Mother Smith played a few strains of the funeral march and pointed to a jar on the desk. “Oh, that’s right, thank you, Mother Smith. Last week we told you about a new instant coffee but we will have to take it off our list of recommendations, and I am just as sorry as I can be about it but it’s just not up to snuff, as they say, is it, Mother Smith? She says no and made a face but as I say to all my sponsors, Keep trying because we are behind you one hundred percent.
“And remember our motto: If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”
Unfortunately for Bobby, his mother’s motto was one he was to hear from her firsthand the very next week, when he dragged in the door having lost the Bazooka Bubble Gum Bubble Blowing Contest for the second year in a row. It didn’t help him feel much better. He had practiced long and hard until his jaws were sore but he came in sixth. Rats, he thought. Everybody in the family is always winning something but me.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
DOC WAS HOME for lunch and Dorothy stood by the kitchen table waiting for an opinion about the new hat she had just bought for their upcoming trip to Memphis. He studied the object perched on her head for a long moment and then said, “Oh, I don’t know, Dorothy. As far as hats go, I’ve seen worse.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said.
Mother Smith jumped in and offered, “I like it,” and gave her son a dirty look.
Dorothy blinked hopefully. “Really?”
“Oh, yes, it’s very stylish. Don’t ask him. He doesn’t know anything about hats.”
Doc readily agreed. “That’s right. Don’t ask me. I can’t tell one from the other.”
“Honestly,” said Dorothy, “I don’t know why I go to so much trouble if you don’t know the difference. I could just stick a pot on my head for all you care.”
When she left the room Mother Smith said, “Now you’ve done it.”
Doc shrugged. “Well, they all do look alike, only this one looks like a pancake with some fruit and a dead bird on top.” Beatrice Woods, who was sitting at the table, laughed. Doc leaned over and spoke under his breath. “Count yourself lucky you can’t see it. You wouldn’t know whether to shoot it or eat it.”
After Doc had gone back to the drugstore they all sat around the table talking about the upcoming trip. Dorothy sighed. “I just wish I could lose ten pounds before I go.”
Mother Smith said, “I just wish I was eighteen again and knew what I know now.”
Dorothy said, “What would you do differently?”
“Oh,” she said, “I’d marry the same man and have a child, of course, but I would have waited awhile before I did it . . . maybe been a bachelor girl like Ann Sheridan or a career woman and had my own secretary, smoked cigars, and used bad language.”
Dorothy and Beatrice laughed and Dorothy said, “Beatrice, if you could have any wish come true, what would it be?”
Beatrice, whose favorite radio show was the Armchair Traveler, thought for a moment. “I would wish I could get in a car and drive all over the world and never stop.”
Dorothy reached over and touched her hand. “Would you, honey?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“It sure would,” said Mother Smith and quickly changed the subject. She could see that Dorothy was about to get emotional. What was doubly heartbreaking about Beatrice was that even though being blind had limited her life, she did not have an ounce of self-pity and they had to be sure she never heard any in their voices. And it was especially hard when the thing she wished for could never come true.
A week later, the old adage about the boy who cried wolf once too often came true for Bobby when he woke up and claimed he couldn’t go to school that day because he had broken out all over in big red spots. Dorothy knew this was the day of a big math test that he had probably not studied for. Last year at this time he had claimed his leg was broken. The year before it was appendicitis. So she sent Anna Lee to his room for the third time with a simple message. “Mother says if you’re not up and dressed and out the door in five minutes you’ll wish you had spots.”
“But I do!” Bobby protested. “Come here and look at all these big red spots all over me and I feel sick. . . . Come and look.” He pulled up his pajama top for her to see. “Look at these spots, they’re getting redder by the minute, and I feel sick and I think I have a temperature, feel my head.” But Anna Lee ignored him and said as she left, “Stay in bed—I don’t care, I hope you do get a whipping.” Bobby got up, mumbling and grumbling to himself, and put on his clothes and went to the kitchen to find his mother, who promptly handed him a banana. “Here, eat that on the way to school.”
“But, Mother—” he said.
“I don’t want to hear it, Bobby. Now you go on before you’re late.” He mumbled some more under his breath and stomped down the hall and out the door, slamming it behind him.
At about 2:00 that afternoon Bobby’s teacher called.
“Dorothy, I just wanted you to know that I had to take Bobby down to the sick room because he was all broken out in red spots. Ruby says he’s come down with measles and needs to be quarantined.”
Dorothy was alarmed. “Oh, no. Tell Ruby I’m on my way to get him right now, and thank you for calling.”
Dorothy could not have felt any worse and Bobby played the part to the hilt. “I told you I was sick, Mother,” he said in a thin voice and by the time Anna Lee got home from rehearsal, at 5:30, Bobby was propped up in his bed like a king, his every whim catered to. His bed was covered with loads of new comic books his father had brought home for him from the drugstore. He had already been served ice cream, two Cokes, and a 7UP, and his mother stood by ready to do his slightest bidding. When Anna Lee walked into the room, Dorothy looked at her daughter with stricken eyes. “Your brother has the measles—the poor little thing really was sick.” Bobby lay back and smiled weakly for her benefit and waited for Anna Lee to apologize. But instead of an apology she looked at him in horror and said, “Measles!” and ran out of the room to scrub her hands and face.
She was terrified of contracting a pimple, much less the measles. She had a performance to do. She was president of the Drama Club this year and was in the upcoming school play. It wasn’t until Nurse Ruby assured Anna Lee that she could not catch the measles twice that she consented to go anywhere near him. Even then she wore gloves and a scarf over her face. She could not afford to take any chances. Not only was she in the school play, she was the lead!
Mother Smith, Jailbird
UNLIKE HER SON, Doc, who was easygoing, Mother Smith was a thin feisty little woman who had been quite a beauty when she was younger. Born in Independence, Missouri, right down the street from Bess Wallace, who eventually married Harry S. Truman. He and Mother Smith had once played the “Missouri Waltz” together on the twin pianos, and she often remarked about the president, “I met him on his way to greatness.”
Mother Smith had always been a free-spirited woman, long before it was fashionable; she said you could not be born and raised in a town called Independence and not have it affect you. And it must be true: She had been one of the state’s early suffragettes and in 1898 she, along with a group of her college girlfriends, had marched on Washington to fight for votes for women and had been arrested for disturbing the peace. This is a story Bobby and Anna Lee loved to hear over and over. “They sure threw us in the old hoosegow that day,” she would say, then laugh and add, “Your grandmother may be a jailbird but we finally got the vote!” And although she was already in her forties at the time, she had been the first woman in town to get her hair bobbed. She had also visited a speakeasy in Kansas City, gotten a little tipsy on a teacup full of bootleg gin, and had played a jazz tune on the piano. But since she played organ for the First Methodist Church she did not spread that one around.