Cheaper by the Dozen (23 page)

When Anne came home from school one afternoon and announced that she had been invited to her first dance, she seemed so happy that both Dad and Mother were happy for her.

"I told you that if I started dressing like the other girls everything would be all right and that I would be popular with the boys," Anne crowed. "Joe Scales has asked me to go with him to the prom next Friday night."

"That's lovely, dear," Mother said.

"That's just fine," Dad smiled. "Is he a nice boy?"

"Nice? Gee, I'll say. He's a cheerleader and he has a car."

"Two mighty fine recommendations," Dad said. "If only he had a raccoon coat I suppose he'd be listed in the year book as the one most likely to succeed."

The sarcasm was lost on Anne. "He's going to get his raccoon coat next year when he goes to Yale," she hastened to assure Dad. "His father's promised it to him if he passes his work."

"That takes a load off my mind," said Dad. "It used to be that a father promised his son a gold watch if he didn't smoke until he was twenty-one. Now the kids get a raccoon coat as a matter of routine if they manage to stumble through high school."

He shook his head and sighed. "Honestly, I don't know what the world's coming to," he said. "I really don't. Friday night, you say?" He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and consulted it. "It's all right. I can make it."

"You can make what?" Anne asked him suspiciously.

"I can make the dance," said Dad. "You didn't think for a minute I was going to let you go out by yourself, at night, with that—that cheerleader, did you?"

"Oh, Daddy," Anne moaned. "You wouldn't spoil everything by doing something like that, would you? What's he going to think of me?"

"He'll think you're a sensible, well-brought-up child, with sensible parents," Mother put in. "I'm sure that if I called up his mother right now, she'd be glad to hear that your father was going along as a chaperone."

"Don't you trust your own flesh and blood?"

"Of course we trust you," Dad said. "I know you've been brought up right. I trust all my daughters. It's that cheerleader I don't trust. Now, you might as well make up your mind to it. Either I go, or you don't."

"Do you think it would help if I called up his mother and explained the situation to her?" Mother asked.

Anne had become philosophic about breaking Dad down a little at a time, and she had suspected all along that there was going to be a third person on her first date.

"No, thanks, Mother," she said. "I'd better announce the news myself, in my own way. I guess I'll have to tell him about some people still being in the dark concerning the expression that two's company and three's a crowd. I don't know what he's going to say, though."

"He'll probably be tickled to death to have someone along to pay for the sodas," Dad told her.

"Shall I tell him we'll go in his car, or ours?" Anne asked.

"His car? I haven't seen it, but I can imagine it. No doors, no fenders, no top, and a lot of writing about in case of fire throw this in. I wouldn't be seen dead in it, even if the dance was a masquerade and I was going as a cheerleader. No sir. We'll go in Foolish Carriage."

"Sometimes," Anne said slowly, "it's hard to be the oldest. When I think of Ernestine, Martha, Lillian, Jane—they won't have to go through any of this. I wonder if they'll just take things for granted, or whether they'll appreciate what I've suffered for them."

On the night of Anne's first date, we stationed ourselves at strategic windows so we could watch Joe Scales arrive. It wasn't every day that a cheerleader came to call.

As Dad had predicted, Anne's friend drove up to the house in an ancient Model T, with writing on it. We could hear the car several blocks before it actually hove into sight, because it was equipped with an exhaust whistle that was allowed to function as a matter of routine. When the car proceeded at a moderate speed, which was hardly ever, the whistle sounded no worse than a hellish roar. But when young Mister Scales stepped on the gas, the roar became high pitched, deafening, and insane.

As the Model T bumped down Eagle Rock Way, heads popped out of the windows of neighboring houses, dogs raced into the woods with their tails between their legs, and babies started to scream.

The exhaust whistle, coupled with the natural engine noises, precluded the necessity of Mister Scales' giving any further notice about the car's arrival at its destination. But etiquette of the day was rigid, and he followed it to the letter. First he turned off the engine, which automatically and mercifully silenced the whistle. Then, while lounging in the driver's seat, he tooted and re-tooted the horn until Anne finally came to the front door.

"Come on in, Joe," Anne called.

"Okay, baby. Is your pop ready?"

Dad was peeking at the arrival from behind a curtain in his office. "If he 'pops' me, I'll pop him," Dad whispered to Mother. "My God, Lillie. I mean, Great Caesar's Ghost. Come here and look at him. It's Joe College in the flesh. And he just about comes up to Anne's shoulder."

Anne's sheik was wearing a black-and-orange-striped blazer, gray Oxford bags, a bow tie on an elastic band, and a brown triangular porkpie hat, pinched into a bowsprit at the front.

"You and I are going to the dance," Joe shouted to Anne, "and so's your Old Man. Get it? So's your Old Man."

"Of course she gets it, wise guy," Dad grumbled for Mother's benefit. "What do you think she is, a moron? And let me hear you refer to me tonight as the 'Old Man' and you'll get it, too. I promise you."

"Hush," Mother warned him, coming over to peek out the curtain. "He'll hear you. Actually, he's kind of cute, in a sort of vest-pocket way."

"Cute?" said Dad. "He looks like what might happen if a pygmy married a barber pole. And look at that car. What's that written on the side? 'Jump in sardine, here's your tin.' "

"Well, don't worry about the car," Mother told him. "You'll be riding in yours, not that contraption."

"Thank the Lord for small favors. You stall him and Anne off until I can get the side curtains put up. I'm not going to drive through town with that blazer showing. Someone might think he was one of our kids."

Dad disappeared in the direction of the barn, and Mother went into the living room to meet the caller. As she entered, Joe was demonstrating to Frank and Bill how the bow tie worked.

"It's a William Tell tie," he said, holding the bow away from his neck and allowing it to pop back into position. "You pull the bow and it hits the apple."

Both Frank and Bill were impressed.

"You're the first cheerleader we ever saw up close," Frank said. "Gee."

Joe was sitting down when he was introduced to Mother. Remembering his manners, he tipped his hat, unveiling for just a moment a patent-leather hairdo, parted in the middle.

"Will you lead some cheers for us?" Bill begged. "We know them all. Anne and Ernestine taught them to us."

Joe leaped to his feet."Sure thing," he said. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted in an adolescent baritone that cracked and made Mother shudder:

"Let's have a hoo, rah, ray and a tiger for Montclair High. A hoo, rah, ray and a tiger. I want to hear you holler now. Readddy?"

He turned sideways to us, dropped on one knee, and made his fists go in a circle, like a squirrel on a treadmill.

"Hoo," he screamed, at the top of his voice. "Rah. Ray..."

It was at this point that Dad entered the room. He stood viewing the proceedings with disgust, lips pursed and hands on hips. At the end of the cheer, he sidled over toward Mother.

"The car won't start," he whispered, "and I can't say that I blame it. What shall I do?"

"You could go in his car."

"With that insane calliope and those signs?" Dad hissed. "Do I look like a sardine looking for a tin to leap into?"

"Not exactly," Mother conceded. "Why don't you call a cab, then?"

"Look at him," Dad whispered. "He doesn't come up to her shoulder. He wouldn't dare get funny with her— she'd knock him cold."

Dad walked over to where Joe and Anne were sitting.

"I hope you youngsters won't mind," he said, "but I won't be able to go to the dance with you."

"No, we don't mind at all, Daddy," said Anne. "Do we, Joe?"

"A hoo, rah, ray and a tiger for me, is that it?" Dad asked.

Joe made no attempt to hide his elation. "That's it," he said. "Come on, baby. Let's shake that thing. We're running late."

"Now, I want you to be home at midnight," Dad said to Anne. "I'm going to be right here waiting for you, and if you're not here by one minute after midnight I'm coming looking for you. Do you understand?"

"All right, Daddy," Anne grinned. "Good old Foolish Carriage saved the day, didn't it?"

"That," said Dad, "and the way certain other matters"—he looked pointedly down at Scales—"shaped up."

"Come on, Cinderella," said Scales, "before the good fairy turns things into field mice and pumpkins."

He and Anne departed, and he didn't forget to tip his hat.

"Do you guess he meant me?" Dad asked Mother. "Why, the little... I ought to break his neck."

"Of course not. He was speaking in generalities, I'm sure."

The hellish whistle could be heard gradually disappearing in the distance.

Once the ice was broken, Anne started having dates fairly often, and Ernestine and Martha followed suit. Dad acted as chaperone whenever the pressure of business permitted. Although he had decided that Joe Scales was small enough to be above suspicion, he had no confidence in the football heroes and other sheiks who soon were pitching their tents and woo upon the premises. When Dad couldn't act as chaperone himself, he sent Frank or Bill along as his proxy.

"It's bad enough to have you tagging along on a date," Ernestine told Dad. "But to have a kid brother squirming and giggling on the back seat is simply unbearable. I don't know why the boys in school bother with us."

"Well, I know, even if you don't," Dad said. "And that's exactly why Frank and Bill are there. And let me tell you, if those sheiks would stop bothering you and find some other desert to haunt, it would suit me just right."

Frank and Bill didn't like the chaperone job any more than the girls liked having them for chaperones.

"For Lord's sake, Daddy," Frank complained, "I feel just like a third wheel sitting in the back seat all by myself."

"That's just what you're supposed to be—the third wheel. I don't expect you to be able to thrash those fullbacks if they start trying to take liberties with your sisters. But at least you'll be able to run for help."

The girls complained to Mother, but as usual she sided with Dad.

"If you ask me," Anne told her, "it's a dead give away to be as suspicious as Daddy. It denotes a misspent youth."

"Well, nobody asked you," Mother said, "so perhaps you'd better forgo any further speculation. It's not a case of suspicion. Just because other parents won't face up to their responsibilities is no reason for your father or me to forget ours."

At the dances, Dad would sit by himself against a wall, as far away from the orchestra as possible, and work on papers he had brought along in a brief case. At first no one paid much attention to him, figuring perhaps that if he was ignored he might go away. But after a few months he was accepted as a permanent fixture, and the girls and boys went out of their way to speak to him and bring him refreshments. People, even sheiks, couldn't be around Daddy without liking him. And Daddy couldn't be in the midst of people without being charming.

"Do you see what's happening?" Anne whispered to Ernestine one night, pointing to the crowd around Dad's chair. "By golly, he's become the belle of the high-school ball. What do you think of that?"

"I think it's a pain in the neck," Ernestine said. "But it's kind of cute, isn't it?"

"Not only cute, it's our salvation.You wait and see."

"What do you mean?"

"When Daddy gets to know the boys, and sees that they're pretty good kids, he'll decide this chaperone business is a waste of time. He really hates being here, away from Mother. And if he can find a way to quit gracefully, he'll quit."

Dad resigned as chaperone the next day, at Sunday dinner.

"I'm all through wet nursing you," he told the girls. "If you want to go to the dogs—or at any rate to the tea hounds—you're going to have to go by yourselves from now on. I can't take any more of it."

"They're really not bad kids, are they, Daddy?" Anne grinned.

"Bad kids? How do I know whether they're bad kids? Naturally they behave when I'm around. But that's not the point. The point is they're making a character out of me. They're setting me up as the meddlesome but harmless old duffer, a kind of big-hearted, well-meaning, asinine, mental eunuch. The boys slap me on the back and the girls pinch me on my cheek and ask me to dance with them. If there's anything I hate, it's a Daddy-Long-Legs kind of father like that."

He turned to Mother.

"I know it's not your fault, Boss, but things would have been a whole lot easier if we had had all boys, like I suggested, instead of starting out with the girls."