The Saturday-Night Bath

CERTAIN aspirations are so deeply rooted in the souls of men that they persist through generations in spite of every obstacle. I write in defense of one of these — a time-honored ceremonial, the Saturday-night bath.

If you are city-bred, and accustomed from childhood to step from a warm bed to a warm bathroom and thrill to an every-morning scrub, you are probably scornful of me and my theme. Let me ask you a question. Did you ever, on a freezing winter day, stand precariously in one slippery wash-basin while you sponged your shivering self with about a quart of water from another china bowl? If you think you would have persisted in this, morning after morning, in an unheated bedroom, through zero weather, I salute you! You belong to the elect. I know there are such people; my sister Frances was one of them. I remember that mother called in the family doctor to see if he did n’t think it was this peculiar habit that made Frances so thin.

My own childhood, as it stretches out behind me, is punctuated at regular intervals by furiously busy Saturdays and shining, immaculate Sundays. The weekly bath was a fixed institution — no one ever went to church without it; but the problem of bathing eleven boisterous (and occasionally rebellious) children, and getting everybody finished and out of the way by nine o’clock at night, made Saturday an interesting day for mother. Considering the difficulties we had to contend with, I think we were a very industrious family about bathing. In the first place, the reservoir on the kitchen range had to be filled thirteen separate times. It was the unvarying rule that each member of the family old enough to carry a pail must bring water from the cistern in the wood-shed for the one next in turn. It was a sad day for the wretch who used all the water and forgot to fill the reservoir. Then the tub had to be emptied each time, by dipping out the water until it was light enough to carry. Gerald and Charlie got around this once by using the same water; but mother strongly discouraged them from ever trying it again.

We bathed according to age. The baby, whoever he was, had his bath right after breakfast, while such members of the family as were not otherwise occupied stood around in an adoring circle, ready to hand the safety-pins, to warm blankets, or fly upstairs for some forgotten accessory. (I must not give the impression that the baby was washed only on Saturday. He had his bath every morning until there was a newer one.) After he was tucked away for his nap the younger children, one at a time, engaged mother’s attention until dinner. She did n’t superintend any but the very smallest; but she rigidly inspected each child before he was allowed to step from the tub — and woe to the culprit who had failed to wash behind his ears! We older ones took turns during the afternoon, and we had to be ready promptly and be swift in action, for getting thirteen baths out of an ordinary range-reservoir requires a high grade of efficiency. Six o’clock found us gathered around the supper table, radiantly clean and ravenously hungry. But the crowning ceremonial of the whole day occurred at nine in the evening, when mother filled the tub for father and laid out his clean things. Mother always encouraged father in bathing, and made it as easy for him as she could. In fact, as I look back upon it, I think it was mother’s deep yearning for the bath that kept us all in the paths of virtue. Her own ablutions occurred late at night, after the rest of the family were sound asleep.

Stationary tubs and running water were virtually unknown in Brierly at that time, and our experiments with substitutes were varied and interesting.

I remember a tin tub, painted blue outside and white inside, with a back to lean against like a sleepy-hollow armchair, and little round soap-dishes on each side of the rim. We children sat Turk-fashion in it, and could lean back comfortably between scrubs. It must have been in one of these intervals of rest that Caroline, burning with injury over some family disagreement, scratched the following sentence on the inside of the rim, with a pin: “Edward is an ugly, naughty boy. Hi yi, ki yi!” Edward’s bath came after Caroline’s, and this judgment confronted him weekly, as long as the tin tub endured.

The rubber tub was bought when Tryphena had inflammatory rheumatism, and was a great luxury in those days. It was made of pliant rubber, and hung from a wooden frame which rested on two chairs. In repose it was about the size and shape of an ordinary porcelain tub, but it “gave” so unexpectedly when occupied, and was so very slippery, that getting in was a science, staying in an adventure, and getting out an art.

The courthouse burned down just about the time that mother read The Last Days of Pompeii, and I think a vision of Roman tepidaria must have lingered in her mind when she built the Little Room. Father sent home two tall glass doors from the courthouse fire — all that was left of the building. Presumably they were given to him because he was the judge. Mother conceived the idea of walling in the little porch just off the kitchen and using these glass doors as part of the east wall. This was how the Little Porch became the Little Room. In the floor of this room mother instructed the surprised carpenter to build a tub, about six feet long by two and a half wide. He made it beautifully smooth inside, and calked the seams so that it could not leak. A drain was constructed leading into a gravel bank under the porch. The tub had a cover which matched the floor and which, when let down, transformed our bathroom to sun parlor. We were jubilant over this invention when it was finished; but long before the carpenter’s bill was paid on the installment plan, our illusions were dispelled. The drain refused to work as it should, and for a discouraging length of time after each bath the tub would stand half full of water. After the cover had been left up once or twice, and several of the family had walked into it in the dark, we gradually gave up using it.

We had one small room called the Bathing Room, but no one ever bathed in it within my memory. The old black walnut washstand used to be kept there, which perhaps gave rise to its name. Later, as the family grew and closets became congested, hooks were installed all around the Bathing Room, and we hung our Sunday clothes on them. Still later, the baby’s crib stood there — but the name remained. This, and another room called the China Closet, where no china ever was, together with the Library, where mother kept her canned fruit, were a source of never-failing glee to visitors.

In summer we sometimes bathed upstairs, but we objected to this in our youth because the water had to be carried up and down. It is true that Sherman and John conceived the labor-saving idea of pouring it out on the wood-shed roof, but they did it only once. Mother happened to be giving an order to the grocery boy at the moment, and he came out of the back door just in time to get the soapy flood squarely down his back.

As we grew older, we developed an etiquette of bathing. A small clique, led by Frances, insisted that it was only decent to save half the water to rinse off in. Some of the rest of us warmly argued this point. We held that it was impossible to take a real bath in half a reservoir of water, and that the results obtained by rinsing did n’t compensate for the extra labor involved. Personally, I went through life unrinsed until we moved to the city. Arthur was the one to found a cult of outdoor bathing. In an angle formed by the walls of the dining-room and the library he constructed an impromptu room of sheets strung on clothes-lines, with the russet apple tree for one corner. “No roof but the blue above us. No floor but the beaten sod.” The idea took like wildfire. Bathing out of doors, with the apple blossoms and blue sky over our heads, took on a tinge of romance that was not to be resisted. But of course it was limited to the very warmest days in summer.

When all was said and done, the thing we always came back to, like returning to the old-fashioned safety-pin after all these new-fangled contrivances to keep your skirt in place, was a wooden wash-tub by the kitchen stove. There we arranged clothes-bars and chairs, draped them with sheets, blankets, and father’s army blanket, to insure privacy, and successively performed the Saturday rite, while the rest of the family waited their turn.

Of course the old order changed in time. Galvanized tubs succeeded wooden ones, and finally a windmill and a tank on top of the house brought running water. When father gave up a country judgeship for a law office in town, and we moved to the city, bathing became an everyday affair.

I would not say a word in deprecation of modern plumbing. Beyond a doubt it is one of our greatest blessings and the herald of a true democracy, when there shall be neither a “great unwashed” nor a “submerged tenth.” But, somehow, Saturday has lost its savor. Life is tamer than it used to be. No man in his senses would wish, in this day of Pullman sleepers, to cross the Great Plains in a prairie schooner, but the names of the men who risked their lives to do it are enshrined in history. And so I think we ought to build a little altar to the middle-class country mothers who, in the face of every obstacle, kept the Saturday-night bath a sacred institution, and handed it down to their children inviolate.

To THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY: —

The experience of your anonymous contributor, as told in the May Atlantic, is singular but not unique. From a scrapbook of the war-days of 1861, I extract the subjoined stanza of a poem in which the writer tells how he approached the Infinite. No name is given; it was but the vagrant verse from the poets’ corner of a country newspaper; but it is of a quality that makes it live ever after in the memory of the reader.