“I hope they don’t think we’re bringing them your grandmother’s corsets,” Dorothy whispered to me. We left the boxes at the desk with an unpleasant woman who was too busy to say thank you, and who made no move to open the boxes to see what they were. About a week later we got a printed form from the hospital, addressed to Dorothy and me together, since both our names had been on the boxes; the printed form said thanks for our gift, the children in the wards would appreciate it. On the bottom of the form someone had written, “For Indian beadwork.”
I don’t suppose, strictly speaking, that after that day clothespin dolls came into my head from one year to the next. When I had to have a place to hide my book of poetry I must have taken the box of clothespin dolls and put them away with the feather fan and the autograph albums and the china dogs. The whole batch of them got sensibly put up into the attic, where they would have stayed in perfect safety, untroubled by any longing of mine for them, if my mother had not gotten to thinking about the old china, which wasn’t there anyway, as I could have told her, my brother and I having used it long before that for tea parties in our tree hut.
I was sitting on the living room floor, holding the feather fan and reading through the autograph albums, when I heard the voices of my children outside, on their way home for lunch. I made a frantic effort to scramble all the things back into the carton, but I was too late. “What’s that?” Laurie said, coming into the living room, and “Let me see,” Jannie said behind him. Sally came over and sat down on the floor next to me, and possessed herself of the feather fan, which for some reason struck her as irresistibly funny.
“Never mind,” I said, snatching childishly. “It’s mine.” I was unreasonably angry at Sally for laughing at my feather fan, and then Jannie got hold of the box of clothespin dolls. My mother (at least, I prefer to think that it was my mother) had tied a blue ribbon around the box, and before I could stop her Jannie had untied the ribbon and opened the box. “Ooh,” she said, and Laurie, peering, said, “Jeeps.”
I had forgotten D’Artagnan, I am afraid, and the soldiers in pink and blue, and the cotton hair. I had forgotten the name labels in Dorothy’s neatest handwriting; I had forgotten the line of four hundred and thirty-one clothespin dolls going down the long hall at Dorothy’s house. I had forgotten the hats and the feathers and the yarn hair and the silver boots. “Looka this one,” Laurie said. “I found one named Linda,” Jannie said. “I want that one with the blue hat,” Sally said.
“Hey,” Laurie said, “this one’s got no name.”
I looked over my son’s shoulder at the green shirt and at the name label which read only “?” and snatched the doll out of his hand. “You let that alone,” I said. I had slept with that clothespin doll under my pillow for several weeks, hoping it might influence my dreams and my future, although I have really no quarrel with my present husband.
“What’d I do?” demanded Laurie indignantly. “I was only looking at the little doll, I didn’t—”
Tenderly I set out the clothespin dolls on the floor, stopping to fluff out Linda’s skirt and adjust D’Artagnan’s feathers. We had builded better than we knew, thanks to our homemade paste. Although some of the hats had come off, not one was dented, not one star had faded from the queen’s cloak, not one sword was tarnished nor one buckle askew. The children, enchanted, helped me stand them up. Then, inevitably I drove off, as my mother had so long ago, with all the children in the back of the car. We bought crepe paper and gold paper and silver paper, and the grocer found a box of round-headed clothespins in his cellar. I remembered how to make the paste, even the pinch of salt which makes it stick better.
When we moved to Vermont into a big house, my mother had offered me the old dining room table, which was made of some incredibly solid substance—perhaps paste and crepe paper—that stood up under my brother and me for twenty years, and is surely good for a hundred more; I have every intention of giving it to Jannie when she marries. My father and mother were always telling my brother and me to keep our feet off the heavy pedestal which is the foundation of the table, and now I sit at dinner with my feet resting comfortably and tell my children to keep their feet off the table. It was with a telescoping of time that made me feel faintly ghostlike that I found myself sitting at the same table with a box of clothespins and a dozen packages of crepe paper. My first fear, that in all these years I had forgotten how to make clothespin dolls, turned out to be unjustified; perhaps making clothespin dolls is not a knack which evaporates with time. “See?” I said to the children, “you take a little piece of brown paper to fit around the doll’s waist, and you gather the crepe paper, and you make a little bodice. . . .”
“That’s not the way,” Laurie said. “What you want to do is, you want to take the clothespin and you drill a hole through it and then you put something like, for instance, a pipe cleaner through the hole, and then you’ve got arms, see? And that silver stuff’s no good for swords, what you need is plastic, and then you really got something, boy.”
“And those clothes, Mommy dear,” said Jannie. “Mine is going to be a lady in a bathing suit.”
“Mine’s going to be a Martian,” Laurie said. “I need the scissors, Mom. You can make yours in a minute.”
Sally rode around and around the dining room table on her tricycle, the feather fan proudly displayed on the front. “I’m a airplane,” she sang triumphantly. “I’m a old witch riding a broomstick.”
“I think real cloth,” Jannie said thoughtfully to her brother.
“Plastic,” Laurie said firmly. “Anyway, paper’s no good.” He looked with interest at his sister’s doll, which had on the bottom of a two-piece bathing suit. “What you need there,” he said with enthusiasm, “is toes.”
After they had given up I made a doll with cotton hair and a yellow skirt and a blue cape, carrying a parasol, and I took it in to my husband in the study.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a clothespin doll,” I said. “I made it for you.”
“It’s very nice,” he said. “How did you happen to think of making me a clothespin doll?”
“I just thought you’d like one,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, and he put the clothespin doll on the corner of his desk.
I went and picked up the dining room and put all the crepe paper away and washed out the dish with the homemade paste. Later that afternoon my husband, who was clearly very much puzzled, asked me again what had decided me to make him a clothespin doll, although of course he was very pleased to have one, and I said that I used to be quite a hand at making clothespin dolls. “A long time ago,” I told him.
At about ten o’clock on an evening late in February the entire pattern of our collective lives was violently altered. My husband and I, sitting in the kind of companionable stupor that sets in when all children are in bed and presumably asleep, were startled at hearing a sudden astonished “Oh!” from Sally’s room. As we half rose, looking at one another, her voice lifted in the greatest, most jubilant shout I have ever heard: “I can READ! I can READ!”
It turned out she could, too. After we had calmed the other children (“Sally had a bad dream”) and put them back to bed with another piece of candy each, Sally came down and sat in the living room in her red pajamas and read to her father and me the first chapter of Ozma of Oz, the book I had been reading her before she went, as I thought, to bed. She explained that every night after I had turned out the light and gone downstairs, she had been going over and over the book I had read her, trying to apply the reading knowledge she picked up in kindergarten, and tonight, without effort, the letters on the page had fallen together and become readable; she had gone along for a page or more before she realized that she was reading the words. We listened, congratulated her, remarked on how surprised her teacher would be, and asked what she had been using for light, teaching herself to read up there in bed. After some hesit
ation she admitted that she had found that it was possible to slant the book so it caught light from the hall, where we always left a nightlight burning. My husband, who used to read at night when he was a boy with a flashlight under the covers, said that inadequate light was harmful to the eyes. I, who used to read at night when I was a girl by the street light outside my window, said that little girls who stayed awake reading at night were very apt to be sleepy in school the next day. Sally agreed soberly, as befitted one newly admitted to an esoteric society, and went back upstairs with Ozma of Oz. When I went up to cover her later she was asleep with her light on and Ozma of Oz open on her stomach.
The most immediate impact of Sally’s reading was on Laurie. I went into town and bought Sally a bedlight, and Laurie had to put it up. The small bookcase in her room, which had been adequate for picture books and the Oz books I had been steadily reading my way through, starting with The Wizard of Oz with each child, and going right on down the line, so that there are, by now, great swatches I can read with my eyes shut—her bookcase turned out to be far too small for the books she confiscated from the rest of us, and Laurie had to build her a new bookcase. Everyone moved up a notch. Sally’s collection of picture books went into Barry’s room, where Laurie, who was by now asking and getting twenty-five cents a shelf, built another bookcase to hold the books Barry already had, and the collection he inherited from Sally. Sally took over from Jannie an enormous accumulation of fairy tales, Uncle Wiggly stories, Bobbsey Twins books, and Barnaby. Jannie, annoyed at the great gaps in her bookcase, went into Laurie’s room and selected from the books he had gathered those which she felt were suited to her taste and refinement. Jannie thus came to read Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island and Little Men, the last having fallen into Laurie’s hands through an accident; he thought, he said bitterly, from the title that it was a book about boys. I was disturbed because there were five copies of Alice in Wonderland in the house and no child would read it. Laurie was so indignant over the loss of everything except Little Men that I went into the bookshop and got him an omnibus Jules Verne, and his father gave him a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. I could hardly buy Laurie a book without getting books for Jannie and Sally, so, because I preferred to keep my own old copies of each, I brought home Little Women, and The Rootabaga Stories. Just to square everything nicely, I got a gun that shot corks for Barry, which was a mistake.
As I say, the immediate impact was on Laurie. Still reeling under the combined magic of Jules Verne and six dollars earned from building bookshelves, he invested his money in tools and lumber. He replaced a board in the back steps, for fifty cents, put up a set of shelves in the kitchen for two dollars, explaining that his price went up when things had to be anchored to the wall, and built a record cabinet as a surprise for his father, declining payment but accepting the cost of the lumber and nails. With our permission he opened three charge accounts, one at the lumber yard, one at the big hardware store in town, where they sold tools, and one at a little hardware store around the corner from us, where they sold nails and little metal brackets for anchoring things to walls.
He dismissed almost at once the notion of making a flying machine, but he and his friend Rob made a complicated kind of fort in the field next to the barn, with a padlock on the door and an involuntary window where two boards did not quite come together. The boys kept all kinds of treasures in their fort, but lost interest in it abruptly when they discovered that Sally had been going, eel-like, in and out the window of the fort and that she had returned to me, with great amusement, the package of cigarettes and the package of matches she found inside. I told Laurie with some heat that it was perfectly all right with me if he wanted to smoke and stunt his growth and ruin his wind for baseball and basketball and football and ping-pong; it was a silly habit, I told him, and expensive and useless, and if he wanted to smoke he could buy his own cigarettes and stop taking mine. His father suggested a pipe as more manly, and a day or so later in the five-and-ten I found a particularly revolting-looking corncob pipe, and I picked up a tin of tobacco and brought them home and gave them to Laurie to smoke. That did not make him sick, either, so his father gave him a cigar and when he smoked half of that without ill effects we decided that we were attacking this thing in the wrong way, and we told Laurie that he was absolutely forbidden to smoke under any circumstances, and if he did, he would first of all be heavily fined, and then we would close his charge accounts at the two hardware stores and the lumber yard. I do not for a minute suppose that that had any slightest effect on him, but at any rate Sally never found any more cigarettes, and the fort blew away in a particularly heavy windstorm.
With three reading children in the house, competition over Barry, who could be read to, was very heavy. I still retained my post as bedtime reader—I began again with The Wizard of Oz—but Laurie and Jannie and Sally found themselves sometimes all reading aloud from different enticing works, each hoping to lure Barry who moved, basking, from one to another. For a little while Jannie forged ahead through a brilliant imaginative stroke; she refused to read aloud, and offered, instead, to tell stories made up out of her own head. This began the Jefry stories, which were about a little boy named Jefry who had an elephant who was called Peanuts because he ate so many . . . “What?” said Barry. “Cabbages,” said Jannie firmly. Jefry had a bear named Dikidiki, just like Barry, and Jefry irked Sally so considerably that she brought out her boy doll Patpuss, renamed him Jefry, announced that he was her little brother, and commenced telling him stories about a little imaginary boy named Barry, who had a bear named Dikidiki just like Jefry. This became the competing Barry series. One evening Laurie came staggering from the Story Hour in the kitchen, and announced to his father that he had just made up a story about a little boy named Dikidiki who had two imaginary bears, Barry and Jefry, and we had to make a rule that stories must be told one at a time, and last no more than two minutes by the kitchen clock.
Barry resigned from the position of Beekman when he entered nursery school, because everyone there called him Barry again. When it was almost time for him to start, I went up to the closet where I had happily stored all the snowsuits in moth balls. I found the snowsuit Laurie had worn our first winter in Vermont and which Jannie had worn later when she entered nursery school; I had taken the hood off and Jannie had worn a little blue furry cap. When I checked it for Barry I found that the wrists were really too frayed to be mended, but I decided to keep it anyway because the snowpants were solid enough and the jacket could probably serve in some emergency. Jannie’s second snowsuit, which she had gotten when Laurie took to wearing ski pants and a windbreaker, was too large for Barry and was pink besides. I remembered now that Sally had not been able to wear Laurie’s first snowsuit three years before because the sleeves of the jacket had been too frayed then to be mended, but that I had kept the snowsuit because it would probably be useful in some emergency. Sally’s first snowsuit had been inherited from a friend; it was light blue and had a fur collar and cuffs, and I had passed it on when Sally outgrew it and it was now being worn by a little girl named Anne Elizabeth in West Haven. I tried Laurie’s first windbreaker on Barry, and the sleeves hung down and the belt went around his knees, so I went downstairs and told my husband that before Barry started nursery school he would have to have a new snowsuit and my husband said that was ridiculous, there must be a dozen snowsuits up in the closet.
Barry’s new snowsuit was brown, and the hat had fur ears, and when I looked at him trying it on to show his father and his brother and his sisters, I realized acutely how strange it was going to be now during the long empty mornings. I asked my husband if he was aware of the fact that for eleven years there had always been one youngest child around the house all the time and he said he was only too aware of it and eleven years was longer than they gave you for anything except barratry and mayhem. Somewhere I found a long red feather. I fastened it to Barry’s fur-eared hat, and when it broke I got another and put that one on, and I got
another one later and put it on the cap he wore in the late spring and another on the little straw hat he wore during the summer, so that from the time he was two and a half he always wore a feather, sometimes red, and sometimes white or black or blue, and people who saw him on the street or in stores or the library or the post office or the bank came to recognize him—and, I suppose, me—by the feather, and on the rare occasions when I went shopping without him, people everywhere would say, “Where’s the Indian?” or “the feather boy?” or “Robin Hood?”
Barry also achieved a certain kind of family distinction by becoming the one child who did not care for pudding, but preferred eggs. A lot of the enthusiasm went out of my pudding-making when I knew that while the rest of us were eating pudding for dessert I would have to fry an egg for Barry. I have always been fascinated by the contemplation of growth in the children, the development of small quirks and odd little habits as they change into individuals, but I admit that with six of us going different directions it is sometimes very difficult to set up any kind of an over-all pattern and plan from it; food is perhaps the best example of this. The only actual staples in the house were milk and peanut butter. These were the lowest common denominator in the kitchen; nothing else was common to all six, and yet everyone complained constantly about the food. My husband said that it cost too much, Laurie said that there was not enough variety, Jannie said that we did not have mashed potatoes half often enough, Sally just complained that she had to eat it, and Barry thought that there were not enough eggs. I myself thought that making dinner and cleaning up afterward every night was too great an effort to make if all I was going to get was complaints, and anyone who wanted to live on milk and peanut butter from now on was welcome to as far as I was concerned.