Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  So on Labor Day morning, there was Mary again on the edge of the bed, waiting. Mary, it seemed to me, was changing her personality. From participant to observer, from leader to follower, from active to passive. She had, quite suddenly, become timorous, shy, uncertain. Above all, she had become silent. Days would pass and except for the conversations with her mother, she would not utter a word. Psychiatrists do not talk to fathers. Mrs. Clark didn’t say much either. I worried.

  So I got out of bed and started to the bathroom to shave, and Joannie came in. Joannie was crying. “Mom, I can’t tell two roommates that I’m dropping out. It’s not fair.”

  Joannie was in a financial jam. She had signed up for an off-campus room at college and she didn’t have the extra two hundred and eighty dollars.

  Mrs. Clark held firm. “When you don’t have the money, that’s what you have to do.”

  I felt sorry for Joannie. It is difficult to say “No” to one who has brought gaiety and joy to the household all summer, who has planted flowers and cultivated them and brought them in in the morning with a joyful smile, saying, “Look.”

  And difficult to turn your back on one who has found herbs and searched the town for whole grains and had fun cooking “earth meals.” More difficult when she is crying.

  But Mrs. Clark was absolutely right. Joannie could have earned the extra money this past summer and she hadn’t. So.

  I finished shaving and walked back into the bedroom. Mary was still there, and Tommy was bouncing up and down on the bed, menacing Joan’s coffee. “Careful, be careful, Tommy.”

  Elizabeth entered on cartwheels, beautiful, perfect cartwheels, legs straight up in the air at the top of the circle, long red hair mopping the floor. Joannie was still weeping silently and Mary waiting and Tommy bouncing and Mrs. Clark said to Elizabeth, “I called the school and they’ll let you back in.”

  Everybody stopped. Everybody knew that Elizabeth had been expelled “for possession” and everybody was interested and considered Elizabeth to be wronged.

  I was not sure she had been wronged. I “considered” her wronged, partly out of loyalty to Elizabeth and partly, as I told the school principal when he called, because there was no way of proving whether she was wrong or wronged.

  She had passed a package of marijuana from one girl to the next on the school stairway, and when accosted had maintained that she did not know what she was passing.

  Nicholas stormed in, wearing bright red pajamas. Joan made room for him under the covers. “Well, there you are.”

  And at once became Mrs. Clark again. “I told the principal,” she said to Elizabeth, “that I didn’t see any point in putting you on restrictions for violating the rules because obviously you know now what will happen to you if you violate rules.”

  One up for Mrs. Clark. She had reminded Elizabeth about rules without accusing her of breaking them; she had warned Elizabeth under pretext of defending her.

  I went downstairs to boil myself an egg. There was, after all, a lot to be said for Joan. There she was up there with five people in her bedroom—one in money trouble, one in psychological trouble, one in disciplinary trouble, a fourth using her bed as a trampoline and a fifth wanting to be cuddled. Odd, the telephone hadn’t rung. Usually it does, and Joan answers as gladly as though the one thing she had been missing was an offer of human companionship.

  But today was Labor Day. People were not doing customary things. Susan, for example. She had already been out fishing and when she came in, she sat down at the table while I ate my egg. “What’s up?” I asked casually.

  “Thoreau is up,” said Susan. “Thoreau on civil disobedience. I have to write a paper before I go back to school. Inviolability of the human spirit; the state can seize your body but cannot touch your mind. Get it?”

  And just as I was about to say, “Yes, I get it,” a voice interrupted. It was a pleasant voice, but firm. “Nonsense,” said the voice, “if you get it, you get it wrong. Thoreau was a romantic. Read Orwell. Read 1984. When the state held the rat in front of the man’s face, the state seized his mind.”

  Susan and I looked in the direction of the voice. Mary was standing in the doorway.

  I didn’t say anything. I don’t remember that Susan said anything. I remember that I looked at Susan and Susan looked at me, and both our mouths were open.

  I went to the foot of the stairs and I called up to Mrs. Clark. “Joan,” I said, “Let’s you and me go out to dinner tonight.”

  Blithe. That’s the word. I felt absolutely blithe.

  So Help Us, God

  One winter little Joannie and I made an irregular practice of attending meetings of the Friends on Sunday mornings. Joannie had done some previous shopping around among local churches and had decided that the Friends were the best because various people were moved from time to time to say a word or. two, and what they said was often thoughtful and interesting. There were no sermons.

  We stopped going to the meetings because of an incident one Sunday, and which both of us thought—in Joannie’s words—was “dumb.”

  It was the first Sunday after Mr. Nixon’s “incursion” into Cambodia and during the meditation a woman who wore a long gray hand-knitted shawl rose to suggest that those assembled ponder the devastation and the killing. For some days I had been musing upon the word “incursion,” a new euphemism in the political language which seemed to me worthy of joining George Orwell’s list of those words and phrases most often used to defend the indefensible: “transfer of population,” “pacification.”

  “Latin words,” wrote Orwell, “fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring all the outlines and covering up the details. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry. This is called rectification of frontiers.”

  “Incursion,” I was reflecting, as the woman in the shawl spoke, had a clean, surgical sound, as in “Stand still now. This is going to hurt for just a minute.” Who could hear the word “incursion” and picture the dust and the devastation, tanks leveling straw huts and the bombing of neutral people?

  But immediately as the woman in the shawl subsided, a group seated up front rose huffily and departed. One of its members, a tall man, chesterfield-coated, wearing also, I noted, a vest and chain, remarked aloud that “Politics profanes a meeting house.”

  Those who remained appeared to side with the critics. The silence suddenly became embarrassing and the woman in the shawl seemed very much alone.

  Silently, Joannie and I took her part. What, we speculated on the way home, was the use of God if not to call upon when in trouble? And if the trouble was political, what difference, so long as it was personal too?

  The only limitation on prayer, Joannie suggested on the way home, should be the test of humanity. That is, no one should be permitted to pray for brutality, cruelty or unkindness.

  I said I would add the test of sincerity and I told her the story of my Uncle Ray, who came to our house once a year when my father and his brothers held a reunion in our living room.

  The reason they came to our town was that two of the brothers lived there—my father and my Uncle Baird, who was the minister of the First Baptist Church. The reason they came to our house instead of to Uncle Baird’s was that all of the brothers except my father were ministers of various denominations, and so my father’s house was a neutral ground. Uncle Baird, who was the oldest brother, always insisted upon leading the rest of them in prayer at these annual reunions, and I know my father was embarrassed each time.

  But Uncle Baird cared and so my father did it. Mother would draw the blinds so that the living room was quite dark, and she would draw the curtain which separated the living room from the dining room. Though I was not admitted to the meeting, I knew that they were on their knees in there and I could hear Uncle Baird in prayer. Somehow, I shared my father’s embarrassment, and if it had not been for my tall Uncle Ray, who was a Presbyterian minister from Oklahoma, I would be embar
rassed still, and probably unable to relate the story to Joannie.

  But Uncle Ray had his older brother pretty well fixed and I remember that when they had finished their meeting—and after Mother had drawn the curtain back—Uncle Ray would hold up his right hand and look straight at my father and would say, “Brothers, let us thank the Lord for this opportunity to have met once again and let us go out and do the work of the Lord, each of us in our own way, and Baird in His.”

  My father loved this old story and used to tell it long after Uncle Baird was dead. But I think the memory is one of the reasons why prayer in our family has never been public and the only occasions when any of us have mentioned the name of the Lord aloud have been those occasions when we needed Him, quick.

  “Dad, Dad,” I remember Nancy shouting, “Come now! It’s Joannie!” I had told Joannie not to go out on the roof of the house to sunbathe, but I had not known that there was a skylight on the roof, else I might have told her in even stronger tones. The skylight was an old one and the glass had not been reinforced and now Joannie was protruding halfway through it, her legs bleeding horribly from the jagged wounds.

  Quick action may have helped, and strength in my arms and knowing the way to the hospital and towels to staunch the bleeding. But I also think that saying over and over, “Oh, God, please. Oh, God, please,” may have helped too, because that was one thing I did and everything I did must have been right to do. For Joannie recovered. Today her scars are not bad; perhaps some day they will be invisible.

  “Is that a porpoise?” I asked Joan, as we were strolling on the beach. What I was looking at was a long way up the beach, exactly, I noticed, in front of our house. Joan couldn’t see it. “Look,” I said, pointing, “it’s something tumbling in the waves, back and forth, and it looks like a baby porpoise, except—” And then I said, “My God! It’s a white nightgown! It’s Nancy!”

  Near the water, where the sand is wet and hard, Ocean-side’s beach was very good for running, and I ran as fast as I could, which in those days was pretty fast. And all the time I ran, the “Please, God” tumbled over and over in my head. There is no doubt about it. God saved Nancy.

  Certainly, I didn’t save her. She’d obviously been tumbling back and forth in the waves for some time before I reached her, and a one-year-old child who has crawled into the sea survives, so it seems to me, only through the grace of God.

  Surely, the same is true of four-year-olds on crowded freeways. We had taken two cars to drive back from Lake Tahoe and I was driving the second car, jammed with the used paraphernalia of a two-week vacation. David drove with me but Joan and the younger children were somewhere up in front, two or three miles, I estimated, remembering that she had pulled out first from the last stop for gasoline.

  It had been a long, hot, silent ride through lonely country but now, as we approached Riverside at rush hour, the traffic boomed, with trucks and trailers and passenger cars all making the seventy-mile-per-hour limit in three fast lanes. Suddenly, there was a slowing down and a squawling of brakes, and the big truck in front of me flashed red signals and the driver had his hand out the window, palm outstretched for a stop.

  Slowly now, we ground—the truck ahead in low gear—to the scene of whatever was holding up the long lines and then I saw a yellow dress and standing on the divider strip was Joan, the children around her, wide-eyed with fear, and in Joan’s arms a bleeding mess.

  Out, and onto the pavement and the bleeding mess was Nicholas, and a Mexican-looking man with a red half truck was shouting the way to the hospital and when I looked at him, helpless and confused, he said he’d lead me there.

  I called out orders. David into the driver’s seat of the first car. Everybody in that car home: Joan and I and the bloody mess—and then Elizabeth, whom David had forgotten in the confusion, squeezed in with the paraphernalia and we drove off the freeway, following the half truck to the hospital.

  It was only then that I remarked that the bloody mess was screaming, “Oh, God, help me!” at the top of his lungs, over and over, unceasingly. “So he must be all right,” I prayed to myself, and in fact, God must have remarked him too—and just in time.

  Joan had been driving along at seventy miles an hour, and noting that home was barely an hour away, she had suggested that Nicky and Tommy clean up the back seat. Gum wrappers and other oddments on the floor were to go into the ashtrays next to the door latches. The door had flown open (it was one of those rear doors which open from the forward end of the car, so the wind can take control) and then Nicholas was hanging for a moment and then he wasn’t.

  One of the children told me later that he had bounced, in front of trucks and speeding cars, down the road a bit and then from the inside fast lane he bounced across two other lanes and into the brambles on the highway shoulder.

  Only a four-year-old could have done it without breaking bones and even a four-year-old would have hit a wheel had it not been for God.

  Nicholas’ skin was pretty well frayed but otherwise there was nothing wrong with him whatever, and about four o’clock that morning he stopped crying out “God, help me” and went to sleep. Slowly the next morning, we proceeded, speculating, and giving thanks.

  Nicholas seems to be accident-prone. When he was two, a girl whom Joan had hired “to help out” left him in the bathtub with the hot water running while she went to answer the telephone. It must have been more than a cursory conversation because by the time she got back, Nicholas was pretty well boiled and Mary, holding him while she called Dr. Harvey’s office, noticed that his skin was coming off.

  I think Stub Harvey was the one who saved Nicholas’ life on that occasion, because he dropped whatever he was doing in his office, picked up Nicholas at the front door and had the treatment well under way at the hospital before Joan and I got there.

  But maybe God was the one who presided over the unspoken pact of friendship which existed between Stub Harvey and me so that he was always ready and always on the run.

  And surely God saved Nicholas’ eyesight the time he got hit in the head with a baseball bat and I was out mowing the lawn, and grabbed him and rushed him to the hospital, bleeding from the eyes. Much as he was hurt, he refused to tell me the truth about what happened. “I fell down,” he repeated. “Falling down,” I chided him, “on your eyes?” “Yes,” said Nicholas.

  Nicholas protects to this day the name of the boy who accidentally hit him with a baseball bat. The doctor said he had a fifty-fifty chance of losing his sight in both eyes, and that we would know after he had gone to bed for two weeks with bandages over them. Nicholas got the message, though he was only eight.

  That afternoon, before the bandages were to go on, he walked around the house and in the yard and looked and looked with his one good eye. “So I can remember,” he said, and then again, “God, help me.” The rest of us cried a little and prayed that God would.

  He always has. Some of that which He has done for our family, I probably do not know. Logic tells me that the older children must have been engaged in scrapes and narrow escapes which they have failed to report, except to Him.

  Eight is too many to bring up without the help of God, but God must feel a little pressed sometimes when he hears our cries. I wonder whether the narrow escapes suggest that He too thinks eight is enough.

  Fathers Can’t Resign

  There was a large dog mess on the front hall rug when Joan and I came in from a movie last night, and when Joan went upstairs with a weary sigh of resignation, she discovered another just outside our bedroom door. I went into the kitchen to turn the lights out. The floor was not quite ankle deep in trash.

  “Now, let me explain about this. Trash goes into a large green plastic bag under the sink and each night the large green bag must be taken outdoors, placed in a container, and the lid securely fastened.

  “You know that, don’t you? Let me remind you why you know it. You know it because you know that if we leave the trash in the kitchen and somebody lets a dog in, the
dog will tear the large green plastic bag into bits and strew the paper and the peeling and the tin cans all over the floor.

  “Don’t we both know that? Then, by God, why don’t our children know it? And why do I have to be the one to cope with this goddamned mess?”

  Some such speech—I think it was very nearly exactly that speech—was the speech I made to Joan last night, and as I concluded, an idea struck me and I acted at once before Joan could intervene.

  “Just for once,” I said, “I’m damned if I will cope with this goddamned mess,” and I went upstairs, wakened each separately sleeping child and summoned him or her to duty.

  There was, of course, an outcry, mostly from Tommy and Nicky, both of whom expressed their confidence that the dog—whichever dog it had been—had not been their dog. “It’s not my fault,” Nicholas said. “It wasn’t my dog,” said Tommy.

  Nancy was harder to awaken, and when she arrived in the hall she said she thought I was crazy. Mary and Elizabeth suggested, without quite saying so, that they agreed. By the time everyone had expressed an opinion, the dog messes had been cleaned up and the kitchen floor too.

  It was all over in less than fifteen minutes. But there had been, as Joan pointed out when we reached the bedroom, a certain emotional cost. “If you keep this up, you will have a heart attack.”

  “No,” I replied, “I will not have a heart attack. I will have children who realize their responsibilities.”

  How many years have I been saying that? How many more years will there be? The face of my friend the beautiful Elizabeth Weymouth came to mind, and I saw her laughing at me, then saying, quite seriously, “You really are a little bit of a fool.”

  The beautiful Elizabeth Weymouth had been visiting us in Oceanside, and there had been a large beach party in honor of her and her two tiny children. Many children had come as guests and run up and down from the kitchen to the sand on the beach and back again. Before I went to bed, I scrubbed the kitchen floor.