Cheaper by the Dozen (3 page)

When we'd all gathered in front of the house, the girls in dusters, the boys in linen suits, Mother would call the roll. Anne, Ernestine, Martha, Frank, and so forth.

We used to claim that the roll call was a waste of time and motion. Nothing was considered more of a sin in our house than wasted time and motion. But Dad had two vivid memories about children who had been left behind by mistake.

One such occurrence happened in Hoboken, aboard the liner
Leviathan.
Dad had taken the boys aboard on a sightseeing trip just before she sailed. He hadn't remembered to count noses when he came down the gangplank, and didn't notice, until the gangplank was pulled in, that Dan was missing. The
Leviathan's
sailing was held up for twenty minutes until Dan was located, asleep in a chair on the promenade deck.

The other occurrence was slightly more lurid. We were en route from Montclair to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Frank, Jr., was left behind by mistake in a restaurant in New London. His absence wasn't discovered until near the end of the trip.

Dad wheeled the car around frantically and sped back to New London, breaking every traffic rule then on the books. We had stopped in the New London restaurant for lunch, and it had seemed a respectable enough place. It was night time when we returned, however, and the place was garish in colored lights. Dad left us in the car, and entered. After the drive in the dark, his eyes were squinted in the bright lights, and he couldn't see very well. But he hurried back to the booths and peered into each one.

A pretty young lady, looking for business, was drinking a highball in the second booth. Dad peered in, flustered.

"Hello, Pops," she said. "Don't be bashful. Are you looking for a naughty little girl?"

"Goodness, no," he stammered, with all of his ordinary poise shattered. "I'm looking for a naughty little boy."

"Whoops, dearie," she said. "Pardon
me
.

All of us had been instructed that when we were lost we were supposed to stay in the same spot until someone returned for us, and Frank, Jr., was found, eating ice cream with the proprietor's daughter, back in the kitchen.

Anyway, those two experiences explain why Dad always insisted that the roll be called.

As we'd line up in front of the house before getting into the car, Dad would look us all over carefully.

"Are you all reasonably sanitary?" he would ask.

Dad would get out and help Mother and the two babies into the front seat. He'd pick out someone whose behavior had been especially good, and allow him to sit up front, too, as the left-hand lookout. The rest of us would pile in the back, exchanging kicks and pinches under the protection of the lap robe as we squirmed around trying to make more room.

Finally, off we'd start. Mother, holding the two babies, seemed to glow with vitality. Her red hair, arranged in a flat pompadour, would begin to blow out in wisps from her hat. As long as we were still in town, and Dad wasn't driving fast, she seemed to enjoy the ride. She'd sit there listening to him and carrying on a rapid conversation. But just the same her ears were straining toward the sounds in the back seats, to make sure that everything was going all right.

She had plenty to worry about, too, because the more cramped we became the more noise we'd make. Finally, even Dad couldn't stand the confusion.

"What's the matter back there?" he'd bellow to Anne. "I thought I told you to keep everybody quiet."

"That would require an act of God," Anne would reply bitterly.

"You are going to think God is acting if you don't keep order back there. I said quiet and I want quiet."

"I'm trying to make them behave, Daddy. But no one will listen to me."

"I don't want any excuses; I want order. You're the oldest. From now on, I don't want to hear a single sound from back there. Do you all want to walk home?"

By this time, most of us did, but no one dared say so.

Things would quiet down for a while. Even Anne would relax and forget her responsibilities as the oldest. But finally there'd be trouble again, and we'd feel pinches and kicks down underneath the robe.

"Cut it out, Ernestine, you sneak," Anne would hiss.

"You take up all the room," Ernestine would reply. "Why don't you move over. I wish you'd stayed home."

"You don't wish it half as much as I," Anne would say, with all her heart. It was on such occasions that Anne wished she were an only child.

We made quite a sight rolling along in the car, with the top down. As we passed through cities and villages, we caused a stir equaled only by a circus parade.

This was the part Dad liked best of all. He'd slow down to five miles an hour and he'd blow the horns at imaginary obstacles and cars two blocks away. The horns were Dad's calliope.

"I seen eleven of them, not counting the man and the woman," someone would shout from the sidewalk.

"You missed the second baby up front here, Mister," Dad would call over his shoulder.

Mother would make believe she hadn't heard anything, and look straight ahead.

Pedestrians would come scrambling from side streets and children would ask their parents to lift them onto their shoulders.

"How do you grow them carrot-tops, Brother?"

"These?" Dad would bellow. "These aren't so much, Friend. You ought to see the ones I left at home."

Whenever the crowds gathered at some intersection where we were stopped by traffic, the inevitable question came sooner or later.

"How do you feed all those kids, Mister?"

Dad would ponder for a minute. Then, rearing back so those on the outskirts could hear, he'd say as if he had just thought it up:

"Well, they come cheaper by the dozen, you know."

This was designed to bring down the house, and usually it did. Dad had a good sense of theater, and he'd try to time this apparent ad lib so that it would coincide with the change in traffic. While the peasantry was chuckling, the Pierce Arrow would buck away in clouds of gray smoke, while the professor up front rendered a few bars of Honk Honk Kadookah.

Leave 'em in stitches, that was us.

Dad would use that same "cheaper by the dozen" line whenever we stopped at a toll gate, or went to a movie, or bought tickets for a train or boat.

"Do my Irishmen come cheaper by the dozen?" he'd ask the man at the toll bridge. Dad could take one look at a man and know his nationality.

"Irishmen is it? And I might have known it. Lord love you, and it takes the Irish to raise a crew of redheaded Irishmen like that. The Lord Jesus didn't mean for any family like that to pay toll on my road. Drive through on the house."

"If he knew you were a Scot he'd take a shillalah and wrap it around your tight-fisted head," Mother giggled as we drove on.

"He probably would," Dad agreed. "Bejabers."

And one day at the circus.

"Do my Dutchmen come cheaper by the dozen?"

"Dutchmen? Ach. And what a fine lot of healthy Dutchmen."

"Have you heard the story about the man with the big family who took his children to the circus?" asked Dad. " 'My kids want to see your elephants,' said the man. 'That's nothing,' replied the ticket-taker, 'my elephants want to see your kids.' "

"I heard it before," said the circus man. "Often. Just go in that gate over there where there ain't no turnstile."

Mother only drew the line once at Dad's scenes in Foolish Carriage. That was in Hartford, Connecticut, right in the center of town. We had just stopped at a traffic sign, and the usual crowd was beginning to collect. We heard the words plainly from a plump lady near the curb.

"Just look at those poor, adorable little children," she said. "Don't they look sweet in their uniforms?"

Dad was all set to go into a new act—the benevolent superintendent taking the little orphan tykes out for a drive.

"Why, bless my soul and body," he began loudly, in a jovial voice. "Why, bless my buttons.Why, bless..."

But for once Mother exploded.

"That," she said, "is the last straw. Positively and emphatically the ultimate straw."

This was something new, and Dad was scared. "What's the matter, Lillie?" he asked quickly.

"Not the penultimate, nor yet the ante-penultimate," said Mother. "But the ultimate."

"What's the matter, Lillie? Speak to me, girl."

"The camel's back is broken," Mother said. "Someone has just mistaken us for an orphanage."

"Oh, that," said Dad. "Sure, I know it. Wasn't it a scream?"

"No," said Mother. "It wasn't."

"It's these dusters we have to wear," Anne almost wept. "It's these damned, damned dusters. They look just like uniforms."

"Honestly, Daddy," said Ernestine, "it's so embarrassing to go riding when you always make these awful scenes."

The crowd was bigger than ever now.

"I," said Martha, "feel like Lady Godiva."

Mother was upset, but not too upset to reprimand Anne for swearing. Dad started to shake with laughter, and the crowd started laughing, too.

"That's a good one," somebody shouted. "Lady Godiva.You tell him, Sis. Lady Godiva!"

The boys began showing off. Bill sat on the top of the back seat as if he were a returning hero being cheered by a welcoming populace. He waved his hat aloft and bowed graciously to either side, with a fixed, stagey smile on his face. Frank and Fred swept imaginary ticker tape off his head and shoulders. But the girls, crimson-faced, dived under the lap robe.

"Get down from there, Bill," said Mother.

Dad was still roaring. "I just don't understand you girls," he wheezed. "That's the funniest thing I ever heard in my life. An orphanage on wheels. And me the superintendent. Gilbreth's Retreat for the Red-Haired Offspring of Unwed but Repentant Reprobates."

"Not humorous," said Mother. "Let's get out of here."

As we passed through the outskirts of Hartford, Dad was subdued and repentant; perhaps a little frightened.

"I didn't mean any harm, Lillie," he said.

"Of course you didn't, dear. And there's no harm done."

But Ernestine wasn't one to let an advantage drop.

"Well, we're through with the dusters," she announced from the back seat. "We'll never wear them again. Never again. Quoth the raven, and I quoth, 'Nevermore,' and I unquoth."

Dad could take it from Mother, but not from his daughters.

"Who says you're through with the dusters?" he howled. "Those dusters cost a lot of money, which does not grow on grape arbors. And if you think for a minute that—"

"No, Frank," Mother interrupted. "This time the girls are right. No more dusters."

It was a rare thing for them to disagree, and we all sat there enjoying it.

"All right, Lillie," Dad grinned, and everything was all right now. "As I always say, you're the boss. And I unquoth, too."

Roads weren't marked very well in those days, and Dad never believed in signs anyway.

"Probably some kid has changed those arrows around," he would say, possibly remembering his own youth. "Seems to me that if we turned that way, the way the arrow says, we'd be headed right back where we came from."

The same thing happened with the Automobile Blue Book, the tourist's bible in the early days of the automobile. Mother would read to him:

"Six-tenths of a mile past windmill, bear left at brick church, and follow paved road."

"That must be the wrong windmill," Dad would say. "No telling when the fellow who wrote that book came over this road to check up on things. My bump of direction tells me to turn right. They must have torn down the windmill the book's talking about."

Then, after he'd turned right and gotten lost, he'd blame Mother for giving him the wrong directions. Several times, he called Anne up to the front seat to read the Blue Book for him.

"Your Mother hasn't a very good sense of direction," he'd say loudly, glaring over his pince-nez at Mother. "She tells me to turn left when the book says to turn right. Then she blames me when we get lost. Now you read it to me just like it says. Don't change a single word, understand? And don't be making up anything about windmills that aren't there, or non-existent brick churches, just to confuse me. Read it just like it says."

But he wouldn't follow Anne's directions, either, and so he'd get lost just the same.

When things looked hopeless, Dad would ask directions at a store or filling station. He'd listen, and then usually drive off in exactly the opposite direction from the one his informant had indicated.

"Old fool," Dad would mutter. "He's lived five miles from Trenton all his life and he doesn't even know how to get there. He's trying to route me back to New York."

Mother was philosophical about it. Whenever she considered that Dad was hopelessly lost, she'd open a little portable ice box that she kept on the floor of the car under her feet, and hand Jane her bottle. This was Mother's signal that it was time to have lunch.

"All right, Lillie," Dad would say. "Guess we might as well stop and eat, while I get my bearings.You pick out a good place for a picnic."