Belles on Their Toes

by Frank B. Gilbreth

  “Aw, come on, tell us,” Jane insisted.

  “Well,” Mother blushed, “when it was your father, I guess I said something like, ‘Why Mr. Gilbreth, imagine finding you here. Where have you been keeping yourself all evening?’”

  “Was that before or after you were married?” Jane asked.

  “Oh, both,” said Mother, now apparently intent on her reading.

  “And where had he been keeping himself?” said Jane, refusing to let the subject drop.

  “What’s that, dear?” Mother asked, as if she hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Where had he been?”

  “Your father? Never very far away, dear,” Mother smiled. “Not down in the locker room.”

  JANE’S DEBUT at high school was a success, and Jack and Bob informed her she had passed the opening day scrutiny. Besides Jane, only a handful of seniors had worn bobby sox clothes. But the handful was composed of girls who admittedly set the fashions, and there was no doubt that the new style would take hold.

  Fred and Dan returned to Brown and Pennsylvania, respectively, and Jack and Bob continued the grooming of their youngest sister.

  She was to be friendly with everybody, including sad apples and teachers. She was to learn the names of everyone in her classes, and to speak to them by name when she passed them in the halls. She was to be a good student, without giving the impression of studying too much. And she was to keep her face, hands and nails clean, even if it meant going to the girls’ room between every class.

  “There’s nothing worse than a dingy looking girl,” Jack told her. “So don’t think I’m minding your business if I see you in school and tell you to go wash yourself. I’ll just whisper it.”

  “How about dingy boys?” Jane protested.

  “Why Bob and I always look just like we stepped out of a bandbox,” Jack smirked.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Jane. “But if you did, you must have been playing the drums.”

  “Nobody notices how boys look,” said Jack, cuffing her fondly. “And nobody cares whether boys are popular in school.”

  Sometimes Jane thought it was more trouble than it was worth, especially when the two boys said she might begin to put on weight, and so started taking her desserts away from her. But she had to admit they had been right about the clothes, and she suspected they knew what they were talking about on other things, too.

  She started having movie dates at night, on weekends. Mother didn’t disapprove, and Jack and Bob were elated. The boys wanted to make sure, though, that no one got the wrong idea about what sort of a girl she was, so they always told her just what time she was to be home. Usually, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, they told her date, too. When the date saw the size of her older brothers, and was informed that they’d be waiting up for Jane, there was little or no argument.

  “Even Cinderella could stay out till midnight,” Jane would complain to Mother. “Jack and Bob make my dates bring me home by 10:30.”

  “Your father wouldn’t let Anne go out at all at night, unless he went along as a chaperone,” Mother comforted her. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have such liberal-minded men in the family.”

  “Good night, that was a generation ago. Times have changed!”

  The first dance of the school year was a junior-senior-alumni affair, held during the Thanksgiving holidays. It was unusual for girls in the tenth grade to be invited—in fact none of our girls ever had been asked until they had become juniors.

  But Jane’s special popularity course had brought results. She had invitations from a junior and two seniors. The boys told her to accept the junior, since he had asked her first. The word always got around, they said, if you turned down an early invitation to accept a later one.

  Fred and Dan were home for the holidays, and they and the younger boys agreed to go stag to the party, to make sure Jane wasn’t stuck on the dance floor. Each of the boys also enlisted the aid of four or five friends, all of whom seemed willing, even eager, to cooperate.

  Right from the start, Jane was broken more than any other girl. Her hand squeezes as she left one partner, and her pleased smiles as she started off with another, apparently became important factors as the night wore on. Because even without her claque, she was undeniably getting a rush.

  Then Dan cut in, and found Jane near tears.

  “He kissed me,” she whispered indignantly. “I slapped him as hard as I could, and he just laughed and kissed me again.”

  Dan roughly shoved away two boys who were trying to cut in.

  “Beat it,” he growled. “She doesn’t want to dance with you.”

  “Those weren’t the ones,” Jane whispered, as the boys retreated.

  “I don’t care,” said Dan. “You’re not going to dance with anybody until we teach you some more.”

  He signaled Fred, Jack, and Bob, and then guided Jane out onto a porch.

  “Who did it?” Dan asked. “I’m going to show him whose sister to make passes at.”

  “A boy named Ned Morris,” Jane told him. “He’s a senior. I hope you fix him good.”

  Fred, Jack and Bob joined them on the porch, and Dan explained the situation.

  “He’s in my class,” said Jack, “so I get to whip him. Right?”

  Dan and Bob said that was right, but Fred disagreed.

  “We spent a whole summer teaching her to be popular,” he warned, “and now you want to undo it all. Nobody’ll take her out if he thinks he’ll have to end up by fighting us, in case he gets romantic.”

  “It’s really our fault,” Bob conceded dramatically. “We taught her how to be attractive, but we didn’t teach her how to turn it off.”

  “I slapped him good,” Jane said. “I thought that would turn it off.”

  “Worst thing you could do,” said Fred, shaking his head. “It’s our fault, all right. We’ll keep a close eye on things for the rest of the night, and don’t you let anybody else take you off the dance floor.”

  MOTHER WAS ASLEEP when Jane and the boys returned home from the dance, but she heard them and came down in her bathrobe to help them raid the icebox. Jane wasn’t upset any more, and she told Mother with considerable detail about the rush she had had.

  “You’re lucky to have so many brothers to help you get started,” Mother said, looking proudly at the boys. “You boys have been mighty sweet to her.”

  “I’ll say,” Jane agreed excitedly. “And what do you think, Mother, tonight they’re going to teach me about kissing.”

  “I think that’s fine,” said Mother, “and it’s not every girl … They’re going to teach you about what?” she shouted.

  “About kissing,” said Jane.

  “I won’t have it,” Mother announced flatly. “I try to be modern. I didn’t say a word when you were showing her about handsqueezes and things like that—things most girls don’t know until they’re in their twenties.” She raised her voice again. “But I won’t have any lessons in that. The very idea!”

  It took a little explaining to get across the notion that the boys were planning to teach Jane how not to be kissed. And after Mother had heard what had happened at the dance, she agreed that the instruction wasn’t taking place a minute too soon.

  She poured herself a glass of milk, while Fred fixed her a peanut butter sandwich, and she got plates and cut apple cake for everyone. Then, after looking around selfconsciously as if she wasn’t sure but what Tom would return unexpectedly from the hospital, she perched on his table.

  “School’s in session,” she declared.

  The boys asked Jane how and where it happened.

  “We were dancing, and he asked me how I’d like to go out on the porch and look at the moon,” she said. “I squeezed his hand, like you showed me, and said I wouldn’t mind.”

  “No wonder you got kissed, you sap you,” Dan moaned. “What did you do that for?”

  “You told me to,” Jane replied angrily. “Don’t try to put the blame on me.
You said I should try to make all of them like me. How was I supposed to know he didn’t want to look at the moon?”

  “Jane’s right,” Mother agreed. “It’s not her fault.”

  The boys said that from now on Jane was supposed to shun parked cars and porches, and was to view with suspicion any conversation about planets, satellites, constellations, or the need for a breath of fresh air. They showed her, too, how to sit far over on her own side of the car, coming home from a date, and how to lean forward, or twist around so her back was to the door, if anyone tried to put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Now if a boy kisses you anyway,” said Jack, “the best squelch you can give him is to act like a dummy. The kiss doesn’t affect you one way or the other. You’re bored with the whole business.”

  “That usually gives them the idea,” Bob agreed. “If it doesn’t, you can wipe your lips with the back of your hand, and look as if there’s something there that their best friend ought to tell them.”

  “Never slap them,” said Fred. “A slap just makes them mad. And they still don’t know whether you really object to being kissed, or whether you’re just playing hard to get.”

  “You boys,” said Mother, disapprovingly, “seem to know a great deal about it. Where’d you find out about things like that?”

  “It’s information,” Fred grinned, “that’s handed down from father to son.”

  TOM DIED a few months later, convinced that pleurisy was the old enemy that finally had laid him low. While he was at the hospital, some of us went to see him almost every day. Sometimes he’d beg to be taken home, where he felt sure he could cure himself in a few days with his Quinine Remedy. But the doctors wouldn’t allow him to be moved.

  On several occasions we smuggled bottles of the Remedy into the hospital, hoping that his faith in its curative powers might make him well again. It didn’t seem to affect him, one way or the other.

  Tom always had been suspicious of hospitals. He had often told us his belief that doctors sometimes gave the “black bottle”—poison—to patients who didn’t have plenty of money.

  Toward the end, when he recognized us less frequently, he refused to take any medicines, even the Remedy.

  It could be said that Tom was a man who never amounted to much. By some standards, perhaps he wasn’t even a very good man. He swore a good deal, and in later years he drank more than he should have. But the day he died, twelve people wept for him.

  That number may be more than par for the course.

  21. All Alone

  THE RAISING OF ELEVEN children had taken a far heavier toll on our house than it had on Mother. Mother still was slim, quick, and erect, but the house was tired and sagging.

  The stairs were grooved, and spokes were missing from the banisters. The furnace, never too efficient, now could be coaxed to breathe heat only into the central rooms. The floors had been scuffed beyond repair, and initials had been carved in some of the woodwork. One of the columns of the porte-cochere had begun to rot, causing the roof to angle downward like the tilt of an old rake’s hat.

  The year Jane was to go to college, Mother agreed with us that it was time for her to move out of the house. We thought she’d try to sell it, but she didn’t like the idea of other people living in it, and she knew it wouldn’t bring much money anyway. Besides needing repairs, it was built primarily for a family with ten or twelve children. People who could afford to run such a large house didn’t have families that size any more.

  Mother called for bids and had the house torn down. She supervised the demolition herself. If she felt any pangs as the workmen stripped off the walls and laid open the interior, she kept them to herself.

  The motion study equipment, the files, the double desk she and Dad had used to perfect their original time-saving experiments went to the laboratory at Purdue. The mahogany furniture she had had since her wedding was sent to a cabinetmaker to remove the scars and stains of a generation of children and several generations of dogs and miscellaneous livestock.

  Mother’s finances had improved immeasurably as more consulting jobs were offered her. And now she also came into an in inheritance from her family’s estate. With Bob partly through college and only Jane to go, Mother could retire, if she wanted to, and relax for the rest of her life.

  After years of working and scrimping, she could have fur coats, a maid to bring her breakfast in bed, even a limousine and a chauffeur, if she wanted them.

  Mother didn’t want them, and she had no idea of stopping work. She and Jane moved into a middle-priced apartment in Montclair. The old furniture gave a familiar appearance to Mother’s new living and dining room—except that everything was tidy, polished and re-upholstered. She started using her best silver and china, that she had packed away years before, when Anne was starting to walk and pulling things off of tables.

  A cleaning woman came over twice a week, but Mother and Jane did their own cooking. With unrestricted use of her own kitchen, Mother soon became a good cook. If Jane had let Mother have her way, Jane would have been the one who had breakfast in bed. As it was, no matter how early Jane got up, her eggs and toast appeared on the table about the time she walked into the dining room.

  Then Jane left for college, and Mother was alone. None of us liked the idea of that. We thought that anyone who had raised eleven youngsters always needed children in the house. Besides, it seemed only right that, after all the years she had looked out for us, we should start looking out for her.

  We hadn’t had a meeting of our Family Council for years, but when Anne next came to Montclair from Cleveland for a visit, we called a meeting of the Council to discuss Mother.

  The Council had been one of Dad’s ideas, and he had patterned it after employer-employee boards in industry. The Council had decided matters of policy, such as the size of allowances and the apportionment of house and yard work. Dad, as self-appointed chairman, had his own set of parliamentary rules, and wasn’t above launching a one man filibuster or bottling up appropriations bills in committees. But for the most part, the majority ruled.

  We didn’t want Mother to know about the meeting to discuss her, so we held it at Ernestine’s house. It wasn’t a formal session—no one presided with gavel in hand and a pitcher of ice water at his elbow, as Dad used to. But we did sit in our old positions, around Ern’s dining room table. We still looked on Anne, now a matron in her late thirties, as automatically in charge when she was home. She sat at the head of the table.

  We agreed, first of all, that either Mother would move in with one of our families, or one of our families would move in with her. We felt that what had kept Mother going through the years was the goal of sending all of us through college. When that goal was achieved, there might not be any incentive to keep going, and that would mean Mother would have to make an adjustment.

  We thought we’d better start preparing her, in advance, for the adjustment. We knew that many women in their sixties had had years of experience in taking things easy. They played bridge, they talked about movies and their friends, or they sat on rockers with cats on their laps.

  Mother didn’t know how to do any of those things, but we thought perhaps we could help her learn.

  There was something else that all of us took into consideration, but hesitated to put into words. Suppose Mother should want to keep working, but as she got older the job and lecture offers should become less and less frequent. There was a rule at Purdue that faculty members had to retire when they reached seventy. That wasn’t too many years in the future.

  The Council appointed Ernestine to talk with Mother about moving in with one of us. If we could get Mother to do that—to forget about the idea that she might be imposing on someone—she would become interested in helping to raise another generation. Then Jane’s graduation would be just another incident.

  But when Ernestine put the proposition up to Mother the next day, she might as well have saved her breath.

  “I can’t tell you how much I appre
ciate it, dear,” said Mother. “But I couldn’t do that.”

  “Of course you can do it,” Ernestine told her. “There’s no use being stubborn.”

  Mother may have thought that was the pot calling the kettle black, but she realized the intentions were good, anyway.

  “As long as Bob and Jane are in college,” she said, “I want them to know that we—just they and I—have our own home. That’s something that all of you other children had, and I think it’s important for them. For me, too.”

  “How about when they’re out of college and married?” Ernestine asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. And I don’t know. Your father’s mother lived with us for quite a few years after we were married. I was fond of her, and I think she was of me. But I don’t think either of us really liked the situation. I don’t know.”

  So Mother continued to live alone, except when Bob and Jane were home on vacation. And we were still worried about her.

  World War II came, then. Five of the boys were in it, and overseas. Mother was older, suddenly, and sometimes she was tired.

  She wrote each of the boys every day, and waited mornings for the mailman before she went into New York. She never talked about the war or how battles were going. Telegrams made her nervous; she held them up to the light before she opened them.

  There were new demands on her time. We could see there wouldn’t be any question about her not being busy as long as the war lasted. She was working with the War Manpower Commission. The government was using her studies on motions of the disabled, to help rehabilitate amputees. War industries wanted the latest time-saving techniques. Many of the graduates of her Motion Study Courses, which she had discontinued some years before when the engineering jobs started to come in, had important production jobs, and sought her out for consultation. Walt Disney made a training film, in Technicolor, of the process chart.

  She journeyed to Providence to help christen a Liberty ship named for Dad. She went to Chapel Hill for Bob’s graduation. Finally the day arrived when she boarded a train to Ann Arbor, for Jane’s.