Cheaper by the Dozen (12 page)

"Nothing to it," he said. "And I know we got some great movies. Anne slept just like a baby. All right, Ernestine, girl.You're next; let's go."

"I'm not hungry any more," she said. "Now I'm just scared."

A nurse put a napkin saturated with ether over Ern's nose. The last thing she remembered was Mr. Coggin, Dad's photographer, grinding away at the camera. "He should be cranking at two revolutions a second," she thought. "I'll count and see if he is. And one and two and three and four. That's the way Dad says to count seconds.You have to put the 'and' in between the numbers to count at the right speed. And one and two and three..." She fell asleep.

Dr. Burton peered into her mouth.

"My God, Gilbreth," he said. "I told you I didn't want Martha."

"You haven't got Martha," Dad said. "That's Ernestine."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure, you jackass. Don't you think I know my own children?"

"You must be mistaken," Dr. Burton insisted. "Look at her carefully. There, now, isn't that Martha?"

"You mean to say you think I can't tell one child from another?"

"I don't mean to say anything, except if that isn't Martha we've made a horrible mistake."

"We?" Dad squealed. "We? I've made no mistake. And I hope I'm wrong in imagining the sort of a mistake you've made."

"You see, all I know them by is their tonsils," said Dr. Burton. "I thought these tonsils were Martha. They were the only pair that didn't have to come out."

"No," moaned Dad. "Oh, no!"Then, growing indignant: "Do you mean to tell me you knocked my little girl unconscious for no reason at all?"

"It looks as if I did just that, Gilbreth. I'm sorry, but it's done. It was damned careless. But you do have an uncommon lot of them, and they all look just alike to me."

"All right, Burton," Dad said. "Sorry I lost my temper. What do we do?"

"I'm going to take them out anyway. They'd have to come out eventually at any rate, and the worst part of an operation is dreading it before hand. She's done her dreading, and there's no use to make her do it twice."

As Dr. Burton leaned over Ernestine, some reflex caused her to knee him in the mouth.

"Okay, Ernestine, if that's really your name," he muttered. "I guess I deserved that."

As it turned out, Ernestine's tonsils were recessed and bigger than the doctor had expected. It was a little messy to get at them, and Mr. Coggin, the movie cameraman, was sick in a waste basket.

"Don't stop cranking," Dad shouted at him, "or your tonsils will be next. I'll pull them out by the roots, myself. Crank, by jingo, crank."

Mr. Coggin cranked. When the operation was over, Dad and the nurse carried Ernestine upstairs.

When Dad came in the parlor to get Frank, he told Mother to send someone over to Aunt Anne's for Martha.

"Apple pie, doughnuts or not, she's going to have her tonsils out," he said. "I'm not going to go through another day like this one again in a hurry."

Frank, Bill, and Lillian had their tonsils out, in that order. Then Martha arrived, bawling, kicking, and full of pie and doughnuts.

"You said I didn't have to have my tonsils out, and I'm not going to have my tonsils out," she screamed at the doctor. Before he could get her on the desk which served as the operating table, she kicked him in the stomach.

"The next time I come to your house," he said to Dad as soon as he could get his breath, "I'm going to wear a chest protector and a catcher's mask." Then to the nurse: "Give some ether to Martha, if that's really her name."

"Yes, I'm Martha," she yelled through the towel. "You're making a mistake."

"I told you she was Martha," Dad said triumphantly.

"I know," Dr. Burton said. "Let's not go into that again. She's Martha, but I've named her tonsils Ernestine. Open your mouth, Martha, you sweet child, and let me get Ernestine's tonsils. Crank on, Mr. Coggin. Your film may be the first photographic record of a man slowly going berserk."

All of us felt terribly sick that afternoon, but Martha was in agony.

"It's a shame," Grandma kept telling Martha, who was named for her and was her especial pet. "They shouldn't have let you eat all that stuff and then brought you back here for the butchering. I don't care whether it was the doctor's fault or your father's fault. I'd like to skin them both alive and then scalp them like red Indians."

While we were recuperating, Dad spent considerable time with us, but minimized our discomforts, and kept telling us we were just looking for sympathy.

"Don't tell me," he said. "I saw the operations, didn't I? Why there's only the little, tiniest cut at the back of your throat. I don't understand how you can do all that complaining. Don't you remember the story about the Spartan boy who kept his mouth shut while the fox was chewing on his vitals?"

It was partly because of our complaining, and the desire to show us how the Spartan boy would have had his tonsils out, that Dad decided to have only a local anesthetic for his operation. Mother, Grandma, and Dr. Burton all advised against it. But Dad wouldn't listen.

"Why does everyone want to make a mountain out of a molehill over such a minor operation?" he said. "I want to keep an eye on Burton and see that he doesn't mess up the job."

The first day that we children were well enough to get up, Dad and Mother set out in the car for Dr. Burton's office. Mother had urged Dad to call a taxi. She didn't know how to drive, and she said Dad probably wouldn't feel like doing the driving on the way home. But Dad laughed at her qualms.

"We'll be back in about an hour," Dad called to us as he tested his three horns to make sure he was prepared for any emergency. "Wait lunch for us. I'm starving."

"You've got to hand it to him," Anne admitted as the Pierce Arrow bucked up Wayside Place. "He's the bee's knees, all right. We were all scared to death before our operations. And look at him. He's looking forward to it."

Two hours later, a taxicab stopped in front of the house, and the driver jumped out and opened the door for his passengers.Then Mother emerged, pale and red-eyed. She and the driver helped a crumpled mass of moaning blue serge to alight. Dad's hat was rumpled and on sideways. His face was gray and sagging. He wasn't crying, but his eyes were watering. He couldn't speak and he couldn't smile.

"He's sure got a load on all right, Mrs. Gilbreth," said the driver enviously. "And still early afternoon, too. Didn't even know he touched the stuff, myself."

We waited for the lightning to strike, but it didn't. The seriousness of Dad's condition may be adjudged by the fact that he contented himself with a withering look.

"Keep a civil tongue in your head," said Mother, in one of the sharpest speeches of her career. "He's deathly ill."

Mother and Grandma helped Dad up to his room. We could hear him moaning, all the way downstairs.

Mother told us all about it that night, while Dad was snoring under the effects of sleeping pills. Mother had waited in Dr. Burton's ante-room while the tonsillectomy was being performed. Dad had felt wonderful while under the local anesthetic. When the operation was half over, he had come out into the ante-room, grinning and waving one tonsil in a pair of forceps.

"One down and one to go, Lillie," he had said. "Completely painless. Just like rolling off a log."

After what had seemed an interminable time, Dad had come out into the waiting room again, and reached for his hat and coat. He was still grinning, only not so wide as before.

"That's that," he said. "Almost painless. All right, Boss, let's go. I'm still hungry."

Then, as Mother watched, his high spirits faded and he began to fall to pieces.

"I'm stabbed," he moaned. "I'm hemorrhaging. Burton, come here. Quick. What have you done to me?"

Dr. Burton came out of his office. It must be said to his credit that he was sincerely sympathetic. Dr. Burton had had his own tonsils out.

"You'll be all right, Old Pioneer," he said. "You just had to have it the hard way."

Dad obviously couldn't drive, so Mother had called the taxi. A man from the garage towed Foolish Carriage home later that night.

"I tried to drive it home," the garage man told Mother, "but I couldn't budge it. I got the engine running all right, but it just spit and bucked every time I put it in gear. Durnedest thing I ever saw."

"I don't think anyone but Mr. Gilbreth understands it," Mother said.

Dad spent two weeks in bed, and it was the first time any of us remembered his being sick. He couldn't smoke, eat, or talk. But he could glare, and he glared at Bill for two full minutes when Bill asked him one afternoon if he had had his tonsils taken out like the Spartans used to have theirs removed.

Dad didn't get his voice back until the very day that he finally got out of bed. He was lying there, propped up on pillows, reading his office mail. There was a card from Mr. Coggin, the photographer.

"Hate to tell you, Mr. Gilbreth, but none of the moving pictures came out. I forgot to take off the inside lens cap. I'm terribly sorry. Coggin. P.S. I quit."

Dad threw off the covers and reached for his bathrobe. For the first time in two weeks, he spoke:

"I'll track him down to the ends of the earth," he croaked. "I'll take a blunt button hook and pull his tonsils out by the by jingoed roots, just like I promised him. He doesn't quit. He's fired."

We spent our summers at Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Dad bought two lighthouses, which had been abandoned by the government, and a ramshackle cottage, which looked as if it had been abandoned by Coxey's Army. Dad had the lighthouses moved so that they flanked the cottage. He and Mother used one of them as an office and den. The other served as a bedroom for three of the children.

He named the cottage
The Shoe,
in honor of Mother, who, he said, reminded him of the old woman who lived in one.

The cottage and lighthouses were situated on a flat stretch of land between the fashionable Cliff and the Bathing Beach. Besides our place, there was only one other house in the vicinity. This belonged to an artist couple named Whitney. But after our first summer at Nantucket, the Whitneys had their house jacked up, placed on rollers, and moved a mile away to a vacant lot near the tip of Brant Point. After that, we had the strip of land all to ourselves.

Customarily, en route from Montclair to Nantucket we spent the night in a hotel in New London, Connecticut. Dad knew the hotel manager and all of the men at the desk, and they used to exchange loud and good-natured insults for the benefit of the crowds that followed us in from the street.

"Oh, Lord, look what's coming," the manager called when we entered the door. And then to an assistant, "Alert the fire department and the house detective. It's the Gilbreths. And take that cigar cutter off the counter and lock it in the safe."

"Do you still have that dangerous guillotine?" Dad grinned. "I know you'll be disappointed to hear that the finger grew in just as good as new. Show the man your finger, Ernestine."

Ernestine held up the little finger of her right hand. On a previous visit, she had pushed it inquisitively into the cigar cutter, and had lost about an eighth of an inch of it. She had bled considerably on a rug, while Dad tried to fashion a tourniquet and roared inquiries about whether there was a doctor in the house.

"Tell me," Dad remarked as he picked up a pen to register in the big book, "do my Irishmen come cheaper by the dozen?"

"Irishmen! If I were wearing a sheet, you'd call them Arabs. How many of them are there, anyway? Last year, when I went to make out your bill, you claimed there were only seven. I can count at least a dozen of them now."

"It's quite possible there may have been some additions since then," Dad conceded.

"Front, boy. Front, boy. Front, boy. Front, boy. You four boys show Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth and their seven— or so—Irishmen to 503, 504, 505, 506, and 507. And mind you take good care of them, too."

When we first started going to Nantucket, which is off the tip of Cape Cod, automobiles weren't allowed on the island, and we'd leave the Pierce Arrow in a garage at New Bedford, Massachusetts. Later, when the automobile ban was lifted, we'd take the car with us on the
Gay Head
or the
Sankaty,
the steamers which plied between the mainland and the island. Dad had a frightening time backing the automobile up the gangplank. Mother insisted that we get out of the car and stand clear. Then she'd beg Dad to put on a life preserver.

"I know you and it are going into the water one of these days," she warned.

"Doesn't anybody, even my wife, have confidence in my driving?" he would moan. Then on a more practical note: "Besides, I can swim."

The biggest problem, on the boat and in the car, was Martha's two canaries, which she had won for making the best recitation in Sunday school. All of us, except Dad, were fond of them. Dad called one of them Shut Up and the other You Heard Me. He said they smelled so much that they ruined his whole trip, and were the only creatures on earth with voices louder than his children. Tom Grieves, the handyman, who had to clean up the cage, named the birds Peter Soil and Maggie Mess. Mother wouldn't let us use those full names, she said they were "Eskimo." (Eskimo was Mother's description of anything that was off-color, revolting, or evil-minded.) We called the birds simply Peter and Maggie.