Cheaper by the Dozen (9 page)

"Really, I have no idea."

"Well, guess, can't you?"

"No, I'm sorry, I have no idea."

"Aw, you know who it is," said Dad, who now had read the book that Mother said everyone should read. "It's the White Rabbit from Boston."

"The who?"

"The White Rabbit from Boston."

"Oh, I see. I think you must want to talk with one of my daughters."

"My God," said Dad, who didn't stop swearing until after he was married. "Who's this?"

"This is Mrs. Moller. To whom did you wish to speak?"

"May I please speak with Miss Lillie?" Dad asked meekly.

"Who should I say is calling?"

"You might say Mr. Rabbit, please," said Dad. "Mr. W. Rabbit, of Boston."

A few days later, Dad was invited to Mother's house for tea, where he met her mother and father and most of her brothers and sisters. A workman was building a new fireplace in the living room, and as Dad was escorted through that room he stopped to watch the man laying bricks.

"Now, there's an interesting job," said Dad in a conversational tone to the Mollers. "Laying brick. It looks easy to me. Dead easy. I don't see why these workmen claim that laying brick is skilled labor. I'll bet anyone could do it."

"Right this way, Mr. Gilbreth," said Mother's father. "We're having tea on the porch."

Dad wouldn't be hurried. "It seems to me," he continued in his flat New England twang, "that all you do is pick up a brick, put some mortar on it, and put it in the fireplace."

The bricklayer turned around to survey the plump but dapper dude from the East.

"Nothing personal meant," said Dad, with his most patronizing smile, "my good man."

"Sure, that's all right," said the workman, but he was furious. "Dead easy, eh? Like to try it, Mister?"

Dad, who had set his sights on just such an invitation, said he guessed not. Mother tugged at his sleeve and fidgeted.

"The porch is right this way," her father repeated.

"Here," the bricklayer said, handing Dad the trowel. "Try it."

Dad grinned and took the trowel. He grabbed a brick, flipped it into position in his hand, slapped on the mortar with a rotary motion of the trowel, placed the brick, scraped off the excess mortar, reached for a second brick, flipped it, and was about to slap on more mortar when the workman reached out and took back his trowel.

"That's enough, you old hod-carrier," he shouted, cuffing Dad affectionately on the back. "Dude from the East you might be. But it's many a thousand brick you've laid in your life, and don't try to tell me different."

Dad dusted off his hands gingerly with a spotless handkerchief.

"Dead easy," he said, "my good man."

Dad behaved himself pretty well during the tea, but on later visits he'd sometimes interrupt Mother's parents in the middle of sentences and go over and pick up Mother from her chair.

"Excuse me just a minute," he'd tell his future in-laws. "I think Miss Lillie would look more decorative up here."

He'd swing her up and place her on the top of a bookcase or china closet, and then go back and sit down. Mother was afraid to move for fear of upsetting her perch, and would remain up there primly, determined not to lose her dignity. Dad pretended he had forgotten all about her, as he resumed the conversation.

We knew, too, that the first time Dad had been invited to spend a weekend at the Mollers' he had thrown himself with a wheeze and a sigh onto his bed, which had collapsed and enveloped him in a heavy, be-tasseled canopy.

"The tilings your daddy shouted before Papa and your Uncle Fred could untangle him from the tassels!" Mother tittered. "I can tell you, it was an education for us girls and, I suspect, for the boys, too. Thank goodness he's stopped talking like that."

"And what did your family really think of him?" we asked her. "Really."

"I never could understand it," Mother said, glancing over at Dad, who was at his smuggest, "but they thought he was simply wonderful. Mama said it was like a breath of fresh air when he walked into a room. And Papa said the business of laying bricks wasn't just showing off, but was your father's way of telling them that he had started out by making a living with his hands."

"Is that what you were trying to tell them, Daddy?" we asked.

"Trying to tell them nothing," Dad shouted. "Anybody who knows anything about New England knows the Bunkers and the Gilbreths, or Galbraiths, descend through Governor Bradford right to the
Mayflower.
I wasn't trying to tell them anything."

"What did you lay the brick for then?" we insisted.

"When some people walk into a parlor," Dad said, "they like to sit down at the piano and impress people by playing Bach. When I walk into a parlor, I like to lay brick, that's all."

There were seven children in the family when we set out with Mother for California. Fred was the baby, and was train sick all the way from Niagara Falls to the Golden Gate. Lill, the next to youngest, had broken a bone in her foot three weeks before, and had to stay in her berth. Mother was expecting another baby in three months, and didn't always feel too well herself.

The chance to return with her children to her parents' home meant more to Mother than any of us realized, and she was anxious to show us off in the best possible light and to have her family approve of us.

"I know you're going to be good and quiet, and do what your grandparents and your aunts and uncles tell you," Mother kept saying. "You want to remember that they're very affectionate, but they're not accustomed to having children around any more. They're going to love you, but they're not used to noise and people running around."

Mother had spent a good bit of money buying us new outfits so that we would make a good impression in California, and she thought she ought to economize on train accommodations. We were jammed, two in a berth, into a drawing room and two sections. She brought along a Sterno cooking outfit and two suitcases of food, mostly cereals and graham crackers. We ate almost all our meals in the drawing room, journeying to the dining car only on those infrequent occasions when Mother yielded to our complaints that scurvy was threatening to set in.

She spent most of her time trying to make Lill comfortable and trying to find some kind of milk that would stay on Fred's stomach. She had little opportunity to supervise the rest of us, and we wandered up and down the train sampling the contents of the various ice water tanks, peeking into berths, and, in the case of Frank and Bill, turning somersaults and wrestling with each other in the aisles.

At each stop, Mother would leave Anne in charge of the broken foot and upset stomach department, while she rushed into the station to buy milk, food, and Sterno cans. The rest of us would get off the train to stretch our legs and see whether a new engine had been switched on. Once the train started up again, Mother would insist upon a roll call.

After four days on the train, with no baths except for the sponge variety, we were not very sanitary when we reached California. Mother wanted us to look our best when we got off the train, and she planned to give each of us a personal scrubbing and see that we had on clean clothes, an hour or so before we got to Oakland.

Her oldest brother, Uncle Fred, surprised her and us by boarding the train at Sacramento. He found us in the drawing room, in the middle of a meal. Suitcases were open on the floor, and there was a pile of diapers in a corner. The baby, still train sick, was crying in Mother's arms. Lill's foot was hurting, and she was crying on the couch. Bill was doing acrobatics on the bed. There were bowls of Cream of Wheat and graham crackers on a card table. The place smelled of Sterno and worse.

Uncle Fred used to joke about it when we were older—it reminded him of a zoo, he said. But at the time you never would have known he noticed anything unusual.

"Lillie, dear, it's good to see you," he said. "You look simply radiant. Not a day older."

"Oh, Fred, Fred." Mother put down the baby, wiped her eyes apologetically, and clung to her brother. "It's ridiculous to cry, isn't it? But it means so much having you here."

"Was it a hard trip, dear?"

Mother was already bustling around, straightening up the drawing room.

"I wouldn't want to do it every day," she admitted. "But it's almost over and you're here. You're my first taste of home."

Uncle Fred turned to us. "Welcome to California," he said. "Don't tell me now. I can name each of you. Let's see, the baby here making all the noise, he's my namesake, Fred. And here's little Lill, of course, with the broken foot, and Billy..."

"You're just like we imagined you," Martha told him, hanging on to his hand. "Are we like you imagined us?"

"Just exactly," he said gravely. "Right down to the last freckle."

"I hope you didn't imagine them like this," Mother said, but she was happy now. "Never mind. You'll never know them in a few minutes. You take the boys out into the car, and I'll start getting the girls cleaned up right now. Of course, none of them will be really clean until I can get them into a tub."

We were presentable and on our best behavior when we finally arrived in Oakland, where Mother's sisters and other brothers were waiting with the three limousines. It was a wonderful welcome, but we thought our aunts were the kissingest kin in the world.

"They must think we're sissies," whispered Bill, who was five and didn't like to be kissed by anyone except Mother, and only then in the privacy of his boudoir.

"Lillie, dear, it's good to see you, and the dear children," they kept repeating.

Each of us had a godparent among Mother's brothers and sisters, and now the godparents began sorting us out.

"Here, little Ernestine, you come with me, dear," said Aunt Ernestine.

"Come, Martha, dear," said Aunt Gertrude. "You're mine."

"Give me your hand, Frank, dear," said Aunt Elinor.

"Dear this and dear that," Billy whispered scornfully.

"Where's dear Billy?" asked Aunt Mabel.

"Right here, dear," said Bill.

But Bill, like the rest of us, felt happy and warm inside because of the welcome.

The aunts led us over to the automobiles, where Henriette, in black puttees and with a stiff-brimmed cap tucked under his arm, was standing at rigid attention. Uncle Frank and Uncle Bill got behind the wheels of the other two machines.

The glassed-in cars seemed formal and luxurious as we drove from the station to Twenty-ninth Street, and Henriette managed to remain at attention even when sitting down. We wondered what Daddy would say about Henriette. Certainly rigid attention wasn't the most efficient way to drive an automobile. Anyone with half an eye could see the posture was fatiguing to the point of exhaustion. It was some class, though.

Frank and Bill started to crank down the windows so they could put out their hands when he turned the corners, but Anne and Ernestine shook their heads.

"And the first one who hollers 'road hog' is going to get a punch in the nose," Ernestine whispered.

Mother's father and mother—Papa and Grosie, we called them—were waiting for us on the steps of the house.We thought they were picture-book grandparents. Papa was tall, lean and courtly, with a gates-ajar collar, string tie, and soft, white moustache. Grosie was short and fragile, with a gray pompadour and smiling brown eyes. Grosie kissed us and called us "dears." Papa shook hands, and said that each day we stayed in his house he was going to take all of us down to a toy shop and let us pick out a toy apiece.

"Honestly," Anne bubbled, "it's like stepping into a fairy tale three-deep with godmothers and with wishes that come true."

"That's the way we want it to be for Lillie's dear children," Grosie said. "Now, what's your very first wish? Tell me, and I'll see if I can make it come true."

That was easy. After four days of Mother's drawing room cookery, with only infrequent trips to the dining car, what we wanted most was something good to eat; a real home-cooked meal.

"I hate to say it after the way Mother's been slaving over a hot Sterno can," said Ernestine, "but we're starving."

"If my wish would come true," Mother hastened to change the subject,"you'd all be sitting in bathtubs right this minute, washing soot out of your hair."

Grosie said we were going to have a big dinner in about an hour and a half, and that she didn't want to spoil our appetites.

"How about just a little snack right now," she suggested, "and then baths and dinner? How about some graham crackers with milk? I know how much little children like graham crackers, and we have a great big supply of them."

The mention of graham crackers took away our appetites, and we said we guessed we'd skip the snack and get our baths.

"Such dear children." Grosie squeezed us. "They want their dear Mother's wish to come true!"

We were so impressed by the comforts and quiet organization of the Mollers' home that we were subdued and on our best behavior. But the biggest change was in Mother. Ensconced again in the bedroom in which she had grown up, she seemed to shed her responsibilities and become again "one of the Moller girls." Automatically, she found herself depending on her father to make the important decisions, and on her mother to advise her on social engagements and the proper clothes to wear. She seemed to have forgotten all about motion study, her career, and the household back East. Her principal worries seemed to be whether her parents had slept well, how they were feeling, whether they were sitting in drafts.