Cheaper by the Dozen

would come leather manicure sets for the girls and pocket knives for the boys. How we loved him then, when his frown wrinkles reversed their field and became a wide grin.
    Or he'd shake hands solemnly all around, and when you took your hand away there'd be a nut chocolate bar in it. Or he'd ask who had a pencil, and then hand out a dozen automatic ones.
    "Let's see, what time is it?" he asked once. Out came wrist watches for all—even the six-week-old baby.
    "Oh, Daddy, they're just right," we'd say.
    And when we'd throw our arms around him and tell him how we'd missed him, he would choke up and wouldn't be able to answer. So he'd rumple our hair and slap our bottoms instead.

Chapter 2
Pierce Arrow

    There were other surprises, too. Boxes of Page and Shaw candy, dolls and toys, cameras from Germany, wool socks from Scotland, a dozen Plymouth Rock hens, and two sheep that were supposed to keep the lawn trimmed but died, poor creatures, from the combined effects of saddle sores, too much petting, and tail pulling. The sheep were fun while they lasted, and it is doubtful if any pair of quadrupeds ever had been sheared so often by so many.
    "If I ever bring anything else alive into this household," Dad said, "I hope the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals hales me into court and makes me pay my debt to Society. I never felt so ashamed about anything in my life as I do about those sheep. So help me."
    When Dad bought the house in Montclair, he described it to us as a tumbled-down shanty in a run-down neighborhood. We thought this was another one of his surprises, but he finally convinced us that the house was a hovel.
    "It takes a lot of money to keep this family going," he said. "Food, clothes, allowances, doctors' bills, getting teeth straightened, and buying ice cream sodas. I'm sorry, but I just couldn't afford anything better. We'll have to fix it up the best we can, and make it do."
    We were living at Providence, Rhode Island, at the time. As we drove from Providence to Montclair, Dad would point to every termite-trap we passed.
    "It looks something like that one," he would say, "only it has a few more broken windows, and the yard is maybe a little smaller."
    _ As we entered Montclair, he drove through the worst section of town, and finally pulled up at an abandoned structure that even Dracula wouldn't have felt at home in.
    "Well, here it is," he said. "Home. All out."
    "You're joking, aren't you, dear?" Mother said hopefully.
    "What's the matter with it? Don't you like it?"
    "If it's what you want, dear," said Mother, "I'm satisfied. I guess."
    "It's a slum, that's what's the matter with it," said Ernestine.
    2No one asked your opinion, young lady," replied Dad. "I was talking to your Mother, and I will thank you to keep out of the conversation."
    "You're welcome," said Ernestine, who knew she was treading on thin ice but was too upset to care. "You're welcome, I'm sure. Only I wouldn't live in it with a ten-foot pole."
    "Neither would I," said Martha. "Not with two ten-foot poles."
    "Hush," said Mother. "Daddy knows best."
    Lill started to sob.
    "It won't look so bad with a coat of paint and a few boards put in where these holes are," Mother said cheerfully.
    Dad, grinning now, was fumbling in his pocket for his notebook.
    "By jingo, kids, wait a second," he crowed. "Wrong address. Well, what do you know. Pile back in. I thought this place looked a little more run down than when I last saw it."
    And then he drove us to 68 Eagle Rock Way, which was an old but beautiful Taj Mahal of a house with fourteen rooms, a two-story bam out back, a greenhouse, chicken yard, grape arbors, rose bushes, and a couple of dozen fruit trees. At first we thought that Dad was teasing us again, and that this was the other end of a scale—a house much better than the one he had bought.
    "This is really it," he said. "The reason I took you to that other place first, and the reason I didn't try to describe this place to you is—well, I didn't want you to be disappointed. Forgive me?"
    We said we did.

    Dad had bought the automobile a year before we moved. It was our first car, and cars still were a novelty. Of course, that had been a surprise, too. He had taken us all for a walk and had ended up at a garage where the car had been parked.
    Although Dad made his living by redesigning complicated machinery, so as to reduce the number of human motions required to operate it, he never really understood the mechanical