Cheaper by the Dozen (19 page)

"Daddy, do you think that what Mr. Fremonville is saying is of general interest?" Lill interrupted a long discourse to ask.

Dad and Mother, and most of the guests, laughed away remarks like these without too much embarrassment. Dad would apologize and explain the family rule involved, and the reason for it. After the guests had gone, Mother would get us together and tell us that while family rules were important, it was even more important to see that guests weren't made uncomfortable.

Sometimes after a meal, Dad's stomach would rumble and, when there weren't any guests, we'd tease him about it. The next time it rumbled, he'd look shocked and single out one of us.

"Billy," he said. "Please! I'm not in the mood for an organ recital."

"That was your stomach, not mine, Daddy. You can't fool me."

"You children have the noisiest stomachs I've ever heard. Don't you think so, Lillie?"

Mother looked disapprovingly over her mending.

"I think," she said, "there are Eskimos in the house."

One night, Mr. Russell Allen, a young engineer, was a guest for supper. Jack, in a high chair across the table from him, accidentally swallowed some air and let out a belch that resounded through the dining room and, as we found out later, was heard even in the kitchen by Mrs. Cunningham. It was such a thorough burp, and had emerged from such a small subject, that all conversation was momentarily suspended in amazement. Jack, more surprised than anybody, looked shocked. He reached out his arm and pointed a chubby and accusing forefinger at the guest.

"Mr. Allen," he said in offended dignity. "Please! I'm not in the mood for an organ recital."

"Why, Jackie!" said Mother, almost in tears. "Why, Jackie. How could you?"

"Out," roared Dad. "Skiddoo.Tell Mrs. Cunningham to give you the rest of your supper in the kitchen. And I'll see you about this later."

"Well, you say it,"Jack sobbed as he disappeared toward the kitchen. "You say it when your stomach rumbles."

Dad was blushing.The poise which he told us he valued so highly had disappeared. He shifted uneasily in his seat and fumbled with his napkin. Nobody could think of a way to break the uneasy silence.

Dad cleared his throat with efficient thoroughness. But the silence persisted, and it hung heavily over the table.

"Lackaday," Dad finally said. The situation was getting desperate, and he tried again. "Lack a couple of days," Dad said with a weak, artificial laugh. We felt sorry for him and for Mother and Mr. Allen, who were just as crimson as Dad. The silence persisted.

Dad suddenly flung his napkin on the table and walked out into the kitchen. He returned holding Jack by the hand. Jack was still crying.

"All right,Jackie,"Dad said."Come back and sit down. You're right, you learned it from me. First you apologize to Mr. Allen. Then we'll tell him the whole story. And then none of us will ever say it again. As your Mother told us, it all comes from having Eskimos in the house."

Dad's sister, Aunt Anne, was an ample Victorian who wore full, sweeping skirts and high ground-gripper shoes. She was older than Dad, and they were much alike and devoted to each other. She was kindly but stern, big bosomed, and every inch a lady. Like Dad, she had reddish brown hair and a reddish brown temper. She, her husband, and their grown children, whom we worshipped, lived a few blocks from us in Providence. Aunt Anne was an accomplished pianist and gave music lessons at her house at 26 Cabot Street. Dad thought it would be nice if all of us learned to play something. Dad admitted he was as green as any valley when it came to music, but he had a good ear and he liked symphonies.

Aunt Anne must have sensed almost immediately that we had no talent. She knew, though, that any such admission would have a depressing effect on Dad, who took it for granted that his children had talent for everything. Consequently, Aunt Anne stuck courageously to a losing cause for six years, in an unusual display of devotion and fortitude above and beyond the regular call of family duty.

When she finally became convinced of the hopelessness of teaching us the piano, she shifted us to other instruments. Although we had no better success, the other instruments at least were quieter than the piano and, more important, only one person could play them at a time.

Our Anne was shifted to the violin, Ernestine to the mandolin, and Martha and Frank to the 'cello. It was awful at home when we practiced, and Dad would walk smirking through the house with wads of cotton sticking prominently from his ears.

"Never mind," he said, when we told him we didn't seem to be making any progress. "You stick with it. You'll thank me when you're my age."

Unselfishly jeopardizing her professional reputation as a teacher, Aunt Anne always allowed each of us to play in the annual recitals at her music school. Usually we broke down in the middle, and always had a demoralizing effect on the more talented children, and on their parents in the audience.

To salvage what she could of her standing as a teacher, Aunt Anne used to tell the audience before we went on stage that we had only recently shifted from the piano to stringed instruments. The implication, although not expressed in so many words, was that we had already mastered the piano and were now branching out along other musical avenues.

Just before we started to play, she affixed mutes to our strings and whispered:

"Remember, your number should be played softly, softly as a little brook tinkling through a still forest."

The way we played, it didn't tinkle. As Dad whispered to Mother at one recital: "If I heard that coming from the back fence at night, I'd either report it to the police or heave shoes at it."

Aunt Anne was good to us and we loved her and her family, but like Dad she insisted on having her own way. While we reluctantly accepted Dad's bossing as one of the privileges of his rank as head of the family, we had no intention of accepting it from anybody else, including his oldest sister.

After we moved to Montclair, Aunt Anne came to stay with us for several days while Mother and Dad were away on a lecture tour. She made it plain from the start that she was not a guest, but the temporary commander-in-chief. She even used the front stairs, leading from the front hall to the second floor, instead of the back stairs, which led from the kitchen to a hallway near the girls' bathroom. None of us was allowed to use the front stairs, because Dad wanted to keep the varnish on them looking nice.

"Daddy will be furious if he comes home and finds you've been using his front stairs," we told Aunt Anne.

"Nonsense," she cut us off. "The back stairs are narrow and steep, and I for one don't propose to use them. As long as I'm here, I'll use any stairs I have a mind to. Now, rest your features and mind your business."

She sat at Dad's place at the foot of the table, and we resented this, too. Ordinarily, Frank, as the oldest boy, sat in Dad's place, and Anne, as the oldest girl, sat at Mother's. We also disapproved of Aunt Anne's blunt criticism of how we kept our bedrooms, and some of the changes she made in the family routine.

"What do you do, keep pigeons in here?" she'd say when she walked into the bedroom shared by Frank and Bill. "I'm coming back in fifteen minutes, and I want to find this room in apple-pie order."

And: "I don't care what time your regular bedtime is. As long as I'm in charge, we'll do things my way. Off with you now."

Like Grandma and Dad, Aunt Anne thought that all Irishmen were shiftless and that Tom Grieves was the most shiftless of all Irishmen. She told him so at least once a day, and Tom was scared to death of her.

Experience has established the fact that a person cannot move from a small, peaceful home into a family of a dozen without having something finally snap. We saw this happen time after time with Dad's stenographers and with the cooks who followed Mrs. Cunningham. In order to reside with a family of a dozen it is necessary either (1) to be brought up from birth in such a family, as we were; or (2) to become accustomed to it as it grew, as Dad, Mother, and Tom Grieves did.

It was at the dinner table that something finally snapped in Aunt Anne.

We had spent the entire meal purposely making things miserable for her. Bill had hidden under the table, and we had removed his place and chair so she wouldn't realize he was missing. While we ate, Billy thumped Aunt Anne's legs with the side of his hand.

"Who's kicking me?" she complained."Saints alive!"

We said no one.

"Well, you don't have a dog, do you?"

We didn't, and we told her so. Our collie had died some time before this.

"Well, somebody's certainly kicking me. Hard."

She insisted that the child sitting on each side of her slide his chair toward the head of the table, so that no legs could possibly reach her. Bill thumped again.

"Somebody
is
kicking me," Aunt Anne said, "and I intend to get to the bottom of it. Literally."

Bill thumped again. Aunt Anne picked up the table cloth and looked under the table, but Bill had anticipated her and retreated to the other end.The table was so long you couldn't see that far underneath without getting down on your hands and knees, and Aunt Anne was much too dignified to stoop to any such level. When she put the table cloth down again, Bill crawled forward and licked her hand.

"You do too have a dog," Aunt Anne said accusingly, while she dried her hand on a napkin. "Speak up now! Who brought that miserable cur into the house?"

Bill thumped her again and retreated. She picked up the table cloth and looked. She put it down again, and he licked her hand. She looked again, and then dangled her hand temptingly between her knees. Bill couldn't resist this trap, and this time Aunt Anne was ready for him. When he started to lick, she snapped her knees together like a vise, trapped his head in the folds of her skirt, and reached down and grabbed him by the hair.

"Come out of there, you scamp you," she shouted. "I've got you.You can't get away this time. Come out, I say."

She didn't give Bill a chance to come out under his own power. She yanked, and he came out by the hair of his head, screaming and kicking.

In those days, Bill was not a snappy dresser. He liked old clothes, preferably held together with safety pins, and held up by old neckties. When he wore a necktie around his neck, which was as seldom as possible, he sometimes evened up the ends by trimming the longer with a pair of scissors. His knickers usually were partially unbuttoned in the front—what the Navy calls the commodore's privilege. They were completely unfastened at the legs and hung down to his ankles. During the course of a day, his stockings rode gradually down his legs and, by dinner, had partially disappeared into his sneakers. When Mother was at home, she made him wear such appurtenances as a coat and a belt. In her absence, he had grown slack.

When Aunt Anne jerked him out, a piece of string connecting a buttonhole in his shirt with a buttonhole in the front of his trousers suddenly broke. Bill grabbed for his pants, but it was too late.

"Go to your room, you scamp you," Aunt Anne said, shaking him. "Just wait until your father comes home. He'll know how to take care of you."

Bill picked up his knickers and did as he was told. He had a new respect for Aunt Anne, and the whole top of his head was smarting from the hair-pulling.

Aunt Anne sat down with deceptive calm, and gave us a disarming smile.

"I want you children to listen carefully to me," she almost whispered. "There's not a living soul here, including the baby, who is cooperative. I've never seen a more spoiled crowd of children."

As she went on, her voice grew louder. Much louder. Tom Grieves opened the pantry door a crack and peeked in.

"For those of you who like to believe that an only child is a selfish child, let me say you are one hundred percent wrong. From what I have seen, this is the most completely selfish household in the entire world."

She was roaring now, wide open, and it was the first time we had ever seen her that way. Except that her voice was an octave higher, it might have been Dad, sitting there in his own chair.

"From this minute on, pipe down, every last one of you, or I'll lambaste the hides off you. I'll fix you so you can't sit down for a month. Do you understand? Does everybody understand? In case you don't realize it,
I've had enoughl"

With that, determined to show us she wasn't going to let us spoil her meal, she put a piece of pie in her

Tom, watching at the door, saw his duty. Putting aside his fear of her, he ran into the dining room and slapped her on the back.Then he grabbed her arms and held them high over her head.

"You'll be all right in a minute, Aunt Anne," he said.

His system worked. She gurgled and finally caught her breath. Then, remembering her dignity, she jerked her arms out of his hands and drew herself up to her full height.