Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  That’s my theory, and on the basis of the psychology of Citizen Kane, it’s a perfectly sound theory. The only thing wrong with it is that in real life, if a man has a desperate need to go to the closet and look at an old sled—or some other symbol of lonely strength and self-sufficiency—he finds, sooner or later, that the children have taken it.

  Consider my own symbol. I don’t know why I cared so much about that .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. I never used it. I carefully avoided accepting bullets for it. I know that a loaded gun in a house full of children is an invitation to tragedy. And yet, there it was, in my left-hand bureau drawer along with my handkerchiefs, oiled and cleaned, and well, there. And then one day it wasn’t there and I cared.

  And this despite the fact that none of the memories associated with it were particularly proud. I fired it once at a German officer running down the road, and missed.

  And once in Italy’s December snows, I used it in a way that is still painful to remember. We had been marching and skirmishing all day and when it got dark we came near a village and the boys in my platoon were elated at the prospect of sleeping indoors.

  But somehow the colonel and the majors and the captains all got under roofs ahead of us, and all I could find for my platoon was a tiny white house, occupied by a young Italian family.

  I wondered why the young father who stood there barring the door wasn’t in the army. Was he a deserter? Or was it that he was home on leave—his wife had a very new baby-when he had been caught by the Allied landing?

  He was wearing plain dark trousers and a white shirt and he had a handsome face under his black hair. But there was hatred in the dark eyes and he was adamant in his refusal to let us come in.

  So out came the revolver and sometimes at night, still, I have the picture in my head of the man and the woman and the bundled-up baby trudging up the road in the snow while sixteen soldiers move into their house. It is not a pleasing self-portrait for a man to go to bed with. “Don’t be silly,” I say to myself, “they must have had friends to stay with and we were out of their house the next morning. Other families used to let us move in for a night and they didn’t go up the road. So quit thinking of that family disappearing in the snow.” But I don’t like the picture, and particularly I don’t like the one before it—the one of me at the door, pulling the revolver.

  Why do I go on about this silly revolver? Obviously, it must have been a security blanket, a symbol of status and also a symbol of a time before I had all this family. It reminds me that I got along, nevertheless, very well.

  The loss of most things is merely annoying—combs, socks, money, hairbrushes, ties, razors. Often, to be sure, very annoying, particularly in the morning. You get out of bed, cheerily recounting to yourself that which ought to be done. You make your way to the shower, and then, naked before the mirror, you soap your face with shaving cream, reach out to the right or to the left for the razor on the shelf, and it’s not there.

  It is the moment when a man feels at his most powerless. He is tricked and defeated and gulled. Right at the beginning of the race saboteurs have caused him to break stride.

  So there you are in the bathroom with nothing on and a lot of soap on your face. You can’t go out into the hall and shout, “Who took my razor?” because you are naked and if you shout, “Who took my razor?” from behind the closed bathroom door, somebody will say, “Dad’s shouting.”

  On the other hand, there is the soap. If you don’t do something soon, the soap will begin to disintegrate. Already it is feeling sticky.

  So there is nothing to do but wash it off and dry your face and get dressed and go look for the razor. And when you find it, you have to get partially undressed again, or else shave with your shirt on. There is nothing so disaster prone as shaving with a shirt on.

  “Who took my razor?” I cry angrily, as I march from bedroom to bedroom, and girls fly before me through the hall. I buy them razors at Christmas time. I always do. But sooner or later one of them will come, nevertheless, and take mine.

  It is, as I say, an annoyance. But the loss of the .38 was something else. One day it was not in its customary place, but for all I know it may on that day have been missing for weeks or even months. A man can raise hell about an annoyance like a missing razor, but a missing security blanket calls for solemnity. Quietly, I asked about the .38. Nobody knew the answer; it was just gone.

  In the same mysterious way, I lost my sleeping bag, which was also a link to the past though to a past less long ago. I had lugged that bag over a great many mountain trails in Colorado and California and I treasured it in the true sense of the word, taking pleasure in the fact that it was there.

  The sleeping bag disappeared not long after the revolver, and I pined more loudly and openly about it, perhaps because pining for a thing of use seemed more rational and therefore more acceptable than pining for an object of sentimentality.

  Though for that matter, the two were really about the same. It had been years since I used that sleeping bag. It was, in fact, in 1966 when the California State Board of Education of which I was president assaulted Mount Whitney on a dare.

  We had been discussing physical education programs, and I had said that I kept in pretty good shape by running a mile every morning. Dr. Maxwell Rafferty, who was the Superintendent of Public Instruction, disagreed with me, as was to be expected from one who presided over a system requiring every schoolchild in the state to participate in physical education for one hour every school day.

  I suggested that all nine board members, none of whom exercised one hour per day, were nevertheless in pretty good shape and that to prove it we’d climb the state’s highest mountain.

  Some of the members were wise enough to have other things to do on the appointed weekend but I was stuck with the challenge because it got into the newspapers and several reporters said they wanted to go along.

  I got to the foot of Whitney very late and had to hike at night to catch the party. It was cold and I was exhausted. But my son, David, had been in the advance and when I arrived, there was an air mattress, blown up and out for me, and there was my sleeping bag. The next morning Billy Norris, the Board’s vice president and a fellow hiker, had to remind me that lugging an extra sleeping bag to 10,000 feet and then blowing up an air mattress was a thoughtful and loving thing for a fourteen-year-old to do.

  So now that sleeping bag was gone, too, and nothing to do about it. But I mourned, and out loud.

  And then one winter evening at dinner, Joannie stood up behind her chair and said she wanted to give a gift to her father on the condition that he would ask no questions about the source of the gift. And I said, “Of course,” not knowing what she had hi mind. And she produced the sleeping bag from under her chair. At which point David rose, asked for the same condition, and handed me across the table an old beaten-up rusted-out gun. It was recognizable though. It was my .38.

  So there they are back in their places, the gun in my drawer, the sleeping bag in my closet, both somewhat the worse for adventures about which I have never inquired, but both effectively fulfilling their purpose as security blankets.

  I wonder if on some future winter’s eve I’ll get back my .22 rifle, my Swiss army knife and—to mention mere nuisances again—the tops to my blue pajamas.

  The Love Affair

  Sometimes when I see Nancy’s love affair, his boots propped on the dining-room table, his motorcycle crash helmet on the floor, his slightly blotched visage confronting me with wary but otherwise expressionless eyes, my mind goes back to that parachute I brought home from Italy.

  In Italy, VE Day dawned very hot and the sun beat down mercilessly as we got our gear together and lined up by the trucks which were to carry us on the first stage of the journey home. There was a whole pile of parachutes dumped by the side of the road and there were piles for other kinds of equipment too and the piles grew as more and more soldiers got rid of that which they would no longer need.

  But I was in doubt
about whether to put my parachute in the pile. A red-faced sergeant, still packing his on his back, made up my mind for me. “Are you going to keep that thing?” I asked. “Hell, yes,” he answered, “I’ll give it to my daughter for a wedding dress.”

  They made parachutes out of real silk in World War II.

  So, my parachute has been stored in one basement after another during the years since, a no-doubt moldering symbol of the kind of wedding ceremonies my daughters would choose.

  You can visualize the scene. A lovely afternoon in June; gray flannel trousers and white coat; an awning; a glass of champagne. F. Scott Fitzgerald reduced to modest but respectable circumstance.

  Alas, it may never be. Nancy is the only one of my daughters who has yet fallen in love and I do not see anywhere in her future the slightest promise for the use of that parachute.

  At eighteen, Nancy has without question the classic good looks in the family. Blond, tall, good legs, good figure, large blue eyes, oval face. Add to that a high intelligence—at least she gets the best grades in the family—and a polite but unswerving sureness of purpose. When Nancy was fourteen, my friend Jack Valenti warned me of what was to come, and I have often looked back wistfully upon his advice.

  “Tom,” he said, in his slight Texas drawl, “I tell you what I’d do if that were my daughter. I’d get myself a damned good shotgun and I’d set out on the front stoop.”

  I laughed. You can afford to laugh when a girl is fourteen.

  Nancy’s love affair entered my life about two years ago, having previously entered Nancy’s life as a classmate in high school. The first time I saw him he was wearing a dirty red sweater, a pair of pants and boots and had his feet propped up on the table. He did not speak to me then and has seldom spoken to me since, a fact which I have tried, not altogether successfully, to excuse on the grounds that he is embarrassed and shy.

  And I know that it is I who make him embarrassed and shy. I cannot help it. I do not like boys who prop their boots on somebody’s table; I do not like boys who don’t introduce themselves. I know it’s old-fashioned; I know that teen-agers are self-conscious and that self-consciousness sometimes reveals itself in seeming rudeness; I know that neither clothes nor manners make a man. But I cannot help it; I do not like boys who seem to have absolutely nothing to do except sit in my dining room or my kitchen and stare at my daughter. In short, and from the start, I did not like Nancy’s love affair.

  And as I look back on the symbol of the parachute and wonder how I got into the fix I am now in with Nancy, I must say in honesty that the fault is mostly mine. Not liking Nancy’s love affair, I made only occasional and not very strenuous efforts to get to know him so that I should like him better. I hoped that even without Valenti’s shotgun, he would go away. Any psychiatrist could have told me it was not the thing to do. A father who disapproves of a love affair and who makes his disapproval clear is almost certain to evoke rebellion. In this instance, it went all the way.

  Nancy wrote a note of apology and explanation, asserting decision, independence and love.

  Joan said, “At least Nancy’s note is sweet.” I said, “‘Shocking’ is a better word; ‘maddening,’ ‘dumfounding,’ ‘cataclysmic.’”

  I disapproved. I strongly disapproved. I think sex assumes responsibility. I recalled Judge Ben B. Lindsay, who shocked the nation during the twenties by proposing what he called companionate marriage. Even Judge Lindsay would have had the couple come to court and obtain sanction for the trial marriage. He knew that sex assumed responsibility.

  But as time has passed and temper cooled, I have begun to argue with myself. How long ago did Judge Lindsay propose companionate marriage? Fifty years ago. That was a war ago; a pill ago; a liberation ago. And what, I ask myself, does sex assume responsibility for?

  For children, comes the ready answer. But the answer to that is that there won’t be any children, or needn’t be. Pill.

  For physical care, then; for a roof; a bed; board. But Nancy has a roof and a bed and board. She has all that from me, and if I choose not to share them with her any more, she has a job now that she’s graduated from high school, and it’s a good job and she can pay for all these things on her own. Liberation.

  Well, then, I told myself, sex assumes responsibility for marriage. Or so we used to think. But Nancy does not want to get married. I’m not sure she has even made up her mind to live with her love affair. She is talking about going off to Alaska with him for a month so that she can find out. Marriage, in Nancy’s lexicon, is a favor you might be willing to do for your father or mother but only after you have lived with your love affair for quite a long time so as to be sure.

  Is there not some reason in her point of view? I ask myself that question. I hate to ask it because my every instinct is to find Nancy’s conduct so maddening as to warrant ordering her from the house. But much as I hate to ask the question, I hate the answer more. For the answer—I say to myself, “Be cool now and answer the question”—the answer is “Of course, there is some reason to her point of view.”

  I saw her point of view most clearly on that Saturday when she lay in bed with a stomach ailment. All day, the love affair, braving me and my unwelcoming air, tiptoed up and down the stairs bringing cups of hot tea from the kitchen. At dusk I went out to get myself some coffee and found him standing over the burner.

  “Not hot enough?” I asked, disguising embarrassment with innocuousness.

  “She can only take a few sips at a time,” he answered. “I have to keep it from getting cold.”

  “Devotion,” I remarked to myself, “is a virtue which does not require the sanction of marriage.” Nancy’s love affair loved her back.

  And yet I must say that if Nancy’s point of view prevails, and observation tells me that its adherents are of growing numbers, I fear for the old traditions. I should hate to see them go. Is there any hope for weddings—with or without silk gowns? If a wedding is no longer a necessary or even particularly desirable consequence of a decision by two people to live together, will those who are married be counted as squares? And how shall the census bureau count families? Marriage rates and divorce rates won’t mean much any more.

  But I think of things I counted as more important. I remember exactly where I was standing and exactly how Joan looked when I persuaded her to set a date for our wedding and I remember exactly where I was standing and exactly how Joan looked when she changed her mind and I had to persuade her again.

  And a wedding—isn’t it always and no matter of whom a lovely thing? All that hope and kindness and tenderness and coming together? The words of the vows are lovely words as are the friends to look back on, and the official parting from the family. Will girls no longer care to remember that their fathers were nervous and couldn’t tie their ties?

  I’m less sure about the sex. Two inexperienced people on a wedding night probably do not afford each other a pleasant memory though maybe, in the maturity of later years, it’s a funny one. A wedding used to be sanction for maturity suddenly arrived. Nancy’s generation may be right in the tacit assumption that it was silly of our generation to assume that maturity came all at once, on the wedding night.

  So I don’t really know whether to feel sad or angry or just resigned about Nancy. And I am not certain yet whether I am witnessing the coming of a new age or merely a particularly vivid and personal departure from the standards I held dear.

  And I’m only kidding about the parachute. I don’t care if nobody uses the parachute. Let it rot in the basement. Except, I was thinking just the other evening about how Susan happened to go to Dartmouth. I went to Dartmouth. I’m on the board of trustees there. One night after I got home from a trustee meeting, I was standing in Susan and Joannie’s room telling them about how the trustees had voted to admit girls. There had been a long argument with many of the trustees vigorously opposed, and I said I had fought hard for the girls.

  And then I went down the hall to go to bed and the next morning Joannie t
old me that after I left, Susan said, “Well, that settled it. I’ll have to go to Dartmouth.” And Joannie said, “Why?” And Susan answered, “Poor Dad. Somebody has to.”

  Say, you don’t suppose that when Susan has her love affair, she might want to use that old parachute down in the basement?

  The Anti-Saloon League and Me

  When I was a small boy in Dubuque, Iowa, I accompanied my mother and my grandmother one evening to hear a lecture by the Reverend Wayne B. Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League.

  Mr. Wheeler was a large, florid man with white hair and an old-fashioned style of oratory. He boomed at the respectable citizens gathered in the basement of the First Congregational Church, and after he boomed, he pled: “For the sake of the soldiers, dead on the field of battle; for the sake of the unborn babies stretching out their heavenly arms, woncha, woncha give up rum?”

  Mother wrote a description of the meeting for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury and reported that the Reverend Wheeler pled first with the organist of the Second Baptist Church, then with the rector of St. John’s.

  “He induces,” she wrote, “the whole company to stand in groups and for an assortment of reasons: ‘the WCTU ladies because they are the mothers of the Anti-Saloon League. Oh, what a story could be told about them.’”

  Mother thought the Reverend Wheeler was funny, but she wrote her article under a pseudonym. It would have been almost as cruel to let Grandmother know that any child of hers would make fun of the Anti-Saloon League as it would have been to let her know that any child of hers would take a drink, which, of course, Mother did.

  I think of the relationship between my mother and my grandmother on the subject of the taboo because it seems to me a nearly perfect mirror of the relationship between my children and me. My grandmother thought alcohol an abomination. My mother disagreed. I think drugs an abomination. My children disagree. “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh” did not adequately warn us that the roof was about to fall in.