Cheaper by the Dozen

shouted, cuffing Dad affectionately on the back. "Dude from the East you might be. But it's many a thousand brick you've laid in your life, and don't try to tell me different."
    Dad dusted off his hands gingerly with a spotless handkerchief.
    "Dead easy," he said, "my good man."
    Dad behaved himself pretty well during the tea, but on later visits he'd sometimes interrupt Mother's parents in the middle of sentences and go over and pick up Mother from her chair.
    "Excuse me just a minute," he'd tell his future in-laws. "I think Miss Lillie would look more decorative up here." He'd swing her up and place her on the top of a bookcase or china closet, and then go back and sit down. Mother was afraid to move for fear of upsetting her perch, and would remain up there primly, determined not to lose her dignity. Dad pretended he had forgotten all about her, as he resumed the conversation.
    We knew, too, that the first time Dad had been invited to spend a weekend at the Mollers he had thrown himself with a wheeze and a sigh onto his bed, which had collapsed and enveloped him in a heavy, betasseled canopy.
    "The things your daddy shouted before Papa and your Uncle Fred could untangle him from the tassels!" Mother tittered. "I can tell you, it was an education for us girls and, I suspect, for the boys too. Thank goodness he's stopped talking like that."
    "And what did your family really think of him?" we asked her. "Really."
    "I never could understand it," Mother said, glancing over at Dad, who was at his smuggest, "but they thought he was simply wonderful. Mama said it was like a breath of fresh air when he walked into a room. And Papa said the business of laying bricks wasn't just showing off, but was your father's way of telling them that he had started out by making a living with his hands."
    "Is that what you were trying to tell them, Daddy?" we asked.
    "Trying to tell them nothing," Dad shouted. "Anybody .who knows anything about New England knows the Bunkers and the Gilbreths, or Galbraiths, descend through Governor Bradford right to the Mayflower. I wasn't trying to tell them anything."
    "What did you lay the bricks for then?" we insisted.
    "When some people walk into a parlor," Dad said, "they like to sit down at the piano and impress people by playing Bach. When I walk into a parlor, I like to lay brick, that's all."

    There were seven children in the family when we set out with Mother for California. Fred was the baby, and was train side all the way from Niagara Falls to the Golden Gate. Lill, the next to youngest, had broken a bone in her foot three weeks before, and had to stay in her berth. Mother was expecting another baby in three months, and didn't always feel too well herself.
    The chance to return with her children to her parents' home meant more to Mother than any of us realized, and she Was anxious to show us off in the best possible light and to have her family approve of us.
    "I know you're going to be good and quiet, and do what your grandparents and your aunts and uncles tell you," Mother kept saying. "You want to remember that they're very affectionate, but they're not accustomed to having children «round any more. They're going to love you, but they're not used to noise and people running around."
    Mother had spent a good bit of money buying us new outfits so that we would make a good impression in California, and the thought she ought to economize on train accommodations. We were jammed, two in a berth, into a drawing room and two sections. She brought along a Sterno cooking outfit and two suitcases of food, mostly cereals and graham crackers. We ate almost all our meals in the drawing room, journeying to the dining car only on those infrequent occasions when Mother yielded to our complaints that scurvy was threatening to set in.

    She spent most of her time trying to make Lill comfortable Und trying to find some kind of milk that would stay on Fred's stomach. She had little opportunity to supervise the test of us, and we wandered up and down the train sampling the contents of the various ice water tanks, peeking into berths and, in the case of Frank and Bill, turning somersaults and wrestling with each other in the aisles.
    At each stop, Mother would leave Anne in charge of the broken foot and upset stomach department, while she rushed into the station to buy milk, food, and Sterno cans. The test of us would get off the train to stretch our legs and see whether a new engine had been switched on.