My Brother Louis Measures Worms

by Barbara Robinson

  My father was amazed. He made Mother tell him the whole story again, and when she was finished he said it seemed even worse now that he knew who the baby was.

  He also said there was probably no way to keep Louis’s wedding out of the family history—“Remember when Louis was nine years old and won the wedding?”—but he did hope there would be someone on hand to fill in the details.

  Trn Rt at Chkn Frm

  Until Mother’s mysterious malaise, my father had always believed her to be somewhat disorganized in her thinking but perfectly sound of mind—and when, for a brief time, he had reason to doubt this, it affected his own common sense.

  “I was too worried to think straight,” he said—and in the absence of his common sense and straight thinking there was no one in charge of the store, so to speak, and misunderstandings multiplied.

  At first Louis and I didn’t even know Mother was supposed to be sick—but, of course, Mother didn’t know it either.

  “I just wish I had known,” she said later. “I would have gone to bed with a lot of magazines and all the Perry Mason mysteries and had some pleasure out of it.”

  My father said she didn’t deserve to have any pleasure out of it, that she had put him through a terrible time of strain and worry.

  “I didn’t put you through anything,” Mother said. “You put yourself through it, being so secretive. If you thought I’d gone crazy, why didn’t you say so?”

  That was, indeed, exactly what he thought; but it was not what he told Louis and me, out of respect for our tender years. He simply said that Mother wasn’t feeling well: that she might seem nervous and edgy, and we should try hard not to upset her.

  We knew what that meant, or thought we did, and immediately began to wonder whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, and—since we were always bone honest with each other—whether we would like it, whatever it was.

  We thought it odd that no one gave us the straight dope on the matter, babies being commonplace around the neighborhood and their origins no longer any special mystery. But we didn’t think it was any big secret . . . and so, unwittingly, we complicated the whole misunderstanding.

  I said something about our new baby to Mother’s sister Rhoda, who, having just been told that Mother was in a precarious mental state, immediately put two and two together and got six.

  She decided that Mother, then thirty-nine years old, either was pregnant and didn’t want to be, or wanted to be pregnant and wasn’t—and, in whichever case, had retreated from reality.

  Aunt Rhoda also thought it odd that my father had not given her all the facts, but put it down to a sense of delicacy, this being so personal a matter. She also decided that if my father, a wholly practical and forthright man, couldn’t even bring himself to suggest the details of the situation, she shouldn’t say anything to him about it and must simply bide her time, be available and await developments.

  Mother, unaware of all this, thought it odd that Rhoda should suddenly start dropping in every other day for no good reason, but finally concluded that she was just lonely or bored or maybe feeling old before her time. So, while Aunt Rhoda was watching Mother for signs of pregnancy and/or mental collapse, Mother was watching Aunt Rhoda for signs of despondency about her fading youth.

  “Come with me to Circleville to judge a flower show,” Mother would say, thinking that was just what Rhoda needed.

  “Isn’t that a long way to go? I don’t think all this travel is good for you; you look tired to me. Why not stay home and rest?” Aunt Rhoda would say, thinking that was just what Mother needed.

  As a matter of fact, Mother thought it was a long way to go, too. She loved the flower shows and the sociability and the tea and cookies, but she didn’t love getting there.

  My father had again provided her with a car—for his own peace of mind, he said, lest in some emergency she find herself crashing through traffic with Aunt Mildred—but Mother still had little confidence in her driving skills, and no sense of direction at all, and continued to avoid any expedition which required her to drive very far or to figure out where she was going.

  Still, when elected a judge by her garden club, Mother must have decided that the pleasure involved outweighed the perils. Once or twice a week, at the height of the flower show season, she would set out, clutching maps and instructions on how to get to the appointed place in Circleville or Athens or Wilmington, but even so, she was either lost or late most of the time until she stumbled on a way out of this continual dilemma.

  While she was traveling down the highway one morning on her way to a distant flower show, a sudden gust of wind blew her vital information out the window, leaving her stranded; because, as she said, “If I get lost with a map in my hand, I would certainly get lost without one.”

  At that moment she noticed a station wagon ahead of her on the road—loaded with green growing plants, driven by a lady in what looked like a pretty hat; and, having nothing to lose, she simply followed this car on the reasonable assumption that it was going to a flower show.

  “And not only was it going to the show,” she added triumphantly, “but that lady won first prize for her tuberous begonia. It wasn’t a hat after all, it was a tuberous begonia.”

  Thereafter Mother spent less time studying her maps (which didn’t seem to help much anyway) and more time studying the traffic around her, with surprising success. Time after time she was able to locate, identify and pursue some member of the local flower show crowd . . . and thus arrive at the right place, on time and unruffled. Sometimes the clues were obvious: many plants, ladies holding dried arrangements; sometimes more subtle: a horticultural society emblem in the window, a bumper sticker reading I Grow Gladiolas.

  Of course, my father had no idea that this was going on. He knew that Mother liked flowers and was a judge of them, but he had no interest in such activities. If she enjoyed doing it, whatever it was, he was happy for her, and that was that . . . and Mother, knowing this, chose not to bore him with details.

  He was very much surprised, therefore, while having lunch with a customer in a town some forty miles from home, to look up and see Mother in conversation with the cashier of the restaurant—getting change for a dollar, as it happened, so she could use the phone in what was an emergency situation.

  She had followed a car absolutely loaded with flowers and greenery all the way to its destination, which turned out to be a funeral home. She was not only distressed but somewhat indignant, because the driver of the car, a florist, had not used his delivery truck, in which case she would not have followed him in the first place.

  My father excused himself to his customer and went to see what this was all about. Had anyone asked him that day about Mother’s whereabouts he would probably have said, “Oh, Grace is at home—not much of a gadabout, you know,” for so he believed.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” he said, and kissed her. “What are you doing in Fredonia?”

  In Mother’s reply lay the crux of the whole ensuing tangle . . . for what was she to say? That she had, by mistake, followed a car full of plants to a funeral home? That she was really supposed to be in Semperville, ten miles away? Most of all, that this was not a unique experience?

  Various harmless fictions crossed her mind—she had come to visit a friend, to get the dining room chairs reglued, to buy something big and important on sale that very day in Fredonia—but Mother was no good at fictions, harmless or otherwise. An uneasy liar, she always fell apart two sentences into the lie.

  However, it seemed to her that any answer involving the truth of this situation would surely lead to lengthy explanations, and might well produce some kind of public scene.

  Hoping to avoid all this, she simply said, “I don’t know,” and immediately hurried back to greet the customer, to make polite small talk and to leave before my father could pin her down.

  He said later that she seemed distracted, not herself, her eyes vague and troubled (all perfectly true, since she was then half an hour l
ate for the flower show and had no idea how to get there). He was puzzled by her answer, but not alarmed . . . until the same thing happened several days later.

  Mother had pursued what looked like a sure thing: an elderly Packard, gleaming clean and bearing three ladies in hats. They led her to a high school auditorium—a common flower show arena— and took from the back of their car three different flower arrangements, all of which turned out to be table decorations for a luncheon-lecture on Yugoslavian folk art.

  Mother didn’t know that, though; it looked to her like a flower show, and a very fancy and elegant one, which pleased her. She sat down at a table to make preliminary notes: Good use of daisies in Number 7. Awkward larkspur in Number 10.—and was served, and ate, a dainty appetizer of pineapple and cream cheese before she caught on.

  Thus trapped—“I couldn’t very well eat their food and then just get up and leave, could I?” she said—she stayed until the room was darkened for a slide presentation and then raced for a telephone to call, first, the flower show committee, and then Louis and me, to be sure we were all right.

  As it happened, my father had stopped home between appointments, was already surprised to find Mother gone (“Not much of a gadabout”), and even more surprised to answer the telephone and learn that she was in Concord.

  “What are you doing in Concord?” he asked.

  Of course Mother was surprised too. She didn’t expect my father to answer the phone and, caught unawares, had no ready reply. Once again, she had followed a strange car to an unknown destination, felt a little foolish and didn’t want to go into it over the phone or, indeed, at all. No doubt she reasoned that what worked before would work again and said, “I don’t know—but I’m coming straight home to fix the fish.”

  The idea here, a spur-of-the-moment notion, was to get his mind off one thing (her whereabouts) and onto something else (supper); and she thought the fish would do it, fish being his favorite meal.

  It had no such effect. Had she gone to Concord to buy fish? he wondered. That made no sense, with a perfectly good fish market not ten minutes away. And even supposing there were better fish, or cheaper fish, or bigger fish in Concord, why hadn’t she said so?

  Louis and I were not only no help to him, but added fuel to the fire.

  “When you left for school this morning,” he asked us, “did your mother say she would be gone for the day?”

  We said no.

  “Well, was she dressed to go out?”

  “I don’t think so,” Louis said. “She was in the kitchen, making meat loaf.”

  “For supper?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  The meat loaf proved to be in the refrigerator with strips of bacon across the top of it, clearly ready for the oven—and in light of this, Mother’s telephone conversation seemed not just strange and disjointed, but downright loony.

  As my father later said, it was now clear to him that from time to time—indeed, frequently—something came over Mother; she would get in the car and drive somewhere (Fredonia, Concord) and then come to her senses and, exactly as she had told him, not know why she was wherever she was. The reference to fish struck him as an attempt on her part to hang onto reality: home, family, routine household matters.

  It was at this point that he told Louis and me that Mother was not well, for he pictured a rocky time ahead and wanted to prepare us. He also planned to sit down quietly with Mother and try to talk about it—but then Mother came home with an enormous fish, complete with head and tail, opened the refrigerator and said, “Why, here’s a meat loaf!”

  She had forgotten about the meat loaf in all the confusion of the day, but her tone and choice of words suggested that she had never known anything about it in the first place. This convinced my father that she was in worse shape than he thought and needed more help than he could provide.

  From here on, events marched off in all directions.

  My father consulted Dr. Hildebrand, who said that Mother was the last person alive he would expect to go off her rocker; that if she had, it was out of his line; but that he would set up an appointment with her for a regular checkup and see what he could conclude.

  He subsequently reported that Mother appeared to him to be perfectly sane, though overconcerned about her sister Rhoda, and that to satisfy Mother, he had set up an appointment for Rhoda.

  Following that consultation he told my father that if anyone had a problem it was Rhoda. “She’s got pregnancy on the brain,” he said. “Doesn’t want to talk about diet and blood pressure. Wants to talk about babies; who has ’em, who wants ’em. I don’t know”—he shook his head—“have to keep an eye on her.”

  Still, my father was not encouraged. Mother appeared to him to be perfectly sane, too, most of the time—but what about her amnesia jaunts to Fredonia and Concord? What about the meat loaf and the fish?

  Meanwhile Louis and I were still waiting to be told about the baby, and Aunt Rhoda continued to come and go, waiting for Mother to break down and reveal whatever was troubling her and making her do the strange things my father said she did, and Mother went right on scrambling around the countryside from one flower show to another.

  After the luncheon-lecture incident she was extremely cautious about following cars; but, as she later said, this system had worked for her more times than it hadn’t. . . . When she next found herself heading into strange country with sketchy directions (Trn rt at chkn frm; tke scd rt Briley? Borly?) she looked around for something likely . . . and found it, in a car whose rear window was literally abloom with pink and white blossoms.

  She couldn’t see the driver or the passengers, but neither had she seen anything along the road that might be a “chkn frm” and time was ticking by; so when this car turned off the highway she followed it.

  The first thing that met her eye was a large billboard advertising Brown-Broast Broilers, which she took to be the Briley or Borly of her directions; and so she proceeded, confident and pleased with herself, until the flowery car stopped in front of the bank, and out stepped my father.

  She had already pulled in behind him and there was no escape; but at least, as she said, this time the shoe was on the other foot. What was he doing in somebody else’s car full of flowers? she demanded. And what was he doing here in Albion?

  First of all, my father told her (gently, he later insisted), they weren’t in Albion, but in Conneaut; he was here to make a business call; he was driving George Colgate’s car because George asked him to; the flowers were all petunia plants to be delivered to George Colgate’s mother-in-law, who lived in Conneaut.

  “That is the craziest tale I ever heard!” Mother told him. She was, once again, upset with herself; exasperated with a driver who had led her astray; astonished that that driver should be my father; sick and tired of being late to flower shows; and fed up with the whole thing. “I’m supposed to be in Albion this very minute, judging a flower show. But because I followed you, I’m a long way from there.”

  “But why did you follow me?” my father asked.

  “I thought you were going to the flower show.”

  “Why would I be going to a flower show, for God’s sake?”

  “Well, I didn’t know it was you!”

  And so it all came out—right there in front of the Citizens’ Bank of Conneaut, before what my father called a cast of thousands.

  “Let me try to understand this,” he said. “Do you mean to tell me that for weeks you have been following just any old car, hoping it will lead you to where you want to go?”

  “Not just any old car!” Mother said. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Since that was exactly what he had thought, he said so, in the heat of the moment . . . and so all that came out—the consultation with Dr. Hildebrand; Rhoda’s reason for being underfoot all the time; even the cautions to Louis and me—and it made Mother so furious that she got back in her car, slammed the door and drove away in a screech of tires.

  By evening, thoug
h, they had both simmered down. They began to see the humor of the situation and produced appropriate peace offerings: My father brought a pot of the petunias home and set it in the middle of the table, like a flower show exhibit, and Mother presented him with a large baked haddock for dinner. They even became a little slaphappy, recalling to each other significant steps along the way: “You kept saying, I don’t know why I’m here.” “I just forgot about the meat loaf.” Louis and I, encouraged by the convivial atmosphere, picked this time to say that we knew all about the baby, were very happy about it, and wanted to know when it was due.

  My father, recalling his conversation with Dr. Hildebrand, instantly connected “baby” with Aunt Rhoda, assumed that Mother knew all about it and said, “I don’t know. Grace, when is the baby due?”

  Mother said, “Baby? What baby?” and my father said, “Why, Rhoda’s baby”—which was, of course a big surprise to Louis and me.

  Mother, though a little miffed that she was last in line to know this news, was overjoyed at the prospect of a new baby in the family. The very next day she dragged the crib and the buggy and the playpen out of the attic and hauled everything over to Aunt Rhoda, who, though fearful that Mother had finally slipped over the brink, nevertheless declared categorically that she, Rhoda, wasn’t going to have any baby.

  “Oh, yes, you are too,” Mother said happily, hugging her. “And I should have guessed, because I was that very same way with Louis—nervous and a little blue, not quite myself, wondering whether I was too old . . .”

  “What very same way?” Rhoda bristled. “I’m not nervous or blue and you’re the one who’s not quite herself!”

  Mother said that was just a little misunderstanding, and she didn’t want to talk about it, she’d rather talk about the baby.

  “There is no baby!” Rhoda insisted.

  “Then why did you say there was?” It suddenly occurred to Mother that she had been right all along about Rhoda, and she immediately adjusted her voice and manner to one of solicitous concern, saying things like “Don’t get all excited” and “If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t talk about it.”