He took Mother by the arm.

  “My throat is as hoarse as a frog’s from all that reciting,” he said. “The only thing that will soothe it is a nice, sweet, cool, chocolate ice cream soda. With whipped cream. Ummm.” He rubbed his stomach. “Go to bed, children. Come on, Boss. I’ll go get the car and you and I will go down to the drug store. I couldn’t sleep a wink with this hoarse throat.”

  “Take us, Daddy?” we shouted. “You wouldn’t go without us? Our throats are hoarse as frogs’, too. We wouldn’t sleep a wink, either.”

  “See?” Dad asked. “When it comes to sodas, you’re right on the job, up and ready to go. But when it comes to going to bed, you’re slow as molasses!”

  He turned to Mother. “What do you say, Boss?”

  Mother protruded her lower lip, sagged her shoulders, and let her hands hang down to her knees.

  “Did you say mo’ ’lasses, Mr. Bones?” she squeaked in a querulous falsetto. “Mo’ ’lasses? Why, Honey, I ain’t had no ’lasses. Git yo’ coats on, chillen. Yak. Yak.”

  “Thirteen sodas at fifteen cents apiece,” Dad muttered. “I can see the handwriting on the wall. Over the Hill to the Poor House.”

  17

  Four Wheels, No Brakes

  BY THE TIME ANNE was a senior in high school, Dad was convinced that the current generation of girls was riding, with rouged lips and rolled stockings, straight for a jazzy and probably illicit rendezvous with the greasy-haired devil.

  Flaming youth had just caught fire. It was the day of the flapper and the sheik, of petting and necking, of flat chests and dimpled knees. It was yellow slickers with writing on the back, college pennants, and plus fours. Girls were beginning to bob their hair and boys to lubricate theirs. The college boy was a national hero, and “collegiate” was the most complimentary adjective in the American vocabulary. The ukulele was a social asset second only to the traps and saxophone. It was “Me and the Boy Friend,” “Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie,” and “Jadda, Jadda, Jing, Jing, Jing.” The accepted mode of transportation was the stripped-down Model T Ford, preferably inscribed with such witticisms as “Chicken, Here’s Your Roost,” “Four Wheels, No Brakes,” and “The Mayflower—Many a Little Puritan Has Come Across In It.”

  It was the era of unfastened galoshes and the shifters club. It was the start of the Jazz Age.

  If people the world over wanted to go crazy, that was their affair, however lamentable. But Dad had no intention of letting his daughters go with them. At least, not without a fight.

  “What’s the matter with girls today?” Dad kept asking. “Don’t they know what those greasy-haired boys are after? Don’t they know what’s going to happen to them if they go around showing their legs through silk stockings, and with bare knees, and with skirts so short that the slightest wind doesn’t leave anything to the imagination?”

  “Well, that’s the way everybody dresses today,” Anne insisted. “Everybody but Ernestine and me; we’re school freaks. Boys don’t notice things like that when everybody dresses that way.”

  “Don’t try to tell me about boys,” Dad said in disgust. “I know all about what boys notice and what they’re after. I can see right through all this collegiate stuff. This petting and necking and jazzing are just other words for something that’s been going on for a long, long time, only nice people didn’t used to discuss it or indulge in it. I hate to tell you what would have happened in my day if girls had come to school dressed like some girls dress today.”

  “What?” Anne asked eagerly.

  “Never you mind. All I know is that even self-respecting streetwalkers wouldn’t have dressed—”

  “Frank!” Mother interrupted him. “I don’t like that Eskimo word.”

  The girls turned to Mother for support, but she agreed with Dad.

  “After all, men don’t want to marry girls who wear makeup and high heels,” Mother said. “That’s the kind they run around with before they’re married. But when it comes to picking out a wife, they want someone they can respect.”

  “They certainly respect me,” Anne moaned. “I’m the most respected girl in the whole high school. The boys respect me so much they hardly look at me. I wish they’d respect me a little less and go out with me a little more. How can you expect me to be popular?”

  “Popular!” Dad roared. “Popular. That’s all I hear. That’s the magic word, isn’t it? That’s what’s the matter with this generation. Nobody thinks about being smart, or clever, or sweet or even attractive. No, sir. They want to be skinny and flat-chested and popular. They’d sell their soul and body to be popular, and if you ask me a lot of them do.”

  “We’re the only girls in the whole high school who aren’t allowed to wear silk stockings,” Ernestine complained. “It just isn’t fair. If we could just wear silk stockings it wouldn’t be so bad about the long skirts, the sensible shoes, and the cootie garages.”

  “No, by jingo.” Dad pounded the table. “I’ll put you both in a convent first. I will, by jingo. Silk stockings indeed! I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you, or into the convent you go. Do you understand?”

  The convent had become one of Dad’s most frequently used threats. He had even gone so far as to write away for literature on convents, and he kept several catalogues on the tea table in the dining room, where he could thumb through them and wave them during his arguments with the older girls.

  “There seems to be a nice convent near Albany,” he’d tell Mother after making sure that Anne and Ernestine were listening. “The catalogue says the wall around it is twelve feet high, and the sisters see to it that the girls are in bed by nine o’clock. I think that’s better than the one at Boston. The wall of the Boston one is only ten feet high.”

  The so-called cootie garages, which Anne and Ernestine now detested, had been the style several years before, and still were worn by girls who hadn’t bobbed their hair. The long hair was pulled forward and tied into two droopy pugs which protruded three or four inches from each ear. If a girl didn’t have enough hair to do the trick, she used rags, rats, or switches to fill up the insides of the ear muffs.

  Anne decided that she could never get Dad’s permission to dress like the other girls in her class, and that it was up to her to take matters into her own hands. She felt a certain amount of responsibility to Ernestine and the younger girls, since she knew they would never be emancipated until she paved the way. She had a haunting mental picture of Jane, fifteen years hence, still wearing pugs over her ears, long winter drawers, and heavy ribbed stockings.

  “Convent, here I come,” she told Ern. “I mean the Albany convent with the twelve-foot wall.”

  She disappeared into the girls’ bathroom with a pair of scissors. When she emerged, her hair was bobbed and shingled up the back. It wasn’t a very good-looking job, but it was good and short. She tiptoed, unnoticed, into Ernestine’s room.

  “How do I look?” she asked. “Do you think I did a good job?”

  “Good Lord,” Ernestine screamed. “Get out of here. It might be catching.”

  “I’ll catch it when Dad gets ahold of me, I know that. But how does it look?”

  “I didn’t know any human head of hair could look like that,” Ernestine said. “I like bobbed hair, but yours looks like you backed into a lawn-mower. My advice is to start all over again, and this time let the barber do it.”

  “You’re not much help,” Anne complained. “After all, I did it as much for you as for me.”

  “Well, don’t do anything like that for me again. I’m not worth it. It’s too big a sacrifice to expect you to go around like that until the end of your days, which I suspect are numbered.”

  “You’re going to back me up, aren’t you, when Dad sees it? After all, you want to bob your hair, don’t you?”

  “I’ll back you up,” said Ern, “to the hilt. But I don’t want to bob my hair. I want a barber to bob it for me. What I’m wondering is who’s going to back up Dad. Somebody had better be there to catch him.”

  “I have a feeling,” Anne said, “that I’m in for a fairly disagreeable evening. Oh, well, somebody had to do it, and I’m the oldest.”

  They sat in Ernestine’s room until supper time, and then went downstairs together. Mother was serving the plates, and dropped peas all over the table cloth.

  “Anne,” she whispered. “Your beautiful hair. Oh, oh, oh. Just look at yourself.”

  “I have looked at myself,” Anne said. “Please don’t make me look at myself again. I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”

  Mother burst into tears. “You’ve already spoiled mine,” she sobbed.

  Dad hadn’t paid any attention when Anne and Ernestine entered the dining room.

  “What’s the trouble now?” he asked. “Can’t we have a little peace and quiet around here for just one meal? All I ask is …” He saw Anne and choked.

  “Go back upstairs and take that thing off,” he roared. “And don’t you ever dare to come down here looking like that again. The idea! Scaring everybody half to death and making your Mother cry. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “It’s done, Daddy,” Anne said. “I’m afraid we’re all going to have to make the best of it. The moving finger bobs, and having bobbed, moves on.”

  “I think it looks snakey,” Ern hastened to do her duty to her older sister. “And listen, Daddy, it’s ever so much more efficient. It takes me ten minutes to fix these pugs in the morning, and Anne can fix her hair now in fifteen seconds.”

  “What hair?” Dad shouted. “She doesn’t have any hair to fix.”

  “How could you do this to me?” Mother sobbed.

  “How could she do it to an Airedale, let alone to herself or you and me?” said Dad. “The Scarlet Letter. How Hester won her ‘A.’ Well, I won’t have it, do you understand? I want your hair grown back in and I want it grown back in fast. Do you hear me?”

  Anne had tried to keep up a bold front, but the combined attack was too much and she burst into tears.

  “Nobody in this family understands me,” she sobbed. “I wish I were dead.”

  She ran from the table. We heard her bedroom door slam, and muffled, heartbroken sobs.

  Dad reached over and picked up his convent catalogues, but he couldn’t put any enthusiasm into them, and he finally tossed them down again. Neither he nor Mother could eat anything, and there was an uneasy, guilty silence, punctuated by Anne’s sobs.

  “Listen to that poor, heartbroken child,” Mother finally said. “Imagine her thinking that no one in the world understands her. Frank, I think you were too hard on her.”

  Dad put his head in his hands. “Maybe I was,” he said. “Maybe I was. Personally, I don’t have anything much against bobbed hair. Like Ernestine says, it’s more efficient. But when I saw how upset it made you, I lost my temper, I guess.”

  “I don’t have anything against bobbed hair either,” Mother said. “It certainly would eliminate a lot of brushing and combing. But I knew you didn’t like it, and …”

  Anne appeared at dessert time, red-eyed and disheveled. Without a word she sat down and picked up her knife and fork. Minutes later, she smiled enchantingly.

  “That was good,” she said, passing her plate. “If you don’t mind, Mother, I’ll have another helping of everything. I’m positively starved tonight.”

  “I don’t mind, dear,” said Mother.

  “I like to see girls eat,” said Dad.

  That weekend, Mother took the girls down to Dad’s barber shop in the Claridge Building in Montclair.

  “I want you to trim this one’s hair, please,” she said, pointing to Anne, “and to bob the hair of the others.”

  “Any special sort of bob, Mrs. Gilbreth?” the barber asked.

  “No. No, I guess just a regular bob,” Mother said slowly. “The shorter the better.”

  “And how about you, Mrs. Gilbreth?”

  “What about me?”

  “How about your hair?”

  “No, sir,” the girls shouted indignantly. “You don’t touch a hair on her head. The idea!”

  Mother pretended to consider the suggestion. “I don’t know, girls,” she smiled. “It might look very chic. And it certainly would be more efficient. What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Ernestine, “it would be disgraceful. After all, a mother’s a mother, not a silly flapper.”

  “I guess not today, thank you,” Mother told the barber. “Five bobbed-haired bandits in the family should be enough.”

  Having capitulated on the hair question, Dad put up an even sterner resistance against any future changes in dress. But Anne and Ernestine broke him down a little at a time. Anne got a job in the high-school cafeteria, saved her money, and bought silk stockings, two short dresses, and four flimsy pieces of underwear known as teddies. These she unwrapped with some ceremony in the living room.

  “I don’t want to be a sneak,” she said, “so I’m going to show these to everybody right now. If you won’t let me wear them at home, I’ll change into them on the way to school. I’m never going to wear long underwear again.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Dad shouted. “Take those things back to the store. It embarrasses me to look at them, and I won’t have them in my house.”

  He picked up a teddy and held the top of it against his shoulders. It hung down to his belt.

  “You mean that’s all the underwear women wear nowadays?” he asked incredulously. “When I think of … well, never mind that. No wonder you read about all those crimes and love nests, like that New Brunswick preacher and the choir singer. Well, you take the whole business right back to the store.”

  “No,” Anne insisted. “I bought these clothes with my own money and I’m going to wear them. I’m not going to be the only one in the class with long underwear and a flap in the back. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s not so disgusting as having no back of the underwear to sew a flap on,” said Dad. “I just can’t believe that everybody in your class wears these teddybear, or bare-teddy, things. There must be some sane parents besides your mother and me.” He shook his head. But he was weakening.

  “I don’t see why you object to teddies,” Anne said. “They don’t show, you know.”

  “Of course they don’t show, that’s just the trouble. It’s what does show that I’m talking about.”

  “There’s only one other girl in high school besides Anne and me who doesn’t wear teddies,” Ernestine put in. “If you don’t believe us, come to school and see for yourself.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Dad blushed. “I’m willing to take your word for it.”

  “I should say not,” said Mother.

  “Aside from the possibility of being arrested for indecent exposure every time they crossed their legs or stood in a breeze,” Dad muttered, “I’d think they’d die of pneumonia.”

  “Well, I’m glad there’s one other sensible girl in school besides you two,” Mother said, clutching at a straw. “She sounds like a nice girl. Do I know her?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Ernestine whispered. “She doesn’t even wear a teddy. And if you don’t believe me …”

  “I know,” Dad blushed again. “And it still won’t be necessary.”

  He picked up one of the stockings and slipped his hand into it.

  “You might as well go bare-legged as to wear these. You can see right through them. It’s like the last of the seven veils. And those arrows at the bottom—why do they point in that direction?”

  “Those aren’t arrows, Daddy,” Anne said. “They’re clocks. And it seems to me that you’re going out of your way to find fault with them.”

  “Well, why couldn’t the hands of the clock have stopped at quarter after three or twenty-five of five, instead of six o’clock?”

  “Be sensible, Daddy,” Anne begged him. “You don’t want us to grow up to be wallflowers, do you?”

  “I’d a lot rather raise wallflowers than clinging vines or worse. The next thing I know you’ll be wanting to paint.”

  “Everybody uses makeup nowadays,” Ern said. “They don’t call it painting any more.”

  “I don’t care what they call it,” Dad roared. “I’ll have no painted women in this house. Get that straight. The bare-teddies and six o’clock stockings are all right, I guess, but no painting, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “And no high heels or pointed toes. I’m not going to have a lot of doctor’s bills because of foot troubles.”

  Anne and Ernestine decided that half a loaf was better than none, and that they had better wait until Dad got used to the silk stockings and short skirts before they pressed the makeup and shoe question.

  But it turned out that Dad had given all the ground he intended to, and the girls found Mother a weak reed on which to lean.

  “Neither my sisters nor I have ever used face powder,” Mother told Anne and Ernestine, when they asked her to intervene in their behalf. “Frankly, girls, I consider it nonessential.”

  “Don’t tell me you’d rather see a nose full of freckles!”

  “At least that looks natural. And when it comes to the matter of high heels, I don’t see how your father can be expected to travel around the world talking about eliminating fatigue, while you girls are fatiguing yourself with high-heel shoes.”

  Dad kept a sharp lookout for surreptitious painting, and was especially suspicious whenever one of the girls looked particularly pretty.

  “What’s got into you tonight?” he’d ask, sniffing the air for traces of powder or perfume.

  Ernestine, after playing outside most of the afternoon, came to supper one evening with flushed cheeks.

  “Come over here, young lady,” Dad yelled. “I warned you about painting. Let me take a look at you. I declare, you girls pay no more attention to me than if I were a cigar store Indian. A man’s got to wear grease in his hair and gray flannel trousers to get any attention in this house nowadays.”

  “I haven’t got on makeup, Daddy.”

 

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