Thirty Rooms To Hide In (5 page)

A wag observed that a firstborn’s birthday is enshrined with detailed memory: “Our beloved son entered the world at precisely 1:19 a.m. on Monday, the 16th of August, in the year 1947.”

The next child’s birthday is remembered as “January, ‘49.”

All the third gets is “He was born, uhhh, the year the grocery store burned down, right?”

As the fifth son of six, I arrived late to a noisy party that had started years ago and, as neither firstborn nor baby, I was a face in the crowd. Collin, my only little brother, was born in ’57 and from that year forward we youngest four became known as “The Little Ones.” Kip and Jeff retained their given names; all the rest of us were The Little Ones.

“Kip, will you please send the little ones outside?”

“Jeff, have the little ones brushed their teeth?”

By the time they were 10 years old, Kip and Jeff had been dubbed lieutenants in Mom’s army and were conscripted to help her with crowd control. But her toughest mothering years, Mom confided, were actually when she had just the first two – Kip and Jeff, as toddlers. Dad was still away at the Navy then and she was left to keep two small boys from sticking forks in each other’s eyes. It’s been said when there are just two children to watch, the parents can run a man-on-man defense; when the third is born they’re forced to switch to zone. Mom was in zone defense from the get-go, and with six children – six boys no less – some might have advised her to just drop back and punt. Simply getting her brood from parking lot to store involved mapped-out plans on the level of Omaha Beach. Yet in a 1957 letter, she seemed to shrug it off: “We made our way through the train station in the fashion of a paramecia – one child thrusting ahead and being held back physically, another child lagging behind and having to be coaxed forward verbally.”

If it takes a village to raise a child, what sort of horizon-filling metropolis does it take to raise six? Raising only two boys as I am today, each evening finds me exhausted and wondering – marveling really – “How did she raise six?” When asked, all Mom offers is an unsatisfying “One at a time.” Perhaps, like the forgotten pain of childbirth, one at a time is simply the best she can remember.

What I remember, however, is a constant sound of thunder.

We Little Ones thundered over the wooden floors of the Millstone destroying everything in our path. Every object in our parents’ new home was something for 40 greasy little fingers to prod, pull out, bend in half, push in a brother’s ear, or otherwise destroy. Antiques became weapons; knick-knacks, missiles.

I seem unable [wrote my mother] to impose much discipline on Luke. He has unscrewed every unscrewable screw in the house (from water faucets, radiators, door knobs, washing machine, and typewriter); he’s squeezed out miles of toothpaste, shaving cream, Prell shampoo; he’s lost six needles from the record player in the Rumpus Room, two sets of my car keys, and dozens of toothbrushes; he’s cost us at least $200 in plumber’s bills to recover tractors, Tinkertoys, tongue depressors, and apple cores from the toilet; he’s spilled coffee, honey, boxes of straight pins, Grape-Nuts, poured gallon jugs of bleach into a $3.65 box of Tide, sugar into the flour bin, and all the checkers down the hole in the fireplace; he has been discovered stacking up the Irish Belleek china, leaning perilously out car windows at 45 mph, playing with kitchen matches, crayoning on the dining room wall, blowing into a full ashtray and, as you well know, he’s had his taste of kerosene. The chances of his surviving into the hazardous 6-to-16 years seem remote.

Hurricanes have categories, as do tornadoes (the dreaded “F5”); even the armed forces assign a metric to the destructive power of their explosives. Little boys should be no different. Gradients could well have been calibrated to prepare our parents for the effect we would have on their belongings and had such a system been in place, warning sirens would’ve been on full blast at the Millstone through most of the ‘50s.
(Cut to my poor mother telling the reporters, “Well, I guess it was a ‘Level K’ by the time it hit our couch. And then it touched down near that new lamp, you know the one we used to have by the fireplace?”)

Little boys have an ability to look into a thing and divine its weakest internal structures. In one eidetic blink we knew the precise spot to bend a thing – the exact coordinates to produce the most pleasing snapping noise, maximize the number of resulting pieces, and ruin a thing beyond all hope of repair. Destruction was an art.

Much of Myra’s new home was built out of stone, which we could only deface temporarily; sometimes with mud, sometimes paint. Cast-iron was another medium we found difficult to work in and so the giant furnace in the basement and the radiators were all safe. Wood was an attractive canvas and gouging a specialty of ours. But even here we had difficulty as the Millstone was done in “combed oak” – a hard crenellated surface resistant to all but the most determined vandal. It was Jeff who finally cracked the code on wood. He’d seen Davy Crockett on TV throw a knife into a tree and, after some practice, successfully reproduced the same pleasing “thunk” on the back of his bedroom door. But as it turned out, our best work was done on the plaster walls of the long hallways of the Millstone. Frescoes in crayon and booger went up throughout the giant house with new exhibits opening weekly. Magic Marker was popular but more memorable were some excellent studies done in fingernail polish.

Destruction was an art, one we pushed to a level critics might call meta-destruction. When Mom locked something away from us, the lock itself became the new toy and we’d break that first, play with it, and then break whatever she’d locked away. If Mom roped off the vegetables in her garden, it simply provided a cool lasso to wrangle tomato plants with.

Each destructive act came with its own sound and our mother soon learned the signature noises associated with our various disassemblings. Crashing china was, for instance, an easy read but one heard after the fact. Harder to discern were the sounds of horrible things
about
to happen – the scrape-bump-rattle of a ladder being leaned against the china cabinet
;
the hollow slosh of paint cans being stacked up; the brittle clack of framed paintings being arranged into a fort. Had my mother been able to catalog these sonic silhouettes she might still own many of her nicer things.

“My children,” she wrote to her parents in 1961, “are being boys. Records turned on loud, wrestling on the floor, timing each other in dashes upstairs – oh, tell me, what do little girls do early on Sunday mornings?”

What little girls did we had no idea. We lived in our Man Village – a place without cleanliness, quiet, and where everything was eventually destroyed. Had my Dad owned an
anvil
we would’ve figured out how to destroy that, too. And the dirt. Oh, the dirt. Six pairs of feet tramping in from Minnesota’s mudbottom Aprils moved the rich soil of the Midwest into the Millstone as steadily as if we’d shoveled it in through a window. Wet clothes heavy with earth were peeled off at the front door before a mad dash to the bathtub to choke the drain with the leafy sludge that washed off us in viscous waves. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails were not what we were made of, as my poor mother could well attest as she cleaned up the bodily messes six boys left like a slug trail through her deteriorating home:

– a house full of unflushed toilets – bathrooms splattered by little boys playing “sword fight” while peeing – the smell of urine in a sink
(“But the bathroom was so far away.”)
– and the sick.

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