by Helen Doss
They rushed in, twittering like a flock of birds, pointing at everything, heads turning round and round like little owls. From then on, once they were shown their presents and the unwrapping was begun, the radio staff merely had to stand by and record. The children were too excited to pay any attention to the microphone. Soon tissue paper and ribbons were flying everywhere, and the children were ooohing and aaahing over each item opened, whether for them or not.
“Gosh, pretty,” Teddy said, as he opened a box of dresses.
“Oh, boy!” Diane exclaimed, as she unwrapped a package of boys’ undershorts.
Donny tried on a pair of pants which were too big, even on top of his jeans, and out of the general hubbub the microphone picked up his plaintive, “Hey, Mama, my pants keep coming down.” A minute later he hollered, “Gee, I bet I’ve opened a hundred presents!”
Alex found some transparent blocks with movable figures inside and contented himself with those, leaving further unwrapping to the rest. While the children were still busy under the tree, the announcer took Carl and me around, showing us the balance of the gifts in the house. Besides the time-saving appliances, there were two Hungerford mahogany bedroom sets, and a resplendent black Nash which we could see outside the dining-room window. In the china cupboard were arranged a set of Metlox pottery, and service for eight in Easterling silverware. Under the sheets in the living room were several pieces of a new living-room set, and some more things for the children: five wagons, five doll buggies, and six small bicycles.
The children, eager to rush outside with their new wheel toys, first agreed to sing, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” for Santa’s genial helpers. They caroled in their sweet, soprano voices, all on key except chubby little Timmy, who plodded along at his own speed in his earnest, deep voice, just a little flat. Later, letters poured in from listeners from all parts of the United States, telling how whole families listened to the “Welcome Travelers” program on Christmas morning; many of the writers confessed they had to wipe their eyes after hearing the childish voices raised together in the familiar carol. Many noticed “one very small boy’s voice, husky and a little off-key,” and said they liked his singing best.
The recorded program faded out on the last strains of the carol; when it was over, willing hands helped the children take their wheel brigade outside. We had been afraid that the radio show might be confusing to the children, but they were having too good a time to be confused. They discovered several gym sets of swings and trapezes in their play yard, and like squirrels they spurted from swings to wagons to doll buggies, and went weaving about unsteadily on the unfamiliar medium of two-wheeled cycles.
Actually, it was Carl and I who were completely bewildered and overwhelmed by the number and magnitude of the gifts. It had happened with such Cinderella suddenness, we were not prepared for the avalanche of gifts. I expected the clock to strike midnight, and everything to disappear, at any moment.
By dark it was all over, and the last reporter, photographer, sound man, and Welcome Traveler had packed his gear like the Arabs, and as silently stolen away. Carl and I sank into the new chairs, exhausted, and looked at each other. The living room was knee-deep in crumpled tissue paper and ribbons. Open boxes spilled their contents all over the floor, and some of the new white underclothes and tee shirts were patterned with dark footprints. Discarded flash bulbs, bits of paper, and stamped-out cigarettes covered the floor in the dining room and kitchen.
“What a day!” I said.
“You didn’t see the half of it,” Carl said. “You should have been here when they were unloading everything, and setting things up, and putting things together. What a madhouse!”
“I can imagine.”
“Just before the broadcast,” Carl said, “I went into the bedroom to take off my overalls and change into my suit, and I was standing there with nothing on but my shorts when a lady reporter walked in and squealed, “Oh, excuse me, I thought the telephone was in here.”
I looked around the room at the unfamiliar new furniture. It was a great contrast to the wicker set that usually sat about the edges of our green linoleum rug.
“Where’s all our old furniture, and stuff?”
“Oh, it’s around,” Carl said vaguely.
We called the children in, gave them sandwiches and hot cocoa and oranges, and sent them off to an early bed. “Where do we sleep, Mama?” they came back, asking.
I opened the doors of the downstairs bedrooms, but I couldn’t get in. Desks, bookcases, books, filing cabinet, tables, lamps, beds, and dressers were piled on top of each other, halfway to the ceilings and jammed to the doors.
“There’s part of our furniture,” Carl said, “and stuff.”
“Where do we sleep, Daddy?” the children asked.
“You girls can get in your rooms, upstairs,” Carl said. “I’ll fix up you little boys on the couch and the window seat, until Mama and I can get your rooms empty.”
By midnight we had moved everything from the downstairs bedrooms into the dining room. We tucked the boys into their beds, and tumbled into our own, half asleep already. No sooner had I rolled over a time or two, and yawned twice, than the morning sun was coming in our window and the children were streaming in our door.
“Daddy, Mama,” they hollered. “How do we get through the dining room, now?”
We slipped into jeans and tee shirts and joined the children in the downstairs hall, at the dining-room door.
“Well,” Carl said, “we could all climb out of our bedroom window and go around, and come in the kitchen door.”
“I can crawl under those tables,” Timmy said.
“Me, too,” Diane said.
The children all crawled through, weaving their way under tables, and between dressers and unconnected kitchen appliances. Carl and I got down on our hands and knees and followed the children.
“This is fun,” Rita said. “Let’s leave it this way.”
“What do we eat on?” Elaine asked.
“Why don’t we sit on the kitchen floor,” Teddy said, “and eat breakfast like a picnic?”
We did. When we were through we piled the dirty dishes on the sink, and I said, “Now what?”
“Let’s do the dishes in the new dishwasher,” Donny said.
“In the first place, it’s buried behind everything else in the dining room,” Carl said. “In the second place, it’s not connected.”
“Connect it then,” Donny suggested.
“In the third place,” Carl continued, “there isn’t room for it in this little kitchen until we remodel it, and I tear that old pantry wall down.”
“We’ll help!” the children volunteered in an eager chorus.
“In the fourth place,” Carl finished, “the water hasn’t drained out of the kitchen sink all winter. So, until we dig a new septic tank, how could the water drain out of a dishwasher, even if it was connected?”
Timmy stood staring at the choked-up dining room. “Santa Claus brought you too many things.”
“Nothing we can’t put to good use,” I said. “Give us time, and Mama and Daddy will find a place for everything.”
When we tired of eating on the kitchen floor, we moved half the things from the jammed-full dining room into the already overcrowded living room, leaving a narrow rabbit trail through to the front door. Our house was not wired for 220 current, so until the electric company could get around to installing the heavy-duty wire, we had to store the new electric stove and the clothes drier in the dining room. All winter, during the interminable rain, rain, rain of coastal northern California, I strung wash lines across my dining room, reaching over my unconnected electric clothes drier and stove to hang up the dripping sheets and diapers to dry over the gas heater.
“You know what I hope Santa Claus brings us next year?” Diane asked.
“What, dear?”
Diane threw out her arms. “A house as big as the sky.”
“We could use one,” I said.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER 16
There Was an Old Woman
IN the late spring, Donny brought me a letter. “I decided I was too old to ask Santa Claus again, this last Christmas. So I thought I ought to do it directly.”
“Do what directly?” I asked. I looked at the letter. “This begins, ‘Dere Lady.’ Does that mean me?”
“No, Mama,” Donny said. “I wrote that to the lady who owns the orphanage.”
“Which orphanage?”
“Any orphanage. Any place that’s got boys to adopt, just the right size of me. You can read it.”
The letter said, in a bold scrawl:
Dere Lady,
I would like a bother 9 years old, my father made me a room, it has a desk, a doubble desk, cowboy BunkBed, Cowboy and Indian wallpaper, two rugs a table some blocks a car and other toys so you see theres lots of room for a new bother.
Donald Doss
“Will you put it in a letter and send it for me?” Donny asked. “You see, I don’t know any address.”
That night I told Carl about the letters Donny and I had sent to an orphanage in the Rocky Mountain area.
“Ummmhmm,” Carl said, from deep inside an editorial in the Christian Century. He hadn’t tuned in on me yet; he was just nodding in an abstract way.
“Donny’s letter was really cute,” I said. “When he copied it over, I saved his original.”
“That’s nice,” Carl murmured, turning a page, still nodding absently.
“He was asking for a brother, only he spelled it ‘bother,’” I laughed. “When he gets one, he may find that a brother his size might be a bother, too. But if we can only find one, I’m sure it will be worth all the trouble. As the old saying goes, the more the merrier!”
The magazine lowered and Carl looked at me with a startled expression. “The more the what?”
“When Donny gets a brother,” I explained.
“He’s got brothers,” Carl sputtered. “Brothers all over the house.”
“No, the one he’s hoping to get, just his size. We sent letters—”
The Christian Century hit the floor and Carl hit the ceiling.
“Letters? Letters?” he roared. “We’ve been through all this before.”
“It does sound familiar,” I agreed.
“We can’t afford another child! Nine is all—”
We started going round and round at this point, and we were still going round and round a week later when our answer came from the orphanage.
“We are sorry to disappoint you and your Donald,” the director wrote. “At the present time we have no older boys for adoption. I don’t suppose you would be interested in a baby? We have here a seven-month-old Cheyenne-Black-foot Indian boy, named Gregory. . . .”
Carl stopped arguing and looked interested. “Well, now, if you must have another boy, this one might be worth considering. Now that Alex is past two, I kind of miss not having a little baby around the house.”
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. “I’m looking for a big boy, and not another baby.”
“Sorry you took Alex?”
“What a silly question. Just the same, I can’t stand the thought of more diapers, bottles again—”
Carl wouldn’t let go of his brass ring, so we were back on the merry-go-round. After days and weeks of going in rhetorical circles, another letter arrived. It was the letter Donny and I had waited for all these years, the letter I was beginning to think never would come.
“Perhaps you won’t be interested in our little Gregory,” the director of the orphanage wrote, “when I tell you we now have a boy the age of your Donald. Richard is Chippewa Indian and Canadian on one side, Blackfoot Indian and Scottish-American on the other. He was nine years old this winter. Although Richard is not nearly so dark as little Gregory, he may be even more of a placement problem. Because he has had so little love or security, he has become uncooperative, sullen, and withdrawn.”
“Another Little Beaver,” Carl said.
“Y—you wouldn’t think of turning this Richard down?” I gasped. “Would you?”
“I’m thinking quite definitely along those lines.”
“After all these years of hunting, searching, just hoping to find a boy the size of Donny? A boy who needs us, and here we are, wanting him, too—”
“Look, Helen,” Carl said, putting the letter away with an ominous finality. “In the first place, I’ve dedicated my life to my faith, and if I’m tied to the ball and chain of a big family, how can I serve? In the second place, we both have an obligation to the nine we already have. Bring home a problem child, and you’re apt to throw the house into an uproar.”
“But Donny wants—”
“Donny’s too young to know what he wants. He’s just as apt to end up bitterly jealous of a new, competitive brother.”
Now I clutched the brass ring, and we were back for another long ride on the merry-go-round. Several weeks later, another letter came. It was from the same orphanage.
“If you are thinking of choosing between Gregory and Richard for your last child, you may not be interested in a girl who has come to us for permanent placement,” the letter read. “Like Richard and your Donald, she is just nine years old. Her name is Dorothy, and she is a lovely and talented girl, with an artistic bent and a nice singing voice. Her mother was Welsh, English, and French. After the death of her parents, she lived with her maternal grandmother; when the grandmother died, she came here. No one was left who could give us data on the father’s background; as nearly as we could guess, he was possibly Brazilian-Portuguese. Dorothy is a pretty child, with fair complexion, blue eyes, and curly, dark-auburn hair. In spite of Dorothy’s charm, she will be difficult to place. Not only is part of her background unknown, but it is also at least partly ‘foreign.’ As one set of would-be parents objected, ‘How could we be absolutely positive that she doesn’t have some hidden Negro blood?’ And they wouldn’t take a chance.”
“How ridiculous can people be?” Carl said. “I wouldn’t mind if Dorothy actually were Negro, and dark. I’ve always been sorry we couldn’t get Gretchen.”
I threw my arms around Carl’s neck. “Let’s bring home all three! Richard, Dorothy, and the baby. Let’s splurge, and not be so timid!”
Carl looked stricken. “Three more? All in one swoop? I’ve told you and told you—”
“Don’t be so worried,” I laughed, giving him a kiss that smothered his arguments. “Pooh, what’s a few extra? As the old saying goes—”
“I know,” Carl said. “The more the merrier.” There was no conviction in his voice.
Donny went with me to bring back our three new children. He would not only provide company for Dorothy and Richard on the return trip, but he could be an advance-guard kind of friend, in helping them meet the strangeness and inevitable adjustments of a new home.
Carl drove us to the Sacramento station, where Don and I boarded the California Zephyr. We arrived at the orphanage two days later. First, the superintendent took us to see Richard.
Our new son looked like a typically American boy, with his straight brown hair and brown eyes, his light skin sprinkled with freckles; only his slightly high, flat cheekbones revealed the Indian side of his ancestry. When I put my arm around him, he hung his head; but he looked more lonely than sullen. I knew he would be willing to give his love, when he knew it wouldn’t be ignored or thrown back in his face.
If Richard had nothing to say, Donny more than made up for the lack. “Hey, Richard,” he chattered, “did you get my two letters I wrote? Hey, wait till you see our room, wait till you see our bunk beds, do you want to sleep in the top or the bottom one? Hey, Richard, we got two dogs. One’s Patsy and the other one’s Rufus, and we got—”
They walked on out to the playground, shoulder to shoulder, while the superintendent took me to see Dorothy. I found her to be an unusually attractive girl, with fine dark eyebrows and curling dark lashes to frame her blue eyes. Not as tongue-tied as Richard, she shyly began to
call me “Mama.”
Dorothy accompanied us to the nursery, to see the baby who was to be her new brother. Gregory was a husky, brown-skinned little boy, pink on the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, with silky-straight dark hair and enormous brown eyes. I picked him up and he was dumply, fitting into my arms as if he were made to be there. He poked at my eyes with his chubby finger and said, “Goo?” As I kissed him, the thought of more bottles and diapers didn’t bother me at all, any more.
For Don, Richard, and Dorothy, the train ride home was a picnic, with no time for the games I had brought to amuse them. We rode upstairs under the transparent bubble top of the Vista-Dome chair car, and the nine-year-olds watched the stars go by overhead at night, counted deer in the mountains by day. They dashed downstairs for an endless supply of paper cups and drinking water. With their heads together, wavy yellow-blond hair contrasting with straight dark Indian hair and crisp curls of chestnut-brown, the three were as thick as pudding. They chattered and giggled as if they had always been brothers and sisters.
On our last morning, they had been crowding around while I handed out breakfast, begging, “Please, Mama, give us some more sweet rolls,” and “Please, Mama, can we have our apples now?” I was giving the baby his bottle, and burping him with experienced pats at my shoulder, when the lady across the aisle engaged Donny in conversation.
“Are all of you brothers and sisters?” she asked, incredulous.
“Yep,” Donny said, his mouth full of apple.
“The baby over there, too? He’s your little brother?”
“Yep,” Donny nodded.
“You certainly have a big family!”
“This is nothing,” Donny said expansively, waving his apple. “You ought to see what we got back at home.”
When tired, the three nine-year-olds curled up in their seats and slept, but I hardly dared to close my eyes for the whole trip. Gregory intermittently dozed and bounced in my lap; I was afraid that if I drifted to sleep, my arms might let him drop. Compounding my general weariness was a knifing pain in my back. I had sprained it severely, once, when I skidded on icy steps at Hebron, while carrying Laura and Susan from the buggy into the house. Now, on this trip, with the load of a heavy baby and bulky hand baggage, I had twisted my back again.