Cheaper by the Dozen (2 page)

Then out would come leather manicure sets for the girls and pocket knives for the boys. How we loved him then, when his frown wrinkles reversed their field and became a wide grin.

Or he'd shake hands solemnly all around, and when you took your hand away there'd be a nut chocolate bar in it. Or he'd ask who had a pencil, and then hand out a dozen automatic ones.

"Let's see, what time is it?" he asked once. Out came wrist watches for all—even the six-week-old baby.

"Oh, Daddy, they're just right," we'd say.

And when we'd throw our arms around him and tell him how we'd missed him, he would choke up and wouldn't be able to answer. So he'd rumple our hair and slap our bottoms instead.

There were other surprises, too. Boxes of Page and Shaw candy, dolls and toys, cameras from Germany, wool socks from Scotland, a dozen Plymouth Rockhens, and two sheep that were supposed to keep the lawn trimmed but died, poor creatures, from the combined effects of saddle sores, too much petting, and tail pulling. The sheep were fun while they lasted, and it is doubtful if any pair of quadrupeds ever had been sheared so often by so many.

"If I ever bring anything else alive into this household," Dad said, "I hope the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals hales me into court and makes me pay my debt to society. I never felt so ashamed about anything in my life as I do about those sheep. So help me."

When Dad bought the house in Montclair, he described it to us as a tumbled-down shanty in a rundown neighborhood. We thought this was another one of his surprises, but he finally convinced us that the house was a hovel.

"It takes a lot of money to keep this family going," he said. "Food, clothes, allowances, doctors' bills, getting teeth straightened, and buying ice cream sodas. I'm sorry, but I just couldn't afford anything better. We'll have to fix it up the best we can, and make it do."

We were living at Providence, Rhode Island, at the time. As we drove from Providence to Montclair, Dad would point to every termite-trap we passed.

"It looks something like that one," he would say, "only it has a few more broken windows, and the yard is maybe a little smaller."

As we entered Montclair, he drove through the worst section of town, and finally pulled up at an abandoned structure that even Dracula wouldn't have felt at home in.

"Well, here it is," he said. "Home. All out."

"You're joking, aren't you, dear?" Mother said hopefully.

"What's the matter with it? Don't you like it?"

"If it's what you want, dear," said Mother, "I'm satisfied. I guess."

"It's a slum, that's what's the matter with it," said Ernestine.

"No one asked your opinion, young lady," replied Dad. "I was talking to your Mother, and I will thank you to keep out of the conversation."

"You're welcome," said Ernestine, who knew she was treading on thin ice but was too upset to care. "You're welcome, I'm sure. Only I wouldn't live in it with a ten-foot pole."

"Neither would I," said Martha. "Not with two ten-foot poles."

"Hush," said Mother. "Daddy knows best."

Lill started to sob.

"It won't look so bad with a coat of paint and a few boards put in where these holes are," Mother said cheerfully.

Dad, grinning now, was fumbling in his pocket for his notebook.

"By jingo, kids, wait a second," he crowed. "Wrong address. Well, what do you know. Pile back in. I thought this place looked a little more run down than when I last saw it."

And then he drove us to 68 Eagle Rock Way, which was an old but beautiful Taj Mahal of a house with fourteen rooms, a two-story barn out back, a greenhouse, chicken yard, grape arbors, rose bushes, and a couple of dozen fruit trees. At first we thought that Dad was teasing us again, and that this was the other end of a scale—a house much better than the one he had bought.

"This is really it," he said. "The reason I took you to that other place first, and the reason I didn't try to describe this place to you is—well, I didn't want you to be disappointed. Forgive me?"

We said we did.

Dad had bought the automobile a year before we moved. It was our first car, and cars still were a novelty. Of course, that had been a surprise, too. He had taken us all for a walk and had ended up at a garage where the car had been parked.

Although Dad made his living by redesigning complicated machinery, so as to reduce the number of human motions required to operate it, he never really understood the mechanical intricacies of our automobile. It was a gray Pierce Arrow, equipped with two bulb horns and an electric Klaxon, which Dad would try to blow all at the same time when he wanted to pass anyone. The engine hood was long and square, and you had to raise it to prime the petcocks on cold mornings.

Dad had seen the car in the factory and fallen in love with it. The affection was entirely one-sided and unrequited. He named it Foolish Carriage because, he said, it was foolish for any man with as many children as he to think he could afford a horseless carriage.

The contraption kicked him when he cranked, spit oil in his face when he looked into its bowels, squealed when he mashed the brakes, and rumbled ominously when he shifted gears. Sometimes Dad would spit, squeal, and rumble back. But he never won a single decision.

Frankly, Dad didn't drive our car well at all. But he did drive it fast. He terrified all of us, but particularly Mother. She sat next to him on the front seat—with two of the babies on her lap—and alternated between clutching Dad's arm and closing her eyes in supplication. Whenever we rounded a corner, she would try to make a shield out of her body to protect the babies from what she felt sure would be mutilation or death.

"Not so fast, Frank, not so fast," she would whisper through clenched teeth. But Dad never seemed to hear.

Foolish Carriage was a right-hand drive, so whoever sat to the left of Mother and the babies on the front seat had to be on the lookout to tell Dad when he could pass the car ahead.

"You can make it," the lookout would shout.

"Put out your hand," Dad would holler.

Eleven hands—everybody contributing one except Mother and the babies—would emerge from both sides of the car; from the front seat, rear seat, and folding swivel chairs amidships. We had seen Dad nick fenders, slaughter chickens, square away with traffic policemen, and knock down full-grown trees, and we weren't taking any chances.

The lookout on the front seat was Dad's own idea. The other safety measures, which we soon inaugurated as a matter of self-preservation, were our own.

We would assign someone to keep a lookout for cars approaching on side streets to the left; someone to keep an identical lookout to the right; and someone to kneel on the rear seat and look through the isinglass window in the back.

"Car coming from the left, Dad," one lookout would sing out.

"Two coming from the right."

"Motorcycle approaching from astern."

"I see them, I see them," Dad would say irritably, although usually he didn't. "Don't you have any confidence at all in your father?"

He was especially fond of the electric horn, an ear-splitting gadget which bellowed "kadookah" in an awe-inspiring, metallic baritone. How Dad could manage to blow this and the two bulb horns, step on the gas, steer the car, shout "road hog, road hog," and smoke a cigar— all at the same time—is in itself a tribute to his abilities as a motion study expert.

A few days after he bought the car, he brought each of us children up to it, one at a time, raised the hood, and told us to look inside and see if we could find the birdie in the engine. While our backs were turned, he'd tiptoe back to the driver's seat—a jolly Santa Claus in mufti—and press down on the horn.

"Kadookah, Kadookah." The horn blaring right in your ear was frightening and you'd jump away in hurt amazement. Dad would laugh until the tears came to his eyes.

"Did you see the birdie? Ho, ho, ho," he'd scream. "I'll bet you jumped six and nine-tenths inches. Ho, ho, ho."

One day, while we were returning from a particularly trying picnic, the engine balked, coughed, spat, and stopped.

Dad was sweaty and sleepy. We children had gotten on his nerves. He ordered us out of the car, which was overheated and steaming. He wrestled with the back seat to get the tools. It was stuck and he kicked it. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and raised the left-hand side of the hood.

Dad seldom swore. An occasional "damn," perhaps, but he believed in setting a good example. Usually he stuck to such phrases as "by jingo" and "holy Moses." He said them both now, only there was something frightening in the way he rolled them out.

His head and shoulders disappeared into the inside of the hood. You could see his shirt, wet through, sticking to his back.

Nobody noticed Bill. He had crawled into the front seat. And then—"Kadookah. Kadookah."

Dad jumped so high he actually toppled into the engine, leaving his feet dangling in mid-air. His head butted the top of the hood and his right wrist came up against the red-hot exhaust pipe.You could hear the flesh sizzle. Finally he managed to extricate himself. He rubbed bis head, and left grease across his forehead. He blew on the burned wrist. He was livid.

"Jesus Christ," he screamed, as if he had been saving this oath since his wedding day for just such an occasion. "Holy Jesus Christ. Who did that?"

"Mercy, Maud," said Mother, which was the closest she ever came to swearing, too.

Bill, who was six and always in trouble anyway, was the only one with nerve enough to laugh. But it was a nervous laugh at that.

"Did you see the birdie, Daddy?" he asked.

Dad grabbed him, and Bill stopped laughing.

"That was a good joke on you, Daddy," Bill said hopefully. But there wasn't much confidence in his voice.

"There is a time," Dad said through his teeth, "and there is a place for birdies. And there is a time and place for spankings."

"I'll bet you jumped six and nine-tenths inches, Daddy," said Bill, stalling for time now.

Dad relaxed and let him go. "Yes, Billy, by jingo," he said. "That was a good joke on me, and I suspect I did jump six and nine-tenths inches."

Dad loved a joke on himself, all right. But he loved it best a few months after the joke was over, and not when it was happening. The story about Bill and the birdie became one of his favorites. No one ever laughed harder at the end of the story than Dad. Unless it was Bill. By jingo.

When Dad decided he wanted to take the family for an outing in the Pierce Arrow, he'd whistle assembly, and then ask:

"How many want to go for a ride?"

The question was purely rhetorical, for when Dad rode, everybody rode. So we'd all say we thought a ride would be fine.

Actually, this would be pretty close to the truth. Although Dad's driving was fraught with peril, there was a strange fascination in its brushes with death and its dramatic, traffic-stopping scenes. It was the sort of thing that you wouldn't have initiated yourself, but wouldn't have wanted to miss. It was standing up in a roller coaster. It was going up on the stage when the magician called for volunteers. It was a back somersault off the high diving board.

A drive, too, meant a chance to be with Dad and Mother. If you were lucky, even to sit with them on the front seat. There were so many of us and so few of them that we never could see as much of them as we wanted. Every hour or so, we'd change places so as to give someone else a turn in the front seat with them.

Dad would tell us to get ready while he brought the car around to the front of the house. He made it sound easy—as if it never entered his head that Foolish Carriage might not
want
to come around front. Dad was a perpetual optimist, confident that brains someday would triumph over inanimate steel; bolstered in the belief that he entered the fray with clean hands and a pure heart.

While groans, fiendish gurglings, and backfires were emitting from the barn, the house itself would be organized confusion, as the family carried out its preparations in accordance with prearranged plans. It was like a newspaper on election night; general staff headquarters on D-Day minus one.

Getting ready meant scrubbed hands and face, shined shoes, clean clothes, combed hair. It wasn't advisable to be late, if and when Dad finally came rolling up to the porte-cochere. And it wasn't advisable to be dirty, because he'd inspect us all.

Besides getting himself ready, each older child was responsible for one of the younger ones. Anne was in charge of Dan, Ern in charge of Jack, and Mart in charge of Bob. This applied not only to rides in the car but all the time. The older sister was supposed to help her particular charge get dressed in the morning, to see that he made his bed, to put clean clothes on when he needed them, to see that he was washed and on time for meals, and to see that his process charts were duly initialed.

Anne, as the oldest, also was responsible for the deportment and general appearance of the whole group. Mother, of course, watched out for the baby, Jane. The intermediate children, Frank, Bill, Lill, and Fred, were considered old enough to look out for themselves, but not old enough to look after anyone else. Dad, for the purpose of convenience (his own), ranked himself with the intermediate category.

In the last analysis, the person responsible for making the system work was Mother. Mother never threatened, never shouted or became excited, never spanked a single one of her children—or anyone else's, either.

Mother was a psychologist. In her own way, she got even better results with the family than Dad. But she was not a disciplinarian. If it was always Dad, and never Mother, who suggested going for a ride, Mother had her reasons.

She'd go from room to room, settling fights, drying tears, buttoning jackets.

"Mother, he's got my shirt.
Make
him give it to me."

"Mother, can I sit up front with you? I
never
get to sit up front."

"It's mine; you gave it to me.You wore mine yesterday."