Books: Nostalgia

BIG FAMILY — Bellamy Partridge —Whittlesey House ($2.75).

“If you’re the man I think you are,” said the agent who sold Bellamy Partridge’s father a 16-room house, “you’ll fill every room in that house inside of ten years.” It took 13 years. Big Family, a sequel to Author Partridge’s best-selling Country Lawyer, is a total recall of family jokes, family stories and the intramural mores of Father, Mother, Grandma and eight little Partridges from the time the youngest was born until the last has left the upstate New York nest. As bucolic Americana it is superb. As a picture of boys’ life, it is what Booth Tarkington’s Penrod is supposed to be and for many people isn’t.

When Author Partridge was born, Father, an efficient man, put a sign on an open cigar box on his office desk: “It’s a boy! Take one.” Mother was also “an enthusiastic advocate” of big families. Author Partridge suspects that she had “some vague idea that by bringing children into the world she was helping to swell the armies of the Lord against the … incursions of the Devil and the insidious infiltrations of Demon Rum.” Author Partridge felt that older brothers were useful in a fight; younger ones made wonderful opportunities for teasing.

Younger brother Stan was Bellamy’s chief target, especially after a little girl named Alice discovered that she was not an “own” child but an adopted orphan. :’ ‘Why, it might happen to anybody,’ Stan said. ‘How could a person tell?’ It was at that moment when the idea came to me. . . . ‘You couldn’t tell,’ I said, ‘nobody could. . . . Stan, I hadn’t intended to tell you this, but . . . you’re not really my brother at all—you’re an orphan.’ ”

His mother reassured weeping Stan. But Bellamy was not stumped: “They’ve made up their minds that you’re never to know the truth.” At last Mother forbade any reference to orphans. But when a visitor remarked that Stan did not look like his brothers, Bellamy said, “Now you know why.” And when Stan discovered that his thumb was different from the other Partridge thumbs, Bellamy asked: “You’re not surprised, are you?”

“Fight, Fight.” In public the boys stood by each other. Bellamy’s older brother, Herb, was a great scrapper. But whenever Herb was in a fight, it was understood that Bellamy would “hover near by waiting for the battle cry.” If Herb needed reinforcements, he would shout: “Jump in, Bill!”

There was a much bigger, tougher boy named Joe. One day at cries of “Fight! Fight!” Bellamy came skating across the pond to find Herb on his back and Joe on top of him. “Herb had a tricky way of rolling an opponent who tried to pin him down; but Joe made no attempt to pin him—he simply began to hammer the living daylights out of him.” Herb “must have been absorbing quite a drubbing for the moment he heard my voice he called . . . ‘Jump in, Bill!’ ” But Joe had a long reach, held Bellamy off with one fist while he wore out Herb with the other.

“A short distance away on the ice I saw a sturdy wooden stake some three or four feet long and as thick as my arm. . . . Joe did not see me coming and as I skated up behind him his head made a perfect target. I gripped the stake in both hands and put everything I had into my swing. It struck Joe’s head . . . like a home run —and the fight was over. . . . The speed of my attack had carried me past, and by the time that I could . . . turn back, he was lying prostrate in a pool of blood, surrounded by a crowd of horrified schoolboys.”

Sure he had killed Joe (who soon recovered), Bellamy went home. “What brings you home?” asked his surprised mother, “you didn’t break through the ice, did you?” “Why no—I didn’t break through.” “As I stood there before her the voice of conscience kept whispering, ‘Murder will out! Murder will out!’ . . . I couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering. . . .” “Why, you have a raging fever,” she said, “I must get you into bed this very minute.”

When Lawyer Partridge came home for midday dinner, Bellamy knew he was in for a crossexamination. ” ‘How was the ice?’ asked Father. ‘Fine.’ ‘Why didn’t you stay?’ ‘I—I—I got cold.’ ‘But it isn’t very cold today.’ I realized at once that I had given the wrong answer and I began to hedge. … As he stood there stroking his beard and looking at me I heard the door slam and Herb’s voice from down stairs asking where I was. … I tried to think of a way to warn him of Father’s presence . . . but my mind would not work fast enough. . . .

“I certainly admired the way he acted when he suddenly saw Father standing there. . . . ‘Hello, Pop,’ he said casually, ‘Didn’t know you were home. When do we eat? . . .’ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Herb [asked his brother]. . . . ‘He’s running a little fever,’ said Father. . . . Herb shook his head. ‘That’s funny. He was having as good a time as anybody up there—and the first thing I knew he was gone.’ I looked at Herb with admiration. … He was so calm, so unperturbed. . . . The dinner bell rang. . . . ‘Don’t lag, Herb,’ said [Father], ‘and don’t forget to wash your hands.’ Herb listened at the door until he was sure Father was out of earshot, and then turned to me and said, ‘Joe never knew what hit him!’ ‘

Big Family is not all about Boy Town and fist fights. There are Mother’s efforts to make both ends meet, Grandma’s efforts to break up the children’s ungodly card playing. Grandma found that burning a whole pack of cards in the stove in her room was too much bother, so she sabotaged sin by slyly removing just one card from each new deck. It was always the ace of spades, and Author Partridge believes the old lady thought the ace was the devil’s hoofprint.

There were also characters like irreligious Mr. Curtis: “What do you do on Sundays while your wife is in church?” the preacher asked him. “Breed mares, geld colts, and build hogpens. I can always find some pleasant way to pass the time.” There was mysterious Jerry Billings, Father’s gardener, whose trial and ten-year sentence for arson was one of the high points of Country Lawyer.

Father never believed Jerry was guilty, and when Jerry got out of jail, offered to set him up in business in another town. Jerry insisted on coming back to prove “he could be as good a citizen as any of them.” Father set Jerry up as a butcher. When Jerry died, “Father, too upset to eat, served the rest of us and then sat looking at his empty plate.” “Well, Jerry is gone, and I’ve lost a friend,” he said finally. “A friend that I was proud of. … I don’t know who Jerry was or where he came from, but I do know that he was made of good stuff. …”

Mother, who never liked Jerry, thought that people would not go to his funeral. “People,” she said, “are funny about funerals.” She would not let Bellamy go. But walking past the house, he could see that it was packed, “and even the door-yard was full of people who stood there all through the service. … I had never before seen people walking in the street behind a hearse, and I was so absorbed by the sight that I did not notice that the onlookers were uncovering their heads until a man behind me touched my shoulder. ‘Take off your hat,’ he said in a low tone, ‘and show your respect for a real man. Ain’t you got no manners?’ ” At that moment young Bellamy Partridge realized that manners “were not just a form of household oppression . . . but that they had a substantial standing in the community.”

Author Partridge is no more sentimental than a washbasin. In getting back to the past he completely bypasses the antique shop. His books are nostalgic, but it is not a nostalgia for antimacassars or oil lamps. The nostalgia is for a democracy that was real because in the general dearth of material things, nobody was able to have much more than anybody else. It was integral and uniform, and its patterns were as obvious and as artless as the patterns in its Brussels carpets.