My Brother Louis Measures Worms

by Barbara Robinson

  My Brother Louis

  Measures Worms

  And other Louis Stories

  Barbara Robinson

  For my very special aunt, Jean Dodds

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Louis at the Wheel

  The Mysterious Visit of Genevieve Fitch

  Louisa May and the Facts of Life

  Big Doings on the Fourth of July

  The Wedding of Willard and What’s-her-name

  Trn Rt at Chkn Frm

  The Adoption of Albert

  Marcella and Me

  Vergil, the Laid-back Dog

  Misplaced Persons

  Other Books by Barbara Robinson

  Another Hilarious Story by Barbara Robinson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The car stopped about a foot away from me and a disembodied voice said, “Let me have your geography book.”

  It was Louis.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy? You can’t drive a car!”

  “Yes, I can,” he said. “It isn’t easy, but I can do it—but I need your geography book to sit on so I can see.”

  Louis at the Wheel

  I was ten years old when my little brother Louis began driving my mother’s car, and by the time I was eleven he had put over four hundred miles on it. He figured out that if he had done it all in one direction, he would have landed in Kansas City, although I’m not sure he allowed for rivers and mountains and other natural obstacles.

  I also wasn’t sure that my mother was really as astonished as she said she was when all this mileage came to light. And, in fact, she finally acknowledged that she probably knew what Louis was doing, but she just didn’t believe it.

  “It was like one of those dreams you have,” she told my father, “that seem so real when you wake up. Let’s say you dream that the President of the United States shows up for dinner. And you say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. All we have tonight is meat loaf.’ And he says, ‘That’s just fine, Mrs. Lawson. Meat loaf is my favorite. Do you cook it with bacon across the top?’”

  She hurried right on before my father could comment on the story so far. “Now, when you wake up, you know it was a dream. You know perfectly well that the President of the United States didn’t come to dinner, and isn’t going to come to dinner. But if he were to come, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would say, ‘Meat loaf is my favorite. Do you cook it with bacon across the top?’ . . .

  “That’s the way it was with Louis and the car—as if I dreamed that he was driving the car, woke up and knew absolutely that he wasn’t . . . but if it turned out later that he was, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  My father said that was the wildest kind of reasoning he had ever heard in his life; that dreaming the President came to dinner had absolutely nothing to do with why Louis, at his age, was driving up and down the street and all over the place. He also said that anyone who dreamed about meat loaf probably needed to get up and take some Alka-Seltzer.

  “Well . . . you don’t like meat loaf,” my mother said.

  This was a good example of how her mind worked, and to say my father found the process mysterious is an understatement. He never understood her brand of logic, but at least it never surprised him.

  Nor did it surprise him to learn, when the whole thing was sorted out, that it was Mother who first told Louis to drive the car—though of course she didn’t say, “Louis, go on out and drive the car. Pull the seat up as far as it will go and sit on one or two telephone books.”

  Mother was not that casual about cars and people driving them, probably because she didn’t learn to drive till she was almost thirty-five years old. As a consequence, she never enjoyed driving and would go out of her way to avoid it unless she absolutely had to go someplace and there was absolutely no other way to get there.

  She was, therefore, dismayed when my father bought her a car for Christmas. It wiped out her number-one excuse.

  “Now you won’t have to depend on buses,” he said, “or other people, or using my car. I hope you like the color. Do you like the color?”

  Mother said she loved the color, that it matched the living room. This was very much on her mind because what she really wanted for Christmas was a new sofa, which would also match the living room.

  My father led her in and out of the car, showing off its many features, while Mother oohed and ahhed, stuck her head in the trunk and under the hood and nodded knowingly at the mysterious innards coiled up there.

  It was a difficult performance, since all she asked of a car was that it would start, keep going and stop when it was supposed to—and that she would not have to drive it very much.

  But there was worse to come. Having provided Mother with the means of mobility, my father wanted to hear all about how she was enjoying it.

  “Well, where did you go today?” he asked every evening, and he was always disappointed if she hadn’t been off and running. So she had to lie, which she didn’t do very well; or tell the truth, which was not what he wanted to hear; or hedge, by saying she was sick, or worn out or cleaning the oven.

  In view of all this stress, it was probably not surprising that she should absentmindedly tell Louis to pick me up from my flute lesson on a day of complicated comings and goings. My father was out of town; Mother was leaving at noon with her friend Ada Snedaker to go to a flower show forty miles away; I had missed my regular flute lesson and, hence, my regular ride.

  As we ate breakfast that morning Mother tried to work all this out: “If I drive to the flower show I could leave early and get you at your lesson—but I can’t fit all the plants in my car. Your father won’t be home till after nine o’clock. The car will be here but what good is that? I suppose Louis could pick you up, he gets home from school at three thirty. . . .”

  “All right,” Louis said, but nobody heard him—and of course my mother didn’t really intend that Louis, not yet eight years old, should drive her car all the way across town and get me at my flute lesson. She was simply thinking out loud, dissecting a problem: people who must be picked up; plants which must be transported; cars in which to do all this; and people to operate those cars.

  “Or you could take a bus,” she suddenly said. “That’s what to do. You get the bus outside Miss Cramer’s house, and then transfer to the Mabert Hill line.”

  Satisfied with this arrangement, she put the whole thing out of her mind and went off to the flower show, or so I assumed. I was therefore surprised, while waiting for the bus, to see Mother’s car coming down the street very slowly and, as far as I could tell, entirely on its own.

  The car stopped about a foot away from me and a disembodied voice said, “Let me have your geography book.”

  It was Louis.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy? You can’t drive a car!”

  “Yes, I can,” he said. “It isn’t easy, but I can do it—but I need your geography book to sit on so I can see.”

  I was too horrified to think straight. Never a rambunctious child, I was a born follower of orders and obeyer of the law, and here was my own brother running amok—or so it seemed to me.

  The most puzzling thing was that Louis was not a rambunctious child either, and I couldn’t imagine what had gotten into him.

  “I just thought I should try it” was all he would say as we drove home . . . down back streets and alleys where no one could possibly see us. No one could possibly see Louis anyway, even sitting on my geography book. I wanted him to sit on my flute case too, but he wouldn’t do it.

  “Then I couldn’t reach the pedals,” he said, which was true.

  T
hus it began; for, since we were neither killed nor arrested in the course of this trip, it seemed to me, in retrospect, less harum-scarum than I first thought. And in no time at all, I accepted the fact of Louis at the wheel, as people do accept the most unlikely or bizarre circumstances if they happen often enough and nobody pays any attention to them.

  It turned out to be a great convenience. If I didn’t want to ride my bicycle to a friend’s house, Louis would take me; if we ran out of peanut butter or notebook paper or Cheerios, Louis would go get some. On tiresome rainy afternoons we could go downtown, or to the library, or to the YMCA.

  To be sure, we could never go very far or stay very long. There was always the remote chance that Mother would want to go somewhere in the car, or the equally remote chance that she would notice the car was gone and wonder why.

  Of course, Mother’s apathy about the car was our great ace in the hole. When absolutely necessary she would go do whatever errands had to be done; but at all other times the car simply didn’t enter her thinking. For one thing, she was perfectly happy not to go anywhere, having dozens of puttery projects at her fingertips at any given moment. Then too, most of her friends were tremendous get-up-and-goers, car keys always at the ready, and they counted on Mother to go along—to lunch, to various sales, to flower shows and needlework exhibitions. So she was always busy, quite contented, and able to ignore the car for days on end . . . though she didn’t want my father to know that.

  Our other ace in the hole was Louis himself. He was probably the only eight-year-old boy alive who would drive all over town in his mother’s car and never tell anyone about it, never see how fast he could go, never take a friend for a ride.

  His attitude was never “Hey, look at me!”—so no one ever did. We might have been children and a car from outer space, touring the countryside unseen, which was a little spooky.

  There were spooky aspects as well for my mother—unexplained peanut butter and Cheerios—but she tended to dismiss such minor mysteries on the grounds that she must have bought the thing, whatever it was. Being unwilling to run to the store for this or that, she shopped like a bear about to hibernate.

  She could not, however, anticipate every whim.

  “Do you know what I’d like?” my father said one evening. “I’d like some old-fashioned gingersnaps. They used to sell them in bulk, by the pound. They were hard—almost broke your teeth off.”

  Mother frowned. “I could try to make some, but I wouldn’t make them hard, to break people’s teeth off.”

  “Well, that’s what they were,” my father said. “Hard, like rocks.”

  The very next night, while rummaging around for something to nibble on, he found a big brown sack labeled Old-fashioned Gingersnaps, which he brought into the living room for all of us to share.

  “Well, where did you find those?” Mother said.

  “I found them in the bread drawer.”

  “No, I mean where did you buy them?”

  “I didn’t buy them.” He grinned at her. “Come on, Grace, I know you bought them, and I appreciate it. Here you go. . . .” He handed the sack to Louis and me.

  “Don’t break your teeth off,” Mother said automatically, but her mind was clearly elsewhere, her eyes puzzled, as she tried to figure out how this sack of cookies got into her bread drawer all by itself.

  “I bought them at that little store where they sell the airplane models,” Louis told me later. “I used my airplane-model money.”

  “That was nice, Louis,” I said.

  “Well . . .” He shrugged. “I figure, I never buy any gas.”

  Of course, there was no way that we could drive up and buy gas; but we didn’t have to, because Mother always bought gas whether she needed it or not. Since we knew this, and since we never went very far anyway, we didn’t even think about gas. We also didn’t think about other people using the car, since no one consulted us about such matters.

  Consequently we didn’t know that my father had used Mother’s car on a Monday, when his was in the shop—and we didn’t know that Mother’s friend Helen Moulton borrowed the car two days later, when hers was in the shop.

  So it was that on the following day, Louis, driving downtown, ran out of gas and, not knowing what else to do, simply left the car parked on Grandview Avenue. He carefully locked it up and walked home, a distance of some five miles.

  Long before he arrived my father had come home, missed the car and, after a tangle of misunderstanding involving Mother, Mrs. Moulton’s cleaning lady and Vinnie Tedesco at the service station (who seized the wrong horn of the dilemma and thought that he had mislaid Mrs. Moulton’s car) called the police.

  An officer came and took down all the information, much of it dealing with Mrs. Moulton, who was two hundred miles away in Cincinnati.

  “. . . and driving my car, probably,” Mother said. “I told Helen to use the car. I didn’t say when, or what for.” Mother hadn’t wanted to call the police at all, and was uncomfortable about the fuss being made.

  “Well, Helen Moulton wouldn’t drive your car to Cincinnati without telling you,” my father said.

  “When did you last drive the car?” the policeman asked.

  Of course Mother didn’t want to go into that because she hadn’t driven the car for two weeks, and she knew my father would be so exasperated with her, which he was.

  They were both edgy and a little cross, but I was just scared to death because I couldn’t imagine what had happened to Louis.

  He arrived home eventually. After the police called to say they had found the car—undamaged, locked and out of gas. “Unusual for it to be locked,” the officer said.

  Louis, unaware of all this commotion, had automatically put the keys right back on the hook where they belonged and where they were discovered ten minutes later, to further complicate matters.

  “How can the car be locked on Grandview Avenue, while the keys are here?” my father puzzled.

  “Well—maybe Helen left them?” Mother suggested, but with little conviction.

  “That would mean that Helen stole the car.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t see them when you looked before?”

  “That would mean that no one stole the car.” He shook his head. “Well, I have to go get it before it rolls away all by itself. I wonder where on Grandview Avenue it is?”

  “It’s in front of the eye doctor’s house,” Louis said.

  I had known, I think, that he was going to say this, or something equally damning. He was worn out from his long walk and only half awake and responding by instinct.

  “Well, at least it’s not all the way downtown, but even so. . . .” My father stopped.

  In the heavy silence that followed, Louis came to, realized what he had said and was, I suppose, too tired to wiggle his way out.

  “I just ran out of gas,” he said, which was true in every way.

  We were grounded, of course, forever; and several other punishments were considered. But we were not easy children to punish, because of those very traits of character and temperament which had allowed us to drive around, unnoticed, for a year: our caution, our modest goals (in terms of destination), our quiet ways while motoring. Besides, my father seemed more inclined to blame himself, my mother and the public at large for failing ever to see what we were doing.

  So, in the end, nothing much happened to us.

  Mother, however, continued to fret. She seemed to think that Louis would now be driven to drive, as people are driven to drink, and saw the car as a dangerous temptation . . . or so she said.

  I suppose my father saw no reason to maintain a car no one wanted to drive—except Louis, sitting on telephone books.

  “Well, you’ll be out one Christmas present,” he told Mother. “So you have one coming. Make it a good one.”

  “Oh”—she eyed the sofa, which was old and rump-sprung and didn’t match the living room—“I’ll think of something.”

  The Mysterious Visit of Genevieve Fitc
h

  Maxine Slocum lived two houses down from us, and when Maxine’s cat got pregnant, Mrs. Slocum called up all the mothers in the neighborhood to say that all children would be welcome at the lying-in unless their mothers objected. It was the beginning of an enlightened era and no mother wanted to seem unenlightened, so everybody accepted Mrs. Slocum’s invitation.

  My father said it was the craziest idea he had ever heard in his life. “There must be thirty-five kids in this neighborhood,” he said. “What are they going to do, put up bleachers?”

  “They have that big basement,” Mother said.

  “Suppose the cat decides to have her kittens in the hall closet, or under the bed? Poor damn cat. . . .” He looked at me and my little brother, Louis. “Take my advice, don’t go. Be kind to a cat. How would you like to have a baby in front of thirty-five people?”

  “French queens used to have to,” Louis said, “to prove the succession.”

  When Louis said things like that, people always raised their eyebrows and whispered to Mother that he must be a genius. He wasn’t, though; he was just one of those people who remembered odd, unrelated facts. Ask him to tell you what “the succession” meant, and he would have been up a tree.

  I was only worried that the cat would have her kittens in the middle of the night or something, but Maxine promised that if that happened she would run out in the street and ring her father’s antique cowbell.

  “Don’t worry, Mary Elizabeth,” she told me. “You’ll hear that.”

  In the meantime, we all kept the cat, whose name was Juanita, under close surveillance and privately hoped to get a kitten out of the whole thing.

  According to my father, that was really Mrs. Slocum’s dark purpose. “It isn’t that she wants to provide this rich educational experience for everybody under sixteen,” he said. “She just wants to get rid of the kittens.”