Cheaper by the Dozen

laughed at her qualms.
    "We'll be back in about an hour," Dad called to us as he tested his three horns to make sure he was prepared for any emergency. "Wait lunch for us. I'm starving."
    "You've got to hand it to him," Anne admitted as the Pierce Arrow bucked op Wayside Place. "He's the bee's knees, all right. We were all scared to death before our operations. And look at him. He's looking forward to it."
    Two hours later, a taxicab stopped in front of the house, and the driver jumped out and opened the door for his passengers. Then Mother emerged, pale and red-eyed. She and the driver helped a crumpled mass of moaning blue serge to alight. Dad's hat was rumpled and on sideways. His face was gray and sagging. He wasn't crying, but his eyes were watering. He couldn't speak and he couldn't smile.
    "He's sure got a load on all right; Mrs. Gilbreth," said the driver enviously. "And still early afternoon, too. Didn't even know he touched the stuff, myself."
    We waited for the lighting to strike, but it didn't. The seriousness of Dad's condition may be adjuged by the fact that he contented himself with a withering look.
    "Keep a civil tongue in your head," said Mother, in one of the sharpest speeches of her career. "He's deathly ill." Mother and Grandma helped Dad up to his room. We could hear him moaning, all the way downstairs.

    Mother told us all about it that night, while Dad was snoring under the effects of sleeping pills. Mother had waited in Dr. Burton's ante-room while the tonsillectomy was being performed. Dad had felt wonderful while under the local anesthetic. When the operation was half over, he had come out into the ante-room, grinning and waving one tonsil in a pair of forceps.
    "One down and one to go, Lillie," he had said. "Completely painless. Just like rolling off a log."
    After what had seemed an interminable time, Dad had come out into the waiting room again, and reached for his hat and coat. He was still grinning, only not so wide as before.
    "That's that," he said. "Almost painless. All right, boss, let's go. I'm still hungry."
    Then, as Mother watched, his high spirits faded and he began to fall to pieces.
    "I'm stabbed," he moaned. "I'm hemorrhaging. Burton, come here. Quick. What have you done to me?"
    Dr. Burton came out of his office. It must be said to his credit that he was sincerely sympathetic. Dr. Burton had had his own tonsils out.
    "You'll be all right, Old Pioneer," he said. "You just had to have it the hard way."
    Dad obviously couldn't drive, so Mother had called the taxi. A man from the garage towed Foolish Carriage home later that night.
    "I tried to drive it home," the garage man told Mother, "but I couldn't budge it. I got the engine running all right, but it just spit and bucked every time I put it in gear. Durndest thing I ever saw."
    "I don't think anyone but Mr, Gilbreth understands it," Mother said.
    Dad spent two weeks in bed, and it was the first time any of us remembered his being sick. He couldn't smoke, eat, or talk. But he could glare, and he glared at Bill for two full minutes when Bill asked him one afternoon if he had had his tonsils taken out like the Spartans used to have theirs removed.
    Dad didn't get his voice back until the very day that he finally got out of bed. He was lying there, propped up on pillows, reading his office mail. There was a card from Mr. Coggin, the photographer.
    "Hate to tell you, Mr. Gilbreth, but none of the moving pictures came out. I forgot to take off the inside lens cap. I'm terribly sorry. Coggin. P.S. I quit."
    Dad threw off the covers and reached for his bathrobe. For the first time in two weeks, he spoke:
    "I'll track him down to the ends of the earth," he croaked. "I'll take a blunt button hook and pull his tonsils out by the by jingoed roots, just like I promised him. He doesn't quit. He's fired."

Chapter 11
Nantucket

    We spent our summers at Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Dad bought two lighthouses, which had been abandoned by the government, and a ramshackle cottage, which looked as if it had been abandoned by Coxey's Army. Dad had the lighthouses moved so that they flanked the cottage. He and Mother used one of them as an office and den. The other served as a bedroom for three of the children.
    He named the cottage The Shoe, in honor of Mother, who, he said, reminded him of the old woman who lived in one.
    The cottage and lighthouses were situated on a flat stretch of land between the fashionable Cliff and the Bathing