Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  So I went to the laundry room, and stared at the broken machine with the blue jeans inside it and looked about me at the disheveled piles of children’s clothing, and I said, “Ye Gods” and Beatrice said, “These children.”

  So, with my permission, Beatrice had a lock put on the laundry room door, and out of a sense of conspiracy and secret sharing, she had a key made for me too, although I never use it, and have not visited the laundry room since that day on which I looked and said, “Ye Gods.”

  The reason I mention the locked closets and the keys is that they are the subject of considerable resentment among the children, who argue that it deprives them of basic rights, like being able to get another jar of peanut butter when the old one is out, or wash a pair of blue jeans which have not been washed sufficiently to be worn without embarrassment.

  “There’s something wrong about a house with locked doors,” David remarked the other day. I think he does not understand that the locked doors are essential to keeping Beatrice as a helper. In my opinion, if there is one thing worse than a house with locked doors, it is a house with eight children and no help.

  Up to three children, I think Joan and I could have managed. After that, never.

  We have had over the years a considerable parade of “help,” though it has been nothing like those stories I used to hear of the Robert Kennedy family—one maid arriving and another leaving every other day or week. But as memory now casts the faces of “help” before me in sequence, I count fourteen, and I am including Pablo and his wife from El Salvador.

  Pablo believed that his wife should labor long and that he should watch, which was the way—or so he said—that they did things “in my country.” He explained about “my country” frequently, but I still could not accustom myself to the sight of Pablo’s wife, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, while Pablo looked on approvingly. I would get down on my hands and knees and take the brush away from her and scrub the floor in front of Pablo, and I thought it might shame him. But since he had already explained to me how things went in “my country,” he assumed, I suppose logically, that this demonstration on my part showed a dissatisfaction with his wife’s labor. So Pablo left, taking his servant with him.

  Not counting Pablo, the average length of time in which real “help” has helped has been about two years, and I’m rather proud, now that I think of it, to note that all of them were friends and many of them still are.

  Joe Alsop’s point is that since Americans consider it degrading to be servants, they have made use of the noun “help” in order to disguise the fact that they find servants indispensable. But I doubt that Joe has ever examined the difference between help and servants. Servants serve meals. Help helps serve meals. Servants make beds and clean up bathrooms. Help helps make sure the children do it. Servants wait upon others. In our house, others often wait upon the help.

  So, the word “help” in our country has become nearly synonomous with the word “hand,” as my father used to say. The hand on the Kansas farm of my grandfather was often a young fellow working to get his own piece of land and quite eligible to squire my father’s sisters to the village dance on a Saturday night.

  “Help” in the middle-class home of today is likely to be female but except for that distinction, the job has much the same stature as that of the “hand.” Help—except upon occasions of company for dinner—eats at the same table, takes possession of a good room and a television set—if “help” decides to “live in”—has Sundays and every other Saturday off, and is consulted about every family problem from meals and report cards to vacation journeys and the purchase of refrigerators and cars.

  Moreover, help is granted a certain immunity from criticism and quarrelsomeness. It is all right—at least it is all right at our house—for a child to say to his mother or father at dinner that she or he is talking nonsense, but it is not all right to say the same to Beatrice.

  There have been mistakes, of course. We have employed as help one alcoholic and two nymphomaniacs.

  The alcoholic was very secretive about her problem and disguised it so well with mouthwash that it was not until after she left that we discovered her weakness. Joan and I had to get boxes from the grocery store to hold-all the empty bottles secreted behind her closet door.

  I learned about one of the nymphomaniacs from the Oceanside police, whose curiosity had been aroused by the sudden popularity of our hitherto quiet and attractionless street to squadrons of Marine Corps recruits from nearby Camp Pendleton. The other I learned about from my small daughters, who were learning things during the night time which astonished me when they were related in the day.

  When I think back upon the alcoholic and the nymphomaniacs, I am sorry. We should have known better and spared our children. Nevertheless, I shrug my shoulders. What would Joan and I have done if there had been no help at all?

  If you estimate that each child goes through ten diapers a day for two years, that’s seven thousand and three hundred diaper changes, and for eight children it comes to a grand total of fifty-eight thousand, four hundred.

  Or take meals. The average age of the children now is sixteen. If my arithmetic is right, that means that Joan and I and the help have served them roughly one hundred and forty thousand, one hundred and sixty meals—and washed the dishes and put them away—though, of course, the children helped as they grew older.

  Servants don’t know how to help. I think for example of Sing, a Chinese man, who came to us from Hong Kong and was in every respect a servant.

  Everybody in the family liked Sing. He was cheerful. He was enormously efficient. He cooked excellent Chinese meals and cleaned the house better than it was cleaned before or has been cleaned since.

  Moreover, he took his job as servant in the very ancient sense, as a vassal and protector. We kept a surfboard outside the Oceanside house and the neighborhood teen-age boys were accustomed to borrowing it. One day I looked out the window and saw two boys lugging the surfboard up the steep bank to its customary place outside the back door. Ten feet behind them, in silent pursuit, was Sing, bearing in an outstretched hand a great kitchen knife, by the show of which, he had forced them to return what he thought was stolen property.

  But the trouble with Sing was that he insisted on doing things himself, and it was obvious to me that eventually he would explode. Anyone who tries to be a servant in a house of eight children will explode.

  Sing’s explosion was gentle. He insisted that none of the eight children could ever enter the kitchen and that he would serve them, outside the kitchen. This was a reasonable demand for a servant to make. But it was not a demand which “help” would ever make because help understands democracy and democracy begins in the kitchen. Children home from school want a glass of milk and a peanut butter sandwich. They should get it for themselves and clean up afterward. What red-blooded American boy or girl wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich served on a plate? I liked Sing and I was sorry to see him go, but as I think back now on the differences between the servant and the help, I think of Sing on the one hand and on the other, my mind conjures up the enormous figure of a man named Dick.

  Dick was a buck sergeant in the Marine Corps, who came to stay with us because his wife, Louise, a beautiful woman, was “help.” Dick wasn’t paid. He just lived with us once in a while and did special jobs in repayment for room and board. Dick had a disability pension for some ailment he must have overcome. For he was well over two hundred pounds of muscle. He could lift a car off the ground by its rear axle. He could eat enormous quantities of food—whole chickens would disappear down his gold-edged mouth in a single sitting. And he handled a horse as though it were an undersized child.

  Dick’s stint as “help” in our family lasted throughout a love affair he had with a barrel racer named “Lady Golden,” whom Dick met one summer while we were vacationing in Aspen, Colorado. Until he saw Lady Golden win a local barrel race, Dick never showed any interest in horses. But after that r
ace, he talked of nothing else and he hung around Lady Golden’s stall, caressing her and talking to her and telling her what a fine barrel racer she was.

  I guess she was, too. I saw her once or twice in a race, and the turn she executed, in which, after going full speed at the barrel at one end of the course, skidding to a virtual halt when she reached it, lunging around it on her knees, and then charging back again full tilt at the barrel on the other end of the course, was spectacular.

  Indeed, Lady Golden was a powerful quarter horse, of a color her name aptly described, and with a white mane hung down over her eyes which she tossed from side to side in defiance. She was free spirited, this horse, unaccustomed to greater discipline than that which could be enforced by a hackamore and dubious about whether she would accept even that.

  Lady Golden appealed to Dick so greatly that when it came time to pack up the car and go back to Oceanside, he bought her. I was informed of the purchase just the day before departure, I supposed because I was driving the station wagon and Dick knew it would be necessary to attach a trailer to its rear end.

  But I found there was an additional reason. The purchase price of Lady Golden had put Dick out of funds and he asked me whether, as a favor to him, I would buy the trailer.

  So Dick and I hunted around Aspen and found an old horse trailer without a top and I bought it for fifty dollars and we got Lady Golden into it and set out for home, not deviating from our planned route, which included—Joan had arranged it—a detour through Bryce Canyon National Park.

  One of the things which is notable about Bryce Canyon National Park is the series of natural bridges and tunnels through which the road winds. Many people, driving across country or through the West, are thrilled by these monuments and, as is well known, children enjoy them because the moment the car enters they can raise their voices and hear them echo against the rock walls.

  But to this day, I think of the tunnels of Bryce Canyon with a dread which approaches fear. For Lady Golden, riding in her open trailer, saw each tunnel coming and let forth a whinny of such power and treble that as the sound bounced back and forth between the tunnel walls, it became truly terrifying, and totally encompassing, ruling out speech, thought, decision, even identity.

  Other motorists were petrified. They pulled over sharply to the side of the tunnel and stopped, which is dangerous and against the law. If it had not been for the massive rock of the tunnels, they would unquestionably have plunged off the road. My own fear should have been tempered after a time by experience, but somehow as we appraoched each tunnel, the knowledge of what was to come served me as the sight of an instrument of torture is said to serve the man who has felt its pain.

  Fortunately, the Bryce Canyon drive is short, and we were out of the park and in the clear before travelers in the opposite direction could report the disturbances, before park officials could intervene, and before we met that driver, whom the law of averages suggests would plunge at us instead of away.

  Throughout all this, Dick, in the back seat, murmured reassurance. “The Lady will be all right,” he would say, in the tone of a man spreading ointment on a sore. Once through the tunnels, she was.

  I had not realized that so many towns in this country keep a stable as a municipal service to the traveler who wishes to put his horse up for the night. I doubt that many of the inhabitants of our towns realize it either. I don’t know what I thought we were going to do with Lady Golden when we stopped during the thousand-mile trip from Colorado to California. Did I suppose that Dick and I would walk her around while she nibbled on the lawn outside the motel where the children slept?

  I have an impression now of grizzled old men, some in boots and cowboy hats, some in ordinary overalls, who keep the town stable, and without having to go beyond the first policeman we encountered, we found it, unhooked the trailer from the station wagon full of children, and quartered Lady Golden for the night.

  The difficulty was the morning after, when Dick and I would arrive to load Lady Golden for the next stage in the journey. At all the stops, the grizzled stablemen agreed: “She’s a good looker but she won’t load.” Lady Golden balked and kicked and we would strain and push and get her halfway up the ramp onto the trailer, when she would rear onto her hind legs, and the stablemen and Dick and I would lose our grips or our courage and she would come off the ramp again.

  As it turned out, it was all very much worthwhile. Lady Golden was a great joy to Dick and to us. Dick and David took first prize in an Oceanside parade one Labor Day, with David riding Lady Golden as Huckleberry Finn, and Dick walking alongside as Jim. The following year Dick caparisoned Lady Golden with a great silver-plated saddle and silver-plated fittings which hung down all around, so that she gleamed in the sunlight. Then he rode her down Oceanside’s Main Street, not for any prize at all, but simply to take part in the parade.

  The whole family stood together and cheered and clapped as Dick rode by. He was too big really for Lady Golden; his feet nearly touched the ground. But he was proud and beautiful all the same.

  I don’t know where Dick and Louise are now, but whenever I think of “help” and also about important moments of pride and triumph in our family, I think of Dick on Lady Golden, riding down Oceanside’s Main Street, in the parade.

  Mrs. Clark Goes to Africa

  I put Joan on the plane to Africa one bright afternoon in June, and it wasn’t until several days later that I realized Mrs. Clark had gone too.

  It always works that way. I mean, it’s Joan that’s going, dressed and packed, and with a book under her arm, feeling very sentimental and looking very little-girl-like. “Tom,” she said, in a frightened, small voice as we approached the gate, and she turned her face up to kiss me goodbye, “I’m really going now; I’m really going to Africa.”

  There was a Peace Corps type, a casual acquaintance, and like Joan, employed by a worthy organization called Save the Children Federation who was taking the same plane. He looked at her, crisp and scrubbed and beautiful in the neat white khaki bush jacket with the black buttons. “Yes,” he said, “and obviously for the first time.”

  And so Joan left. But it was Mrs. Clark who turned out a couple of days later to be gone. Joan is a little girl with a perpetual tan who dresses for the occasion, loves parties and people and loves, most of all, as she puts it, “to get to go.”

  Mrs. Clark, on the other hand, has little time for such nonsense. Mrs. Clark sees that each child has something to do; she plans next steps about problems with each child in turn. Mrs. Clark loves each and all together. She arranges family vacations and outings. She likes boys with haircuts and eventually prevails; she doesn’t believe in failure on the part of any member of her family; yet she is understanding, wise, comforting, shrewd and full of good advice about any member’s temporary defeat.

  As I say, whereas Joan is a little girl, Mrs. Clark is a sensible, grown-up woman. I love Joan a lot, but when she went to Africa, I missed Mrs. Clark the more.

  “Mrs. Clark” was originally Tommy’s name for his mother but it caught on because everyone realized that Tommy had defined the two-sidedness of Joan.

  “Mom,” Tommy would say, “can I go to the movies?” Permission to go to the movies is a minor problem. But take a serious problem. Take a problem such as wanting to change schools or go out for the basketball team and thus not be home three nights a week in time for dinner. “Mrs. Clark,” Tommy will say on such occasions, “Mrs. Clark, I’d like to talk to you.”

  Talking with Mrs. Clark is always worthwhile. She is full of wise saws and modern instances. Also, she has many confidences which she will share, and these confidences bring out confidences in return, so that Mrs. Clark knows much more about the secret fears and desires, troubles and happinesses of my children than I do, and her advice to them comes from the understanding which mutual confidences bring.

  Mrs. Clark is also the CIA of the family. At our house, if you want to get money from Dad, you have to confront him directly, state your
case, be prepared to argue it, and to take the money openly, perhaps in front of others. It is, in effect, a grant, publicly stated as such and likely to be mentioned at the dinner table.

  But Mrs. Clark, knowing as she does about secret troubles and difficulties which ought not to be mentioned aloud, will often fund covertly, as they say in the intelligence trade, using unvouchered funds for the purpose, requiring no public accounting, and never to be mentioned again, “even to Dad.”

  Mrs. Clark is also a very brave woman. She thinks nothing of putting eight children in a station wagon and setting out across the country or taking off for India with the wife of the President of the United States because the President tells her at dinner one night that, of course, she can get the trip paid for by writing an article in “one of the magazines.”

  Sometimes Mrs. Clark’s enormous self-confidence breaks down and then she calls me from some near or far-off place and becomes, quite suddenly, Joan again. Joan is dependent upon me; therefore, I feel superior. But Mrs. Clark assumes a co-equal status. Does some need to prove myself superior to Mrs. Clark, too, evoke the memory of an instance in which metamorphosis took place quite suddenly?

  On one of the trips across the country with six of the eight, the drive shaft broke on the station wagon and Mrs. Clark hiked eleven miles in the Utah desert before she could find a telephone. Eleven miles in the hot sun had turned Mrs. Clark into Joan, and very nearly in tears.