Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  Particularly of course when Mrs. Longworth came to dinner, and one evening the warming taught me something about the character of Israel’s Prime Minister, who was then Ambassador Yitzak Rabin.

  Rabin is a short blond man with cold and extremely bright blue eyes and a shy, seemingly diffident manner. He had been a tank commander during the Seven Day War, but he has none of the bluffness which Americans—possibly because of General George Patton—associate with the trade.

  He is, however, a man of instant decision, as I learned one evening while we were chatting over a drink in the living room.

  Elizabeth entered from another room and rushed up to us wide-eyed. “Dad,” she said, “the snake is wrapped four times right around Mrs. Longworth.” Elizabeth was excited because four times around was a warming record for Ben Boa. But Yitzak Rabin heard what Elizabeth said and was excited in a different way.

  Those blue eyes grew even brighter until they seemed to me to be spitting fire. “A snake around Mrs. Longworth,” he repeated quietly, and as he said it his right hand disappeared inside the shoulder of his left sleeve. He had taken two steps toward the other room before I caught him from behind and blurted an explanation.

  I caught him in time to prevent myself from learning precisely what he was carrying inside his coat near the left shoulder, but I have a strong suspicion and I rather admired him for being prepared. It wouldn’t have done him any good, of course, but he gave the impression of a man who was prepared to fight, with or without weapons and as instantly as occasion might demand.

  Inevitably, as Ben Boa was taken out of his cage with greater frequency, somebody would forget to put him back. Customarily on these occasions, it fell to Susan to find him. And one day, she couldn’t.

  Of all the children in our family, Susan is possessed of the greatest inner calm and fortitude. The disappearance of Ben Boa did not at first distress her. Calmly she hunted the usual places—in drawers, behind doors, on closet shelves, down heating ducts. It was to no avail. Each evening at dinner I asked for the news. Each evening the news was bad. Even Susan began to fret and to conjure in her imagination scenes of vivid doom; Ben Boa out on the sidewalk, accosting a neighbor, wishing perhaps to be “warmed”; the neighbor rushing for a policeman; the policeman drawing a gun.

  Such scenes were not beyond the possible, as Mrs. Long-worth revealed with practiced malevolence, when she heard that Ben Boa was gone.

  “There is,” she remarked to a group of women gathered in my living room for some charitable cause to which she herself had summoned them, “an enormous snake loose somewhere in the house.” Then turning to three women seated upon the couch, “You know they love to get under the cushions.”

  I was not present when Mrs. Longworth made this remark but Joan reported that evening that the three women turned pale and that the meeting broke up almost immediately. “It was really over anyhow,” she said. “Mrs. Longworth just thought it was time to go.”

  Joan’s recital of the afternoon’s events gave us a clue. Susan and Nancy went upstairs and began dumping mattresses on the floor. Under Susan’s bed, fully extended in the steel coils, lay Ben Boa, inert and cold.

  There is sadness in parting from the familiar even when the familiar is a snake and there was guilt in the knowledge that parting with Ben Boa might have been avoided. Boa constrictors, I discovered by calling the National Zoo, are comfortable at 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Ben Boa’s cage contained a light which helped to warm him, though probably not enough. Outside the cage and in the house, he was at seventy degrees, and for a boa constrictor, this is very cold weather. But in this midwinter season, Susan had inadvertently exposed Ben Boa to much worse. Without doubt she stated accurately the cause of death. “Dad, I never should have been sleeping all these nights with the windows open.”

  It must have been sad for Susan, preparing Ben Boa for burial, getting him out from the bed springs and into a pillow case, but when I came home the following evening she was not at all sad; she was breathless. “Nancy and I dug a hole back of the azalea bushes and we were putting Ben Boa in and the pillow case moved. So we got in the car and drove as fast as we could to the zoo and we went up the wrong driveway and the zoo man stopped us and we explained, and he took Ben Boa and we waited and he came out with the empty pillow case and said he thought Ben Boa would live.”

  Which Ben Boa did. Indeed, the children visit him once in a while and somewhere in the files I have an official letter from the zoo thanking me for the donation of one boa constrictor, valued at eighty dollars. Her friend Andy must have liked Susan a lot.

  I wish parting with all pets were as happy. It does not seem possible that during a modest lifetime, I have assumed ultimate responsibility for thirteen dogs, five horses, and eighteen cats, as well as the lamb and the boa constrictor.

  And I am leaving out birds and a short-lived monkey named Fagin, whose queer, guttural coughing I mistook for monkey chatter when it should have warned me of pneumonia.

  They are all gone now—all but four dogs and a single cat—and I believe their souls rest in peace, for without exception they were well treated upon the earth, inoculated, vaccinated, fed, curried and washed, exercised, petted, trained and, where appropriate, housebroken.

  And buried. I have been pallbearer at many funerals, and chief consoler to the bereaved. Something about the combination of the words “animal” and “family” foretells certain tragedy, for animals die soon. They die despite care and affection and fences and training. They die under wheels and if not under wheels, they die of old age while children who love them are yet young.

  So the child learns tragedy. But he has already learned care and feeding and washing and training and visiting doctors. He has learned hunger and ennui and sheer joy and sickness and recovery. He has learned about growing old. Should he not learn about dying? In the still-mysterious ways by which God governs, isn’t this what pets are for?

  There was a time before I had children when I owned a large and beautiful German shepherd, and when Thorsten Veblen’s famous remark about dogs in his Theory of the Leisure Class embarrassed me. “The dog,” Veblen wrote, “commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in man’s regard as a thing of good repute.”

  Perhaps that is true for old ladies with dachshunds or for single men with German shepherds. But now that I have known all these animals—and dogs in particular—I would rewrite Veblen as follows:

  “The dog commends himself to our favor in a way we hesitate to admit, which is that being possessed of an enormous capacity for affection and friendship, and being also short-lived, he exposes our children in the kindest possible way to the sadness and the inevitability of parting.”

  Castles They Have Known

  “A man’s house is his castle,” said the judge, about halfway through his charge to the jury, and as he cited a nineteenth-century opinion of the California Supreme Court in which the quotation was used, I leaned back in my chair with a tentative sigh of relief.

  It was a civil suit, and the amount of money demanded of me was twenty-five thousand dollars, a sum I might have raised, I suppose, if I’d sold most of what I owned.

  Moreover, I knew I was guilty of hitting a man. I had hit him square on the mouth with a left hook. “Here,” he had shouted, after he sprang into the hallway, and stuck a fistful of papers hard into my chest, “You are served.”

  Was it wrong to hit him? I wished I hadn’t. For here I was in court, and there were the jurors over there in the box, and I didn’t know what they were thinking. What do jurors think of a man who hits a process server?

  Once more, I went over in my mind the happenings of that morning two years before. It was 6:20 A.M. That had been established in court and I remembered the time vividly because Joan and I were fast asleep when we heard the banging on the door. More important, Elizabeth was asleep and Elizabeth wa
s the one whose sleep we were worried about. Elizabeth was nine at the time and a very sick girl. Whooping cough, or whatever name it is by which doctors might now describe a constant racking which seemed to begin down at the base of her spine and surge upward until her entire body was convulsed. Elizabeth had a pretty small body. Dr. Harvey had come over at midnight and given her something, and about two she went to sleep.

  Actually it was Joan who heard the banging first, and she awakened me, tugging at my arm. “Tom, Tom, somebody’s at the front door.” I had thought it was the middle of the night, but a glance at my wrist watch did not calm me. Whoever it was pounding at the door was pounding hard.

  I sprang out of bed and rushed to the stairs. “Just a minute,” I said, calling out, and then, more cautiously, “What do you want?”

  “Are you Thomas W. Braden?” said the voice outside as I reached the door.

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I have a summons for you.”

  Now, a summons was a fairly ordinary event in my life. I ran a newspaper in Oceanside and I had about thirty employees, one or more of whom would from time to time run up a bill he couldn’t pay, or get in trouble with a finance company. Sometimes, I would be told, via the summons, that I had to garnishee his wages. But the summons was usually delivered by one of the local marshals, and delivered at the office. What was the man doing here at this hour?

  I asked him.

  In reply, he asked a question too. “Are you going to accept service?”

  “No.” I said, “You’ve got a hell of a nerve waking people up at this hour. I’ve got a sick daughter. Come back at nine o’clock.”

  At that point, he opened the unlocked door, took a step forward and thrust the summons into my chest.

  That was when I hit him. Joan had testified, and the opposing lawyer had drawn from her the admission that when I got out of bed I had been, in her words, “cross.” Would that be damaging?

  I asked myself honestly whether I had used Elizabeth as an excuse. In part, perhaps. Anger looks for an excuse. Still, the protective instinct is strong at six in the morning when a child is sick and someone is pounding at the door. “A man’s home is his castle” seems to me to sum it up accurately.

  So I was relieved that the judge included it in the charge to the jury, and included it despite the objection of the other side. It proved, so some of the jurors told me later, to be chief among their considerations in the decision to acquit I mention it now because it seems to me also chief among the considerations of being a father of eight.

  Defensive is how fathers feel about the castles in which they house their children. They would, if they could, build moats and strong walls. But that “something” which Robert Frost described as not liking a wall might be a child. A wall is a challenge to a child and so is a locked front door.

  Over and over I explain to my children that it is important to keep the front door locked, and over and over I find it unlocked. It has been a persistent battle between us during our joint occupancy of three castles, none of which I actually ever had to defend, but about all of which I have felt defensive.

  One of these was in Virginia, overlooking the Potomac; one in Oceanside, California, overlooking the beach; and one in Maryland, overlooking what David calls “the cultural ghetto” of Chevy Chase. The house in Chevy Chase is bigger than the other houses were, but my guess is that the house in California is the background of their dreams.

  The house had been built on the beach in 1929 by a film director named Richard Wallace, and it had been built cheaply, which was lucky for us. For when we moved into it in 1954, there were only three children, and David, the oldest, was four. A house with inner walls made out of thick cardboard is a good house for a family in the process of doubling itself. You rip out the cardboard to enlarge the room or you put in more cardboard to make two rooms.

  As the number of people in the family kept changing, the house kept changing. Everybody’s room kept changing. “You remember,” Nancy now says to Susan, “when we had the bunk beds at the end of the hall in David’s room?” And Tommy will say, “David’s room wasn’t at the end of the hall. David’s room was just to the right of the stairs.”

  And then Nancy will clinch the argument with a line that all except Nicky have been privileged to use: “You don’t remember David’s old room. You weren’t here yet.” I don’t know whether not having been “here yet” is hard on the psyche. I know that the face of the person who wasn’t here yet always falls. It’s a hard argument to beat unless you can disprove it, as in, “I was too here yet. I remember the old stairs that led down to the beach outside David’s room and Susan had the duck tied by the leg to the bottom stair.”

  But the one thing that everybody’s memory holds in common is the beach. It never changed. Oh, it did change, of course, in the Rachel Carson sense. The tides carried a little away in the winter and brought a little back in July; passing ships jettisoned sludge upon occasion. Once to my horror, a body washed ashore and Joannie and I were down on the beach at the time. It was bloated and bitten, almost unrecognizable as a body, so much so that I didn’t have to say it was a body and could hope Joannie wouldn’t know. There were stranded porpoises, too, which came ashore, nearly always in the summer, for a reason I don’t understand, and the children flocked to watch them, and sometimes a porpoise would recover from whatever ailed him and move on, to accompanying cheers. Each summer, you could see the perch tossing in the green waves. On weekends David fished all day with a long line, and in the evening we ate grilled perch over a beach fire.

  We often sang over those fires, lustily and together and without embarrassment, matching our lungs against the timed crash of the waves. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” became our favorite song, long before Robert Kennedy seized upon it as an unofficial campaign song in 1968. I remember when I first heard the song so used at a Kennedy rally, feeling as though he had taken it away from us. I solaced myself with the contemplation that his children didn’t know all four verses.

  And each early spring, at midnight or at one in the morning, the grunion ran. “Mom, can I stay up and catch grunion?” It was a happy cry that marked the swing of the seasons and to this day it seems to me much more exciting and zestful and free spirited than “Merry Christmas.”

  In fact, I look back upon those early years in Oceanside, when I didn’t have any money, when the annual payments on the newspaper I had borrowed to buy caused me such worry that sometimes I couldn’t sleep, and Joan would wake up and find me sitting on the edge of the bed, just sitting and worrying, and when nobody else in Oceanside had any money either. So that when I went to collect the bills, the merchant friend would say, “Tom, I don’t have any money.” I look back on those days and I am grateful to my children because they made me happy nevertheless and “nevertheless,” I have always thought, is the only way a human being ever knows what happiness is.

  Oh, I had other things to gratify me. One of them was the Oceanside boat harbor on which the mayor and I and Congressman James B. Utt back in Washington worked hard. The Marine Corps had a boat harbor at the very northern edge of Oceanside, but it wasn’t any good because it kept filling up with silt, and every few years the Army Corps of Engineers had to spend a hundred thousand or so dredging it out.

  I think it was Oceanside Mayor Erwin Sklar’s original idea that if the town could get Congress to appropriate a little extra money for the Corps of Engineers, they could dig a boat harbor in Oceanside while they were digging out the old Marine Corps harbor. That would put the town on the map. Why, there wasn’t a single boat harbor on the Pacific Coast between San Diego and Newport.

  So we all got to work on the idea, and as publisher of the newspaper, I went to meetings and thundered in editorials and wrote letters back to Washington. I think I had some influence too. I know I was mighty proud of that telegram signed John F. Kennedy which came into the office one day. “Happy to inform you that today I signed H.R. 1362 permi
tting construction along Oceanside shore. Congratulations.”

  Later, I got a pen in the mail—the pen Kennedy used to sign the bill. I had the pen framed, right under the telegram.

  Some people in the town complained about our victory. Some of the old-timers said the ocean current running south would hit the jetty and then swirl in and cut the beach away. There’s always some opposition to progress. But I was happy, trying to collect bills and being broke and working for a boat harbor and playing with the children.

  I learned to surf and the children did, and David worked hard and got good at it, and they all learned to love the sea and to beware of it.

  Two events occurred to mar the charm of Oceanside. I’d like to think that both were acts of God and “not my fault,” as Nicholas would say. But the first event challenged my duty as a father, and the second came about because I had accepted the duty of being a booster for my town. They accosted me, these two events, like two witches asking questions, and when I had fully committed myself, they struck.

  The first event came about as follows: One day, in the summer of 1963, a newcomer appeared on the beach, advertising his presence with a strange device. Workmen came upon the sands and began handling two enormous timbers which, as they were imbedded into place, turned out to be the foundation of a house.

  Now, all the beach dwellers of Oceanside lived along a high bank and descended to the beach by stairways, long stairways—twenty-six at our house (I am a stair counter) and even more at others, depending upon the bank’s incline.

  And so all the beach houses in Oceanside were protected from the sea, not only in fact but also in style—no picture windows offering a vista of the sea, but tiny ones with shutters shutting out the sea, the whole imitative of Cape Cod houses, which was sort of silly in a California climate and was not at all atune to modern architecture’s attempt to make a house welcome its environment.