When I was a child I read Cheaper by the Dozen the way I read all my favorite books: often. Fifty or sixty times, at least: fast, slow, word by word, huge sloppy gulps, bits and pieces, the whole thing. I abandoned it after college, but the dog-eared paperback eventually crept back into my hands, bringing with it in adult rereadings a familiar, unanswered confusion. First published in 1948 and still in print, Cheaper By the Dozen is the true story of motion study experts and industrial management pioneers Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) and their family of 12 children, six girls and six boys. As is common with old-fashioned children’s classics, it’s bracing and cynical as well as affectionate, and full of dry humor. Even as I enjoyed the crisp writing and cozy detail, though, a nagging fact began to beg for my attention. It had tickled the back of my brain as a kid–I was aware of it–but I never examined it closely. As an adult, speeding through the book over and over, the truth, and the confusion it brought, arose from the whirring rereadings like an image in a zoetrope, growing stronger as the acceleration increased.
The way the Gilbreths’ theories of scientific management and time saving sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t when applied toward large scale childrearing lend Cheaper by the Dozen much of its charm. Pet tactics of Frank Sr.’s such as calling a “Family Council” to discuss important decisions, playing French language records while the kids brushed their teeth, or painting Morse code on the walls of their vacation home are treated with an adult’s fond but unsentimental eye: sometimes a hassle, sometimes inspired examples of their parents’ professional work, sometimes funny in their unintended aftereffects, and sometimes undeniably useful in raising and training a household of so many kids.
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Many kids…11 kids. How do you find this out? There’s no mention of Mary’s death in the text of Cheaper by the Dozen. The book is carefully structured and episodic, moving loosely forward in time even as chapters bounce around chronologically and thus, with a few notable exceptions, avoid the need to list the children’s names in order. Different anecdotes describe which children were around when a particular event took place, but when family life is discussed in general there are always a dozen. Only a few ancillary parts of the book directly reveal the truth: an early edition includes a family tree in the appendix that notes Mary, deceased, and a where-are-they-now chapter, but I didn’t have that version. The way I found out was from one bald sentence on the second page of the authors’ 1950 sequel, Belles on Their Toes, the narrative of which is much more linear than Cheaper by the Dozen, and less artfully arranged, making it impossible to knit the story together over the gap where Mary should be.
The most far-out version of the story is the 1950 film starring Myrna Loy and Clifton Webb, which was made with the approval of the Gilbreth family (Gilbreth and Carey have writing credits). At the time the film takes place, 1924, Mary would have been dead for over ten years, but in this adaptation, which uses 11 children and one baby, Mary is actually a character. Her proper place in the birth order appears to have been pushed down until she’s maybe 11 or 12 years old, and unlike the other children, all of whom have their own handy, reiterated quirk (nail-biter, Indian costume wearer, etc) to help the audience tell them apart, she isn’t developed as a distinct personality. The film is more straightforwardly chronological (and saccharine) than the book, and as such the ghostly strangeness of this Mary, who says almost nothing and has paler hair than the other children, looms large.
This certainly would have been common practice for the time; indeed, in Lillian Gilbreth’s Living With Our Children, first published in 1928, she stated, “Some parents feel that children should know the perils of disease and its devastating effects. But I question the wisdom, especially with a child, of dwelling on disturbing or unpleasant matters.” However, she later wrote in As I Remember that Mary’s death “was an experience an understanding psychologist might possibly have adjusted, but it was not adjusted, and left a permanent scar.”
“We always thought of ourselves as our parents’ ‘dozen,’” Carey wrote. “This included Mary.”
But the Gilbreths, intentionally or not, planted just enough clues for generations of readers to be forever curious about Mary, even if that’s the last thing they wanted. In the preface to the most recent HarperPerennial paperback edition of Cheaper by the Dozen, Carey ruefully describes the effects of curiosity, a trait vigorously encouraged in the Gilbreth family, which led to the book, and thus to a lifetime of endless questions from readers. “What a range of queries, personal and professional, now confront me. Here are examples of a few: ‘What happened to your sister Mary? After a while, you and your brother forgot to mention her. Why? Did she die, maybe? If she did die, then I want to hear how, please.’” She doesn’t provide any answers, though, leaving Mary the missing puzzle piece for which kids will always be scrambling.
