by Tom Braden
We were lying in bed in Oceanside, California, where I ran a newspaper, and Joan was nursing Nicholas, our eighth child. First we had had a boy, and then we’d had five girls, and though I never admitted to myself that I had a sex bias, the arrival of Elizabeth, the fifth girl, had seemed, at the time, redundant.
But an odd thing happened. Elizabeth turned out to have red hair, which made her very different. And then had come Tommy and then Nicholas. Stub Harvey, who was my golfing and touch football partner as well as the family doctor, pronounced the odds: “From now on you’ll have boys.”
Anyhow, on that morning the mail had come, brought to us in bed by one of the children, and Joan, opening it, paused over a telegram and laughed out loud. “Wonderful,” she said, passing it on to me. With the tolerance due a mother with a newborn son, I refrained from remarking that it was addressed to me.
It was signed by the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy. “Congratulations,” it read, “I surrender.”
I was amused and proud. How many did the Kennedys have? Seven? But then a horrifying thought struck me. How much money did the Kennedys have? Somewhere I had read that each of the children of the Attorney General’s generation had been made several times a millionaire. What was I doing accepting congratulations from a Kennedy on having more children than a Kennedy? Eight, it seemed to me at that moment, was enough.
It was, as I recall, my first major doubt and as it grew into decision, the Kennedys remained helpful. For example, I remember one summer in Aspen, Colorado, where we used to take the children from time to time, camping high. One morning, before the expedition was to start, Susan, who was ten, came into the motel bedroom bearing coffee for her mother and a copy of the Denver Post. I noticed that she was excited as she watched over the brimming cup she held in outstretched hand. “Mom,” she said, “a terrible thing has happened. The Kennedys have caught up.”
There it was, a small squib on the front page. “Number Eight for Ethel.” Unanimously, the children urged that I do something about it at once. Joan thought it was funny. I pretended to laugh, but inwardly, I had made a resolution.
Was this joke about rivalry with the Kennedys transformed, in the minds of the children, into real rivalry, even animosity? On a subsequent summer, the Kennedy family also turned up in Aspen, and Bobby and Ethel and Joan and I all went out to the movies, leaving the Kennedy and Braden children in a rented house. When we came home, we found that the Braden children had locked themselves inside the house and were holding it as a fort while the Kennedys stood outside in the dark, some throwing rocks as cover while others made periodic assaults in an effort to storm the doors.
Looking back now, I’d like to pretend that it was all very friendly, which was, of course, what we pretended at the time. But it was not friendly. Those rocks were real. Do large families develop intense tribal loyalty and more than average consciousness of turf? Are they, therefore, inclined to be quarrelsome and aggressive when as a tribe they are placed in proximity to another tribe of relatively equal strength or self-esteem?
I had not liked that moment in the dark with the rocks flying. Too many rocks. Too many children.
But that was in 1963. It was not until late in 1966 that resolution turned to embarrassment and that I realized I could be charged with being an over-consumer of the world’s goods.
“You’re his type of guy,” Kirk Douglas had said, speaking of Charlton Heston. “He ought to come in for at least a thousand.” Douglas was having a fund-raising party, and the funds were for me because I was running for lieutenant governor of California. Kirk had been a stalwart in my campaign and that afternoon he had packed his house with friends and acquaintances and made the money pitch. Then, while the hat was being passed, Kirk brought Heston over to a corner of the room for a private chat; just Heston and me. Heston broke the ice with the subject of planned parenthood and we never got off it. He was, it turned out, an ardent advocate, a committed committee man. He told me how he had enlisted in the battle against population growth. The figures which proved the soundness of the cause came readily to his mind. Sometime during the conversation, he pulled out a check and wrote on it, holding it against the wall, and when he departed, he handed it, folded, to me. Not until I had turned it over to Kirk and saw the disappointment on his face did I remember that at one point the conversation had taken a personal turn.
“A hundred dollars,” Kirk announced flatly. Then, “What in the hell did you say to him?”
“He only asked me one question,” I replied. “I told him I had eight.”
I still do have eight. I was reminded of it only yesterday. I had to write a column, get started on the income tax, do a radio broadcast, and have lunch with the Indian Ambassador. In addition, there were a lot of telephone calls. About 7 P.M. I settled into a brown leather chair to have a drink with my wife and review events. The following had occurred:
1. Joan had been called at her office in the early afternoon to be notified that Elizabeth was at the police station.
2. Mary had not eaten since her arrival from college for a brief vacation three days previously. Joan explained that she had become a Buddhist and was fasting.
3. Tommy’s teacher had called to say that he was doing well at baseball but paying no attention to classroom activity and would we please exercise influence?
4. There was a nice letter from David, who was traveling around the world and had reached Afghanistan. The mail also included a notice from the American Express Company acknowledging the loss of his traveler’s checks.
5. Joannie had backed the station wagon into the stone pillar at the end of the driveway. Estimated damage: $150.00.
6. We had an inconclusive discussion about what to do about Nancy, whom Joan described as “in a state of rebellion.” Would we confront her, risking defiance? Or should we leave her out of family plans and hope she cared?
The problem of Elizabeth and the police station had been solved. At least, she was now in her room. It had been a warm day; she had skipped school and gone window shopping and a policeman had noticed. Should I go to her now, while I still think it’s serious, or should I wait and risk revealing that I know she’s not the first truant in history?
As I say, Joan and I were discussing these problems when Nicholas skipped excitedly into the room. “Dad,” he said, “tonight’s the finals of the basketball tournament and you promised to watch with me.” I looked shamefacedly at Joan. She broke the news. “Daddy and I have to go out to dinner.”
When Nicholas had left, I remarked gently, “Maybe we have too many children.”
“You’re wrong,” Joan replied, “we just don’t have enough time.”
Why We Had Eight
I know how I had children. The same way everybody has children. But eight is different. And the difference was Joan.
The first time I ever saw the girl, I was sitting in the outer office of Nelson A. Rockefeller, waiting for an interview. I had been teaching at Dartmouth College, and one day the President of Dartmouth, an ebulliently kind and interested man named John Dickey, asked me if I would like to talk to his friend, Nelson Rockefeller, about a job at the Museum of Modern Art. I don’t think John Dickey was trying to get rid of me. I think he thought I was too much interested in too many things to be interested forever in teaching English to college freshmen.
So there I was in Nelson Rockefeller’s outer office. I remember the magazine I looked up from. Business Week. I haven’t read Business Week very often in the years that have passed but I have always honored its name.
So I looked up and there was a girl in a dark-green taffeta dress with a skirt that sort of swirled, and she had a marvelously fresh and open face and freckles and curly, brown hair. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life.
The mating rites have changed a lot since then, so I am told. Women have adopted what was once the man’s role. They no longer lure, they suggest; at times they attack; they no longer wait for the light
to be dimmed, they dim it; or even don’t care if it’s dimmed. A great emancipation is at work. I’m sure women feel less unnaturally subservient and men less unnaturally responsible and uptight. But it all came too late for me. Joan had never called a man on the telephone in her life. She still won’t do it. I had to be the aggressor, and when I think about the aggression, I think of its symbol. Without doubt, I should say, it was Joan’s skirt.
I’ve seen Joan in a lot of skirts, and I’ve bought a lot of them. There was the taffeta skirt she wore that day in Rockefeller’s office, and the blue and purple plaid skirt that I bought for her in Scotland that first summer after we were married. Once I bought her a dress in Paris off the back of a model who was almost as pretty as she was. On the model, the bodice was transparent. I wasn’t used to buying clothes from models and it was embarrassing. I wouldn’t let Joan wear it with the bodice transparent, but the way other people looked at her when she wore that dress, she might as well have. The dress was around the house for a long while. When did I last see it, faded now, and no longer crisp, but still beautiful? I remember. Elizabeth wore it last Halloween.
What was it about Joan? What is sexy? Was it a good figure? Was it that she blushed? Was it that she was so pretty? You’d have to work very hard not to have babies if you were married to Joan.
But I’m capable of hard work, so why didn’t I work hard not to have babies? At least, not to have eight babies? Was it simply that people tend to behave within the bounds of societal permission, and that when Joan and I were having babies, society had not yet signaled that we shouldn’t?
There were accidents. Two of the children were accidents. That’s twenty-five percent. But when I think back to the days before the pill and all that harness and hardware, is it any wonder people had accidents? Maybe twenty-five percent of all Americans over twenty are accidents.
Money must have had something to do with eight children. We never had enough money but we always had just enough, or thought we would have. As everybody knows, babies don’t cost much until they’re not babies any more.
Then there was the electricity factor. Eugene Black, who used to be the head of the World Bank, once told me that the best way to cut down population growth in the underdeveloped countries was to install electricity. Far better than dispensing birth control information. Joan and I lived on the beach in Oceanside, California, and though the town had plenty of electricity, the electricity factor was nevertheless at work.
Two theaters there were, showing movies almost exclusively aimed at the young men who lived nearby on the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton. So what to do at night? In Oceanside it was either a movie or the PTA meeting.
So I get back to the skirt. President Kennedy was coming down the White House steps to take Joan to a car one evening after a Halloween party with his daughter Caroline and my daughter, Susan, and suddenly he noticed something and he said to Joan, “Again?”
And she said, “Yes, again.”
And he remarked, “Why don’t you get Tom tied?”
I never knew a girl who looked prettier in a skirt nor one who so unconsciously and yet so irresistibly flaunted before my eyes the challenge to take it off.
That’s the reason we had eight children. The skirt. The rest is persiflage.
How to Have Babies
Having babies was very difficult for me at first, but it got a whole lot easier with practice. The hardest baby was the second one, and I remember the occasion with shame because I lost my temper and swore at my wife. “How could I have done that?” I ask myself even now, and the answer comes back: “For the same reason you always lose your temper: when you have done something stupid, and want to blame it on somebody else.”
It was early in the morning—which is when babies nearly always come—and I was not a bit nervous when Joan awakened me to tell me she was having pains. After all, everything was in readiness. When you’re counting on a baby, you have to plan carefully. You have to have the doctor’s number by the bedside; you have to have your clothes ready to slip into; you have to tell your wife to let you know the moment she feels any pains; you have to have the car full of gas; you have to stay alert. No drinking after dinner.
Indeed, I had planned for this moment so carefully that on the table by the bed I had placed, along with the doctor’s number, a thin volume in hardcover, with a pinkish jacket, entitled Childbirth. I had read it through and noted its specific instructions on every aspect of the event.
So when Joan spoke, I switched on the light and picked up Childbirth at once. Joan described the pains in detail. They turned out to be not so much pains as twitches. I turned to Childbirth’s last chapter. Sure enough, Childbirth described the twitches. I began to read out loud, Joan lying beside me in a ruffled blue and white nightgown. With gratification, I remarked on finding her symptoms so precisely mirrored on the pages in front of me. And then I came to the last sentence. “My God,” I exclaimed, “It says here ‘… in any case, call the doctor.’” Childbirth had left the most important instruction for the very end. I sprang from the bed, called the doctor and hurried into my clothes.
Joan dressed more leisurely. She always does, but on this occasion it seemed to me she was more deliberate than usual, demonstrating a meticulous care for the selection of each item of clothing or bottle of lotion which was to go into the overnight bag that had lain so long by the bathroom door.
I started the car and let it run, then went back to get the overnight bag, led Joan to the car, and swung out the driveway and down the road. The gas gauge on the Chevrolet had registered empty for a long time and I remarked to Joan as we looked into the black dawn that it gave me a queasy feeling, “Even though I know it’s full.”
“Well, it can’t be quite full,” she said casually. “What do you mean?” I asked, turning to look at her in surprise. “I had it filled night before last and it’s been sitting in the driveway ever since.” “No,” she answered calmly. “The Crowes borrowed it yesterday for house hunting and brought it back last night just before you came home from the office.” I was appalled. “You can’t do this kind of thing to me,” I said. “Why do you suppose I haven’t been taking the car to the office? So you’d be able to get to the hospital or so that you could lend it to the Crowes?”
But Joan was on her way to have a baby. I told myself, “Gently now.” There was nothing to do but to suppose that the Crowes did not drive very far, or that, if they did, they had had the courtesy to replenish the tank. But I feared the worst. My care had gone for naught; my forethought had been unavailing. It seemed to me that the car sputtered.
I stopped for a red light. It was beginning to get lighter and a few blocks away, I could make out the hospital with its wide circular driveway. The light changed and I put my foot on the pedal. Nothing happened. I pressed the starter button. Again, nothing. We had stalled. “God damn it,” I said. “God damn you and God damn the Crowes. We’re out of gas and we’re about to have a baby and you have treated this whole thing as though it were some nonserious, casual affair.”
I looked at Joan. There were two tears running down her left cheek. The twitches had turned into pains. She was having to be brave.
I pressed the starter button hard. It ground fruitlessly. I got out of the car, turned the steering wheel sharply to the right and pushed toward the curb, swearing breathlessly. And by the curb I left it. There was nothing else to do. I ushered Joan out of the curbside door, and started walking gently and with small steps, but quickly. With firm application of my arm against her back, we proceeded the four blocks toward the hospital.
Dr. Brown, a man with curly black hair, was waiting in the driveway, wearing a white jacket. He was obviously disturbed. He called for a wheelchair and hurried Joan down the long hall toward the elevators. I went to the front desk and filled out forms.
It seemed to me that everybody was particularly kindly and helpful. Nurses put scrubbed fingers at the places where I was to sign and exercised great care in their
directions about where I was to go next. I didn’t get quite which way it was that I was to turn to reach the elevator nor the floor where I would find Joan. “Did you say six or seven?” I asked. A nurse said sweetly, “Come with me, Mr. Braden, and I’ll show you.” I think people thought I was nervous and distracted. But I was not conscious of being so. The nurse put me on the elevator and I found the right floor and the right desk to ask at, and Dr. Brown appeared from somewhere to tell me that the baby was already born. It was a girl. He said it had been a close call. “We didn’t even have time to prepare her. But there’s no point in your staying here. Why don’t you go out and get something to eat and come back in a couple of hours when she’ll be awake?”
So I went out and walked down the street to the car, thinking about Joan and the baby. It was a bright fall morning now, and I was a very solid fellow. We had had a boy baby, and this time we had wanted a girl baby. So we got a girl baby. That’s the way it was, I reflected, with Joan and with me.
When I got to the car, I didn’t even think about the fact that it was illegally parked. Certainly I never thought about the gas. I just got in and started up and drove straight home.
How Not to Have Babies
When a man has eight children, a lot of things tend to run together in his mind. I mean, I can never remember how old each of the children is, or the dates of their births.
But I remember very well the birthdays themselves—a bright and beautiful day in June when the leaves were still fresh and the azaleas were in bloom. That was the day Joannie was born. After that, there was a day in May, which was cold, as I well remember, because with Joan doing all that had to be done inside the hospital, I fixed subconsciously upon a compensatory activity.
