Cheaper by the Dozen Read Free Page A

with death and its dramatic, traffic-stopping scenes. It was the sort of thing that you wouldn't have initiated yourself, but wouldn't have wanted to miss. It was standing up in a roller coaster. It was going up on the stage when the magician called for volunteers. It was a back somersault off the high diving board.
    A drive, too, meant a chance to be with Dad and Mother. If you were lucky, even to sit with them on the front seat. There were so many of us and so few of them that we never could see as much of them as we wanted. Every hour or so, we'd change places so as to give someone else a turn in the front seat with them.
    Dad would tell us to get ready while he brought the car around to the front of the house. He made it sound easy—as if it never entered his head that Foolish Carriage might not want to come around front. Dad was a perpetual optimist, confident that brains someday would triumph over inanimate steel; bolstered in the belief that he entered the fray with clean hands and a pure heart.
    While groans, fiendish gurglings and backfires were emitting from the bam, the house itself would be organized confusion, as the family carried out its preparations in accordance with prearranged plans. It was like a newspaper on election night; general staff headquarters on D-Day minus one.
    Getting ready meant scrubbed hands and face, shined shoes, clean clothes, combed hair. It wasn't advisable to be late, if and when Dad finally came rolling up to the porte-cochere. And it wasn't advisable to be dirty, because he'd inspect us all.
    Besides getting himself ready, each older child was responsible for one of the younger ones. Anne was in charge of pan, Ern in charge of Jack, and Mart in charge of Bob. This applied not only to rides in the car but all the time. The older sister was supposed to help her particular charge get dressed in the morning, to see that he made his bed, to put clean clothes on when he needed them, to see that he was washed and on time for meals, and to see that his process charts were duly initialed.
    Anne, as the oldest, also was responsible for the deportment and general appearance of the whole group. Mother, of course, watched out for the baby, Jane. The intermediate children, Frank, Bill, Lill and Fred, were considered old enough to look out for themselves, but not old enough to look after anyone else. Dad, for the purpose of convenience (his own), ranked himself with the intermediate category.
    In the last analysis, the person responsible for making the system work was Mother. Mother never threatened, never shouted or became excited, never spanked a single one of her children—or anyone else's, either.
    Mother was a psychologist. In her own way, she got even better results with the family than Dad. But she was not a disciplinarian. If it was always Dad, and never Mother, who suggested going for a ride, Mother had her reasons.
    She'd go from room to room, settling fights, drying tears, buttoning jackets.
    "Mother, he's got my shirt. Make him give it to me."
    "Mother, can I sit up front with you? I never get to sit up front."
    "It's mine; you gave it to me. You wore mine yesterday."
    When we'd all gathered in front of the house, the girls in dusters, the boys in linen suits, Mother would call the roll. Anne, Ernestine, Martha, Frank and so forth.
    We used to claim that the roll-call was a waste of time and motion. Nothing was considered more of a sin in our house than wasted time and motions. But Dad had two vivid memories about children who had been left behind by mistake.
    One such occurrence happened in Hoboken, aboard the liner Leviathan. Dad had taken the boys aboard on a sightseeing trip just before she sailed. He hadn't remembered to count noses when he came down the gangplank, and didn't notice, until the gangplank was pulled in, that Dan was missing. The Leviathans sailing was held up for twenty minutes until Dan was located, asleep in a chair on the promenade deck.
    The other occurrence was