“Are you quite sure you’ll be able to swing this deal?” I asked grimly as I dried Miss Peabody’s priceless Lowestoft.
“But of course I can, my little love, with you here to help me. Frankly, I’m just as glad that the Pringle creature has gone. She knew nothing—less than nothing—of handling children. They must be led, not driven. After all, these babies have undergone a severe traumatic experience. All those bombs, the fear, the insecurity—being plucked out of their nests and sent to a strange land. And then being pushed around by a lot of paid help like Miss Pringle—interested only in the salary. You’ll see. My example of loving understanding and gentle guidance will work wonders. And of course I’ll be needing a man around the house,” she added hastily. “Especially one who’s been with the British Army and whom they can look up to as a hero. By the way, I have a splendid book on child guidance. I want you to read it tonight. We haven’t a moment to lose.”
We hadn’t. In the living room the children were playing their game. I learned in a couple of days that when a game is quiet it’s dangerous. Tiptoeing into the room, we found the girls lined up against the wall, their hands on their hips, wriggling obscenely, while the boys sauntered past scrutinizing them carefully.
“What game is this you’re playing, Albert dear?” Auntie Mame asked.
“Wattaloo Bridge, mum,” Albert said prissily.
“What sort of game is that, dear?”
“The gels is all prostychutes and we’re pickin’ ’em up.”
Auntie Mame’s jaw fell open.
“’Ow’s about a little tupenny uproight wiv yew, Myme old gel?” Edmund said, leering slimily.
“Mind your manners, damn you!” I roared.
“Patrick, please. Bear in mind the neurotic condition of these little ones,” Auntie Mame said. “Now dears, I think we’ve had enough of this game. It’s bedtime and we must all get a good rest to prepare ourselves for the joys of tomorrow. Patrick and I will undress you.”
“Those kids are big enough to undress themselves,” I muttered.
“It’s important this first night,” Auntie Mame whispered. “Establishes the intimacy of the mother and father relationship.”
Upstairs there was a bit of confusion as to who was going to undress whom. Edmund, who was fifteen and more precocious than seemed desirable, wanted Auntie Mame, and Gladys insisted on me. We turned thumbs down on that. I started out with Albert. I think I really hated Albert the most, although it’s difficult to decide. But he was the easiest to handle. Being a prig and a toady and stool pigeon and a coward, he was only too anxious to curry favor. When I got Albert into the bathtub I tackled Ginger, a kid of eight who was the most sullen, willful, negative child I’ve ever seen. Then I turned to Edmund.
“Touch me an’ Oi’ll yell the ’ouse down,” he growled.
“Suits me,” I said. “Get to bed by yourself.”
“M’ybe Oi will an’ m’ybe Oi won’t.”
“I’ll bet you will,” I said grabbing him by the shoulder.
“Tyke ya filthy ’ands orfa me and kiss me arse,” he said, bending over.
“Okay, Edmund,” I said. “Look, no hands.” I hauled off and gave him a kick that sent him flying across the room. I’d used my bad leg and the pain was shattering, but it was worth it. Edmund slunk right under the covers.
I got into bed about midnight and tried to read The Twentieth Century Child. I’d just reached an informative chapter— “Masturbation: A Sin or a Sign?”—when there was a faint rustling at my door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“It’s me. Gladys.”
“What do you want?”
“Oim caold.”
“Well, there’s an extra blanket in your closet.”
“Aow, c’mawn, tall, dock, an’ ’an’sim, tyke me inter bed with yew and ’eat me up a bit,” she gurgled unalluringly through the door.
“You get back to your room,” I roared, “or I’ll warm your backside so you won’t be able to sit down for a year.”
“Sy-dist,” she giggled, and tiptoed away.
I’ve never gone through such a summer in my life. Those six limeys were enough to make Winston Churchill pro-Hitler. Gladys, at thirteen, was a wanton little nymphomaniac. Edmund, at fifteen, was a complete thug with halitosis and an advanced case of satyriasis. Why he and Gladys couldn’t have found some release in one another was beyond me, but that would have been too considerate of them. Edmund had a yen for Auntie Mame while Gladys went in heavily for me.
Eleven-year-old Enid was a kleptomaniac, and whenever anything was missing one only had to look in Enid’s room to find it. Ginger was an illegitimate child who exploded the old theory that love children are always the loveliest. I never heard him say Yes once. Albert at ten was just despicable, and his little sister, Margaret Rose, although the best of the lot, was a chronic bed wetter and no bargain.
But Auntie Mame stuck to her guns and her psychology. She kept insisting that the children were improving, although it was lost on me. The treasures in Miss Peabody’s house went faster than I could keep track of them. The Sully portrait of Colonel Peabody served as a dartboard. A priceless primitive of a Miss Chastity Peabody developed sweeping mustachios and a full beard. Every day I’d check off a bit of new breakage against the inventory. On their best day, the kids managed forty thousand dollars’ worth; on their worst, a paltry three hundred. Rich as Auntie Mame was, it made my blood run cold. Nor were her attempts at color therapy very successful. The authentic wallpapers were painted over a dozen times that summer. At first, Auntie Mame tried to interest the kids in Beauty and gave them their choice as to what colors the walls should be painted. But in the end it didn’t really matter. When the walls were light colors, the children scribbled obscenities on them in pencil. When they were dark, they used chalk. They knifed all the tires of the station wagon, and Auntie Mame, who patriotically resisted anything that smacked of black market, was helpless and had to spend a small fortune on a new set. Miss Peabody’s beautiful garden was totally uprooted. One by one the hand-blown glass windowpanes went. The Chippendale chairs, the elm settle, the tester beds disintegrated as though by sorcery. In an effort to get Gladys out of Silver Screen and into “something of more lasting value,” Auntie Mame sent her off for piano lessons, but the night Gladys chose to give us an impromptu recital, she struck the first chord of “That Old Black Magic” on Miss Peabody’s harpsichord with a force that completely gutted the instrument. Gladys went back to Silver Screen.
But our worst loss was Ito. While the children rather admired Nazis, they saw their archenemy in gentle, silly Ito. They called him Tojo and made his life a hell on earth. Once I discovered him shackled in the old slave quarters above the kitchen. Another time the kids found some cement in the tool shed and poured it into poor Ito’s sukiyaki. But what finished our only servant was the time they buttered the back stairs with oleomargarine. Ito’s leg was broken in three places. I raced the station wagon all the way to the hospital in Port Jefferson while Ito and Auntie Mame wailed in the back seat. It was six months before he returned. After that there was a steady procession of maids. I remember an Ophelia, a Delia, a Celia; Jessie, Bessie, and Tessie came and went immediately; Mary, Margaret, Maude, Madeleine, and Maureen passed through Miss Peabody’s portals and right out again. The last of them, Anna, stuck it out for a week. As she was leaving, she gave Auntie Mame a few homely words of advice. “Lock them kids in, turn on the oven, and walk out,” she said. Then I drove her to the station.
It was only natural that Auntie Mame would be welcomed by the summer colony in the Long Island community. And during June the two of us were asked to dine out quite a lot. One kindly grande dame even secured guest privileges for us at the local beach club, but after one day on the sands with the kiddies, Auntie Mame received a letter from the Board of Governors—“You and your nephew,” it began, “will be more than welcome, but as for
the children …” We never went to the beach club again. A few young matrons even sent their offspring over to play with our brood—once. By July Auntie Mame and I were pariahs, notorious throughout the county.
The local library revoked all privileges at the end of a week. After that, the children contented themselves with ripping up the historical records, bound in full calf, in Miss Peabody’s library. They never cared much for reading. What Auntie Mame called “thespian enchantment” was also wasted on her charges. She sent the whole brood off to see What a Life at the local summer theater one night, but they were back at the end of Act I, barred forever from the premises. The local drugstore placed an embargo against our six, as did the ice cream parlor, the Howard Johnson’s, the playground, the pizzeria, and the bordello. The kids did love the movies, but the movies didn’t love them. As the manager was refunding the price of their seats, he said to me: “I know what you and your aunt are trying to do—and don’t think I don’t admire the sentiments—but, hell, I’ve gotta make a living. Look what those little bandits have done to my seats; slashed to ribbons. Can’t get replacements. There’s a war on, you know.”
Besides their food, lodging, clothes, and constant breakage, the kids’ medical expenses cost Auntie Mame a lot more. She insisted that they go back to England in prime condition, and she engaged a local doctor to drive over from Stony Brook every Sunday, just to check up on her charges. His name was Potter and he was a lot more realistic about the kids than Auntie Mame was. “Hell,” he kept saying, “nothing the matter with any of them that a lethal chamber couldn’t cure.”
Auntie Mame also invested a couple of thousand bucks into their ugly little mouths, and it was my almost pleasant duty to take them to the dentist and listen contentedly to their screams of anguish. Their teeth finally got repaired, but the dentist retired at forty-one, a badly bitten, defeated old man.
I looked forward to the first day of school as though it were the Second Coming. At last the happy morning dawned. We were guaranteed seven hours a day, five days a week of peace and quiet—that is, whenever one of the kids wasn’t laid up with a cold or temporarily suspended from classes for some heinous atrocity. On those carefree days we had only to awaken the children, cook the breakfast, put up the lunches, drive them to school, wash the breakfast dishes, make the beds, scour the bathrooms, remove the newest blasphemies from the walls, dust and vacuum, order the food, plead with the butcher, check the laundry, and loaf. When the cold weather came I also had to stoke the furnace—antique—dump the cinders, fuel the twelve fireplaces, shovel the snow, make whatever repairs were possible on Miss Peabody’s furniture, and loaf. I kept telling myself that I never had it so good, but I didn’t believe it.
And so the winter passed. Ginger was expelled from school three times. Enid was brought home once by a policeman when she’d been caught red-handed shoplifting from Woolworth’s. Margaret Rose developed serious kidney trouble. Albert got tonsillitis in a sort of sympathy strike, and it was our pleasure to put them both in the hospital where Albert’s tonsils and adenoids were removed—a slight improvement. Then Enid stole a pair of Auntie Mame’s nail scissors and stabbed Ginger—not fatally. A citizens’ committee launched a complaint against Gladys: openly soliciting on Main Street, they said. Auntie Mame hotly denied it, but I believed every word. In March Edmund got a local girl into trouble and her father threatened to kill him. I was all for letting a father give vent to his natural emotion, but Auntie Mame paid and paid and paid.
I know now that all kids are a lot of trouble, and I really don’t think that Auntie Mame and I would have minded quite so much if there had been just one lovable quality in any of them. But there wasn’t. Auntie Mame worried and fretted over them and put up a pretty fair pretense of adoration. I didn’t. I hated their guts and didn’t care who knew it. We were literally prisoners in that house, and after six months of it, both Auntie Mame and I were snarling and snapping at each other for no reason at all.
There was a hint of spring in the air on Easter Sunday, and the house smelled sickeningly of lilies and jelly beans and brats. The kiddies had had a riotous time pelting one another with Easter eggs and Albert had broken the last piece of Miss Peabody’s Lowestoft. Doc Potter came in for his usual Sunday call and stayed on for dinner. Auntie Mame had turned into quite a proficient cook and it was a marvelous meal—or would have been if Margaret Rose hadn’t vomited during dessert.
Doc Potter took another good look at Margaret Rose and put her to bed. “It’s probably nothing,” he said, “but keep her tucked away for a day or two. I don’t like the look of her throat. I don’t like the look of any of her, for that matter. If she gets any worse call me and I’ll slip her a good dose of cyanide.” Then he stared at Auntie Mame with a kind of worried expression. “Actually, you’re the one I ought to be visiting, Mrs. Burnside, not them. You look terrible—thin, nervous, run-down, underweight. Just be careful these kids don’t kill you.”
After Margaret Rose was landed in dry dock, the dishes washed, and the kids sent upstairs to amuse themselves as quietly as possible, Auntie Mame and Doc and I sat around the living room drinking blended rye in complete bliss.
“Don’t you think Hitler will ever surrender, Dr. Potter?” Auntie Mame sighed. “I mean, if I could only see a way out of this … this maternal situation, I don’t think I’d mind quite so much. I suppose it sounds unnatural and horrid of me, but much as I’ve tried to love those youngsters, I’ve failed. If only something …”
There was an explosion that rocked the tavern. I was thrown clear off my chair and the three of us landed in a heap in the middle of the living-room floor.
“My God!” Auntie Mame cried, “the children!” She jumped to her feet and raced up the stairs with Doc and me following.
The big playroom on the second floor was a shambles. All the windows were shattered, the ceiling hung in grotesque stalagmites, and one wall was completely blown out. “Oh, no!” Auntie Mame whispered. “The children! Quick! Help me. They must be buried under the rubble.” She dived into the mess and started burrowing her way through the mountain of junk on the floor. Just as I ripped away a huge sheet of fallen plaster, I heard a loquacious giggle. I wheeled around and saw all six children, safe and sound and clutching their sides in rapturous amusement.
I sprang for Edmund, but not before Doc had collared him.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Doc shouted. No answer. “What did you kids do? Tell me, damn you, before I break every bone in your body.” There was still no answer.
“Oi’ll tell if yew promise not to tyke it out on me.” It was Albert, naturally. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.
“You’re bloody right you’ll tell. You’ll tell right now before I beat the bejesus out of you.”
“Ouch! Yer ’urtink me,” Albert whined.
“I’ll hurt you a damned sight more if you don’t tell me how this happened,” I yelled.
“We was only mykink a buzz bomb,” Albert said.
“A buzz bomb? Out of what?”
“Aoh, just some stuff we found in the tool ’ouse.”
“You mean dynamite? Explosives? Things like that?”
“It wasn’t moi oidea,” Albert whimpered. “Them other kids started the ’ole thing an’ Oi taold them, Oi said …”
Auntie Mame stood up in the middle of the wreckage. She was covered with dirt and grime and fallen plaster. Suddenly she started to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the tears came. “I can’t stand it anym … it’s just too funny for … and not even my room, but Miss Peabody’s and the ancestors and … it’s just the funniest thing I’ve ev …” She swayed with laughter. “And of course the s-sidesplitting feature is … is that we might all have been … all have been blown to … to kingdom come.” She doubled up and slapped her knee.
The kids tittered nervously.
“Shut up,” I growled. “Get into your rooms. I’ll dea
l with you later.” They were too scared to put up any arguments.
“But my dears, don’t you see the …” Auntie Mame’s face was contorted by her horrible merriment. “Don’t you see the simply killing side of it—killing, that’s a hot one!” She rocked back and forth, holding her sides.
I stared at her, horrified.
“Stop it,” Doc barked. “Stop it right now.” He marched up to her and slapped her squarely across the cheek. She was silent for a second, and then she began crying as though her heart were broken.
Doc carried her to her room and put her to bed. While he was sterilizing his hypodermic needle, I poured a double brandy down her throat. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it any longer. I wish that bomb had killed me.”
“Auntie Mame!”
“Okay, Eleanora Duse, relax. Come out of it. You don’t really wish anything of the kind. At least I don’t. You’re too profitable a patient,” Doc said, stroking her hand. “You’ve just been through more than one human being can stand.”
“But here I thought I was a little mother—Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch sort of thing. And I’ve failed, failed, failed!”
“You’ve got to get rid of those kids,” Doc said. “I really mean it. You’re a sick woman.”
“But I can’t. Where would they go?”
“Could I suggest a good reformatory?” I said.
“And there’s always Bellevue,” Doc added.
“No. It’s out of the question,” Auntie Mame sighed. “I can’t. I said I’d take care of them and …”
“And kill yourself while you’re at it? It isn’t a question of wanting to get rid of them. You have to. Doctor’s orders,” Doc said seriously. “You’ve done more for those little changelings than anybody could. You’ve spent damned near a year of your life with them. Poured thousands and thousands of dollars into them. This house, their food, their clothes, their schooling. My bill alone has come to more than two grand. Fun’s fun, but you can’t go on this way. You’ve got to get rid of them—before they get rid of you.”
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