Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  But we did have the bunk room, a long, low-ceilinged and narrow hallway which ran the length of the house under the main floor. The bunk room was as close to the sea as you could be and still be in our house and it was, I think, a gay room for guests. Though the opposite of elegant, it had a shower, a couple of tiny dressing rooms, and one bigger room with bunk beds. The only trouble was that to get from the bunk room into the house, you had to go outdoors and walk along the beach side of the house and up a stairway. Guests didn’t mind; it gave them privacy. But it bothered me a little, when the family swelled, and Mary, Susan and Nancy had to move down into the bunk room. They were tiny girls, and they were under the roof all right but at night or in the morning, they had to go outside to get in. It bothered me—that bunk room—and it also made me admire the more what I saw rising below and to the right of me upon the sands.

  For here was a bunk room better than a bunk room. A bunk room that was also a fully enclosed house. I marveled at the audacity as well as at the skill of modern architecture. Not that this was a mammoth undertaking. It was a small cabin of a house, but the concept upon which it was based was so simple that one wondered, Why didn’t I think of that?

  “You don’t have to build a house high on the bank and descend and ascend stairways all your life,” this house seemed to say. “You simply anchor two long beams at the foot of the cliff, sink a couple of cement pillars deep in the sand at the other end of each beam, and there’s your foundation. Let the waves roll in under the floor and under the plumbing. They can’t hurt anything.”

  It worked too. Worked exactly. In the highest tides the water almost but not quite touched the floor planks of this new house; and even at low tide, there was enough water so that the front porch not only stared out to sea but was in the sea. A brilliant concept. I made a mental note that one day I should congratulate the owner.

  Alas, it was not to be, for when the owner and I met for the first time, it was at one o’clock on a winter’s morning, and the mist from the sea rolled in through the windows of the bunk room and I flattened myself against the wall, listened to the footfalls coming up the stairs, listened as the door opened, watched the figure enter the door and stand there, listened to it breathe.

  Directly in front of me where I stood at one end of the room, I could see the three little girls in their beds—Nancy at the far end, near where the figure stood; then Susan, then Mary opposite me. To my left, standing at the far end of the room, was Mr. Lorimer.

  I had no doubt about it, though in the dark I could not make out his face nor see whether the face wore the horn-rimmed spectacles I had been told to look for. On the previous night all three girls had come flying into the room in their white nightgowns, waking Joan and me with terrified sobs. A man had come into the room, they said, and had stood there and breathed. He had done it before, they were sure. Mary had mentioned it. She had been awake and she had heard footsteps on the stairs, and then heard the door push open, and seen a figure and had been too terrified to cry out. She had not mentioned it to me or to Joan. Maybe it had been a nightmare but now this night she had cautioned her sisters. Nancy had fallen asleep but Susan and Mary had remained awake and they had both heard and seen the figure. “It’s Mr. Lorimer, Dad; the man with the new house, and Dad, he just stands there and breathes.”

  So there I was, the night after that, pressing my body hard against the bunk-room wall. I remained there during what must have been four to five minutes of absolute silence. Outside the waves boomed, and then crashed, and between the boom and the crash, I could hear the clock ticking on the shelf over Mary’s bed. Suddenly, the figure at the other end of the room turned, the door opened silently and I heard the footsteps going down the beach stairs.

  “Quiet,” I whispered loudly to the girls. “Stay right where you are. Don’t say a word and don’t move.” The three little girls were sitting bolt upright in their beds.

  Mary whispered, “Dad, was it Mr. Lorimer?”

  I did not wait to reply. For when I heard the last footfalls on the wooden stairs, I too went out the door and from the corner of the house, I fixed my eyes upon the patch of beach between the new house and mine. Sure enough, within a minute, the figure of a man walked across that patch of beach, and I followed him with my eyes until they lost him at his back door.

  I went back to the bunk room, hugged all the girls and took them upstairs and squeezed them into various beds where sisters and brothers were asleep.

  Joan was for calling the police then and there. I decided instead to go see the chief, who was a friend, “in the morning,” as I like to say when it’s already morning and I haven’t been to bed yet.

  So that was the way I met Mr. Lorimer. He was, it turned out, a bachelor scion of a rich family who had spent a lifetime living along beaches. My friend, the chief, put a stakeout, consisting of a patrol car, in front of the house on the street and a plainclothesman on the beach side. The plainclothesman picked him up the very next morning on his way up the stairs to the bunk room.

  According to the chief, Mr. Lorimer had said, upon being asked to get into the patrol car and answer a few questions, that he had heard that I was away on business a great deal and he worried about whether the little girls were safe. He felt it his duty to go over at night and see.

  “Queer duck,” said the chief, “but he was scared. I don’t think he’ll bother you any more.”

  But Lorimer did bother me. He tabbed me henceforth as an enemy. I heard the neighbors saying that he thought I was dangerously left-wing (Lorimer flew the American flag on top of his new house). Moreover, he met Mary on the beach one day and abused her with such language that a Marine Corps sergeant passing by was made so angry that he went to the county attorney’s office and issued a complaint. But these were minor matters. The way Lorimer really bothered me, the way he got me in fact, was that he caused me to remodel the house again.

  Out went the bunk room and out came the walls to cover the space where the bunk room had been. And as long as we were doing that, we might as well do this, and about sixty thousand dollars later, there I was with what must still be the most beautiful house along the Oceanside beach.

  Beautiful, but purposeless. I had no sooner finished it and begun to pay the new and higher mortgage than the second event struck. It struck slowly, but not so slowly as to be imperceptible. You could see it coming down the shoreline from the new harbor, moving just a few feet each week, gradual, but final, interesting but awful, natural; therefore remorseless.

  Ironic too, I suppose, for I had worked so hard to help build that boat harbor. But it was not the sort of irony at which I could smile. For the beach went when the boat harbor came, just as the anti-progress old-timers had predicted that it would. First, the currents hit the new jetty and swerved around it and began to scoop the beach. Then the currents brought in all the rock which the engineers had removed for the boat harbor. They piled the rock high along the shore; at first on the jetty’s protected side, then foot by foot and yard by yard, along the beach to my new house and beyond.

  It’s sad to see that house now. It sits there high on the bank, the great glass window looking out from where the bunk room used to be; looking toward the ocean where the beach and the touch football and the bonfires used to be; looking out on a hundred yards and more of piled-up rock.

  You’d have to wear heavy shoes and dungarees now to reach the ocean from the house, and you’d have to be prepared to climb hills of rock. When you had scrambled over all the rock, you would not be able to swim because the current is still dragging large boulders to pile up against large boulders, and each wave can kill.

  The money I spent on the house is gone along with the beach. Who wants to buy a beach house that has become a rock house?

  As I say, it’s sad to see it, and I did go back and look at it just the other day. An expensive derelict, that house. There was only one consolation. Standing there on the rocks with Dr. Harvey, viewing the desolated scene, it occurred to me
to ask myself how Mr. Lorimer had survived progress. And I looked over at Lorimer’s house. You know what? There were piles of rock where Mr. Lorimer’s house had been, but Mr. Lorimer’s house was gone.

  Dad Shouts Too Much

  On the beach at Oceanside we built great bonfires and sang into the night about railroads and silver dollars and being “five hundred miles from home.” The waves broke heavily on the flat, wet sand below our fire, and the pounding reverberated, so that you had to sing very loud to encourage a child to sing too.

  With all her many attributes, Joan has a single fault: She cannot carry a tune. So it was up to me to set an example for shy children, and it may be that those fourteen years of beach singing account for my tendency to stentoriousness.

  Or it may be that having been trained early in life as a platoon leader, and finding myself now with half a platoon, it seems natural to bark out orders in an extremely loud voice so as to be heard above the sound of jeeps and half tracks and Nicholas saying, “I’m nine years old and I’ll do what I want to do.”

  Anyhow, Joan says I am loud and all the children have echoed her criticism, so that when in bantering conversation at dinner, we list each other’s faults, it is agreed by all that “Dad shouts too much.”

  I feel correctly chastened. I envy the quiet and the calm. Are there fathers who can accomplish order or a warning with a nod or a raised eyebrow? Surely there are times when there is nothing to do except shout.

  I remember once in the army in Italy making a terrible mistake which only a strong voice could correct. We had to cross a shallow river, and to get to the crossing point, we were to follow a narrow muddy road along the bank and then make a sharp right-hand turn at a junction. The turn was important, I explained to the four truck drivers as we halted under a tree and looked at the map under a flashlight, because anyone who continued straight on would sooner or later hit the German lines.

  And so we set out and I was first in the jeep and the trucks carried the guns behind. It was very dark and we were driving without lights, so we drove very slowly. Maybe that was why when I reached the turn, it did not occur to me to drop off a man as a guide. Of course, I should have done that. Any fool would have done that. But I could see the truck behind me; its driver could see me making the turn. There was a truck right behind him. Anyhow, I didn’t set a man out as a guide.

  Up the road a little bit after the turn, I stopped and looked back. I could see three trucks following me. But I couldn’t see four. I got out of the jeep and I began to run, and as I ran, past one and then two and then three trucks, panic struck me, and I ran harder and faster and as I ran I shouted as long and as hard as I could shout.

  “Stein! Stein! Stein! Turn back, Stein!” I wonder if the Germans heard it, splitting the damp night air and coming back at me from the thickness of the woods along the road. It was a good name to shout at Germans, and Stein, the driver of the fourth truck, must have had good ears to hear the distant shout above the slow grinding of his gears.

  Stein stopped. He said later that he was having qualms at not seeing anything ahead and that he might have stopped anyhow. But the fact is he heard me and if he and the other members of his gun crew are still alive today, they owe it to the luck that their stupid platoon leader possessed at least the ability to shout.

  I’ve thought about that river crossing often because it seems to me that whereas some men live lives through stages, as in Shakespeare, my life has been arrested and I am doomed to the perpetual task of getting people across a river, shouting as I go.

  We were hiking once in Colorado and I looked back up the mountain path down which we had come and saw Joannie, aged eight, sitting on a ledge overlooking a drop of some two hundred feet. She had wandered off the path and slid down a very steep bank of granular rock. Looking over the outcrop, she was terrified, unable to get back up. She sat there, clutching onto herself, and as I later learned, crying out, “Dad, Dad,” though I could not hear her.

  It seemed to me, looking up at the tiny figure against the sky, that she was in the grip of vertigo and that if she stood, she might become dizzy and fall. I shouted to her, so loudly that I aroused the curiosity of a Basque shepherd from a nearby meadow and he came galloping up on horseback and reached Joannie before me.

  I still carry, in my mind’s eye, the picture of that rough and bearded man, looking like some wild Tartar, plunging his horse down onto the ledge, and swooping Joannie up in front of him, grasping her easily with one arm. It is a good picture to carry around in the head, except that it makes me something of a fool. I say to myself, “Well, at least I shouted. Otherwise, he would not have come.”

  What bothers me about the criticism of my family is not that I shout too much but what I shout. What I shout is so devoid of intellectual content, so unworthy of the life I have lived and of the wisdom which books and teachers and good friends have tried to impart. The things I shout make trivial and silly the notion that between generation and generation the torch is passed.

  “Turn off the water!” “Put down that lighter fluid!” “Look behind before you cast that fly rod.” “Wait! Don’t dive!” “Hey! Come back here! You haven’t made your bed.”

  Is this the kind of wisdom Longfellow imparted to his grandchildren between romps during the children’s hour? Is this what Winston Churchill thought was missing from the education of the “untutored striplings” to whom he hesitated to pass the lamp?

  How sad that three-quarters to four-fifths of that which a father imparts to his children should consist of such commonplace warnings that it is almost embarrassing to put them in writing.

  And yet if I were asked to name the attributes essential to a father of eight, I should unhesitatingly place among the chief, the ability to shout for attention, not only over distance but over rivals, whether animate or no. My shouts, I firmly believe, have saved eyes, and prevented broken necks, burns and death by automobile. They have summoned help and brought home stragglers. They have overridden argument at times when argument meant delay and when delay meant danger. Also, they have summoned the guilty to justice when the guilty were about to flee.

  I justify this last as a contribution to family discipline and therefore to the general welfare but I would agree that the contribution is made at some cost to immediate peace of mind. Joan says that the shout disturbs almost as much as the cluttered-up room or the unmade bed which provokes it.

  But when a father is standing in the middle of the cluttered-up room looking at the unmade bed and sees out the window the child halfway down the street and moving fast, he must make an immediate choice. Rightly or wrongly, my choice is to shout.

  I suppose that a father of one child might choose to wait until the child came home from the friend’s house or the baseball game and then speak to him quietly about duty undone. But more than three children mitigate against this course. With eight, a man would have to keep a reminder list. For with eight, it is certain that something else will turn up that will call for shouting. In a family of eight children that child who is not immediately chided may never be chided and his escape is unfair to him who is caught red-handed.

  For many years I told myself that the time would come when the family would live without much shouting, that as the children grew older, the need for warning would fade and so would the shout of outrage at discovery of neglect. I had forgotten about the telephone.

  As the children grow older, the telephone becomes more and more important to their daily lives, so that after school and when they are all home at Christmas time and during the summer, the house rings with shouting.

  There is no other way. A buzzer system is a waste of money. No child is ever in his room when he is wanted on the telephone. He is out in the yard playing touch football or he is in some other child’s room or he is in the kitchen getting something out of the refrigerator, or he is not there at all but has gone down the street to visit a neighbor, a fact which is only revealed by his not answering his shouted name.

/>   I have tried a separate number and a separate listing—“Braden children.” The telephone company suggested this and it did save Joan and me from shouting for a few days, until the children’s friends learned that when “Braden children” was busy, “Braden” would do as well.

  Our friends, too, when they could not get us, rang on the children’s line. Joan was on our phone telling a reporter from the New York Post that she hadn’t talked to Henry Kissinger for months and therefore had no knowledge of his state of mind or whether he intended to remain at his post or resign (he was then a White House assistant). When Tommy burst into the bedroom shouting at the top of his lungs, “Mom, Henry Kissinger is on the other line. He says, ‘What time is dinner?,’” the reporter was cool. “Go ahead and take it,” she told Joan. “I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

  So we have become a family of shouters. I shout in warning or reprobation and they shout in summons, and only when we are together assembled at meals is one of us not shouting at or for another.

  As a result, the children have become extremely quiet when they are away from home. I am told by Susan’s friends at college and by Joannie’s and Mary’s that they speak in virtual whispers, and David, who has survived the shouting longer than the rest, has become so silent that his friends wonder whether he is fulfilling a vow.

  It is, I am sure, a kind of protest against shouting and against me. I’d like to join it. There will come a time, I hope, when the children, grown to full estate, will remark to their children or to future wives and husbands not yet known, that “Dad [meaning me] never raises his voice these days.” I hope so. I want it to be that way. But as I look back upon the bonfires and the swimming pools and the hikes, and as I mentally tote up the number of telephone calls, the answering of which has fallen by chance to me, I think I shall know—even if they do not—that one of the reasons they all survived and grew up and got married and had children of their own, was that Dad had a strong pair of lungs.