Mother shook her head and tried not to smile. “They’re the limit,” she agreed.
“They invent all kinds of excuses about why they have to leave. The lamest you ever heard—and they expect him to swallow them. Like, it’s high time they taped the handle of their base-ball bat. Or they’d better go check and see whether Fourteen has had kittens. Or they promised Tom they’d help him sift the ashes.”
“It’s hard to be the oldest,” Mother agreed.
“If Bob and Jane don’t get the hint, the others pick them up bodily and carry them out. And then Frank and Bill mumble something about saving electricity, and go around switching out the lights. My shins are all barked up from bumping into things in the dark.”
“It just means the children like Doctor Bob,” Mother said. “It’s a compliment to him, really, dear.”
“But suppose,” Anne groaned, “he gets the idea that all that business of turning off the lights has been going on with every boy I’ve ever had over here before?”
Doctor Bob liked children and knew how to talk with them. Bob and Jane started following him around the house, and wouldn’t go to bed at night unless he’d come up and tuck them in. Although we tried to keep them out of the way, they started begging to be taken along when he and Anne went out in his car in the afternoons. Bob would sit between Doctor Bob and Anne in the coupe, and Jane would sit on Anne’s lap. We were horrified, but the two youngest children wouldn’t listen to reason.
“I give up,” Anne told her fiancé, on one such afternoon excursion. She adjusted Jane on her lap. “Either they’re in our hair, like right now, or they’re tiptoeing around turning out lights.”
“I don’t mind it either way,” her Bob chuckled. “Except I never saw a house where they had more baseball bats to tape or more ashes … Look, Bobby,” he said, pointing out his window. “See the choo-choo train?”
“Where?” said Bob, leaning across him. “Where, Doctor Bob?”
“We just passed it. Look out the back window, and you’ll see it.”
Bob stood up on the seat and then, so he could get a better view, stood on Doctor Bob’s thigh. “Choo, choo, choo,” he said. “Big son of a gun, isn’t it, Doctor Bob?”
“It sure is. One of the biggest.”
“At one time,” said Anne, “I was silly enough to think that by the time I was engaged I might occasionally ride in an automobile without holding children in my lap. I used to have dreams, when I was a little girl, of sitting up front and having a whole half-seat, all to myself. I used to dream … Look, Janey, see the horsey?”
“Where, Anne? I don’t see the horsey?”
“We just passed it,” said Anne, holding her up so she could look out the back window.
Doctor Bob reached over and squeezed Anne’s hand. Her diamond solitaire picked up a piece of the sun and sparkled.
THEY WERE MARRIED in September of the following year, after Anne had received her diploma. The wedding was at our house. At Anne’s insistence, Mother herself gave the bride away.
The minister of our church in Montclair, who was to officiate at most of our weddings and a dozen or so christenings of Mother’s grandchildren, performed the ceremony.
The minister had children of his own, and a good deal of poise. He wasn’t upset when Lillian and Fred blundered into the room that had been assigned to him, while he was slipping into his vestments. And he chuckled, along with everyone else, when young Bob jumped onto Anne’s train and brought the wedding procession to a faltering halt.
It was a happy wedding, but we felt sorry for Mother. We thought we knew what was running through her mind. Anne was the first to leave the fold. Ernestine and Martha would probably be next. How would Mother get along with a family of only eight children? How would she feel when all of the children, even Jane, had married and left home?
Poor Mother, we thought. Poor, poor Mother.
Tom watched the ceremony from the back of the crowd, occasionally producing a none-too-clean hand-kerchief to dab at his eyes. When it was over, he pushed his way up to Anne, fished in his pocket, and handed her twenty crumpled one dollar bills.
“If he ain’t good to you,” he said, “I want you to buy a ticket and come home.”
Anne looked for a minute as if she might lean over and kiss him, but Tom went into his fighter’s crouch, weaving and making fierce faces.
“If he don’t behave hisself,” said Tom, “let him have the left like I learned you, and follow it with the right, like this.”
He feinted twice at Doctor Bob, who made believe he was baffled and completely helpless under the onslaught.
“If I find him with so much as an elbow on my kitchen table,” Anne promised, “I’m sending for you.”
It wasn’t until Anne and Doctor Bob got their suitcases and started for their coupe that Jane and Bob realized the newlyweds were going away on a trip.
“Take us with you, Doctor Bob,” they begged, lunging for his legs. “You haven’t taken us for a ride all day.”
He lifted up Jane and kissed her, and looked helplessly at Anne.
“No, sir,” said Anne, trying to disentangle them. “Not on our honeymoon. On that I positively draw the line.”
17. Pop and the Weasel
MARTHA HAD CONTACTS, ALTHOUGH she never went out of her way to develop them. She knew the mayor, the mayor’s secretary, librarians, store managers, motormen, policemen, delivery boys, and firemen.
With Anne married and Ernestine at Smith, Martha took charge of the household when Mother was away on business, and stretched the budget further than it ever had gone before. Without spending any more money, she saw to it that each of us got a few more of the things he wanted.
Martha ran the house in the same manner that she performed her school work—effortlessly and efficiently, but without pretense of perfection. She saw to it that the necessary and important things got done. And she refused to allow the unnecessary or unimportant ones to cause her any concern.
If she could settle for a “B” or a “C” in a school subject, she saw no point in slaving for an “A.” Of course, if an “A” came naturally, and occasionally one did, so much the better.
Likewise, if we swept and dusted the house in the mornings, she saw no reason to nag if we sometimes forgot to wipe our feet or hang up our overcoats when we got home from school in the afternoons. Besides, sometimes she wasn’t too careful about wiping her own feet, or hanging up her own overcoat.
Martha’s contacts in Montclair made things easier for all of us. She’d get the grocer’s delivery boy to stop by the hardware store to pick up something we had bought. She’d ask the men who drove the city’s snow plow if they’d mind taking a few minutes to clear our driveway. If Tom were sick, she’d get the milkman to help Frank and Bill carry the furnace ashes from the basement to the yard.
People seemed to like doing things for her, and Martha didn’t, mind helping them. She knew whom to call if a street light were broken, or if the garbage man had forgotten to come by our block, or if a rabid dog were reported in the neighborhood. Mother, and even the neighbors, began to depend on her when they wanted something done by the town.
Once when Mother was out of town, a sleet storm broke the power lines and the utility company said service couldn’t be restored for twenty-four hours. Martha called the fire chief and asked him what to do.
“With all the children we have in the house,” she told him, “I thought it might be a fire hazard to have them stumbling around in the dark striking matches.”
A fire truck pulled into the driveway a few minutes later with six electric lanterns, on loan to Martha. She had a thermos of coffee ready to send back to the station to the chief.
Martha studied the budget periodically to discover just where the money went, and to see if she could fix it so that less of it went there. If she couldn’t figure out a way herself, she’d call the person who was getting the money, and ask him.
For instance, there was the matter of hairc
uts. As Martha pointed out, it was a relatively small item, but one that recurred. She telephoned the owner of the barber shop frequented by the boys, and explained her problem.
She told him that, since we had six boys, we had to spend more money on haircuts than most families—that it usually came to at least $3 a month. She wondered whether there was any way he could give us a special rate. And if it wouldn’t pay him to make us a rate, did he know anybody who was just opening a shop, and needed the business, who might be willing to do so.
The barber said he never had given special rates before, but that he wouldn’t mind doing it provided the boys didn’t come on weekends or after five o’clock in the afternoons, when business was heaviest.
Money saved on transactions such as that was available for luxuries. If any of us wanted anything badly enough, and it didn’t cost too much, Martha would try to get it, and still keep within the budget. If she turned us down, we could always go to Mother, who usually would see that we got what we wanted whether the budget could afford it or not. But Martha, ordinarily easy going, became furious when any of us worried Mother about money matters. And we found it was advisable, if we were going to expect favors from Martha in the future, not to go over her head.
Whenever possible, and if the price were right, we did business with the United Cigar Store, which gave out coupons and certificates with each sale. The Cigar Store had a catalogue of premiums that included almost everything any of us wanted.
There were such items as a Genuine Cowhide, Jet Black, Positively Guaranteed, Big League Catcher’s Mitt, for 415 certificates. And the catalogue said that in addition to the mitt, a regulation big league baseball would be given away absolutely free, for a limited time only, to boys taking advantage of this amazing offer.
Five yellow coupons equaled one green certificate, and we kept them in separate cigar boxes on Martha’s dresser. Every couple of weeks, she’d call us into her room and we’d count what we had, putting rubber bands around each hundred coupons and each 20 certificates, and then figuring how long we’d have to wait until we had enough of them to redeem.
Tom was a chain smoker, and usually bought his cigarettes by the pack, at whatever store happened to be handy. He was continually running out of them, and borrowing from the men taking Mother’s course, or smoking butts from the ashtrays.
Martha started buying cartons of his brand, at the United Cigar Store, and leaving them in the pantry. Whenever Tom took a pack, he’d put an IOU in the carton, and settle up with Martha on pay day.
“I never thought you’d try to make money off me, like in a company store,” he’d grumble as he paid his bills.
But Martha pointed out that she was selling him the cigarettes at cost—and that he was saving money by getting the carton rate. All she wanted was the certificates.
Tom really was pleased by the convenience of Martha’s “canteen,” but he went out of his way to check and re-check her addition, and to question the authenticity of his IOUs.
“That don’t look like my writing,” he’d say. “Where’s that magnifying glass at?” Then, after he had paid with seeming reluctance and twice counted his change, he’d add: “Give me them IOUs so I can tear them up. I think some of these were the same ones you charged me for last week.”
Mother’s students found out about the supply of smokes, and began patronizing the pantry. Later, Martha started stocking razor blades, which were another item Tom usually forgot to buy.
The first premium we obtained with the certificates was a Mother’s Day present, an ornate bedside lamp with a bright and dim switch. Mother used to say that Mother’s Day was a ridiculous occasion, and that anyone who felt he had to give his female parent a special present, one day a year, must be trying to atone for 364 days of previous neglect.
We thought, though, she was telling us that so we wouldn’t feel bad because we couldn’t afford presents.
It took 650 certificates for the lamp. Mother seemed startled when we presented it to her. But when she found that we hadn’t spent our allowances for it, or dipped into the budget, she was as pleased as if she had invented Mother’s Day herself.
“When I think of you children saving those certificates for months, just so you’d have something to give me …” she began.
“You don’t believe we’re atoning for other days of neglect, do you, Mother,” Lillian asked her anxiously.
“No, I don’t think that, dear,” said Mother, and her voice broke. “I know how long you’ve been saving those certificates, and counting them at night, and … Well, I don’t think there was anything to atone for.”
After that we got the catcher’s mitt, an electric toaster, ice skates and skis, a cigarette lighter for Tom, and finally a bottle-capper.
Martha decided on the bottle-capper so that the younger children could make their own soft drinks. The budget, in the past, hadn’t been able to include root beer or ginger ale. But Martha knew the children were fond of soda pop, and would like to have it in the ice box to serve their friends. It still was out of the question for us to buy soft drinks at a store, because a case would have disappeared in a single afternoon. But if the children could make the drinks at home, the cost would be negligible.
Old gin, rye, White Rock, syrup, and bluing bottles were rounded up from the neighbors’ basements, washed thoroughly, and then boiled in a tub on the kitchen stove. Some of the labels wouldn’t come off, but we figured the bottles were clean on the inside.
Sugar was added to root beer extract, which in turn was poured into a vat of simmering water. Then a little yeast was added, and the mixture poured into the bottles. After the caps were applied, the bottles were stored in the basement for a week, and then were ready to drink.
The children thought, and so did their friends, that the root beer was the peer of any that came from the store. A new batch was made every couple of weeks, and finally a sort of assembly line technique was developed, with two children washing bottles in the basement, two boiling bottles on the stove, and two mixing the brew.
The empty bottles were lined up around the stove, and the mixture siphoned into them through a rubber tube. We could make a couple of hundred bottles of root beer in less than forty minutes, and from that time on the basement always contained a batch that was ready to drink, and another batch that was aging.
Fortunately, Tom liked root beer, so there was no objection from him about dirtying up his kitchen. But as the weeks passed, he said he was getting mighty tired of the same old flavor.
The next time we made root beer, he suggested that we leave about a gallon of the mixture on the stove, so that he could change the flavor to suit his taste.
Tom added a package of prunes, a cup of sugar, and a whole yeast cake into the brew. Then he boiled it for half an hour, before siphoning it into the remaining bottles.
“I’m putting my name in chalk on these there bottles,” he told us. “Don’t nobody touch them, because I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I’m going to leave them stand for six months, and see how the flavor is.”
“You’re sure you’re not trying to make yourself some kind of home brew?” Frank wanted to know.
“Who, me?” Tom asked piously. “There’s a law against that, ain’t there?”
There was a law against it, all right. But after a day off in West Orange, Tom in the past had sometimes returned to the house smelling strongly of something that wasn’t root beer.
COUSIN LEORA wasn’t really a cousin, which was something to be thankful for. Her family and Mother’s had been close friends and neighbors in Oakland, and she had married and moved East about the same time that Mother had.
She was plump, soft, bejeweled and inquisitive. None of us liked her, and Dad had despised her. He said she was a bloated drone, and that if the Bolshevists ever took over—which wouldn’t surprise him—she’d be at the top of their purge list.
Cousin Leora’s husband wisely had given up the ghost within a year of their wedding day
. It was an action we felt sure he never regretted, although his worldly goods had been considerable. Left a widow with a sizable fortune, which flowed through her fingers like flypaper, she lived by herself in an apartment in New York.
Her visits to our house had become fairly frequent since Dad’s death. Since she liked to quiz us about family affairs, she usually came when Mother was out of town. Invariably she arrived while we were eating supper. And, almost invariably, it would happen to be the one night of the week when we were relying on leftovers.
Once she had written Grosie, Mother’s mother in Oakland, that she doubted if we were getting enough to eat. As a result, Mother had had a series of anxious telephone calls from Grosie asking if everything was all right, and if we needed money.
The calls had upset Mother so much that all of us tried to act particularly well-disciplined and well-fed, when Cousin Leora came to call.
A few months after we started to make our own root beer, Cousin Leora dropped in one night just as we had sat down to the table. Tom saw her chauffeur wheel the limousine into our driveway, and rushed into the dining room to spread the alarm.
“Everybody quiet down and behave hisself,” Tom shouted. “It’s the fat old snoop from New York.”
“Not,” gasped Martha, clutching her head, “Cousin Leora! How could she know this is hash night?”
“I think she likes my secret reseat,” Tom said proudly. “I believe Old Snoop can smell my hash all the way acrost the Hudson.”
“Open some cans of vegetables,” Martha hollered as she dashed into the front hall to hang up overcoats and to kick arctics and ice skates into a closet. “And everybody pick up his dishes and put on a Sunday tablecloth.”
Cousin Leora entered the hall without ringing the bell.
“Why look who’s here,” Martha cooed. “Cousin Leora! What a lovely surprise. I do hope you’ll stay for supper.”
Belles on Their Toes Page 15