held it at Ernestine’s house. It wasn’t a formal session—no one presided with gavel in hand and a pitcher of ice water at his elbow, as Dad used to. But we did sit in our old positions, around Ern’s dining room table. We still looked on Anne, now a matron in her late thirties, as automatically in charge when she was home. She sat at the head of the table.

We agreed, first of all, that either Mother would move in with one of our families, or one of our families would move in with her. We felt that what had kept Mother going through the years was the goal of sending all of us through college. When that goal was achieved, there might not be any incentive to keep going, and that would mean Mother would have to make an adjustment.

We thought we’d better start preparing her, in advance, for the adjustment. We knew that many women in their sixties had had years of experience in taking things easy. They played bridge, they talked about movies and their friends, or they sat on rockers with cats on their laps.

Mother didn’t know how to do any of those things, but we thought perhaps we could help her learn.

There was something else that all of us took into consideration, but hesitated to put into words. Suppose Mother should want to keep working, but as she got older the job and lecture offers should become less and less frequent. There was a rule at Purdue that faculty members had to retire when they reached seventy. That wasn’t too many years in the future.

The Council appointed Ernestine to talk with Mother about moving in with one of us. If we could get Mother to do that—to forget about the idea that she might be imposing on someone—she would become interested in helping to raise another generation. Then Jane’s graduation would be just another incident.

But when Ernestine put the proposition up to Mother the next day, she might as well have saved her breath.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, dear,” said Mother. “But I couldn’t do that.”

“Of course you can do it,” Ernestine told her. “There’s no use being stubborn.”

Mother may have thought that was the pot calling the kettle black, but she realized the intentions were good, anyway.

“As long as Bob and Jane are in college,” she said, “I want them to know that we—just they and I—have our own home. That’s something that all of you other children had, and I think it’s important for them. For me, too.”

“How about when they’re out of college and married?” Ernestine asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that. And I don’t know. Your father’s mother lived with us for quite a few years after we were married. I was fond of her, and I think she was of me. But I don’t think either of us really liked the situation. I don’t know.”

So Mother continued to live alone, except when Bob and Jane were home on vacation. And we were still worried about her.

World War II came, then. Five of the boys were in it, and overseas. Mother was older, suddenly, and sometimes she was tired.

She wrote each of the boys every day, and waited mornings for the mailman before she went into New York. She never talked about the war or how battles were going. Telegrams made her nervous; she held them up to the light before she opened them.

There were new demands on her time. We could see there wouldn’t be any question about her not being busy as long as the war lasted. She was working with the War Manpower Commission. The government was using her studies on motions of the disabled, to help rehabilitate amputees. War industries wanted the latest time-saving techniques. Many of the graduates of her Motion Study Courses, which she had discontinued some years before when the engineering jobs started to come in, had important production jobs, and sought her out for consultation. Walt Disney made a training film, in Technicolor, of the process chart.

She journeyed to Providence to help christen a Liberty ship named for Dad. She went to Chapel Hill for Bob’s graduation. Finally the day arrived when she boarded a train to Ann Arbor, for Jane’s.

That was a special occasion for Mother. She rode in a lower berth. From that time on, when the space was available, she rode in lowers.

She and Anne sat together with the spectators when Jane received her diploma. It should have been a happy occasion, because it symbolized the fulfillment of something Mother had promised herself. But when Anne thought about the sacrifices Mother had made to keep that promise, a lump settled in her throat.

Mother’s youngest, handsome with her mortarboard cocked debonairly over one ear, bounded nonchalantly across the stage. She took the hand of the man who presented it—possibly giving the hand a parting squeeze—and rejoined the class.

Anne dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Jane doesn’t appreciate what Mother’s done for her,” she thought. “None of us appreciate it. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, either. I thought I did, but I didn’t, really.”

Jane turned around in her seat, spotted them, and waved the diploma triumphantly aloft.

“I guess Dad would be proud,” Anne said, turning to Mother.

Mother didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed. Her face, in repose, hadn’t changed much through the years. There was the new nose, of course.

Anne waited a moment, and nudged her slightly.

“I declare, you’re a great one,” Anne teased. “Work a whole lifetime to send your children through college, and then go to sleep when the final great moment arrives.”

Mother opened her eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” she said softly. “I was saying thank you.”

BOTH JANE AND BOB
were married in a year or so—all of us married young and soon had children of our own. And then the war was over and the boys began to come home. Mother seemed to shed some of the years that had piled suddenly upon her.

She thought it would be a good idea to hold a family reunion, so that all of us could see the boys and so that the three newest grandchildren could be christened together in our church in Montclair.

We converged from various parts of the country. Some of us from out of town and our families stayed at Mother’s apartment, and others moved in with those who lived in or near Montclair.

Extra leaves were put back into the dining-room table, and Mother’s ice box was full of baby bottles again. The good china was taken out of circulation and put on high shelves.

As Mother bathed and powdered our children, and gave them their bottles, she seemed gayer and happier than we remembered seeing her since Dad’s death. When it came time to do the dishes at night, she’d take three or four of the older grandchildren back into the kitchen and they’d dry while she washed. We’d hear a lot of giggling, and know Mother was telling them stories about when we were young. Sometimes they’d sing the old songs that Mother had taught us, and we had taught them.

We whispered to each other that we couldn’t understand why, since Mother seemed to enjoy our visit so much, she wouldn’t move in with one of us.